Over the coming weeks, Peter will serialise his first novel on this website.

Here is a brief synopsis.

Paul Socrates sweated his entire working life in a Turkish bath of his own making. For a Greek-Cypriot this was something of an irony.

A steam presser by trade, Paul discovers one Monday morning he is being made redundant, his daughter has a blood disease called leukaemia, and it is 24 years to the day that he started working in the factory at Loukades Fashions as a steam presser.

The year is 1979.

The story revolves around one day in his life.

It was inspired by the book ‘A Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich’, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

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CHAPTER 1

THE LITTLE NUMBA

Thursday 10^th December 1979 7.30am

WHAT’S GOIN’ ON?  – MARVIN GAYE

I swet my life ina Turkish bath I bin makin myself … for a Greek – Cypriot isan irony. Eh? An thas me … an irony. Is what I do. Irony, foa livin! Hah! You si what I do?

Cascades, they say, of stim, iz jet the heat, lika geyser, notta geezer – direc on the dresses I press with my spit – sizzlin industrial ion. I bin surroun by the fierce burning air, envelop I say, in it and by it. I hadda constantly hissing cobra in my han. My right arm, my pressing arm is comin direct from my swollen right hand. When is busy the heat is make me a bath in my own sweat. The back and front of my doc martin shirt, is stick to me, is cling to me, an my ves, like the golden gum glue you can by in the shop. My hard-earned, hones, sweet smellin sweat.

While I work I could balance a tsigarette on my lip. One day I forget I havvan unfinish tsigarette in my mouth and now I gotta a littel scar right in the middle of my bottom lip.

I smoke the Rothmans tsigarettes. I smoke forti a day, maybe more. Some days is 3 packs. I spen abow 30% of my wages on tsigarettes. I add it up and is a lot of lefta – money. Every Cypriot in London, he smoke Rothman tsigarettes. Everyone I met them, they smoke the Rothmans. But now, they smoke the poncy Silk Cut the Cypriots, with the purple colour on the paket.

I am a man who been givin the swet on my back to the work and I bin proud to do so. Because is a noble thing to swet when you bin working. Is like you bin min to bin swet because you bin workin, hard, proper work. This pipol, they sit down with the computas, or they typin, or they makin the books to add, this is no work, not hard, proper work. They call this clerical, ha! Is crimnal this work!

I neva met a fat pressa, they don exís! You show me a fat presser and I show you he is a pattern – cutter standing in because someone his off the work, or he’s scrounger, you know? The pressas they neva fat ‘cos they been working too bloody hard. Proper work.

Am on the 217 bus every day, five, sometimes six days a week, to the factory, because is go all the way down to Old Street from Palmers Green where I bin living for 25 years, since 1954. The bus is stop outsigh the door. Yes outsigh the door with the sign above, the number 27, 27 Old Street, like the GLC is plan it.

Am try to reed the Daily Mirror on the bus on my way to work. But I can get a seat today, is pack. I know a lot of the pipol on the bus and they makin the same journey every day, like me you know. Some of them I know and they been from the same villages in Cyprus I come from.

A lovely, Caribbean fellow, the conducta on the bus. Is Henry and I always say hello to him whenever he ask me for the fare. Sometimes I wait for his 217 bus before I get on. I like to reed the paypa. I like to kip up. Kip up with the times. The news. The new Government, the new pipol taking over. The first woman, she Prime Minista. My God, is modern times we livin in. A woman, she run the country. Thacha. She live above the shop. Now she prime minister.

But today I cooden iven hav a tsigarette on the 217 this Monday morning, ‘cos upstairs is pack anall. The air is stinky smoke up there, but because am smoking too I don notice. I only notice the smoke on the top of the bus when I stop smoking.

Anyway, is no seats today. None.

I cooden concentrate this morning anyway on the paypa becuz I know is the day I have to ring the doctor. Never mind Thacha. Today the Doctor is gonna tell us the results for Eleni, my daughter. The tests she have done.

Eleni is my life. She make my life complee. She is the alpha and omega. You know what I mean? In fact she’s more important than my life. All my swet is for her. Every drop. I din want for her what I have for my life, you know? Am thinking about her all the time, especially since these bloody tests she have.

“Not gwan work today then Mr Paully man?” is Henry. Jesus. Almost miss my stop. I jump off the bus as is pull away from the stop outside 27 Old Street. I jus make it in time. Henry, his belly laughing. “See you tomorrow man!” he shoutin as he pulling the cord for the driver to pull away. I bin thinking about Eleni so much I almost miss the stop eh?

I read somewhere. A book. Somewhere. I like to read, you know. It say, ‘The feet are the most intelligent part of the human body’. I understand this. My feet is telling me to stay on the bus. Don’t go to work today. Eh? What you think? ‘The feet are the most intelligent part of the human body’ Where you feet, is where you want to be. Eh? Is nice.

So I get off an I go down the sidestreet, is Colebroke Road, so I can have some breakfast. I nearly always have my breakfast at The Green Angel Café in Colebrooke Row. A cup of strong tea, an egg and bacon sandwich maybe, a tsigarette, of course and we maybe have an argy bargy before the day is start. Is round the back of the factory and everybody in there know me. I go in, the door is sticky and always make a noise from a coppa bell on top of the door frame when you go in. Like the old antique shops. Is a few punters I know, all stuffing they faces with toast or eggs. The smell of the fried bacon is everywhere.

“Martha, good morning! How you doini?”

“The lovely Mr Paul! Fine thank you darling, nice weekend?”

“Yes thank you. Very nice. Very nice. Quiet.” Am lying, of course.

Martha is Italian. She is very kine but she is tieya all the time. Her eyes have big bags under. She run the place with her husband Tony, who does all the cooking. He has a very thin moustache and is only got one eye. He wears a black patch like a pirate, on his left eye. His son left a frying pan on the stove and the oil is spit into his eye. He never forgive his son. His son was name Tony too.

Martha know how I like my tea.

“Strong enough to stand your teaspoon in, eh Mr Paul?”

“I keep telling you am no mista to you my darlin. Just you callin me Paul.”

“And how is Mrs Paul and Eleni?” Tony asked from the kitchen while he making an Omlette.

“Fine, fine thank you.” Am lying again. I can tell them, can I? I don wanna bring my private business, my family business here eh? We talk about politics instead. Not my personal family life. Is too much.

Tony the son, he got an eye for Eleni. He got two working eyes unlike his Dad. I seen him looking at her with them. She’s fourteen. She’s too young my son. I wanna tell him, but I wanna keep things sweet when I come for breakfast.

“Din you see the paypa?” Am askin when she bring me my tea. I kip to the Politics.

“Soon you not even gonna have a Union, Mr Paul!” Martha was saying.

“They say we had ‘a winter of discontent’. Everything is gonna change now, with this new woman, Mrs Thatcher.” I tell her. “We gonna have a three-day week again just like the bloody Heath, you’ll see Mr Tony. Everybody is gonna be on strike again now. The Unions is not gonna have it. The Unions is finish.” Tony the younger, is come over with my egg and bacon sandwich.

“And don ask for no more wages eh re Tony boy. Otherwise, you fatha is gonna be asking to borrow from the IMF, like Callaghan.”

“Say hello to Eleni for me, will you Mr Paul.” Tony the son, is whisper this when he speak and he leans over to me when he says this. He has eyes for my girl. You see?

Too young for you my boy. I finish my paypa before the bell is ring behind me.

Am walking up the three flights of stairs at the factory as I never use the lift no more. One day I get stuck in it when it brek down. Three hours I was in there, waitin for the bloody fieya brigade pipol to come and open the door. The other owners went spare, ‘cos they have to repair the bloody thing and is cost them a lot of money my friend. Is no my fault it stuck.

But when I am walking up the stairs this Monday I bin thinking. Today is twenty-four years to the day, when I start work here as a presser. I bin workin in this factory for twenty-four years re!

8.30am

I look at my card and reed my name with the time on it. I check the clock. I punch my card and is make me think. Twenty-four years today.

I go to my machine. I check the electricity she’s on. I look to see if the Govna is in the office and I start to make sure the temprature is goin correct by putting up the gage on the cylinda. Is got to pass boiling wata up through the hose, so I have a little time before is hot enuff number on the gauge. I go to the cloakroom.

I don spik to noone yet. I don’t get on with the other pressers anyway. Many of the pipol they are nice in the factory, but these new young pressers they come in recently, I don get on with them. They bin whisperin and making signs behind me, behin my back and making my life more shit thsn it is anyway, so now I don spik to them unless I have to. Most of the pipol in the factory is like me and I like them, but not the other pressers. If fact am very easy to get on with, because am a nice guy. I can tell what signs they doini, when they think am not looking, but I catch them, I see them. Is not my fault I don say hello, you understand?

I finish another tsigarette. The pressure she is ready. The ion is hot. I start my first dress of the day. I pull her from the rail. The new order is come in on Friday. Big order. But is fussy. Is a big problem for all the factory. Is much work on one garment for us, the pressers and the costings is shit for them, the machinists.

I bin work for hour and half and still these rails are fucky fuwl. I can get ahead. Ssss. Is the sound the steam she come out from the iron as am working. This dress has so many fucky butto is really slowin me dow. Normally, ssss, I can get through the pressin of a dress in, ssss, on avrege you understan, ssss, like when the Govna isno aroun, ssss, I really slow up then, unless the mastorisa is getti on my back, ssss, well anyway I could do a dress in abow fifty secon. But these fucky buttons, ssss, are driving me crazy. They nine buttos right down the frun, ssss!!

I to finish these Dorothy Perkins dresses so the young girls can look good when they wearing them. We make a lot for Dorothy Perkins and we make the midi and the maxi, the chevron with the viscose, the polyester or the corduroy, dresses they have the pleats, the ruffs on the sleeves. I know all about the styles. I press them all. So the dress we have on this Monday is got buttos all the way down the fron and all the girls is love them. I hate them. Isa made from Denim. Long dress in denim, with buttos all the way down the fron. Heaven for the girls whjo wear them. Hell for the men who press them.

One thing I like to do when am working is talk. I like to talk to pipol because is many pipol from my lovely Cyprus, is work in the factory. An only five years ago is about the worst thing happen in Cyprus. But we don talk about the invasion.

We have Turkish people working in the factory too, so is not good politics to talk about that, you know, the troubles in Cyprus. Is no no, no – eh? A no go area just like the Ledra Palace Hotel now in our beloved Famagusta. I have to bite my lip when someone they say something in the news about the 1974 invasion, the UN, Kissinger, Makarios, Grivas, Sampson, EOKA, EOKA B, the Green Line, the Lydra Palace, But I was the one who know all about the issues there and the situation and that bastard Ecevit.

Am thinking am not even gonna do even a hundre this fucky mornin. These buttos, sss, these fucky buttos, sss! In my head am say, “You know that bloody Ecevit is gonna be the president of Cyprus if we not careful!” I make sure no one is gonna hear this, ‘cos you know is gonna get you sack. Pipol is very upset about politics at the factory. So nobody is allow to talk anything about that on the shop floor.

An am the fastest presser in Old Street my son. Can be beaten you know. Nobody is quicker that me. I got tekneek. The best tekneek. I tell you my tekneek. Just so you can understand what am talking about.

I quickly pull another dress from the haystack of polyester beside me, give it a quick shake by the collar with both hands (the way you get a whip to crack) and I swivel around with the numba. As I do, the dress she open up in mid – air, fill with the air passing through it, floating towards the ironing board. As the dress is release by my right hand, is guided by my left hand on to and through the front end of the ironing-board. As it come to rest it pass right round the board so it completely covers it like a condom on a dick. This my trademark. You know the trick when someone he pull the tablecloth away and he leave a whole plate full of cutlery? This the reverse. Is like magic and everybody who watches likes to see this. Some of the young apprentice when they start to workin they send them here to watch me do this. They watch and they learn from me and my tekneek. I should be charging them for this you know.

The dress she lay lifeless on the board like a woman who waits for you. I sometimes imagine her to be a lover. And she is restless for me to unbutton her.

I start the inside of the back first, Buttons always takin a litlee bit more time to do. So as the iron she finally rest on the back of the garment is already moving, the steam already pouring into it, making it fresh and is like reviving the material with life-giving steam. But you have to be very careful with an iron who is this hot because you can scald the dress and mark the material. This will mean the numba has to come back or at the worst they have to throw the dress away. Sometimes she has to go all the way to the beginning in the factory to replace the burn section. Is half a days work. No one is want the aggravation.

Very short spurt now on the crease and smooth away from the dress and it disappear. I point the very tip of the iron very delicately on the crease. Over the back and on to the right seam now with a quick flick from my left hand on the bottom hemline, making the garment turn over. Is like she turning position for sex. I whisper to the dress as if to a lover.

“That’s right my darling, jus a littlee bit, move over for me”! Is make me laugh to myself. Am talking to the dress you understan? In my head you understan?

I follow the new line of the seam, and make the dress come to life. Twenty seconds before and the dress is a rag, a piece of material you gonna use as a duster. Now, she has a shape and she’s clean and she’s fresh. Thas me. Thas steam. Thas irony. That’s my tekneek.

And sometimes the finishers, they say. “Oh, perhaps you might have missed this Mr Paul…do you see, a little blemish.” Blemish. Blemish? What is this blemish? I never hear the word. Sometime they bin there five minutes and they tellin you how to do you job. These girls, these young girls, oh mishi mou she bin trained at the college, the fashion college in Eess London.

And one day, Takoui, the senior finisher, she say to me, “Oh my daughter went to the London College of fashion Mr Paul didn’t you know?”

No, I din know and I din care madam.

After the seams, I start the real finishing, the arms. Jesus. Am struggle with this numba. A dress I can finish in less than three minutes?

Is hot today; almost finished the inside. Almost finished the cuffs. Finish the back, finish the next cuff and then look at my watch. Got to phone the doctor. Lunchtime. Eleni’s test.

I hold the dress. Now it’s a dress, not a numba no more, a dress, she has life and body and shape, And I never went to college to say that. I hold her up before me and I take a black plastic hanger from the cardboard box next to my station; is full of them. Sometimes they have a mind of their own. They cause me aggeravation because they get all tangled up with each other. Sometimes is was as if they know how much you need to get the work out so they all got together inside the box and said, ‘Right, if he tries to take one of us right? We stick together!’ Sometimes when production is at the most hard I need someone to separate the hangers from each other. Someone has to stand to one side an’ separate the hangers and put them on to my rail, ready for me to pick them up individually, an’ I gain a few seconds more speed in-between from numba to dress. Is all about speed in the factory; everything depen’ on how fast you can work to get the production out.

Finishers is like vultures waiting for the dress. Speed, see?. Thas the end of the line for dresses in the factory. If you want dresses out, they have to go through the finishers, because if they not finish properly is gonna come back from the wholesalers. And when the work is come back, is no pay for the Govna, is no good for you and is no good for the factory.

Takoui catch my eye as am workin’. I haven seen her all morning till now and I see she is looking at me for the first time, this Monday morning. When everythin’ change.

She bin wearing black for as long as I bin working there and probably, many years before that. She gonna be sixty-five now but she bin there in that factory, as a young woman, and then she became a widow. She bin there all her life as far as I know. You only got to give her a smile an she would have a smile for you too. Armenian family and they bin through a lot, them people. The Turks did some terrible things to their people too. But is too much politics eh? Don’t wanna upset the dust cart eh?

Am get plenty of time to look around me when am working because I can always see how people are working nearby. Behind they hands.

Widow Takoui has very small hands, very delicate. She has a very small pair of special scissor. She make tiny cuts of the thread that’s left over on a seam, or if there is too much thread when one of the machinists left over on the inside of a dress it has to be taken out. Every single dress in that factory come through her. Even the other finishers, they all look on her if they have a problem with a creess or a particular machinist’s work. They all go to her to ask what to do.

She looking at me and I can see her asking a question without saying nothin’, what the hell is she looking at me for? So she says.

“Something wrong Paul? You ok? You look upset.”

I take another dress from the pile at my side and am like a machine sometimes you know. A robow, and I go through the routine again. I start over.

What does this dried up old woman want from me eh? She wants me to be happy every day of my life? Can’t she see am not happy? She asking me if I am upset? Sure am upset, but am not gonna tell you about it.

“Too many fucky buttos,” I tell her and then I say it again to her so she gets the message. Thas the problem, nothing else. Maybe this, she gonna understand. Nothing to do with my daughter, ‘cos is nothing to do with you or anybody…

Every machinist in the factory knows is too many buttos, but this is what is selling.

Because of her I can stop thinking the phone – call, the results. I can even look at my watch properly now because I have to finish the next numba. I bet the govna, he come around soon. Looking at my work. Asking if am ok. Jus leave me alone eh?

“Bastard fucky dress. Bastard seam, bastard buttos. Sod this, I’m going for piss.”

I say this so Andy the other presser next to me can hear, and all he does is laugh but he didn’t look up from his pressin. There is steam coming from him all over. He is quick.

“Nex week, thank God, nex week.”

“What, you goin for a piss nex week, re?” Andy laughing again.

“We finish the order by nex week!” I say.

I pulled my dick out to have piss and am thinking to myself, I mean, God never gave me this jus to hav a piss wiv, eh?

And as am having this piss, am thinking about the phone-call am gonna make at lunch. I look my watch, I get relief from the piss, at last, a release. Aaah, it goes into the bowl and gives me relaxation for a moment.

I don’ notice whose standing nex to me.

10.34am

LONDON CALLING – THE CLASH

“Din you hear, re Pavlo?”

Is the boss Andreas, the Govna. His high squeaky little voice. Like he talk through his nose.

I realise, the Govna, is standing in the nex pissbowl, mouthin off abow sunthin. He caneven see his cock for his belly these days. At least when I go for a piss, I can still find it without looking for half an hour. It makes me happy inside to know that I will live longer. You know why? I’m leaner and meaner my friend. You get me? I bin sweat for a living mate, instead of living off the sweat of others.

He say, “I said, din you hear, we goin to put some hangers in that place in the corner. Nex week.”

“Eh?”

“You din hear a word I said, din you?”

“When?”

“I said we need to have some more hangers aroun in that corner pressing area, we making the changes nex week.”

“Eh?”

“Changes with the layout. I told you last week.”

And the Govna turns, he shakes his cock, some splash is coming in my direction ‘cos we so close to each other, too close to each other if you ask me. Standing there you know. They neva make the men’s toilets far enough apart. An he neva wash his hands. Dirty basta. Am always wash my hands after having a pee and I think is disgusting of the Govna not to wash his. Especially as there was a sign the Govna himself, he put it up. It say that ‘All employees should wash their hands after reliving themselves.’ He spelt relieving wrong, ‘cos I know good English, but am neva gonna say nothin because I like to see he looks foolish. ‘Cos he is a stupid foolish fat man.

I like to lather my hands with soap and when I do this now, am thinking about the Govna and how he sound more and more pissed off with me these days. “He’s always sound piss off with me!” And am talking to the mirror now you understand? Is like if anyone is comin in they not gonna notice because am doing it behind my soapy hands, you see?

In my head am thinking, what does it fucky matter about where a few hangers go in the corner eh? He’s angry with me pano sanemo eh, for no reason. This is what is worry me. Why he so angry with me the hole time? Am begin to think something is going on that I don’ know abow. Something I’m not sure abow. Something the Govna he say about tellin me last week. Thas what he say. When last week? I can remember. Is like people bin talking behind they hands about something, in a voice that I can quite hear, is not quite loud enough. What’s the word. The English word? Audio, something. No, is no audible, inaudible. That’s the word. Is driving me nuts.

Am gonna have words. Am not gonna let it go.

I catch up with the Govna just as he is getting back into his office. He turns to my rail and he is looking.

“You never said nothing to me Govna. I never heard you say nuthin.”

He turns to me…

“Jus ‘cos you neva heard, dosen min I neva said nothin eh?”

The Govna has a dress in his hand and he puts the dress back on my rail and he give me the look of he could murder me. His looking at the dress like something is wrong with it. There is nothing wrong with it. The dress is beautiful. He goes. He pulls the belt of his trousers up to pull his big belly up and he goes to his office.

Am about to begin work when…Stelios, one of the three other younger pressers, he starts. He’s always put his oars in. His voice was very loud.

“The Govna say about the changes.” and suddenly his interrupt because the Govna is come back and his shouting. At me.

“Re gologo, last Friday we had the big meeting to talk about the changes. I bin telling everybody and you the only one re, you the only one who dusen know. Fifty pipol in the factory and you the ONLY ONE!”

Everyone of the fifty people in the factory is watch Andreas humiliatin me. Everybody know sometimes he let fly and can mark someone out, like they marking your card, the English is say. He do this to mark me out for everyone to see. He knows what his doini. He was like a commandant in a concentration camp, shouting at the prisoner before they shoot them in the head. But am not gonna let this go this time. Am not gonna stand there and let him have a go at me this Monday morning. Not this day. I had enough now, right? So I say to him.

“Last Friday, I wasn’ here last Friday, my daughter, you rememba? You gave me the Friday off. Don you rememba? I wasn’ here Govna. How am gonna know what you bin talkin about when am no here do I?”

Andreas din have no ansa and his not gonna apologise like he should. He hasn’t finished. He carries on.

“Well why din you ask somebody? You could ask anybody here and they tell what we bin talkin about my friend.”

His lookin aroun and pipol is stare.

“The show is over everybody, get back to work please, is a big order this week.”

And suddenly the factory start back into life after what happen and everything seem to stop in time you know. All eyes are watching the two fighters at the centre of the ring, now everybody is pretending to ignore the row and they carry on with they work..

10.40 am

CHAPTER 2

ANDREAS – THE GUVNA

STAYIN’ ALIVE -THE BEE GEES

I think many times, he could be me. I could be him. Same village, same background, same school. We grew up together. We played in the same Church Square. We lifted the same skirts. We shared the same dreams; everything the same really. But he has the factory and I have the ion. He has the big car, I have the bus. He got Koulla with the designer clothes and the Pamela Anderson boob job. I got Stella with the crochet needle and the moustache. Ah. Life huh? And I know am the same as every Greek-Cypriot. All wanting what the other fellow have. He’s no better than me.

He just had the chances and I just had the no chance. When you look on the other side of the fence they say, is always greener they say. But I got Eleni. Koulla can have children any more. She have the operation. The, the hysterectomy thing. Barren. Is a good word. He got money, but no happiness. I got no money but I got the joy of Eleni. Even without money, am happier because I got a daughter who loves me an who respeck me. All he has is a worthless son, who burns his money on Hashish and koumari and putanas.

I know Andreas always feel guilty for having the money too, the MERCEDES 260 E class and the detached house in Hadley Wood. He got a Georgian House, the Tudor mock or something, I don know what it is. He say to me is all made to look like is three hundred years old. I mean what’s the point? You gonna spend all that money on a house to make it look three hundred years old. I can see the point. We got a house in Berkshire Gardens, in Palmers Green. Is lovely. Small, but lovely. Just off Green Lanes, before the Cock Tavern and the North Circular Road is only a few minutes away. I can be on the motorway in twenty minutes, up to Hadley Wood for when Andreas is invite me for a Souvla. Is not mock anything.

He told me he felt guilty about sending his son to the expensive public school. He said he would never, never be able to explain that to anybody that worked there. They din understand that a good education would change his son’s life and take him away from this shit factory and into another world. He couldn’t explain it to them.

Many times he talks to me on the quiet. To me. Andreas, he don’t like to show off his money, he feels guilty to show his money off, he feels guilty to go to a club and smash the plates. The only way he can show his power is shoutin in the factory at the people like me. And now he’s gonna feel guilty for shouting at me. This is the way the man is. I know him better than he knows himself. When we drunk last Chrismas, we in his office and he tell me…

“Oh re Pavlo, singeni, sometimes it’s such a burden to have all this responsibility, so many people dependin on me to feed their kids, pay their mortgage, the HP. You understan? You don’t know what the pressure is like every day, every week, to bring in the orders, to keep the factory running, so I can keep all these people workin, keep their heads above the water. It’s too much sometimes. I come home and I’m tieya, I wake up and I’m still tieya. What am I gonna do? Every week the costings get smaller from the wholesalers, the work is harder, the dresses get more complicate. The wholesalers don’t give a shit. They say, ‘You make them at this price or I get an Indian factory to make them and you gonna put these people out of work!’ What you gonna do, eh?”

Buy today, he will apologise. I know him.

But I didn’t know then what I know now. But I din know then. I din know and even if I did I couldn’t change what was gonna happen. Andreas was keeping it from me. He knew everything was changing and I din. He tell me layta he din know how to tell me. How to break it to me. Eh? You believe this?

I start to speed my work and I was flying suddenly. I was quicker on the dress with the buttos down the front. I look into the office can see Andreas sitting behind his desk and he look angry. Like a cartoon where the cloud follows the cayote around and just rains on him.

All of us from the old country, we still as Cypriot as the day we arrive. The English we speak, is the kind our kids try to avoid at school, our accent, is like the Berlin wall between us and the English.

Friday 1^st June 1965. Palmers Green.

TONY ORLANDO AND DAWN – KNOCK THREE TIMES

We had a picture of a very dark-skinned Egyptian woman who wore two ridiculously huge earrings, in the centre of the front room above the green tiled mantelpiece, which was adorned with a tiny army of dolls dressed up in national costume. Stella loved these dolls and she thought it was nice to have the colour of their costumes and the decoration of their dresses in the house. To us, the picture of the Egyptian woman, was the three ducks flying along the living room wall, we’d seen in English houses. We had little sea-blue glass ashtrays that looked like upturned shells sitting on the coffee table in front of the brown upholstered leather settee. There was a tiny bureau that went up against the wall and when you opened the lid, I could sit and write at it. I would write sometimes but mostly Eleni did her homework there. It also doubled as a drinks cabinet. There was also a collection of 78RPM records my father had brought back with him to the house one day. He’d been on his first visit to Camden Town one afternoon and there, at one end of the market was a tiny Greek man in a three piece suit, with white hair, selling his collection to raise a little money. The market there blossomed during the sixties. We inherited that collection from my father, and occasionally I would borrow one or two Greek discs from the factory, that became another collection, no questions asked. The Camden collection included, Roza Eskenasi, Noni Dousopoulou, Olga Cavadia, Tetros Demetriades, with some 45rpms from Stratos Dionisiou, George Dalaras, Nana Mouskouri and Poly Panou. The factory collection included, Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman, Cathy Kirby and Doris Day, Cliff Richard, Strauss, Beethoven.

Our home was in Palmers Green in North London, off Green Lanes. Green Lanes ran through the middle of Cypriot country. Haringey, Bounds Green, Palmers Green, Wood Green, and Southgate; which is the furthest North in London you can go and still be in London. Along this stretch of road, we Cypriots have come together, in a kind of Babylon. Putting down roots without any soil. How the peasants became the shopkeepers and how the shepherds became the waiters. It took a week for Stella to come here by ship and she came alone. She was one of the extraordinary women who travelled here to make a life, find a husband, make some kids, then go back home. That was always the plan. Everybody knew that. Pretended that. Aspired to that.

Eleni was how much change had happened since Stella was young. Second generation, becoming the almost freshly minted class of Cypriots who knew little or nothing about Cyprus and whose, friends, places of beauty, were part of this country.

Growing up with Eleni was fabulous. And after a while, Eleni realised how to twist us around her little fingers. She always got her way. She began to realise also, that with this new found way of getting things, she could also do the same at school and get her own way with her teachers. Her natural charm and her constantly sharp honesty, made her a match even for the most hardened of hearts.

It was a tiny mid-terraced 1920’s house and l always thought that by owning my house, it meant I owned a little bit of England, that was forever Cypriot. There were two bedrooms upstairs and a bathroom, a living room, dining room, and kitchen downstairs. All the rooms were carpeted except for the kitchen and the bathroom. I told Stella when we moved there, that we would be warmer with a carpet on the floor. The idea of a carpet to Stella, who had never seen anything on a floor in side a house other than a snakes and dirt, was more than a kind of magic.

Stella thought the carpet looked like a bed and laid down on it when she walked into the still empty front room. She made me lie on top of her so we could make love and l obliged, but I did feel very odd doing it there and I told her so. She laughed and we did it on the floor often after that. Until, bit by bit the furniture arrived and we ran out of room to lie down. In the end, the bed became the ‘proper’ place for our lovemaking.

Eleni’s childhood was the happiest time in our life. I think I was a great father. I tried to be. Never to over protect her. So much so, that she got a real sense of independence from me. From a very early age I would talk to her as an equal and let her try to say what she wanted. She was speaking in just over a year after she was born. Not complete sentences, but she was managing to make us understand what she wanted. Amazing. And in two languages. She’d already picked up new words from the television, which we had never spoken to her.

She had learnt to speak two languages by the age of three. Her Cypriot was very good and l took pride in teaching her, so that she would impress everybody who came round. She spoke so well that her accent was perfect, the street accent I had in my youth, when I was running around in shorts. I taught her the best put-downs for boys and the best curses, so that she would always have something to say to anyone who tried to get smart with her. The boys were interested in her from a very early age.

I remember I was driving Eleni home in the blue Triumph Zodiac one day. She’d just had her first day of nursery school. Sitting on her mother’s knee in the front seat, she was having an animated conversation with me.

