One of Us (10 page)

“I will do them in the morning,” I said. It sounded very domestic.

“Whatever,” Sean said. “But now...” He stood with one hand behind his back and grinned like a child.

“What?” I said. “Now you bring out some doves, lots of coloured handkerchiefs?”

He grinned some more and then waved a box at me. “Better. Champagne truffles. The real thing, not some crap from Tesco’s. Proper chocolate, from...” he squinted at the label, “from ‘a chocolatier whose family have been making chocolates in Belgium for two hundred years’, no less. A chocolate to be savoured, it says on here. Stuff that, I’m going to open the box, and neither of us gets up until it’s empty.”

“Wow,” I said. “Sean.” I loved chocolate, very much, too much. Not that it showed. Sometimes I looked at my face in the mirror and thought that it was just that I had lost some of the puppy fat I had as a teenager. Sometimes I thought that it was nothing to do with age, and all to do with being poor. Which made me think. “These cost a lot of—”

He waved a hand to dismiss this. “Present from my mum. She said I was to keep them for a special occasion. But I thought I’d bring them out when you were here instead.”

“Ha ha,” I said, and I did not believe him for a minute and I think that he knew it. Still, it would not stop me from eating the chocolates.

We talked about his childhood. He told me about months he could not really remember. Whether it was from medication or sadness, he did not know, but they were blank spaces in his life.

“I remember odd things,” he says. “A fete, where I won a jar of honey on the tombola. It’s like, uh, a prize draw. Out of a tub, only it—anyway. Sitting at a window somewhere that wasn’t our house, staring out as the rain lashed down like someone was hosing down the glass, and there were three tall trees, tall and thin, poplars maybe, and they just trembled in the wind and all I did was sit there and watch. Dunno where I was. Think it was a hospital.”

He talked about other places, other times. He talked about family holidays by the sea and ice cream and wasps and machines where you put pennies in to make other pennies fall. He did not talk very much about people though. Sometimes a name wandered into one of his stories, hung about for the next one, and then was never heard of again. I wanted to cry, and I wanted to go and give him a hug, but I did neither, because they would have been all about the past but they would have opened up the future. He fell silent, and we drank our wine, and listened to a CD, sad acoustic music from an American woman which made me think of empty roads and lives full of disappointment.

“I miss them both,” I said in the end. “So very much, you know.”

“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“But it’s complicated,” I said.

He arched an eyebrow. He did not understand.

“Never mind,” I said, because I could not tell him.

That night, Sean insisted that I slept in his bed, and he slept on the couch. His pillow smelt of him. I could hear him in the other room, the couch creaking as he tried to get comfortable, coughing, clinking a glass. I got out of bed once, to get my glass of water because I was thirsty after all the wine and I had left the water on the bookshelf by the door. All the noise from the next room stopped. I got back into bed, and after a moment or two I heard him call himself an idiot, louder than he meant to because he was more drunk than he realised, and then I stayed very still so I would not make him think that I was coming for him again.

CHAPTER NINE

The marks on Elena were healing. The ones on the outside that I could see, that is. The ones on the inside I could not tell. I thought that maybe there were layers of scar tissue there that would never come away. I saw her where she lived now, not the house where I had first seen her. Corgan kept her in a one room flat on the first floor of a house on a street full of one room flats and broken-down cars. He did not need to keep her locked in anywhere to stop her from running away. He did not even need to threaten her. He knew she had a son. She knew that he knew. A plain equation, no need for much thought. She stayed where she was.

“When I first met you,” I said, “you were talking. About family in Canada, about getting your son and starting a new life.” We sat in her small room, on a sagging couch where the cushions were so soft that it was hard to stand back up again. Much of the room was taken up with a big bed on the far wall opposite a fireplace which had been beautiful once, when the house was first built. Now it was painted over with thick white paint. When I had come in, Elena had thrown a spread over the bed, as if that would make it not be there.

“Yes,” she said, “I was, wasn’t I? I also would like to fly, like Superman. And maybe have a yacht, too, to take me where I want to go.” She smoked furiously, her shoulders hunched up around her ears. She sat with her long legs folded up to her chest, one arm wrapped tight around them. “You would not know what it was like. You are a doctor, you will have had a different life.”

