Читать книгу Lucky Packet - Trevor Sacks - Страница 4

I’m five or six years old and for twenty minutes I’ve been trawling the three short aisles of the Acropolis in my pyjamas. While Ma waits at the counter, her patience ebbing, I pick up and put down one chocolate bar after another.

‘Can’t I have a lucky packet?’ I ask. From behind his counter Mr Georgiou offers my mother a light.

‘I told you,’ says Ma, ‘anything except a lucky packet.’

Lucky packets are against the law. At least, they are on Sundays in 1979, since they’re considered a form of gambling, and un-Christian. It’s hardly a hanging offence, but my mother would not want Mr Georgiou held responsible.

My hand hovers over the bars of Tex, Chocolate Log and Chomp, then drifts to a pack of tomato-sauce-flavour chips. The choice is like an incubus, the consequences weigh heavy upon me: if I choose badly I’ll spend the rest of the evening – the last before an entire week of school – regretting it.

Sweets don’t interest me. I’ve never developed more than an incidental craving for sugar. Indecision takes root easily in me, but a sweet tooth, no.

A lucky packet offers not only the most reward, with its surprise gift, but a release from the burden of choice, from the consequences of a bad choice. Pick a bad lucky packet and you have a throwaway knickknack, but still the sweets; pick a good one and you have a toy to play with for the rest of the week.

There’s the fake plastic watch, the stickers, the dice, the vampire teeth, the spider or the small puzzles, all nestled in a bed of doctor-and-nurse pills: the powdery pink musk sweets inside the thick paper bag.

Most prized of all, though, is the black plastic Lone Ranger mask. It’s so rare some of us doubt it’s a lucky packet prize at all. When a kid brings one in to school, boasting how he picked out his lucky packet with a secret technique, he wears it all week.

‘But I want a lucky packet,’ I say to the row of sweets. I take up a Tex with a sigh and walk to the front of the shop. Smoke blows sideways from the cigarette between Mr Georgiou’s lips, driven by the fan. The mechanical gusts flick the edges of the newspaper pinned under his elbows. But it’s not Mr Georgiou who makes this night different from all the others in the Acropolis.

Where this other man in the memory comes from, I can’t say. I’m too short to see over the counter, but he must have come from there – I mean, he probably placed the chip packets, Coke bottles and milk on the counter next to Mr Georgiou and went around to help himself to something.

Whoever he is, Mr Georgiou knows him because he ignores him while he reads his paper. The man rises like Poseidon from behind the counter, holding in his hand a lucky packet. The packet – the dangerous enemy of the state, agent of subversion, cornucopia and saviour – fills my vision, so I miss the man’s features. The lucky packet drops into my hands and ripples wash away the Acropolis Café.

The memory runs out there; it loops and repeats from a different starting point, like a needle kicking back from the end of the record’s groove, but it goes no further. I’m ignorant of my mother’s reaction, or of Mr Georgiou’s, of the man’s next move and whether the prize inside the lucky packet was the Lone Ranger mask or some other trinket.

Forty years later, I still toy with slotting first my father’s then Leo Fein’s form into the scene: Eddie Aronbach / Leo Fein / Eddie Aronbach / Leo Fein on a ceaseless carousel. Neither fits perfectly; memories reject transplanted tissue.

I was five or six in the Acropolis Café, but which, I can’t say. If I knew, I’d know which side of the dividing edge between a living father and a dead one the memory lay. Stare as I might, nothing will un-smudge the actor in the Acropolis Café, nothing can ossify the facts, and the harder I look, the smaller the face becomes.

Perhaps I try to hold on to these images in an attempt to claim a greater part for my late father in shaping who I am; or to avoid giving Leo Fein that role.

Ma has been dead for some time now, and my brothers don’t like to talk about these things any more. And so it falls to me alone to untangle what passed between my family and Leo Fein – the betrayals and guilt and, I’ll admit, some measure of adventure.