The Road Home (16 page)

“Good. Glad you think so, Chef.”

“This is how it should be every night, though. Even when we’re chocka. It should purr like that. Well, cheers, everyone. Where’s Nurse?”

They looked over to where Lev stood at his sinks. “Come on, Nurse!” called Ashe. “Come and get your crostini before Miss Sophie Greedy-Guts eats it!”

Lev wiped his hands on a clean towel. He unwound the bandana from his head and dabbed his face with it. As he sat down, a beer was put into his hands. “Cheers!” said Ashe again.

Lev drank and ate. Though the familiar ache was in his back, he understood, at this moment, that he was fortunate. If he could hold down this job, rewards like these would be his. He would tell Ina in his next letter that he was working for a good establishment. He would compare the beautiful food he was given here to the crude starch-laden stuff he and Stefan used to eat at the Baryn lumber yard.

He looked over to Sophie, whose curly hair had recently been dyed a shade of robin red. She’d taken off her whites and Lev noted that her arms were plump and still brown from the summer heat wave and that near her shoulder there was a tattoo in the shape of a lizard. He wondered whether he was going to ask her why she’d tried to contact him. He tried to imagine telling her about the embarrassment of the ringing phone in the Festival Hall, but felt that he wouldn’t find the right words. And perhaps, anyway, her call had been an error. Perhaps she’d wanted Mario’s mobile number, or Jeb’s, and Damian had given her Lev’s by mistake.

“English girls,” Christy had commented. “There’s only one trouble with them: they’re racist. They don’t see themselves like that; they’d hate it if you accused them of it, but they are—or a lot of them are. And you and me, we’re foreigners, both. All Angela could say to me when things started to go wrong was ‘I shouldn’t have married a fucking foreigner.’ That’s what she called me. I speak the same language. I’ve lived in London fifteen years, but there you are, I’m still a ‘foreigner’ to her. That’s English girls for you, I’m telling you. Or, rather, I’m warning you. Don’t get involved with an English girl.”

“I will not involve with anyone,” Lev had said.

“Well, that’s okay, then. But if you do, don’t choose Miss United Kingdom.”

Lev looked away from Sophie. He felt G. K. Ashe’s hand on his shoulder. “You’re doing all right, Nurse,” he said. “No mice. No cockroaches. Not even a silverfish. Not yet. Keep up the standard, though. Don’t let things drop. Eh?”

Ashe went home at half past twelve, and one by one, everybody left and Lev was alone, mopping the floor. But he didn’t mind. His head felt light from the beer. He mopped in time to an old folk song he sang in his mind. Optimism seemed to have caught him unawares.

Then he heard the outside door open and Sophie was there, wearing a ragged sheepskin coat and a yellow football scarf.

“Came back to help you,” she said. “I suddenly just didn’t like it that we all left you.”

Lev straightened up and looked at her. He thought, I like her clothes.

She began unwinding the football scarf. “What can I do?” she asked. “Take the bins out?”

Lev smiled at her. Underneath her shaggy coat she wore a red sweater the approximate color of her hair and a beige leather skirt.

“It’s okay,” he said. “This is my job.”

“I know it’s your job,” said Sophie, “but I’ll bag up the rubbish and get it out for you, right?”

“You don’t need —”

“I know I don’t. Stop saying that. I’d like to do it. Then you can get home.”

Lev watched her lifting out the black bags and tying them and piling them up by the door. As she worked, she suddenly said, “I called you the other night. Damian told me you live in Tufnell Park. I go to a pub there sometimes with my friend Samantha: Sam Diaz-Morant. She works in fashion. We thought it would be a laugh to buy you a drink.”

“Yes?” said Lev.

“You wouldn’t have come, though, would you?”

“I don’t know . . .” said Lev.

“You just keep yourself to yourself. And, actually, I admire that. Most men are such fucking prostitutes.”

Lev didn’t understand this. He shrugged. Then he said, “I know you called. I was at Festival Hall.”

“Yeah? You were? What were you doing there?”

“Well. Elgar. You know him?”

“Yeah. ‘Land of Hope and Glory.’ All that stuff.”

“Yes? I didn’t know him. You know he began very poor, with his father in small poor shop, selling music?”

“Did he?”

“Yes. Very poor.”

“Yeah. Well, good on him. Now he’s on the twenty-pound note!”

“That’s Elgar?”

“Yup.”

“It’s some businessman. No?”

Sophie rummaged in her coat pocket and brought out a cheap plastic purse. She produced a twenty-pound note, took it over to Lev, and pointed out the name, Sir Edward Elgar 1857–1934.