Yes, I did, I thought. And one which touched on lives like yours. But I will not tell you that. “But you need money,” I said.

“Yes, I need money. I need my son, and I need to be out of reach where no-one knows me, and that means money. More money than I can save from what they leave me with. But I kid myself it is not, and I hide what money I have away inside my radio, and I’m lying there sometimes, when they do things to me, and I try and think about Canada. Or anywhere. Anywhere else. I could make it all go away, no problem, but then none of my money gets saved, it all goes up my nose or in my arm.”

There was a photo of a young boy up on the wall. He grinned at the camera, his curly hair all over the place like he had been in a hurricane, his skin brown as if from a summer spent playing in fields and making camps in trees.

“My son,” she said. “I take it down and put it in a drawer every time the men come. I cannot let him see that.”

“He’s beautiful,” I said, and he was. “Elena. There’s one of your...one of the men who sees you. I’ve heard something about him.”

She shrugged and studied her nails. “I pay no attention to them. They do not exist. They are not people. They just come in, they do what they do, they leave again. I do not think of them as people.”

“Well, this one, he is not just a nobody.”

“They are all nobodies.”

“Yes, but this nobody is somebody. He is important, Elena.”

“Good for him,” she said, and lit another cigarette. She was quiet for a little while, smoking and staring out of the window. “He has money?” she said in the end.

“It’s not about the money,” I said. “This man could be a way to bring Corgan down. To make you free.”

Elena laughed. “Oh thank you,” she said. “Free. But broke. What, so we bring Corgan down, and I go get some shitty job in some shitty place like you, and I never have no money?”

I had not been expecting this. I had expected fear, maybe. Thanks, for sure. But not mockery.

“Oh sorry,” I said. “Stupid me. I thought that bringing down the man who makes you earn your living getting raped, would be a good thing. So sorry my plan did not come with a necklace, maybe some furs.”

“Fuck you,” Elena jumped to her feet, stabbed her cigarette towards me with every word that she spoke. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. You know nothing.”

“I know what they do to you.” I was shouting back at her. “How can you just think about money?”

“I do not,” Elena said.

I shrugged, one of those big shrugs you do when you call someone an idiot, or a liar. “Sounded that way to me.”

She stuck her face close into mine. I did not move it back an inch.

“I do not think about money,” she said very quietly. “I think about him.” And she looked over my shoulder, at the photo on the wall, and then all the anger was gone, like someone had pulled a plug. She looked much older than I had thought her to be, and very tired. “He was born wrong,” she said. “He is beautiful, my beautiful boy. But some of him, it does not work how it should.”

“Oh my God,” I said. “Elena.”

“Fuck God,” she said. It sounded automatic, like something she said whenever she heard the word, the way people here say god bless you when someone sneezes.

I looked at the photo of her son.

“He is beautiful,” I said.

“Yes, he is,” she said. “And there are things that can be done. Operations, yes, but also things that can be done every day, he can be taught to walk better, do more. But it costs money. And my family is poor. His father was poor too, and now he is dead anyway, I always knew that fucking motorbike would kill him. So I pay for the things that will make my beautiful boy better. That is what I care about.”

“I am sorry,” I said.

“Me too,” she said, but I do not think she was saying it to me.

“This man,” I said. “Some things that he says could be worth a lot of money.”

We sat in silence again.

“They will kill me,” she said after a while. “They will find out, and they will kill me. If I try to blackmail. Worse than kill me. They will give me to the men who use me and tell them that they can do what they like.”

I remembered Corgan’s casual words into his phone. She did not know how close she had come to that. And it would have been my fault. I do not know if I could have lived with that. And then I felt very sad, and very bad, because I feared that in the end, maybe I would have lived with that. I was good at living with things like that. After all, I had years of practice.

“No blackmail,” I said. “Blackmail, he gets to find out first. And then he tells Corgan and his men. So no blackmail.”

Elena looked at me. “So what, then? We pick his pockets and hope there is enough? I would stay with the doctoring, you are good at that. This stuff, not so much.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “But I do have a better idea than blackmail. If what I hear is true about this man, then there are others who would pay to know things about him. And you would not have to worry about Corgan or this man. Not once these others found out.”

Elena arched an eyebrow at me. “I thought you were a doctor,” she said. “Making people well, not killing them off.”

