The Road Home (40 page)

Midge finished his breakfast and took down the pay ledger he kept on a sideboard, which, during Donna’s brief day, might have been set out with glass or china but was now piled up with machine catalogs, magazines, and newspapers, old Jiffy bags, maps, broken pens, pruners, and balls of garden twine. He put on a pair of narrow spectacles and squinted through them at his own untidy handwriting.

“Looks like I owe you a hundred and thirty-three pounds. Four extra hours in the chiller this week. Right?”

“Yes.”

“Shame you can’t stay for the soft fruit, later on. We do Pick Your Own at weekends.”

Pick Your Own.

Lev had a sudden memory of Lydia seeing these words through the coach window and admitting that she didn’t understand them.

“What is
Pick Your Own
, Midge?” he asked now.

“Fruit,” said Midge. “
Pick Your Own Fruit
. It’s when I let the public loose in a strawberry field. Come swarmin’ in on fine days, they do. Never know who you’re going to meet there.”

Pick Your Own.

Lev smiled. He imagined the silence of Longmire Farm broken by the laughter of women in pale summer clothes. “That’s good, Midge,” he said. “Maybe you meet someone new this year.”

“Who knows? But is it worth it? Crikey. All that aggravation. Perhaps I’m better off with just me and the dog.”

Midge went out and returned with Lev’s money in an envelope.

“I’ve called it one three five,” he said. “Haven’t got the coins.”

“I give you change?”

“No. Yew keep it. You earned tha’, fair and square. Sorry to lose yew, I am.”

There was a part of Lev that wished he could just slip away from the Mings without saying good-bye: tenderness and embarrassment mingled.

But when they saw him packing his things, they came and stood at his elbow, staring sorrowfully at him.

“Rev. Why you reaving?”

“Rev. You hate us now?”

“We no’ hurt you, Rev . . .”

“You in crazy mood, Rev. So we take care you. Is awl.”

He reached out for their hands. They came to him and he held them close to him, like children. He said he was grateful that they’d taken care of him, that he would always remember them.

They clung together, the three of them like that, for a moment. Then they heard the toot of Midge’s Range Rover summoning the Mings to the asparagus fields. They grabbed their old canvas satchel, which contained their lunch, tugged on their boots, and scuttled out into the sunshine. Before they reached the car, they turned and waved.

“You good man, Rev!” called Sonny.

And the echo from Jimmy: “Yah, you good man, Rev!”

19

The Room of Colored Glass

A GREEK FRIEND of Christy Slane’s, Babis Panayiottis— usually known as “Panno”—ran a popular taverna in Highgate Village. Christy had recently replumbed Panno’s kitchen, installed a new hot-water boiler, a glass washer, and some deep-bowl sinks and smart drainers, overseen the setting up of a gas-fed charcoal grill. And Panno had said to him, “Lovely work, Christy. Just how I like it. From now on, you be my guest sometimes.”

Staff came and went from Panno’s taverna. He preferred to employ Greeks, or Greek Cypriots, claimed the customers liked to be reassured, in a city of mixed-up cultures, that people were who they pretended to be. But he admitted to Christy that hiring Greek staff was difficult. “A lot of Greeks get miserable in London,” he said. “Not their fault. They just can’t take the climate.”

When Christy told Panno about Lev, his willingness to work hard, his spell at GK Ashe, Panno said, “Does he look Greek?”

Lev took a waiter’s job at Panno’s. Six pounds an hour, plus tips, evenings only, six to midnight, six nights a week. The taverna was a twenty-minute walk from Belisha Road, so he’d save on fares, save on time. And he liked Panno. A stooped man in his fifties, with a melancholy face. Brows singed by his charcoal fire. A wrestler’s handshake. In his eyes, a fierce patriotic Greek pride.

Compared to the menu at GK Ashe, Panno’s was simple: fish, chicken, lamb kebabs, steak, spiced Greek sausages seared on the grill; beef stifado, lamb kleftiko simmered in a low oven; sage-scented moussaka mulched with a thick head of béchamel; prawns and octopus fried with green chili salsas; zucchini rissoles; stuffed mushrooms and tomatoes and vine leaves; oily hummus and tarama; butter-bean stew; aubergine pâté; fried halloumi cheese; bowls of fleshy green olives; charred pitta bread and Greek salads . . .

“Never changes,” explained Panno to Lev. “My regular customers know the menu by heart. It’s what brings them back: good food, but simple. Adriatic food. Sometimes, depending on what looks nice at the market, I put on different fish or I make a fish soup. But if I changed the menu, there would be a Highgate mutiny!”