As we were talking, she was playing with a little toy she had made at her nursery. All the kids had been given bits of the inside of a toilet roll and Sellotape and something to colour it with. Eleni had chosen two bits of card of different colours, one blue and one green and she had very skilfully cut them into circles, one smaller than the other and joined in the middle with a brass pin the teacher had helped put into the centre of the circle for her. She drew the top half of a daddy, a mummy, a teacher, and a milkman on the four points of the compass and where the card overlapped she drew the bottom half of each. When she turned the smaller card she got different top and bottoms, which the teacher gave her, a gold star for. Eleni was also deciding that she must make another people toy and use a pen of the same colour for each of the people next time and she would make sure all the pictures were the same size next time too. She told me she wasn’t sure if she’d put us on the next one. She could put a policeman on one of them. That would be funny she said. She was creating toys for herself and to show the other children in her class.

One day l was feeding the two goldfish we had. They lived in a little bowl I cleaned every weekend and put little bits of plastic looking like seaweed inside. On the bottom there was a thin layer of what looked like red sand I bought. It was like a fake a kind of seabed. Eleni was watching me drop the little bits of food onto the surface of the water. The fish swam up to the surface to feed. Eleni was five. She talked to me in English.

“What are the fishes thinking in the bowl Dad?”

I didn’t have an answer.

“I think they’re saying who is that ugly little girl looking at me and where’s my steak?”

“Dad, you’re funny!”

“Not as funny as the fishes.”

“Why are you so funny Daddy?”

“Because everybody should be funny my darling, everybody. It makes you happy when you’re funny. Life is meant to be happy my darling.”

“Are you happy Daddy?”

I repeated her words in my head because I couldn’t quite believe what I had just heard. Am I happy?

“Yes my darling, yes, I’m happy. I’m happy because I have you. And I tickled her until she screamed with laughter.

“Daddy you’re so funny.”

She laughed too and tried to tickle me back.

l let out a huge roar of laughter for her. My clever little girl talking to me like this and I pretended to her that I had been tickled. It just blew me away and at the same time I wondered how intelligent she must be if she can say things like that at her age.

“It wouldn’t surprise me, if she turned into a doctor or a lawyer.”

I told Stella one day.

“Who can she marry when she can think for herself like this? What man is gonna have her? He is going to have his hands full.”

I laughed.

“So clever, so clever, my God she will be something.”

At seven when she had been rummaging through my record collection, she had managed to work out the stereo system player button and volume control and put on a whole load of Greek music till she found something she really liked.

A few days later, we were in the car and I had the radio on, she heard the same piece of music she had been secretly playing when she was at home the day before, in the front room. There was a quiz programme on Radio Four called, The Brain Of Britain. There was a song playing and the question was, what was the piece of music called and who wrote it?

“Moonlight Serenade by Glenn Miller!” she piped up from the back seat.

One of the contestants then said, “Moonlight Serenade by Glenn Miller.” In response and the radio Quiz master said ‘Correct!’

I actually had to stop the car. l brought the car to a complete stop in the middle of Green lanes and actually skidded as I put the brakes down so fast. We were just outside the Cock Tavern where the North Circular Rd meets Green Lanes. It was not a good place to stop because the traffic lights were green and cars behind me were blowing their horns. I pulled the car to one side of the road.

I was amazed.

“How do you know the answer?”

“I just do”

She didn’t want to admit she had been listening to my records without my permission.

I remembered I had a Glenn Miller record in my collection. In an instant I realised, she must have been playing my records but I didn’t let on. I never let on and even though I knew she was sneaking into the lounge to play my record collection, I never minded. It was her secret and mine.

I found out the collection she was most interested in was the Readers Digest one of ‘classical and popular favourites, through the ages,’ whatever that meant. l had sent off for them thinking they were free because of the wording on the letter and didn’t read the small print about returning them within the twenty-one day trial period. I was stuck with them and I had to pay off the balance in instalments. I could afford it, though and on reflection it was worth the price, as I enjoyed the discs enormously over the years and so did Eleni.

I had everything from Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony to Rossini’s Four Seasons. I had Barber Shop Quartets and Mozart Quartets, songs like  Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair and of course, Moonlight Serenade.

Eleni particularly liked the way Benny Goodman played his clarinet. He could really make her feel as if he was singing to her with it. She loved the way Glenn Miller made her feel too. It was a kind of relaxed feeling and made her warm. It felt like she understood something. Like she could play it too she said. She would pretend to hold a clarinet like he did. She loved to read the words that accompanied the sleeve of the records, because it told her more about the people whose lives she liked to hear about. I watched he play her imaginary instruments and listened to her talking about the way the music made her feel.

She said she wanted to play the clarinet but when we found out what the lessons would have costed we realised we couldn’t afford it. l asked at the school, if there was any way she could get lessons, but the school didn’t do musical instrument lessons and they didn’t have a teacher who could teach the clarinet. She took it in her stride and she continued to pretend to play air clarinet whenever she heard anything on the radio she liked the sound of and whenever she recognised a Benny Goodman tune.

CURTIS MAYFIELD – MOVE ON UP

There were also three people in the factory who were directly related to me. I didn’t share too much more with them about Eleni or the rest of our family. Genes was about the only thing we shared. There was Martha, Lia and Ronny, cousins and koumbaros respectively. They all called each other, but didn’t call Stella and me.

Martha worked as an Overlocker and was my cousin from the same village in Cyprus. I witnessed my first chicken being slaughtered for supper in her Mum and Dad’s Garden. I watched it’s headless body running around the yard, blood spurting from the top before it died. I was seven. Cluck cluck cluck.

Martha was nine and saw my fear and my fascination. She recognised the same thing she felt in herself and realised then that boys could be just as soft as girls when it came to headless chickens. She shared the feelings with me, the way she felt when she first saw that sight made her also realise that she loved me. She said she loved me. She let me kiss her later on that afternoon and l first tasted a girls lips at seven, in the shaded veranda of the courtyard of their parents’ house, while my Uncle and Auntie were asleep, out of the afternoon heat.

Cyprus was still the land of my birth, though all around me things were changing, with people talking about going to some other country, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. I could hear the adults in talks about how the streets were paved with gold there. All the family were going there. Eventually I found out, we were all going to follow our father to London. To England. My Sister and brothers, relatives, and wives, all going. And that the ‘that other family’ was already a part of the history of Cyprus and England, as far back as Richard the Lionheart.

When Granddad began selling the land we had had in the family for generations, we all turned a blind eye. Not that we knew anything about it, not in detail anyway. But something drove all those immigrants from Cyprus. And of course, not just Cyprus.

l followed my Grandfather Harry around one day, because I couldn’t figure out what he was up to, wandering from one group of men, sat at their backgammon games, to the next. At each table the talk was always ‘my land’. Down the street he would make a long slow journey of stopping to talk and maybe take a coffee with whomsoever would talk to him about buying his land from him. There were plenty interested, but playing hard to get, lest old Harry got the better of them and exacted a price they were going to regret. Some were even shrewder realising the value of what he was selling and offered fair money immediately, not wishing to antagonise the most colourful character in the village. Harry, the old gambler was betting on success in England where they had snow and rain, in the Summer! They would giggle behind his back as he went down the street pointing at him and saying. ‘Look, there he goes, gambling with the future of his family!’

What a leap of imagination to make a man, whose family had been in the village since before any records were made by the Ottoman Turks, to want to sell our birth right and our family’s inheritance? To go to England and start a new life there? What came into the imaginings of men and women that enabled them to make such a leap into the unknown?

The Cypriot diaspora was a disparate and piecemeal affair. It symbolised the draw of England in its most fundamentally flawed way. Yes, the Cypriots came because they thought the streets would be paved with gold; like so many immigrants, but they also came because there was no real prospect of them ever making a living in Cyprus anymore. If only they’d known that the ones who stayed on Cyprus would resent them when they eventually came back to spend their money on the Island, perhaps they wouldn’t have left so readily.

Some made wealth in England and lorded it up when they went back to Cyprus with enough money to buy a beach of their own. Pretending to be somebody they weren’t, in a land where they were no longer who they thought they were. Surrounded by people who didn’t know them anymore anyway. They went back as foreigners in their own country. They made a bad name for the others who wanted to come back to the mother country for a holiday or to see their relatives once or twice a year.

Centuries of being in one place and then, uprooting your family to want to go to some mystic land. A country, which was given away by the Ottoman Turks, after they had finished with it. Given to the grand old Queen Victoria for helping them against the Russians. The Ottomans were so grateful that they let Cyprus go in the way a whore might dispose of an old client she didn’t want to fuck anymore.

The family, that sacred cow of continuation. The myriad Diaspora of a nation’s gold-seeking runaways. Running from the safety of what you know, not because someone is trying to wipe out your race but because you want a better life. Economic migrants. So they left, thinking they would return when they’d made a million or two.

But there were reasons that weren’t so easy to explain. These were the sly, well tested methods of British Imperialism of divide and rule. The Turkish-Cypriots who joined the police force were encouraged to do so, by a policy of the British colonialist government. They relished their jobs and became brutish and malevolent local enforcers. It wasn’t difficult to stir up real or imagined slights within a community, when the vast majority of the population were Greek-Cypriots and those in the minority were running the police service. Differences and arguments, minor infringements of the law became major incidents. So on and so forth. The rioting between the two communities was as frightening as it was inevitable. Many left because they were afraid for both themselves and their families. Some were driven out of their homes.

I am tempted to say something about our family being Cypriot and not Greek. English people never understand the difference between Greeks and Cypriot. Their geographic understanding is poor. The English really have no sense of cultural shame. They are unaware of their pigeon holes and their misunderstanding of the foreigners who make the things they use, clean the shit they leave, wash and clothe their old, wipe the arses of their elderly, doctor their sick. The people’s they don’t see. They are the invisible serving class. The lives and cultures they have sought to dominate and destroy. Cyprus being small example.

But, you know something? I’m only speaking like this to tell this story.

In my head I don’t have the accent, or the inability to express myself. In my head I can talk and use all the words I like and I don’t have an accent.

I speak the ‘sweet bastard’ Cypriot that Byron was so enamoured of. And I bet you weren’t expecting that were you? Because in my head I speak perfect Greek-Cypriot and I don’t struggle for the words that make me sound like a foreigner. Because in my head I’m not a foreigner, am I? But in youa head? Ah…got you!!

In my head are the words of a man whose authenticity and integrity are only legitimised by the reader of this story; in spite of and not because I chose to tell the truth. The truth about his life, his feelings, and his destiny, as I see it and saw it then. With the benefit of hindsight, oversight, foresight. A Holy Trinity of understanding that only an author can genuflect to or worship at the altar of. At any rate, I take the communion of this bread and sanctify it with the life of the man he was, the man he is before and after those events on that Monday. To enable, ennoble and also exorcise, the time, the memory, the people.

I didn’t do it then for him, when I lived it, but I do it now from beyond the grave, because now I am the ghost of Paul that lived his life and his shadow is all there is left. He cast this shadow as the ghost of the man who lived the story. I saw it all. And I want you to, too. The words are buried in the vaults of my ancestors and they are joined with the same thread that made the dresses, the same sweat that steam-pressed them, the same skill that stitched them together. I wrote it in the life I led and the pages of the book which has become the memory made alive again. What’s in a book but memory anyway? Ours and of those of others. Mine is here.

I will strive to tell the truth. To achieve kind of equilibrium. To redress what I feel is a terrible imbalance, a nuisance, a sin.

I’m sensitive to the invisibility of our culture, our ethnicity, identity, almost everything that makes us who we are. So, as I walk alongside the ghost of Socrates, I take pride in knowing I am doing something, giving something back to him. An attempt at redressing the imbalance. He is not Zorba.

I am invisible in the factory and outside it but Eleni will be different eh? My daughter will talk without an accent and be like one of them and she will be the first generation to do that. She will learn the secret ways of the English.

Andreas said one time.

“People they work for you, they just like the stubborn donkey that won’t see the easy way down the mountainside but they try instead to go down the most difficult way. You have to beat them with a stick. No more carrots. No more Mr nice guy.”

All the machinists and the other pressers, the buttonholers, and the over-lockers they all knew. So while I’m working and I’m working the fastest I have all morning. I’m thinking about what I’m gonna to say to the Govna.

So as I’m watching the office carefully, one of the other pressers goes in and the Govna is talking to him and occasionally they’re looking over to me in my direction. And they’re talking and talking. About me, I’ll bet.

“Just because they’re relatives they think you don’t understand when they’re talkin behind their hands about you.” I’m talking more to myself than to the other presser, Stelios, who is a few feet away from me, but Stelios hears me.

“I seen them goin’ to the office, I can see them looking at me. Blah blah blahing.”

“Ungourka!”

Stelios says back to me. This makes me very angry inside but I don’t say anything, nothing. I just swear inside my head how I’m gonna exact my revenge and I imagine that the numba I’m working on, is Stelio’s chest and that he is tied to the ironing board screaming in agony. I’m ironing his bare flesh into a mass of burnt meat. I wanted to cook Stelios’ flesh with the iron, and silently I did and the sound of the steamer drowned his screams.

I can see Andreas shaking his head in the office. He left the blinds up. What was this? He was looking right at me now. ‘Blah blah blah!’

“He’s talking about about me!” and I look at my watch, ‘cos I know it’s close to lunch.

12.54am

Six minutes to one exactly. Now I gotta make the fucking phone-call. Suddenly everything else is of no importance.

“What did he mean, what changes?” I ask Gologo eyes, next to me. He has eyes like the funny man, the comedian fellow, Marty Feldman. He’s on the television and it makes me laugh to myself when I compare the two together.

“They’re putting in a steam pressing machine, which does part of the pressing and it…”

“There isn’t any space for a pressing machine, so how are they gonna put it in here unless they get rid of the pressers?”

Gologo Eyes sighs very deeply and makes an ‘ach’ sound that there is no equivalent to in the English language. The only equivalent is like someone saying, ‘Well there you go shithead’.

I hear him.

“They’re just gonna get rid of the pressers then,  or what?”

“Just the old and the useless.” Marty Feldman eyes says. My head is spinning now.

“Eh?”

“I don’t know what they’re gonna do, why don’t you ask him?”

“Why don’t you shut your Gologo eyes and watch what you’re doing to that dress?”

“OK, Paully old son, don’t get your knickers in a twist. Nothing wrong with my work mate!”

And this is something I hate because it was Gologo eye’s sentence he always said to me. No respect.

“I don’t wear them, you malaga, women’s knickers are for pricks like you who can’t see what they’re doing. You’re marking that dress!”

“Re, don’t you know anything yet? They’re gettin in some bloody machine which is gonna put us all out of work!”

This is when it hit me in the face like someone slapped me in the face with a flannel.

“You can’t get a machine to do buttons or the cuffs, is not possible!”

“Or collars, but they’re still only gonna need one less presser for that. Figure it out mate.”

“Eh?”

“That’s right, you should be looking for other work, my son” and with this he laughed.

Three minutes to lunch. No time for another numba now. Leave it.

“I’m gonna talk to him after lunch. I’ll find out what’s going on. Believe me. 24 years I’ve been here mate.”

“You’re still gonna be out of a job, just like the rest of us soon, old man. They getting a machine to do your job. My job to one day!”

I turn the pressure gauge down to be ready for clocking off. In a minute or so, the steam, started to pour out of the release valve and the iron, began to cool down. Then and only then, can I safely leave the iron alone, without worrying it’s gonna explode from having too much pressure.

I look over by the pay phone at the front door and there wasn’t a queue yet. Finally I have time to make the call I’ve been scared to make all morning. I was the first one by the phone and the bell hadn’t even gone yet. I picked up the receiver and I started to dial.

01.00pm

The bell went for lunch. You know the kind of bell we have in the factory. It’s the loudest noise you can imagine. It’s the kind you have at fire stations. 5 seconds of trying to burst your eardrums. And I’m right underneath it, ‘cos it’s above the pay phone by the doors of the factory in the time it takes for the bell to ring for those five seconds. The sewing machines were turned off and people head for the door, the canteen, the toilet. Nearly half go out quickly, noisily. The rest begin to chatter or whisper by their machine. They pull their packed lunches from their bags, this new stuff they call Tupperware, they’ve all got now. Modern inventions eh? You can keep your food fresh for when you take it out to eat. It’s amazing, they make this plastic seal now. It keeps water out and air and your bread stays fresh, the salad is fresh as the second you take it out of the fridge, people bring in pasta and they heat it on the little stove in the canteen.

I put the receiver down. I’m not gonna call from here. I don’t want other people hearing my business. I’ll call from the street phone-box.

CHAPTER 3

OLD STREET EC1

Monday 7^th December 1979.

12.50am

THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD – THE BEATLES

Stella Socrates slowly put the phone in the hall at the foot of the stairs down. She was nervous after speaking to Dr Patel. She looked upstairs to see if Eleni was going to pop her head out of her room and ask her about the call. She didn’t. Her daughter was still listening to Radio 1’s breakfast show. Stella could hear the music as Eleni danced to ABBA up in her bedroom. Stella went into the kitchen, filled the kettle with water from the cold tap and put the kettle on. It was her default, for the next thing to do. Tea. But she really needed a cup of tea this time. Now. Because she knew Paul would be angry when he spoke to her. When she told him what Dr Patel had said.

She sat alone at the kitchen table by the wall, waiting for the kettle’s whistle to do its thing.

She would need to tell Eleni that they had to go to the hospital. Doctor’s orders. Today. They would be waiting for her at the Churchill Ward.

The world had suddenly become a scarier place and the implication of what Dr patel had said made her feel like Eleni was under some sort of threat. She convinced herself that this was just a mother’s intuition. And what about her school? Is she going miss all her classes? She loves her school. What would happen to her classes? She’d have to tell her teacher Miss Fletcher why she’d kept her off school today. She’d call her later. She would have to know.

She was afraid that she couldn’t explain to Paul what had just happened when she spoke to Dr Patel about the results of the tests they’d been waiting for. She was worried she wouldn’t be able to stop him getting upset with her because, she couldn’t explain it to him properly. She didn’t understand some of the English words the doctor was using anyway. But most of all, she was scared of having to go to the hospital. Her thoughts gave her a cramp in the pit of her stomach. She had this terrible thought that her daughter had something awful, but she didn’t know what it was and neither did the doctor, did he? Perhaps they’d find out at the hospital and that’s why they needed to go there today.

She re-lived a car running her daughter over outside her school. The stupid English woman who said she was distracted by one of her children in the car. Eleni had stepped out into the road. But this was worse. Eleni, was twelve then and lucky to be alive. In her head she saw her daughter flying through the air again. The kettle’s whistle made the image disappear.

As she poured a little boiling water into the teapot she remembered the nursing staff, the last time she was in hospital, They all fell in love with Eleni, because she was always so full of laughter and so clever and funny. Stella remembered how the woman responsible for the accident had brought her a chess set. Stella didn’t know what it was, but Paul knew and he taught his daughter how to play. She emptied the pot of water.

“Clever girl, she pick it up din she?”

Stella said to herself in Paul’s voice, as she measured three heaped spoonful’s of typhoo tea into the teapot. It was like that film they’d seen with the shark in the sea. Eleni is swimming on the surface and a big shark was underneath he, following her, threatening her. Watching her splashing on the surface of the water from below. Watching and following her, slowly, silently. She poured the rest of the water into the pot, gave it a stir and as she did, the phone rang.

It was Paul.

1.06pm

I ‘m outside at another phone box this time, so I can talk properly. I don’t want all the people in the factory knowing our business, you understand? This phone box is right outside the factory door,  but it stinks of piss, I make the call, standing in the stink of someone else’s piss.

I dial the number as I pull change from my pocket. I hear the pips. I put the pennies in. I press the button. People going past me all the time as it starts to ring the other end. She picks up the phone.

“I couldn’t use the phone in the factory ra. Too many people. What did he say? Anything?”

“The doctor, said they have to do some more tests. Again…for the blood he said. We’ve got to go down to the hospital today.”

“Eh? More tests. What about the results of the tests they did already?”

“He says it’s for the blood again. The tests. They need more blood. She’s going in today. I’m taking her to Silver Street. The Middlesex.”

“Eh? You’ve got to take her to the hospital?”

“He said maybe she’ll stay there tonight. I’m gonna take her.”

“Next time you tell that bloody bastard doctor to write down on a piece of paypa what’s wrong with my daughter or write us a letter. In English so you and I can understand it. You don’t even know what he said. You can’t even explain it to me? Tell him to write it on a piece of paper in English next time or send us a letter, so when I get home I can read it and see what the bloody hell is going on with her. You tell them down the hospital. Kirieleison, what’s happening to her? So you’re taking her today? You’re taking her? What, now?”

“Yes, my darling yes. Grimas taniada mas Ge berasamenda stin Anglia. I’ll take her to the hospital. The doctor, says she must go there now and maybe stay overnight.”

”What else, quick, before the pips!”

“Get some bread on your way home, from George’s, she likes it from George’s. You know they have the extra crusty loaf and they put more sesame seeds on top, you know the one. You bring it when you come to the hospital, later.”

Before I hang up. I need to comfort her. I have to let her know we are in this together. Reassure her.

“Call me from the hospital, okay? Look after her, ra. And please don’t cry when she is with you ah? It upsets her. I’ve told you this. We have to show her the positive, not the negative. We both have to keep our nerve, you understand?”

The pips start. I put the phone down and immediately get a nose full of the smell of what someone did earlier.

But when we talked about Eleni I get this pain in my chest. It’s so tight, like it’s holding my heart in its hand and squeezing, squeezing. Stella, never talks about her feelings. I’m gonna need something to calm my nerves at this rate and I’m gonna ask the doctor to give me something too so I can sleep properly at night, because that’s becoming a problem.

Bambos, one of the cutters, was outside the phone box in the street.

I open the door and I tell him.

“There’s plenty of other phones in this street you know!”

‘They’re all broken!’ Bambos says and he used the way I speak to make fun of me. He impersonated me.

Bambos, is an arrogant man…early thirties. I looked this word up. He has an ‘offensive attitude of superiority’. Somebody showed me a picture of this guy…they call him the Buddha and Bambos is just like this Buddha guy, because he’s fat, this guy, except he doesn’t understand anything about himself. Just his stomach. This, he’s in love with. The Buddha, well, he was supposed to understand how to meditate or something. This was a new word. Instead maybe, of the pills for my nerves, maybe I will meditate I’m thinking. But it’s useless. How can you lose yourself in your head when your daughter is sick. You ask this Buddha fellow that eh?

Bambos was a young new kind of cutter who think he owned the cloth; so much so that 18 months later Bambos, went to prison for theft. He had been stealing cloth on the quiet and getting it secretly secreted to his own little factory and there he was making his own dresses, selling them under the Govna’s nose.

Bambos needed to make that particular call outside the factory for the very good reasons I have just been outlining, because he was arranging the next pick-up of stolen cloth he had hidden, by arrangement with the wholesale delivery driver of the cloth, on to one of the other unoccupied floors by the goods lift. It wouldn’t be too long before his card was marked believe me. But on this particular day he and we were all blissfully unaware of this viper in our midst.

‘Bambos. You’re a, rude bastard! One day, One day.’ I say, as I walked away from the phone box.

Bambos called me a wanker through the glass, when he was inside the phone-box. I mouthed silent curses as I walked away. One day my son, not long from now you will be standing in a queue to get your lunch and the inmate next to you is gonna use the very same obscene gesture to you behind your back and as you are turning over in your bunk beneath him in your sleep, he is going to wake you by putting his fist halfway into your rectum until you start to squeal like the pig that you are.

I needed to eat and I decided on Valotis café that Monday. I didn’t want to have to go over everything with Martha and Tony. I wanted to put it out of my mind for just an hour or so. Less than an hour now. I look at my Casio. It kept very good time. Better get a move on. I quickened my step as I crossed the road towards Valoti’s, which was halfway down Old Street.

So she was going to hospital? Why? What did they need her to go to hospital for? Maybe I’ll take the bread there instead. Maybe I should go there now. Maybe I should stop work. There things buzzing through my head as I stepped in and out of traffic, realising that I wouldn’t do any of them, pano sanemo.

I reached the other side of the street and a young dark-skinned woman pushing a pram caught my eye and it made me tighter inside. I always made a fuss of children whenever I saw them. It’s a compulsion to father. My view was quickly interrupted by a double-decker bus going by, as I was walking. All I could see now was her afro from behind.

As I turned my back on her, I imagined a life for that mother and her child. I imagined a boy and a girl. I imagined the girl getting married and being very pretty in her wedding dress. I imagined the boy grown into a big youth, full of love for his mother and just as quickly as I imagined all that, I was opening the door into Valotis.

“I can get a pie and chips. They do the nice heavy gravy.” I never fancied Greek food much those days either.

“Esinithises!” Stella would say to me, “You’ve become like the English with their roast beef and steak and kidney pie. That’s all you like now. Englishman!”

I would mostly go to Valotis anyway, unless it was a Friday ‘cos there was a stripper in the The George and Dragon, on the other side of the street. It was only a few hundred yards down. On a Friday it would be packed with a steaming dirty mass of men like me, all with one thing on our mind, all centred on one woman’s flesh.

I had also started to go to the library during my lunch break. About three weeks after we found out Eleni had some sort of a blood problem. I looked it up in a book in the library. It took me a week to find. I remember, there was a very nice young girl who helped me find the right book, Amy.

I found out that Eleni might not have the right amount of white and red blood cells.

“And these doctors always tellin me they don’t know enough yet. They should bloody know enough by now eh? They don’t go to medical school for seven years to learn nothin? I bet I could tell them something now!”

I said this to the sympathetic librarian who helped me get the right book, Amy.

But I’m not ready yet. I didn’t know enough yet. When I found out more about what blood problems there could be, then I would tell them something, eh? Then I’d show them that I knew you had to have six red blood cells to every one white blood cell and that if that wasn’t right you could get infections and not be able to get better, your body can’t stop infections. I’ll tell Dr Patel. “I’ll tell that bloody Patel,” I made a rhyme, like a poem with the words in my head. ‘Tell Patel,’ I say but I said this to myself.

1.15pm

I walk into Valotis. It’s always full at lunchtime but I can normally get a seat. I know the waitress very well. Sarah. A red haired lady. She must be nearly thirty. Always respectful, always asking me how things are but not in an intrusive way. She cares and it’s not about her tip. Her eyes are full of questions. Her mouth is always smiling. She has an accent and when I asked her one day, she said she was from Poland, Gdansk. They got the Communist Government in that country and they all protesting against them now. She had to leave, she said. Too much violence.

As I come through the door, Roast beef…coffee…boiled cabbage…custard…fish pie. All the smells come at once. I go to the nearest seat that isn’t taken. There were eight or nine tables and seating for about thirty people.

“I’ll have the pie please Sarah.” I was always polite and I try to show her the respect that she deserves. I’ve known her twelve years.

“Chips or mash?”

“Mash please.”

“Steak and kidney or chicken and mushroom?”

“Chicken.”

“Nice weekend? Everything alright?”

She already read something in my face maybe.

She was a very sympathetic woman, Sarah, and she said.

“Eléni again?” And she pronounced it right.

I make a gesture with my head. It’s a Greek gesture and it’s like telling Sarah she was asleep. I close my eyes and lean my head to one side. She understands.

“Still? Oh, sorry darlin.”

She made a little ‘t’ and ‘ah’ sound together like a tut which turned into an ahh and then she nodded her head back just like Cypriots do to say ‘no’. As she said this, she is already turning and walking towards the counter to call out her order. It’s the busiest time of the day and I know she can’t talk properly to me now. Too many big hungry working men waiting for their hot food.

She got to the little curtain on the hatch between the kitchen and the restaurant. She shouted her order through the curtain.

“One Chicken and Mushroom with extra gravy, special for lovely Paully chef!”

Normally I would delight at what was put before here. To me eating was part of what made life enjoyable and worthwhile. I never had to worry about what I ate and to my dying day, I never knew what a diet was or counted anything as stupid as calories. I loathed people who said they had to watch what they ate. I thought vegetarians were from another planet and whenever I heard the word on the news I shouted at the announcer and once when I encountered one during my lunch hour, I made a point of eating my meat in a way that left the unfortunate fellow in no doubt how I felt. It suddenly came flashing back.

Sarah was taking an order at another table in and. l heard this fragile voice saying,

“Have you got anything vegetarian on the menu please?”

I turned round with a horrified expression on my face, to the pasty-faced youth sitting on the next table.

“Vegetarian, vegetarian? You wanna go up bloody Covent Garden mate, where they got the vegetable market. This is a bloody restaurant not a bloody poxy bistro for vegetáirhrrians.”

I stressed the third syllable like the word was a huge ‘air’ that I couldn’t get my mouth wide enough open for. The shamefaced youngster said,

“Egg, and chips please.” He whispered and l laughed out loud.

“Well, at least they got something for the vegetarian!”

Sarah giggled raised her apron to her her mnouth to conceal a stifled laugh and reprimanded me with an icy look.

“I’ll have a bloody huge bit of beef, no potatoes, no vegetables, just beef and gravy alright? I got a better idea. Just find me a dead cow, wipe its arse and stick it on a plate!”

I laughed and Sarah knew I was joking, but the young lad next to me sank further into his seat as all around me the men sided with me and smiled and laughed out loud. It was the only time I ever saw this boy and I bet he doesn’t come back. l half wanted to share my plate of meat with him or at least offer him something off my own plate, but I decided to leave the matter there and let it end without making him suffer any further humiliation.