“Just a medical student,” I said. “So it doesn’t count. Not yet. You can arrange for your son to be flown out. Paid for. And the two of you disappear, before Corgan and his men even know. Besides, they will be too busy to worry about you.”

“How?” she asked. “Tell me how.”

“Budden,” I said. “The man called Budden. He is the key to all of this. What Corgan is up to with him, Lomax or the man they call the Ukrainian would pay good money for.”

Elena shivered as if the room was very cold. She stared at me for a little while, as though she could see something on me.

“No,” she said. “No. The Ukrainian? Stop this.” She stood up, and started to walk up and down the floor. My friend Michael was studying for his exams in our second year, and he had left it too late. Just like Michael always did. So when he grew panicked enough to stop partying, and to start studying, he did not have enough time. He took some amphetamines that a girlfriend of his had stolen from a hospital pharmacy. I saw him at dinner time in the student canteen, when he gave me and the others a big confident grin, and told us that he was going to study for twenty-four hours straight, so his brain could soak up everything that he needed to know. He came banging on my door at two in the morning, and paced up and down the floor of my room until four, jumping from questions about the motility mechanisms of the gut, to my childhood, to why it rained, and whether or not his girlfriend was a lesbian. Elena moved with the same jerky quickness that Michael did then, like film of a puppet, speeded up.

“Stop this,” she said. “It is not fair, you are cruel, you are a bitch, Anna. Leave. I don’t need you, I can get better by myself, I do not want you here, go, go on, fuck off, fuck off.”

“Elena,” I said.

“No, no, fuck off. Don’t do this. Don’t talk to me like this as if this could be something real, something that would bring my son to me—”

“Elena.” I stood up and stepped in front of her, blocking her path. She raised a hand as if to push me out of the way, but left it there, between us, trembling.

“Elena,” I said again, more gently this time.

“Can it work?” she said. “Can it really work? These men kill people, Anna.”

“I know,” I said. “There is a lot that we need to do. But I think it can work.”

“He didn’t send you? If I do not throw you out, does it mean I get a beating?”

“I would not do that for him,” I said. “Never.”

She made a face, and yanked her blouse up to show the marks. “You do this for him. You help this go away, so it can be done again.”

I tried to say something but I could not think of anything to say. I sat down on the edge of the bed. After a moment or two, Elena sat down next to me.

“Sorry,” she said. “I do what I do because he makes me. You do what you do because he makes you. I cannot hate you for that.”

Yes, but he makes you with your son, I thought. I am doing this all for myself. She put a hand on my shoulder.

“And you should not hate you, for it also.”

I put my hand on hers. “Thank you,” I said. But just because she told me that did not make it so.

“This money,” Elena said. “How much will it be?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“It has to be enough that I can get my son, and get us away,” she said. “Or I do not do it.”

“I know.”

“I mean what I get, it must be enough,” she said. “My half. That must be big enough to do that. Or I do not do it, we forget it.”

“There is no your half,” I said. “All of it will be for you.”

She looked at me, puzzled. “You are not taking any of the money?”

“No,” I said. “The money will all be yours.”

“Then what do you get?” The suspicious Elena of a few moments ago was back.

I looked at her for a long time.

“Corgan,” I said. “I get him.”

CHAPTER TEN

“No offence,” Sean said. “But you’re fucking mad.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I am grateful for your support.”

We were sat in the little front room of Sean’s flat. It was not fair to Sean if I stayed with him for long, so I had moved back to the hostel. I was worried that if we lived too close, too long, that it would bring to the surface things that should stay sunk. I would think Anna, listen to yourself, you think you are some great catch, the way you look now? But then he would look at me, just for a second longer than he should, or he would not look at me at all, and I thought no, I am right not to stay here, it is not fair on him. He told me I could stay as long as I want, but I talked some bullshit about losing my room if I stayed away too long. He started to say something else, but then he stopped and gave me one of those Sean grins that he did to cover an awkward moment.

I sat on one end of the small couch that once had been orange but now was faded to dirty brown. Sean had been wandering around the room, changing CDs while he talked excitedly about the music, and making a pretence of tidying by moving things from one pile to another. When I started to talk to him about Elena he sat down on a plastic chair that he had stolen from a pub garden.

