Freefall 2009, day 6

the last day's work, also part of the bigger story I started. Not sure what I'm going to use in the end, it all feels clunky right now but I'm glad I've got 'something' to work on…




We are playing WW2 and I let Anna win this time. I’m collecting Airfix soldiers. I collect other things too. Mummy gave me grandad’s stamps and I’ve got a penny black. I think it’s a penny black I don’t have my book here. I couldn’t bring it because it’s too heavy. Mummy made me choose between the book and my soldier collection. I’ve got 8 Japanese Infantry, 4 British commandoes 3 British paratroopers and 1 Russian. He’s really ace. He’s in the infantry. He shoots from the hip. I also have a German armoured car. I’ve still got to paint the Japs and they don’t really all go together but I make up my own battles. Anna likes to play and mostly doesn’t mind losing. It’s really boring here but I’ve got a lilo and sometimes I pretend it’s a U Boat. Sometimes I pretend it’s just a plane and I’m flying back home. We’ve got hours and hours before supper. They eat everything here even fish guts. Michaelis is meeting me at the souvlaki shop before we go to the cave. The souvlaki’s are really good. We have to bring Anna because Mummy is asleep for the whole day. She sleeps a lot. I asked her if she’s got encephalitis lethargica. That means sleeping sickness and brain disease at the same time. Mummy also gets lots of headaches and takes pills for those that the doctor at the hospital gave her. I had a headache yesterday and I wanted a pill but she wouldn’t let me have one she said they were only for adults. She put a wet cloth on my head instead and fell asleep on my bed. The cloth smelled a bit. I can hold my breath for one minute and twenty seconds. The world record is eight minutes. Maybe it’s more now I don’t know. I asked Michaelis but he didn’t know. I’m teaching him English and he’s really good actually.

Anna wants to play by the beach. I don’t have my lilo with me it’s still in the house but it’s too far we’ll be late for souvlaki. Maybe I’ll have two. I’m really hungry and Michaelis said it’s a long way to the cave. He’s bringing his motorbike. I’ve never been on a motorbike so it’s going to be really good. I tell Anna to hurry up or we’ll be late. She’s always dawdling. Mummy hates it when she does that because sometimes she gets lost. Once we couldn’t find her for hours. Well maybe it was only an hour but it felt like hours and my feet got really sore going up and down the street. It’s very hilly here and the streets are made of stones like they did in Roman times so if you don’t wear really good shoes your feet hurt. I’ve got my tennis shoes on. Anna was only on the beach all the time, beside one of the fishing boats that had a big hole in the side like an explosion happened. She was playing with the doll she made out of mummy’s socks. One of the fishermen found her and he came and got me because she wouldn’t go with him. He kept stroking her hair and I know she doesn’t like that but they all do it you just have to pretend it’s okay. I don’t mind mostly. Even Michaelis did it to me once. I told him only girls did that so he stopped. But I was lying lots of people do it to me too men too. I asked Mummy to give me a crew cut but she just said Later maybe and that usually means never because she forgets. It’s too late to go to the beach now. It takes ten and a half minutes to walk to the Souvlaki shop. That’s the average time. Sometimes it takes 14 minutes and I once did it in 6 and ¾ minutes but that’s because Anna wasn’t with me. I’ve got a Timex that Daddy gave me and it’s waterproof. I’ve tested it in the bath but not the sea yet.