Lev was told to wear his own clothes. “Black or gray trousers. White shirt. Keep everything fresh and clean.” Tied round his waist was the taverna’s hallmark, a blue-and-white apron, striped like the Greek flag. Lev liked its heavy cotton texture, didn’t mind that it was a kind of uniform.

The place was full most nights, crazy on Fridays and Saturdays, Lev and the other waiters, Yorgos and Ari, walked a full ten kilometers in their six-hour shift, back and forth to the kitchen. But Lev’s sinews were toughened by his time in the asparagus fields. He was nimble and fast. Soon got the art of balancing three plates up his arm, acquired that left-of-vision knack of seeing the raised hand, the wine bottle held aloft. And he didn’t mind being front-of-house. After working behind the scenes in the high-velocity kitchen at GK Ashe, it was interesting to be in this other arena, the dining space, taking the food to the tables.

The customers got drunk on Greek beer, wine, retsina, raki, but Lev noticed that they usually seemed to have a good time. The food brought out in them a kind of abandonment, an emotional outpouring, as though they were on a Greek-island holiday for a few hours. There was a lot of laughter, a few arguments, some weeping. Mostly, the tips were generous.

“The British need Greece,” Panno was fond of saying, shaking his grizzled head, as the last inebriated customer staggered out into the summer night. “Always did. Even before Lord Byron. It’s where their hearts feel most free.”

Lev had little time in the kitchen to note how Panno’s dishes were prepared, but he kept a notebook anyway, understood how cheap lamb shanks could become succulent kleftiko—the dish named after the
kleftes,
the robber bands who fought against Turkish rule of their homeland in the 1800s—when braised slowly with garlic, wine, onions, and tomatoes, how vinegar tenderized the stifado beef, how the split prawns had to flare like firecrackers on the charcoal to get their “butterfly” shape, how olive oil flowed over everything like a benediction . . .

“You got eyes, Lev,” Panno said to him one night, as they were finishing up the service. “I’ve seen it. But it surprises me. Not many people from your country are interested in good cuisine.”

“No,” said Lev. “That’s because we’ve eaten Communist food for sixty years. But now it’s changing.”

Lev walked home from Panno’s taverna through the dark, often choosing the route down Swains Lane, past Highgate cemetery, locked and barred against intruders and desecrators of Jewish graves. Christy had told him that Karl Marx had been buried there after his “long, sleepless night of exile.” Lev wondered if he’d go and stand at the headstone one day and tell the bones underneath that, in a grave above Auror, lay the body of a man who’d held on, held fast to the old Marxist ideas till his last breath. Then Lev would add, “But in another year, Karl, the graves will be under fathoms of water. And who knows where the occupants of them are going to be rehoused?”

Sometimes, at one in the morning, Lev heard noises in the weed-choked hinterland of bushes and dusty trees that bordered the cemetery, noticed litter lying there, tires, a child’s broken bicycle. Once, a cat streaked out in front of him, shivering through the railings, like a phantom. Another night, he stopped, listened, heard a wailing that might have been feral or human, it was difficult to say.

On the opposite side of the road, where the roots of the plane trees pushed upward and cracked open the pavements, were parked two ancient camper vans, curtains drawn across who knew what scenes of ecstasy or woe. The vans never moved. The curtains were never drawn back. Sometimes rubbish sacks were left out beside them in the gutters. Quite often, Lev saw vomit staining the wheels, runnels of piss flooding in and out of the sidewalk cracks. One night, a police car was parked there, its blue light slowly turning, but the car was empty and the vans were as closed and as silent as they ever were.

Lev enjoyed the solitary walk home. The nights were warm now. They reminded him of the nights he’d known when he first arrived in England, almost a year ago. With his body tired from his shift at Panno’s, he let his mind rampage around his Great Idea, which was becoming more real to him now that he was back in London. He congratulated himself on how far he’d come, and wondered how far it might be possible to go . . .

Back in Belisha Road, he’d make tea, sit dreaming at the window, postponing, till he felt his head fall, the moment when he’d lie down in his room and sleep. Or, if Christy was there, stay talking till they both started snoring in their chairs.

One night Christy said to Lev, “There’s something on your mind, Lev. I can see it in your look. D’you want to tell me what it is?”

“Yes,” said Lev. “Soon I will tell you, Christy. When everything is more clear to me.”

