The Forwarding Agent by Austen Kark

My father was obsessed with the number thirteen. Otherwise not superstitious, if anything, a scientific man, thirteen bugged him. I remember once our all going to a hotel together. It was a quite classy establishment and when we got out of the lift and followed the bell-boy, porter, whatever he was, to the room, my father said, "No. No, we're not having that room." We returned to Reception. There were no other rooms available, except the desk clerk looked at us, not quite smiling; mother, father and my eight-year-old self-the Bridal Suite. It was spoken, reverentially, in capital letters.

It cost over double the original room. My mother complained all the time. We couldn't afford it, she reminded us every other minute: it was madness. I rather enjoyed it. It had a sitting room and two bathrooms. Why, I wondered later, two bathrooms in a honeymoon suite? His and hers?

When I got Mum alone and asked her what all that was about, she said, "Your father has his little funny ways. About numbers I mean."

"But," I remember saying, "It was a nice number, grey and blue." I think I saw three as grey and seven as blue.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said in one of those infuriating parent-to-child voices, all superiority and sanity. "It was room 337. And the numbers were in lacquered brass." And that'll squish you up, Sonny, with knobs on, is what she meant. You think it's not bad enough to have a husband who does his nut over funny numbers but a child that's colour blind as well? It was a week or two before I thought about it again and realized it added up to thirteen and Dad had been posted to Northern Ireland by then.

"Thirteen dead," Eloise was saying when I and my bubble floated back, "and you might have made the fourteenth."

Cheerful thought. Cheated death again, gentlemen. Third time over the top and saved by the bible in my tunic pocket. Talking about numbers, chaps, the bullet lodged in the holy book just hadn't got mine on it. Nonsense, my mother would say; As God Intended. She always seemed to have a private line to Him Up There. I was never sure whether it was to Yahweh the Ancient of Days or Christ the Redeemer. She'd had a double dose of religion, poor Mum.

Her parents were Ladino-speaking Jews in Salonika and they, like almost all the Jewish community there, were exterminated in the gas-chambers. Mum had escaped the death camps because an Orthodox priest had taken her, aged five, into his family. He'd found her inside his church, trying to light a candle, a small suitcase beside her and a battered doll. Her father had left her there, rightly fearing the SS and the Gestapo.

The Pappas had smuggled her into his house, joined her to his family, his children were all older than her, and had her baptised. Exit Rachel, enter Eleni. She must, he told her, beard fiercely jabbing the words home, forget all about Rachel. She was new-born in the love and grace of Christ the Saviour, Eleni. Did she know who Eleni was? She was the mother of the Emperor Constantine who made Constantinople the Christian capital of the world. She had brought back from the Holy Land a piece of the True Cross.

When Mum told me the story I was at school in England and not very interested in Greek priests. Emperors were different. I came to life with Constantine and told her proudly that he was first proclaimed emperor in York in 306, won as Emperor of the West in 312 and became Emperor of the East, sole Roman overlord in fact, in 324. The only reason I remembered all this was the happy run of numbers.

What Mum remembered was the priest burning her doll. It had a little gold chain round its neck with a Star of David, also in gold. She howled for two hours, until one of the older girls told her that if she didn't shut up they'd put her in a coffin and close the lid.

In reality they were marvellously kind and brave. The Pappas could have been executed, his family dispossessed and imprisoned. She came to love them as they loved her. She stayed with them till after the Civil War, around 1950. All her immediate family had been wiped out but there was a cousin who for some reason or other had fetched up in Cairo, Cousin Sam.

He somehow traced her and after much argument took her with him. The priest was losing not only a much-loved adopted daughter-she had been with them for ten years, two-thirds of her life-but also a soul, a Christian soul, who would now return to the unredeemed ranks of the Christ-killers. Before she left all of them in tears, he made her promise always to wear her baptismal cross around her neck. And she always has. Much to the consternation of Cousin Sam's other Jewish friends in Alexandria where he and my mother went to live.

"I wonder if your Mum ever met my Mum in Alex," I said to Eloise but, when I looked, the room was empty.

I could feel the sunlight, warm, bright but not yet that hot, intense breath of high summer. I opened an eye. Eloise was back, curled up in a chair, touching the bed, my left hand held against her cheek, her beautiful, curved high-cheekboned face.

It was a lovely waking up. Then I moved and the rest of my body sang with pain. I looked at the plaster cast. Where the hell was my right hand?

I must have woken Eloise up. It was not altogether surprising: I expect I'd shouted. A nurse was called and then more drugs, more remoteness, less pain. Back inside your bubble, laddy.

My father, a Lancastrian, used to put on Scots, Welsh and Irish accents and words to suit. It was whenever he wanted to, felt he should, express some emotion. The "laddy" came with a light touch on the shoulder and an awful music hall Scottish patter. He was a shy man, very competent, very self-contained very controlled, which was just as well since he was a bomb disposal expert.

I used to say he was a captain when I was in England but he was really a WO1, the most senior Warrant Officer in the army, a much more special thing to be. He was quiet even when, very rarely, he'd had a few beers or scotches; quiet but you always, without his trying, heard every word. It was a soft voice but very clear, every syllable properly formed.