by Monica Ali
‘I have a bottle of vodka,’ said Nikolai. ‘In my locker.’
Gabriel did not want to drink vodka at work with Nikolai. He did not want to sit in this bar. He did not want to traipse any longer around these streets. He did not want to go home to Lena. The only thing he did want was to call Charlie, and that he could not manage yet. ‘Let’s go, then,’ he said.
Though it was strictly against regulations they smoked in the locker room. They drank Nikolai’s cheap vodka from plastic water-cooler cups. Little spots of colour appeared in Nikolai’s dead-white cheeks. He could almost be albino, Nikolai, with his white eyelashes and brows. He had the eyes of a mouse. But his hair was ginger and nutmeg, to keep you guessing, as Nikolai always did.
‘What shall we drink to?’ said Gabriel, topping up the cups.
Nikolai smiled but did not speak.
‘To Yuri?’ said Gabe.
‘If you like,’ said Nikolai.
‘There’s a dream I keep having,’ said Gabe.
Nikolai nodded.
Gabriel sat on his right hand to keep it from flinging up again to his head. He clutched the plastic cup in his left and tossed the vodka down.
‘Why do they call you Doc?’ Nikolai’s English was barely accented. He was clearly educated. What was he doing, chopping onions all day?
‘Ah,’ said Nikolai.
‘You don’t say much.’
‘I got out of the habit,’ said Nikolai.
‘Don’t let me force you,’ said Gabe.
Nikolai smiled. Gabe looked around the locker room. It seemed the right place to be drinking with Nikolai. It matched his austerity. There was something Soviet in the strip lighting, the metal lockers, the two that gaped open utterly bare. Though Russia, of course, was totally different now. Moscow was all glitz and glam, what he’d seen in the supplements, gangsters and molls, the Wild West gone east. But that wasn’t Nikolai. Nikolai was cheap vodka, bread queues, empty shelves.
Nikolai liked to make himself an enigma. Well, Gabe wasn’t playing the game. He wouldn’t ask him anything. They’d sit here in the bowels of the Imperial and listen to the rumble and whine in the walls. Might as well drink vodka in silence with Nikolai as do anything else he did not want to do.
‘Drink to the year ahead,’ said Nikolai. ‘May it be full of joy.’ He saluted with his cup.
‘My girlfriend left me,’ said Gabe. ‘We were engaged.’
‘A beauty,’ said Nikolai, as if that explained it all.
‘Oh,’ said Gabe, ‘you saw her. That time at the club.’
Nikolai lit a cigarette and offered it to Gabe, who slid his hand out from under his bum. When he was smoking his arm behaved itself.
‘She’s a cracker,’ said Gabe, like some no-hope punter. ‘I fucked up.’
‘You were together long?’
‘Three years. Three years and a bit.’
‘And before? You were married before?’
Gabe shook his head. ‘Waiting for, you know … the right time.’
Nikolai crossed his legs. He drank off another shot. His eyes were pretty much pink.
Gabe matched him with another drink. He needed a few drinks tonight. All this stress. He needed to relax. ‘The thing about Charlie is, she’s very independent. She likes her freedom. Likes to do her own thing.’
Nikolai poured again.
‘But she can be very needy. Biological clock, all of that. You know how women are.’
Nikolai assented with a slow blink.
‘She’ll look in the mirror, see all kinds of faults with herself. She knows it’s daft.’
‘Ah,’ said Nikolai.
They drank.
‘She’s not stupid, though. She sees through all that magazine stuff. Botox, implants – she’d never go there. I don’t think so, anyway.’
Gabe ground a cigarette butt beneath his heel. ‘She’s pretty serious, interested in politics, culture … and music, she’s serious about that. Although sometimes she says she’s not.’ She sounded pretty unstable the way he was describing her, but he hadn’t said anything about her that wasn’t true. She was changeable, that was the thing. Be one way and then another. Contradict herself. Hadn’t she said to him, I’m only going to ask this one time – and then she asked him again. Forced him to say yes, I slept with her, like it was exactly what she wanted to hear.
‘When I was growing up—’ said Nikolai. He broke off to deal with the bottle again.
