Some people come into your life like sunshine. When they leave, suddenly you feel your clothes are all wrong, and there’s a cold ache. It’s like the shiver that sets in after the last swim of the summer, only it can’t be fixed by drying-off with a towel or putting on a warm jumper. 

My boy and I have felt the cold this week. At the end of the summer holidays but before we said hello to the new school year, we said goodbye, ‘yiassou’ to Stathis.  

Stathis first came to our door three years ago. A fellow expatriate recommended him as a home-tutor, to teach my boy Greek. Not classical Greek. We were not that precocious, aged 5 and a bit. Ordinary, everyday kitchen Greek, but better, more structured, than my own half-remembered pidgin version. 

Before we met, he sent me his CV – first degree – masters – teaching experience. Earnestly, he hoped I would find him suitable. Suitable! Vastly over-qualifed. One of many exiles washed to this cold mud-brown port. Flotsam and jetsam of the Greek economy. 

As the German chancellor said she would welcome refugees, washed-up on the beaches of Greece and Italy, her own-money men  cynically whipped-up a storm the effects of which drove thousands of Greeks, into economic exile.  As the human traffic flowed, the profits of usury, masquerading as a salvage operation, also flowed, straight back to the Bundesbank.

Greece’s loss, was, at least for a while, our personal gain. Brown-eyed, brown-skinned and fit from cycling and being young, and working-out. 

I was far too pre-occupied with my own misery, to notice how handsome he was, until another mother squealed at me one day when collecting her son after tea:

“My God, who’s He?”. “Why didn’t you tell me you had an actual Greek God in your kitchen?”.

An actual Greek God. Sadly, not being immortal myself, and a good 20-years older, the thought of attempting to be Aphrodite to this Adonis was exhausting, and a bit gross. Once, or twice,I toyed with the idea of leaning-in to kiss him. The thought lasted as long as it took me to take off the slightly grubby, pink apron I was wearing (a birthday present from a practical-minded friend), and open the door. As I looked at his open, warm, smiling face, the absurdity of treating him as anything other than a teacher and friend came as comfort and relief. 

So each week, I bustled a bit, offered him tea, coffee, fruit, biscuits and when he only-ever took a glass of water, I would tease him pretending to be offended at his refusing my hospitality. 

Week by week he came up with new games and strategies to hook my boy’s attention. Week by week he charmed his way into our lives and taught my boy to speak, read and write words and phrases by stealth. 

They would play football, or battle games. I would hear them running around the house and garden, shrieking “strike”, “wind”, and “fire” in Greek, as they zapped each other with magic powers. I aided the stealth-teaching by leaving ever-greater varieties and colours of fruit at the kitchen table: Pomegranate, red-grapes, green apples, sweet strawberries, orange oranges, sunshine bright lemons. 

About every third question, my boy would answer “baskalitsa, baskalitsa, baskalitsa” “Ladybird, ladybird, ladybird”. The colour of the sky today –  “baskalitsa”. Today you are wearing – “baskalitsa,”. Always with a grin, a pause, and then the right answer. 

But now he’s gone, and taken the sunshine and a masters in something techie, with him to go make his own life. 

My boy was bereft, even before he said goodbye. “Don’t go,” he said, quietly, tugging at his sleeve. Then “Baskalista, baskalitsa, baskalitsa” louder, this time. A binding-spell to tie him to us a little longer, or at least forever.

I saw in this goodbye, the other one, that my boy didn’t say to his father when he left home. My sweet blue-eyed boy said all his goodbyes in this one first big, 8-year-old’s goodbye.

We gave Stathis a small framed print of a ladybird to take home with him. I made him promise to invite us to holiday on his yacht when he becomes a tech zillionaire. 

And then  Stathis (“not staphili/grape”), wheeled his bike out of the hall and rode away. My boy and I held it together just long enough. We closed the door and turned clutching each other and lurched unsteadily to the sofa where I held my boy tightly, as he howled.

We were grief-stricken, which is not an exaggeration.

e.antoniou 2018