Just now Sarah knew what was in my beligerence and left me alone. She might have a word later, and anyway she was really busy right now. Her mad hour time. I can see that.

And as I stopped thinking about the boy at the next table along I began thinking about everything going downhill after the Govna brought in the new rates for the girls. The new costings. It doesn’t affect me but it’s only a matter of time before the girls are gonna start looking somewhere else for work eh? I know all the tricks in the book. I know about the short money in your packet because Andreas didn’t pay all the extra overtime you worked. So then you had to speak to him about it and remind him you came in three evenings not the two he put you down for. It was always on the clock anyway so why he ever made mistakes with money I never knew. Probably pulling a fast one with everyone. I’ll bet some of the girls wouldn’t realise they were short until it was too late, eh?

Short money, hah? In my head I’m turning this over, “What a bastard thing to do to someone who’s workin their bollocks off for you all week. Making you profits and on top of that you still stealing some of their wages from them. Shit bag, what a bastard shit bag was the boss who stealing from his workers this way. Some of them they don’t know what is what and they don’t suspect nothing I’ll bet. But they could be they losing hundreds of pounds”, hah. “Anyway, Andreas is not gonna try this with me. I’m wise to the tricks.” This was the conversation etched into my memory from a wedding, where I sat opposite two of the wealthiest factory owners in London, who happened to be on the same table as me. I was too drunk to care who heard me.

My food came. The gravy was just how I like it, thick and all over the pie. There were mushy peas underneath the gravy too and they always go down well with the pie. As I cut my knife deep into the top of the pie I imagined it was Patel’s head and that I was carving a piece of meat from his scalp. I ate without saying another word. I burnt my tongue on the pie. I was trying to eat too quickly and I wasn’t concentrating. I endured the pain as a penance for the murder of Patel in my head. Serves me right I thought. Then I remembered…

George’s, I must get bread from there before the end of lunch. I looked at my watch, it was twenty to two so I didn’t have much time left if I was going to get to the library as well and back in to work before the bell. It was a seven minute walk to the library and I knew Monday was Amy’s day off so the snotty one was in, the one who made me pay for the books I kept for too long. Imagine, there are people dying everywhere, being tortured, murdered, cut up into little pieces, eaten and she still had to make me pay sixty-four poxy pence for the overdue on those poxy medical books that I couldn’t understand anyway. The only reason I had them so long anyway was because I needed more time to understand what the bloody words meant; to translate them. Mrs bloody Flowers her name was. The nearest she came to a flower was one of them cactus plants, Harry my neighbour had in his garden shed to cover up the other plants he had in there. She was a cactus, Mrs Flowers. Amy was the Rose.

Steve, one of the apprentice cutters, came in through the door and strode right over to where I was sitting. He was seventeen, like a heroin addict, very thin, too thin if you ask me, thick black curly hair down to his shoulders, and a handsome boy with an honest face and a big Roman nose.

Steve was like a young handsome Greek God. He wore stylish jeans and a T shirt with the name of a group he liked called ‘The Doors’ on it. He liked to make sure the clothes he was wearing were matching, that they were clean and that they didn’t look cheap. He liked fashion and had a pair of flared jeans on too. He had a small crucifix earring dangling from his left ear.

“Mr Paul, there’s a message for you to ring some doctor; the govna wanted me to tell you. Okay, is it?”

“Yeah, yeah, did he leave a name this doctor?”

“Patel. Dr Patel.”

“Thank you, re boy.”

I’m screaming, you know what I mean? Inside me when I hear this…deep inside where he can’t see..

“Anything I can do, pick you up some cigs?”

“No, thanks. Unless you’ve got a little spare time?”

“It depends on what it is.”

“Well, don’t bother then!” I snapped and then I regretted it straight away. He’s a good kid. Why was I having a go at him?

“I’m kidding, man, I know things are a bit tough for you and all.” the kid replied.

“Eh, who told you this?”

“Look, everyone knows your daughter’s not well.”

“Everyone?”

“Well, you know what it’s like in there, everybody gossips, you know?”

“Do I?”

“Eh?”

“Do I know? No, I don’t know. It’s none of their fucking business. Bloody gossip, in the factory. I just want my privacy you understand?”

The boy looked away, trying to see if he could get a glimpse of Sarah to order his food or to look at her brassiere more like. She wears these big chiffon blouses. He just wanted a little glimpse eh? A little sight of her black bra. In fact once or twice she had a few of the off-cuts from big Ronny the senior cutter. I wonder what sort of helpings she gave him for those eh? Eh? Oh Christ, my head is so full of crap I can think straight. The bread…what am gonna do?

“Can you go to that delicatessent George’s on the corner, to pick up some bread for tonight? It has to be from George’s you understand? A sesame seed loaf?”

“Sure, but you gotta press a couple of trousers for me okay?”

He makes me laugh, for the first time that day.

“Of course.”

He goes to leave.

‘You’re good lad you know. I like you. You remind me of me when I was the same age as you.”

“Thanks, Granddad. George’s you say?”

“It’s on the corner of Old Street and Farringdon. The Greek deli.”

Steve turned to leave, and as he did an extraordinary thing happened. Sarah was turning to go to the hatch and bumped into him with a tray, but amazingly it didn’t go all over the place because with lightning agility the three of us, me, Steve, and Sarah, in the split second it happened, saved the situation. It was like the gymnastics in the Olympics. A Gold medal for us to save the tray of food.

Steve always use come in to Valotis for the odd look around. To him it was full of old men and overcooked boiled vegetables, which he hated. He preferred a Wimpy for his lunch or a quick sandwich. Either that, or a swift couple of pints and a joint in the alleyway behind The Bald Faced Stag. To Steve however, Sarah was a very beautiful woman in her sexual prime, going to waste in a smelly job surrounded by smelly old men. He found out she was actually forty-two and not in her thirties at all, and he worked out she had a thirty-six DD bust. This was really the only thing on Steve’s mind when he came into Valotis. To Steve she was the epitome of sex. The luxuriousness of her décolletage drove him to drop by Valotis for sandwiches he never ate and tea he never drank.

Steve forgot to go to George’s because he had a terrible short-term memory. It was all the dope that did it. Too many evenings getting smashed because that was the only way he could get through the next fucking day. He told me he only remembered to buy it on his way back from The Bald Faced Stag, because he happened to see an old biddy putting a loaf of bread into a carrier bag as he was walking by the deli.

He went into the Co-op and bought the bread and brought it back to me and he says, “George says hello”. As soon as he says this to me I knew. George would always say, “Come on you Spurs!” If I had sent a boy with a message. It’s not the same kind of bread either. It’s not as nice. And they didn’t put sesame seeds on the top like Greek Koulouri. He should have known this.

There was something in the air that day that made me feel there was bad news waiting for me. I didn’t like the way this Monday was shaping up already. Someone should write a song about Mondays. I hated this one.

“Why does Patel want me to call him? What the bloody hell is it now?” is going through my head.

I go over to the counter. Sarah already had the bill ready for me. I paid her the £3.75 quietly. I looked down at the plate I brought over from the table to give them for the washing up, so she don’t have to go back to the table. I hadn’t finished everything on the plate.

“Not much of an appetite today Paully, not like you, is it?’” She was kind. She was a very good waitress and wanted to check everything was ok with the food. I’d only left a little bit of mash potato but that was unusual for me.

“It’s Eleni. Everything is happening today.”

“I hate Mondays.” She said.

I knew that Sarah was a good person. She had a way with people that very few people had. She was a light shining kindness on me. A real human being. An honestly compassionate person, who didn’t want anything from me or expect anything in return. This meant a lot to me. I think it means a lot to the world. These people are gold.

“Yeah me too. Thanks. The pie was lovely, tell Louis eh?”

I put fifty pence into her apron and walked out of the door quite quickly. I had to make another call, no. I wasn’t really looking where I was going and I ended up in the centre of Old Street and I didn’t see this bloody car. A loud car horn pull me up short.

“You tired of livin’ or summing?” It was a taxi driver having a go at me with his window wound down.

I didn’t hear the rest. Too busy doing dodgems trying to get to the phone box on the other side of the street.

The nearest phone box was on the corner of Domingo Street but there was someone in it, so I had to wait outside and then it start to rain. I was getting very impatient, getting wet and waiting for this bugger to finish on his phone-call, so I decided to go all the way back to the factory and use the phone inside instead. I was running short of time and I didn’t want to miss speaking to the doctor before the afternoon shift. The library would have to wait.

Old street is full of traffic delivering cloth or taking dresses to the wholesalers. Little vans, with angry taxi drivers. The delivery drivers park up on the pavement, loading the dresses and they load up the Parking meters to add on to their time. They smoke even more than me. Players finest Virginia, untipped. The packet, that had the sailor on the front.

I smoked a cigarette before I went up the stairs. I looked at my watch and I realised I only had four minutes left of my lunch break. I’m gonna have to call in office hours. This is not good, not good at all. So now I don’t even have time to finish my fag before I have to go up because some skinhead was on the phone outside. Probably talking to the DSS, because he hadn’t got his giro. Or he didn’t sign on that week because he couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed, lazy bastard. They know all the tricks, these people on the dole.

1.56pm

As soon as I walk in through the door the Govna was coming out of his office and he calls me over. It wasn’t even the end of the lunch break for Christ sake. There were still three minutes left before the bell.

“Pavlo, ella mesa re thelo se.” It was Andreas’ way of saying, ‘come in’ politely. It was an unnecessarily harsh turn of phrase and an unkind tone in his voice that I didn’t like at all. Hang about, this isn’t right at all. He shouldn’t be talking to me this way. I’m not having this. I have to call the bloody doctor anyway. I can’t do this now. Can’t it wait?

I walked into the office, and nearly all the staff who were back from lunch were watching or anyone still eating in the staff canteen could see as well, cos they were still there talking and smoking in those last few precious minutes of the lunch break. The hush sometimes was beautiful. It reminds me of the atmosphere in the library. Everybody keeps their voices lower than normal to respect the silence of the space. But when the bell went the shouting begins.

So as I’m going into the office with everyone watching I’m thinking to myself, how am I gonna make the bloody call to the Dr Patel person? The bell would be ringing in about two minutes for the end of lunch..

Didn’t Steve say the Govna gave him the message?

I went in.

CHAPTER 4 THE NEWS

2.15pm

HEART OF GLASS – BLONDIE

Stella sat on the end of Eleni’s bed as she zipped up the little shoulder bag she was taking with her to the hospital. She made sure that her daughter had a change of underwear for her and a spare pair of pyjamas. Eleni told her Mum she was quite looking forward to it, but she wasn’t. She was just saying that so her mother wouldn’t be any more upset and scared than she was already. Eleni could see her Mum was agitated so she told her to leave her on her own for a bit while she packed. Stella went next door into their bedroom to have a think. Everything seemed to be in whirl today and since speaking to Paul she’d become more tense. It made him angry to talk about Eleni and especially at work when everybody could hear their business. She normally knew how to steer the conversation so it was less awkward, less focused on his angertand more on what they needed to talk about, but he was up and down, so temperamental. So much so, that it was difficult to judge their conversations and guide him somewhere with the right form of words.

Eleni, now alone, knew her Mum and dad well enough to know that they could become emotional at the drop of a hat. Maybe mum less so but she didn’t want to get into that. Not today. She wanted to go to the hospital quietly. In her mind, she was in a movie that she was playing out in front of her mum, so that she wouldn’t guess what was really going on in her mind. Eleni was a girl, far more mature than her fourteen years and in everything she did, there was always her way of doing it. Other girls at school gathered round her because she had that essential quality about her which made her born to be followed by adoring fans. Endless streams of laughter filled her days. School never once gave her cause for concern, nor did she ever feel threatened by anything. If ever there was anybody who ever led a charmed life, it was Eleni Socrates. So she had to make work in the movie in her mind.

Eleni knew now at this moment for her Mum, she needed to be Ali McGraw in Love Story, which she’d only had just seen. She wanted to meet a doctor at the hospital who looked like Ryan O’Neil and fall madly in love with him. Stepven was her Ryan O’Neil and instead of Ice Hockey, he played soccer, that worked for her. Dad was just like that actor who played Jennifer’s father in the movie she thought. Yeah, what was his name, Phil Cavalleri, the baker, and Dad was a steam-presser, yerah that worked too, but what was the actor’s name, yeah, John Marley. Everything was a film to Eleni and she was the leading lady. She cast every role with the people in her life. She thought through the scenes as she remembered them. And in the film though, she dies, but it’s only a film isn’t it? I mean it’s all make believe. They’re only actors. All this hospital stuff was gonna be part of this a huge film she was in and she was playing the main role in it. It would be really exciting to be in the ghospital with all those hard working nurses who she loved, looking after her. She wondered if any of the ones she knew from the last time would still be there. Not bad. Not bad. She’d be the tragic heroine and she’d love every minute of it. She could hear the theme music in her head as she put the last book she wanted t have with her into the blue rucksack she nornmally took to school. Where Do I begin? That’s how it started. “Where Do I begin? Da da da da da of how great a Love Can Be….or something. The sweet Love Story that is older than the sea. She loved that line. What could possibly be older than the sea, but love?

Stella wasn’t going to take her daughter on two buses and the tube to get all the way to The North Middlesex Hospital on Silver Street and what did it matter if was going to cost money they didn’t really have? What did it matter? She sat on their bed now. The marital bed. Waiting for Eleni to finish packing. She would call Micky’s the mini cab place on the corner at the end of Berkshire Gardens and Green Lanes. He’d be there in less than a minute. But whilst she sat on the bed, she thought about how to process the trip to the hospital, talking to Eleni about it and talking to Paul about it. She needed to understand enough of the English to be able to have at least some input. He always took over any conversation they were having anyway and it was always just less trouble to go along with things until she needed to put her foot down and maybe now was the time to do that. This phone call or that phone call didn’t make a difference. The moment wasn’t right. As she was looking around the room she saw the Stefania, the wedding crown, they called it, above the bed on the wall in its wood and glass container. The Orthodox reminder of their union and worn as they were married. A ribbon connecting each crown to the other, on which all the best men and best women wrote their names and paid a fee to be so honoured. She thought of their lovemaking and how much she missed him there. How much she still wanted him. How much they had drifted apart. And the guilt of feeling like that at that moment struck her between the eyes and shamed her for allowing the thought to develop.

She would say something. Now was the time. She wouldn’t allow his anger to get the better of every conversation. She needed to come out of the shell she had withdrawn into these last few weeks. Enough being the dutiful wife who takes everything on the chin. It was her time now. She would say something. She would.

She went downstairs and made another cup of tea and by the time the kettle started whistling Eleni had come bounding down the stairs two at a time, with her rucksack ready.

“You want another cup of tea before we go sweetheart?”

“Not sure I want a cuppa now Mum.”

“A cinnamon one?”

“Ooh yeah, go on then, if there’s any left?”

“Call the number in the phone book. The mini-cabs.”

“Ooo, we’re going by mini-cab!”

“Tell him 15 minutes, otherwise he’ll be here before we’ve finished our tea. Chocolate Bourbon?”

“Is the Pope a Catholic mum? Does a bear…?”

“Don’t you dare!”

And they both laughed

Eleni picked up the phone and began to dial the number that was in the little flip up phone book by the onyx side table in the hall. A few minutes later, the driver was sounding his horn out in the street because he couldn’t park in the road. They left, making sure the front door was locked and all the windows were bolted. Shut.

The factory bell rings – 2.00pm

Everybody could see me going into the office. Like Boxer the horse walking himself wearily into the back of the lorry headed for the abattoir, they were the sheep being led by Napoleon.

There was record playing on the stereo system. It was Devil Woman sung by Cliff, the one with the two first names.

“Ooh, that Cliff, you’ve got to hand it to him”.

“I would!” Cackles from the machinists.

“If I could only have him for one night I’d show him the Devil Woman.” More laughter and more of the women joining in.

Stelios chips in with “Why don you let me be youa devil, eh?”

“Ooh, Mr Stelios, I didn’t think you had any devil in you.”

“No, I be the devil in you!”

Ron the senior cutter could hear the commotion from the other end of the factory and as the boss was occupied, he thought he should at least try to bring the factory back to some sense of order. He knew, they could see the boss was busy in his office. He wasn’t having this. He strode down towards the machinist’s end of the factory and spoke in his most foreman like voice.

“Come along now ladies, come along, you spend more time talking about it than doing it!”

One of the overlockers sang, “It’s so funny how we don’t to talk anymore!” and that was it.

All those that heard it above the commotion burst into laughter. A huge wave of laughter ripped around the machinists and even Ron had to see the funny side of it. Ivy quietened down because she liked Ronny and as a senior sample machinist she thought she should show a little restraint now too. They’d had a laugh and what was going on was serious, so she carried on her work without another word. She gave those who looked at her the evil eye and everyone quickly settled back into their work.

Rene, who was Ivy’s best friend and who sat next to her, needed  finish her bundle, but before she did, Paul had crossed her mind, in there talking to the Govna. All the machinists liked Paul. He was polite and always asked after them. Who didn’t like Paul? She sighed to herself, as she as she took up some more material to pass under another to make a cuff. She was gathering the material up in little pleats as she went around the circle of the pattern, snipping excess blue cotton quickly away from her as she passed one way and then the next to make a circle with the machine.

Rene continued to work on her bundle as she told Ivy that she’d seen Paul go into the office with the boss. Ivy nodded sagely as she took a long draw on her cigarette through her yellowed nicotine-covered index and forefingers. They talked nearly all day at their machines. It was endless during breaks and when the boss wasn’t around, well anything went. Ivy was fifty-four, Rene was thirty, but the two of them were inseparable. Ivy listened to Rene telling her that she had known the boss was gonna call Paully in because Steve the apprentice cutter was talking to Ronnie, the senior cutter who said they were getting a new steam-press machine and that there was talk about people being sacked or made redundant.

I sat down opposite Andreas and took a cigarette from my packet. I noticed there seemed to be less in it than usual. I knew I had another packet by my place so I didn’t think too much more about it. There was a silver-plated lighter on the table and Andreas picked it up, reached over toward me, and lit my cigarette. I was more than a little surprised by this, as that had never happened before. In twenty-four years the Govna had never lit a cigarette for me. Not even when they were drunk together.

“You get the message?” asked Andreas

“Eh?” I was too busy thinking about the fact that Andreas light my cigarette.

“I sent the boy, Steve. Make your phone-call. Call the doctor. We can speak afterwards.”

2.50pm Berkshire Gardens

Eleni was talking to the driver driving them to the hospital. He was a very cheerful Gambian fellow from just outside Banjul and he had Christian symbols on the dashboard, which Stella liked enormously. They were safe with him she thought. He had a St Christopher and a St Peter which he referred to as his ‘paytran sayns’. Eleni was saying,

“Don’t take the North Circular because they’re widening the A1 where it meets the A406 and we got stuck there on Sunday, had to delay kick off. Best go down Green Lanes and hop onto it from Bourne Hill, up through Enfield and pick it up just before Silver street.”

“Well you dawta know the London very very well. I’m certainly himpress wiv ha madam.”

“I looked it up in the A-Z! I have to find all the pitches when we’re not playing at home.” she said proudly.

The discussion turned to the latest eleven Tottenham were fielding against Liverpool at the weekend. Her knowledge of the tactics she thought Keith Burkinshaw should employ, were equally impressive and he listened intently to her ideas about the formation. The Lillywhites were doing extremely well and she was impressed with Bukinshaw’s selections and his style of play for the team.

He followed her instructions and they were there in about twenty-five minutes. Stella never spoke a word in the cab and gave Eleni her purse so she could pay the young driver. He laughed as she put her hands into the wallet her mother had given her and gave him the fare.

“I should be paying you for the entertainment!”

2.15pm Old Street

Paul was on hold. Dr Patel was, at that precise moment, telling a man in his late thirties that he was now diabetic. Given his weight and his sweet tooth he was nearly at the point where he might go into a coma if he were to carry on eating the same diet of chocolate, cream cakes and crisps every night. But Dr Deepak Patel cared enormously for the well-being of every sentient being, even if this one was determined to have no karmic value worth taking into his next life.

He knew Paul Socrates was on hold and Deepak needed to talk to him but he would have to finish with this patient first.

As I waited for Dr Patel I looked into Andreas eyes and he looked right back at me. I wondered what the hell was going on. Letting me use the office phone to make personal calls, lighting my fags for me. It was unprecedented. He was looking me in the eyes too. Something different in the way he was looking at me, made me think there was something strange going on. Something I didn’t know. Has he spoken to someone I didn’t know about? Does he know something I don’t know?

I think while I’m waiting for Dr Patel, that things were good at the factory until the Govna started to turn things upside down with compulsory overtime for the machinists in the evenings and on Saturday’s and then the shitty costings, so their wages started to go dowm for the same amount of work. They had to work more hours just to earn the same pay they were getting before. I’d decided I wasn’t going to be harassed into working at weekends and I told him straight that I wouldn’t be able to come in. If he’d just been a little more respectful and asked me if it was ok. Would I mind coming in, kind of thing. I’m one of the longest serving workers here. I’m a senior here, I was the one they asked to do the Christmas raffle for the rest of the staff. That has to mean something doesn’t it? You trust the guy whose pulling the raffle tickets eh?

“I’m just gonna pop down to Ronnie. Call me on the internal when you’re done on the phone ok? I’ll come straight back! We need to talk”

Andreas called back as he was leaving the office. I couldn’t remember a time when I was in here alone. My mind was wandering again as I waited for the doctor to come on the phone. The receptionist, she put me on hold, on the phone. As I was holding on, my mind was drifting off, thinking about the people in the factory I liked. I was looking through the glass window from the office. Looking ionto the factry, A view I’d never seen from inside the office. The view Andreras has when he sits behind his desk.

I could see Periklis who I liked enormously. He was someone you couldn’t tire of, except when he was very drunk. Mildly drunk, he was ok, but when he’d had one more than that, he was a different guy.

At Christmas, I said they asked me to pull the little yellow raffle tickets. I made a cloth bag from different bits of material that Ivy had joined together with five different-coloured threads. To the younger people and in particular those who had been there less than five years, I was a bit of a joke because of my shirt always being white. I knew that they made fun of it, but that was ok, because I shared in the joke. It wasn’t a behind-my-back sort of a joke. Ivy said my pressing was ‘a ballet that some people even liked to watch.’ Because, you see, in the years I worked there, my work had always been immaculate. This was the word they used, not me. ‘Immaculate work Mr Paul’, Andreas used to say.

The younger workers at the factory, the pressers mainly, except for Steve, who was the exception that proved the rule, didn’t like me. I knew that. Steve says they thought I was a show-off when I displayed my skills. What can you expect eh, from young people? They can’t even string two words together. I mean you expect a grunt from a pig eh? They’re only interested in football and getting out the dresses. They didn’t make conversation with me. They wouldn’t know how.

But Periklis was the kind of man people liked in spite of themselves. Even the people who didn’t like Periklis at least admired his honesty. He had a mouth on him the size of the Blackwall Tunnel (which he drove through every day to get to work). He had an opinion on everything and read ‘the Daily Mirror’, every day assiduously just like me. It became part of his ritual to read each part of it at certain times during the day, just like me. Whenever he got to something that made him angry or he wanted to say something about, he would shout out in the middle of the sacred silences during the breaks (he was the only one with either the bottle or the authority to do this) and make his point, this was, however, one of the way we differed. I would never do that. In the morning break, he would read all the news there was to read and during the lunch break he would catch up on all the sports pages.

As I was looking out of the office window, I could see all the other people from ethnic minorities in the factory. Mainly they were of Cypriot extraction, but we had Sri Lankans, Bengali’s, Armenian, Carribean, all working togeyher, like the United nations we were. The Greeks or Turks, together  and never once, even during the ‘74 invasion, was there any real friction. In fact the Cypriots and the Turks of London, we have always got on together in the workplace and outside.  I bet nearly 80 per cent of the staff was either Greek or Turkish-Cypriots, who had settled here since the 50’s. Some came over because of the riots and the troubles in Cyprus. They were called ‘the betrayers of Cyprus’, by those back on the island. They had a name for them, the Cypriots did. They called us Cypriots who left Cyprus ‘Char-li-ehs’ (with three syllables) which meant just what it sounded like. The traitors, we were.

2.24pm

“Mr Socrates are you there?”

“I’m here. Doctor.”

“I’m so sorry to keep you waiting. It’s Dr Patel. Now we need to talk about Eleni.. I spoke with your wife earlier today and advised her we needed Eleni at the hospital. I’ve also got the results of the tests in front of me.”

“What do they say?”

“Well, I think it would be a good idea if you were to be able to come and speak to me personally, again, like we did the last time, here at the surgery. Now do you think you can take some time off your job to do this?”

“You can’t you tell me ova the phone? I’m at work now you know. Is serious?”

“Well, it could be yes and that’s why I telephoned this morning and asked for Eleni to be admitted today. I think we need to make a treatment plan for her straight away.”

“Was the problem Doctor Patel?”

“Well, now I think it would really be better to discuss this face to face, here at the surgery and you please come with your wife, so we can have a chat together about this?”

“I make an appointment?”

“I will make an appointment for you now, but I wondered if you could come in either later today or this evening, I will be here until late for you so we can talk.”

“Is serious eh…eh?”

“Do you think you could make it here to the surgery later on today with your wife?”

“I call her. She’s going to the hospital.”

“Well, perhaps you could speak to my lovely receptionist Maureen, and let them know when you will be coming in and I will be here waiting for you both Mr Socrates.”

And then it was a blur. A fog. I couldn’t hear it. I was deaf. I don’t remember putting the phone down. And I couldn’t stay in the office after the conversation ended. I had to get away. I couldn’t breathe properly. My eyes started to play tricks on me. I thought I was seeing Eleni screaming in pain after she was run over. I was feeling her brow, as she had a temperature of 102. She was burning up. I lit another cigarette and my hand was actually trembling. This wasn’t happening was it? This wasn’t actually happening? It was like a dream I was in. An actual dream.

I thought about leaving the factory right there and then. I was gonna walk out and just go, I didn’t know where. Just leave, maybe go to the hospital. I just didn’t know. My mind was confused, muddled with all the words he had just spoken, pressing in on me. I need to go the surgery with Stella to talk about Eleni because Doctor Patel couldn’t tell me over the phone or he, Patel, didn’t want to, because it was, what? Too serious? What? Didn’t want to upset me, what? Jesus it was like being in a prison cell and each way I turned there was another wall made of iron bars keeping me inside this tiny room of confusion in my head.

I could literally feel the walls closing in on me. The whole of the office had shrunk so much that there surely isn’t enough air left in here, I thought. I couldn’t breathe any more. My shirt was sticking to me as the sweat started to drip from my forehead. My underarms were damp. I was so scared I thought I was going to piss myself.

The door opened and Andreas stood there, grim faced.

“Bad news? Was it bad news? Paul? Are you ok? Do you need a drink or something?”

He called out in Greek to Takoui who at that moment was just passing the door outside with some work for an Overlocker.

‘”Mrs Takoui, a glass of water please for Mr Paul.”

“At once!” and she turned on her heels for the canteen to get me a cold drink of water in a proper cup.

I could see the Govna was upset too. Probably because he’s never seen me like this before. I’d never been like this before. I was wheezing I think. Like I was fighting to breathe.

I was in shock. I didn’t know if she was gonna die. I wasn’t prepared for the emotions jumping into my head. I was trying to use a size ticket to fan my face with.

“Take you time re. You wanna lie down somewhere? I take you to the canteen.”

 Mrs Takoui walked in with a very cold mug of water, which she helped me to drink from. I was actually unable to get up from the chair. She fussed around me saying I should see a doctor, because I looked pale and that she had some aspirin if I needed it or had a headache.

“You feelin dizzy Mr Paul? Somethin you eat lunchtime maybe? I have the Rennie tablets as well, because I get the heartburn you know.”

“Thank you Mrs Takoui. I just need to take some air maybe. Can’t breathe in here! Andreas, why do you never get any air conditioning in this bloody factory, eh?”

I got up and walked out through the doors of the office and through the double-doors of the factory to the floor landing outside, without saying another word. Andreas just stood in the office with my empty mug in his hand, as I left. Takoui whispered to him.

“He’s right Mr Andreas we should get some air conditioning in this place.”

I stood at the top of the stairs outside the double doors of the factory and felt something welling up inside me. I wanted to express something I couldn’t put into words and I could feel something building up inside me. I held on to the railings of the stairs and looked down the central lift shaft. At the lift that had been my constant fear for my whole working life.

And then I started screaming down the stairs. It came from somewhere as deep as the lift-shaft itself and it filled the space inside me. I screamed again and my voice boomed down the central shaft to the basement floor.

I needed to let my emotion out, otherwise I might have had a heart attack, right there and then in the office. No one was listening thank God; the noise from the factory’s machines drowned out my scream. t was a piercing scream full of my heart and full of me. I listened to the echo of my voice and it made me releived to let it out. I needed to gather myself toi face what was next. And I wasn’t sure what that was going to be.

CHAPTER 4

MUPPA

WAR – WAR AND PEACE

3.12.pm

The Churchill Ward, North London Middlesex Hospital

Eleni Socrates was talking to a little girl half her age, who was wearing a Tottenham Hotspur home kit as pyjamas.

