CHAPTER TWO
“I am not a doctor,” I said. “I was a medical student.”
Corgan studied me for a little while. He took up more of the room than his body occupied. His hair was cut short, very short, the look of a soldier, a policeman. “For more than a few weeks, I hope,” he said. “I was told you were the finished article.”
“I had taken much of my academic study when—when I left my country. Had to leave my country. And I have two years of clinical practice, but I still had my last year to do, and some of my practice was spent in gynaecology and paediatrics, and looking at him I do not think that will be much help.”
“In your last year? That’ll do me. Now listen: I need you to do two things. I need you to sort him out—” he jerked his head towards the man on the bed— “and I need you to keep your mouth shut. Can you do both of those? Because if you can’t, go now.”
“I can,” I said. “And in return I get what I am promised?”
He stared at me for a moment. “You’ll get your papers.” Then he stooped down, slid a black case across the floor to me. “The gear you need should be in there. If anything isn’t, tell me what it is you want and I’ll get someone to bring it here within half an hour. He’s been shot, right arm, small calibre handgun. Looks like it’s gone right through, but he’s lost a fair bit of blood.”
I unwrapped the sheet from the man’s arm. I could hear him breathing, a shallow, rapid, whisky breath. I opened the bag. It looked like someone had been round a hospital supplies cupboard. And the pharmacy. I turned a tap on a tiny sink that hung off the wall. Somewhere, a pipe coughed, and after a moment warm water came out. I scrubbed at my hands as best I could. I went back to the bag, opened an instrument case. “Are these sterile?”
“I’m told they are,” Corgan said. “We’ve got a proper doctor—had a proper doctor—worked for us for years, all this is his. Too fond of his own prescription pad though, and just when we need him, useless bastard, he couldn’t even walk down the path tonight without falling over. He’s finished with us. But he swears this bag is fine. And knows what I would do to him if he told me wrong. So we had to find a stand-in, and when we phoned around, Danny boy came up with you. Turns out he’s good for something after all.”
The man on the bed stirred and moaned, and occasionally when I did things he screamed but then Corgan leant forward and held his hand over the man’s mouth, and they were not loud screams anyway, more like the sounds that someone makes when they are having a nightmare.
“He should be in a hospital,” I said, when I had inspected the wound. He had a ragged hole torn in the flesh of his upper arm, another hole on the far side where the bullet had passed through. “The wound is not too bad, but there is much risk of infection.”
“If he could be in a hospital, he would be in a hospital, and you wouldn’t be here,” Corgan said in a gentle voice. He was bent over the bed, next to me, and I could feel his breath warm on my cheek. “So let’s not have a pointless conversation, eh.”
I worked hard in the dim light of the room, making sure that the wound was clean and that there was no foreign matter left in, because no matter how well I stopped the bleeding and stitched up the wounds, it would be for nothing if the wound became infected. I do not know how long it took me, kneeling beside the sagging bed with Corgan standing silent at my shoulder, but I know that I did a good job. My hands moved, my brain worked, and I did the things that I had been trained to do and I did them well. After weeks of turning burgers over and pouring coke, I felt good to be doing what I was good at. In the end I was satisfied with my work, and I was done. I stepped back from the bed, and realised that every muscle in my neck and shoulders hurt, as if I had been beaten. I took a deep breath, and tried to let the tension seep away from me. I wanted to breathe deeply, but the room smelt of sweat, and blood, and a thousand old cigarettes. I had blood on my hands, on my blouse. There had been no plastic gloves in the case. I tried not to think about what might be in the blood.
“That is everything that I can do,” I said, washing my hands again. My blouse I would throw in a bin, even though I could not afford to do so. “The wound is clean and he should not bleed any more. Get me some paper.”
Corgan looked around the room, pulled an old envelope from the bin. I wrote down on it what was needed, the antibiotics, the iodine pads, the dressings.
“He will need these. The dressing will need to be changed—”
Corgan held up a big hand, and I stopped talking.
“Write your list. It’ll all be here for the morning,” he said. “For when you come back.”
I stepped forward, waving a finger at him. “There is no coming back. I was asked, I came here, I did what I was asked. I have done it.”
