Please note that whilst partially auto-biographical these stories are subject to artistic licence and any characters that bare description to real-life people are simply an accident - Not really, its all true... or is it?
Turning 17
When you’re growing up away from your parents there are many things you hope never happen to you. When you are growing up away from your parents in an odd country like Cyprus there are many things that must never happen to you, and it’s funny how plans borne of the greatest ideas can lead to, in hindsight, ones that are flawed at best. Andrei Brechkovsky, a close friend of mine, was celebrating his 17th birthday. Its a cliché to say the Russians like a drink but Mr Brechkovsky liked a drink. Two drinks. Thirty. And proposed for this most historic of birthdays, seventeen being the year you are allowed to drive a motorbike and claim your freedom, a 24 hour party in the park Drink-a-thon.
Rachel and I got there fairly early given the time frame, cracked open a beer at one in the afternoon and watched on as the birthday boy dowsed himself in alcohol. We watched him tear the wrapping paper off of booze and cigarettes, stationary and an elephant dung paper weight. Standard gifts you give each other when you’re a teenager. We sang and danced and learned all about Russian folk music.
Drinking so heavily in the middle of the day is something that most adults tend to avoid. And that’s because they know something teenagers don’t. It’s almost a right of passage on the fateful day that you learn your lesson. Not only can your liver not process alcohol as quickly so you get drunker, but beer, famous for not taking its time to travel through the human body, hurries itself along faster in the daytime. Frantically we looked for a toilet but the only ones in the park were closed. So in one moment of complete desperation we picked our trees. It was only Rachel’s luck that she picked the perfect cover from the main path. A large towering tree, hollow in the middle. She emerged relived and proud only to discover that behind the ideal tree of her choice was a house and as luck would have it the occupants were home. Something that to this day I have never let her forget.
As it got darker the evening carried on and more people came to wish our dear friend the happiest of birthdays. A group of us sat down in a circle to prepare for the drinking games I had brought along. Jake spent the most ridiculously lengthy time slaughtering a half a dozen lemons and wasting most of them in the process, deeming them not up to his bar tending standards. We opened a bottle of tequila I had been saving for such an occasion. Brought from Chile by a friend of my father’s, it was a rare tequila, laced with chillies. Several shots in I wandered aimlessly over to the wall of the locked amphitheatre in the park and stared over through some fencing, like you do. It took me sometime to focus but I could see blue lights. Like a messenger in distress I circulated through the crowd warning them that I had seen moving lights. No one listened. In all fairness my credibility was lacking. Convinced that I was drunk and hallucinating everyone went on enjoying the party. So I assumed everything must have been fine and continued doing my thing.
I don’t know quite how much time had passed, or how the others had finally been alerted to the news but, ever so subtlety, a party goer approached our group. We were lying on our backs watching the stars blur into each other across the sky. “Run.” No particular tone. No emotion. No panic. Just “Run.”
Christina, Rachel and myself followed Mark thinking he would clue us in to what was going on, certain that a man so calm must know what he’s doing. Jake, who in a fit of panic completely forgot about his girlfriend Christina, took off in the opposite direction with one of Andrei’s other friends, Ivan. In my drunken panic, my underage mind thought of nothing but reliving myself of any evidence that we had been drinking. It hadn’t occurred to me that I smelt like an American sorority girl on spring break. I threw the tequila into the bushes but pushed the drinking games to the bottom of my bag, unable to part with them. We ran as quickly as we could through the park towards the main road. Half way along we stopped to regroup. Some of the others had caught up and Christina had gotten a broken phone call from Jake. Out of the dark green grass we saw a figure in the distance. We turned off our torches and stood frozen.
When you’re 16 years old and you think your going to be arrested the first thing that comes to mind is how your parents will react. When you’re 16 years old, about to be arrested and your parents are in another country, you wonder how your guardian grandparents will react. It’s hard to say how two Cypriots in their early 80’s with specific ideas about how a young lady should present herself, would react to their 16 year old granddaughter being arrested at 10:30 in the evening for drinking in a public park. They were going to kill me. And then they were going to call my father. And then I’d be on the first plane back to England. And then he would kill me. Shaking in my flip flops, my mind searched for answers. I needed a game plan. There were so many choices. Should I tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Should I lie? Would I get caught lying? If I got caught lying would it make the situation worse? If I told the truth would I be ridiculed by my peers for not at least trying to lie? Great! Panic and peer pressure. What a wonderful combination. I could feel my brain dancing the same way my bladder had been dancing that afternoon.
The figure in the distance got closer. It turned out to be Jake. Huffing and puffing with a huge grin on his face he emerged from the darkness and I had never been happier to see his face. The story he told was shocking. He had seen things you couldn’t imagine. In the wilderness he learnt of the harsh world we were living in and he had emerged a free man and more enlightened than he could have ever wished to be. Well, sort of, I exaggerate. He managed to get away. Ivan and him had been stopped and searched. Once they had realised that Jake was in fact Cypriot they became more interested in the other young lad. They barely looked into his bag but decided to take Ivan in for questioning. Jake saw an opportunity and snuck off.
As angry as we were about the whole situation it seemed like the police were moving in a different direction and nothing was going to happen to us that night. We weren’t going to stick around and find out. We sat in the bakery outside the park and watched the squad cars that had been looking for us drive home to their bitter, ignored wives.
Andrei’s night turned out to be quite different. He returned to the scene of the party to cover up his bike. Still with no actual licence or insurance he couldn’t afford to have it identified. On his way back the police stopped him and he was taken in as well. In his bag the police discovered some pills. Andrei suffers from hay fever as well as several other allergies. But the police kept them just in case. He had birthday presents on him too. A carton of cigarettes. The police kept them too. He was underage and they’d fetch a pretty buck at the next police auction, if the officers didn’t smoke them themselves. And a suspicious brown clump of soil and hay preserved in a bulb of thick glass. The arresting officer turned his harsh eyes towards the boy and asked brutally, “What is this?” And Andrei, truthfully and honestly turned to the man who had ruined his birthday and replied, “Shit. It’s shit.” For reasons that cannot be explained they kept the shit and all.
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