Aftershock (13 page)

‘Now you get up.' Makis sprang off Clarke, and Clarke slowly got to his feet. He opened his mouth to say something; but he must have thought better of it, because he turned and ran out of Prince's Fields.

‘You'd better get a steak on that face,' the father told Makis, ‘or you're going to be black and blue tomorrow.'

‘Thank you,' Makis said. And he ran off home.

Sofia was appalled. When Makis saw her looking at his face, he knew she was thinking of his father, lying there after the earthquake. ‘What's happened?' she demanded. ‘Who's done this to you?'

Makis pulled away from the handkerchief that was blotting at his face. And he smiled. ‘I had a fight,' he said, ‘with a boy who called me nasty names.'

‘Did you hurt him?'

‘I won. I wrestled him like I wrestled the big goats. He won't be saying those names again.'

‘What names? What's he been saying?'

Makis stared his mother out. ‘It doesn't matter,' he said. ‘He won't say them any more.' He looked beyond her to the table where she had been sitting with paper and an envelope and a pen. ‘Who are you writing to?'

She put a hand to the letter as if she was about to turn it over. But instead, she held it up in front of him. ‘It's to Dimitris, your father's friend in the Mandolino choir – if he's still in Argostoli.' She took a breath. ‘He didn't die, I know he didn't, I saw him afterwards, at the cemetery – and his house wasn't damaged so badly…'

Through a rapidly closing eye, Makis couldn't quite read the writing on the letter. ‘What are you saying to him?'

Sofia put the paper down again and faced Makis square on. It took a number of breaths before she could speak. ‘I'm writing to ask him to send us the mandolin music for the songs your father used to sing. He might have them himself.'

Makis looked at her, and across at the Gibson that was hanging again on the living-room wall.

‘Or he might be able to find them somewhere. The way you sang and played ‘To Taste the Assos Honey' is more important than fighting a stupid boy, I can tell you. You are a Kefalonian, but Kefalonia isn't the island it was, not after the earthquake, not after so many died, and now that so many have left the island…'

Makis frowned. All this was true, but why was she saying it?

‘…But a boy who can sing and play so well, can surely learn to sing and play all our Kefalonian music. And a boy who can teach his mother English could go back one day, when Argostoli has been rebuilt, to teach the island to sing its songs again.'

There were tears in her eyes; and there were tears in Makis's, too, which stung.

He said nothing for a long, long time – because he knew he wouldn't be able to get the words out without sounding like a bleating goat.

But at last he took a deep breath, and taking the Gibson down from the wall and stroking the chip on its body, he said, ‘I think Papa would like that.'

BERNARD ASHLEY
now writes full time after a full career in teaching. He first went into print after writing stories for children in his junior school class.

Before teaching, he served in the RAF – and he will always be grateful for being taught to type instead of learning to fly a Hawker Hunter! He has written over fifty books of realistic fiction for young people – from picture books to teenage novels – and has been shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal three times.

His BBC TV serial
Dodgem
won a Royal Television Society award for the best children's entertainment of its year. He is a popular visitor to schools, and enthuses about reading and writing at meetings all over the UK. His first book for Frances Lincoln was
Angel Boy,
followed by
Ronnie's War
.

Bernard lives in south London, only a street or two away from where he was born.