“Hey, Blondino!!!” She had called him that the day she first met him. The day his bouquet of hair powered up out of the water into the near tropical sunshine of Brno’s Riviera lido. Bereft of palm trees but full of tanning oil aroma, the outdoor pool was an urban sanctuary for the bathers dotted all around its vast vicinity. Light, water and skin all converged into a dazzling Hockney ménagerie. Blondino had been larking about that very first time, playing lawless water polo with a tennis ball and his Czech buddies as rippling shadows bounced off the pristine white concrete of the pool’s perimeter. Three years later he was still the same. Still larking, still diving against gravity, powered upwards by his charisma. Marija loved him immediately.
It was Sunday afternoon at Brno’s grand bowl. In truth, with its tufty green lawn, it was more Seurat’s Paris than the Los Angeles of Hockney. Blondino, his light, rugged beard somehow accentuating his youth, started to this time wade like a speedo-clad Neptune to the water’s edge. He threw the ball up in the air, whooping in Spanish as his wife approached. Their eyes absorbed each other, though his momentarily flicked to the left. “Hey, my sweet, sweet angel…” Marija was Serbian, with mellow skin and the finest hair he had ever caressed, an impressive title given the miles of locks which had passed through and under his fingers.
She set down her things while he stood on the warm grass, luminous hair flirting with the sun. He was the centrepiece of the whole mise-en-scène. He always was, to most people and especially to Marija, who in half a year would bear their first child.
“Check my bag, Luke, please. See if Daddy’s phone is in there.” Magnus had also spent the afternoon at the Riviera and was now driving his four-year-old north on the ring road towards their home in Kraví Hora. He had been in Brno six months now, sent over from Gothenburg to work on a huge IT project with a company recently acquired by his bosses. He had initially baulked at the prospect, knowing little of Moravia beyond the superb wine his colleague had brought back for him following an earlier reconnaissance trip. His apprehension was misplaced. His dry, phlegmatic wryness fitted in very nicely with his team of programmers and testers. They took him to ice hockey matches and fed him Slivovice that his wife, Freja, said made him smell like an oil rig. She was happy, though, working in HR for another multinational. Magnus was happy also and, more important than anything else, so was Luke.
He had asked in Swedish, but Luke agreed in the language of his new country, giggling a little. His Czech was already better than his father’s, despite the in-house lessons Magnus got for free. Luke had started at his kindergarten midway through the year without understanding a word of his classmates’ tongue but was popular and productive. The Ukrainian kids, struggling to learn how to exist again but at least grounded in the contortions of Slavic grammar, all helped him. His parents couldn’t wait for him to arrive but when he did it was a month early and he was in hospital fighting for himself and them on a ventilator for weeks. They were told there was a chance his prematurity could mean disability. They started to read up on it all, read the literature from the doctors, but also look on Google and elsewhere, determined their son’s life would be full of joy regardless. One night as he and Freja had held each other in bed, only ten minutes from the hospital but feeling like they were in another universe to their son, a song popped up in their Youtube suggestions. It was an ode to difference, Scorn not his simplicity, and sung by an Irishman whose voice was so mesmerising they stole his name. Their son, whatever they all faced, would now be Luke.
“No, daddy. It’s not here,” he said. Magnus sighed. He never let that phone out of his sight for a second, but amid the laughter and the watching of Luke splashing in the water with all the other kids, it had just happened. He was fine, a completely healthy young boy but the years spent anticipating an issue to arise made their lives more idyllic still. Magnus thought he had seen a girl from another division at work with some Californian looking guy, but otherwise he was just lost in the love of watching his son play and paddle. “Ok. Just have another little look.” Luke leaned over to the bag again, the bag on the rear right seat.
“I love you, Blondino.” Marija kissed the words into his ear as she leaned back against him, a dozy love enveloping them while the shadows started to capture the grass. She had been in Brno for five years after arriving to study informatics and stayed because there was nowhere better to work in IT than the city she had come to adore. For two years, unbeknown to her, there was a Spanish boy doing a PhD in English Literature in the same building. When she went along to meet a couple of friends that first Sunday she had no idea the vision which emerged from the water and sat down with the group next to them was at her university. He had chided her when she laughed when he said what he was doing, her finding the idea of this Spanish surf dude producing a thesis on Byron’s fascination with a gardener’s skull and the roasting heart of Shelley a little perplexing. She shouldn’t have. For all the alpha bounding, he was a bright, bright boy.
And now here she was, the sun washing the water off his back as they lay together on the grass. They would marry twice, officially in Cadiz and then again in Novi Sad, neither of their huge families wanting to forego the nuptial traditions of their regions. Yet they would stay in Brno. She would continue for her IT firm and he as a professor for international students in due course.
“Hey, Blondino!”. She playfully slapped his arm in mock horror. “I said ‘I love you’, you idiot.” He smiled, wagged his finger at himself and repeated the words. But it was the only time in the fifty years they would be together that she ever doubted him. He was distracted, twitchy almost, gazing over her shoulder into all the colours.. “Blondino? Hey, my little Blondino? What’s wrong?” He wasn’t the only one distracted. A wailing wall of emergency service sirens started to sail over the lido’s walls and turn bathers’ heads towards the reality of the world beyond.
