This was therefore, for all these reasons, the day. Zbigniew had decided the day before that today was the day, and his first thought when he had got up in the morning was that today was still the day. He had woken, ignored Piotr, gone to the loo, got dressed, ignored Piotr a little more, eaten some cereal, set out for work, been let into the house by the crazy divorced lady, painted the hallway purple, had a break for lunch, checked his share portfolio, painted some more walls purple, talked a little bit with the crazy lady about how long the rest of the job would take and pretended to ignore her while she had a fifteen-minute conversation on the phone with someone about how much she hated her ex-husband and how she didn’t blame ‘that whore’, only him; then he had gone home to change out of his work clothes, ignored Piotr again, and gone out to the bar by the edge of the Common, the one where they’d met for the first time, to meet Davina, to dump her. All this time he had been possessed by the certainty that today was the day for the break-up, and had been working on how to say it. From experience, Zbigniew knew that the information needed to be conveyed clearly and at the start of the conversation; after that, he could say nice things, if she were amenable to being spoken to, and if she wasn’t, it wouldn’t matter, he would just run away. The worst would be over.
‘My grandmother is dying. I must go home to Poland. We can never see each other again.’
‘I am gay.’
‘I have Aids.’
‘I am gay and I have Aids.’
‘I am gay and I have Aids and my grandmother is dying in Poland, also of Aids, and I have to go back to Poland and my mobile contract is about to lapse so you can’t call me.’
That might be too much.
Zbigniew arrived in the bar fifteen minutes early. The choice of venue was the product of a great deal of thought about whether to have the talk in public or in private. This boiled down to whether she was more or less likely to explode if there were other people around. He had decided that a public place was better; and had then realised that this was probably a mistake, but it was too late to change his mind now, because if he did that would be a good reason to postpone the split-up, and he wouldn’t do that.
He bought himself a glass of sparkling water. If he had alcohol it would increase the chance he would end the evening by having sex with Davina.
The bar was crowded for a Tuesday night – but then it was always crowded, like everywhere else around this part of town. If Zbigniew had to sum up London in a single image, there would be a number of candidates: a group of young Poles sitting in a flat watching television in their socks; two dustbins outside a house, with a plank of wood balanced between them, to reserve a parking space for a builder’s van; the Common on a sunny weekend day, with exposed white skin stretching to the horizon. But the winner would be the high street on a busy evening, full of young people bent on getting drunk – the frenzy of it, the particular pitch of the noise, the sex and anger and hysteria. Zbigniew had once had a sense of the British as a moderate, restrained nation. It was funny to think of that now. It wasn’t true at all. They drank like mad people. They drank to make themselves happy, and because alcohol was an end in itself. It was a good thing and people want good things, want more and more of them. So, because alcohol was good, the British wanted more and more of it. With drink, they were like Buzz Lightyear: to infinity and beyond!
It would be good to go home soon and see some Polish drinking, in its natural habitat. He should see his father and reassure his mother that he was eating properly and had not caught tuberculosis.
Then Davina came in. She looked around, as always with an element of theatricality: standing slightly on tiptoe, turning her whole head, her expression seeking, expectant. She had a faint frown which was ready to turn into a smile when she saw him. It was like a one-woman performance called ‘searching for my boyfriend in a crowded bar’. In the few seconds between him seeing her and her seeing him, Zbigniew was struck yet again, yet again, by her prettiness, her blondeness, her faint but sexy dishevelment – she was wearing a patterned black and white scarf which had slipped on one shoulder, so it was trailing much lower on one side than on the other, indeed was on the point of slipping off. Zbigniew, for the billionth time, felt the uncomplicated wish to have sex with her and the complicated reservations and aversions that went with the wish, but told himself, firmly, that tonight was not for having sex with Davina but for dumping her. He phrased it like that to himself, words he wouldn’t use out loud, to brace his intentions. Dumping, not sex. This was the plan.
Davina saw him. Her face lit up like someone acting out the phrase ‘her face lit up’. She began to walk towards him with her quick stride, swerving to avoid a man who without looking where he was going lurched back from the bar carrying three pints.
‘Darling!’ she said. Davina was in a good mood. And then, dropping into one of her stage voices, she repeated a line she often used, from some film Zbigniew had never seen, and which she always seemed to find inexhaustibly funny: she said, ‘You came.’
Zbigniew cleared his throat and said, ‘Glass of white wine?’
51
That went well, Zbigniew thought, on his way to work the next morning. In fact he could hardly believe how well it had gone.
The thing about breaking up with someone, Zbigniew now realised, was that it was a type of job, a specific task, and like other specific tasks was best accomplished by being broken down into its component parts, analysed, and then put back together in the correct sequence, accompanied by a plan of action. That was what he had done. So the break-up needed to be 1. unequivocal, 2. as gentle as possible while still consistent with 1, and 3. executed with the minimum possibility of public disruption and fuss.
It was not that different from plastering a wall or rewiring a socket. A practical-minded man did not flinch from such tasks. Piotr was an idiot.