Eleni and her Mum had checked in already and were told she would be seeing see a Dr Keller who would be overseeing her first session of chemotherapy later that day with one of the senior nurses. Dr Keller was occupied elsewhere when they arrived and he had already been told that Eleni and Mrs Socrates were on the ward. Stella Socrates sat in the chair by the side of Eleni’s bed as Eleni chatted to the little girl in the ‘Tottingham’ shirt a little way down the ward. She’d brought her Tottenham Jim Jams, her toothbrush, her big brush for her hair, an apple, a milky bar and the book she was re-reading, Love Story by Erich Segal.

Just a little later she was explaining the benefits of the Italian sweeper system to one of the Portuguese hospital porters who had been fascinated by how knowledgeable she was about the beautiful game. He stood watching her, learning new things about football from this patient.

“I mean it’s only a matter of time before managers in this country start playing that way. If you want to get to the finals of the European Cup like Notts Forest or the World Cup, you gotta be able to play the European style. Cloughie’s got the right idea.”

“Just ‘cos the Argentinian’s won doesn’t mean we have to play like that!” He pitched in.

Bernardo Da Cruz was loving it. This young girl, she couldn’t have been more than, maybe 12, no even not 13 surely, sitting there, talking about football! Amazing! He had to get a bed to E wing and couldn’t stay. On leaving her he said,

“The best team got knocked out. Brazil!”

“Maybe in ’70 they were the best team. I don’t know, I‘m too young to remember! The French were the better side. More imagination. And the Italians, what a side! They play great football and if you want a prediction Mr Da Cruz, I’ll bet the Italians win in 1982. They’ve won it twice already.”

Eleni loved football. In fact, she was in love with a footballer. He played in a Sunday League side and she never missed a match he played in. His name was Steven Loukades and he was the boy whom Paul had asked to buy the bread from George’s at lunchtime. She thought he was Johan Cruyff, the Dutch centre forward who played on the losing side of the 1974 world cup final. He had the same shoulder-length hair and a long thin body. She admired his skill but most of all she loved him because he was, ‘Out of sight, radical and slamming!’

Steve played in the side that Tony Phillipou, the senior cutter in the factory played in and Eleni went to watch the matches, all the matches, wherever they were, with or without her father; on Sunday mornings where football at its most fundamentally amateur level is played. Sometimes her Dad showed up with her but most Sundays Paul just wanted a lie-in. Stella was always off early to Pratt Street Cathedral in Camden to attend the Orthodox Service, so Eleni had the morning to herself, invariably travelling down to Finsbury Park Fields for the home games or getting herself on to the away mini-bus with the half-time oranges.

Tony had a pigeon chest with a knuckle-sized hollow in the middle of it. He looked like someone had stuck a fist into his sternum. But crucially it also enabled him to take a ball from mid-air on his chest perfectly. His chest was made for chesting.

There was a feud between Tony ‘pigeon-chest’ Phillipou, the, t. and Mus, the Turkish delivery the driver. Tony thought Mustapha walrus moustache’ Ergun  had insulted the Cypriot flag because the latter happened to use what appeared to be a cloth in the canteen to wipe his hands with, but which was in fact, the damp, newly cleaned Cyprus flag, the former, had brought with him to take to football that evening, as AEK Athens were playing the Arse. It didn’t help that Mustapha was not only Turkish but a Gooner to boot.

Tony and Steve were fanatical amateur players and played every Sunday morning in Finsbury Park, along with all the other amateur football local heroes, on those pitches that are next door to each other and nearly always used to have each other’s footballs ending up on each other’s pitch.

Tony was a right-back like Steve Perryman and Steve was a centre forward just like Johan Cruyff. Tony was an old kind of right back though, that was fast disappearing from the game. No amount of mud, rain, sleet, or snow could deter them, the team and particularly, Eleni, from turning out for a game on Sunday mornings.

Tony always had a good head on him and as a back was used to going up into the box at important corners or free kicks. He could nearly always get on the end of something because he had the advantage of being that little bit taller. He also had his famous pigeon chest for bringing the ball under control. Panathniakos AFC, the side both he and Steve played for was a good side and was always in the running for the Isthmian League Cup.

Steve was, amongst other things, a trainee cutter by trade. In fact, in the factory, there were very few things he hadn’t tried his hand at. He was, by now, learning his trade from Tony and the two were close because Tony Phillipou saw Steve as the son he could never have. Steve used to work in a factory in Wood Green that was just down the road from the huge construction site at the soon to be opened, Wood Green Shopping City. The Queen was going to be opening it and Steve would say,

“She wouldn’t be able to find Wood Green on an A-Z, let alone open the bloody shopping City!”

Eleni wasn’t allowed in the changing rooms, not because they were always thick with cigarette smoke. It was because the boys didn’t want the young girl watching them all with their kit off. Before the game, everyone lit up and they all wanted some blokeish banter, so it didn’t suit the side to have a girl around then.

Eleni would bring the half-time oranges in from one of the local greengrocers on Green Lanes, who donated them free every week. She’d slice them up into quarters before she took them out onto the pitch, lighting up herself on the quiet after they had all left for the warm-up. She’d watch from the side of the pitch following the play up and walking up and down on the touchline.

She gawped at the much older girlfriends who wore miniskirts, long stick-in-the-mud-heels and had thick tree-trunk legs which got very cold and white in the exposed and sometimes brutally cold windy weather.

Eleni loved to watch Steve play because when he worked at the factory, he said he was, ‘like the lowest of the low’, but when he was on the football pitch he was “Zeus, on Mount Olympus!”

3.35pm

After she’d been waiting for Dr Keller Eleni had seen the Subbuteo table and challenged a boy who was a little older than her, to a game. As she set the table up, Eleni remembered the recent, crucial semi-final cup match that her team Panathniakos AFC had played.

Panathniakos AFC were playing AEK in the semi-final of the Isthmian League Cup.

Eleni had a very loud voice and was very vocal in her support. She was the noisiest supporter Panathniakos AFC ever had and that match was pretty special. In fact, she was so noticeable that the players wanted to adopt her as the mascot after that. She scared the opposition shitless. She harried them with her bellowing voice. In situations like that when you are on the touchline you can have a lot of influence on a game if you had a loud voice and Eleni was well-practiced at it. She said anything that came into her head and was a brilliant spur to any player who felt like he wasn’t able to reach a ball. ‘You’re pathetic!’ She would say, ‘You could have got to that.’ or ‘Call yourself a footballer, my Mum plays better than you do and she’s in a wheelchair!’ This stream of abuse went on for the eighty minutes or so each game lasted and the opposition didn invariably didn’t know what to do about her because she was so distracting. She went on and on at them throughout the whole match. It became something of a talking point between the referee and the opposing side because sometimes, even the referee got flustered. No one could stop her and AEK were so intimidated that her voice definitely had a hand in the first goal scored by her Steve. Her Johan.

She remembered the strange little man who talked to her in that terrible accent and wore that awful Mackintosh coat.

The man was a local journalist who was covering the match. He was from the Greek paper ‘The Chora’. It called itself a people’s paper, which was ironically, hardly read by any people at all. It supported the Labour party and was staunchly socialist in its editorials. It was the only paper that was printed in Greek and English so that the Cypriots in London, who no longer spoke Cypriot, could read it.

This journalist, who was covering the game was rather charmed by Eleni when he first spotted her and was intrigued that a girl could be interested in football. He also couldn’t believe the sheer loudness of her voice. He watched her from a little way off on the same touchline and scribbled down the abuse leaving blanks for the words he knew would never get into print. He blanched at the sound of all her profanity. He had the idea that if she were a representation of the young Cypriots of London, then he would have to document what she said and put it in his match report.

Eleni didn’t even notice him, as she was too taken up with the game and Steve’s goal had put her into a state of ecstasy. The more the reporter heard, the more he thought he ought to do a feature on her. A special on the young supporter of Panathniakos AFC. What could he call it he thought? ‘Featherweight feminine fan of Finsbury fields?’ No. ‘The voice that launched a thousand kicks?’ He said to himself. No, the boss would never buy it. ‘The little louse that roared.’ He thought, now that’s not bad! He decided to find out more about her and surreptitiously made his way towards her, pretending to follow the course of play, trying to keep up with her as she paced hurriedly up and down the touchline.

She hardly understood his very thick accent. She wasn’t even sure if he was speaking to her,

“Is this youa tim?”

“Eh?” Her face scrunched up at him, “Oh my team, my team, is that what you mean? My team?”

“Thas what I say.”

“Say? Thas’ whadisai!” She mimicked him, “that’s what I said, you min!” She corrected him pointedly and he immediately loathed her. The young were always taking the Mickey out of his accent he thought. She couldn’t be more than twelve or thirteen and there she was, as bold as brass, taking him off like she was a comedian. Aris Theodogolos bristled with wounded pride and self-important umbrage. He would crucify her in print. Eleni had made an enemy in those few short seconds and she was completely, blissfully unaware of it.

“She’s telling me she can’t understand, when I speak better English than the English”, he thought to himself. He found the right English words in his head for how he felt. Incandescent with rage. Yes, that’s what he was.

“Do you speak Greek?”

Aris asked her in his native tongue this time hoping to catch her out.

“Yeah, of course but I’d rather talk in…” she replied in her best Cypriot dialect and mid-sentence, in English she screamed, “Pass it George, pass it, you pratt! Fuckin’ ayda! Right George, Steve’s free on the right. Give the ball, give the fucking ball…give it. Give it!!”

“You lie muppa eh?” he asked again this time back in English, hoping for at least an answer he could directly quote. Eleni was oblivious to him. The match was now her whole life and AEK were getting back into it putting in some good passing moves between themselves, hurting Panathniakos AFC on the counter.

Aris Theodogolos then seethed as Eleni quickly moved away from him to follow the action. She hadn’t even answered his question and the veins in his temples were practically bursting with hurt, macho, malevolent pride. Walking away from him like he wasn’t even there, he thought. Eleni had now broken into a run to keep up with the action elsewhere on the pitch and he didn’t bother trying to talk to her anymore. She was already quite a way off and not looking back at him as he scribbled his bile on to his little notepad. Perhaps her father was playing on one of the teams, perhaps a brother? Yes that’s it. One of them was her brother and that’s why she was here. Or maybe a cousin or an uncle? He had to know more about her and he stayed around trying to find out how she knew the players. He tried all he could to ascertain if someone in the Panathniakos side was attracted to her or if she looked at anyone more than anyone else but he couldn’t figure it out, even though it was blindingly obvious to anyone who saw the way she looked at Steve. While he was playing, Steve also noticed the strange little balding man in the pencil thin moustache and the long grey Mackintosh coat. He was carrying some sort of notepad. Steve thought he might be a scout or something, but he couldn’t be sure. At any rate he was distracting him from the game, because he seemed like he was trying to chat to Eleni and he didn’t like that. Was he some sort of pervert on the touchline? A dirty old man?

The reporter wrote some more notes in his book and tried to assess the sort of story he would write. Foul-mouthed little wretch he thought. The game was suddenly of no importance and covering it for the paper was off the agenda. Now he would write something about how the young disrespected the older generation.

Aris Theodogolos kept schadenfreude maturing like great wine in the old oak casket of his bitter heart. A bitterness few would ever understand or fathom. Deep, in the cellar of his mangled emotions, he tended to an ageing aching angst. Clasping, clawing, cackling at the cancelled career he used to have before he became a hack journalist in a dead end newspaper in the backside of a Camden Passage.

Eleni encouraged and rallied the men on the pitch. They were her side and they weren’t going to be beaten.

“We can do it. You know we can. Come on! You know you can do it. PANA. PANA!!’”

She raised her voice to deafening levels of encouragement. The team had dropped their heads and she could see it. Then a wonderful thing happened. Little Steve came over during a stop in play and quietly said,

“Keep it goin’, it’s good. Who is that geezer, is he pestering you?”

“No! Now get out there and score the winner, for me!”

This was like music to his ears and he went back on to the pitch with the confidence of Johan Cruyff in the 1974 final.

The opposition were sick to death of Eleni and this only encouraged her more. She got a huge laugh from the whole side when she pretended to be the opposition scorer celebrating his goal. Mocking AEK all the while, it sent a wave of pride through the team. They played better than they had ever played before because now they realised, they were playing not just for themselves and a place in the final but for little Eleni on the touchline. They were possessed with such motivation that a professional coach could not have done better in raising the morale of the side. They played like the great players they admired so much. Panikos Michalis was Pat Jennings and he threw the ball to George Savvides who was Alun Mullery who stroked the ball through to Panos Nicolaou who was Alun Gilzean, halfway to the centre circle. Martin Chivers who was Marios Hajisavva beat one player laid it on for Tony Phillipou who was Steve Perryman striding out from the back and throwing caution to the wind. Perryman whacks the ball long through to Steve Loukades who was Glenn Hoddle unmarked on the edge of the penalty area and he chests it down with immaculate skill on to his right foot and in one continuous movement volleyed it into the top right had corner of the AEK/Arsenal goal.

Eleni heard the voice of the BBC Grandstand announcer in her head say at full time,

“Panathniakos 2 AEK London 1.”

Eleni was looking forward to watching the final in three weeks and tore the older boy limb from limb, in the game of Subbuteo.

CHAPTER 5

MUS

2.50pm

Old Street

MY SHARONA – GET THE KNACK

I had been outside on the landing for maybe 15 minutes. Periklis, the senior manager and my only real friend in the factory, realised I didn’t want to talk and eventually left me alone. I didn’t have anything to say to him anyway.

He had come over and whispered ‘What? In this weather?’ but even this didn’t evince any kind of reaction from me and normally it would have. It was the punchline to their favourite gag. I loved him but I needed him to piss off. I didn’t know myself right at that moment, so what was I gonna tell him?

Before I could get my senses back to one place, Andreas is standing next to me.

He inclined his head backwards for me to come into the office.

“Paul, I know you’re worried about your daughter and the changes and everything. We can talk about singeni.”

“Everybody’s worried boss, nobody knows what to expect. You wake up in the morning with your head facing in the other direction. Nothing is the same. I mean we got a crazy woman running the country. No one knows what’s next. A shopkeepers daughter. What does she know? People telling me you gonna change the layout. What do you expect?”

Steve also pokes his head through the door and now the four of us are on the landing. He comes out to tell Andreas there was a phone call from the wholesalers for him. Andreas has to take the call and heads back through the doors. Periklis is now holding open to both of us.

“Well?” is all he could manage. He reaches out to me whilst holding the door open, as if to say you coming back in? I think for a moment, collect my thoughts.

I walk back in like a zombie and I go into the office as Andreas is going into humble pie mode talking to the wholesalers.

“I’ll be with you in a minute.” He is whispering, with his hand over the receiver and nodding his head towards the door for me, indicating he needs to speak in private with them. I start to walk away again and then I realise I’ve learnt nothing from Andreas about these fucking changes everybody’s been on and on about. Nothing. It’s making me so pissed off inside I feel like I’m gonna do something ridiculous.

But, I’m thinking to myself, Andreas was always take a phone call while he was in the middle of a sentence talking to you and then when he’d finish the call, he’d carry on from where he left off, but not this time. Today was turning into a day full of decisions I had to make for myself and not having them made for me, by his fucking phone-calls. The emotions I was feeling were extraordinary. I’m on some sort of a ride, some sort of a roller coaster. Like you get in Battersea Park. Up and down and round and round. This day was ridiculous too. A ridiculous turn of events.

I needed to be doing something and I wasn’t about to go back to my machine. Fuck that for a game of soldiers, unless. That’s why I went into the staff canteen with a bundle of un-stamped size-tickets and began to stamp a style number on the tickets. These were the things that were normally done by a junior, but as I had the time, I could save little Steve half a day’s aggravation. I was doing it as a favour anyway, as a way of saying thank you to him for the bread. Eventhough it was the wrong fucking bread. And then I remembered Steve’s little favour I’d promised him.

As I there, I looked for the boy’s bag of ironing in the canteen. I thought he might have left it there. I couldn’t see him now anyway. He’d disappeared into the cutting area probably, so I couldn’t talk to him about what he wanted me to do with his trousers,. Then from behind me, I see him coming out of the toilet and he talks to me politely.

“Mr Paul. You okay?”

“Where’s your stuff. I’ll do it now lad.’’

He brings me a white plastic bag from on top of the fridge in the corner of the canteen and I take it to my place and he goes back to help Tony,. The iron wasn’t hot enough for me to start on it straight away, so I turned up the valve a little and went to start on the tickets.

As I start doing the tickets, I’m thinking to myself, I’m gonna go down to the hospital. It’s the first time I thought of it. What’s the point of sticking around here? I’ll tell Andreas that I’ve got to take the rest of the day off. He would understand. Sick daughter. Blah blah blah.

So, I’m taking the time to do the tickets and as I did, I smoked a very satisfying fag. I’m sitting down at the canteen table stamping the tickets, so I can take my time. I take long, satisfying drags whenever I got to the end of a pile. In between I go back to my pressing station and finish Steve’s little bundle in about six or seven minutes. I turn the pressure gauge down and wander back to the staff canteen to do some more tickets.

I must have been doing the job for another 10 minutes, which is about another fags length when all of a sudden Andreas is standing next to me. I get up and he sits down opposite to where I’ve been sitting. He starts looking at the tickets I’d been stamping.

“Good, good thanks. We needed more tickets. It’s a big order.”

“I had the time. You know Govna I’m always working my bollocks off for you.”

“I know, I know, sit”

When the boss spoke now it was as if I had never really been hearing him before. I listened and heard it for the first time.

“I’m going to have to lose you re Paul, I’m very very sorry, but that’s just the way it is, it’s a shame, but what can I do? We have to cut our costs we have to….” his words were by now making a whistling sound in my head. A kind of whooshing. Another fog was rising up.

Lose you? LOSE YOU?

I was being sacked. The guy is sacking me after twenty-four years. My guts were starting to get tight, and I could feel myself getting angrier inside. I went for my cigarettes. Somehow, I couldn’t get my fucking fag lit. The flint on the lighter was done, broken. It wouldn’t light when I clicked it in. Flick. Flick. Flick. Nothing. I tried twenty times. That rasping flick, flick flick…Finally, Andreas offered me one from a his own packet. Silk fucking cut. I hate Silk fucking cut.

“No…I can’t smoke them. Can’t fucking taste them anyway.”

“Look Paul it’s not all bad. Look, you got some money coming to you out of this. You’re entitled to it. I’m gonna give you a very good redundancy payment.”

“You giving me the sack after all these years just like that? What else am I gonna do eh? I don’t know nothing else. That’s it eh? That’s it. Just like that?”

I got up. The first thing I thought to do, was hit him. Strike him down with a punch to the face. In my head, in that second, I do it. His face explodes in a sea of claret. His face splits in two and blood pours over the tickets, over the desk, a waterfall of blood. All over my clean, white Doc Martin shirt.

I leave the canteen. Do they all know I’ve been sacked. Eh? They’re all looking sideways at me aren’t they? I can feel it.

The shock makes me move about like a sort of drunk man. I walk back to the press like a robot until I realise I don’t have to press anymore anyway. I don’t have to use that thing anymore. Not here. Maybe not anywhere.. I don’t have to work no more today anyway. I don’t have to do anything. Fuck this.

I’m never gonna press another dress for the rest of my life. You understand? The sweat is over mate. No more cobra, no more sauna, no more steam-press. No more irony. Ironing.

“He gave me the sack…just like that!”

I say it out loud to the whole factory.

“After twenty-four years he gave me the sack. Just like that!”

Rene and Ivy looked up at me from across the factory floor. Steve and Tony stopped putting a new roll of cloth on to the laying out machine, after I said this. They heard me, nearly everyone heard me. Everybody shares the moment with me. For just that second, before they carry on working or get embarrassed, before they put their heads down and carry on.

Mustapha, the delivery driver, was the nearest person to me. He came over and put his hand on my shoulder.

“Re Mus. You betta liv me alone…”

“Mr Paul. Vy don you come sit. I make a medrio for you eh?”

I never put two and two together till now. Suddenly I start to see the answer. All the little shit stuff from Marty Feldman over there, keeping his own head down now. I look at Stelios with the same look I gave Andreas in the canteen. Like I wanna slit his throat right now. Stelios didn’t wanna look at me. He just concentrated on his work and looked down. He can’t look at me. He’s probably ashamed.

Stelios let me be and somehow everybody knew you don’t kick anybody when they just got sacked, you have to be a piece of smelly shit to do this, so he left me alone. Working people didn’t do that kind of thing.

Christ, now I’ve got to tell Stella. What am I going to say and how am I going to say it? I don’t have the words, you understand?…in my head I tried to say it, over and over again but it came out wrong. I go back to the canteen, almost sleepwalking. Mustapha was making a cup of strong Turkish coffee for me and time almost seemed to stand still whilst he did. The aroma was pulling me to the coffee. I knew Mus well and though I didn’t like him too much because he was a Turk, I never harboured any personal animosity towards him. I didn’t hold him personally responsible for his Government’s wickedness. I just didn’t like the fact that I couldn’t understand a word he was saying most pf the time!

Mus finished making me a very nice cup of black Turkish medrio and lit me one of his own cigarettes and put it in my mouth.

“Mr Paul. Take plis…Oy don know, this life eh? Ve don know one day ve well, the next ve sick. Is life no?”

There was nothing for me here. I had to get out. I sipped his coffee, we smoked his Marlborough and they tasted even better with the coffee. The coffee was good and strong.

“Thanks re Mus.”

Mustapha was a little too young to understand that I needed to be alone now. The coffee was the best thing Mus could possibly have done for me.

“Listen re Mus, thanks for the coffee eh? But can you fuck off now please?”

“Sure, sure, Mr Paul. Oy understand. Is shit, oy know.”

Periklis put his head round the door and thought better of it. He didn’t come in. Mus went off to prepare his bundles for the afternoon delivery he needed to make to the outside machinists.

I finished my fag and my very nice afternoon medrio coffee. It was one of the nicest cups of coffee I have ever had.

3.50pm

Dr Keller was telling Stella and Eleni what they were going to do now she was at the hospital. They were in his tiny office at the end of the ward, barely able to sit. The door was shut but every so often a nurse would come in and say a brief hello, rummage around for some notes, a file. Occasionally they would interrupt him briefly and ask him a question, borrow a pen, be curious about her. It was an animated space and not really private at all. And yet it was efficient, free from rushing around, unencumbered by the need to do things quickly, a place of relative calm.

Stella wished her husband was there so he could translate for her. Eleni was listening, but not very carefully, to what the young and very dishy doctor had to say. She knew she had to remember what he what saying so she could eventually translate it for her mum into Cypriot, but she was distracted by his yummy face and gorgeous voice. She was thinking, in the words of the Irish comedian Frank Carson, “it’s a cracker, it’s the way I tell ‘em!”. Well, he was a cracker, and all this had to be a big joke anyway, so you had to laugh eh? She was in Love Story again. Where the tragic heroine is loved by the dishy preppy, isn’t that what she called him? And she used to be a choir mistress and a pianist or cellist or something. Somehow the plot had gone a little differently because there should have been all the other scenes where they got to know each other, and he was a burly ice hockey player. And all that lovemaking, what about all that then eh? When was all that gonna happen then eh? “Oh God he’s dishy,” she thought, and Stella could see the way her daughter was looking at the young English doctor. She knew that look and that wasn’t right. She’d speak to her about it when the doctor had left, yes, she’d have words with her about the appropriate way for a girl of her age to be with a man of his age.

Eleni needed to put a lid on what she was feeling. It was actually making her miss most of what he was saying because she was so attracted to him. Eventually she couldn’t resist it.

“Do you play any sport by any chance? Dr Kelly.”

He was almost floored by this question coming as it did just after he had explained that she would need to start her chemotherapy this afternoon and that they were going to be putting some chemicals in her which might eventually lead to her losing her hair. Was she worried about needles? Did she feel sick at the sight of blood?

He paused for a moment, thought about the question and said,

“Yes actually, I play field Hockey. If that’s what you mean?”

“Ah yes, there’s a difference between that and Ice Hockey, isn’t there? What position do you play?”

“I’m a winger. A left wing.”

“I love Ice Hockey. I’ve never seen a field hockey game. What’s it like?”

And just as he was about to answer, the door swung open and in walked senior Nursing Sister, Cynthia Solomon.

3.40pm

I had to out get out. Andreas had disappeared on yet another phone-call. It was suffocating me being in there, the noise, the smell of my shame, the anger, the eyes not looking at me, the people I had known for so long, ignoring me. carrying on as if nothing had happened.

I walked down the stairs quite slowly, taking in the moment. I didn’t think I’d ever go back through those doors anymore. There was nothing of mine in there anyway. None of my things, nothing I owned. Redundant? What the fuck was that anyway? I’d make him pay for sure. Andreas would have to pay me something for the 24 years I worked there. He owed me.

As soon as I stepped into the street there was a downpour. On top of everything else, God was bringing this shower of shite on my head too. The rain falling on my head was too much. The straw that broke the Camel’s back they say. Before I had realised, the rain in my heart started to agree with God; it started a downpour there too. I felt the full force of the pain I had been locking inside me for so long. It was now that everything hit me. As I walked, I was being blinded by my tears as well as the rain. The sky was crying and so was I. I cried with nature. Was God feeling sorry for me? Was he sending me a message? Fuck that shit, I didn’t believe in him anyway. What was the point of anything anyway? I had no job, my daughter was sick, my wife hated me, what was there left to live for? I was dangerously close to the traffic that was spraying its way down Old Street.

As I walked in the downpour, the thoughts began to take over and I was thinking of Eleni and Stella at the hospital. How was I going to tell them?

Mine till the end of time Stella said when we were young lovers and we didn’t care that we were sinning together after Church. ‘Yours whenever you want me.’ Soulla told me. Had she really said that me, all those years ago? Why did that suddenly come into my head?

My senses started to awaken all at once through the blinding rain and then Stella, Soulla and Eleni looked at me and accused me of giving up. Of being a no hoper. They were standing in the middle of the pavement on Old Street a few feet ahead of me as I was walking. They were everywhere I turned; somehow just ahead of me, the three most important people in my life, just there in front of me, taunting me. I had to shake my head, I hit the side of my head with my palm, like you try to get water that’s stuck in your ear after you take a plunge in the sea.

They said they’d be there for me. They’d look after me.

“Don’t let us down. We love you. We want you to live. Don’t despair. Live!”

And as suddenly as they had arrived, they left. Disappeared, as my head cleared. I realised I must have been having a hallucination. It was a vision of my life. The vision of my life. I’ve never seen anything so clear.

They represented a physical and emotional solar system in which I was their sun. They needed the light I gave them too. They needed me. Future worlds were being formed.

And I don’t think I was ever the same again. In that storm outside and inside my head, I sort of found a reason to go on. Not to throw myself in front of a car. I don’t think I was ever so close to death than in those fifteen or so minutes in the street.

I headed back to the factory after I’d walked without realising it, as far as The Elephant and Castle. It was the middle of the afternoon and I didn’t know what to do with myself. Go back to the factory? Or go to the hospital like I said…

I managed to find a telephone box that wasn’t vandalised and I called 100 to ask the operator for directory enquiries, what the telephone number for the North Middlesex Hospital was. By the time I got through to Stella on the ward it took nearly all the change I had on me and the pips were going again.

“You’re staying at the hospital tonight you say? What? Oh the fucking pips again.”

“Eh?”

“Ok I’ll come straight…oh Jesus Christ!” and the pips went again amnd I was without change.

4.15.pm

I had to go back to the factory to get some change or to make another call where I didn’t have to pay for the call. I was soaked to the skin by the time I got back.

The Govna had already been on the phone to the police and then Stella and then Soulla.

He screamed at me when I got back saying he was worried sick, and I just stood there for a moment. Then I went over to my place and he went back into his office, again. Just for another moment I thought of smashing the whole thing up and breaking the Govna’s big Oak table, but I just looked at him and I said, “May God have mercy on your soul.” I didn’t know what it meant but it sounded good enough to me.

The Govna was on the phone again.

“I can’t talk now, I’m on the phone to a buyer…come back tomorrow, I’ll see you’re alright, Paully. Go see you wife. Look after your daughter.”

“Talk to me, Andreas. Or I’m gonna break your fuckin neck as God is my witness!”

I could see Andreas was on the phone to his mistress otherwise he wouldn’t have had that guilty look on his face and he wouldn’t have been so pissed off that he had to get off the phone. I knew Olga was temperamental and that in the space of a few seconds she could twist Andreas round her little finger. I’d often seen her at the factory swanning around like she owned the place. She’d even given me the eye on one occasion but I knew to steer well clear of that vixen. What a nerve Andreas had pretending he was on the phone to a buyer.

He whispered with his hand over the receiver like he always did and said to her, he dropped his pretence to me and instead turned the tables.

“A customer just came in and I’ve got to go.”

I was listening to it all,

“But I haven’t sold any cabbage this week and he looks like he’s gonna buy a few dresses. I just can’t talk darling…business. It’s important business darling, don’t be like that my darlin.”

He rolled his eyes heavenward for me.

“No don’t hang up…shit, ah, she is so quick with her anger. She’ll bury me!”

“I thought that was Olga or whatever her name is, your tart.”

“Maybe her name is Soulla?” he said.

