In the Kitchen (33 page)

They sat in the kitchen. Lena had used a white sheet as a tablecloth. She'd folded two pieces of kitchen towel into triangles for napkins and found two candle stubs and set them on jam-jar lids. The table was burdened with dumplings, fritters, pancakes and rolls, pickles and salads and breads.

'Eat,' said Lena. She'd washed her hair and spread it out over her shoulders.

She began with the varenyky and explained every dish to him. The Ukrainian girl had shown her how to make the cottage cheese fritters with raisins. The cabbage rolls stuffed with rice and mincemeat they used to have at home.

'Beautiful,' lied Gabe, tasting the potato pancakes. 'You're quite a chef.'

'Tchh.'

She picked at some mushrooms and beetroot, but mainly she watched him eat.

'So, Lena?' he said. 'Why the feast?'

'You like?'

'Yes.'

'OK.'

'Because you thought I'd like it?'

'Why not?'

'OK.' He couldn't stop looking at her. He had to force the food down. 'You found the dress.'

He'd bought it a fortnight before because he wanted to see her in something other than her black skirt and top, but he'd left it at the back of the wardrobe in a plastic bag. This evening she had been waiting by the door when he came in and she was wearing it, a poppy-print dress with short sleeves, a girlish summer dress, all wrong and completely right. 'How old are you, Lena?'

he'd blurted and she had only shrugged.

'Yes,' said Lena now. 'I find.' She had a marvellous ability to kill conversation.

When Gabe thought he'd found an opening, she managed to close it down.

He tried again, 'Must have taken you ages.'

'Yes.'

What was it with all this food? He hadn't told her about his little chat with Nikolai. That money wasn't hers. If it had been hers she would never have left without it. It only occurred to her later and she must have thought nobody else knew. She hadn't mentioned the money since he'd got back from Blantwistle, which was suspicious. Maybe she'd sensed, somehow, that he had found out. She'd still want money from him. Maybe this was a new strategy of hers.

'So Valentina taught you to cook this, when you were in the flat in Edmonton?'

Lena said, 'Maybe. Maybe Edmonton. Maybe Golders Green.' She lifted her wine glass in two hands. She really did look like a child.

He tried to catch her out sometimes and it wasn't difficult. Her story always changed.

Gabe choked down the last of the dumplings. He looked at her, tried to hold her gaze. 'Beautiful,' he said. 'Lovely. Gorgeous.'

She rolled her eyes.

'Do you remember Victor?' said Gabe. Ivan and Victor had been at it again.

Lena might know what had gone on between those two – East European gossip below stairs. Maybe Nikolai had told Yuri and Yuri had told Lena, and maybe Lena would tell Gabriel now.

Lena twisted an earring. 'No.'

'What about Ivan?' said Gabe. He still hadn't made time to go and check on that guest room, the one Ivan had gone into with Gleeson. Not that he'd find anything – they were bound to cover their tracks.

'I don't remember,' she said.

'Yuri must have known them.'

'Maybe,' she said, or half said, the word aborting on her tongue.

He gave up. He didn't feel like talking anyway. All he felt like doing was looking at her and in a second he would get up and clear the table and then they'd sit in the half-dark in front of the television and he would be able to scan her over and over while she pretended not to notice, until finally when he judged her sufficiently hypnotized, he would slip to the floor and take hold of her feet.

She spent, so she said, most of the day in front of the screen. He gave her a little money before he left in the mornings. Not enough that she could run away. She spent it at the shop on the corner. One time he'd waited out of sight to see what she did. He'd stood in a doorway for a couple of hours, craning his neck to see, and when she came out of his building she went into the grocer's and then back home again straight away.

The neighbours hadn't said anything. He'd had his answers prepared, about both Charlie and Lena, but now he knew he wouldn't be needing them. That was the great thing about London. Nobody interfered.

One day she had started weeping in the morning as he was about to leave. He tried to hold her but she disintegrated beneath his fingers, collapsing to the floor. She howled until he thought that surely the neighbours would come and bring the police. This can't go on, he decided. But the next morning she rose early, and when he walked into the kitchen she was humming tunelessly and doing the washingup.