When we get to the shop Michaelis is already there. He’s got his motorbike with him but it’s not a real motorbike it’s a scooter with a truck on the back. It’s a MEBEA and I don’t know what that means but it has a Zundapp engine. That’s a German engine. The Germans make the best engines. I thought he’d have a BMW R75 because I saw one in the garage behind the meat shop. It was under a piece of plastic and I wanted to have a proper look  but the butcher said Oxi which means no. You think Neh means no but it doesn’t it means yes. And you nod your head the opposite way from us. Up and down means yes and side to side means no. Michaelis is teaching me Greek swear words. Asto thialo means go to the devil. Panayeermou means my mother and panayeersoo means your mother. I don’t know why that’s a swear word. I put them together so it made Panayeersou asto thialo but Michaelis didn’t think it was funny. There’s also Malaka which I’m not to say out loud, because it’s the baddest swearword you can say to someone except for showing them the palm of your hand flat with the fingers out. That means five of your eyes out. Michaelis didn’t know the English word for Malaka so I looked it up in Mummy’s phrasebook but they didn’t have it either so I asked Stavros who owns the restaurant we always go to because he speaks lots of English. He looked cross when I asked him but he told me anyway. It means your mother has sex with men she isn’t married to and has a baby.


I’m disappointed about the motorbike but I don’t say anything. I ask Michaelis how fast it goes and he just says We go fast fast. You can sit three in a row on the seat if you want to but Michaelis said I had to sit in the truck part and hold onto Anna. Then Anna started to cry when we started going because her souvlaki fell out and we had to stop and get her another one and wait for her to eat it before we went. Then Michaelis told her to sit next to him but she wouldn’t so I did. I was worried my torch would fall out of my pocket so I have it to him because his pockets are bigger. It’s a really ace torch. Michaelis gave it to me when we first met. I had one at home but I couldn’t bring it either. It was much smaller than the one Michaelis gave me so I don’t mind anymore. This one is really strong. Anna thinks the Green Slime lives under her bed and I use the torch to show her that there isn’t anything there just her box of crayons and shoes and stuff. She doesn’t believe me. I also use it at night to read my Asterix comics and often I point it out the window. I can shine it right to the sea. I pretend I am a lighthouse. Sometimes when Mummy and Anna are in bed I check for intruders. I found one once but Mummy got angry and said he was just a friend and that I shouldn’t be up at night scaring her. She told me I had to put the torch in the kitchen when I went to bed so I wouldn’t be tempted to use it to read because reading with my torch ruins my eyes. I didn’t say I would do it, I didn’t even nod my head and she forgot so I still do it. I’m careful not to lie anymore. I used to do it a lot. Daddy said I mustn’t lie because it hurts people like you are poking them with an invisible knife. I asked him what kind of knife was it a Bowie or just a penknife but he said, that’s not funny. I wasn’t meaning it to be funny. He said even if you lie a small bit it can grow into a disaster like a big war or worse, like the Atom Bomb. He showed me a picture of what the Atom bomb did. It’s a bit like the Green slime only worse. It’s called Gamma Radiation and it kills you really slowly and really painfully. It’s much worse than being tortured by the Chinese with bamboo. They tie you up in a hammock and grow bamboo underneath and it grows really fast and they sharpen the points so they stick right into you until you confess everything. They also drop water between your eyes and that makes you go mad really quickly.

The fastest we go is 22 miles per hour and that’s really slow and it’s really bumpy and the road is windey like the ones in Wales near my school. I’m not going there anymore not since the car crash. Mummy says she’ll take me next term but she always says that and I’ve missed two terms already.  It’s not a Welsh school it’s an English school. I don’t mind not going really. The only subject I miss is chemistry. Mummy says she’ll buy me a microscope for my birthday but that already happened so I’ll have to wait a whole year. I’ve looked in all the shops and they don’t have anything interesting just fruit and stuff. Stavros says I can get one in Athens but Mummy says we aren’t going to Athens for a while not until she’s better. There’s a flea market there that has everything. 

Michaelis wants Anna to have the torch because he says it could fall out of his pocket when he goes over a bump. I don’t want her to hold it because she’ll forget and then it will roll around and break. The lightbulbs are really easy to break because the wire is very thin. It’s called a filament. Neon lights have Krypton gas in them. It’s not the same thing as where Superman came from but it’s the same word. Krypton exploded in a nuclear chain reaction. When I grow up I’m going to be a nuclear physicist. I won’t make bombs I don’t think.