Gabe spilled a little vodka down his chin. God, I’m drunk. But not so drunk I don’t realize how drunk I am. He determined to rectify this situation and emptied the rest of the cup down his throat. What he wanted to be was drunk and oblivious. He did not want to think about degrees of drunkenness.
‘When I was growing up, in the Soviet Union,’ said Nikolai, ‘femininity was a simple thing. A woman was a worker. A woman was a mother. A woman was a wife. My mother, she worked in a factory. In the factory she wore blue overalls, like a worker. When she came home, she wore an apron, like a mother. And once a month she went out with my father to listen to music and drink a little vodka, and she wore lipstick. It was bright red.’ When Nikolai did talk, the talk turned into a speech. He spoke in his usual modest, precise tones but the cadence drew you in. His authority was like an undertow sucking you gently away from shore.
Gabriel closed his eyes. There was a pleasant kind of swimming in his head.
‘On those nights they made a lot of noise when they came home. There was only a curtain across the room. We slept on one side and my parents on the other. Even with my head beneath the pillow I heard everything.’
Gabe opened his eyes again. There were things about Charlie that irritated him. The way she got into bed. She folded one leg under her and swung the other one in. There was nothing wrong with it. But it was always exactly the same. If they got married he’d have thirty, forty, years of it, watching her get into bed, and always precisely, exactly the same.
Nikolai passed him another cigarette. His hand was as white as a surgical glove.
‘But now,’ said Nikolai, ‘what does femininity mean?’
‘Search me,’ said Gabriel, leaning back rather faster than he’d intended and cracking his head against a locker door. The thing about Charlie was … no, it was gone.
‘My mother had one lipstick,’ said Nikolai. ‘We all knew what it meant. How many lipsticks does your girlfriend have?’
‘Charlie? Oh, dozens. I don’t know. Every shade.’ She never closed the door when she went for a pee. Now that was annoying. And he’d never mentioned it.
‘This is like a metaphor for women today,’ said Nikolai. He seemed remarkably sober, or Gabriel was, at last, remarkably drunk.
‘Women,’ said Gabe. ‘Lipshtick.’
‘My mother had only one lipstick. It was bright red. We all knew what it meant.’ Nikolai had said all this before. Perhaps he was pissed as a fart. ‘But now a woman has many shades. She might wear them all in one day. It depends on her moods. It is very confusing for men.’
Gabe reached for the bottle. It was empty. ‘Let’s borrow one from the bar.’
‘And we’ll drink to Yuri,’ said Nikolai.
‘To Yuri,’ said Gabe with a wild laugh.
‘A good man.’ Nikolai burped loudly as though in tribute. ‘He saved his money for his girls. Every couple of months he sent it home. Lucky I knew his hiding place. There was money waiting there and I sent it to his family. The coroner’s office gave me the address. Very lucky for them, or this money would be rotting still inside the wall.’
In the couple of weeks since he’d returned from Blantwistle, he had fallen into a routine of sorts with Lena. When he returned from work they’d get a takeaway or a pizza delivery or have a bit of bread and cheese in front of the TV. Sometimes they didn’t bother to eat. Lena’s monumental capacity for indifference extended, of course, to food. And sometimes Gabe could not bear to think of food again after a day in the kitchen, or he was simply not hungry, or he was h
ungry but too tired to care. Today, though, Lena had broken the routine and cooked a meal.
They sat in the kitchen. Lena had used a white sheet as a tablecloth. She’d folded two pieces of kitchen towel into triangles for napkins and found two candle stubs and set them on jam-jar lids. The table was burdened with dumplings, fritters, pancakes and rolls, pickles and salads and breads.
‘Eat,’ said Lena. She’d washed her hair and spread it out over her shoulders. She began with the varenyky and explained every dish to him. The Ukrainian girl had shown her how to make the cottage cheese fritters with raisins. The cabbage rolls stuffed with rice and mincemeat they used to have at home.
‘Beautiful,’ lied Gabe, tasting the potato pancakes. ‘You’re quite a chef.’
‘Tchh.’
She picked at some mushrooms and beetroot, but mainly she watched him eat.
