Chaplin & Company

by Mave Fellowes

  ‘Don’t test my patience, Zjelko,’ she says again. (It was a good line.) ‘Tell me where she is.’

  Zjelko takes another step forward and puts the juice carton down on the shelf behind her. He lifts his face to hers – it is centimetres away. She can feel the corner of his metal basket pressing into her hip. The coconut smell is overbearing – it has a chemical sweetness at this distance.

  ‘First things.’ He lifts a pink-nailed forefinger in the gap between their faces. ‘I don’t take orders.’ He lifts a second finger, holding it together with the first like a gun. ‘Second things. I don’t take orders from funny-talking girls dressed like crazy people. Third things.’ He flicks his thumb out. ‘I don’t like to be annoyed. I –’ he points the gun fingers at the shoulder of his leather jacket – ‘give the orders. Now you can fucking tell me what is going on with my barge.’

  Odeline sees his eyes drop to her throat and she gulps.

  ‘I just want to know where she is,’ she rushes, pressing her head back against the top shelf. There isn’t room enough between them to untuck her shirt and access the screwdriver even if she wanted to.

  ‘When she go missing?’

  ‘Saturday night.’

  ‘Shit!’ He steps backwards and drops his basket to the floor in the middle of the aisle. ‘Shit! We haven’t been open since Saturday?’

  Odeline shakes her head.

  ‘Why no one tell me? Fucking pigs. I can’t believe they do this.’ He kicks the basket and takes a mobile phone from the inside of his jacket, flipping it open.

  ‘Who?’

  He is flicking his thumb over the buttons. He lifts the phone to his ear, holding it slightly away with his little finger pointing out.

  ‘Who?’ says Odeline. He knows. He’s speaking like he knows.

  He kicks the metal basket again and it goes skidding into the shelves opposite.

  Odeline steps forward in front of his face. ‘Who? Who did this? You said they.’

  ‘Is me,’ Zjelko says into the telephone. ‘You both go down to barge now. Straight away. They fucking took her. I can’t believe, those fucking murija. Ring me and tell me what you see. Check the till. Check appliances. Secure everything. One of you stay there and one of you meet me in the office.’ He snaps the phone shut, puts it back in his pocket, and retrieves the shopping basket.

  ‘Get out of my fucking way.’

  ‘Who was it? Who took her?’

  ‘Move. Stupid fucking woman.’

  He sidesteps Odeline and she spins around to follow him down the aisle.

  ‘You said they. Who is they? Is she in danger? Is it the brother-in-law?’

  He walks faster down towards the checkouts, taking long strides in his tight jeans. Odeline marches behind. They are passing through the refrigerated section. He is muttering to himself, spitting out words. Odeline can’t catch any of it. She pulls the bag of granola out of his basket, dashes a couple of steps ahead and drops it on to a shelf of cheeses.

  ‘Who took her?’

  He lurches past her and snatches it back, puts it into his basket.

  ‘Whatta fuck are you doing, woman? Fucking leave me alone. And fucking shut your mouth.’

  Odeline dives for the basket again, pulls the granola out and takes a tub of Greek yoghurt too, pushes them on to a top shelf next to some packets of ham.

  ‘Where is she? Tell me who took her.’

  He pulls the granola and yoghurt off the shelf without much effort and drops them back into the basket. ‘You’re a crazy.’ He taps his head with a bent forefinger, top lip curling in disgust. ‘Stop fucking touching my shopping.’ He stalks off down the aisle. Odeline puts her hand into the middle shelf of the refrigerated section as she pursues him, taking with her packets of prawns, trays of salmon fillets, vacuum-packed pairs of smoked mackerel. She sweeps all these into her arms and runs forward to dump them in Zjelko’s basket.

  ‘TELL ME WHERE SHE IS!’ She screams this, stretching her mouth open to be as loud as she can.

  He twists round and his forehead is corrugated, his hand rigid as he makes a frantic slashing motion at his neck.

  ‘Shut up your fucking face!’ he spits in a whisper, saliva running over the pad of bottom lip.

  They are standing by a rack of batteries at the end of the aisle. He looks around; all the faces in the checkout queues have turned to them. ‘What is your fucking problem?’ He’s still whispering.