He had told her that he could not see her any more; that she was a lovely girl but that he knew she deserved more; that he was not ready to settle down, it was not the reason he had come to London, that his real life was in Poland and that he would be going back there one day (he implied that it would be soon) and that he could not act on the basis of a lie, and that he felt he was lying to her by acting as if he was ready to be in a stable relationship. Zbigniew was proud of that line, the implicit claim that the reason he was breaking up with her was that he thought so highly of her. She was so important to him that he was chucking her. What woman could resist that?
Not Davina, evidently. She had been quiet, head down, not saying much, no tears, no rage, no public explosion. She had been as untheatrical and self-contained as Zbigniew had ever seen her. He had run through his reasons and she had listened to them and accepted them.
‘So that’s it, then,’ she said. Her tone was sad and resigned and in no way crazy.
‘I am sorry,’ said Zbigniew, reaching the climax of his talk. ‘It’s not you, it’s me.’
‘I’m going to go now,’ Davina had said. And she had got up and left. It was starting to become a pattern, Zbigniew thought, people getting up and leaving him in bars. He had stayed for a beer and gone home and had been in such a good mood that he had come close to speaking to Piotr.
Zbigniew let himself into the crazy divorced lady’s house – she had given him a key the previous day, explaining that she might be out with her personal trainer when he arrived. He went to get the papers to cover the patch of floor where he was working. One thing he had learned to do, part of the way in which he distinguished himself from British workmen, was to be meticulous about cleaning up at the end of the day, so there were no traces of work-in-progress, apart from the work itself. It was a common complaint about British workmen that they behaved as if they were the owners of the property. Zbigniew knew not to make this mistake. It took more time at the beginning and the end of the day, but it was worth it.
He would finish the painting today, he thought. The divorced lady had mentioned ‘one or two other little jobs’ that there mi
ght be for him to do, without being specific, so there either would or would not be extra work. He didn’t mind; he had another job back in Mackell Road, around the corner from Pepys Road, fixing up a kitchen, and work in general was not a problem. If he had nothing lined up immediately after that he would go home to Poland for a few days.
Painting was one of Zbigniew’s favourite jobs. He liked that it was repetitive but also demanded care; the mix of detailed work on which you had to concentrate, with periods where you could charge ahead and get a lot done quickly. He liked the way new paint could completely transform a space, change even its shape, as in this case, where the purple was making the hallway close in on itself, and he also liked the smell of paint. As jobs to do on your own went, it was one of the best.
After about half an hour he heard the divorced lady come in and go into the kitchen. About five minutes later she started coming slowly up the stairs. Zbigniew stopped painting and stood up to let her get past. She was wearing a saggy grey tracksuit, had a headband keeping her hair back, and was carrying a pink iPod nano.
‘That man is going to kill me one day,’ she said.
‘Maybe you should kill him first,’ said Zbigniew. She thought that was very funny.
He went back to painting and as he did so began to make a plan about how to speak to Piotr again. It was clear from his experience with Davina that he was now a master of communicating with other people. Piotr was a Catholic bigot and a fool and a hypocrite, given his own history of failed and broken relationships, and a moralising know-all, but he was also his oldest friend and this had gone on long enough. So perhaps the simplest and best thing would be just to approach him and say ‘this has gone on long enough’, and then they could move on. He did not need a complex plan.
To celebrate last night’s successful dumping – though now that it had happened Zbigniew in his mind was more gentle and named it ‘the break-up’ – he took himself to the café round the corner for lunch. It was what the British called a ‘greasy spoon’ but in fact the food was not greasy at all, since it served salads and pastas as well as the large plates of fried food that British labourers ate. Zbigniew had acquired this taste and ordered a full English number 2, consisting of bacon, a herbed sausage which was not as good as Polish sausage but was still not bad, blood sausage, chips, fried bread, fried egg, mushrooms, tomatoes, and baked beans, a British speciality which Zbigniew had initially disliked but through repetition – they were often included as a standard ingredient – had come to like. As with many foods the British liked their secret was that they were much sweeter than they pretended to be. There was also a large mug of not very good coffee. This meal cost £6 but on a special occasion was worth it. If Zbigniew finished the job today, as he fully intended to do, he would be half a day ahead of his work schedule (the real one, which he carried in his head, rather than the estimates he gave to customers) so he could move on to other work, which meant he could move on to earning more money, which was almost as good as money in the bank, so he was already up on the day.
He got back to the house and to his brushes. He had two more hours of painting to do, then about three hours of filling, then he was done, unless the crazy divorced lady had more work for him. At about three o’clock, just as he was preparing to go round filling and touching up and finishing, the doorbell rang. A delivery, Zbigniew assumed, as the woman of the house went downstairs and stayed there for a few minutes; then Zbigniew heard her footsteps coming all the way back up to the top of the house.
‘It’s for you,’ she said, her expression tight with something he could not read. Zbigniew wiped his hands and went downstairs.
His first thought when he saw Davina was that she had been caught in the rain. Her head drooped, her hair was lank, her expression sagged, her shoulders were sloped, her clothes seemed to hang off her. But it was not raining, had not rained all day. Davina’s skin had lost all its colour and with her blonde hair she looked like a ghost. Zbigniew felt a lurch, a physical sensation in his chest and stomach, rather than any emotion he could name.