He looked at my finger amused, and pushed it very gently so that it was not pointing at him. “Job’s not finished, is it? You know that. Come back every day, do whatever needs doing, and when he doesn’t need it any more, then you get what you want. Only then. Take it or leave it.”
“In the day time,” I said, after a moment or two. “In late afternoon. Evenings and nights, I work. Mornings, I sleep. It must be late afternoon.”
The big man laughed. “There’ll be a car for you. Two o’clock. You’ll have slept enough by then.” He looked at me, a long stare which made me feel as if I had just been weighed, assessed, dismissed. “I don’t need to tell you not to talk about this to anyone, do I? I can see it in your eyes. You know how it works.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know people like you. I know you well.”
“Do you, now? See you then, doctor.”
“Student,” I said, and Corgan laughed and unlocked the door. “Wait by the front door,” he said. “There’ll be a car round in five minutes, run you home.”
I walked down the stairs and out of the door and into the beautiful clean air. I kept walking, down the quiet street, out into a tangle of roads that I did not know and that all looked the same. I did not care, I just kept walking, breathing in hard so the cold air could freeze me inside, make me a puppet that just walked along, arms and legs moving like so, little puppet running away. I had practice at that.
When I fled my home, my plan had been simple. Go to the airport. Get a plane. Fly to another country where the police could not reach me and stay in a hotel while I mourned my brother and thought about what to do. But in a taxi to the airport, I realised my stupidity. Those who would want to hurt me were the police, and if they wanted to they could see every time I used my credit card, where I went. They could find me. And once they realised I had been a witness, they would want to find me. And they would find me. Even if I was in another country. No loose ends.
“Take me back,” I said. “I want to catch a train.”
“You’re joking,” the taxi driver said. “Scared of flying, eh? Lost your nerve?”
“Yes,” I said. “So take me to the station.”
I caught one train, and then another, and then another, doubling back, paying cash, buying tickets to a station but then getting off early. They were the police, they could find out who bought tickets to where, they could make people talk. Old habits die hard, and in my country, those habits were not so old.
I started to run out of money, and I needed to save what I had for things other than train fares. The first of these things took me across the border.
“If I get caught, I’m right in the shit,” the lorry driver said, scraping his hand over the stubble on his chin.
“You won’t get caught. And if you did, which you won’t, I will tell them you didn’t know. You tell them you didn’t know. But you won’t get caught.”
“I could lose my job,” he said, digging a finger in his ear.
“I will pay you twice what I offered,” I said. “But that is all the money I have, I can not pay any more.”
He thought for a moment. “Maybe not money, no.” His eyes dropped to my breasts, down to my thighs, dawdled back up.
“I am on the run,” I said. “My husband is in the FSB, he beats me, he is a bastard. I have cousins in Poland, I can go to them. If my husband finds out I was in your lorry, he will do nothing, he understands money talks, he won’t care about you, just about finding me. If he finds out you touched me though, he will cut your balls off and make you eat them.”
He backed away. Too much, Anna. You have lost your chance.
“Half as much again,” I said. “Who will know? Who will care? It is not you he is after. And I need help, please.” I tried to make my eyes big, like a kitten. I probably looked like a mad woman.
The driver scraped at his chin again. “You get caught, you say you broke in to the back while I took a piss.”
“I will.”
“You pay double.”
“I will.”
They stopped him, at the border. I heard the engine stop, the sound of voices. I burrowed under boxes, did not dare breathe. Then the engine started, and we moved and we did not stop.
He let me out at a truck stop, bought me coffee.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “About the other thing. I couldn’t have, anyway. Got a daughter your age. Beats you, does he? You should be cutting his balls off. If he had any.”
I washed in service station sinks, I slept on hard benches and among crates of fruit, the air thick with the stink of lemons and of me, I slept leaning against boxes filled with giant televisions, all the time waiting for a rough shake into wakefulness, a hand over my mouth, worse. I paid out what little money I had left, I pretended that I did not see the way that some of them looked at me, and I kept on running. I could have stopped anywhere, I suppose. But I could speak English, I had been taught at school and my father had paid for lessons at home. “You could study abroad, London, Los Angeles, where the hospitals have money and the best of everything,” he said. So I learned about Mr Benson, who was a civil servant, and his wife Jane and their children and their dog, Max. And so here I was. The street signs were in a different language, but the men like Corgan were just the same.
