Aftershock (10 page)

The clock said nine forty-five, and he needed twenty minutes to get to school, even running. He had to hope Mr Hersee didn't march the team to the bus at ten o'clock sharp. He tore himself away from his mother and, grabbing his bag, ran up the stairs, out into the ground floor hallway, and frightened the old woman in black from the top of the house – who flattened herself against the wall. In seconds he was outside and pelting along Georgiana Street towards the crossroads.

Please don't go on time, Mr Hersee!

Why can't people in the street walk in straight lines? And why do they have to suddenly stop to look at nothing at all and get in your way? He crossed roads, he dodged cars, he swung his bag and accidentally knocked it against a woman's leg.

‘Oi! Watch out!'

‘Very sorry.'

He didn't slacken his pace. He pushed on at top speed like the man who ran to Sparta, hot, out of breath, his legs aching, and his heart thumping – to turn the last corner into Imeson Street, and see the school closed. ‘Oh, crikey!' There was no line of boys fidgeting just inside the gate like before. The gate was already locked. The caretaker had vanished. They had gone. They had left to catch the bus to Regent's Park without him.

So now he had three choices. He could run to the bus stop. He could go back home, but that, he knew, was not a choice. Or he could run as fast as he could to Regent's Park – except that he didn't know the way.

He chose the last option: he would ask someone. He turned on his heel and ran to the main road where the buses ran. Phidippides couldn't have run harder. He stopped for a gasp of breath and asked a man, ‘Regent's Park? Which way? This road?'

‘That's right, son, Pancras Road. And when it stops being Pancras Road, go right—‘

But already Makis was pelting along the bus route on Pancras Road – in too much of a hurry to hear the man finish, ‘go right on'. He ran past one bus stop, past another – until, looking up with sweat in his eyes to check the road names, he saw that Pancras Road stopped at this next junction and became Crowndale Road. What had the man said?
Go right when Pancras Road stops.
Makis took the turning to the right, and he suddenly recognised where he was. This was Royal College Street, and it led back towards his own home! He would have to run the length of it and ask again.

Running to school and coming back to being level with his own street was like running from Alekata to Lourdhàta. Already he was exhausted. Even if he got to Regent's Park in time, how could he ever kick a heavy leather ball after this?

It was up at Camden Road that he asked the way again – and the woman he asked looked at him as if he was mad for not knowing the way to Regent's Park.

‘It's down there, i'n it? ‘Course it is. Down there, past your underground station, and straight on till you ‘ear the lions!'

The lions?
Makis had heard talk about a zoo in Regent's Park but he'd never been there, any more than he'd been to the park itself.

Every step was harder than the last. Now he really was like Phidippides – at that point where the hero had run beyond exhaustion. He could well understand how the runner came to drop down dead at the end. But Makis pushed himself on – past the World's End pub, past the Spread Eagle – and what he'd give to see the sea eagles of Kefalonia wheeling above him!

But it was push on and push on, whatever the pain. And finally, when he had nothing more to give – there across the road was an open space. It had to be Regent's Park. He crossed the road, and was met by railings. How was he to get into the place? But taking a chance, going left rather than right, he followed the railings round until –
Thank you, St Gerasimos!
– there was the entrance, opening on to a space as wide as the Argostoli lagoon.

There were several different paths, but he took the one straight ahead, and heard the roaring of a lion and the high squawk of jungle birds as he ran on and on – until he heard the welcome sound of shouting and clapping, and whistles being blown.

He followed the sounds and took a left turn, then a right at a fountain – and there they were: the Regent's Park football pitches. He'd made it!

But it didn't look as if a Cup Final was being played here. Makis had imagined seeing twenty-two players on a pitch surrounded by a crowd of people. But here, the crowd was not of people but of pitches. They were all over this part of the park – and there seemed to be a team in red on nearly every one of them.

He ran down between the touch-lines looking for familiar faces, but he knew it was too late. All the games had started; and although later on players might have to come off because they were injured, or were sent off by the referee, no one else was ever allowed to go on. A game started with eleven players and those first eleven were the only people allowed to play the match, even if it ended up with eleven players against four.

So Denny Clarke would be playing in Makis's place, wearing his old dyed-red vest.

Makis ran down one side of a pitch, across behind the goals of two other games that were back to back – and suddenly he spotted one of the old red Imeson Street vests. He ran towards the game, but when he got there, the player wearing the vest wasn't Denny Clarke; it was a younger boy who sometimes took part in the playground games: Lennie Rainbird. Makis looked at the faces of the other players wearing the new red shirts. They were puffing and straining in a fast, hard-tackling game, with the defence trying to cover for Lennie Rainbird who was chasing around, as erratic as an eaglet. Makis knew that if David Sutton shouted ‘W' or ‘M', Lennie would have no idea what to do. It was clear that, had Makis or Denny Clarke been there, they would have made a big difference to the way the game was going. So where was Denny Clarke?

‘Give me that shirt, lad!'

Mr Hersee jumped out at Makis from a group of people along the touchline. No, ‘Where have you been?' No, ‘Why are you late?' He grabbed at Makis's bag and pulled out the Imeson Street school shirt, spilling Makis's boots and shin pads on to the grass in an angry yank.

