One of Us (7 page)

Daniel pursed his lips and blew out some air. “Be like that,” he said. But he grinned as he said it, and did not push it any more. I can wait, the grin said. I can wait, because one day you will say yes.

“Look, Anna, all that stuff back there in the restaurant. About Corgan. You do want to listen. OK? I’m not messing around. Be careful.”

“OK,” I said. “I was not planning on being anything else.”

“I mean it, Anna, stop trying to be clever all the fucking time. Just keep your head down. Like this business with Kav. It’s complicated, you don’t need to know the details, but put it this way, if Corgan thought that what was behind it might get back to the Ukrainian, he would do anything to stop it. And I mean anything. No fucking about, I’m serious. Just keep your head down and don’t talk about any of this to anyone.”

“I thought the Ukrainian was Corgan’s boss?”

“So does he,” Daniel said. “But forget all that. Just forget it. Keep your mouth shut, see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing. And remember: I can help you. Look after you.”

“And why would you do that?” I asked him. “I do not have a good experience with people offering to do things for me. There is often a catch.”

“Ouch. Touché. But that’s why, Anna. I feel like I owe you one for what happened. That’s why I’m offering to look after you.”

“No other reason?”

“Not that I can think of,” Daniel said, and he grinned the biggest grin of the day. “Why, you thinking of anything in particular? Anything you had in mind?”

“You are never in my mind,” I said, and Daniel laughed and got back into his car.

“Later,” he said, and drove away. As he did, he raised one hand out of the window in goodbye. I might have done the same in answer, but I had already picked up the laundry bag, so he lost out.

CHAPTER SIX

Two days later I was sat cross-legged on my bed, staring at a newspaper that was two days old, but not reading any of the words. I was thinking of my father, of how he shivered in a damp cell, mourning his son and not knowing whether his daughter was dead too. He did not mourn for long. They told my aunt it was a heart attack, but that was a lie often told and we knew it for what it was. She told me over the phone, while I stood in a phone box in a city I did not know, in a country that was not my own, and I cried because he was dead, and I cried because I would never see him again, and I cried because I was not there for him, and I cried because I was cold and on my own and my father would never hold me and say “Hush, hush,” again. I told my aunt that I wanted to come back to the funeral, and she said I could not, that it was not safe. “You need to know why, child,” she said. “It is time you knew the truth, past time”, and she told me other things, things I knew already, but had not allowed myself to believe, and then my money ran out and that was that.

Safira poked her head around the door. She was nervous, like a little mouse, always watchful, always timid. I wondered if she had always been like that, or if her journey to this place had made her that way.

“Anna, there is a visitor for you,” she whispered. “A man.” She said this as if it was a thing of great surprise.

I sighed and folded the paper up. I did not want visitors. I did not want men, men were trouble. I just wanted to sit, and to drink hot tea, and to think.

I walked down to the front door and opened it. Safira would not have left the front door open to a man she did not know. Sean stood outside, shuffling from foot to foot, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his coat.

“Anna,” he said. “Hello.”

“Sean,” I said. Then neither of us said anything else for a moment.

“So there’s a problem?” I asked. “At work, I mean. Does Peter need me in?”

“Work’s fine,” Sean said. “It’s not about—I just—I just thought it would be nice if we could talk. Outside work. See how you were, you know. Get a coffee or something. If that’s OK. So I thought I would call round early, before work, see you.”

“Talk about what?” I said. “What else is there to talk about?” He looked as if I had slapped him.

“Maybe this wasn’t a good idea,” he said. “Sorry.” He turned to walk away.

“No,” I said. “Wait. I am short on good ideas. Wait there, I will get my coat. We can walk in the park before work. It will be good to get some air.”

We walked to the park without saying very much. Sean tried to make conversation about work, talking about something that Peter had said, telling it like he was a comedian and I was his audience. His heart was not in it though, and after a while he stopped, and we walked on a way in silence. It was not busy. There were nicer parks, with beds of flowers and bandstands and swings for the children to play on. This one was just trees and scrubby grass and a pond. It was used by joggers and flashers and dog-walkers, by people who had sex in the bushes because there was nowhere else for them to go, or just because they liked having sex in the bushes. But it was close, and it had trees instead of concrete, so it was good enough for us.

I wanted to say something that would make things between me and Sean all right again, because just walking with him, like this, I realised how much I had missed him. But I could not think of the words to say. This was not because of the languages we spoke. It was just because we were people, and people are bad at finding words when it really matters. I thought that if I said the wrong words now, it would make it all worse. So we walked on in silence.