I hurried on to the other side of the road so I did not have to walk past the drunken men who were standing outside the window of the all-night garage and shouting in, laughing and pretending to fight, and then kept on walking towards home until the sky began to lighten, and at last I was back where I lived. I stood in the shower for a long time, even though it was only lukewarm. It was only ever lukewarm. There was no blood left on me, but even when I came out of the shower, I still did not feel clean. Yes, I had treated a patient, done what I had spent years training to do. But I knew what he was, and I knew what Corgan was. They were the men who came for my father, the men who killed Aleksey. Different voices, different passports, same story. And I had worked for some of these men, so that I could avoid being sent back to the others. You do what you have to do, I thought to myself. You do what you have to do.
It still took me a very long time to get to sleep, and I still did not feel clean.
~
The next day, at two, a man who I had not seen before was outside my house, leaning against a car, one arm stretched lazily out over the roof, fingers drumming. He wore sunglasses like mirrors, so that I could not see his eyes, even though the day was cloudy. I think that he thought that he looked good like this, but he was fatter than he thought he was, and his clothes showed it, and when he looked round at me his sunglasses slid down his nose.
“You must be the doctor,” he said. “I’m Paul, your chauffeur for the day. Fuck happened to you last night then? I was hanging around for half an hour waiting for you.”
And so it went on. I was taken to the flat, changed dressings, checked the wound, did what I was told to do. The first time I went back there, the man who had been shot was conscious. There were two other men there, not Corgan, but ones like him. They were talking to my patient in low voices and stopped when I came over to the bed.
“So you’re the one that patched me up,” the man on the bed said, smoking a cigarette and blowing the smoke up to the ceiling. “Cheers, pet. Hurts like hell, mind, but you’ve done a canny job there.” He was still pale beneath his tan, and little crusts of matter had formed at the edges of his mouth, almost hidden by the edges of his little beard that did not go further than around his mouth.
“It will hurt,” I said. “That’s why I asked them to get these tablets for you to take. They will make the pain less.”
“Can I mix them with alcohol?”
“No.”
“Oops.” All the men laughed.
“You’ll have to give up the tablets then, Kav man,” one of them said.
“I want you to stay here for a few days, lie down, take it easy,” I said. “You lost blood, and you will be weak.”
“Aye. Not as much blood as the bastard who did this will lose, mind.”
“One day,” one of the other men said in a low voice.
“Aye, one day, Nicky,” my patient said. “When we’re not having to pussy around keeping these fucking foreigners sweet. Not you, love. You’re sweet already.”
I ignored them, held a dressing down, wrapped tape around it. I did not hear, I did not see, I did not understand. Life lived as furniture.
On the second day, Corgan was there again, leaning against the wall, his presence filling the room. He did not say much, asked a couple of questions about what I was doing, how long things would take, how soon I would know if the wound was infected, what I would do if it was, when they could move him. Then he said nothing else, just watched, and I felt as if a spotlight was shining on to me and I was clumsy and my fingers fumbled everything.
I worked, I slept, I was driven to the flat, I tried hard not to think much about what I was doing or the people that I was doing it for. One day, a man even bigger than Corgan opened the door without knocking. He stepped in, looked around. I could not have wrapped my arms around his chest. He should have been in a circus, lifting barrels full of showgirls, or fighting in a barn, with bare knuckles. He nodded to the corridor, and another man walked in. This man had nothing interesting about him at all. He was short, but not too short, slim but not skinny, his skin pale and his hair grey. His suit was expensive, his shoes looked even more so, but if he had walked straight out again I might have been able to remember the cut of his suit and the shine of his shoes but I do not think that I would have been able to picture his face.
Everyone in the room had fallen quiet. He stared at me for a moment. His eyes were very pale blue, watery as if they stung.
“Who is she?” he said. He spoke in English, but he was a long way from home.
“She works for me,” Corgan said. “My new doctor.”
The man had not stopped staring at me.
“Is she one of us?”