‘Hello,’ said Davina. ‘I wanted to talk to you.’
Zbigniew had seen her acting miserable before, theatrically miserable, but there was something truly frightening about the flatness with which she now spoke.
‘How did you know where I was?’ he asked. As he put the question, he found himself posing it to himself with much more energy: yeah, how exactly? He was sure he had never told her where he worked. So it was creepy and strange that she knew. This was wrong; felt deeply, lurchingly wrong, with the sensation of dangerous weightlessness and loss of control that came when a car went into a skid.
‘Piotr,’ she said.
‘We can’t talk here,’ he said; though the crazy lady had gone upstairs and so if he wanted to, he could. But it did not feel right. He came out and half-thought about taking her arm before deciding not to and going in front of her, making a decision as he did: a park bench on the Common. It would be a good compromise between a public and a private place. She did not speak as they walked. One or two people looked at them as they passed. They must be giving off a strange atmosphere, the distinct microclimate generated by a couple in the middle of an argument. Zbigniew had the momentary sensation that he was being taken hostage, and wanted to appeal to passers-by to help him: Save me! She’s taking me against my will! Help!
They sat on the bench. About twenty yards away a middle-aged man about to go jogging was doing stretching exercises against a tree.
‘Those things you said were so awful,’ said Davina. ‘You can’t say things like that. You must think I’m stupid. “It’s not you it’s me.” How dare you? It’s not a rhetorical question, I really mean it – how dare you? To talk to me as if I was your idiot whore who you could just walk away from, skipping away into the Polish sunset with whoever it is you’re going off with.’
‘There is no one else,’ said Zbigniew, ‘I have left you with the wrong idea if you feel that—’
‘Don’t insult my intelligence, there’s always someone else, that’s what people say when—’
‘I’m not lying to you, there really is no person who could—’
Zbigniew for a moment saw a glimpse of opportunity, a potential escape route. If she kept on like this, angry and getting angrier, he could get angry too, and then they would have a shouting argument, which would leave them very broken up, even more broken up than they had been at the start of the conversation. He might yet get away from this . . . But even as he was formulating the thought, her tone changed.
‘I don’t want you to leave me. I can’t live without you. I won’t live without you. Do you understand me? I won’t live without you.’
She said many more things, all of them along the same lines. Zbigniew saw that there was no getting out of this. She was as upset as Zbigniew had ever seen anybody, and one sign of it was that she did not seem in any way to be acting, or presenting, her feeling. Davina was genuinely distraught. Zbigniew knew that this had gone disastrously wrong; that he could not leave her in this condition. He felt the pressure of something he had known about, but not quite acknowledged to himself: her isolation, her friendlessness. That first night, drinking with the girl beside her, had been misleading. That had been a new girl at work, and that was the first and only time they socialised together. She was cut off; she didn’t like people enough, or trust them enough, to have friends. And that made everything much worse. She would have a breakdown, or kill herself, and he would be to blame. Everything Piotr had said was true. He was trapped. He felt a cloud settle on his spirit. This was something he had done to her, and because of that it was something he had done to himself, and from which he could not get away. He put out his arm and touched her hand where it lay in her lap. She did not react. Out there in the open air, on the park bench with joggers and walkers and London going about its business all around, he felt the walls close in.
52
The purpose of respite care is to give the carer a break. M
ary wanted a break; more, she needed a break. But she couldn’t take a break. When she went home to Alan in Essex, to her own house and what should have been her familiar routine, she found she could not settle. Her mind was on her dying mother back in London and although she wished that it were not so, Mary found that she couldn’t resume her own life, even for a week or two. It wasn’t that she kept thinking about her mother; on the contrary, Mary found it unbearable to think about her mother, who was by now lost to her, closed off and unspeaking. Petunia had turned her face to the wall. But Mary, who couldn’t bear to think about that, also couldn’t think about anything else. Having been absent because she was away, she felt just as absent now that she was at home. Alan would have to say something to her four or five times before she heard it, and when she went for a coffee with two of her girlfriends – which would normally have been a riotous catching-up session ending with her having to take a cab home after they switched to white wine – she found herself having to dig deep to summon up the energy to talk at all. She could feel her friends noticing the change in her and deciding not to comment on it; she knew they’d talk about it between themselves afterwards. She’s just not herself. She’s all over the place. She’s taking it hard. Poor Mary. And all that.
Part of what made it difficult was Mary’s feeling that she was much more like her mother than she had ever realised. Mary had always seen her mother as someone who was stuck, trapped within limits she imposed on herself, and living only a fraction of the life she could have been living. Mary had blamed her father, but when he died it turned out that it was just what Petunia was like, or had become like. She was always someone who was worried about being ‘too’ something, too noisy, too bold, too conspicuous, too careful, too fussy, too worried, too whatever. Back in her own life, cleaning her own house, tidying and fussing around her own sitting room, Mary was being forced to ask herself whether she was really any different. What have I ever done that’s so big, so expansive? If my mother lived in too small a way, where’s the larger scale in my life?
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