We reached the pond where ducks hid amongst reeds and lived off the bread that small children threw at them on sunny mornings while their child minders talked on their phones. I sat down carefully on the scribbled-on bench that looked out at the pond. My back still hurt from Corgan’s punch, and the cold made it worse. Sean hovered for a moment, as if he did not know what to do, and then he sat down beside me.

“So, what’s been happening?” Sean said, too brightly.

I shrugged. “I do not think it is things that you want to know.” I had not meant to say it like that. But I was still angry about the way that Sean had left me, and putting away my anger was not something that I was ever very good at.

Sean sighed, shook his head. “Guess I asked for that. It’s not that I don’t want to know, Anna. Jesus, you’re the best friend I’ve got. But it’s complicated. There’s stuff you don’t know.”

“Tell me,” I said. I did not think that I would have much sympathy in me for one of Sean’s dramas. Not when he did not want to know mine.

“You’re going to find this hard to understand.”

“Try me.”

“I know what you think, Anna. I can see it in the way you look at me. You think that I’m scared of getting involved. Am I right? Be honest. Am I right?”

“I suppose so. But I understand, Sean, it is not your life and there is no reason you should be dragged into it. I am not angry. A little sad, yes, because I needed you and you were not there. But I understand.”

He sat back, shook his head. “See, you don’t get it. Not that I blame you. Anyone would think just that. But you don’t get it.”

“You are right then, I do not understand,” I said, and I did not. “Tell me.”

Sean looked down at his baseball boots, as if he might find the answer written in their fraying black canvas. He took a long breath.

“I’m scared,” he muttered in the end.

“That’s OK,” I said. “So am I.” And I had been, since the moment there was a hammering at our door, and my father pushed me into the cupboard under the stairs so hard I thought he had broken my arm. I have never known a darkness like the one that came when he shut the door. I carry it with me still.

“But not how you think,” he said, and he looked right at me, not blinking, not looking away so that I could see that he meant this. “I’m not scared of what
they
might do. Of getting involved. I’m scared of what
I
might do. Will do. Always do.”

I did not understand. “What you will do?”

Sean smiled, shook his head sadly. “I’ll let you down, Anna.” He looked away again now, staring out at nothing. “You’ll rely on me, and when it comes down to it, I’ll let you down. I’ll run away and you’ll be left on your own. And I will be somewhere else, and I’ll know that I’ve betrayed you, and I—you’re so important to me. I don’t want to do that to you.
Can’t
do that to you. So...” He lifted his hands, grasping at the air as if he could show me something with them that he could not in words. But he could not do that either, and he just slapped them down on his knees in disgust. “It’s what I do,” he said. “It’s what I always do.”

Sean jumped up from the bench and walked over to the edge of the pond, looking down into the water as if there was something there other than weeds and muck. An elderly woman in a green plastic coat walked her dog between us, its fat hindquarters wobbling as it went past. I sat on the bench, and sank down a little further into my coat because I was cold, and I waited for him. After a while, I heard him take a deep breath, and then cough. He turned and looked at me, made a weak effort at a smile. I smiled back. He looked as if he was about to cry, but then he pushed it all down inside himself, closing his eyes for a second, and it was gone.

He came and sat back next to me. He was breathing quick, like a scared chick when you hold it in your cupped hands on a visit to a farm.

“You must think I’m mad.”

“A little,” I said.

“Well, that’s kind of it,” he said. “Really. In a nutshell.” He leaned back on the bench, and stuffed his hands down into his pockets.

“Sean?”

“Things like this, I get...I don’t cope well with it. I get...like I am sometimes. When life is difficult. I can’t handle it, and I find myself somewhere else, another city even, because I just have to get out. So there, in a nutshell, my wonderful life.” He laughed. I did not. I did not speak. He was not finished yet, and I did not want to stop him.

“So, went to what, six schools, never lasted at any of them. Got to university, dropped out, couldn’t handle that either. Never had a relationship that has lasted more than six months and which hasn’t felt doomed from the start. Never held down a job of any consequence because hey, what’s the point, a few months in, a couple of years if I’m really lucky, I’m not going to go into work one day because everything is black and I’m curled up in a ball on my bed wanting the world to stop and go away, and I’m not going to phone in and I’m not going to answer the phone when they phone me and after a while that job will be gone too. Why do you think I’m working at somewhere like Pete’s? It’s because it doesn’t matter if it all falls apart. And in the end, it always falls apart. It. Me. Whatever.”