‘So, Lena?’ he said. ‘Why the feast?’
‘You like?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK.’
‘Because you thought I’d like it?’
‘Why not?’
‘OK.’ He couldn’t stop looking at her. He had to force the food down. ‘You found the dress.’
He’d bought it a fortnight before because he wanted to see her in something other than her black skirt and top, but he’d left it at the back of the wardrobe in a plastic bag. This evening she had been waiting by the door when he came in and she was wearing it, a poppy-print dress with short sleeves, a girlish summer dress, all wrong and completely right. ‘How old are you, Lena?’ he’d blurted and she had only shrugged.
‘Yes,’ said Lena now. ‘I find.’ She had a marvellous ability to kill conversation. When Gabe thought he’d found an opening, she managed to close it down.
He tried again, ‘Must have taken you ages.’
‘Yes.’
What was it with all this food? He hadn’t told her about his little chat with Nikolai. That money wasn’t hers. If it had been hers she would never have left without it. It only occurred to her later and she must have thought nobody else knew. She hadn’t mentioned the money since he’d got back from Blantwistle, which was suspicious. Maybe she’d sensed, somehow, that he had found out. She’d still want money from him. Maybe this was a new strategy of hers.
‘So Valentina taught you to cook this, when you were in the flat in Edmonton?’
Lena said, ‘Maybe. Maybe Edmonton. Maybe Golders Green.’ She lifted her wine glass in two hands. She really did look like a child.
He tried to catch her out sometimes and it wasn’t difficult. Her story always changed.
Gabe choked down the last of the dumplings. He looked at her, tried to hold her gaze. ‘Beautiful,’ he said. ‘Lovely. Gorgeous.’
She rolled her eyes.
‘Do you remember Victor?’ said Gabe. Ivan and Victor had been at it again. Lena might know what had gone on between those two – East European gossip below stairs. Maybe Nikolai had told Yuri and Yuri had told Lena, and maybe Lena would tell Gabriel now.
Lena twisted an earring. ‘No.’
‘What about Ivan?’ said Gabe. He still hadn’t made time to go and check on that guest room, the one Ivan had gone into with Gleeson. Not that he’d find anything – they were bound to cover their tracks.
‘I don’t remember,’ she said.
‘Yuri must have known them.’
‘Maybe,’ she said, or half said, the word aborting on her tongue.
He gave up. He didn’t feel like talking anyway. All he felt like doing was looking at her and in a second he would get up and clear the table and then they’d sit in the half-dark in front of the television and he would be able to scan her over and over while she pretended not to notice, until finally when he judged her sufficiently hypnotized, he would slip to the floor and take hold of her feet.
She spent, so she said, most of the day in front of the screen. He gave her a little money before he left in the mornings. Not enough that she could run away. She spent it at the shop on the corner. One time he’d waited out of sight to see what she did. He’d stood in a doorway for a couple of hours, craning his neck to see, and when she came out of his building she went into the grocer’s and then back home again straight away.
The neighbours hadn’t said anything. He’d had his answers prepared, about both Charlie and Lena, but now he knew he wouldn’t be needing them. That was the great thing about London. Nobody interfered.
One day she had started weeping in the morning as he was about to leave. He tried to hold her but she disintegrated beneath his fingers, collapsing to the floor. She howled until he thought that surely the neighbours would come and bring the police. This can’t go on, he decided. But the next morning she rose early, and when he walked into the kitchen she was humming tunelessly and doing the washing-up.
Sometimes, as now, he had the sensation that if he reached out his hand it would pass straight through her.
‘Thanks for dinner,’ he said.
She stared into the middle distance, as though it were Gabe who didn’t exist.
If they moved through to the sitting room, they could float together in the half-light, neither one truly present, neither one truly getting away.
Gabe pushed his chair back. He fingered his bald patch. That was real enough. It had grown. With Lena the situation was getting to be absurd. It was time to look at it clearly and get it sorted out. He wasn’t going to let it run on and on. Why did he hold his breath around her? As though if he said the wrong thing she might go up in a puff of smoke.
