Chapter 66
THE TREEHOUSE, KERASIA
‘Do you need the paper to read from?’ Kyriaki asked, licking cake from her fingers as she finished the slice on the plate she was holding.
It was the following day and Kostas had got up early, filled with adrenaline and in none of the positive ways.
Today things would change and he suspected, by the end of it, things would most likely change for the worse.
But you had to hit rock bottom before you could begin to grow in a better way, right?
‘I do not know,’ Kostas answered. ‘I almost know everything by heart but holding the paper, it gives me something to do.’
‘But it also shows exactly how much you are shaking,’ Kyriaki said.
‘Great!’ Kostas said, thumping down into a little chair and throwing his notes to the small table.
‘Konstantino,’ Kyriaki said. ‘Why do you act like a child having a tantrum? It is good to have nerves. It is a big thing you are doing, going into a room full of people who will all immediately look at you with dark dangerous eyes and hatred in their hearts.’
‘Is that supposed to help my nerves or make things worse?’ he asked, sighing. ‘I should have got Stathis to write it before he left.’
Stathis had flown back to Athens late last night after they had had a hastily arranged meeting in Corfu Town. His advisor now had work to do in the Greek capital, shaping Kostas’s next venture and researching how it all might work in practice.
‘You do not need anyone else to write it,’ Kyriaki told him. ‘These words, they must come from you. If they don’t, if they are not authentic, then no one will trust what you tell them, remember?’
‘I don’t know if I deserve to have them trusting what I tell them,’ Kostas said.
‘And that is a defeatist attitude that has no place in this moment of epiphany.’ She paused, then: ‘Have you spoken to Faye?’
He shook his head. ‘No.’
‘Good,’ Kyriaki said. ‘Because she must hear this first along with everyone else. Then she will know that you are taking this on the chin, that you are being truthful in every regard.’
He nodded. ‘Honesty.’
‘Here, have some cake,’ Kyriaki said, leaning forward on her stool and passing him a plate.
‘Did you make this?’ Kostas asked her.
‘Are you crazy? I can cook everything except cakes! And I have no need. My friend, Makis, makes one every single week, leaves it in the basket at the bottom and it comes up. It is a perfect arrangement.’
He bit into the sponge and looked over at his grandmother. ‘Will you come?’
‘What?’
‘To the meeting tonight, at the hotel, will you come?’
‘Oh, Konstantino, I do not know if that is the right thing to do.’
‘Listen, I understand, I’m not asking you to come to support me.
I would like you to be there standing or sitting with everyone else who wants to save the land and the eco-systems. I’m not asking you to come to make excuses for what I tried to do or make excuses for my father…
I just… it would mean a lot to me if you were there. ’
‘I do not know, Konstantino. When I go out, within perhaps thirty minutes I am annoyed by anyone and everyone.’
‘But remember what you told me about solitude not being the same as isolation?’
‘I still agree with my words. I am still choosing solitude.’
‘And you are also isolating.’
‘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.