Baby Blue by Pol Koutsakis

Author:Pol Koutsakis [Koutsakis, Pol]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908524928
Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press
Published: 2018-06-01T23:00:00+00:00

17

Sitting in the back seat of a taxi on the way back to Galatsi, I tried to come up with answers: answers for Emma, who would want to know when she’d be able to visit Angelino; answers for Drag about what was going on with the paedophile murders; and answers for myself. Who had Themis Raptas been, and who had Angelino been so scared of that he had taken all those security measures to protect himself? And answers for Maria, about our future. I tried to convince myself that I shouldn’t let this complete inability to come up with anything worry me too much. The first step was to understand the questions. If you understand the questions, the answers inevitably follow. They have to.

The more I listened to homeless people talking, the more convinced I became that taking a young child to live with you up there is not something you’d do out of some romantic notion or other, or some knee-jerk rejection of so-called civilized society or a wish to discover the meaning of life. You wouldn’t even do it if you were desperate and couldn’t find work. You’d only do it to try and escape something. My problem was that the only thing that could possibly explain why Themis Raptas had done what he did was pederasty. We had our suspicions, but not a shred of evidence, and very little chance of finding any.

I arrived at Teri’s at eight. Babis opened the door for me, looking uninterested as ever. To be fair, I think he always looked like that, whoever he was with. It was just that when he was with me, he made a real effort to look even more bored, just to make me feel like an intruder. He wasn’t happy about my relationship with Teri because he couldn’t believe that somebody could be friends with Teri without having an erotic interest in her. In his eyes, she was the ultimate woman, so much so that he, who had never lifted a finger to help anyone in his life, had turned into Teri’s man Friday, helping the unaccompanied minors at the detention centre in Amygdaleza. They worked tirelessly trying to get other charitable organizations on board and to get doctors and psychologists involved, seeing that the state had given up and these children were forever trying to escape from the centre. And most of them would end up in prostitution. Twenty of them had already been transferred from Amygdaleza to the newly painted house on the west side of town, thanks mainly to the efforts of Teri and Babis. Babis visited them regularly to check that things were slowly improving for them. After all, these were children who had seen their parents and siblings die in Syria and Pakistan and were often self-harming or refusing to walk. Teri never visited the children who left. She took care of the ones that were still there, in what was supposed to be a refuge but resembled the worst

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