He recognized the face he’d examined on the coach, with the set expression of a banker and multiple lines of radiance shining down on him. He began to smile. Leaning on his mop, he told Sophie how he’d studied the face of Elgar on his journey to England and then almost heard his great cello concerto but had been prevented at the last minute.

“What prevented you?” asked Sophie.

“You,” said Lev.

“Me?”

“We are waiting for Elgar when my mobile rings. I am only man with ringing phone. And ringing is you.”

Sophie shook her head as she laughed, and her robin-red curls gleamed under the bright kitchen lights. “Fuck,” she said. “Never imagined you at a posh concert. Imagined you all alone in some room. That’s how wrong I often am.”

Lev looked at Sophie’s soft arms and the lizard tattoo. And he thought how, just for a moment, he would like to stroke those arms or rest his head against them. He resumed his mopping, while Sophie went in and out with the rubbish sacks and gusts of the night air intruded on the still-warm body of the kitchen.

When the work was finished, Lev offered Sophie a cigarette and— flaunting G.K.’s laws—she took one and they stood by the two-point-five meters of steel draining top, smoking.

“So,” said Sophie, “would you like to come drinking with me?”

“Yes?” said Lev.

“You don’t sound too sure. But I don’t blame you. Sam and me, we can get a bit out of order. People drink in your country?”

“Yes,” said Lev. “
Vodichka
.”

“Is that, like, vodka?”

“It
is
vodka. It means ‘darling little vodka.’ ”

“Right. Well, we drink ‘darling little gin and tonic’ or ‘darling little Stella’ with rum or whiskey chasers. We tried absinthe one night, but I tell you, that makes you insane and we were sick as pigs.”

“Why do you drink?”

“Why do we drink? Well, why does anyone drink? Just for the way it makes the world start to look. You know?”

“Yes.”

“I work at a care home for the elderly most Sundays. Ten till six. You need a drink after that lot. No use being squeamish around old people. But they’re a laugh, too. I love them, really. You know what their favorite game is?”

“Yes?”

“Slagging.”

“Slagging?”

“Yeah. Slagging people off: criticizing them. They say, ‘I never liked So-and-so.’ Their son-in-law, say. Then it crescendos: ‘He’s such a slob. He’s a bad driver. He sends crap Christmas presents. He dyes his hair . . .’ You know? On and on. ‘He’s useless with a drying-up cloth. He wears white socks with black shoes. He broke the bird feeder.’ It gets hilarious. I encourage them. I say, ‘Right. Today over tea we’re going to have a slagging competition. See who can be nastiest.’ And they hoot with joy. I’m not kidding.”

“Yes?”

“Hate keeps people alive. One old guy, Douglas, says to me, ‘I refuse to die before my sister. She’s looked down on me for seventy-five years. Now I want to look down on her—in her grave.’ And he’s still going strong. He thinks up different ways to kill her. One of these was, he was going to break into her house and take down her curtain rails and fill them with prawns and put them back up again.”

“Prawns?”

“Yes. What G.K. calls ‘shrimp’—just because he once vacationed on Long Island. Wait for her to suffer with the stench. Drive her mad because she can’t find the source of it. Because she’s house-proud as hell, so Douglas says. Has every surface smelling of some crap polish. Dusts the lightbulbs! And the thought of her being driven away from her home by the prawn stink gives Douglas real pleasure. And I can understand that. I had a boyfriend last year I wanted to kill.”

“You wanted to kill?”

“Yeah. Haven’t you ever felt that?”

Lev remembered the longing he’d had to put a knife in the heart of Procurator Rivas, remembered lying awake on his sad bed on the floor and imagining this scene, with Marina screaming and Rivas clutching his fatal wound and falling backward in his chair, with his clomping, institutional feet sticking up in the air. Lev picked up a cloth and began gently polishing the edge of the draining top. “Maybe . . .” he said.

“I did,” continued Sophie. “I’m not joking. He was a PE instructor, my boyfriend. Fit as shit. Like an Olympic gymnast. But he kept showing his fitness off. What a wanker! He could do a backflip from a standing start. It was his party piece. And everybody went, ‘Ooh- aah, my God, how brilliant is
that!
’ But you get tired of someone doing backflips. I did. I kept hoping the next time he did a backflip he’d break his fucking neck. But he never did. I’d like to marry a firefighter. Someone who does something non-wanky. Know what I mean?”