“Fucking mad. And I should know, remember, I’m the expert. Christ. You don’t even know who this bloke is, who to talk to about him, nothing. Anna, Anna I know why you’re doing this, but there’s a hundred, a thousand ways that it could go wrong.”

“Not only your support,” I said, “but your encouragement too.”

“Encouragement? You expect me to encourage you in this? Jesus. Why don’t you just do it the simple way and shoot Corgan?”

I smiled at Sean, a big idiot smile, like a baby does just as it fills its nappy. I had gone with my father and Aleksey to shoot duck, just once, and they had let me shoot a couple of times. But it hurt my shoulder, and I got bored and they drank and laughed and I got more bored and my toes grew so cold that I thought they were going to fall off. So I made a face until they noticed, and then a worse one until they gave in and declared that the day was over. Aleksey drank coffee from a flask and then drove us home along the country roads, very slowly so he did not crash, or wake my father who snored in the back seat like a pig rooting under a tree.

“Whoah, don’t you even think about it, Anna. Anyway, you haven’t got a gun.” He looked up, worried. “Have you? You haven’t gone and got a gun, have you?”

“No,” I said. “I have no gun. And I do not wish to kill him. Well, I do, but the better side of me says not. But Sean, I
must
stop him.”

Sean leant forward, his elbows on his knees, his hand cupping his face. “If only there was some kind of organisation. You know, set up by the government and made to go after people who break the law, and catch them, and put them in prison. It seems like such a simple idea I’m amazed that no-one’s ever thought of it.”

“Funny. You should go on the stage. I cannot go to the police, Sean. One, I have no evidence. Two, I do not trust the police. I know, I know, your police are not the police of my country. But it was men in police uniforms who took my father and who beat my brother to death. So do not tell me I should trust the police, here, anywhere. And you forget, Sean. I have worked for Corgan. If they find out I have done that, and have false papers, they will send me back. And I cannot go back.”

“They wouldn’t.” Sean said. “Not with your story.”

“You keep saying that,” I said, annoyed. “What are you, some kind of expert? Read a book about immigration law during slow nights on the till?”

“OK, OK, I’m just saying,” Sean said.

“Well do not.”

“OK. Jesus.” He scratched his head. “Tell the police anonymously, maybe?”

“Not enough,” I said. “You think they will listen? And besides, if I go to the police, how does Elena get any money? She has to have money to look after her son.”

“With Corgan out of the way, she could settle here properly. Get a job. Bring her son over.” Sean stopped, shook his head, and looked at me. “I’m talking bollocks, aren’t I?”

I shrugged and said nothing.

“A working girl, here without permission, family back home? They’d send her back before Corgan’s had his first night inside, scared shitless that the Daily Mail will get hold of it.”

“More than that,” I said. “If she has no money, she cannot disappear. And if she cannot disappear, Corgan will find her.”

“But he’ll be locked up and—yeah, OK. Bollocks again. Someone like him...”

“Yes. Either the people he works for, or the people who work for him. He will have a long reach. Even from a prison cell.”

Sean put his fingers together, and rested his face against them like he was praying. “OK. So, the police aren’t an option. You need to get proof that Budden is fixing Corgan up with contacts to go it alone. This Lomax or whatever he’s called, he isn’t just going to take your word for it, is he? Recording would be best, if Elena can get Budden talking. Video would be perfect, but you’d need line of sight, and then how do you hide it? Might have to settle for sound.”

“Sean,” I said, amused. “It sounds as if you are starting to help me plan this? I thought that it was madness.”

“Well, it is,” he said. “So who better than a madman to advise you on the finer points of it?” He grinned at me in a scary way and rolled his eyes.

“You don’t have to,” I said. “No joke.”

“I know,” Sean said. “But I want to. No joke. It feels good, Anna, this. Taking something on. Not running away.”

“Good,” I said. “I am so pleased.” And I was.

“Because I don’t want to run away from you,” he said, the grin gone, and I did not know what to say to that so I smiled at him and then pretended that I had a thread on my jeans that I had to pick off. I heard Sean take a breath as if he was about to say something else, but then he let it go in a sigh, and said, “Right. If we’re going to plan this properly, I better make some tea. Here, listen to this while I’m doing it. Found it the other day in the market. She made an album, back in the sixties, then lived on an island or something until a couple of years ago and she got rediscovered. It’s beautiful.”

