A.R. Cochrane

nero

In the back of our school diaries was a list of common Greek phrases that none of us bothered to learn.

 Each morning and afternoon, the school bus driver — stooped back, ears the size of saucers — hunched over the steering wheel with an implacable resolve. From behind him, we swore and screamed and tossed empty plastic water bottles at his windshield because we liked to watch him lose his mind. The conductor — sunglasses, ruby coiffe, receding gums — stalked up the aisle, brandishing the bottles at us. In her broken English she screamed, Why you do thees? Why you do thees?

Ranged along the hill to the right of the road were Turkish sentry posts. Tumbledown wooden huts every fifty yards, rifles cocked against the sides of them like forgotten cigarettes.

Once, one of the soldiers picked up his rifle and trained it on us as though about to shoot. We believed that if he fired we would be unharmed. The windows of the bus would shatter dramatically and we’d have a story to tell in the playground. We were actors in a country torn at the waist by war, playing our part. Like all children — like all actors — we were inviolable, fundamentally unaffected by the story being told around us.

Any area of scrubland desiccated by the sun, however small or large, we called the bondoo — an interconnected ocean of desert, broken up temporarily by human settlements. Clumps of shrubbery offered scant shade for snakes and lizards, hanks of yellowed bunchgrass shivered with crickets. Here and there, a stand of hardy trees and bushes good for den building. We used to kick the writhing heaps of poisonous caterpillars, to risk having one cling to the edges of our socks or to the hairs on our shins, for the sport of watching their furry bodies explode before us. We dared one another to walk ten or twenty paces barefoot. Afterwards, the blood. The black spurs dug into the soles of our feet, skin blistered from the heat.

It was Maya, from the US, who first brandished the rumour like it was news. Three escapees from a prison in the north. Two shot and killed at the border where they tried to cross. The third, wounded but alive, made it across and was still on the loose. It could have been utterly fabricated, this outlandish tale, but suddenly the bondoo in the pitch dark of night was like a blank sheet of paper. We imagined, in the black expanse between our military estate and the local village, the wink of a sheltered fire among the trees, the possibility of a plot-twist etched as if with a bright pen, a flickering scribble of ink.

*

Our football matches with local Cypriot teams inevitably descended into fistfights. Someone getting up from making a rough tackle got punched in the head from behind. The attacker had his shirt pulled in retaliation until he was on the ground shielding himself from stamping metal studs. The players from each team piling in like a fight in a bar in a Western film.

The coaches left us to it.

The next day on the bus to school we compared bruises, recounted the events with a certain amount of poetic licence. 

* 

It might have been that he was merely some homeless man. Or a wandering alcoholic who couldn’t remember his way back. It might have been that Maya’s story of the fugitive prisoner came after we had already told her about this man we found, and that my mind has in retrospect transposed the two to foist some order on the events, to make it all make sense.

He was asleep on his side. We’d made the den a week before and then forgotten about it. When we returned, it was still standing in a lee on the bondoo where the land fell away slightly. Some old broken bits of fencing wedged into the dirt on the slant, a slender tree as backbone. For a roof, branches and hanks of dried leaves tied together with twine filched from someone’s dad’s garage.

He was stirring, waking up and half-rising as we ducked in through the narrow opening. His straggly beard was long on the chin, sparse across the sides of the jaw. His lips were cracked and bleeding, t-shirt torn, his hair gritty and stuck up in the back. He was young. Not as young as us, but not like our parents. 

We took turns looking in at him.

Nero, he said. Nero, nero.

One of us had a Stinger in our pocket, tutti-frutti with a sour fizz in the centre. We chucked it in for him but he kept saying this nero.

We tried to indicate that we’d be back. In someone’s house we checked the school diary. We learned Kalimera and Ti kanis and S’efharisto. Nothing about nero. Just before we left the house, someone suggested we take him a few things. Some chocolate and fruit, a bottle of water.

When we gave it to him in an old plastic bag, he rooted around inside and held the bottle up, said, Nero nero, and tore the lid off. We tried our new Greek words on him but he looked at us, confused.

Turkish, then. Or else just muzzy with dehydration.

We observed him from a distance, checking for a wound. We imagined a portion of his shirt, in the back, caked with dried blood. A blackened stain around the crotch, a limp. Anything.

The next morning, we went back as soon as our parents allowed us out. He was gone. The detritus of the things we’d given him — apple core, empty crisp and chocolate packets, the empty bottle of nero with a cricket sealed inside, suffocated — were piled in a corner. In the addled dust the outline of his huddled form.

When we told her about it, Maya said, That’s called harbouring a fugitive. Don’t you know that’s a felony? Don’t you realise if I tell my dad — who’s an Air Vice-Marshal — what you’ve done, then he could have your dads kicked out of the RAF?

*

The next morning was a Monday. On the bus to school, we stuck our fingers up at the Turkish soldiers and threw bottles at the Greek driver’s windscreen. The conductor stood up and glared, chewing her Nicorette. Why you do thees? she demanded, the fingertips of both hands pursed together and held before her — desperate epiclesis. Why you do thees?

To be honest, we didn’t know. We still don’t.  

A. R. Cochrane lives on the south coast of England. He has previous work placed at The Fiction Desk, Litro, Words for the Wild and Everyday Fiction among others. He is seeking representation for a short story collection about trauma, deformity and the consolation of the creative act.  

A.R. Cochrane wrote the following about ‘Nero’:

I was a military kid, and spent part of my childhood living in Cyprus, where the tensions between north and south were palpable in day-to-day life. The story offers an outsider’s view, for that is what we were, and concerns itself with how acts of cruelty can sometimes give way to an intuitive humanity which transcends sociopolitical struggle. However, being sceptical of happy endings — their often reductive logic — this is not where the story ends. For is it not true that our more lucid moments in life are merely brief islands, waterlocked by a seething sea of confusion, unconscious iniquity, and misplaced allegiances?