“So what? We all need to get some pleasure in this fucking life. You done it to me, re, after all these years, you think you can just get rid of me just like that? Like some casual?”

“Look Paul, re, it isn’t you, don’t you see I can’t afford to keep on so many staff anymore. It’s these prices, the costings. Everybody in all the factories is the same. We can’t afford the costings, the other factories in China, they make things so much cheaper, you’ll see. This bloody revolution in Iran. It’s stopping the Oil supplies. The inflation. It’s not just me, it’s everybody. You’ll see. There’s gonna be a recession my son.. Look, you gonna get a good settlement, Paul. Most people get nothing.”

“Like what?’”

CHAPTER 6

PAULLY OUT

4.12pm

STAYIN‘ ALIVE – SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER

Outside 27 Old Street, the sweet and sour, smell of someone whose life was spent on pavements, theatre stage doors or the doorways of buildings people like me worked in, wafted into my nose.  I lit a last cigarette from the almost disintegrating packet in the doorway. I noticed his shit-caked, tired, careworn face, the wiry wrinkles furrowing every part of his his brow, his tangled matted hair, squashed to the side of his head. He was looking up at me with his steely imploring eyes, searching for a connection. I gave up my cigarette and passed it to him. It was in that moment that I thought maybe I should quit smoking. I looked back into his eyes as I gave it to him, and his gratitude was evident  He nodded at me, looked at the fag, took it and put it straight to his lips. His smell was almost overpowering in that confined space. I realised that he had also defecated next to where he was sat and it wasn’t him that smelt at all, though from the looks of his face, he had been sleeping on his own mess. I looked into my packet and saw there were none left.  I was about to sit next to him, but I saw the mess and thought, nah, I’m in enough shit as it is. Better just to leave it there for them to see when they come out. Doesn’t bother me. I used to work here, I thought. I don’t anymore. No, I wasn’t going to stay. I needed to be on my own.

I always wondered during my working hours what it would be like to do something in the middle of the afternoon. To go to the cinema or to a club maybe and play Tavli with the old geezers. I had never experienced an afternoon to myself since I had started working for Andreas. I had never really had any time off, not in 24 years.

So you think you’ve got troubles? I looked at him. So, you got family somewhere my friend? You got a daughter? You got any children? Maybe. Maybe he doesn’t know where they are anymore. Maybe they don’t care where he is anymore. Whether he shits himself on doorways and sleeps on the pavement because they don’t. All these people trying to keep their heads above water eh? And all I could do was try to understand what was going on in my fish bowl. What my thoughts were doing to my head. It was too much information. Everything happening on the same day. It couldn’t be real could it?

It wasn’t clever re Pavlo, not to have some time off for yourself, re Pavlo! I was admonishing myself. I never took Stella away anywhere. We never went on holiday. We never really visited any of our relatives. We couldn’t go to Cyprus anymore. Apart from the weddings in Pratt Street or the receptions in Southgate, when did we ever go out? Socialise? Go down the clubs? Break a few plates? Get drunk?

‘It’s all a dream!’ I said to him. I dipped into my pockets, found £7 that I had on me and gave it to him. And then I left him there. In his own piss and shit. Smoking my last cigarette and wondering what the fuck I had just said, meant.

I started walking aimlessly down Old Street to somewhere, but really I didn’t give a fuck where. I knew I had to go somewhere…where?

“Fuck, I gotta go to the surgery in Palmers Green. I can’t walk there. I gotta get the bus, But now I don’t even have the fare. I gave it to him. It can’t be nothing eh? Why did he say he wanted us both to go there? Patel thinks it’s serious enough for us to go there today.”

I didn’t know how I was gonna get there. I just knew I had to get there. I had to tell Stella, we had to go there. But she wouldn’t leave Eleni at the hospital on her own, would she? Doesn’t Patel realise that?

I’d left the factory in such a strop everyone knew what was going on.

In my head, I think I picked up my fags, my jacket and left. Walking out in the middle of the day created a big buzz in the factory. On a Monday of all days. Maybe I should have seen it through to get my weeks money. I’ll bet they were saying it now. Before I walked out, I thought, though I could be wrong, I went over and told Big Ronnie the senior cutter, who then went over to Ivy the senior sample machinist and Big Ronny told her that I had told him I was sacked. It was like I could lip read. I know the conversation they would have…

‘Neva!’ she pretended to be astounded. She knew.

‘Yes’

‘Neva!’ she was a brilliant actress now.

‘Yes, the bastard told him after lunch, din you see him go in?’

‘No. I mean how could they? I’ve been here as long as Mr Paul and it makes me wonder who’s next Ron, eh, who’s next?’.

Ronny would do that nod of his he always did when he can’t think of anything to say. It’s like an nod of agreement. But I’ll bet he could see the absolute fear in Rene’s face, and it made him slightly nauseous. So, Rene obviously would have to have had a word with Pat.

In my head I imagined Pat would immediately say she’s going into the office and I’ll bet little Steve had joined her on her way to the office. I imagined this scene in my head as I was walking down Old Street, thinking about where I was gonna get the bus from. And what bus to take and what fare I needed.

In my head I could see Rene getting up and Ronnie going with her and following Pat and Stevie as they made their way down the factory floor towards the Govna’s office. And they were doing this for me. And suddenly everybody stops work, in my head, and bugger me, everyone in the factory, knew they were going in there to see the boss about the Govna sacking me. Loulla, a very fast piecework machinist started to cry and Periklis thought to himself he had better go along too.

And in the same breath, I imagined would be happening in the factory right now. After I walked out of Andreas office.

The whole factory watching me, and suddenly, it’s completely quiet. Machinists just stopped. Without the deafening noise of all the machinists and the over-lockers and the thrashing of the pressers, the factory silent, but for the tick-over of the overlocking machines and the almost, until now, indistinguishable buzzing of the fluorescent lights that were all over the factory ceiling. That gave you a headache looking at them.

It was almost holy for thirty seconds, as everybody hoped that they could do something for me.

Of course, none of this happened. Stevie told me later what happened, and it was nothing. They just carried on with their work, the day’s work carried on and no one came to my defence. No one walked into the Govna’s office to beg him to change his mind.

Andreas just carried on with his plans for the changes. No one knew then, like I know now, that he was about to sack a third of the workers who worked there. That, by the end of the month, 15 people in that place were gonna lose their jobs and have to go on the dole.

And most of them would get nothing in severance pay. Nothing. I was better off than most of them, even though I was the first of them. At least he was giving me something.

But right now, I didn’t have a penny to my name. I didn’t know how I was gonna get to the surgery and I didn’t know how I was gonna tell Stella she needed to be there with me to meet Dr Patel and leave Eleni at the hospital.

4.35pm

JACKSON 5 – I’LL BE THERE

Walking down the street, I hated everybody at that moment. Look at them, lookin’ at the floor so they don’t have to look someone else in the face. Then. In that moment….yes, I hated everyone.

I got to a bus stop on the other side of the street and I’m standing there in a queue waiting for a 217, thinking about when I was young and I used to play a game called ‘knock down ginger’. The three of us in my gang used to jump on a bus and then jump off as soon as were asked to pay the fare.

Suddenly I hear her voice. I recognised it straightaway.

”‘Half day today then Paully?”

Sarah had just finished from her afternoon shift and she was gonna catch her own bus, the 205 to Angel, when she saw me. I don’t know, maybe she’s got a soft spot for me, you know? Maybe at lunchtime, she saw the disquiet, the sadness in me. Like maybe I have something on my mind, and she saw it. She knows I’ve got problems with my daughter and I know she is a person with sympathy for others, a very caring person. She genuinely cares about people I think. And she sees me and she thinks, why aren’t I working? There’s got to be a problem, sort of thing.

Again, she says, “Half day then?”

She was really asking me if I was all right, but she wasn’t using those exact words.. Eh? When she knows I’m not, for sure.

I must be giving something off, like I’m in a daze or something and being out in the street in the middle of the afternoon.

I tell her about the bad news from my job and that they just sacked me after all these years. And it’s probably gonna be the same for everyone. They’re gonna chuck them out because they’re are gonna get a machine to do the work.

“Am being replaced by a machine.” Her 205 to Angel came, but she didn’t get on.

The way she cared about me at that moment, made me feel something inside, I can’t say what, but I’m grateful to her for caring. I mean, I’m only a stranger, really. She serves me lunch, she brings me food, she’s very polite, but what does she know about me, really? Nothing. And yet she’s caring enough to ask me what’s happening in my life and feeling sad for what I’m going through. This is human. I think. This is why I think she is a sympathetic person. I heard somewhere curiosity is intelligence. I think it’s more. Curiosity is what makes mankind leave the cave, follow the Sun, find a name for the stars.

I couldn’t really hear her through the fog in my head. It’s like an animal, a mother, that cares for her young. I’m a grown man but that doesn’t mean I don’t need affection like a child sometimes. And what is wrong with that? Eh? To suckle from the breast of human kindness,. This milk is sacred. There was a special word I knew. Altruism. Not a big word,  but it’s like the world is joined up when it happens.

These English people, they say you have to behave like a man. Stiff upper lip kinda thing. It’s a load of rubbish, when you need to let your feelings out. When you don’t let them out is when you get cancer.

And then the tears escaped from inside.

She stood beside me there by the bus-stop with people walking by and they’re seeing it and not seeing it and walking by without saying anything. She stood by a grown, crying man in the street. Me. Right then. I’m in trouble.

“Come on Mr Paul, let’s go and get a coffee, eh, what do you say, come on then, eh?”

I was about to go with her down the street but I stop and turn to her with my nose all running, with snot dribbling down my face, my eyes sore from the pain.

“Sarah, I neva been ready for what I know now. I never understan nothin…no more.”

I try to tell her what’s going on. To tell her that my daughter is sick in the hospital but I have to go to the surgery to meet her GP. I try to use the words the best way I can to explain this situation in another language, you understand? And this is something I’ll never forget as well. The way she took it on herself to help me. I’ll always remember. She gave me a tissue and I blew my nose and cleared some of the crap that was in my head.

Sarah stopped a taxi and took me all the way to her place on the Goswell Road where she had a little one-room flat. She made me a sweet Turkish coffee. A gliki. She knew what it was called and I drank it.

A Samaritan. There are some left. There are people who do things because they are the right things to do and not because they want something from you in return. We collided into each other that day. She was the Samaritan, and I was the injured Jew she pick up from the roadside.

She let me call the surgery tell the receptionist I couldn’t go down to the surgery because I was going t see my daughter in the hospital and that if the doctor wanted to speak to me, he would have to come to the hospital instead.

She said I must get to the hospital. Sarah let me use her phone to call the North Middlesex Hospital as well. I asked for Eleni by her name. I can’t remember the ward name. They put me through to a Nurse called Solomon and then I spoke to Stella.

After I put the phone down she asked me again what was wrong and this time I had the words to explain.

“My daughter is very sick. She’s has this bloody thing; they call it leukaemia. My Father, he had the same fucki thing. It missed me and it went into her.”

I guess, and sometimes I still wonder why these things come back so clear now, so truthful, so in my head and also, why I want to share, it’s because to me, it’s a kind of sacred thing. A Holy thing for people to take the time to tend to the sick, who have fallen by the roadside and are unable to get themselves up. I’m not a religious man.

THE EMOTIONS – BEST OF MY LOVE

Not 6 months after letting Paul Socrates, Andreas he had told 15 other poor bastards the same thing. This time he made an announcement to everyone in the factory. He stopped the machines, by turning the power off everywhere from the mains. The full-time workers were left with in no doubt that this was not just another sacking or go slow or another three day week. They knew the writing was on the wall. There were many people being laid off.

“I am sorry to say that afta 25 years in this business, my friends, I either have to shut the doors or employ less pipol. Is nothing I can do with the money we are turning over now. Everything is changing within the garment industry. Will the following people come forward when I call your names…”

He gave them each a formal letter as was required by law and inside a final pay packet with a small bonus for those who had worked there for longer than five years. Mrs Takoui got a month’s salary.

This is what Andreas said to everyone that Friday afternoon. Stevie told me Rene was crying and Periklis was too.

CHAPTER 7

O VOVOS

6.15pm

SOUL TRAIN – SHAKE YOUR BOOTY

She gave me the fare to the hospital. It took me an hour to get there on the 243 from Sarah’s bed-sit. I had to change buses at Stamford Hill Broadway for the 149 and on my journey I wept again. This was a unique thing for me. I would never let a stranger see the emotions Sarah had seen, but her knowing me made it all alright for me somehow. And it made me weep even more. Her compassion to me, made me weep.

I came away knowing that at least she wasn’t like so many of the English, unable to acknowledge their own emotions. Unable to drop their masks.

A nation of masks. No wonder there are so many good English actors.

I was thinking of people out of touch with themselves, as I call it. With their emotion. I think this is being you, you know. The you, you are inside. I learnt from them to keep my emotions to myself. I learnt this word. Dissemble. People dissemble. The English. A nation of dissemblers. A people full of dissemblers. It gave me satisfaction to think I could still make sense of what was in my head, make sense of my thoughts on the bus, as I went deeper into myself and what had just happened. And people may say, no, it’s too much emotion! Not so much. Please, you are hysterical! That’s another thing I learnt from the English. Keep your emotions in check.

When you lose a child, tell me it’s too much crying, tell me that you can ever have a second when you’re not thinking about that child. Tell me it’s hysterical in your mind.

In our family we always let things out and never keep things back.. So on the bus in my head, no one listens to a hysterical man, who is losing his mind because he is losing his daughter. No one pays any attention as I’m whispering to myself. As I put my forehead up against the cold glass of the window on the top floor of the bus.

“Seven years old and she was falling on the floor laughing an laughing till her mama told her she had to go to bed. I’ve never seen a girl laughing so much, and God made her pay now didn’t he? He made us all pay, for the laughing eh? He said no you fuckers, you can’t be happy anymore, you’ve got to be mad with the pain from this thing, you have to be mad the rest of your life from this. I don’t get the bloody picture, who’s the boss. God, are you the boss, are you trying to tell me you’re the boss? Are you gonna come and show me a way? I don’t believe it, no. You don’t care. If you are there, you don’t care. You wanna see my girl die? You want her for yourself? Shit. There is no such thing. THERE IS NO GOD.”

“There is no God my friend, you’re right, he doesn’t exist.” was the voice that came from nowhere. It was flat and almost as whispered as my own voice, but it was audible and it went right into me.  I couldn’t yet tell it if it was a man or a woman’s voice.

“Eh?”

“Take it from me, I know, We killed him.”

Again, this voice from inside me and this time I knew it was inside my head. The voice was mine but only in my head. The other voice, the Jimminy Cricket voice, was coming from deep inside my head.

“What’s this eh? You’re trying to make me scared of myself now?”

“I want to talk. Let me tell you something my friend.”

“Fuck off an leave me in peace.”

“Listen my friend..”

“What friend? I don’t know you.”

“I am you. You are the man who killed God. I know ‘cos I helped you, don’t you remember?”

Korphi Cyprus – 1946

Cyprus, I was nine, I was out in the Church Square in Modes Dou Panteli in Limassol. There were ten or eleven of us, all boys, all screaming at the top of our lungs as we ran through the square chasing an imaginary army of Turks off of the land they were trying to steal.

“Svigwa!!”

Michalis, the leader of our gang, screamed and we all swarm towards the nearest Olive tree.

Two or three were already climbing its ancient trunk. Out on one of the nearest branches to the ground, Yianni was tearing at the branch trying to strip off a thick swisher from the tree. He needed it to battle with the Svigwa. Sometimes we would attack them, ‘Pano se anomo.’ rushing at the nest with the strips we had torn from the trees. This day we were all ready to go and Michalis, always our undisputed leader, had a plan. We gathered at the foot of the tree and Michalis was directing the first attack.

“When me and Tasso get the first hit, stay back and wait for the first lot to come out. Then Stéphane and Yianni come quick to us and we will come back with you helping us, when if they attack us too. No one get too close now. Stay back twenty feet!”

Michalis and Tasso started off towards the nest, which was located in the eaves of a house on the corner of the square, next to the bakery. I was looking at a kid called Vovos as the others were on their way over to the nest. I hadn’t seen this kid before, but I was told that he was Tasso’s brother, so he was okay. I was surprised that this kid was getting a bit close, too close to the others as they were stealthily, slyly, secretly, making their way over toward the dreaded beasts called ‘Svigwa’.

“Eh re gologo stay back!”

I hissed at him, but nothing came back from the boy. His back was to me and he just stayed where he was. He was far too close now and the others around said nothing to him, they just stayed and watched in awe as Michalis was crouched down directly beneath the nest. Tasso now started to give him a leg up and Michalis, whilst holding his switch above his head, slowly ascended the side of the building. His switch was about three and a half feet long and had leaves towards the tip so that it acted like a fly swat. It now formed an extension to his arm as he slid up the wall, slowly…slowly… Tasso had now extended himself to his full height with Michalis standing almost erect on Tassos’s shoulders.

“An inch or two my brother…” was Michalis’ instruction.

“Do it now, it’s killing me.”

“Just an inch.”

“Do it! Stretch higher! I can’t!”

“An inch re. An inch more…”

“Christ, you’re too heavy. I can’t support you anymore. My shoulders, you’re killing me! Jesus!””

“Do it. An inch more!”

Tasso made one final further effort, literally on his tiptoes, gathering every bit of extra strength he had left, to lift Michalis’ whole body upwards, that one inch more… a millimetre…and finally the crack of the switch through the air and onto the outside of the nest. Michalis jumped down and crept up, stifling his laughter as he sat alongside Tasso who had collapsed to the floor after that final effort. Rubbing his hands on the back of his neck to ease the stinging in his shoulders, which were hot with pain, torn with the sandals Michalis had been wearing; but he creased with laughter and was aflame with pride at managing to give Michalis that extra lift upwards so he could reach the nest.

The first Svigwa flew from the nest in a noisy ominous drone. The sound was fearsome, a warning, a threat. They watched as then the next few Svigwa flew, angrily from the nest. Bursting out in different directions to ward off the possible threat. The attack developed quickly. Within seconds a swarm had begun to respond to the potential danger the nest was in. The Svigwa were under mortal danger and now they buzzed angrily everywhere looking for the enemy, flying out and going off in different directions blindly. Looking for anyone who could have dared to disturb their fortress.

The silent boy was still standing a few feet off and still much too close to the wall and to what had just happened and the Svigwa started to swarm towards him. I watched from a little way off, unable to move, frozen, as Michalis and Tasso doubled-up with laughter, low and out of the way. The silent boy seemed to be fixed to the ground. It was like he couldn’t move, because some invisible glue was holding him stuck to the ground. He lifted his hand as if to cover his face as he saw them approach, but one big one stung him on his bare leg.

Nothing from the boy. I could see the sting in slow motion. The moment of the sting itself and what followed, are what I re-live in my mind on this journey, on this 243 bus.

The voice in my head had made me remember this in every tiny detail.

I could see the boy’s face contorted into a scream-like gesture and his eyes seemed to blow up with tears. They were streaming down his face and yet there was no sound coming out of his mouth. Everybody could see he was in agony, but no sound came out. Just the sound of his transfixed breath stuck in his throat. He began to rub his leg furiously, scratching violently at his leg so much that he began to bleed from the wound. No one had moved until then and it was only now that the other boys started to laugh. Everybody joined in and started to imitate the boys’ actions. They all copied his facial expressions and mocked his pain and cackled at his agony and scratched at their own imaginary sting on their bare legs. And then in spite of how horrific this seemed, I began to laugh too. I couldn’t stop myself. Like the hysterical laugh of someone at a funeral, who can’t help themselves.

I couldn’t understand why this boy didn’t make any noise and I asked someone in the gang why this boy wasn’t screaming out. It was little Stéphanos, who jeered at me saying,

“Don’t you know Tassos brother is deaf? You stupid cunt? Deaf and dumb! That’s why they call him Vovos!”

I never forgot the deaf and dumb kid getting stung and I never forgave myself for laughing at him, just like all the other boys in that Church Square in Modes Dou Panteli in Cyprus, when I was eight years old.

“Was that when we killed God?” I asked, but he wasn’t there anymore. I was talking to an empty top floor of the 243. Through the window the memory flying out and upwards. The memory of pain and how God died in me.

North London Middlesex Hospital Monday 7^th May 1979 6.35pm

I found out from the signs to her ward that she was on the third floor. I walk up the stairs; the lift was not an option.

As I was walking up the stairs I was thinking what I would say to her when I first saw her. As I began to think about this I started to cry again. What could I say? I was weary as I went up the first flight of stairs on the first floor and stopped to have a breather. There were two corridors on this floor. I stood outside the lift and looked down the corridor. To my right, an old man in his seventies I guess, was sitting on a chair by a fire bucket outside the men’s toilets. He was smoking a fag and I joined him.

“It’s okay to have a smoke here then?”

I ask as I get to him. I was already feeling into my jacket for my pack of 10 Rothman, that Sarah had given me enough money to buy.

“So long as you stay this side of the door.”

The old man offered me a light from an old silver Zippo lighter and the flame on it was enormous, almost singeing my chin as I bent over to light my cigarette from it.

“Just filled it. Sorry.”

We both take a long draw on our fags. A pause and then the old man says,

“I bet I don’t have to fill this up again!”

He flipped shut the lid of the Zippo.

“Eh?”

I look at him and noticed he had a grin on his face. You sly old git! You’re having a laugh with me eh? You old sod. I take a good look at him for the first time and I see the yellow skin of his face. The veins on the back of his hands were all visible against the skin and his eyes seemed to have a sort of emptiness to them and they were sunk deep into his skull. He knows he is dying and he’s ready for it. He is not long for this world.

Another drag on his fag and a nurse came through the door smiling at them as she went by.

“Crafty fags eh? Wish I could.”

And she quickened her step towards us.

“Give us a drag then.”

And as soon as she had helped herself to a lungful of smoke from my cigarette she fanned it away as sheexhaled, she was gone through another door, carrying a bedpan that stank worse than the tobacco she was afraid would linger on her uniform as she went by them.

The old man puffed away on his cigarette, like he was really enjoying it and I share this little smoke-filled sanctuary for the five or so minutes it took to finish his fag and for the old man to light up another. I looked at my watch. I didn’t really read the time it said on there, I was just being polite, as if to say to the old man that I wished I could spare more time with him but I have an appointment.

We didn’t exchange any other words and I continued on my way up to the third floor. As I went up the stairs, I turn back and saw the old, yellow-skinned man draw on his cigarette, like it was the best fag he’d ever had. I thought to myself that it was like looking at a vision of myself in the future, all hunched up and breathless, drawing on my smoky killer. It could be me, I’m thinking. Maybe I really should give them up. Once and for all. Never smoke another.

When I get to the right floor, I pause for a minute or two to get my breath and to think again about what I’m gonna say to her. I didn’t want to go and find a nurse to tell me what part of the ward Eleni was on, because I wanted to find her for myself. I was standing there for about three or four minutes and looking along the line of beds but I couldn’t make her out in any of them. I start to walk along the ward to see if I could spot her and then a plump African nurse with a tag that said Cynthia Solomon asked me where I was going. She had this name tag which said Senior Nursing Sister.

“My daughter, Eleni Socrates. Is this the Churchill Ward?”

“Ah yes, Mr Socrátes.” she said, as if to offer me some consolation by knowing my daughter’s name. She made special music with the way she said my name. And she even stressed the right syllable.

Suddenly and not because of the nurse or anything in her voice, or not seeing Eleni in any of the beds, or having to ask her, I was angry. There was so much fire in my blood, I was so hot, it felt like I was burning up inside. I was feeling like I was gonna scream out loud but I stopped myself. I just couldn’t deal with it, you know, the situation. The fact of being there, in the ward. As quickly as the anger came, it went. I looked at her kindly face and it calmed me. Her compassion calmed me.

I began thinking about certain things I saw on the ward and silently tried to think which things Eleni would have seen on her way to her bed. She would have seen the notice board opposite the lift with all the national health information stuff about carrying a donor card or the poster about the Anthony Nolan Bone Marrow Trust. Stuff about keeping children from getting fillings with huge cartoon pictures of peoples’ teeth with little demons attacking them with pickaxes. My eye passes to the beds, but I didn’t really look at the people in them. None of them could have anything as bad as her, eh? Why should I care about them? One bed had a curtain all the way round and I could just hear the sound of someone taking a pee. Why are those curtains such a disgusting design, eh? It looks like they don’t care what shit you have to look at when you’re ill. My mind was full of rage and calm, rage and calm.

Cynthia Solomon brought me to a room at the end of The Churchill Ward, aptly named as they were all fighting their own private wars eh, so I thought, it’s a good name for a ward. I passed all the other patients on my way and I start looking into each bed for clues. How sick is this person…this person? Wait, this is not a grown-up person, this is a child. And so is this, in the next bed. It was only then I realise that every bed on the ward was another kid. And I also realised they were all just as sick as Eleni.

CHAPTER 8

ELENI

6.53pm

THE TEMPTATIONS – PAPA WAS A ROLLING STONE

Stella and I were sitting opposite Dr Keller. He was stumbling over his words. It felt like he was trying to say one thing, but it was coming out another. He was in a bit of a knot. I could see he knew what he wanted to say, but he just wasn’t sure enough about the way he was saying it. Tongue tied, they say. The English.

To him, Eleni is another patient. To us, our beautiful unique child. And he says she has to stay in the hospital overnight. They’re gonna do even more tests. They’ve done all the tests! They’re gonna take some more blood, they’ve taken all the blood! An examination. They’ve done all the examinations! I mean when’s it gonna end eh? He says she got some spots under the eyelid which they are concerned about. I remember the word. Is hard for me to understand but I worked it out. You know why? Because this word comes from the Greek language. From the language of the first doctors, I reckon.

Hepatosplenomegaly. Spleno for the Spleen, Megalo for the big and Hepatos, the liver, like you have the Hepatitis, these people they have today. All from the Greek language. I remember the word even though I don’t know what it means in English, I can trace the origin through the Ancient Greek language. We gave the world that. All your medical words. Why? Because we made doctors. Hippocrates. The first doctor, was Greek. And they swear by his name, like to a God. These doctors have The Hippocratic Oath. “I will use those dietary regimens which will benefit my patients according to my greatest ability and judgment, and I will do no harm or injustice to them.”

I will do no harm. They’re still saying it today. First, do no harm.

So, she’s got a big spleen, is that it? Why? Why would she have this? That was the way I understood what he was talking about. And Stella, well it was all Greek to her, literally. Even though it’s her language too, she didn’t understand a word of it. I explained as much as I could. I translated as he spoke. In as much detail as I could. Stella wanted to know too. And why shouldn’t she?

I told him I’d been going to the local library for weeks, to try and find out about what my daughter was suffering from. Also he should be able to explain to me and Stella what this thing is, so we can both understand. No? I went five times, to the library, five, six times. Each time on my lunch break. Eventually, I found a dictionary of medical ailments, symptoms, treatments. It had pictures. Terrible but useful. Dorland’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary.

“I been try to findi in the book.”

Three weeks before at breakfast Eleni show me some bruises on her back.

“Did you bang yourself or something?”

I asked her.

“Nowhere, Dad, it’s just like they weren’t there one day and then they were the next,” she says…’

I’m telling Keller now.

“When Eleni look herself in the bathroom she have trouble to see them, you know, the marks, to see them clearly. She say they just look like a little blue, maybe black bruise and they on the lower part of her back. I remember, I went into the bathroom with Stella one night after she’d been having a bath. To me it looked like she had banged her back. Stella says she was wearing skirts and maybe the waistbands, were too tight.”

Keller was listening.

“It could have been Thalassaemia, later on, this is what I think, and thas what I bin expecting because, is many Cypriots, they have this. I know the Thalassaemia is what the Cypriots they have, like we curse with our own blood. A blood-curse from the Gods. I get in touch with the very nice pipol from the United Kingdom Thalassaemia Society, and get some information.”

Finally, I found the right words to say to this Dr Keller fellow and make him listen. He looks upset and this surprises me because I think a doctor is not supposed to get upset. They’re supposed to be calm and show you how they are going to do the treatment they’re planning. The chemotherapy.

“I think it’s best if I tell it to you straight Mr and Mrs. Socrates.”

7.25pm

DEEP PURPLE – SMOKE IN THE WATER

I opened the door to her room a tiny bit so I could look inside and not disturb what was waiting for me. The only way to describe the feeling is, it was like a Church. Hallowed ground yes? Sanctified. I see my little girl in her cot again at eight months and I was checking whether she was back to sleep from having woken up in the night screaming from her teething pains. As a baby, she hardly ever slept right through the night. And she was always so active at bedtimes, so difficult to get off to sleep. She needed stories and songs and jokes. An endless series of things to comfort her before she would rest her head. And she was up before us. She wake before 6.00am sometimes and go straight to the door to drink from the bottle the milkman left.

Stella sat in a chair to one side of Eleni’s bed. The uncomfortable chair. A chair that she had to lean slightly forward in, so she could keep her daughter’s face close to hers. It was upholstered in dark ruby red plastic. The comfortable chair, with arms and upholstery made of leather, was at the end of the bed but Stella didn’t want to trouble any of the nurses to have them move it. It was just easier to sit by her side there, on the uncomfortable chair. It was closer to her daughter’s face. She could comb Eleni’s hair to one side with her fingers or give her a sip of water. She held a white  polystyrene cup in her hands on her lap half full oif cold water. She soothed her forehead with a cool flannel she kept in the palm of her hand. Perhaps in the next couple of days, if she stays in Stella thought, she will pluck up the courage to ask one of the male nurses to move the other chair for her. The comfortable chair.