I tell Michaelis I’ll hold the torch. I can hold onto the seat with my other hand to stop me falling off. He says indaxi which means okay and then he says oxi and some more greek I don’t understand but Anna does. I pretend I knew what he said all along but Anna understands more than me most of the time. But I speak it better. She doesn’t speak it at all to people even though she can because I’ve heard her talk to her doll in Greek. Michaelis says I have to sit really close to him and that will hold the torch in his pocket so long as I put my hand in there as well.

We get to a big crumbly building Michaelis says is a monastery where the monks live. He goes off to find a monk because Anna is thirsty and we didn’t bring any water. He’s gone a long time and it’s very hot so we go inside where it’s cooler and it’s very quiet and smells like beeswax. I like it there it’s a bit like being in a castle. I pretend I’m Sir lancelot and Anna is Sir Galahad. I tell her he’s Sir Lancelot’s son and he’s a bastard and she doesn’t want to be him which is stupid because King Arthur said Sir Galahad was the best knight in the whole world. I tell her she can be Guinevere in the next game but then we have to stop playing because Michaelis comes back with a bottle of water and tells us we can’t come inside because girls aren’t allowed. The bottle doesn’t hold much and we drink it all. It tastes funny like it’s come out of a lake or something. You can’t do that in South Africa because there’s bilharzia. I ask Michaelis if there’s bilharzia in Crete but he doesn’t know what bliharzia is. I make choking sounds and lie on the floor and kick my in the air so he knows it’s poison. He says the Monks water is special water because the monks bless everything. Anna wants to be blessed and she gets grumpy when Michaelis says he’ll bless her because the monks can’t. Then he tells her about the cave and she stops whining. I haven’t said anything about the cave to her because Michaelis said it was a secret, just like the Johnny Anna found on the beach. It hadn’t been opened and she thought it was a sweetie but it wasn’t. Michaelis wouldn’t let her see and bought her a chocolate later. Greek chocolate isn’t as good as Cadburys. It’s all grainy and sticks to the roof of your mouth. I’d only seen a Johnny once before at school. Harry showed it to us and tried to put it on but it was too big and just looked stupid like an elephant’s willy hanging down. He wanted me to put it on him but I didn’t. He makes the younger boys rub him but I’m not a younger boy I’m two months older even though I’m a bit shorter than he is. Not a lot maybe only two inches. Mummy says some boys take longer to grow tall and she’s sure I’ll be as tall as Daddy and was really tall he was six feet and two and a half inches. At night I tuck my feet under the bed frame at the end and make myself longer by pulling on the bed head. I heard about a boy who did this every night and he grew four inches taller in two months. Sometimes it hurts when I do it but I hold my breath and count at the same time. Maybe I’ll grow as taller than Daddy and also win the world record for holding your breath.

I don’t really believe that Jesus was born in the cave. Mummy says Jesus wasn’t the son of God because God doesn’t exist. mummy is an Athiest and so was Daddy. I’m an athiest too but I have to say prayers and things at school and I’m in the choir because I can still sing. I know God doesn’t exist because I’ve asked him lots of things and nothing happened. I asked him to make my voice deep like Harold’s is already. I asked God to make Daddy come back but I know that wont happen because he’s dead and when you are dead you don’t come back not even as an angel or a ghost because I don’t believe in them either. You go back into the earth and all your cells dissolve and your bones might become a fossil.  I hoped there might be fossils in the cave.