  ‘TELL ME WHERE SHE IS. I WILL KEEP ON SHOUTING UNTIL –’

  ‘Okay, you can fucking shut up because I don’t know where she is anyway.’

  ‘But you said you knew –’

  ‘I know who took her. It was the pigs. They were asking questions last week. They came round to my bar. I told Vera she has to be careful. That morning even – Saturday – I go, to tell her.’

  ‘Pigs?’

  ‘The pigs. Murija. The police.’

  ‘Where is she? In prison?’

  ‘I don’t fucking know. No. They take them to detention centre.’

  ‘Where is that?’

  ‘I don’t fucking know. West somewhere. Big place. I never been there. You can leave me alone now. Fucking crazy woman.’

  Odeline steps closer, pushing the metal basket out of the way. She looks down on the ridges of oiled hair combed back from the widow’s peak, the twitching brows, the raw eyelids. ‘Did you send the police to get her?’

  ‘Do I want my business to be wrecked? Do I want my cafe closed since Saturday and taking no money? The fucking pigs in this country want to ruin my life.’

  ‘You are a repellent man,’ says Odeline, stepping back and reversing the gaze he gave her a moment ago – a full inspection, but working down: the shiny jacket, the thick legs in their close-cut, womanly jeans, his boots, which are heeled, at least an inch high.

  ‘Fuck yourself,’ he says, and walks to a vacant checkout, clattering his basket on to the end of the conveyor. He twists his head away from Odeline and looks unblinkingly towards the next checkout. The packets of fish are still in the top of the basket.

  Odeline finds John Kettle by the exit, rolling a cigarette.

  ‘Any luck?’ he says, popping it into his mouth as he follows her out of the electric doors.

  ‘It wasn’t him who took her,’ she says. ‘But I know where she is.’

  As they leave the car park Odeline hears a rattling and looks round to see John Kettle pushing a shopping trolley on to the pavement behind her.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘It’s not for me,’ he says, beard clamped around the cigarette. ‘It’s for a friend.’

  Early that evening Odeline goes over to the barge cafe with a plastic holdall that she has bought from Harrow Road. She ducks under the police tape and takes a few steps towards the threshold. She pushes a half-closed door back on its hinges and it smacks against the cabin wall, sending two pigeons flapping up inside the boat. Zjelko’s men haven’t made it as secure as he’d hoped. The pigeons settle back down to pecking around the broken crockery in the middle of the floor. Odeline hates this pecking: these dirty birds feeding off Vera’s misfortune. She stamps at them, clapping her hands. They half fly over the threshold and then flap down again on the towpath, turning in affronted circles.

  ‘Vultures!’ shouts Odeline after them.

  The till has been taken, so presumably Zjelko’s thugs have been here. She goes behind the counter to look for Vera’s things. Her apron and a pink tracksuit top are hanging on the back of the toilet door. There are some hairclips in a dish on top of the fridge. She looks in the drawers and around the counters for anything else. Down the side of the microwave, where the trays are kept, there is a stash of newspaper pages. She pulls them out. They are individual articles that have been neatly cut out, all relating to the situation in Vera’s country, the horrors there. There are profiles of the individual leaders, reports on particular areas and some accounts of UN negotiating efforts. Odeline looks through them. Some are as small as a
paragraph. Others are pages long, with pictures of burned buildings and mobs with flags. Many are yellow and stained from their hiding place.

  She unfolds a magazine page: a vivid colour photograph with a gruesome figure at its centre. The figure is lying face down across the steps of a building. It wears a uniform, a green jacket and cap with a badge on the front. The head is tilted back, an eye half open, teeth showing. A stain has spread across the back of the jacket. One arm is crumpled under the body, the other is flung along a stone step. The legs flop down the steps, one foot folded over the other as if scratching the back of a heel. Around this figure the steps are chipped, bullet-bitten. On the bottom step are the stringy remains of a burnt tyre. Bits of charred cloth hang from the blackened flagpoles. All the windows of the building are smashed. A flag has been wrapped around a statue at the top of the steps. Desk drawers and papers are washed up against the base of the statue, as if the stone figure is the centrepiece of a bonfire.