He went and bustled in his little kitchen, and I sat on the couch and listened to the woman’s voice, as delicate as thin glass, while I thought about what I would do if Sean made a pass at me. I liked him, very much. But I thought maybe that was all. Sean was sweet, and he understood me in a way that no-one else did. But he did not do what Daniel did, which was make me feel like I could lose control, like I could not predict what I would do because my brain was no longer in charge. By the time Sean had come back in with the tea, I had still not decided how to handle it. I just hoped that I had read him wrong. Or that I had read him right, but he would not do anything, for fear of spoiling our friendship.

“You look lost in thought,” he said, as he put the mugs down on the table. “Got no biscuits, sorry. Beautiful song, this.”

“It is a very complicated world sometimes,” I said, without really meaning to.

“Yeah,” he said. “Which is why I’ve forgotten to get any biscuits. Still, never mind, eh.” But he said it too brightly, too lightly, and I knew then that he knew what I was talking about.

We drank our tea and we made our plans. Sean managed to find paper and a pen amongst the clutter, and we made a list of all that we had to think about. Sean talked it through, looking at every angle, trying to think of all of the problems, and all of the answers.

“The less he’s thinking, the better,” he said. “So if she tries to get him talking right in the middle of it—”

I held up a hand, to stop his excitement which was carrying him on like a train out of control of its driver.

“What?”

“You hear what you are saying, Sean. ‘In the middle of it’. You do realise what else this means? For Elena.”

“Christ. No. I hadn’t thought.”

We sat in silence for a moment.

“Jesus.” Sean sat back in resignation. “Maybe we should just shoot the bastard after all.”

“Do not think that I haven’t thought about it. Much. Often. But Elena will do what she does, I think, one last time. This gives her the escape she wants. A new life. If not, she has to do it over and over, many times.”

“And you? What does this give you, Anna?”

“It frees me from Corgan. It pays back the debt I owe for doing all of these things for him. I do it for them, I become one of them. No matter that I am just the doctor, mending people. I do his work. And by doing his work, I work for him, no different from the others like him.” And I have known others like him, I thought, and from nowhere my eyes filled with tears. I pretended I was tired, rubbed at my eyes.

“I’m just having trouble seeing what comes next,” Sean said, tipping his chair onto its two back legs, and putting his feet up on a pile of music magazines. “For you. Elena gets her new life, she flies off to Canada, reunited with her son. Cool. But you? You said yourself, Corgan has a long reach. So he gets investigated, maybe sent down, maybe not. For all we know he could be paying someone off. Either way, is he going to think Elena’s done all this on her own? Not likely. So if he starts to think who might have helped her, whose name is going to come up, huh?”

“I know,” I said, and I did, because I had thought about it very much. “Mine, maybe.”

“Maybe? Definitely. So then he’s going to come after you. And what are we going to do then, Anna?”

I felt a gratefulness for that word that made my eyes sting with a tear. Both because of what he had said, and because of what I was about to say to him next.

“I am going to run, Sean. I am going to go somewhere he can’t find me. I am sorry. But I will have to leave.”

Sean looked up at me, went to say something, stopped. He looked down at the floor for a moment or two, and then back at me. He smiled, but it was not a very good attempt.

“I see,” he said. “I suppose that’s obvious, yeah. Can’t stay here. Not safe. I just didn’t think—I dunno, I just didn’t think. Not so keen on this song,” he said, and he got up and fiddled with his cheap CD player that sat on the floor under the window. “Don’t know why. Anything else you fancy on?”

“I cannot stay, Sean,” I said. “He will find me. I need to go to another city, I can disappear. I have no identity anyway, Sean, I am no-one. There is Anna, who was nearly a doctor. There is Anna who is here from another country working in a burger bar and might get deported because I am not welcome here. There is Anna, who has the papers that Corgan had made. But they are just papers, they burn. I can be another Anna, just as easily. I lose nothing, leave nothing.” I saw his face, and hated myself for my clumsy words. “Except for my friends. Except for you. I am sorry, Sean, really I am. I will miss you very much.”

“You might not,” he said.

“I will,” I said, offended that he could think that way, but not wanting to show it because I had already hurt him enough.

“Mmm,” he said. And then he went and made himself busy making more tea that neither of us drank.