After the Monastery we follow the sign post to the gorge. I didn’t know there was a gorge but Michaelis said we didn’t have time to go there too. He had already told me the path was dangerous and I must go first because he had to go behind to make sure Anna didn’t get lost or fall off or anything. I had my torch just in case it got dark and it did a bit because there were lots of big trees in the beginning. Anna dawdles  so I walk really fast because I’m bored now and want to get to the cave. Michaelis said there was a secret in the cave and he wouldn’t tell me what it was. I was sure it was a fossil or cave paintings. I’ve seen some of those already when I was very little so I don’t really remember. It was in the Drakensburg before Anna was born but they were done by Bushmen. I have a book of them at home too. It’s called The Lost World of the Kalahari. The Bushmen often live in caves. Michaelis said they don’t have bushmen in Crete but they used to have Gods and Godesses and things and heroes. I like it when he tells me about the heroes especially Theseus who was really strong. He killed the minotaur which is a bull with a mans body and really huge and terrifying, much worse than the Green Slime. The path to the cave is quite windey and crooked and I pretend I’m Theseus creeping towards the minotaur who lives inside the cave. I pretend my torch is my sword and I will slice his throat and cut out his eyes and rescue Ariadne who was clever even though she’s just a girl.

Re: Freefall 2009, day 6

I stopped outside the cave to let Anna and Michaelis catch up. There was a ruined church there. There are lots of ruins here some are very old. We went to the Akropolis once and I took a bit of ruined pillar when no one was looking but I felt bad and put it back. It was a doric pillar or maybe one of the other ones. We only just started Latin and we only do Greek next year but I can ask Mr. Thornby which one it was. He knows Latin and Greek and History. If I can’t be a nuclear physicist when I grow up I might be an archaeologist. I found a bit of the wall on the ground and put it in my pocket. It wasn’t very big, about as big as a conker. I didn’t feel bad because this was just an old church and not as old as the Parthenon. I wanted to go in but it was very dark and I didn’t want Anna to be afraid. Sometimes she has nightmares. She didn’t used to. I think it’s because of the Green Slime film or maybe it started before that. She says she saw a monster in the night with mummy but she makes things up all the time like mermaids and things. She really thinks she sees them and even religious things too. She told me Jesus mother was playing with her that time she got lost. Mummy says she doesn’t know where Anna gets her ideas from but I tell her she mustn’t worry because she’s only little and when she gets older she will stop making things up.

Michaelis got Anna to stop dawdling and she ran the last bit. Inside it was so dark it was like you were walking into the outer space like the exosphere or the thermosphere. There are electrons in a bunch called hydrogen plasma and also dark matter and dark energy. Those are two different things.

When we were inside I turned on my torch. I made monster sounds and shone it in my mouth. Michaelis said I shouldn’t do that because it scared Anna but it doesn’t really.  I was mad at Michaelis for saying that and then he wanted to hold the torch but I pretended I didn’t understand and went off to inspect the walls for fossils and cave paintings but I couldn’t find any. You didn’t really need a torch because after a while your eyes get used to the dark. I couldn’t see any paintings or fossils but I expect it was very old rock, Michaelis followed me and said the cave was polu palyo which means very old. He said that people prayed to a goddess inside and sometimes they did sacrifices even of people. That’s what I think he said sometimes I don’t understand everything. He mixes Greek words with English ones and he didn’t know the world for sacrifice so he acted that part out. Anna told him to stop it but it was interesting so I told her to just close her eyes. I knew they only did human sacrifice hundreds of years ago because people didn’t do that anymore other than in Africa sometimes which they call muti killing. Muti means tree in Zulu but it really means medicine and they make you eat tea made out of treebark and other stuff.
If Jesus was born in the cave I think it must have happened a long time before he was born and that was only nine hundred and sixty eight years ago. A bit more maybe because we don’t know exactly when Jesus was born, we just pretend it was on Christmas day. After that they called all the years AD. Before that they were called BC. Michaelis said the goddess in the cave was called Artemis and she liked to shoot with a bow and arrow. Michaelis said she was better at shooting than a boy. Anna opened her eyes when he said this and pinched me like we do, not hard but just to let each other know if something is important like when mummy is talking and we think it’s about Daddy. I let her hand go because it hurt but only a bit but then Michaelis stopped talking and I got bored just standing there. It was cold like standing in a refrigerator but a bit warmer and then I walked slowly around the sides of the cave with my hand on the walls just in case I’d missed a fossil. I realised I was probably standing on them so I got down on the floor and turned on my torch to make sure I would find one.