“Fair enough,” said Christy. “But the Irish are good at keeping secrets, you know. Maybe because our heads are so chock-full of them. Me ma used to say, ‘If walls could see into our minds, the house’d fall to pieces.’ ”

Mostly, these nights, Christy talked about Jasmina: the immaculate color of Jasmina’s skin; her glossy hair, scented with almond oil; the way the blood-red lacquer of her toenails startled you; the sexy Indian poshness of her voice. Lev hadn’t met her yet, but began to feel he knew her. “Like you,” said Christy, “she’s got a love-in going with food. I eat her cucumber and mint
raita
for breakfast, spoon it over me Weetabix. Sometimes we lie in bed and she brings tiny little samosas and baby meatballs, and we feed them to each other. I’m puttin’ on a ton of flesh, but who cares? Flesh is all we are—Mary, Mother of God, forgive me. Why not have a bit more of ourselves?”

Jasmina had been married once—an arranged Hindu marriage—but divorced by her husband, Anand, because she couldn’t give him any children. Anand had married again and fathered five living daughters and one dead son. Jasmina was forty now. Alone for a long time. Never thought she’d fall for a Westerner. But then Christy Slane had fixed her boiler and that was it. “Gave her back a bit of heat, I guess,” he said, with a grin he couldn’t suppress. “Realized how cold she’d been.”

Christy’s behavior toward Jasmina reminded Lev of how his had been with Sophie. When Jasmina couldn’t see Christy for a couple of days, he fretted. He’d phone or text her in the middle of the night, at dawn, at tenminute intervals . . . He brought her name into every conversation, caressed it with his voice:
Jas-meena. Jasmeena.
Said he’d even come round to liking Palmers Green. Pink magnolias grew in front gardens there. Indian music floated out of doorways and onto patios. Children wore clean white socks.

“Of course,” he said, “there’s a lot of drug shite goin’ on, and Jasmina’s had two break-ins, but that’s standard issue anywhere in London. And wait till you see Jasmina’s front room. Now, there’s a thing. The colors of that place get right into me dreams.”

As instructed by Lydia, Lev had sent £50 to Rudi and told him to use it as a bribe at the Office of Rehousing in Baryn. But Lora, weeping, called to say that Rudi was in bed, that he’d been there for thirteen days, reading old car magazines and staring at the wall.

“If he doesn’t get up, he’s going to die, Lev,” sobbed Lora. “What am I meant to do if he won’t leave his bed?”

Lev was silent. Thought how much he’d relied on Rudi and how Rudi had never let him down. Knew that he’d somehow believed this pattern would continue forever . . .

Lev took a breath and said, “I’m working on a plan, Lora. But I’ve a way to go yet. It involves money. Other things, too. You just have to trust me.”

“What plan?”

“It’s a plan for getting your lives going again—afterward, in Baryn. But someone has to secure two apartments: one for you and Rudi, and one for Ina and Maya. Can
you
go to the housing office?”

“I’ll try. But I’m busy, Lev. A lot of people are coming now for horoscopes. They want to know if they’ve got any future. I’m doing palm readings, too.”

“Good, Lora.”

“Rudi says it’s dishonest, taking people’s money to tell them things that can’t be known.”

“Not if it consoles them, helps them to carry on.”

He heard a voice in the background. Rudi’s. Shouting at Lora not to use the phone anymore: it was a waste of money.

“I’d better go,” she said.

“No,” said Lev. “Put Rudi on.”

An argument between them then. Rudi didn’t want to speak to anybody. Lora pleading with him: “Talk to Lev.” Eventually, a curse as the phone was dropped, then picked up, then Rudi’s weary voice: “Lev, I got nothing to say, buddy. I’m sorry.”

“Did you get the money, Rudi?”

“Yeah. I can’t go to Baryn. The Tchevi’s sicker than me.”

“Okay. How did we get to Baryn before you had the Tchevi?”

“What?”

“How did we used to get to Baryn?”

“You know how. Fucking bicycle. In the shit cold of winter. Froze our faces off. I’m not doing that anymore.”

“It’s not winter, Rudi.”

“Yes, it is. It’s winter
HERE
! In my fucking heart, it’s winter. Guess you haven’t understood, Lev, because you’re arsing about in London, with some ballbreaking bit of English totty who treats you like the cat’s dinner, but we’re finished here. All of us. No work. No house. No transport. No money. We’re dead. You got it? We’re stone fucking
DEAD
!”