Lev stared at Sophie, trying to fathom what she was saying. Her face was wide and dimpled and her breasts large, and her legs looked chunky and strong. There was nothing about her that resembled Marina in any way. But this otherness, this
newness of form,
fascinated him. It made her exotic, like some faraway, sun-soaked place that smelled of sugar. And he wondered what it would feel like to go to this place and breathe the candied air.

“What’re you looking at?” Sophie asked, confronting Lev’s gaze.

“Sorry,” he said. “Only looking at tattoo. Does this hurt you?”

“Nah,” said Sophie. “He’s just my lizard. He’s called Lenny. Had him done two years ago. They all know him in the care home. They say, ‘How’s Lenny today, dear?’ and I say, ‘Oh, Lenny’s fine, he’ll give you a little lick on the nose if you eat up your bread and butter.’ That’s how terrifyingly juvenile and crazy I am.”

Lev smiled. “Not crazy to me,” he said.

“Well, I am crazy,” said Sophie. “I love Lenny. When I settle down to sleep, I sometimes put my arm round my face, like this, and Lenny looks at me and we have conversations in the dark.”

Lev switched off the lights and they stood at the door for a moment, listening to the hum of the chillers in the darkness. Then they went out into the street, where a few snowflakes had begun to fall. Sophie wound her football scarf round her head. Lev pulled up his collar. He wondered where he would be able to find a winter coat he could afford.

Sophie took the padlock off her bicycle and bundled up the chain. “Night, then,” she said. “See you tomorrow.”

“Yes,” said Lev. “See you tomorrow.”

He watched her pedal off along the empty road, with the snow falling all around her. Then he made his way to the night bus stop, where he sat on the plank seat and smoked and rubbed his hands on his knees to try to warm them.

When he got home to Belisha Road, the lights were still on in the sitting room, but Christy was asleep. It was late, but Lev felt wide awake and restless. He made a cup of tea and carried it through to his room and sat down on his bunk, drinking the tea and staring at the Wendy house and the shop and the soft toys on the windowsill. One of these was a clown. Lev took it down and looked at its painted rag face and its tall felt hat. The feel of its body was squashy and soft, and Lev could imagine how much Maya would like it.

Lev looked at the time. He suddenly, desperately, wanted to call Rudi—to get news of Maya—and after some minutes of indecision, in which he imagined Rudi snoring peacefully by Lora’s side, he took out his phone and selected Rudi’s number. The phone was picked up straightaway.

“Hi, Lev,” growled Rudi. “Glad to hear your voice, comrade. No, you didn’t wake me up. Couldn’t fucking sleep at all. How’re things?”

“Okay,” said Lev. “Good. My job’s working out pretty well. Has Ina been getting the money I sent?”

“Yes. Sure she has. I took her to Baryn last Monday and we bought her a new Calor-gas heater for her jewelry-making shed. She’ll be all right now when the snow comes.”

“That’s good. It’s snowing here. What about Maya?”

“She’s fine. We were going to take her to the fair next Saturday, but I’ve got problems with the fucking Tchevi. That’s why I can’t sleep.”

“What problems?”

“Belts on the automatic drive.”

“Yes?”

“So she fucking
creeps
.”

“Creeps?”

“Yes. I’m maneuvering out of a parking space, say, so I get into ‘drive’ to move her forward a bit, then I select ‘reverse’ and I expect her to obey me and go fucking backward nice and slowly, but she doesn’t: she creeps forward before starting to acknowledge the gear she’s in. Then she lurches back, like a fucking kangaroo.”

“What can you do about it?”

“Fit new belts. Except I can’t locate any belts.”

“So?”

“If I had the fucking solution, Lev, I wouldn’t have been awake for this telephone call. Keep searching for belts, I guess. Or bribe somebody to make them. All I can do. But it kills me when the Tchevi’s sick. I love that car like I love my own liver.”

“I know you do.”

“And it’s my livelihood. But, meanwhile, Lora and I have dreamed up a new scheme: horoscopes.”

“Horoscopes?”

“Yeah. Everyone’s into astrology suddenly. They didn’t know what it was in the old days, but now they’re flocking to it like swine to the swill. All you gotta do is keep filling the swill bucket.”

“What are you going to fill the swill bucket
with?
”

“Got a few astrology books from the library. Lora’s mugging it all up. She’s got a fast-learning kind of mind. Then we’re going to advertise star-sign readings. People send their birth dates, accompanied by some hard cash, and we give them a personalized prediction of their immediate future. Four or five euros a shot.”