I bumped right into the bear but I wasn’t scared. The bear isn’t a bear it’s a really big stalagmite and doesn’t really look like a bear. It looked a bit like a person and it was a bit glowy. Stalagmites are speleothems but I prefer stalagtites which are also speleothems. Mummy told me how to remember which ones are stalagmites and which ones are stalactites. The stalagmites try to grow up with all their might and the stalactites hold on to the roof really tight. I knew that already. Mummy sometimes talks to me like she’s talking to Anna as if I were only seven. She didn’t used to do that. Once she even made a mistake and called me Daddy’s name which is Frank. She started to cry when she did that and took one of her pills.

There weren’t any fossils on the bear just drippy shapes and things. I found a really small shaped bump on the ground behind it. It was going to be another stalagmite but only in hundreds of years time. I also found a piece of rock quite big. I could only just pick it up. It almost looked like it was carved because it wasn’t round it was oblong. Maybe it was used for sacrificing animals or people on but I couldn’t see any blood. I pretended my torch was a spectroscope and I measured how old it was. It’s very complicated because you have to see how fast electrons spin and they are very small, much smaller even than an atom. I heard Michaelis cough so I said his name out loud and it echoed a bit. I shone my torch all over the cave and I couldn’t see him or Anna but there were places that were darker like tunnels. I wondered if the Greeks hid here from the Germans but it would be easy to find them because the dark places didn’t go far I already checked. I thought maybe Michaelis and Anna had gone outside but then I heard Anna singing. She does that a lot. It’s not really a song it’s just humming like when she has a nightmare. I shone the torch where the sound came from and it was weird because Anna looked like the bear stalagmite, she was a bit glowy and her dress was all scrunched up and I thought I saw a big starfish on her panties. I stood up too quickly and bumped my head into a bit of the cave roof. It hurt and I dropped the torch and it made a horrible clunk. I couldn’t see properly because I had been using it too much. I knelt down but I couldn’t see anything at all I could only hear Anna humming. I said stop doing that but she didn’t listen just carried on. I waited until my eyes could see in the dark. You can’t see properly when you do that but it’s like being Indians, you make your whole body really sensitive so you can feel everything even other people when they are far away. That’s when I found the torch but it wouldn’t turn on. I felt really bad because Michaelis had given it to me as a present and now I’d broken it. That’s when Anna started crying. I could see better now and Michaelis was giving her a hug to make her stop crying but I knew it wouldn’t work she’d just carry on and on unless I hold her so that’s what I did. She fell a bit when I put my arms around her and I almost fell too but Michaelis stopped us and he was holding us both together, he kept saying ena indaxi ena indaxi which mean’s its alright its alright. He said other things too but I didn’t understand all of it. I could feel his heart beating and it was beating really loudly like he had been running. I tried to push him away because I knew Anna wouldn’t stop crying unless it was just me but Michaelis is bigger and quite strong. He’s nearly seven years older than I am but I’m going to be taller when I’m that old. I had to tell him about the torch so he would go away and be angry all by himself so he wouldn’t hit us but he wasn’t angry he just said then boresi which means it doesn’t matter. He sounded odd like he was crying but when I talked it sounded odd too like I was talking underwater in the bath. After a while he stopped holding us and stood up and went somewhere else so I just sat there with Anna so she’d be alright in a bit which she was eventually.  I saw him, she whispered and I asked her who she meant and she said Jesus and then she said Jesus’ mummy touched her and that it was lovely and that Jesus mummy said Daddy was in heaven but she’s always making things up so I told her not to be stupid it she had probably just bumped into the stalagmite.