I pestered my mother for a twenty drachma.
“What do you want it for?” she asked without taking her eyes away from slaughtering onions on the chopping board.
“I just want twenty drachma. You can take it out of next week’s allowance.”
I couldn’t see Lukia, but I could feel that she was sitting on the steps outside waiting for me to return and tell her I’ve got the money. At Niko’s caff they had a Bubble Bobble machine, and we often had cravings for it. We were a great team playing Bubble Bobble, Lukia and I. We had got to level 78 last time, hogged the machine for an hour and a half while some of the other kids were rooting for us and old Nikos was threatening us to quit soon or he would pull the damn plug out. This time, we were sure, we could go all the way to level 100. Only Petros, the baker’s son had got to level 100, but he was one of the older guys, 17 or something. And he had been playing alone. Easier when you play alone.
“Let’s go,” I said as I ran past her. She caught up with me and grabbed me and bit my upper arm, laughing.
“Let’s go beat Bubble Bobble, baby!” she shrieked, red curls bouncing, freckles morphing into microscopic strawberries on her cheekbones, almond lips kissing my face.
She was fourteen. I was thirteen. And it was the last Sunday we’d ever spend together.
***
We were doing well. Our hands worked the direction levers and the big red buttons like they were keys on a baby grand, the plink-plonk of the machine’s melody repeating over and over again as bubbles engulfed monsters before we burst them strategically – sometimes one by one, sometimes timing our jumps on the trapped sprites so that they would all explode together, granting us colourful fireworks that announced bonus points.
“Go up to the green platform. Go. Wait there.”
“Why? Oh ok. Trap three of them and jump, the green one is too fast.”
“The big cake appears up there, go. GO, GO, GO!”
“You gotta burst them quick.”
“They’ll go red first.”
“They go red for just a split second. Burst and climb.”
“Next one is the one with the real narrow corridors.”
“I hate that one.”
“Me, too.”
“You stand back, I go forward, when they start chasing me I blow one bubble, then hide behind you as you blow three. Easy-peasy. Get the cake. Oh. Oh! Oh super!”
“Yea, baby! I’m getting all four!”
“You got all four!”
“Oh my god, get the diamonds, GET THE DIAMONDS!”
Cheers and applause from the other kids erupted, annoying the card-playing adults. “Hey Niko, get those poxy kids out of here. And get that damn machine out of here while you’re at it, will you?”
“Get on with it, kids. Enough’s enough!”
Lukia and I played on, glancing at each other at the end of every level, wiping sweat off, laughing, planning the destruction of the next wave of monsters. When level 100 was complete, the screen flashed and furnished us with congratulations in English we could barely understand.
“How many people do you think have done what we’ve done in the whole wide world,” I asked her as I was walking her home.
“I don’t know,” she said. “A hundred. No. A thousand.”
“Well, that puts us in the top one thousand players in the world.” I spread my arms wide and spun on the tarmac. “We are international, baby!”
She jumped on me and we both fell down, peck-kissing arms and faces and necks and hair, in the shadow of old blocks of flats, on the warm pavement.
***
We left Thessaloniki a week or so later. My father had to work at Athens airport now, that’s where they needed hands. I couldn’t quite understand why it had to be his hands, though. All he did was mop the floors. What difference did it make which floors he mopped?
On our first weekend in the capital, he took me to the football match. I had been begging him for ages to take me see Aris while we were still up north, but he never did. Now we were in this foreign city, and he took me to see Panathinaikos unprompted.
“What did you think of them, then?” he asked as we were walking back.
“Not a bad team,” I replied. “That number 6 is quite good.”
“Rocha.”
“Yea, Rocha. He’s quite good.”
“He’s Chilean. What’s the capital of Chile?”
“San Diego. How did Aris do today?”
“1-0 over Kavala.” I liked the way he only had to put his little radio to his ear for a few seconds every half-hour or so in order to know all the results.
First the smell hit me. Spicy meat burning. My early teenage brain said to my stomach it needed it. “Can we get one of those sausage things?”
“Sure. Wanna call Lukia and say hi from the payphone while I wait in the queue?”
“Really?”
“Yea, go. Here,” he got out a handful of coins from his jeans pocket and thrust it in my hand – “that should be enough for you to tell her about the game.”
“She’ll be glad Aris won.”
“I know. Go.”
I ran towards the booth through the now thinning football crowd, grateful for the unexpected opportunity to talk to her, eager to hear her voice. Her mother sounded happy to hear me. Lukia had gone to the movies with Petros, the baker’s son.
My father stood there, hot dog in hand. Just the one. He probably couldn’t afford one for himself.
“I don’t want it,” I said.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll eat it.”
I walked the rest of the way a few steps ahead of him. I knew the way back. Athens streets weren’t that difficult to navigate. If he thought I was still a kid, he had another thing coming.
In the flat, my mother was ironing his shirts.