Corgan was about to say something, then he thought better of it. “Anna, go and wait down by the front door. Paul, go with her, make sure she stays there.”
I would have said something, told Corgan that I was doing the job for him that I was meant to do, and that he could go and look for another doctor if I was not good enough, but I did not. I was scared of the small grey man with the watery eyes, because I saw the way that Corgan had swallowed when the small man came in the room, the way that Corgan had stared at me hard, sending a message. Shut your mouth. Say nothing.
I turned to walk out, but the small man put a hand out and touched my arm. I stopped where I was, not looking at him, just looking at the door. It seemed a very long way away.
“What do you know of what happened to this man?” he asked. There was silence in the rest of the room.
“He was shot in the upper arm,” I said. “There was tissue damage but the bullet passed through the flesh and there were no fragments left in the wound. I think he might have some nerve damage but there are exercises he can do to regain proper use of his arm.”
“That is not the question I asked,” he said.
“It is the only question I have the answer to,” I said.
He kept his hand on my arm for a long time. Then he took it away. I walked out of the room, and started to breath again. Paul followed me down the stairs, to make sure I did not do anything stupid. What, I do not know. I went out of the front door and sat on the little wall outside the house.
Paul lit a cigarette. Then he pulled the packet out of his pocket and offered one to me. I just gave him a look.
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “But I’ve known plenty of doctors who’ve liked a smoke and a drink.”
“You’ll know a few less each year.”
“Christ, you sound like my wife.”
I was not sure whether that was an insult to her or to me.
“Three guesses who that belongs to,” he said, and nodded to a black car parked further down the street, a man who could have been the twin of the circus weightlifter leaning against the side, watching us watching him.
“Who is that man upstairs?”
Paul shook his head. “You don’t want to know.”
“I would not have asked if I did not want to know,” I said. “Corgan looked scared of him.”
“Corgan?” Paul said. “He’s not scared of anyone.” But he took too many drags on his cigarette, fidgeted his feet too much, and I knew that he was lying.
“Tell me,” I said. “If I am to be questioned like that I have a right to know who is doing it.”
Paul blew out a stream of smoke. “No fucker can say his name, so everyone calls him the Ukrainian. And ’cause he is, yeah?”
I made a face: do I look like someone who needs that explaining?
“Uh, yeah. Anyway, he’s the man Corgan answers to. Bad fucker he is. If you have any luck you’ll never see him again, and if you have to, if you got any sense you’ll look at the floor and only speak when you’re spoken to. This is the man who runs our whole fucking operation, you know, and Christ knows how many others like it elsewhere, you can just imagine the sort of things he’s done to get to where he is. Or does to stay there.”
“And this operation is?”
Paul looked at me, down the street at the big, black car, and then back at me. “Be a love. Shut the fuck up. Don’t ask any questions, and hand out the aspirin when you’re asked to. It’s good advice, trust me on that.”
A few minutes later the Ukrainian and his bodyguard came out of the house and walked past. Paul straightened up and sucked in his beer belly, as if he was a soldier being inspected at parade time. The Ukrainian ignored him, but stopped at me. Again there was a long stare before he spoke.
“Where you from?” he said.
“Vladikavkaz,” I said.
“Why you here?”
“Bad choices,” I said.
He stood and looked at me for a moment, and then turned and walked off towards his car. His driver already had the door open. A few minutes after they had driven away, Corgan came out of the house with the man he called Nicky.
“Drive her home,” he said to Paul. Then he turned to me. “You never saw him.”
“I never saw him,” I repeated, like a robot.
“If you see him again, you know nothing about anything. All you know is you heard us say that Kav was shot by some kid who wanted to deal where we didn’t want him to be dealing.”
“That’s what I have heard,” I said. “I remember it. Some kid.”
“Good girl,” Corgan said. He looked very tired. “Now go home.”
~
At my next visit, I was told to sit in a chair against the wall, and I did so, scared of what was about to happen. Another man came into the room, and he told me to relax, and look happy, but don’t smile, even though I would be so much prettier if I smiled, and he took some photographs of me with a Polaroid camera and then he left.