No one knew why the netting had split. The netting which secured the rock face while below it workmen and machines bore a tunnel in the ground so trams from Zaborevsky could carry the people to other people and work and children in Pisárky and beyond and back again.
The netting had never split on so many similar projects but it had split now when a huge rock had tumbled down into and through it. Magnus, having decelerated to ponder whether to go back to the Riviera to look for his phone, was on the opposite side to where it struck his car. Luke, though, was leaning over as far as his child seat would allow and rummaging again, trying to help his Daddy like he always did. It was all over in seconds. A huge, venomous thud, the sound of brakes and tortured rubber. Magnus was already screaming his son’s name before he even looked back. The rear of the car had been spun round and they were facing the oncoming traffic, which had thankfully seen all and slowed. He heard the sound of car doors slamming and rapid, scrambling footsteps approaching. Desperate shrieks of “Sanitka! Policie!” into one mobile phone that was there. He heard everything but all he saw was his son frozen like wax on the back seat, the blood across his severed scalp every bit as glistening as the Riviera water. He screamed his name again and again, reached back to try and hold him and sweep him back up into life.
Only fifteen minutes later he was being hustled away from the operating theatre, still screaming with a voice that came from a hell inside him he thought only existed in Kiev, in Kharkov, in Mariupol. He came face to face with Dr Sanala, another transplanted to Brno from afar. He hailed from the MIddle East but was now the greatest surgeon in Central Europe. His home also knew war but he shared the comforting eyes and build of Želenský, a bull unfazed by the red that often accompanied others’ despair. He placed his huge hand on Magnus’s upper arm and suddenly Luke’s father could breathe properly for the first time in an hour. Dr Sanala leant forward, whispered the promise he had made and kept a hundred times before. Magnus wiped the tears and mucus out of his own lightly ginger beard. He nodded into the shoulder of Dr Sanala, who turned and walked towards the room where his young patient lay waiting with wires again going in and coming out of him as four years before. Oh Christ, thought Magnus. Freja. I have to call Freja. “I need a phone!” he shouted. “Please I need a fucking phone now! Please…just…fucking please…..”
Blondino gently released himself from their clinch, stood up and walked twenty metres over to where the ball had landed. Marija could see something twinkling on the grass as Blondino bent down. As he walked back to their towels he stared at the screen. Three missed calls. Freja. Freja. Freja. He swiped up to unlock it as he stood before his own wife, his hand trembling slightly. “Hey, my Blondino. What’s the matter? It’s not your fault someone left their phone.”
Perhaps it wasn’t, but he knew what had happened. The tennis ball, once just another daub of colour in the grand Pointillist mosaic, had landed somewhere amid the bathers all dotted around the banks of the pool. It was thrown back to his buddies, halfway at least, by the adorable young boy who had picked it up. Five seconds before, however, it had knocked a phone, nestling on top of an expensive, Nordic looking man bag, to the ground. The mobile wasn’t broken, wasn’t cracked or sodden. It was just nestling, secreted amid one of the green tufts. All afternoon he thought the guy, the father of the adorable son whose hair was even more golden than his own, would notice and pick it up. Why didn’t he want to check his phone? The guy just played and played with the kid. Blondino thought to go and tell him but Sofija was laying back against him, the weight of love and their unborn child pinning him down in their own family reverie. Then, suddenly, as her hair again ran under and through his fingers, he turned and the doting father and adorable son were both gone, leaving only a reflection in the grass.
“Call her, Blondino. Call this Freja lady. It’s probably his wife. She will be worried of him. Please call her, Blondino.” He knew he couldn’t. Not because he wouldn’t out of cowardice, but because the screen was locked beyond anything he’d ever seen. He swiped up and it was like entering a military green zone. His photo was taken, his fingerprint logged. He turned to Marija, ready to tell her but then a voice of exquisite melody and plaintive defiance filled the air. The phone was ringing. “See the boy…“, the Irishman sang as the word Freja flashed up on the screen. He wasn’t sure he’d be allowed to answer it but he could.
“Hello, who is this? Magnus? Is that you”, Freja asked, her heart increasingly frenetic.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I am at Riviera pool. It isn’t, er, I think you said Magnus. He left his phone. I’m sorry. I guess…maybe Magnus. He is probably your husband or, I’m sorry, boyfriend maybe. I just picked it up. We will wait for him to see if he comes back.
“Thank you for this,” she replied, the thumping in her chest diminishing slightly. “It’s just he said they’d be back at 5 pm and it’s now nearly six. He never normally lets that phone out of his sight. It’s for work. He will come back if you can stay there. What did you say your name is?”
“Well, er, I guess everyone calls me Blondino. I think maybe I will recognise him. He was with a beautiful boy. I’ll wait for him, no problem.”
“Ok, thank you, Blondino. You are sweet. That’s perfect.”