  Odeline refolds the picture and stacks it into a pile with the other articles on the counter. She checks there are no more papers hidden behind the microwave. There is a murmuring sound and she looks around before realising that the radio is on at a very low volume. She brings her ear down to it; it sounds like a news programme.

  She checks underneath the counters but can’t see any other personal belongings. She looks at the double doors at the back of the cabin. Odeline had noticed Vera glancing at these sometimes, when she was making hot chocolates. Odeline walks over now and pulls them open. Inside is a long low storage area, about waist height and the length of two cafe tables. A tarpaulin has been laid over the floorboards and there is a mattress taking up most of the floor space, with an open sleeping bag spread across the middle and blankets folded neatly at the foot. A torch tied to a piece of string is pinned to the rafters over the head of the makeshift bed. Crammed in the corner, a cafe chair with some toiletries arranged on it; Odeline can see toothpaste and a toothbrush in a foam cup, some deodorant and a box of washing powder. Underneath the chair seat is a pile of neatly folded clothes, one of Vera’s floral skirts at the top. On the other side of the bed, jammed at an angle against the low rafters, is a shallow clothes rack with some socks and underwear hanging off it, and a towel slung over the top. Odeline looks to the corner at the head of the bed and sees a neat row of books, as if on a bookshelf, upright between two glass coffee jars. Leaning against the jar nearest a thin pillow is a photograph.

  Odeline crawls in to look at it. It is a black-and-white image of a wedding couple, the man in a dark suit with a flower pinned to his lapel, the woman in a high-collared lace dress and veil. The man has the same crumpled eyes as Vera, and, under his moustache, the same thick mouth. Her father. The couple are standing on a step outside a building with high wooden doors, above which runs some foreign motto. The school perhaps. She takes the photograph and puts it inside the cover of the first book, a red and gold Reader’s Digest edition of Jane Eyre. There are four more books in all, each a Reader’s Digest edition. She takes the five books, the towel, the toiletries and the rest of Vera’s clothes, and unpins the torch from the ceiling. They all go into the plastic holdall. She puts the newspaper articles in there too with the hairclips and the pink top, and after a few moments’ deliberation unplugs the radio, wraps it in the towel and pushes it down to the bottom of the bag.

  As she lifts the holdall out on to the towpath, she hears the chug of a boat coming under the bridge. She looks up and recognises it – it is the orange narrowboat with white lotus flowers that belongs to Ridley’s friend Angela. She is steering and waves at Odeline.

  ‘We missed you on Saturday!’ she shouts. ‘Come again! We’d love to see more of your work. Fantastic!’

  Odeline nods her head vaguely, but the thought of performing is far from her mind right now. She looks down at the holdall with her friend’s world inside.

  ‘Will you come?’ calls Angela, the boat getting closer.

  And then Ridley’s head appears over the roof of the cabin, decorated, friendly, unapologetic.

  ‘Hi,’ he calls, before noticing the scene around Odeline, the police tape and the fallen tables and chairs.

  ‘What happened?’

  THIRTY

  Luminous blue bleeds into the sky with dawn the following morning, and the outline of the huge tower block west of the canal becomes definite against it. The green of the willow trees on Little Venice island takes colour, as does the red of the telephone box, the bridge’s light-blue railings. The shadows under the bridge are still pooled black. In those shadows, underneath the arch of riveted metal, wire mesh and pigeon feathers, stands Crosbie – steering teacher, community canal worker, boat builder, evacuee boy.

  He stands at the edge of the path with his side pressed to the wet wall of brick, the dampness coming through his sweatshirt. His binoculars are again held up against the peak of his baseball cap, looking towards the boat that is moored along the water from the bridge. He has been watching the cabin doors since the girl went inside yesterday evening, after speaking to the tattooed man and the canal warden for a long time on the towpath. He saw all this through his binoculars from the far side of the Little Venice island, but when night fell he moved closer. The porthole lights went out soon after dark and there has been no movement on the boat since then.

  He is waiting.