Sometimes, as now, he had the sensation that if he reached out his hand it would pass straight through her.

'Thanks for dinner,' he said.

She stared into the middle distance, as though it were Gabe who didn't exist.

If they moved through to the sitting room, they could float together in the half-light, neither one truly present, neither one truly getting away.

Gabe pushed his chair back. He fingered his bald patch. That was real enough.

It had grown. With Lena the situation was getting to be absurd. It was time to look at it clearly and get it sorted out. He wasn't going to let it run on and on. Why did he hold his breath around her? As though if he said the wrong thing she might go up in a puff of smoke.

'I've been thinking – we should go to the police. This Boris has to be stopped. There's other girls out there.'

Lena said, 'You want that I leave.'

'Listen to me,' said Gabriel. 'He has to be punished.'

'Your girlfriend have something to do with it,' said Lena, the tendons in her neck standing proud.

'You'll be safe, I promise you.' He would set the process in motion and one thing would follow on from another. He would look back on this episode with Lena and marvel at how quickly it had unfolded and packed up again, once everything was back on track.

'Your girlfriend have—'

'Forget about her.' He cut Lena off. 'She's got nothing to do with this.'

Lena started scraping plates. She knocked a serving spoon to the floor. 'I know girl,' she said, 'she come from Chişinău. You know where is? Moldova, OK, you know, maybe. She is whore like me.'

'Lena ...'

'Whore like me,' repeated Lena, scraping hard, as though attempting to remove the pattern from the crockery. 'She run away and she go to police and she tell them what have happen to her. They say to her, where are your papers? They say to her, you are illegal immigrant. They say to her, you go home now and they put her on aeroplane. These men, they meet her at airport and they bring her back again.'

'I hardly think ...' said Gabriel.

Lena let the plate drop on to the table. 'They bring her back to pimp.' She spoke quickly and there was heat in it, though the words as usual lacked inflection, as though she were racing through a list. 'The police have come and arrest him and asking many, many question and then they let him go. He say to her, see, you cannot touch me, bitch. And then he beat her like never before. After that he sell her to Boris. You see what good it do for her, Irina, when she go to police?'

He didn't know what to believe. She would lie, certainly, if it suited her, but did she have the capacity to concoct a tale so fast? It was hard to tell.

He said, 'They don't do that any more. They changed the law. Girls don't get deported now. They let them settle in this country.' He didn't know if that was a lie or the truth. He had no idea about the law, but there was such a thing as justice and you got it by going to court.

Lena twisted her skinny fingers together. The dress, now he looked at it properly, was too big for her. It hung off her shoulders, the waistband sat on her hips. She looked like a little girl in a hand-me-down. He would never, ever touch her – not in that way – again.

'You have papers?' said Lena. 'You can get for me?'

'No,' he said. 'I can't do that. We have to go to the police.'

Lena lifted a fork. She extended her arm, then opened her fingers and let the fork clatter to the floor. She picked up a knife and repeated the operation.

She did the same with a blue and white dish that smashed and sent a splash of beetroot juice up her l
eg.

'Enough,' said Gabe.

She continued with a plate and a spoon.

'All right,' said Gabe. 'Stop.'

She went on smashing the crockery until Gabe rose from his chair and held her arms.

'He know,' she said, 'where my grandmother live. My parents have move somewhere but my grandmother is in village very close. He will send someone.'

Gabriel bent down slowly. He knelt among the beetroot and cabbage rolls, still holding her by the arms. 'It's OK,' he said. How stupid he was being. He knew that this Boris was terrifying to her. 'No police.'

'My grandmother, she look after me very good.'

He released her arms tentatively. 'Lena, why don't you go home? Forget about everything. Start again.'

She drew her bare feet up on to the chair and hugged her knees. She looked at the ceiling. 'Home,' she said. 'People like me, no, we don't have.'

'Of course you do,' said Gabe, still kneeling. 'Trust me. It'll be fine.'

She lowered her chin and her eyes were level with his. It was awkward looking at her, because she seemed not to see him. It was like staring into a blind person's face.

'Fine?' said Lena. 'No, I don't think. I have hear so many stories. You like to hear one story too?'

