by Francis King
‘You leaving now?’
‘No. I’ve got some things to see to first. Among them – to get all your particulars on to the computer. We’re great on records now. If I don’t do it at once, I’ll forget. You never told me your name.’
He hesitated. Why, she wondered, should he be reluctant to give it to her? Then he said: ‘Mehmet.’ Again he hesitated, screwing up his eyes and turning his head aside. ‘Mehmet Ahmeti.’
She reached over to the reception desk for a piece of paper. ‘Write it for me.’
Yet again he was reluctant. The script, when he finally took the biro from her and painstakingly inscribed the name, was curiously unformed, even childish, as though writing, at least in the Western alphabet, was not something that he was often called on to do.
She looked at the sheet of paper, holding it up to the light from above them. She said the name: ‘ Mehmet Ahmeti’, her head lowered to it, then looked up at him.
‘OK.’
‘Is that an Arab name?’
‘No.’
‘Where are you from then?’
‘Albania.’
‘Albania! You’re the first Albanian I’ve ever spoken to.’
‘Many Albanians in London.’
‘Yes, I know. But somehow … Have you been here some time?’
‘Some time. Yes.’
Suddenly she sensed an unease even more acute than when she had asked for his name. He raised a hand first to the wounded cheek and then to the temple and rocked back and forth in those expensive, highly-polished brown moccasins of his with the floppy, tooled-leather tongues. ‘I go now. Late for you. Thank you. You very kind. Very good with needle.’ He made a gesture of sewing and laughed. ‘I feel nothing.’
‘That wasn’t because of any skill. That was because of the local.’
He stepped out into the street and began to move off with a strangely dragging gait. She stood in the doorway, watching him. His leg must be painful after the kicking – yes, it must have been a kicking – she thought, as she called out: ‘Don ‘t forget to take those antibiotics!’
He turned. ‘ No forget!’
‘And it might be a good idea to take a couple of paracetamols or aspirins before you go to bed.’
‘No need! I always sleep like – what you say? – rock. No. Top.’ He waved. Then, no longer limping but moving with what struck her as an extraordinary grace despite the injury to the thigh, he hurried off at a speed accelerating with each stride.
‘And telephone for that appointment!’ she called after him. But probably he did not hear that, since he did not turn.
Suddenly she felt exhausted. Why had that stupid girl not sent him on to the Chelsea and Westminster and so saved her an extra half-hour of work? But she was not really angry with Carmen. What had exhausted her was not that extra half-hour but those – what? – six, seven hours of all the other people who, at ten or fifteen minute intervals, had demanded her attention. With this – this – she struggled to remember the name, her brain confused and numb – this Mehmet whatever-it-was, she had felt increasingly exhilarated, even though stitching a wound late in the evening after a day of dull, depressing work was not normally something that would have caused her any exhilaration at all. Would she see him again? Presumably he would telephone to make that appointment to have his stitches removed. Well, one of the two practice nurses, one young and frivolous and one middle-aged and grim, could deal with him. But she knew that she did not really want either of them to do that. She wanted to deal with him herself.
She picked the towel up off the back of the chair where he had thrown it. In some places it was stiff with dry blood, in others still damp. She stooped and used it to wipe some drops of blood off the floor and a comer of her desk. But, whereas it was easy to remove the blood from the tiled floor, she could not remove it from the desk even with rubbing. She went over to the washbasin and ran some water over a corner of the towel. She was about to rub once again at the desk, then gave up. Mrs Flynn, the Irish cleaner, could deal with it. If she noticed it, that was. Mrs Flynn had a way of not noticing even the most obvious things. Perhaps she should leave a note for her? But in the end she could not be bothered even to do that.