The only time she would leave the room now was when she had to use the toilet. Although she couldn’t sleep in the same room (they didn’t have the facility; well not at the moment anyway) but she did later on. In the next few days, they would rig something up. They got a little camp bed for her to sleep on.

I look at my wife sitting silently by the side of Eleni’s bed and I realise I‘ve been in this room already for about ten minutes without saying a word. I must have crawled in by my knees I think. And suddenly Eleni is awake and looking right at me as if she was thinking of speaking to me but didn’t want to be the one to break the silence.

“Are they doing the tests again?”

 I say, again, even though I know the answer. I knew they were sure now and I knew she knew and she knew I knew. I found myself talking about the tests anyway. As if that would be enough just to talk about them for the time being. One thing at a time maybe.

“No Dad. They know what it is.” Eleni said.

Stella spoke next, almost so quiet I had to strain my ear just to hear her. As if talking normally was talking too loudly.

“The doctor said he will speak to us again later, together, when he gets back from his rounds.”

Stella was using her most controlled voice. She didn’t rush the words and none of us talked while the other was talking. Each of us in the room had weight in what they said. The expression the English people use is, the air was heavy with anticipation.

When we talked together, the conversation was like a kind of trio in music. Each phrase having a beat at the end of its bar. There was a gap between each person speaking. A trio. A requiem.

Me, “Together?”

Eleni, “The family, you know Dad?”

Stella, “He’s a very nice boy, the doctor. Polite. Diligent.”

Eleni, “They’re keeping me in Dad.”

Me, “I’m here now my darling. We gonna be together.”

Stella, “He has a nice face, but he eats a lot, you see how fat he is.”

Me, “They said they gonna give you something? Some more tests.”

Eleni, ‘No, they’re gonna put some chemicals in me, in my arm.’

Stella, “They’ve done the tests?”

Eleni, “Chemotherapy. It’s called chemotherapy.”

Me, “I know the thing. I know the word. I read the book. They give you lots of pills to break the bad blood so the good blood can take over. It’s good darling.”

Stella, “Not pills, they put the chemicals in her, that’s what they’ve preparing her for more or less since we got here.”

Eleni, “Like now Dad. That’s why this thing is in my arm.”

Me, “Yeah.”

Eleni, “It hurts.”

Me, “Shall I call them?”

Eleni, “No it’s supposed to be helping. It’s ok. They’ll start it later. A nurse has to do that. ”

The end of the movement. There was silence. Everything goes quiet in the room. The Church.

What is sanctified by our words? Memory is some sort sanctity.

What is God?

CHAPTER 9

KAKOPETRIA

6.55pm

THEY LONG TO BE (CLOSE TO YOU) – THE CARPENTERS

Stella thinking about Cyprus as she sits on the uncomfortable chair by Eleni’s bed.

Kakopetria, Cyprus – 1950

She is nine years old and standing next to her mother, Koulla. They live in a two-roomed dwelling made of flint that was brought there from the nearby rivers and hillsides. It was only a short uphill donkey ride from a mountain called Trodos. Their village is called Kakopetriá, ‘where God lives’. Or so Koulla said. She was teaching Stella how to cook Dolmades, in Cypriot, Koupepia.

Trodos is about 450 metres high, and, it’s the highest peak in Cyprus. You could say they lived in its shadow. 20 years later, tourists would come to ski down the side of it after it snowed, which, luckily for the Tourist industry is practically every year.

During the second world war British soldiers were stationed in Kakopetriá. Stella and Koulla lived in Palió Kakopetriá, as the municipality declared the village an area of ‘protected cultural heritage’ during the 70’s. Each house was almost two storeys high and had a little balcony looking out at the river flowing down the centre of the village, in the small valley which separated one side of the village from the other. They could call across from one bank to the other to wish a neighbour good morning or ask for some goats milk, if they were running short for their Haloumi. Nearly everyone made their own cheese or drank the crystal clear water from the rivers that joined together as they passed through the centre of the village down from the mountain.

Stella was listening to her mother explaining how to wrap vine leaves into parcels around a filling of minced lamb, cooked rice, onions, tomatoes, mushrooms, parsley, and mint. Fresh Oregano was the final ingredient and there was wild Oregano spread out to dry over the table they were working on. This filled the room with an aroma that she would always remember. Everything in the village that was grown or reared could either be eaten or sold for food.

The beautiful strength of the aroma of Oregano, not only filled Stella’s nostrils but its incense wafted over the hillside around where Stella grew up and any breeze would carry its scent down through the village and into every home. It filled the room now and always would, during her lifetime. It was the smell of home, of family, of life. Of Cyprus.

She had to spoon some of the ingredients from a bowl where they had been mixed together, onto a flat and very moist vine-leaf and then fold the ends over into a cylindrically shaped parcel. The technique was all about making the right size parcel and folding the ends of the vine leaf over as gracefully as one might make an origami sculpture. Too much pressure and the vine leaf would tear, too little and it would fall apart in the bakers oven when it was cooking. It was the first dish she ever made for Paul. To win his heart, she cooked for him, her mother’s speciality of stuffed vine leaves. Koupépia with the emphasis on the second syllable.

Her mother spoke the earthy Greek-Cypriot dialect, which stayed with Stella all her life. It’s tone was almost Arabic in construction. Raised, in volume when delivered, so people who heard it for the first time would think the speakers were shouting at each other. Inventions like the radio weren’t in the vocabulary. The priest’s television, when it arrived, had to be named the ‘box with pictures.’ The fatherless language of a peasant nation who worked the land to feed their families. A people so dominated by other cultures, over so many centuries, that it’s still hard to know what Cypriot means anymore. The Greeks claimed its heart but the Ottomans hated the language and tried to ban it for nearly a hundred years. The people from the island always spoke to each other in order to outwit the occupiers and so as to proclaim their identity as Cypriots. The language the Turks on Cyprus made their own too and in spite of themselves, started talking their own version of. Turkish-Cypriot and Greek-Cypriot became intertwined like conjoined twins that had eventually to be separated by a Yatagan – the Ottoman knife.

The village Greek Koulla’s mother spoke, couldn’t be written down and couldn’t be spoken amongst the Cypriots during her childhood. The Greek that dared not speak its name. Hellenic Greek speakers from the mainland even today, are just as sneering as the Ottomans were, in their attitude to the language, so enamoured of Byron, and back when Stella was growing up alongside the newly born television service called PIK, she watched a Cypriot television newsreader read the news nightly, in a dialect no one actually spoke on the island, unless they were from the mainland of Greece. The owners of the Greek-Cypriot television company imposed a cultural imperialism so deep that even the Cypriots themselves aspired to talk in Greek rather than their own dialect. They thought their own language inferior in some way. Cypriots deferred to the Hellenes and changed the way they spoke, so as to try and speak more ‘proper’ when addressing a Greek, as if their own dialect wasn’t good enough. But later on in Stella, Paul and Eleni’s home, the BBC became an acronym which stood for British Born Cypriot.

Stella had come over to England regretting the years she spent making a life in a country where she never felt warm enough. Where the sun didn’t stay in the sky for long enough. She was bitter about coming to the UK and about the life she left behind. She missed playing with her friends in the red earth which muddied her knees and made her mother scream at her for being too much like the boys. She missed swimming in the river with just her underwear on with the other girls and boys. She would jump into the freezing cold waters that rushed through the middle of Kakopetriá just to see the thrill on the faces of the boys and because she was in love with not just one river, but with two.

There were two rivers that joined into each other as they came down the mountain and met in Kakopetriá. The small Garillis and the larger Karkotis, which everybody knew were the lifeblood of their lives. The water was so pure you could drink it from your cupped hands. So pure, they bottled it and sold it to the tourists who came to see the village, beginning in the 60’s and after hotels had been built there by local entrepreneurs, who prettified and restored the original flint houses to a rustic charm, which wowed those venturing in from the coast to spend the day experiencing peasant life. They sold it as, ‘the water from Mount Olympus.’

Even when she was sixty, she remembered the two rivers, her childhood friends, the freezing cold waters that the whole village drew water from. The water came directly from the mountain, pure and sweet tasting. So pure that you could see clear down into the rivers bed, whether you stood on the bank or whether you looked out of your balcony from 150 feet above.

Koulla, made her copy her as she rolled out the moistened vine leaves on the table. Stella still wasn’t promised to anyone. This was something that Koulla had to put right and when Stella helped with the cooking her mother would say,

“This will be a good meal for your husband one day…”

“He’ll fall in love with my Koupépia?”

“And then he’ll fall in love with you!”

in a knowing kind of conspiratorial whisper and then they would laugh a loud fierce cackle of a laugh together. A laugh that launched a thousand hips. Stella would be beside herself with excitement thinking about what it would be like to be with a man. To lie with a man. The laughter they shared together was the laughter of knowing how good that could be and how she could expect her very soul to leap inside her when she met the right man. At nine she knew that eroda was wonderful and would be something she could look forward to as a woman. There was nothing shameful about the love a man could give a woman and the love they could share in their marital bed.

She knew all about what eroda was because she heard her Mum and Dad doing it almost every night. At nine she knew that it was something that her mum enjoyed too. She knew her mum took pleasure in feeling her dad on top of her or by her side in the bed. Her mum made the most wonderful aching noises. Noises that Stella knew meant she wasn’t in pain but that her dad was making her so happy, these noises weren’t at all the thing she had been worried about at first. Her first real memory was to do with lovemaking. Her Dad giving her mum pleasure and happiness in the bed, in that room which was their home. As man and wife.

A space of about eight or nine foot square where her mother, her two brothers and her three sisters lived. In that room, at the top of the tiny little valley,  at the top of the two rivers that ran through the middle of the village, where she was born. The same room her sisters and three brothers were born. Her entire family were brought up in that sandstone coloured, half-brick half-flint, two-roomed, dry stone home.

The room had a table, which could sit four, if they’d had four chairs, but they only had two. There was a stone shelf cut into the fireplace on which sat two pewter saucepans, a wooden ladle and two long handled pewter mixing spoons, a bread knife, and a carving knife, two stainless steel forks and a wooden spoon. There was a double mattress on the iron bed they all slept in which was raised on four blocks of wood to keep it from getting damp during the winter and which was in the anogi or upper floor. A tiny wooden stairway ran up one wall to it. There was a small ornately carved black lacquered box in one corner, made of olive wood, in which the materials that her mother needed for her lace work and crocheting were kept. This was the one possession Koulla owned. Opposite the foot of the bed, by the wall, a little votive candle burned, next to a tiny icon the size of a postcard, which was of the Apostle Andreas, the first apostle to be called by Jesus.

After Stella had left for England and her mother had died, her sister put two small, framed pictures on opposite walls, one was of a map of Cyprus and the other was a black and white photograph of the bearded Archbishop Makarios who was regarded as a saint by her parents, and quite an Apostle as well, but very nearly both rolled into one. The benign bearded priest was also regarded as the liberator of Cyprus by most Greek-Cypriots. An Orthodox priest who single-handedly took on the British Government and got Cyprus its independence. These two new framed photographs had replaced the two small unglazed plates, Stella took to England with her when she left Cyprus. They were her dowry and they hung from wires on two walls opposite each other. They depicted scenes from ancient Greek mythology and were hand painted by a local artist. One where Ilios is being drawn across the sky by the winged Pegasus and another where Zeus the king of the God’s, is sending down a thunderbolt to earth from atop Mount Olympus. An image made known in the west by the illustration drawn by William Blake.

The only other household possession was an orange-coloured light shade with tassels, in the centre of the room covering the lightbulb. Candles provided most of the light in the room. This happened also to be the entire inventory as recorded on a document by the local Muchtári, called in after her mother died, to oversee the sale of the tiny little room they called their home. She took the legal paper that Koulla gave her, to England and kept it as a treasured possession.

Her mother Koulla spent her last months, unable to leave the room.

Stella had heard about the bite from people in the village who had rushed to get her whilst she was out helping to catch a neighbour’s goat that had snapped the rope keeping it tethered to a post in Mr Leonidas’s olive grove.

Koulla was in an adjacent lemon grove helping with the harvest and whilst she was sitting down to some bread and olives under a tree with some of the other women, a little black snake bit her on the ankle and injected its poison into her. She ran screaming back to the village, but the only doctor in those parts was in another village delivering a breach birth and wouldn’t return until two days later. He lived in Limassol and didn’t make house calls. In those days you had to go the doctor in the town or hope someone in the village knew enough about what you had, to help you.

Stella was eleven when her Mum got bitten by the snake, and the family couldn’t afford the doctor anyway. They relied on the old wives tales for curing snakebite, which only helped to kill her slowly. They had tried sucking out the poison, but they didn’t get it all out and her foot got steadily worse and eventually became gangrenous. It started to smell of rotting flesh. The whole village knew what it was, but the last people to know were her children. She knew she was dying but couldn’t do anything about it. People in the village would hold their noses going past the front door so as not to smell the stench. Her neighbours eventually had to move away for a while until after she’d died because they couldn’t bear to be near it.

Koulla was too poor to feed all the family every day and sometimes they went out into the streets of the village hungry for something to eat. People who lived nearby or who knew she was sick with the snakebite, would feed the children. Stella wouldn’t stay hungry all day. Sometimes one of the neighbours would give them some cheese to eat, which they had made at home. Sometimes, they would go hungry because the neighbours were just as poor as them. Sometimes they could go out into the fields and work, but the children were too young to look after themselves and so it was decided that they would be better with relatives in another village.

Sometimes she would go out with her two younger brothers and find a fig tree and take fruit from it and eat. Figs tasted good and they were free, like cherries were. Sometimes they ate Quince but these always tasted very sour. The best things to eat from the trees were the oranges or tangerines or cherries, which would always taste the best and because they were the easiest to pick. Once they tried eating olives straight from the tree and spent two days thinking they would die from the taste that the bitter fruit had left on their tongues and their bellies.

Stella’s mother’s village was only a version of the actual reality. She had blocked out a lot of the horror. The terror of seeing her father drinking himself into oblivion and then weeping by the bedside in drunken impotence barely able to breathe from the smell. Her Mothers slow dance with her own death. She knew what was coming, close to the end and tried to prepare her children. She tried to rouse her husband for their sake. His grief however, was inconsolable and his suicide from a broken heart, three months later, as tragic as it was predictable.

Stella hadn’t wanted to remember any of that now, sitting by the side of her own daughter’s bed. It had just crept into her mind as she sat there looking for any sign in her daughters sleep to tell her whether she was more or less comfortable. But she drifted to Cyprus back as her daughter slept…

When she met Paul, she was only thirteen. She was his love from then on and became his wife five years later after waiting till she became a decent age to marry; to satisfy the village gossipers and nosey parkers and there were plenty in Kakopetriá. Her father had agreed to the match immediately, the Broxenia was as quick as was considered decent. No fancy dowry, just the two plates and a simple Orthodox service with a few relatives acting as best men and best women. Her sisters wore black on her wedding day. She refused to and wore her mother’s own white wedding dress.

In spite of the trauma of her childhood, Stella remembered Cyprus as a place of love. A place where she was happy for a time, where life was easier, simpler, more fullfilling.

It was hard for her to come to terms with all of that, as she sat in that hospital room at the end of the Churchill ward, looking at her daughter. Eleni was the same age as she was when she had first met Paul.

“We didn’t have shoes on our feet. We ran down the streets barefoot because our father couldn’t afford to buy us any shoes.”

She’d tell her.

“There was plenty of food. We could eat from the trees. We never went hungry, just barefoot!”

She knew the reality was different. She was never bitter about any of it. She carried this dark secret around with her for the whole of Eleni’s life. Paul would never dream of telling his daughter and neither would Stella. The reality would have been too much for their daughter. They thought she wasn’t yet old enough to know about that stuff.

She looked at Eleni and for a few short moments, she had been sure it was her mother lying in the bed again after all those years and she was fourteen, in that room. Now it was Eleni rotting away. Something eating away at her from inside. A invisible snake had bitten here, spreading its poison inside her.

8.25pm The Churchill Ward

The three of us together, sat down in Keller’s tiny little consulting room. He was explaining what Dr Patel hadn’t had the chance to tell them before they got to the hospital. Patel had run Keller and told him he would have to break the news even though it really should have been him.

“We needed to start her chemotherapy immediately. So would it be possible for one of you to stay at the hospital whilst we continue the treatment? The blood test has shown that Eleni has Leukaemia, which is already in its advanced stages. It’s serious and I know you want me to be honest with you. We can treat her and there are a lot of things we can try. A bone Marrow transplant.”

As his voice almost trailed off, they listened in growing disbelief.

Keller said we had to keep away from Eleni for a short time because the blood doctors were talking to her and then they were going to talk to us outside her room after he had spoken to us.

Eleni already knew, because she had made Keller tell her on her own before either her Mum or her Dad knew. She wasn’t sure how was she was going to keep her father and Mother from getting too freaked out with it all when Keller eventually told them. She knew they would be hysterical. How was she gonna explain about what having chemotherapy would mean? About losing her hair? She also thought that she was going to have to cope with the fact that there was no doubt about the diagnosis too. Fucking hell.

Dr Keller, the young blond-haired, fresh-faced South African haematologist wanted to honour this bright young woman’s very intense feelings. She’d told him she wanted to know everything there was to know, so she could better explain it to her parents who would be confused and not understand. In fact he rather admired the fact that she was so young and yet so mature about her parent’s emotions. She reminded him of himself at fourteen. So driven. She was so determined to have her own way. Like me he said to himself. His father would have been proud of him. His whole family would have been. It was a tough first week.

The Senior Nursing Sister had begun the chemotherapy by starting to put a Hickman line into the back Eleni’s hand. Stella, sat on a chair just outside the room. She didn’t like to see the needles going into her daughter’s arm. She is afraid of needles. The sister with her was talking about an IRA bomb on the news. She understood this and she could see the bomb.

Eleni didn’t want to cry, but she knew she was going to sometime soon. It was painful. She knew what her Mum would do and her Mum did more or less exactly what Eleni thought she would. She was sat up in bed not thinking of herself at all. She was trying to spell Haematology. Hemma, from the Greek for blood she thought… Her mind wandered. She was finding it hard to concentrate.

The Senior Nursing sister introduced herself as Cynthia Solomon, whilst she was cannulating the back of her hand.

Eleni didn’t want her Mum to see her like this either because she knew how upset she would be. She was thinking about them all the time more or less.

I was amazed later when the doctor told us she was thinking about us.

In another world, Soulla was on her own in her flat in Haringey. She was wondering if Paul was coming over after his work tonight or whether she would be off to the bingo with Sandra, Sandy to her and her best mate, was the only other person to know about Paul being Soulla’s lover and a married man; whose wife was one of her best women, when they were married.

CHAPTER 10

LIFE IS

7.00pm

GARY NUMAN – CARS

Stella was trying to figure out what Eleni’s destiny would be when she looked at her daughter closed eyes. She couldn’t see what Eleni was dreaming whislt lying there in that bed, with those tubes going into her hand.

Perhaps it was about a boy. She knew she had played with herself. She knew she had had a boyfriend, ”but for God’s sake Mum, don’t tell dad, he’ll go spare!” It was in the front room, when they thought she was busy in the kitchen cooking. Or at least they thought she was. It was furtive, so it wasn’t at all clear, what they’d been up to. But Eleni didn’t object to it and that was good enough for her. She wanted her daughter to taste love the way she had and to have men fawn over her and love her. She wanted her to know what the joys could be like between two people who loved one another and that the sex was infinitely better if two people were in love and not just in lust. But she was too young for that yet. Not too young for pleasure, but tyoo young to uinderstand what true love was. Lasting love. The love that endured. Love over time, years. Matured in the cellar of the heart.

She wanted to educate her daughter about all she knew about love and lovemaking, eroda. They hadn’t learnt from the television that you could make orgasms and give good sex, Paul and her just did it in the way they thought was right, giving love to each other’s bodies and taking what love was offered in return. And Paul was a loving man. The kind who cared enough to ask if it hurt not just the first time. The kind who took his time to make she was wet. Wet enough that she didn’t want him to leave from inside her. This was right between a husband and wife. Natural. Not this, ‘Wham! Bam! Thank You Ma’am!’ she’d heard so much of with the young these days.

The love she’d had from Paul, she wanted for her daughter as she lay there. To have the love of someone inside her when she was grown into a woman, the same way she did and have that love be a baby, a child, a person. The knowing that the love was real and honest in the way they touched, the way she knew she had felt with Paul and he had felt for her. And care for all of that became the life she had had with Paul.

Stella took up some of the crochet work she’d brought with her and this became her meditation. Her index finger flicked rapidly round and round the hook on the needle’s head as the cotton wound round and round it, into the circular shape she was making. A treble crochet stitch and a chain, that would make the filet stitch she was turning into a table cloth. There by her daughters bed her calm, whilst looking, waiting, looking again, waiting again, with her eyes fixed, working again then and looking again, for any sign as Eleni slept. She wondered again what her daughter would be dreaming about. She hoped it was about a boy.

Paul would look over at Stella crocheting occasionally,  fascinated by her skill but never telling her how much he admired it. He always knew she was artistically inclined, but he never appreciated how much beauty there was in the things Stella made with her hands. Always busy making her bedspreads or doilies or tablecloths. Her ‘bits and pieces’ as called them.

Their whole family had something she had made for them in their homes. Every relative considered it an honour to have one of her intricately made gifts. They would point them out to people who didn’t understand the work involved, or who looked at them in admiration.

The Cypriots wouldn’t need them to be pointed out for them, but the English… The Cypriots knew the labour it took to make these works of art. It was the most treasured of all the presents at Christmas, to get one of Stella’s creations. And her fingertips, almost as worn away as her eyesight. The constant tiny intricate threrad she looped and knotted and curled  and threaded, into the intricate thousand-fold replicated patterns, had degraded her eyesight year after year until it had lost its sharpness and she was beginning to get cataracts.

Paul couldn’t talk to her when she was working and this is how she spent her time in solace. He knew she could have stopped to talk to him, but it was easier for him just to let her get on with it and let the silence speak instead.

She sat, quietly meditating through her fingers, her thoughts of Eleni and this dreadful, yet sacred place they were in. They were now in a private room. Paul had spoken to Nurse Solomon and they had arranged it. A private room for her an the two of them. Paul was going to use any money he had coming to him from Andreas to make her as comfortable as possible. Ne didn’t want others seeing his family businessm and he wanted his daughter to have the best that money could buy.

Paul looked and tried not to judge Stella. He also stared at his daughters motionless face and knew she had lost something of herself in this place. Something had flown away or was taken from her as she lay there. Her essence. A part of her soul? He didn’t know, but he didn’t know how to stope it. He couln’t stop it. It was like a train they were all on, destination unknown, the speed was getting quicker wioth every hour they were there. All of a sudden the train was travelling much faster than he had imagined. And Eleni had lost some part of herself in this place. Where they were forever taking things from people. They took Gall Bladders and appendixes and livers and kidneys and piles and limbs. It was like a butchers shop. And what do they give you back?

Paul suddenly had thought that the English were worrying themselves into an early grave anyway, so what  is the point of making them well? Let them die from the fags or the strikes. Let them die! The country is falling to bits now anyway with this new woman, making everybody at war with themselves. Fighting the Unions. Deregulation. Whatever the hell that meant. Selling everything off to the capitalists. Free market economy. Whatever the hell that was too. His mind was wandering to what he’d like to do to her.

Some time had passed and he was aware of Eleni sleeping. He hadn’t meant to but he had been daydreaming. He had been sitting there without saying anything for maybe an hour and now he looked at her again.

As she breathed in and out he became entangled in the rhythm of her breath. He breathed with her, began to take her breath as if breathing in with her so he could feel what it was like to be her, there, breathing in bed. In and out, along with her, to feel what it felt like to breath at the same pace as her, whilst she was asleep. He caught himself doing it and looked over in Stella’s direction. The movement of his head caught Stella’s eye and she then looked at Eleni as if disturbed by his looking at her, as if this was a warning. She grunted a small disagreement as if to say nothing’s wrong, what are you looking at me for? He turned his head once more to Eleni and let the air out very slowly making sure it wasn’t along with her this time. The last thing he wanted to do was wake her. All he wanted her to do was to make these chemicals they were putting in her kill the thing that was attacking her body.

This life, what is it good for eh? He remembered the song in the hit parade at the moment. ‘War, was it is good for? Absolutely nothing.’ Nothing but pain and suffering. This was a war. We are fighting a war.

In his head a tumble of thoughts.

“When was I happy, eh? When was I ever fucking happy? When she was born?”

The hospital Eleni was born in. He remembered. It was this bloody Hospital. He remembered. Fifteen hours labour for her and that was after Stella had had a miscarriage the before she got pregnant again wioth Eleni. Remember, he said to himself, then secretly to Stella. He whispered his thoughts to her.

“Fifteen hours for her eh, you remember?”

“You need to ask? You asking me?”

She whispered it back so as not wake her.

“Who else, no one else here my darling.”

It was soft and kind with no hint of malice. Now was not the time. But soon. Soon. She was weary of the moments she was caught in between his memory and her wisdom.

“You need to ask?”

“No, I know, I know, I’m just saying, you know?”

A long pause left the thing said hanging there.

“I just remembered.”

He whispered now too, almost inaudibly.

And quietly this time his tears again as Stella went back to her lace and he remembered Eleni’s birth. The taste of his tears on his tongue as he drank, keeping this whole salty mess into himself, for himself and by himself. What did he want to share this for?

8.07pm

Paul is looking at Eleni asleep and trying to remember the night she was conceived. He thinks hard about when and where. He can’t ask Stella, what a ridiculous idea, but maybe he can think.

“You remember Kokos party?” He found himself whispering across the room.

“You need to ask? Another question you need to ask?”

“I just remembered. It came into my head.”

They both looked across at Eleni in unison and shared a long pause together signifying the shared memory. They just happened to be in the same place at that moment.

She was asleep and looked, at that moment, the perfect daughter they had brought into the world together. Even though they saw the shadow of death covering her entirely.

The trio came to end of the second movement.

CHAPTER 16 DEATH-WATCH

BOB DYLAN – TANGLED UP IN BLUE

TSome say that the pain of burying your own child is the worst kind of pain. Some say that kind of pain is about something more than yourself, in the sense that it is able to be outside of you and inside of you too. It can also be a part of nothing you can understand and part of something that is very clear to you at the same time.

Paul felt the pain of Eleni dying in a kind of series of waves. It would rise up from start as a tide deep within him, until it crashed out and washed over him. A personal Tsunami. It would not offer relief. It would never offer relief. It was as relentless as any Tsunami. The only time he ever felt different was when he would allow himself the luxury of believing that her dying meant she would be relieved from pain. The only pain worth feeling is the pain for someone released from it.

Pain is always a great friend to experience but pain is in fact, a rampant bisexual; it’ll fuck with anything that moves. Or anything that is moved. Death is a friend to pain and pain worships at death’s dreadful feet.

Stella would let her pain show only to Paul, because she allowed no one else the intimacy of her innermost depths. Paul was the only one who understood her pain. And he didn’t really understand it, he just knew more about it than anybody else. The only pain worth feeling is the pain for someone released from it, she would believe what Paul told her the chance to relieve someone else’s.  She would allow Eleni to see her love, but not her pain, because she was afraid it would frighten her even more. Paul knew more about this. This, he understood and condoned.

The knowledge that they could do nothing. The hopelessness of that, was the worst thing about it. It was also a kind of worthlessness;, this pain they had. That they meant nothing, because they could do nothing. They had to rely on others to do the work of saving her and those others could do nothing more than they were.They weredemoted to being an audience, watching the theatre of her death. Of course the actors cared, but that wasn’t enough. People even loved, but that was nowhere near enough. Love wasn’t enough.

Pain has many lovers and death is kind of waiting lover, in a room you know you must go into. It will always be there for you in the end. Ugly, ancient, and willing to wait as long as it takes to grip you in its embrace. And endless embrace in eternity. A Camilla.

When she died, there was a stillness of understanding that pain was finally, ultimately, vanquished by the very thing which was perpetuated it in you, but not in the one released from it in her. Knowing that pain was unavoidable now. This occupied Paul’s mind. And that hers was gone now.

He thought that there could only be less pain for Eleni too and this made it more bearable for the both of them. The dying was a release and an imprisonment. These thoughts that occupied his mind were the only things that made anything, in time, pass. He only realised time now through the world carrying on around him. For him, time stopped. The tea ladies coming in to offer what he never drank. The nurses coming in to read what charts that couldn’t be changed. The doctors coming in to treat what couldn’t be treated.

When Eleni died (almost buried anyway beneath the mountain of medical attention she was getting) Paul and Stella lived it too. They lived her death forever. They slept with death every night afterwards.

He used to say

“The devil, he got in the bed now, right in the midal!”