When I told Kav that I would not need to come back any more, he grinned, blew smoke out of his nose, and shook my hand. “You’re a diamond, pet. Just what I needed. Whenever I touch the scar, I’ll think of you. You can nurse me any time.” He grinned again, and I thought to myself: I am a whore.
I asked how I could get in touch with Corgan for my payment and he just laughed and said, “You don’t, love. He’ll find you. Just relax and wait. Chill.”
So I waited, and still I worked for Peter and still I ate the leftover food, and saved up my money. I had not told Sean what I was doing, but he knew that something was going on, all the same. He would ask me how I was, whether everything was all right, and he would hold my gaze for just a moment or two longer than was needed. Sean was never very good at looking anyone in the eye, so I guessed that this was his way of letting me know that he was concerned, without putting me under any pressure. Or perhaps, without getting himself too involved.
One night, we were clearing up after the place had closed. It had not been busy. Pete was in the back, in the cupboard that he called his office. He often disappeared into there and said that he was doing the accounts, but Sean and I knew that he was reading the racing paper, or dozing for twenty minutes, looking at girlie magazines that he kept in the filing cabinet or just sitting back and breaking wind long and loud when he thought that we could not hear.
I was wiping down the counters, and Sean was pushing a mop around the floor, chasing some spilt shreds of onion that had escaped the sweeping brush. Everywhere smelt of bleach. My feet hurt, and my lower back felt as if someone had been kicking me there. The streets outside had emptied, apart from the occasional drunks who still had not found their way home. Every so often, one would bang on the glass, but we just ignored them. The doors were locked, and the sign said closed, and if we started to talk to them through the glass they would never go away. So we pretended not to see them, and then they went away after a while. Sometimes a homeless man came and slept in our doorway. We never disturbed him, and we turned the front light off so that Peter would not see him. But once, I went back because I thought I had forgotten to turn the light off, and I saw Peter opening the front door, and handing the man a bag of food. I crept back through the kitchens, and did not say a word.
“Anna,” Sean said, whipping the mop around in great circles, as if he was fighting something off. “I heard something the other day. Sorry, probably out of order telling you this, I’m not trying to pry into your situation.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. Sometimes Sean got caught up in apologising for his apologies. I wiped grease and smears of sauce from the counter.
“My landlord, he owns a few properties.” He kept his eyes on the floor, following the sweep of the mop. “And he was talking, the other day. He said there were going to be some vacancies in some of his flats. And I didn’t really say much, you know, I was just trying to ask him to fix my window because when it rains and the wind’s in one direction, the water comes in, and he’s one of these blokes that if he gets started on something, he’ll stand there for an hour boring you to death. Sorry, getting off the point.” He put the mop into the bucket, swirled it around, then slapped it back onto the floor.
“Anyway, he goes on, says he knows there’s going to be these vacancies because his girlfriend—well, her sister—she works for the Borders Agency. And she says there’s a right panic on, quotas and targets to meet, or something, they’ve been told to get their numbers up or else. So they’re doing a whole bunch of raids, rounding up overstayers, asylum seekers who’ve got all the way through the appeals process but not gone, that sort of thing. My landlord, all he’s bothered about is filling the vacancies so he doesn’t lose any money, he couldn’t give a toss. But you know, I don’t, I don’t know your, uh, your status. You know. So I thought I ought to warn you that stuff’s going on. In case. I’m not trying to say—”
“Thank you Sean,” I said, before the apologising started again. “I appreciate that. But I think I may be OK, I hope.” I dropped the cloth back into a plastic white tub of bleach and water, and wiped the counter dry with a paper towel so that it did not smear.
“Cool, you mean they’ve made you legal? You got your refugee status? Oh Anna, you should have said.” He did a little dance, with the mop as his partner, whirling it around the room. “That’s fucking brilliant news. You should have told me, we should celebrate or something.”
“Not quite that,” I said, and then I thought: did I want to say that? Was it not easier just to tell Sean what he wanted to hear? It would make him happy, and it did not seem like there were many things in Sean’s life that made him happy. It would save me having to explain any further, or not explaining enough and leaving Sean hanging as if I did not want to tell him.
