‘You do not need me to be there, like you do not need the papers to hold,’ Kyriaki insisted.
‘If you say you will come, I will not hold the papers,’ he bargained.
‘This sounds like blackmail,’ Kyriaki said. ‘Have we not had enough of that kind of behaviour in this family?’
Kostas said no more, took another bite of the cake. He wasn’t trying to blackmail his grandmother and she knew that too. As good as she had always been at giving advice, she was also very bad at taking her own. The only sound in the treehouse now was the ticking of the clock above the stove that somehow always showed five forty-five.
‘I will think about it,’ Kyriaki said abruptly.
Kostas smiled.
‘Do not look like that,’ she ordered him. ‘I did not say I would come. I said I would think about it.’
‘I know,’ Kostas answered.
‘And now you must think about learning those words and… what will you wear? You need to give the best impression.’ She got down from the stool and walked to an old trunk that was shoe-horned into a corner of the space. ‘I think I have something of your grandfather’s in here.’
‘What?’ Kostas exclaimed, almost dropping his plate. ‘I’m not going to wear any clothes my grandfather wore.’
‘You need to look like a gentleman,’ Kyriaki continued. ‘Your grandfather always looked like a gentleman.’ She dipped half her body into the confines of the trunk.
Leventi mou. He remembered his grandmother calling his grandfather that. It meant my brave, honourable, handsome man. Kostas was sure it was a title not worthy of him.
‘My grandfather didn’t only look like a gentleman,’ Kostas said. ‘He acted like one. He was the person I should have looked to as a role model.’
Kyriaki appeared back out of the trunk. ‘Ah, Konstantino, if only he had more time, no? I often wonder, if he had, that things might have turned out differently with your father.’ She seemed to look into the mid-distance. ‘But then I think, no. It would have changed nothing. And I am glad that my Spiro did not get to see the chaos his son brought to everything in the end.’ She smiled then. ‘But I am sad he did not see you play for your country.’ She pulled something from the trunk. ‘How about this!’
‘Oh my God,’ Kostas remarked as he got to his feet and stared at the Greek basketball jersey from long ago. It was faded, yet still all the nylon-shiny of the era. ‘What is that?’
‘You do not remember your grandfather wearing it?’
‘When he was ten? It is so small!’
Kyriaki laughed. ‘I do not remember it being so small and I think the moths had got to some of it. But here is what I am looking for. Hold the vest.’
Kostas held the fabric and he watched his grandmother unpinning something from the very front of it. Once she was done she held the badge in the flat of her hand. The metal symbol. The eagle wings. The name. Petsas.
‘I have seen something exactly like this,’ Kostas said, running a finger over the design.
‘You have?’ Kyriaki said, sounding surprised.
‘I did not know that these were made with my name on.’
‘As far as I know there are only two,’ Kyriaki told him. ‘Giorgos, the blacksmith, made them for your grandfather. To wear when they watched the games. One for him and one for your father.’ She sighed. ‘I suspect your father sold his long ago.’
Kostas swallowed. ‘I do not think he did.’ He knew exactly where it was. Placed in Corfu Town at his statue.
‘Well, it does not matter.’ She took the badge and pinned it to the front of Kostas’s top. ‘This is what you should wear at the meeting. For good luck.’
He looked down at his chest, his grandfather’s badge stuck there, and was overwhelmed with a feeling of hopeful release.
‘Thank you,Yiayia.’
‘Dhen enai tipota.’
Except, to him, it wasn’t nothing. It was just about everything.
67