The end came fairly quickly, when she couldn’t fight off a small infection she had caught whilst she was in the hospital. The chemotherapy had drained her of all her disease fighting blood cells. Her heart wasn’t strong enough to cope with the added pressure of fighting a new infection. Her heart had an enormous burden placed on it anyway with all the drugs and the new infection. It was too much for a fourteen-year-old heart to cope with and it just gave up. It would have been kinder to let her die from the cancer rather than from the hospital theatre drama that went on during the twelve hours of intense activity that turned out to be her last hours of life.

There are so many people who surround someone in a when someone is struggling for life; it’s like the patient, the one that really matters, is lost in the middle of it all. Tubes going into her and lines coming out, injections, infusions, shocks and doctors pounding on her chest. Like some tragic last supper, all the faithful disciples of modern medicine, that great new religion of our latter-day culture sharing in her first communion with death;, the great atheist.

But right now Paul is looking at Eleni asleep and trying to remember the night she was conceived. He thinks hard about when and where. He can’t ask Stella, what a ridiculous idea, but maybe he can think.

“You remember Kokos’ party?” He found himself whispering across the room.

“You need to ask? Another question you need to ask?”

“I just remembered.”

They both looked across at Eleni in unison and shared a long pause together signifying the shared memory. They just happened to be in the same place at that moment.

She was asleep and looked, at that moment, the perfect daughter they had brought into the world together. Even though they saw the shadow of death covering her entirely.

The trio came to end of the second movement.

CHAPTER 11 ELENI AGAIN

YOU’RE THE ONE THAT I WANT – GREASE

Eleni Socrates tried really hard till she was ten in fact, because she really wanted her Mum and Dad to be all right. But at ten she’d decided she wasn’t bloody Greek-bloody-Cypriot that’s for sure. They wanted a little doll brought to life. A pure little Greek girl in whom the seed of the bastard race now growing up in England would grow. “Dolls for a doll” they would buy.

She was sharp enough to know that her parents didn’t understand her or the English. They never would. From the moment she went to English infant school she understood what it was like to be English. It was just a couple of years before they had the free third of a pint of milk stopped by a woman called Thatcher. Before it was stopped she used to drink hers and then look through the top to the bottom of the bottle when she had almost finished (hers went down in almost one long swallow) and she would look at all the other kids in her class and see them through the remainder of the white liquid. They seemed like they were in one of those little glass domes that had a fantasy castle or a wedding couple or ballet couple in and you could make the snow inside the dome, fall all around them by shaking them in the palm of your hand. She looked at them and saw how white they all were. There weren’t any other girls like her in her school. Not ones with funny names like Socrates, anyway.

She loved the free milk and she loved being in this milky world with the milky white people. She loved the ads on the telly all about the milky bar kid. “The Milky Bars are on me!” she would scream at the spectacled little white boy in his cowboy outfit. She would shoplift milky bars whenever she could. She loved eating milky bars, especially after she had stolen two or three bars from the Newsagents at the end of their road.the stuff. It was exciting eating stolen chocolate.

At seven she had a thing for the colour white. Everything she ate had to be coloured white. Bananas and chicken breast; certainly not the skins of either. She hated every vegetable except cauliflower and cabbage. She could eat raw onion and peeled, cored cucumber, Haloumi cheese, or Feta. Wrigley’s spearmint gum was out because it wasn’t white enough. She couldn’t eat Pez sweets because they didn’t have a white flavour, she’d only eat the inside of custard creams and only the white bits of bread, until her Mum put a stop to all of it by saying one day,

“En amartia na bedasis do psomi!”, which actually gave Eleni a brilliant new avenue of argument and she loved a good argument.

It meant, she had to accept custard cream biscuits (which were clearly very light brown biscuit in colour) as edible given the rule of white in her life, then she could also accept a whole host of other non-white things, like the different coloured line in the toothpaste which she’d always loathed, so that things became predominantly white instead.

“Mostly white from now on.” She thought, “I can accept things that aren’t white so long as they’ve got a lot of white in them I suppose”. The more she thought about it as time went on the more she realised how important milk was to do with all of this. When they stopped getting the milk every morning and she asked her Dad why she wasn’t getting it anymore he said,

“Ah, you see my clever girl, they say they can’t afford it anymore, they got no respect for the children, you see? They don’t look after they children anymowa!” She was also beginning to hear something in her fathge’s way of speaking which was dofferent to the people she knew at school. When they spoke Greek together, iot wasn’t thete. But whenthey spoke in Englishhe spoke differently. He used the same woprds, but they sounded different. Notlike the English spoke them. And she spoke like the English.

Eleni now fourteen, was sitting in an interview room with her mother and was talking in English to the person who had the results of her test in front of him. She knew the writing was most definitely on the wall. She’d written those words on the blackboard, in front of class,  wall the week before anyway. ‘Acute Myloid Leukaemia.’

Whilst she was on crate duty, she wrote someother words on a blackboard. Bringing in the empty milk bottles to the back of the kitchen at morning break, she snuck into an empty Form three classroom and took the chalk from its resting place at the foot of the wall sized blackboard and wrote in her best italic, “I am not sharing my Milky Bars, signed The Milky Bar Kid.” Unwrapping a Milky bar on her way out, Eleni, was very pleased with herself.

Keller asked Stella if he could have a word with Eleni on her own. He got her a seat just outside the office. All the staff doctors in the Churchill ward used. Cynthia was sent off to get her a cup of tea and keep her company for a few minutes. It was a huge liberty, but he was prepared for it and hoped she was too.

As Dr Keller asked her questions that Monday afternoon about her family’s ethnic background and its history whilst her mother sat there unable to understand most of what he was saying, she wanted to say I’m not anything, but she knew that wasn’t true. She wanted to deny her olive-skinned life and fade into the white world of his coat and the colour of his skin. Yet she felt what it was like to be from a different country because she was ethnic, because her dad had an accent actually. That’s the difference she thought. I know I’m one of the ethnic minorities but you’d never know it. I only know it, but I don’t feel it. I don’t feel anything different though, that’s the trouble. I don’t feel white and I don’t feel Cypriot. What did it matter where my family come from? I don’t feel like I’m a minority. She told him, “There’s so many people whose parents come from so many different countries all living here aren’t here aren’t there, Dr Keller?”

“Yes?” and he said it with an upward inflection as if he knew she wanted to say something else.

“What does it matter where we’re all from?”

He tried to explain that it mattered only in terms of the information he was gathering about the disease and its prevalence amongst people from her part of the world. He tried to maintain that it didn’t matter or at least he thought it didn’t matter, but that wasn’t the point, it didn’t matter to him, he said, where she came from, but it might matter later on, to someone else looking at her files. People doing research. The people it might help later on. People in her situation.

Eleni translated for her mother as she spoke to her in Greek-Cypriot. She spoke very well in fact and her after-school Greek teacher, Mr Michaels, had said she would pass the A level in a year or two. At fourteen she would have passed it with a top grade in fact. She was very bright and would have been the first in her family to have gone to University, had she lived. Eleni realised in her heart of hearts, as she was being told by the dishy Dr Keller, that she had a kind of cancer. There was very little hope for any kind of treatment and it would be wrong of him to pretend otherwise. She loved him for his honesty and he said,

“This kind of thing doesn’t happen, I would never normally tell a patient your age, the full extent of your prognosis,(that’s your prospects) with this thing.”

“Okay”

“Without first being convinced that you were very different from most children your age…you’re very mature for your age, even at fourteen you know”.

“Yes, my Greek teacher told me that. He’s nice, Mr Michaels. He says I could get a scholarship and study languages, if I want, but he doesn’t know that I’m probably going to die does he?”

A pause. A breath. He takes her in. He let’s her continue…

“I’m a bit stunned though, I must say, it’s weird, because I knew I wasn’t well and I was, well, I was getting so tired all the bloody time, and these bloody marks, you know, on my back, these bruises.”

He said, “Well that kind of did it for me, when I saw those. They are what we’re told to look for, as symptoms and I’ve seen them many times before in children younger than you. They all have the same kind of look.”

“Are there lots of kids like me then?”

“Younger ones?”

“Yeah”

“Yes, some of them a lot younger”

“Then I’m quite lucky really aren’t I?” she concluded, and this amazed him even more. Brave young woman, he thought.

They didn’t look deep into one another’s eyes, at least not at the same time. Keller looked deep into her eyes because he wanted to look at her Iris, but it wasn’t quite the same as the sort of lovey-dovey romantic cliché it is in the movied. But he did find something in her eyes he hadn’t really looked for. It wasn’t something Martin Keller had wanted but there was no escaping he was finding his emotions bound up in this fourteen-year-old’s fate. There, on the third floor of the Churchill Ward. The children’s Leukaemia ward.

Dr Keller was looking at her across the desk and something extraordinary had been happening in the short time he had been discussing her test results with her. He had realised that what he was telling her without her parents really understanding, even though her mother was actually there, might be considered unethical, by “The powers that be”. But she was so bright and he had been quite taken by her insistence at fourteen on him being ‘up front’ with her as she put it. He considered himself privileged to know her because he thought she was quite incandescent. An inner light which he, as a sensitive young catholic doctor, saw shining magnificently inside her. This just wasn’t supposed to happen. He was allowing his personal feelings to be bound up in her fate. This wasn’t good for him now and for the future, if he was going to carry on working with children who had leukaemia.

He felt like he wanted to ease her into oblivion, because he could see only too clearly, the advanced symptoms, the bruise like lesions on her back, the acute anaemia, the lethargy, the T cell count, all the evidence together amounted to conclusive clinical proof. There was a kind of thumping in his head, telling him not to resist the feeling and that whilst with her, to let himself be carried along whatever happened. Fuck the bloody professional misconduct thing he could be facing, speaking to her like this, but all of that seemed so insignificant. And telling her all he had about her condition, Jesus was he crazy or what? It’s probably actionable by the British Medical Council disciplinary board. He needed to think more clearly than he was allowing himself to at the moment. He just didn’t care. He was ‘going with the flow’, like she had told him to.

The leukaemia was so advanced there would be nothing they, or any hospital in the country could do. No amount of chemotherapy would help her now. The only cure for leukaemia was a bone marrow transplant and that was far too late for her. She would be lucky to have had weeks left as opposed to months and this is what made the focus of what he said to her so sharp. He couldn’t separate his own feelings. It was unavoidable. He was allowing his own emotions to get mingled up with hers. Transference usually went the other way round, he thought.

He was sure there had to be some sort of way to get his own emotions in check. He probably needed counselling himself about this. What on earth could he possibly say to her that would make any of it any easier to hear? There were no other routes he knew of. Keller felt like telling her the chemo was a waste of time too.Keller asked Stella if he could have a word with Eleni on her own. He got her a seat just outside the office. Cynthia was sent off to get her a cup of tea and keep her company for a few minutes. It was a huge liberty, but he was prepared for it and hoped she was too.

“Look, what do you want me to do about your parents, because they’ll need to understand as much as you do about everything.” He said.

“I think you should tell them the truth, but don’t tell them you’ve told me, because then it would be like, too hard to take, now”.

“Sure”

“There’s a brilliant woman who comes in and visits, her name’s Marjorie and she’s a counsellor, and she’s a real laugh. I’ll get her to come and see you”

“Sure.”

He takes an intake of breath as if to say something more difficult. She senses this and says.

“Yeah?”

He says it quickly after he gets up and looks through the square latticed window in the door. He says this quickly.

“The chemo is painful and will probably take up to twenty four hours to administer. You’ll have to come back and have it repeated three weeks later.” He pauses because he’s not sure whether he should tell her, “Look, it’s not going to work with your advanced form of leukaemia. You have something called, acute myeloid leukaemia and it’s very advanced. “

“So, I’m really fucked then eh?”

“Can you get away somewhere? What about your mates, why don’t you go away with some of them. I’ll bet you have loads of mates eh?”

She takes what he has said in and doesn’t give anything away, like what a stupid thing to say, or how do you think they could afford to send me on holiday, or where does he think he’s coming from?

She’s nervous because it’s a real shock and she hadn’t thought it could be anything like this. She hadn’t thought it would be this final, a real ending, like a bad thriller. He’s cute though, with nice eyes and short black hair. She quite fancied him really. She was looking into his eyes now with a different kind of gaze. Hers was now full of lust and she didn’t try to hide it either. What was the fucking point anyway?

At fourteen she was well into blokes but hadn’t yet lost her virginity. She’d say to people who asked, she hadn’t “bitten the bullet” yet and done it. Unlike Sally and Tracie, her two best mates. They were only two months older than her and even for fourteen year old girls she was mature for her age. But there was something about doing it, which was final and irrevocable. She knew quite a lot about it and was damn sure she wasn’t going to let some boy on the end of a furtive little finger round the back of the local swimming pool take it from her. She was sure it was still there too because she was sure she could feel it. She made sure she didn’t wear tampons when she had her first period too because she was sure they would damage her. She was saving hers for someone she had yet to meet. Until now. Martin was the perfect candidate.

She thought about letting him be the one and then she thought, what am I thinking about, the guy is telling me I’m gonna die and I say, well how about you taking my virginity before I kick the bucket? Sure that’s a good idea she thought, but at the same time, what did she have to lose? He could only say no. I mean what’s the worst thing that could happen? Right and that’s happening already right, so why on earth should I worry about asking this guy for a bit of casual sex?

“Can you catch leukaemia or is it something you are born with in your family?”

He looked at her and finally went into the details of the disease and how her chances of developing it were to do with factors that the doctors themselves were unsure of. He told her it’s a young person’s disease. More children have it than adults and he went into how some had Bone Marrow transplants. He said that if she had been able to cope with the chemo they could have tried to get her a match with a donor and then a transplant, which actually is a relatively simple operation.

“People think when you say I need your bone marrow they want to open you up and cut into your bone or something. I’ve had this happen to me whilst I’ve been working in this unit. There are places like The Royal Free Hospital that have Bone Marrow Transplant centres and they do transplants there. They started this charity called The Anthony Nolan Bone Marrow Trust, just a few years ago because of a boy with the same thing, in 1974. It was a register of people with matching bone marrow to the patient.”

“Yeah, but I can’t get one right?”

“Look there’s nothing to stop us from trying for a match for you.”

“Matching my bone marrow?”

“Sort of, but it’s more to do with tissue type. There is a national register of blood tissue types and we have to try and find a match for you and get that person to donate some of their bone marrow. We take it from them and inject it into you after we have done the chemo so when your blood is completely cleansed of the cancerous cells, we introduce the new marrow and it should replenish the blood cells.”

“But that wouldn’t work for me?”

Keller was at the point where the whole thing was either going to drown him or he was going to float the rest of his life up to his neck in shit anyway.

8.50pm

Charmian was not happy bunny. She said a little Daimoku on her way through the wards and up to the leukaemia ward Churchill. It was her practiced Buddhist way of settling herself and trying to pass on her positive feelings to the parents and the child or children she was just about to meet.

Mind you at fourteen, the young girl in question was really a young woman she thought to herself. The sort of age when she might be experiencing periods and other hormonal changes. It was no surprise that she was confused with what was going on she thought, trying to put a mental picture together of her next client (her preferred word) and if the parents were from the Middle East then who knows what their attitude towards these changes were.

Paul was looking at his watch as Charmian knocked quietly at the door of the room they were in. Paul thought it was another doctor or a specialist anyway because he couldn’t see a white coat. Stella looked around to the window and beckoned her in. She spoke softly and they had a little trouble hearing what Charmian had to say to them.

“Mr and Mrs Socrates?”

“Yes,” said Paul feeling like it was an admission of guilt in a court of law.

“Charmian Lawless, Camden Social Services.” She extended a hand, which neither of them was willing to shake. “Is Eleni asleep?”

“Yes, what you doin here?”

“I’m a social worker. Perhaps we could talk outside?”

“I’m not goin outside this room. No more.” Stella interrupted.

“Would you prefer to talk to someone in Greek? I have a colleague I could call and…”

“What for? Tell us what you want.” Paul said getting angry quickly.

She explained that she was there to help with advice and that Dr Keller had asked her to come over and see if there was anything she could do. Of course she was worse than useless because what could she do? What a pointless waste of the time they had left her with. Keller was an idiot, as they were obviously not ready to see anybody yet and she was here far too early to help them with any grief. The girl might live for months yet. What did he mean by dragging her down here for nothing?

“Look, I’m sorry if I’ve upset you at a time when you probably just want to be alone with your daughter. I’ll go but if you want to call me, then you can use this direct line.” She put a card on to the raised bed-tray at the bottom of the bed, nestling it up against the bowl of Satsumas, which were sitting waiting to be eaten. Her eye momentarily rested on them and she thought how tender and sweet they must be.

“Take one” Paul said and she instantly became flushed with embarrassment, her whole neck going a kind of burgundy. He wanted to show her a little hospitality.

“Please,” pleaded Stella “Take one. They just gonna go to waste. Who’s gonna eat them?”

“Enjoy them please.” said Paul whilst putting two into her hand. She mouthed a thank you as she struggled with her shame at being given the Satsumas.

It made her really angry that Keller had got her here without a proper reason and as she peeled one of the Satsumas and bit into a segment she realised why at once. He was still hot for her from the last time they had been together. All that stuff to do with that other case. “I’m not sure about these marks on the child’s hands.”

It was obvious they were cigarette burns and he didn’t need her to call in the police that soon. Though he was right about her needing to be the one who made the final decision after speaking to those completely messed up parents; the Winston’s, like something out of ‘Kes’, that Ken Loache movie. Their flat was so full of chemicals she needed a prescription to leave. It’s a wonder either of them hadn’t died by now. The two year old was already a heroin addict and well, that was in the hands of the courts now.

But what was Keller doing, calling her out at half past eight on a Monday evening to speak to a couple whose daughter had AML and had just had her first chemo? What could she do? She put another segment or two of the sweet tasting fruit in her mouth and its juice ran down her lip as she closed her mouth around it. Charmian was looking for somewhere to put the peel from her Satsuma when from behind her Keller’s voice stopped her.

“I was rather hoping we could have a chat before you left.”

She turned on her heels and for some reason he was giggling. This made her uncharacteristically cross and she didn’t want to show her anger, as it was not good, not good, anger in any form was useless and unnecessary.

“What on earth is so funny?”

“You look like an eighty year old patient of mine after we’ve tried to get some liquid in him.”

“Eh? Oh for goodness sake.”

“You’re dribbling.”

And then she realised the juice on her chin and it made her laugh too.

“Oh, right. The…” she couldn’t say their names “…the, Mr and Mrs Socrateses, they gave me a couple of Satsumas.”

And that was how they fell in love. Charmian Lawless and Dr David Keller. From that act of kindness. Well, not just that act of kindness you understand, but a part of the reason they fell in love was because of Stella and Paul and Eleni. Because if she hadn’t have been given two Satsumas she might never have had that little bit of juice running down the side of her mouth. Well, anyway. Things really do happen like that. It happened to them and they did fall in love. There, with all that pain and suffering going on all around them. Like in-the-midst-of-death-we-are-in-life kind of thing.

When Charmian left the room, Paul decided he’d had enough.

“Yes, I’d had enough. I couldn’t stand being in that room anymore”.

I told Stella I needed to go back to the factory to sort something out with the Govna. I would be back later and I asked her if it would it be ok? Of course, Eleni didn’t mind, but Stella would never forgive me.

“Where you gonna be?” She asked and she was abrasive and harsh. I knew she was pissed off with me

“I need to go to the factory ra! I can’t help!”

“Well make sure you ring when you get there because I will worry.”

She had misread what I was up to and I know she regretted her harshness.

“They’re doing overtime tonight. They’ve got a big order. I’m gonna speak to Andreas.”

“Telephone me.’”Stella said dryly.

”I will, of course I will.”

“Phone Mum, Dad!” Eleni added “when you get there, ok?” It was a question and an order together.

Yes, Yes, Yes, I will!”

I was out of the door and putting a fag into my mouth before I’d left the ward. I was heading towards the stairs and at the main entrance, I lit it as I pushed on the circular panes of the doors.

9.44pm 27 Old Street

We drank whisky from two tea-stained mugs. Andreas and me spent most of the last half hour sharing the bottle of Johnny Walker Andreas kept in a desk drawer. He had started keeping a bottle down there for many years but over the last few weeks things had been getting from bad to worse and I knew, he needed, ‘a little help’, to get him through the continuing downward spiral his business was in.

“The bloody wholesalers, pushing down the costings the whole bloody time. How can you make a dress for one pound twenty with six buttons, eh? Only the Asian fellows can make it for that price because they pay them shit and they will work for almost nothing. And their work is lousy and the wholesalers know it. They even sent some kid from the West End office down here, to put the patterns in front of Ronnie, to show him it could be made with less cloth. Silly bastard didn’t know a sample size from a sixteen. Ronnie started putting the big pattern sizes’ down and he made the costing more than when the guy first turned up. Bastards, and they expect us to pay the wages from that re Pavlo? How can I keep thirty people in the factory and another fifty outside workers with enough work to keep them busy, unless I take the costings down like they say? I take the costings down or I’m losing money making the dress. What can I do?”

He was caught between a rock and a hard place. That’s what they call it. And I could see that. Andreas used to be so good at being logical and keeping his emotions fairly hidden, but these days, these days, with the bloody wholesalers lowering all the prices, no one controlled anything. Emotions were as cheap as the dresses he made. He didn’t need anybody to tell him what he needed to do. Not anymore.

I knew he had a conscience. He went to Church occasionally, as a means of relieving it and then tried wrestling with it when Church didn’t work. Instead he wept silently into a dirty mug with me. When it came to weeping, he was up there amongst the greatest. Weeping in his cups with the whiskey he kept secretly disguised as tea.

I had started it off by crying; whiskey has that effect eventually and this set Andreas off and we ended up weeping on each other’s shoulders. As we poured out our hearts to one another. A forty two year old man and he’s fifty year old and there we are, weeping into each other’s shoulders. It was almost funny.

People who were still working late in the factory, could see into the office, as the walls were glass from halfway up. They could see the Govna and me weeping and they knew why we were crying. Work had almost come to a standstill anyway. The only people working now were the two Bangladeshi piecework machinists and the two Turkish-Cypriot over-lockers making sure there was enough work for the morning. One of the machinists looked up. In Bengali, she said

“I’ll tell you later. Work! I can only do fifteen minutes more. I have to cook that for that lazy bastard when I get in.”

Everybody knew it was to do with my daughter and they all knew the Govna went way back with me. Everyone had seen us all together at the staff dos and at the weddings. Even those who weren’t Greek were moved by what they saw. Some people would say that men shouldn’t weep as women do and that this sort of thing shouldn’t be displayed publicly, as it isn’t fair to those who have to witness it, but I think that’s a pile of shit and Andreas and me didn’t understand what holding back meant. Or what a stiff-upper lip looked like.

The bottle was empty. I was empty. The two of us drained of tears. It was Andreas who broke the moment. I watched Andreas look at his watch and thought ‘that is what I used to do all the time, look at the clock, check the bloody time!’

“I’ve got to shut down it’s nearly nine re.” Andreas said finally.

Andreas was already up and through the office door before I registered the time.

“I didn’t ring. Fuck! I said I would!”

I picked up the receiver and dialled the hospital. Maybe they had been waiting for me to call, this is what rushed through my mind as I waited to be connected to  the phone in Eleni’s room.

It was Stella. She wasn’t angry and when she eventually came on she said I should come down because our daughter wouldn’t be going anywhere for the time being. They said they were keeping Eleni in that night.

“Is she sleeping?”

“She was watching the television. It’s a Knockout. It was making her laugh, even though the games are stupid. The people in the costumes are funny. She fell asleep in the middle.”

“The man with the funny laugh. Stuart Hall?”

“Yes.” A pause. “You still there?”

“Where else am I gonna be?”

“You had a drink huh?”

“Yes I had a few with Andreas. Can you blame me?”

“Just come before she wakes up and sees you’re not here.”

“I’m coming, I’m coming.’ A pause. ‘You want me to bring a takeaway?”

“No. I’m gonna go home and bring something to the hospital. For later, when she wakes up. The doctor says she’s gonna sleep for a few hours aqain.”

When she didn’t respond for a moment, I assumed she didn’t think it was a bad idea and so I said I’d get souvlakia from Theo’s on the way over. I was quite drunk and I wasn’t able to remember much of what I said two seconds earlier, let alone the next day.

“Don’t stay at Theo’s, for God’s sake, have some shame.”

Stella knew it was a social club where we played cards and gambled. She knew I might be there all night. She always used to scold me about it. It was her way of trying to get me to avoid going there. She probably thought that surely tonight with Eleni in the hospital I wouldn’t be so stupid as to get even more drunk and not come back.

“You want to eat. Ra?”  Another silence.

“I’ll be there before she wakes up.”

The phone went dead. She hung up on me. I had finished the conversation but she had ended it. I felt pissed off at her for putting the phone down, especially as I was going to put myself out by going to Theo’s. I might have a drink there, but she wasn’t to know that was she? Who am I kidding? I knew she knew. I knew she knew everything there was to know about me.

I stood up and watched as Andreas started to usher out the last few workers from their places. The two reluctant Bangladeshi women were the last to finish.

Andreas was saying,

“Come on now ladies, I want to go home too you know! I appreciate you’re hard working but you must have husbands to cook for?” They made sure they had another bundle started before they had to quit. By now the Cypriots had gone and the only workers left were the two women from Bangladesh. Hardest workers on the planet. They were gathering their things together and moving towards the doors.

As Andreas went to the back of the factory to check it was empty, I came out of the office and greeted the two women on their way out. They were already talking about me as they passed me by, even though I didn’t speak any Bangladeshi, I knew it. They were deep in conversation with their coats on as they walked out the door and clocked off. They were practically singing to each other in a duet of question and answer. It faded out as they left, just like a record. I listened to them disappear through the door and then out onto the stairway. Their voices could still be heard as the lift took them down the four floors to the ground. I only lost them as they went out the front door at street level.

I looked at the empty factory and I couldn’t remember ever having seen it this way. Andreas was beginning to turn the lights off at the far end of the shop floor as the hum of the machines tick over had stopped at last and there was silence save for the buzzing of one of the fluorescent lights that was nearly always partially lit.

Getting up from the chair ha14d made me a little dizzy. I could feel myself swaying as I looked at the factory getting darker and darker, as each section of light was being turned off as Andreas made his way toward me.

I watched Andreas turn out more lights in the back of the factory and I was then suddenly feeling very drunk and dizzy. A police siren broke the silence between us. It shrieked its way down Old Street and cut through our thoughts as we looked at one another from opposite ends of the shop.

I looked over towards the irons in their holsters. I looked at my spot in the line in almost disbelief.

I was being shown a spanking new machine by a young lean and sweaty Andreas 24 years ago.

“It’s a mark 2 or something, it does the work in half the time.”

“You mean we have to work twice as fast!’ we were laughing”

“Eh?”

“It means I have to do the work twice as quickly eh? Re Andreas?”

No re Kologo it means” it’s easier re, easier than you’ve been used to and quicker for pressing re. It’s the new thing in steam pressing. We’re the first to put them in.”

“Twice as fast for twice the pay eh re?’

“Well, we can talk about that!’”

He laughed again this time, on his own.

Of course it meant I had to work quicker. I’d never be able to accept the new iron and I didn’t like the weight of the new piece of steel in my hand. It was almost a third again as heavy as the iron I had got used to over the last twelve years, since I worked for Andreas. I was already well used to working with the other iron and all the other pressers felt the same way. There was almost a strike, but we never got that far because there wasn’t the opportunity to argue. There were no other machines in the factory. Andreas had had all the old ones replaced over the weekend. So it was either learn on the new pressing machines or look for work in another factory with older pressing machines.

The Greek song ‘Mrs George’ came over the factory speakers and before I could think of anything to do I was already almost a rail behind and I had to get on with it. It was another momentous day. Everybody had to just get on with it.

Just as suddenly I was back as Andreas was turning out the last lights. He called over to me,

“What a day eh…when we got those Danor pressing machines. Those bastard new irons eh?”

“The great Danes eh?” That was the nickname we gave to the brand name of the new pressing machines that changed our lives.

“Because you had to work like a fucking dog on them!” The whiskey had reminded me of how angey I still was with him.

I shouted this to Andreas who was at the far end of the factory looking out of the window and down four floors to street level. He was checking whether his car was still all right and hadn’t been broken into or given a parking ticket.

He locked the window and started down the factory. As he approached me he was talking,

“They’ve got this new laying up machine, I saw it at the trade show this year. You’re not gonna fucking believe it. All you do is put the material on a roller on one end and it lays the material automatically.”

“Make sure they don’t make a machine to do what you do eh re Andreas?” I was being too honest now. The drink was talking. I didn’t really care if Andreas got a piece of my mind. I was working myself up to say a lot more. To get some stuff off my chest.

“One day re, one day they’re gonna have machines to do everything to do with making dresses. None of us is gonna have a job my friend!”

Andreas was right there, but I didn’t offer any more to the conversation, yet. I wanted to tell Andreas a lot of things. But I wasn’t sure I could say them without losing it and inside this made me feel inadequate. I couldn’t say how I really felt. It was too difficult right now and I knew Andreas didn’t really want to know about my feelings anyway.

There was a lot going on in my head as I was talking, about where I should be right now. I should have been at the hospital. I should have been with my daughter. I was always thinking about where I should be. Duty. Responsibility. Swords of Damocles. Guilt. I always did what I thought I should do, instead of what I wanted to do. But I could feel, today was a real change in all that. Today I finally came round and started saying that I didn’t care what people thought about what I should do. Today, I thought I’m going to do what I want to do.