He heard something in my voice, and straightened up. The grin fell from his face. “OK,” he said. “Look. If it’s something—if you want to talk. If you don’t, you know, it’s no problem.”
All of a sudden, I felt like I wanted to cry. All the time I had spent in the terrible journey here, I had not cried. When the other women in my room had cried themselves softly to sleep, I had lain in my bed and dug my nails into my hand and thought to myself: you must not cry. I do not really know why. Maybe because I thought that it was weakness, and that if I was not strong I would go under. I came out from behind the counter and sat down in one of the hard plastic chairs bolted to the tables.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”
Sean dropped the mop, and vanished behind the counter. I blew my nose on a rough blue paper towel, and took some deep breaths, grateful that he had gone, but also hoping that he was coming back. I was starting to think that he had gone home, disappeared out of the back door into the cold air of the early morning because he had taken offence that I was not sharing with him. But a minute or two later, he came back, with two polystyrene cups of coffee and a handful of paper napkins. He sat down at the table with me, slid across one of the cups and all of the napkins.
“Just in case,” he said. “I’ve checked in on Pete. He’s fast asleep, snoring up at the ceiling tiles. Office reeks of brandy. I think he stays the whole night in there sometimes, you know.”
“I thought he had a wife at home.” This was safe, conversation about someone else.
“Yes, he does,” Sean said. “I think, you know. Maybe that’s why he stays here sometimes.”
“Oh.”
“Yes.”
We sat in silence for a little while, and I drank some of my coffee, even though it was too hot.
“I’m so scared of being sent back, Sean.”
“Of course,” he said. “I mean, would you be here, doing this—” he gestured at the plastic and grease around us— “if you had any choice?”
“No,” I said. “I would not.” And I wondered whether he had a choice, but I did not ask.
We drank some more coffee.
“I cannot go back,” I said. “My family were on the losing side. And so, I cannot go back, because I am on the losing side too, and the winners, they do not like loose ends or people who might want revenge. And anyway, there is nothing to go back for. They took the best things that I had. My family. My place in the medical school. I cannot go back, Sean.”
“I understand,” he said. “They won’t make you, they can’t.”
I laughed, as if he had just suggested that we applied for a Michelin star for Peter.
“Not with a story like yours,” Sean said. “They can’t.”
“Sean, my story is just another story,” I said, and I thought, yes, this is true. “All these things are hard to prove, here in England, when the people in your immigration offices hear so many stories, from so many people. Everyone has their own story to tell, some of them true, some of them not, and I think it is easiest for the people in the offices to believe that all are not true. Easiest not just because it helps them reach their numbers, but also because it is easier when they go home at night and have to be with their families and be normal people.
“I have nothing to show that my story is a true one. So I am just like everyone else, taking my turn, scared that this week it will be the end for me and I will be put on a plane. And I cannot do that. I cannot. So, I am made an offer which will make me safe. Which means I will not be sent back. And in return for this, I will have to do some things.”
Sean looked up at me.
“No, not bad things,” I said. “Medical work.”
“Well, that’s OK then, isn’t it?” Sean said. “If you’re not doing bad things. You were trained to be a doctor, Anna, it’s the fucking crazy system here that makes you waste that talent and work in a shitheap like this, instead of doing what you’re good at. So using that training, that’s a good thing, yeah?”
“Yes. But this good thing, I am doing it for bad people.”
“Uh—OK. Right.” He sat back in his chair. “What do you mean, bad people? It’s cool, you can tell me.”
So I told him.
When I had finished, Sean sat back in his chair, picking away at the polystyrene of his cup with his fingers, dropping little flakes of it across the plastic of the table like snow. This was very Sean, part of his shy side, that had him stumbling over words when he was talking to people he did not know very well, the stoop of his shoulders as if he did not want to stand out for being tall, the way that he found it hard to meet the eye of the person he was talking to, instead studying their shoes, the lapels of their coat, or whatever he had picked up and was twisting round and round in his hands. He did this all the time. Pens, cups, the plastic stirrers that we used in the restaurant. Anything that was around. He would pick it up, turn it over and over in his hands as he spoke, spinning it round, walking a pen end over end through his fingers and back again, or pull it to pieces, leave them scattered over the table like confetti.