“Oh, Sean,” I said. I thought about putting my arm around him, but I was worried that if I did, he would cry, and that would be fine but he needed to talk first. The words were coming out of him fast now, like water bursts through a river bank, slow streams turning into great floods that break everything down. He rocked backward and forward on the bench while he talked.

“I remember once,” he said. “I was nineteen. Had been through what everyone politely called ‘an episode’. I’m sitting in this doctor’s office, squirming in a plastic chair while on the other side of the desk he looks over his glasses at me and asks me questions about how I feel. He’s probably thinking about what he was going to have for dinner that night, wondering how England had got on in the cricket. But he asks me, Sean, how do you think about your life?

“And I thought right, you asked. So I told him. Imagine a scene from some Victorian novel. It’s Christmas. Like a card. The house is all bright, there’s happiness, a crackling log fire, children there, racing around like mad, and the grown-ups sit in comfortable chairs with glasses of something hot. Outside, it’s freezing cold, and there’s six inches of snow. Some poor orphan is looking in through the thick panes of glass, peering past the snow in the corners. He’s watching all the happy people inside. He can see what is going on in the house, but he knows he’ll never be part of it. He can see it, but he doesn’t know how to get inside. He can see it, but even if the kind people invited him in, he wouldn’t know what to do when he was there. It’s not his world, and he knows that it never will be, and that’s just the way things are, and always will be. There, you asked, that’s how I think about my fucking life.” He took a deep, shuddering breath, and the words kept on pouring out.

“So this psychiatrist, he looks a bit freaked out, and he coughs and pushes his glasses back up his nose and says that I had a very creative imagination. I know, I said, it’s a curse. Many people would think of it as a blessing, he said. Only those who don’t have any imagination, I said. And then his little clock chimed, and it was the end of the session, and I think we were both relieved by that. He thanked me for coming in, and upped my dosage. Which is what they always did, in the end. Upped the dosage. Changed to a different drug. Upped the dosage of that one. Combined two together. Another day, another prescription. Some worked, for a bit. Some worked but took away everything that it meant to be me. Some didn’t work at all. But there was always something new to try.”

“Sean,” I said. “I did not know.”

“Well, now you do,” he said. “The dirty little secret of my life. I can be doing fine, getting on, and then the black dog comes sniffing around my door, just like the song says, and I run away from it, and when I do I run away from everything else too, no matter what it costs. Once, my mum was angry with me because I wouldn’t leave the house for a month. You were always such a happy child, she said, what happened? Why are you like this? I said I didn’t know, but maybe if she wanted the answer she should have a good think about what it was she did that made me this way. Can you believe that? My own mum. She crumpled in on herself like I’d hit her, and I went back to my room. It was a horrible low blow, with no truth in it at all, not that I can think of anyway, but she was trying to make me go outside and I really, really, really didn’t want to go there. So I said it. Little shit.”

He looked at me, for the first time since he had come to sit back down, and he blinked hard to keep the tears back. “I’ll do it to you, Anna. I do it to everybody in the end. And I so, so don’t want to do it to you.”

I reached over, took his hand in mine. “I will take that risk, Sean.”

He shook his head, squeezed my hand tight. “It’s not a risk. It’s a certainty.”

I shrugged. “Well, until that time. Then I will deal with it.”

“I don’t want to hurt you, Anna.”

“And you think this doesn’t, Sean?” I was letting more emotion into my voice than I should have done. “Shutting me out like you have, when I am your friend?”

“Sorry,” he said, and he looked down so I could not see but the tears fell from his cheeks and splashed on the denim of his jeans like rain. I put my arms around him, and hugged him close to me, and for a long time we sat on the splintered wood of the park bench like that, like lovers, while he shook against me.

In the end, he sat up, looked away and scrubbed at his eyes with his knuckles, sniffed and coughed. I turned to look at the pond, to give him time. It was not nice, crying in front of other people. It let them see you ugly, and like a child, with snot hanging from your nose, and you cannot speak because you are choking on phlegm in your throat, and your eyes are pink, like a pig’s. I cried once when I was fourteen after my first boyfriend told me that he would leave me. Cried, and cried in front of him. I thought that it might win him back. When I finished though, I saw the disgust in his eyes. “Please,” I said to him, wiping my sleeve across my face. “Please.” He shook his head and left. It was only after he had gone that I saw the silver streak across my sleeve, like a slug had crossed it.

“Christ,” Sean said in the end, when he got his voice back again and could talk without catching his breath. “Well, that was embarrassing. Sorry.”

I kept looking at the pond, at the tangle of rushes with an old training shoe hanging in them, at the green scum on the water. “Don’t be. It is good that you can be like this, with me, it makes me feel like I am a real friend.”