Tonight too.

Be where I wanna be. That’s the choice only a real man can make. the feet are the most intelligent part of the body, remember?

“I mean what is life for eh? To be miserable and die or to live your life and be happy?”

Stella. Soulla. Came and went in my mind. When I looked at the pressing boards they became them, on their backs waiting for me to make love to them. My Stella was one of the ironing boards and another was Soulla. Horizontal for me and willing. They both purred like sirens with a gentle and imaginary trail of steam coming out of their mouths in harmony. The sirens that drove ancient Homeric sailors to their deaths because their song was too beautiful to resist. I walked towards the machines, like the awestruck sailors, anger rising as I approached them. I had to stop them singing, stop the voices singing so sweetly in my ears. I kicked at one with my foot kicking wildly at the horizontal board nearest to me. It was Andy’s.

“What you fuck are you doin re?”

I was deaf to anything he said. I kicked out again almost breaking my big toe and I doubled up when I was conscious of the pain. The whiskey had numbed my foot and I almost didn’t feel it at first. I lashed out again breaking the board with the strength of my kick. As I did the board cracked and it sent me over on my back. It was almost comical. I’d probably broken my foot. All Andreas was concerned about  was the ironing board. He could see it was damaged beyond repair and was apoplectic.

“That machine is worth £4000!! Re Kologo are you listening to me re?” He screamed whilst turning crimson around his face and neck. The veins bulging with excess blood. I thought he was going to have a heart attack. I would have loved him to have a had a heart attack. He went to Andy’s machine and picked uop the broken end of the board and almost brought it down on my head until he saw me on the floor and realised I was injured.

He dropped the board and leant down towards me to lift me up.

“Fuck off!!” I screamed back at him. I was trying to take my shoe off so I could have a look at my foot. I thought I’d broken it.

Andreas knew what was going on and he wasn’t about to throw anything at me. He had been responsible for making me redundant for Christ sakes. He knew my daughter was ill. He knew I was angry and upset about that. He just looked at his fucking machine trying to figure out if he could get a replacement in for tomorrow and then he realised he would have been one presser down anyway so Andy could use my machine now. He was now thinking about whether the insurance would cover it.

“Take the bloody shoe off re, you probably broke your foot!”

He helped me take off my shoe and helped me up and sat me down on Rene’s chair. This act of Andreas was the equivalent of Christ bathing the foot of the beggar and exonerated him from any future guilt.

I began to take my sock off as Andreas went into the kitchen to see if there was any ice in the freezer of the fridge in the canteen area. The best he could come up with was an old pack of half-full birds eye frozen peas, which had been forgotten in the back of the freezer compartment. He brought them to me and told me to put it on the end of my foot.

“It’s good for the swelling. You need an ambulance to take you to the hospital.”

He spoke softly, not wishing to make any more out of the incident than had already given me cause to weep. I wasn’t crying because of the pain of the injury. Mine was a deeper and more permanent pain, a non-physical, mental wound. A pain of loss so great that the injury to my foot made my violence seem completely futile and mocked my sense of myself. Inside Andreas, the father, not the Govna, wept for me. Maybe I wasn’t emptied enough after all. Maybe there were oceans of tears I had yet to cry. How many tears are enough eh? How many tears will be enough to satisfy this feeling, this loss I knew would happen, was happening.

Andreas offered to drive me to the hospital instead of an ambulance. I couldn’t walk properly with my toe now anyway. It was getting swollen and blue and more painful by the minute. The alchohol anaesthesia was wearing off too. I accepted the lift.

I limped out of his Mercedes and I told him not to come inside. I didn’t want Andreas involved in my life any more. That was it. Piss off. Leave me alone.

“I never want to see you again.”

I said as he drove away. I don’t think he heard me.

My right shoe had come off with some difficulty. I couldn’t stand on it any more. I couldn’t put my foot back into my shoe. It was too swollen.

l stood on the pavement outside The North Middlesex Hospital and hobbled painfully toward the main entrance. This was not supposed to be how I came back. I was now the patient and should probably have gone to the Accident and Emergency Department, but I stood at the entrance thinking about going in and fishing into my pocket for a fag.

There were two youngish lads in their twenties, I couldn’t really tell. They were sat on a wooden bench cut around the trunk of a tree to the left of the main entrance. Both of them sitting cross-legged with a ripped leather jacket for a cushion, shared between their respective buttocks.

They were far away in the land of lager and home-grown. They each had matted dreadlocks that hadn’t been washed for months and they were sharing a sizeable joint.

l walked over to use the bench. Perhaps I could put my shoe back on. I needed to give my toe a rub. The lads were intrigued at my shoeless foot and it was as if this loss of clothing validated my presence among them. l sensed that even though this was a public place, at that time of night, no one but drunks and addicts were allowed in their group of two. Night had made enough darkness of shadow underneath the tree and it gave them a temporary home to get high in before the security guard, I had noticed, just the other side of the revolving doors, would later ask them to move on.

I wasn’t scared of them. Nothing could scare me now. I stared anything in the face now. It didn’t really matter to me, people’s fears, or apprehension at my staring. The petty worry of politeness. I would never have to be polite to anyone again. Why should I be? What would be the point of being someone I wasn’t? When, through the darkness of the shadow under the tree, a small ember of red drifted towards me, I knew it wasn’t a fag and I took hold of it straight away.

When I was a much younger man there had been talk of hashish and I knew people who had taken it at weddings I had been to. I also knew that some of the great singers and bouzoukiplayers of my generation took the stuff. I had never encountered grass and had never smoked it either, till that moment. When I drew on the joint, I knew to inhale deeply and hold it in my lungs for as long as I could. I took one long draw and kept it in and didn’t breathe out for as long as possible.

The mellowness descended upon me before all of the breath was out. I took two more puffs and passed it on. To my astonishment and huge pleasure, the pain in my toe vanished very shortly afterwards. I felt waves of euphoria over my brain. A slow pulsing feeling of wellness I couldn’t help but enjoy. The big toe pain was gone and what was more, I was in a state of bliss for at least twenty minutes from just those three well-drawn puffs.

“Yo man. Well ‘ard man.” Rikki from Tooting said as I passed him over the remainder of the joint. Rikki had been pleased when I didn’t take offence and took a toke.

“Is your toe broken or something man? A&E is by the other entrance man.” Slim said. Slim hardly spoke to anyone and Rikki was rather taken aback.

“The hospital is there man, behind you.”

“I know, I just don’t wanna go in. It doesn’t hurt now.”

“Listen man, this hash is like, something else. You take it easy, eh?”

“Yeah, it’s got a kick like a mule.”

“I need something to help me with this day. It’s been a shower of shit.”

“It’ll do that man. It’ll do that.”

And Slim handed me the joint again for another long draw and a lungful of painkiller.

It wasn’t long before I told them I had someone in there, waiting for me. I didn’t tell them it was my daughter Eleni, but I said it was, ‘Someone in my family’, instead. They didn’t get nosy. They read into what I said and understood the huge ‘no entry’ sign stuck between the lines.

Slim knew a lot about people. He didn’t ask any more questions and let Rikki do the talking after that. Rikki was guaranteed to talk drivel after half a can of Cider anyway. Slim later explained things as he saw them, to Rikki, telling him about the old geezer, as he saw him. By this time Paul had gone and they were already getting concerned about their missing pal Terry, who was supposed to be bringing gear along with him. They were running out and it looked like the rest of the week was going to be one long pain in the arse without enough dope to get them through it and get them out of it.

Slim was saying,

“The guy was from another planet man. Couldn’t you see how far away he was man? It was like he existed on another plane. I’m tellin you geezer, this guy is in pain man. He doesn’t give a toss what others are thinking, he just comes out and says what he thinks. I’d like to know where the fuck someone like that gets all that strength from, you know what I’m saying man?”

Rikki nodded and said, “Yeah man, ‘dya see the way he toked on that J?”

“Fuckin all the way bro. All the way down to the roach man!”

Slim was impressed and Rikki was pissed.

They were living the Cohen song and waiting for their man. Terry.

10.45pm

I limped through the corridors of the hospital with my right shoe in my hand. I tried getting my shoe back on again but it still wouldn’t fit. I didn’t care about the sideways glances of the staff, the other people, the security guard in particular. Maybe he thought I was a druggie too. I didn’t give a shit. Not now. Going up the stairs was like something out of Carry On Doctor, or in my case, Carry On At Your Inconvenience. Two nurses giggling as they went by. People talking about me behind their hands. I was sure of it. When I was back inside The Churchill Ward with my shoe in one hand, I looked at my watch. 10.45pm. And then the fact that it was still the same Monday, the same Monday dawned on me. It felt like a year had happened in one day. More than a year. Time had been squeezed together into this massive series of events. Like inside the Tardis.

Stella didn’t say a word when I opened the door. She didn’t want to disturb Eleni who was still sleeping, thank Christ. She just picked her bag up and left. I knew she was going home to bring food back. I’d forgotten the souvlakia. Christ I could do nothing right.

It was a full hour and a half later before Stella got back with the food and by then l was sitting up in the room with Eleni, chatting about what we were going to do when she got out. Stella had brought in some of the soup she prepared from the previous day. Avgolemoni is always better on the second day. She’d boiled some chicken and had brought bread, a whole loaf, the kind she liked, similar to one from George’s, some olives, black and very small, some tomatoes, a little feta, and a cucumber. We sat and ate together, Eleni sitting up in bed and the nurses looking enviously at the spread before us, as they pretended to find things to do around them. Popping in every so often to pinch an olive or a piece of chicken with bread. Whilst we ate we were almost silent. Something about the meal, the circumstances, the location, it all seemed so incongruous, though we never said that out loud. It just felt odd, us being there and eating our own food in this alien place. Like somehow our food didn’t belong here. Like a supper we would remember, always. It had a resonance each of us could feel because it was displaced, unusual. Emblematic of a moment. Like we were sharing something other than food. A moment we couldn’t get back. A letter we each read together. To each other. And the silence continued through the meal. Just the sound of the food in our mouths and the sound of each of us chewing, cutting a cucumber with a little knife. Pulling a piece of bread from the loaf. Spitting out a pip of olive. It wasn’t a last supper, but it was fucking close.

It was good soup as Stella was just as meticulous with her cooking as she was with her crocheting. We found out Eleni would have to stay for three days during her first batch of chemo and Keller said there was no reason why she couldn’t have food cooked from home. So there we sat and ate in her room, looking at each other and occasionally smiling. Eleni and me both slurped a lot when eating the soup but that was quite natural. You can’t eat quietly when you are that hungry. We made noises of appreciation as the food touched our taste buds. I nodded a full mouthful of approval and dunked my chicken into the soup.  We’d had eaten outside many times, at picnics and souvlas at friends’ houses, but in a hospital, was a first. Either at relatives or in the country, in Broomfield Park, weddings, christenings, funerals everywhere where Cypriots gather. This meal, however, had strangest feeling to it. It was like a picnic but not. Some strange thing was happening whilst we were eating. It was a kind of bonding, a kind of bringing closer together. A sharing of something unique and special. Stella was pleased that the food tasted as good as she had wanted it to, but she wished she had brought some other cheese as well. She’d forgotten a little grated Haloumi, which she knew Eleni loved but in her hurry to get back to the hospital, she’d forgotten.

CHAPTER 12

PAVLOV’S DOGS

11.30pm

Private Room, Churchill Ward, North London Middlesex Hospital

10CC – I’M NOT IN LOVE

Eleni was still sleeping off her first laborious bit of chemotherapy. I had been sitting in the same seat watching for any movement she made. Stella was now slumped in the same uncomfortable chair. I got up and looked through the little porthole window in the door. My foot was starting to throb and the pain was beginning to come back in pulsing waves. Perhaps I had broken my toes or something? I certainly couldn’t put any weight on my right foot. I needed some painkillers and thought about the two lads outside with that beautiful hashish I had just imbibed. That would sort me out4

I couldn’t stay in this room anymore. I had nowhere to go, but out. I motioned to Stella that I was going for a fag outside but Stella, was asleep now too and I hadn’t noticed until halfway through doing a stupid mime to her. I couldn’t leave whilst she was asleep and I didn’t want to wake her. So now, I was in a kind of limbo. I looked through the window again to see if I could spot a nurse, but they were all busy and I didn’t want to disturb any of them anyway. They all had jobs to do. All of them. I got up very carefully and stroked the side of Stella’s face with my finger and her eyes opened to see my face, inches away. She almost started in fear but then in a split second, saw I wasn’t alarmed or upset and then she understood straightaway why I had woken her.

“One. Eh? Don’t stay outside. She might wake up and want to see you.”

I opened the door and I immediately felt another huge wave of guilt as I left the hospital for the second time that night. I was an inadequate and useless father. I had this deep pent up feeling of guilt about my sick daughter and me sneaking off for a cigarette. Guilt. I carried it around me like an albatross for the rest of my days.

“All because I wanna fucky fag. For fucks sake!”

It seemed like the whole of my life I had been feeling guilty about something. I always took it on myself to feel responsible for others. I’m never able to escape from it. All my life was a paying back. Because I had to pay for something. I didn’t know what it was I had done to deserve this or what Eleni had done to have this terrible thing inside her but that was it. Pay back for what I did? Maybe it was my fault she got it instead of me. It was in the blood but it passed me by, like the Jewish Passover and it went into her instead. The Angel of death.

Or was it?

“Something I did in another life. When I was laughing at that stupid boy who got stung by the hornets. Huh? Are you repaying me now eh?”

I said this to no one but myself, but I hoped God was listening, if he existed. I wanted God to feel guilty, not me. It was God’s fault, wasn’t it, if he existed?

I blamed God for my inner sense of guilt, but I had no one to blame but myself and my habit. Guilt from this night. Forever. I wondered what the dreads were doing outside. Would they still be there?

I walked down the six flights of steps to get to ground level. the stairwell seemed to echo every step. I noticed that there was no one really using the stairs, so for much of the time I was on my own walking down the fourteen different sets of stairts to descend the 7 floors I needed to. It was an agony of stepping on to each step with two feet at a time because I couldn’t do a whole step in one go. They must have taken fifteen minutes tfor me to get down them.

As I reached ground level, I limped through the main entrance with  revolving doors and looked about. Couldn’t spot the dreads, shit. There was the old codger in the wheel-chair though, that I  shared smoke with by the lift last time. This time there was a young woman with him, who spoke only once and she said.

“Can’t speak properly.”

I stood next to her and noticed that though she was young, she had grey hair, which looked very odd for someone of her age.

I got there as she was lighting up her second fag from a butt in her hand, which I assumed had been her first. A natural assumption but actually I was wrong, because it came from the old codger whom she had just wheeled into the ward he was on, from two floors up. She’d some back down to have a final fag.

I heard her words as a sort of apology and thought it was very gracious and I said nothing. To me, those words were about her pain and so I didn’t pry. My pain was too obvious for words and so I didn’t need to share any of it with her either, as I sucked the very life out of the butt of the cigarette.

I was just thinking about her as she stood there having her fag. She’s chain smoking. I never chain smoked in my life. Poor girl. She has a fine figure. Shapely. Must be a relative of hers in here, because she is not in a dressing gown though, it would be nice to see her in one.

The un-idle moment over, she puts her fag out as I was reaching the end of mine. For a split second I thought I caught her half smile at me, as I too lit my own second cigarette from the butt of my last cigarette. I guess there’s a first time for everything. She turned and wheeled her father around to face the door and pushed his almost weightless frame through the revolving door.

Flirty old bugger she thought. When she got up the two floors with the lift she was to walk down her own particular gauntlet of the ward she had to take him  to. Middle eastern types, always at it, aren’t they? No shame. Her own father sixteen hours from death. But she admired him for doing it. Most fun I’ve had today she thought and left it at that.

I had only done it to impress her but as she walked away I realised it was the first time that I had done that. I would never chain smoke at work. I thought it looked bad and that you couldn’t control yourself. I mean there were certain unwritten rules. Well, maybe you could do it at a funeral and I had seen that many times. That was sort of acceptable, but never at work. At a hospital, it was okay I suppose, more or less the same as at a funeral?

The awful thing about it was that I was living under a misapprehension. I didn’t know the truth. I would never know the truth, that the young woman had just been lighting her cigarette from the old man in a wheelchair. I would never know because I never saw the old man again. The old man happened to be the young woman’s father. The same old man he had had a fag with earlier and who had just left, not yet two minutes before he had come down the stairs and gone through the revolving doors of the hospital.

I went on with my fag taking deep puffs as I smoked it and I really concentrated on the last few millimetres of tobacco. The filter started to collapse as I sucked the last plasticky breath of smoke through it. I didn’t want to finish this cigarette let alone go back upstairs. What could I do there anyway, except comfort my girl and Stella was there for that.

The truth is I didn’t know what to do. I had nowhere to go and nothing to say any more. I withdrew into myself for a few minutes and began, quite softly and for the second time that day, to pray. I prayed primarily this time to the unseen God of my Father and my Father before him. It was a prayer much more directed at my innermost understanding of God, which I took to be all the things that were good in the world. I never believed in a white bearded God, in fact, I didn’t believe in God, not really, not any more. Not at all really. But, well, maybe it would be alright to believe in him for a bit, like now. When I needed a God to believe in.

I have never been a religious man, but this day, the events and circumstances we found ourselves as parents had finally got me caught up with us and thing called God, any fucking God you understand?. Again, the memory of it came in waves back at me, just as the pain on my foot began throbbing ever more painfully. My prayer was pointless, because as I was saying it, I realised there was nothing God could do anyway.

“I know you’re thinking, why am I bothering you? But, you can’t just take my daughter like this. I don’t understand. If you exist, why do you take her at fourteen? She’s had no life yet. She hasn’t done anything yet and she has so much ahead of her. Why would you do this? Every day I’ve been working and working, trying to do my best for her. I never bothered you, I never said anything to you, eh? I never asked you for anything huh? But now. Boom, just like this, you come to my house and you take my daughter. Well you can go and fuck yourself, because you are a bastard to do this to her and not to me. You can take me if you want? I give you my life for hers. I give you my miserable life for her wonderful one. She was gonna do something useful with her life. She was gonna do something. She could have been a teacher or something. Maybe a professor. Do something with her life. Not work in a factory like me for the whole of her life. But you never gave her the chance eh, you bastard. Take me instead. Take me and let her live.”

“It’s all kids in there eh? All those poor bastards too eh?  All these poor bastards too eh?”

This was to God again the second time it was much louder, so much so, that a young male nurse entering the hospital, gave me a quizzical look as if to say, ‘are you ok, yes, you are and I guess you’re a little scared.’ And then he carried on inside.

I began to think about all the other kids up there and l saw the amount of pain elsewhere and it brought our own into a clearer focus than before and it made me look at the world in a slightly different way. I mean I knew God was too busy to look after my girl, but what the fuck was he doing to all these others as well? The insignificance of our pain was highlighted, almost in a theatrical light. Like some actor, who the director wants you to look at; the other action on stage being irrelevant. And it was not a revelation; it was more like a resignation to our life and my family’s. I didn’t know the meaning of Karma, but I was experiencing it without knowing it. We were picked out by that particular spotlight at the moment.

Life was tightening a kind of Gordian knot around our existence. Right now, it enveloped me alone and I could never ever undo it again. My thoughts wandered inside, and I strode by each of the other beds just slightly above their heads and in my head closing off the thought and tightening the knot. I was trying to shut out some of their pain too, so that I didn’t just focus on my own for a short space of time.

11.55pm

I went back up the stairs but I had to repeat the whole process of taking each stair two steps at a time. It took me longer going up them. In my head, fate was telling me that that was the wrong time to go out for a cigarette, as something had just happened and I missed it. I couldn’t go any faster and the panic, as I got up each flight of stairs began to take pn a desperate quality to it. I was sure, because of the slowness of my steps, I was missing something just hapining now.

I reached the door of the private room at the end of the ward. I looked through the little round, almost comical, porhole window to her at her bedside and caught her eye as she, in turn, sensed someone was at the door. I looked deep into Stella’s eyes and the fact that the door separated us somehow meant I could be even more expressive in my face. I looked at Stella and then motioned with my eyes and head back towards Eleni and as I did I nodded a bleak affirmation swaying my head from side to side. I let my head rest on the door and it pushed open with the weight of my forehead. I almost head butted it open. I didn’t realise how heavy I had rested my head on the door so it seemed slightly Frank Spencer as the door swung open. I sort of overbalanced forward into the room. Stella, always one to jump on a joke, shook her head at me like my mother used to do. Some mother’s do have them she thought. I’ve got one right here.

“You’ll break your head one day my darling.”

“I gotta thick skull.”

Eleni woke up and took us by surprise.

“That fucking needle really hurts! Ah!”

She was rattled and a little out of it. Bloody chemo.

I didn’t remonstrate with her about her bad language and neither did Stella, we thought it was proper under these circumstances. Stella wasn’t sure what the chemotherapy was anyway and so the abbreviation caused her to ask her what she meant.

“When they put that stuff into my blood it hurts like hell Mum. I’ve not got any white blood cells from it, you know and you need them to fight infections, Dr Keller said. They’re trying to kill the leukaemia too by doing this.”

‘Yes.”

I said and left it at that, by letting Stella know that she shouldn’t ask too many questions now.

Eleni said she wanted to ring some of her friends; she was fed up of just having just her Mum and Dad around. We were about as funny as a car crash and she needed some seriously funny adventure. She’d decided she would ring Libby her oldest and closest friend but she was in Spetses by now, with her parents. Another of her friends Lysandros, a budding poet, gay and two years her senior said he’d be over in the morning and Mus and David, an older couple she met when doing a spot of gardening from her inner city schools highly worthy community service, said they’d pop in first thing too.

Eleni said she was going to use the phone by her bed in the morning, as she said she was going to call a couple of her other friends. Whatever she wanted at that moment was ok by us. Whatever she wanted. We didn’t want her to want for anything and so if she needed to use a phone then she would have one. It didn’t matter how much it would cost for her to make calls.

End of this weeks Chapter…

New Chapter coming soon…

NEW – GLOSSARY

AHSICKTÍRI! – “Gordon Bennett!” or “Jesus wept!” or anything similar. A curse.

AHSTOTHIÓWLLO! – To hell with it (literally, to the devil himself)

ARSE – Arsenal football club, after Harry Enfield’s Stavros, but well established before then in North London parlance and especially well used by Tott

enham Hotspur supporters.

AVGOLÉMONI – Egg and lemon soup. A delicacy normally served with a garnish of boiled chicken. There is rice in it as well.

BANO SANEMO – Without any reason (literally, on a whim)

BROXENIA – The ancient and time-honoured tradition of matchmaking for a prospective marriage.

BUNDLE – All the material necessary to make the number of dresses shown on the bundle ticket. This ticket, presented after the bundle was finished, proved the machinist had made that bundle up and she was credited in her own book for that number of dresses. It was ticked off after every bundle was finished and entered into her book. Each dress had a costing per item and therefore the larger the bundle, the greater the amount it was worth.

CABBÁGE – Excess dresses sold under the counter for cash and not shown on the books. Pronounced kah-bahj, as in onion bhaji, (if posh) or pronounced just as the vegetable is in north London Cypriot.

CHATISTA – A form of improvised singing more common with rap than any other form of contemporary music. It is generally sung in praise of the bride and groom at a wedding and is also akin to African praise-singing.

COSTING – The amount of money the Govna or the manufacturer was prepared to make or give for the production of one finished garment.

DAIMOKU – A Buddhist chant (nam-myo-ho-renge-kyo) normally spoken by Naishiren Daishonen Buddhists.

DÉSERA MADIA – Four eyes literally, but meaning, be doubly aware.

EN AMARTEA NA BEDASIS TO PSOMI – It’s a sin to throw away bread. Or ‘waste not want not.’

ÉRODA – Making love. The act of lovemaking.

ESINITHISES – You got used to it!

GÓRI – Girl as in the sassy type.

GOROU – The same but a family member saying it.

GOUMBAROS – The best man (as at a wedding). At Cypriot weddings many best men are allowed, and this can mean their introduction into the family forever; all of them!

GOUMBARA – The same applies to women.

GREEN LINE – The dividing line between the two communities in Cyprus after the 1974 invasion by turkey. It runs right through the centre of the capitol Nicosia. To Cypriot-Londoner’s it runs down the middle of green lanes in Haringey.

GRIMAS TANIADA MAS GE BERASAMENDA STIN ANGLIA – A lament much used by the older Cypriot. All those years were wasted, I spent in this country! In other words, I gave this country the best years of my life.

ESINITHISES – You got used to it or acclimatised.

HALOUMI – Eponymous Cypriot Goat’s cheese. The only authentic Cypriot cheese.

HICKMAN LINE – A plastic tube inserted into the subclaveal region in the chest. It facilitates the injection of chemotherapy into the body without having to constantly reinsert a needle.

IGOYÉNIA – Family or relatives but can mean in practice everyone invited to the wedding.

ILIOS – The sun.

KAKOPETRIÁ – The village of bad rock. The legend has it that the village was founded on a huge rock, which had rolled down from the mountain above and crushed two young lovers beneath it. The enormous rock is still there today as a tourist attraction sitting where it stopped and on the remains of the crushed copulating couple.

KIRIELEISON – God be praised. Can mean, oh god! Or god help us!

KOLOGO – (Pronounced go-lo-go emphasis on first syllable) Marrow-head…pretty self-explanatory.

LINGRÍ – (Stress second syllable) A now extinct game which is more related to cricket than anything eastern-Mediterranean and was played by my father because when I asked him about it, he said he had played it as a boy. The game ‘lingri’ is played by balancing a small stick (about the thickness of a finger and about six inches long) between two stones about six inches apart on the ground. The stones would have to be big enough to keep the stick off the ground by about six inches. A larger stick the length of a forearm (the thickness of a thumb) is then used as a baseball-type bat. The player scoops the smaller stick out from under the stones with the larger stick. As the small stick is balancing in mid-air the larger stick is then used to hit the smaller stick as far it will go. Timing is everything. Whoever hit the little stick the farthest, without it being caught, was the winner. And that was the point of the game. There could be as many players as there were in the group or gang that were playing. Each took it in turns to play. I think my father was brilliant at it. He was strong and forceful and nearly always won “as long your mind was there” he would say. Distractions were part of the game too so if you were looking at girls you could be easily distracted. But that would also be part of why he won sometimes too. Because the girls would be looking, and you had to win at both games.

NUMBER – (Pronounced numbah) The individual style number given to a dress by the manufacturer.

MALÁGA – (Stress second syllable and pronounced ma-lag-ga) Wanker.

MÉDRIO – A medium Turkish coffee made with a little sugar and ground coffee beans in copper coffee pot. Normally drunk in a demitasse cup there are three types of coffee known to Greek-Cypriots. Sketo is a plain coffee made with no sugar and `Gliki is a sweet coffee made with at least one teaspoon of sugar.

MÓNI MAS – By ourselves.

MUCHTÁRI – The headman of the village (appointed during Turkish rule) who was the magistrate or judge and jury on behalf of the Turkish government.

MUPPA – Soccer.

OOSSOU – There there. As in to comfort. Or you be still. It’s alright.

OVERLOCKER – A machinist who did nothing but overlock stitching with an overlocking machine in preparation for the dress being made up by a piecework machinist. Some dresses needed overlocking before making up, as this would ensure hems, cuffs, and collars were cleanly finished.

PANO SANEMO – On the off chance. Without planning. On a whim. Or, on the spur of the moment.

PIECE WORK – The making of each ‘bundle’ for the ‘costing’ which was arrived at by the sample machinist and the boss at the beginning of each new style.

PUTANA – (Stress second syllable) Prostitute or whore.

RE – (Pronounced reh) Mate, as in pal {masculine}

RA – (Pronounced rah) Mate {feminine though a much less flattering term when used in the same way as re}

REMBETIKO – The Greek equivalent of the blues. A thirteen beat to the bar repeatable passage along with a set pattern of chord changes and a repeated generic drumbeat.

SINGENIA– A relation of any kind (female).

SINGENI – A relation of any kind (male).

SOUVLA – A Cypriot gathering normally of relatives, but it can be anytime anywhere and for any purpose, to eat skewered lamb grilled over a barbecue of hot charcoal and seasoned with salt. (not to be confused with a British barbecue, which is normally cooked on an outside grill of bottled gas consisting normally of overcooked beef burgers and chicken drumsticks with a marinade from Sainsbury.)

SPITAKI MAS – Our little home.

STIN IYIAMAS or YIAMAS – Cheers (as in a toast), To health.

SVIGWA – Hornets.

TAVLI – Backgammon.

O VOVOS – The dumb guy, as in someone who couldn’t speak.

VRAGA – The baggy type of Arabic pantaloons that have a dip in the middle of the crutch reaching almost to the knees with an excess of material. Something to do with the next coming of Allah being born through a man’s pants, so to facilitate this they made sure that Allah would fall into a comfy little spot.

YATAGAN – Or yataghan or ataghan (from Turkish yatağan), also called varsak, is a type of Ottoman knife or short sabre used from the mid-16th to late 19th centuries. The yatagan was extensively used in Ottoman Turkey and in areas under immediate Ottoman influence, such as the Balkans and the Caucasus.

YERO – Old man. Can be, respectful, sarcastic, or cheeky.