'I'll buy you a ticket,' he said.

'This girl, sixteen years, Romanian girl, this is story I have hear.'

Gabe put a finger to his lips. 'Shhh!'

'Her pimp he is from Albania, and he take her first to Italy and then Holland and then ... I don't know. Some time they spend in England and then I think they go to Italy again. And one day she is rescue by police, they go for raiding, kick door, take her to shelter with charity ladies and hot soup.'

'Sweetheart,' said Gabe. 'Don't.'

'For six months she have not speak.' Lena lapsed for a few moments into her usual silence. Gabe inched closer to her on his knees. 'Only slowly words are coming. And she have no teeth here at front, the pimp have take out to make easy for give blow jobs.'

'Hush,' whispered Gabe.

'I have not tell you best part of story,' said Lena. 'Why you tell me hush?'

She chewed a fingernail. 'They take her back home,' Lena continued after a while. 'Her family think she have work in restaurant. Then they learn what happen to her. And the father take his shotgun – and he kill himself.'

Gabe looked at the food on the floor. 'You don't have to go back,' he said.

'Stay. Stay for as long as you like.'

She was quiet.

'You want to stay in London?'

Lena laid her head on her knees.

'I'll help you,' said Gabriel. He'd said it often enough. He would really do it. There was nothing he wouldn't do. 'I'll find Pasha for you. I'll help you both get jobs.'

Lena still said nothing. She rocked a little, hugging her knees.

Gabriel's own knees were hurting. He shifted his weight back on his heels.

'Hey,' he said, 'you're doing fine.'

'You know how they prepare new girls ready for working? You can guess?' She brushed his cheek with her fingers. 'Boris bring six men for my first night.

This was party for them.'

Gabe got to his feet. 'Come on.' He took her hand. 'Let's watch some television. I'll clear this up in the morning.'

She let him lead her out of the kitchen. In the hallway she pulled back. 'I fight them,' she said.

'I know.' He squeezed her hand a little, trying to coax her through to the sitting room, thinking they'd be safe once the television was on.

'I kick and scream. I bite. I think they will not keep doing what they are doing to me when they see I am not whore.'

'Sweetheart. Please.'

She looked at him properly then, and it was with the contempt he deserved.

'This is not nice story for you?'

'I don't want you to upset yourself.'

But she had already receded, the blind look in her eyes once more. She spoke softly, wistfully, full of wonder at the mysteries of the universe.

'They laugh,' she said. 'This men. When I kick and cry. I think maybe they are crazy. They have lose their minds. But next day it happen also and also after that and then I start to think, this is normal. This is how things happen. Is me – I am crazy one and this is why they laugh. And then ... then, I don't cry any more. I don't fight. And Boris he come, he say, good – you are ready now.

And I – ' Lena smiled. 'I have want so much to see this world.'

They settled in front of the television and did not speak for a while. Gabe examined Lena's face. In the tricky reflected light her eyebrows were barely visible, two small thin scars arching across her brow. She pulled at her earrings. He said, 'Lena, those men were evil. You know that, don't you?'

She shrugged.

'Psychopaths. Crazies. Not you, them.'

She seemed not to hear him.

'And all the men who came to the flats, when you were ... when you were working, they were evil too. But most men aren't like that.'

She kept her face turned to the screen.

'It must be hard for you to believe it, but most men are basically good.'

Lena, without turning, said, 'Like you, Gabriel? You are good?'

'I hope so,' he said, 'I'm not like those men who ...'

'They are OK,' she said, 'most of them.'

'No,' he said.

'Yes.' She yawned. 'They are OK.'

'But what they ...'

'Is one man who want for me to wear high shoe and walk on him. He is good customer. He never touch me. Never.'

Pervert, thought Gabriel, but he kept the thought to himself.

'Only one customer,' said Lena, 'is very bad.' She got up and switched off the television. She drifted over to the window and leaned, blackly silhouetted, against it.

Behind her the London night streamed by in a haze of headlamps, streetlights, neon signs and window lights.

'If I see this man,' said Lena. 'If I see this man, I kill him. This is how I promise myself.'