‘I’ve been thinking – we should go to the police. This Boris has to be stopped. There’s other girls out there.’
Lena said, ‘You want that I leave.’
‘Listen to me,’ said Gabriel. ‘He has to be punished.’
‘Your girlfriend have something to do with it,’ said Lena, the tendons in her neck standing proud.
‘You’ll be safe, I promise you.’ He would set the process in motion and one thing would follow on from another. He would look back on this episode with Lena and marvel at how quickly it had unfolded and packed up again, once everything was back on track.
‘Your girlfriend have—’
‘Forget about her.’ He cut Lena off. ‘She’s got nothing to do with this.’
Lena started scraping plates. She knocked a serving spoon to the floor. ‘I know girl,’ she said, ‘she come from Chişinău. You know where is? Moldova, OK, you know, maybe. She is whore like me.’
‘Lena …’
‘Whore like me,’ repeated Lena, scraping hard, as though attempting to remove the pattern from the crockery. ‘She run away and she go to police and she tell them what have happen to her. They say to her, where are your papers? They say to her, you are illegal immigrant. They say to her, you go home now and they put her on aeroplane. These men, they meet her at airport and they bring her back again.’
‘I hardly think …’ said Gabriel.
Lena let the plate drop on to the table. ‘They bring her back to pimp.’ She spoke quickly and there was heat in it, though the words as usual lacked inflection, as though she were racing through a list. ‘The police have come and arrest him and asking many, many question and then they let him go. He say to her, see, you cannot touch me, bitch. And then he beat her like never before. After that he sell her to Boris. You see what good it do for her, Irina, when she go to police?’
He didn’t know what to believe. She would lie, certainly, if it suited her, but did she have the capacity to concoct a tale so fast? It was hard to tell. He said, ‘They don’t do that any more. They changed the law. Girls don’t get deported now. They let them settle in this country.’ He didn’t know if that was a lie or the truth. He had no idea about the law, but there was such a thing as justice and you got it by going to court.
Lena twisted her skinny fingers together. The dress, now he looked at it properly, was too big for her. It hung off her shoulders, the waistband sat on her hips. She looked like a little girl in a ha
nd-me-down. He would never, ever touch her – not in that way – again.
‘You have papers?’ said Lena. ‘You can get for me?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I can’t do that. We have to go to the police.’
Lena lifted a fork. She extended her arm, then opened her fingers and let the fork clatter to the floor. She picked up a knife and repeated the operation. She did the same with a blue and white dish that smashed and sent a splash of beetroot juice up her leg.
‘Enough,’ said Gabe.
She continued with a plate and a spoon.
‘All right,’ said Gabe. ‘Stop.’
She went on smashing the crockery until Gabe rose from his chair and held her arms.
‘He know,’ she said, ‘where my grandmother live. My parents have move somewhere but my grandmother is in village very close. He will send someone.’
Gabriel bent down slowly. He knelt among the beetroot and cabbage rolls, still holding her by the arms. ‘It’s OK,’ he said. How stupid he was being. He knew that this Boris was terrifying to her. ‘No police.’
‘My grandmother, she look after me very good.’
He released her arms tentatively. ‘Lena, why don’t you go home? Forget about everything. Start again.’
She drew her bare feet up on to the chair and hugged her knees. She looked at the ceiling. ‘Home,’ she said. ‘People like me, no, we don’t have.’
‘Of course you do,’ said Gabe, still kneeling. ‘Trust me. It’ll be fine.’
She lowered her chin and her eyes were level with his. It was awkward looking at her, because she seemed not to see him. It was like staring into a blind person’s face.
‘Fine?’ said Lena. ‘No, I don’t think. I have hear so many stories. You like to hear one story too?’
‘I’ll buy you a ticket,’ he said.
‘This girl, sixteen years, Romanian girl, this is story I have hear.’
Gabe put a finger to his lips. ‘Shhh!’
‘Her pimp he is from Albania, and he take her first to Italy and then Holland and then … I don’t know. Some time they spend in England and then I think they go to Italy again. And one day she is rescue by police, they go for raiding, kick door, take her to shelter with charity ladies and hot soup.’