“You should smoke,” I had told him once. “It would give you something to do with your hands.”
“Christ no,” he had replied. “I’d be on about sixty a day.”
Now he shredded the cup, and did not look at me. “Jesus,” he said. “Jesus, Anna.” His eye twitched, as if he had something stuck in it.
“I should not have told you?”
“It’s not that, of course you should, you know you can talk to me.” It sounded from his voice though that he wished I had not.
“You do not approve,” I said. “You think I am a bad person.”
“Fuck no, no, Anna, no. Not that, not at all. It’s just, Jesus, I’m scared for you, is all. These people you’re working for, bullet wounds? Jesus. This is serious stuff Anna, what the hell have you got yourself into? And they know you work here?”
He was jumping from thought to thought, and it was difficult for me to keep up. “I don’t know—I don’t think—”
“‘Course they do, they know you work here, that guy, what was he called, Daniel? Daniel. He came here, didn’t he. Jesus, I met him, he saw me when he came here. He’s one of them.”
“Not the same as them, not Daniel, he is just like a little boy who tags behind the big children.”
“Oh no, of course,” Sean said, rolling his eyes. “He’s just Mr Fixer. He’s not bad, he’s only a little boy who knows bad people. Christ, Anna, you don’t have a clue what you’re getting into, I’m sorry but you know, you’re in a strange place, new country, you’re too naïve.”
“There were bad people where I came from too, Sean,” I said. I tried not to let the anger appear in my voice. This was not what I had wanted. I had wanted Sean to listen, to be sympathetic, to give me good advice, to be the friend I thought that he was. Something about Sean had always reminded me of my brother. When I was a girl, Aleksey always protected me, stuck up for me when my father was angry, warned the boys who wanted to take me out that if they were bad for me he would kick them from one end of the town to the other. I remember playing with friends in an abandoned house once, shrieking with joy and fear about whether a rat might run over our feet. We crawled through a narrow passage full of brick dust where the roof had fallen down so far you could not stand, and a rat did run over me, although it was my hand and not my foot. I screamed and tried to stand up. I do not remember much else. One of my friends ran away home. The other ran and found my brother, who was playing football nearby. He arrived just as I came round, and he picked me up in his arms and ran with me all the way to the house of a retired doctor who lived near. When we got there, he was too out of breath to even say what had happened.
I can remember the doctor’s calming voice, a kind, rumbling, bass that never stopped as he cleaned the gash on my head, and checked my pulse with his big fingers. He phoned for an ambulance, saying all the time it will be all right, it will be all right. And I can remember my brother, sitting on a chair in his muddy football strip, chest heaving, eyes wide with worry, my blood staining the crest on his shirt. But my brother was dead now, and I looked at Sean and I could not at that moment remember what it was about him that had reminded me of my brother.
“Anna, look.” He dropped his voice, ran a hand back through his hair, leaving it sticking up in little spikes. “This is crazy shit you have got yourself mixed up in. Get out of it. For God’s sake, don’t let it into your life, Anna, don’t bring it into ours, it’s—”
“Ours? Is that what you are worried about, Sean? Your life? You think these men know where I work so you are somehow involved? This is not about you, Sean. This is nothing to do with you.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Guns? Fucking right it isn’t.”
We stared at each other over the table for a moment, and then there were heavy footsteps behind the counter.
“You two going to stay here all night, then, drinking my coffee that you haven’t paid for? I hope the clean-up is finished.” Peter blinked heavy eyelids at us, swayed slightly on his feet as if there was a strong wind blowing.
“It is,” I said, and I got up. “It’s finished.” I picked up my coffee cup, and dropped it into one of the bins. “Good night.”
“Anna,” Sean said.
I walked out of the back door, walked past the green refuse skips that smelt of grease on the inside and urine on the outside, walked down the narrow back lane, and out onto the main street. It was empty under the orange lights. Not even a late night drunk weaving home, following a path that only he could see. If Sean comes after me, I will take a deep breath, and we will talk, I thought.
But he did not. So I just walked all the way home, and when I got to the room I undressed quietly so as not to disturb the others and I lay on my bed and I dug my nails into my hands, very hard, very hard.