‘Referee! Shirt change!' the headmaster shouted, when the ball went out of play: and before the throw-in was taken, the shirt was pulled over Lennie Rainbird's head. And when Makis looked closely, he could see that Lennie was playing in his street shoes – and all because Makis Magriotis and Denny Clarke hadn't shown up for the match.

For a minute or so, Makis wondered whether to stay or go. Judging by the looks he got from the grim-faced Imeson Street players, he certainly wasn't welcome there. And as he watched the other team rob Rainbird and go on to score a goal, Costas Kasoulides ran to the touchline and shouted, ‘Traitor!'

Makis trailed off home, a lion from the depths of the zoo roaring him on his way – to spend a most unhappy weekend, not even playing well on Sunday for Mr Laliotis. The violinist consoled him with a musicians' excuse: ‘Some days the naughty fingers disobey the brain. It happens.' They cut the rehearsal short; but Makis knew he had disappointed the man.

While Makis's mother was out at the corner shop buying flowers, Makis had a chance to dig out
The Man Who Ran to Sparta
and throw it into the dustbin, burying it beneath a heap of dead coals.

Good riddance!

That Monday, Makis got to school as late as he could – he knew how unwelcome he would be in the playground. He wasn't the player who'd had his hand shaken by Mr Hersee any more.

And he was right. Freddie Gull spat in his direction. Lining up to go in, it was all elbows in the ribs and kicked shins, and ‘Greek' seemed to be the swearword of the day. Makis knew without doubt that Imeson Street had lost in the Cup Final. But it wasn't until the school went in for assembly that he heard the score and realised how they'd lost. The boys who had played were paraded and clapped, and the result was given out: nil-one. The Reds had lost by that one goal scored from Lennie Rainbird's mistake. Makis not being there had made a difference. But Lennie was praised by Mr Hersee for being ‘one of our valiant heroes'.

When the team went back to their places in the hall, two other names were called out, and both boys were made to stand up in their lines: Makis Magritis and Dennis Clarke.

Makis stood, and not knowing where to look, he stared at the picture of the new Queen of England hanging up behind the headmaster. He stared at Elizabeth the Second until his tears dissolved her.

‘Standing among you, like Judas trees in a vineyard, are two boys who are alone in their Imeson Street disgrace. Can you imagine Stanley Matthews of Blackpool not turning up for the Cup Final at Wembley? Can you imagine Nat Lofthouse telling his Bolton team-mates, “I fancied a lie-in, so I didn't bother getting up to join the team coach?” Imagine…' Mr Hersee was working himself up; he had to stop for a moment, and swallow. ‘I can't imagine that happening, can you?'

The juniors shook their heads, and the infants chanted, ‘No-o-o.'

‘Well, Clarke and Magritis, these two,' – Mr Hersee pointed at the disgraced boys like a preacher from a street pulpit – ‘these vipers in the bosom did just that on Saturday. Although honoured by being picked as first reserve, Clarke didn't even turn up at the field of play. And Magritis decided he'd got blanket fever and showed up too late to start the match – leaving brave, heart-as-big-as-his-chest Leonard Rainbird to throw himself into the fray.'

Makis felt dislike rising from the floor of the hall like the stink of seaweed, and sensed the teachers down the sides nodding and shaking their heads. But he could see nothing, standing with his head bowed – not with shame, but with the anger of injustice welling up inside him. This was not fair. Had Hersee bothered to ask him why he'd reached Regent's Park late? No! Did the headmaster know the state of his mother that Saturday morning? Would he even have understood her pain at seeing a picture in a book that looked just like her husband in his death agony? Did anyone in England care that a terrible earthquake had killed hundreds of people on his island in one minute?

Stirred in with his anger was not having the courage to shout something at the man at the other end of the hall. But perhaps that was just as well, because it would only have come out as a breathless snivel, his voice somewhere up in the ceiling beams. So he stood there until he was ordered to sit down, and people shuffled away from him on each side – the start of isolation and insult that were to poison his day.

Denny Clarke was the worst. At morning playtime, as the football match went on around them, he grabbed Makis's neck. ‘You dirty Greek traitor!' He pushed Makis and nearly floored him. ‘You proper got me into trouble, you foreigner!'

‘You not there, too!' Makis managed to get out.

‘Wasn't playing, was I, Greekie? Waste o' time. Then you don' come – an' make me look as stinky as you!'

‘That your problem, not my problem.'

Clarke got hold of Makis's jumper and pulled him violently towards him, stopping just short of a head-butt. ‘I'll tell you your problem, you rotten turd. Me! I'm your problem! A'ter school, round Prince's – I'm gonna knock seven bells outa you, where Hersee an' no one can't stop me. An' you be there – if you got the guts.' He twisted a foot behind Makis's leg and pushed him hard, sending him down flat on his back on the tarmac. ‘Prince's, a'ter school – an' bring your fightin' fists with you, if you got any.'

With a kick in the calf, Clarke went off – and Makis picked himself up, hurting and choking in the throat with the rotten unfairness of life.

He didn't go to Prince's Fields after school. He didn't fight Denny Clarke. He went in the opposite direction, home to Georgiana Street, full of bile and unable to breathe properly in fury and frustration, his eardrums thumping with the beat of his heart. Even the earthquake that had killed his father and destroyed his Kefalonia life hadn't brought this burning turmoil inside him.