  Two days ago, he found numbers for a canal museum at Braunston in the telephone book at the Camden Community Boat Centre. He wrote down the wording of his enquiry and practised saying it out loud. On his shift he used the Centre’s telephone, following the line of numbers with his finger, pressing the buttons carefully. His breath went shallow and fast as he heard the line ring. When it clicked to connect he thought he would slam the handset down. He read his enquiry out loud, heard his breathy accent, tried to slow it down as it came out. The museum woman chatted back to him and he pushed the handset close in to his ear as he heard that old Walter Chaplin’s boatyard was no more, but Walt’s widow still lived, alone and ancient now, in the cottage by the boatshed. The lady from the museum heard silence and then the line went dead.

  As Crosbie looks at Walt Chaplin’s boat now, he reads her appearance the way others read an expression on a face, or the tone of a spoken sentence. She is tired, she has seen enough, she has carried enough. Her time is nearly done and she pleads to be taken home.

  THIRTY-ONE

  A few hours later, Odeline is sitting between Ridley and John Kettle in the front seat of a camper van that Ridley has borrowed from ‘a good friend’. It is extremely old and has no wing mirrors. The rear-view mirror is redundant as the rear window is boarded up with planks. John Kettle is driving as he is the only one of them with a driving licence. Ridley has the map on his lap. He says he knows where this detention centre is. ‘Years of living in the shadows,’ he said. ‘I’ve friends who’ve been in and out of these places.’ Ridley has a lot of friends, evidently. His head is sticking out of the window, calling out when it is safe to turn or change lanes. John Kettle does not like to indicate, it seems, blames the clutch every time he stalls and does not brake before turning – the result is that Odeline has been frequently flung against one or other of them. She has nothing to hold on to to keep herself upright so has slumped firmly back into her seat and wedged her knees against the dashboard. John Kettle says ‘Excuse me’ in an irritating faux-polite way every time he reaches under her feet for the gearstick.

  John Kettle swings them on to the motorway and she is slammed once again into Ridley’s warm, firm shoulder, which smells of washed cotton. He is wearing a short-sleeved cheesecloth shirt and Odeline, as ever, can’t stop looking at the blues and browns of his arm.

  She pulls herself upright and Ridley slides the map down the side of his seat.

  ‘We stay on now for six junctions,’ he says.

  He has still offered no explanation of his recent whereabouts. She has been building up the courage to ask him all journey – now seems as good a time as
any to take the plunge.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she asks.

  ‘We’ve been moored up at Kensal Green.’

  ‘The whole time?’

  ‘Er, yeah. These past two weeks.’

  ‘How long are you going to stay there?’

  ‘I’m not sure. We were thinking of going west next week.’

  ‘You and Angela?

  ‘We three. Me, Marlon, Saltheart.’

  ‘Is Angela your girlfriend?’

  ‘Ha!’ He laughs. ‘She was once, a long time ago. Twelve years.’

  ‘How old are you?’ says Odeline, looking at the tough lines around his eyes, the tarnished gold of the rings through his eyebrow.

  ‘I don’t keep track,’ he smiles. ‘What’d be your reckoning?’

  ‘Twenty-eight?’ she guesses, thinking how old that sounds.

  ‘Bollocks,’ says John Kettle.

  ‘Slightly north of that,’ grins Ridley, ‘but thanks.’

  They bump along the slow lane of the M40. The holdall containing Vera’s things is on the floor in the back, wedged between a sofabed and a fridge with its door missing.

  Odeline’s moneybelt bulges against the waist of her suit trousers. An hour ago she went to the Post Office and released £5,000 from her funds in cash. The money is arranged around her middle in packets of £1,000. She keeps her hands folded over it. She has not told the others of her plan: to use this money to buy Vera’s release.

  Back at her boat this morning she mentally prepared herself for the rescue mission. She sat on her bed. Reality thumped through with every heartbeat. She thought of Vera and her life. She thought of double doors and the mattress with the sleeping bag and the tiny collection of books. She thought of the photograph. She thought of the clothes rack with the socks and the underwear, the towel. She thought of the toiletries on the chair. She had never apprehended another person’s reality so directly. She felt embarrassed at having done so. Until now it has been her rule to keep a safe distance from other people’s lives, other people’s mundanity and messiness. She had always been repulsed by those sorts of tangles.