The pollution was getting worse and worse, she thought, as she strode up Gloucester Road and tasted the air, damp and metallic, on her lips when she licked them and in her mouth each time that she opened it. No wonder so many of her older patients suffered from bronchitis and asthma. Instead of prescribing Pulmicort and Bricalyn, she ought to tell them, Move, get out of this city of dreadful smog, go to the Mediterranean or Switzerland or South Africa, or, if you can’t afford that, try Bournemouth or even Brighton. What was his name? Mehmet – Mehmet – yes! – Mehmet Ahmeti. From Albania. From time to time she’d thought she’d like to go there. Now she had a reason. She smiled to herself.
It was then, as she strode, on the other side of the road, up past the Underground station, that all at once she saw him. He was standing in the station entrance, leaning against a wall, with one leg crossed over the other just above the ankle and the palm of his right hand resting against the cheek that she had stitched. He was looking away from her, into the station. Was he expecting someone? But, unless he had a mobile phone, how could he have made the rendezvous? Unless, of course, he had made it before the ‘accident’ and he had got away from the surgery just in time to keep it. But all through the time that he had been with her, he had never looked at his watch; and he had been in no hurry to go. In fact, when he had asked ‘ You leaving now?’, she had assumed that he was about to ask her to walk with him. Strange. She was almost tempted to wait, here, just here, outside Harts, so that, if he saw her, she could pretend that she was about to go in to do some shopping or had just emerged after having done some. But then she told herself ‘This is ridiculous!’ Why should she be interested in whom a complete stranger, fortuitously encountered, was waiting to meet?
She hurried on, then looked back over her shoulder. He was still there, in that same posture. The light from the interior of the station shone on the polished leather of the moccasin resting above the other, on the close-cut, wiry hair, which came to a peak above his forehead and on the pale, high cheekbones. There was something at once negligent and wary about the way that he stood there, motionless, relaxed and yet, she imagined, with every sense alert. That was how her cat Monkey, now dead, used to wait in her small garden for a bird. Monkey seldom failed to catch one.
Chapter Three
People so often complained of being disturbed by neighbours who were quarrelling. Meg was disturbed by neighbours who were happy. The shouts from Blossom and her husband, a medical student and also Nigerian, were not shouts of recrimination or rage but of two people who each shouted to the other because that struck them as the most powerful way to convey a constant, delirious joy. When they were not shouting – ‘ Hi, there, girl!’ as he threw open the front-door, ‘Chow’s up!’, as she summoned him to the kitchen table – they were laughing, seemingly at nothing, or, late into the night, they were making love with what Meg called their ‘jungle noises’ – screeches, wails, yelps, groans – which, as she lay rigid and sleepless on the narrow, hard bed so close to their wide, sagging one, would fill her with amazement, admiration, envy and exasperation all at one and the same time.
‘You must speak to them,’ Mehmet would tell her, when, staggering and lurching to the breakfast table on her crutches, she would sigh ‘Another ghastly night!’
She would shake her head. ‘No, I couldn’t do that. Oh, no. They have a right to be happy.’
‘You no have right too?’
She drew an even deeper sigh. ‘I sometimes wonder.’
Now, at this late hour, long after eleven, the couple seemed to be chasing each other round their little flat, with whoops from him, screeches from her and a lot of maniacal laughter from both of them. Those jerry-built walls were made of paper. ‘ Don’t you dare, don’t you dare!’ Meg heard Blossom shout at one point. Th
en the thudding of their feet was suddenly silent and all Meg could hear was a cooing sound, as of some distant pigeon. She smiled to herself as she nestled down deeper into the chair from which she was watching television. They were really such a sweet couple, though for some reason or other Mehmet couldn’t abide them. You’d have thought that, being coloured like them, he’d have been better disposed. How could that man be a medical student? Mehmet often asked. He was ignorant, both he and she were ignorant, little better than savages. ‘Oh, Mehmet, why do you have to be intolerant of others? It takes all sorts, you know.’ To which he replied: ‘Mamma – better world if there are fewer sorts.’
Meg looked again at her watch. What had happened to the boy? It was as a boy that she always thought of him, even though he was now thirty-one and so only twelve years younger than she was. One never really knew what he was up to. Mysterious. He liked to lead another life, parallel to the life that he led with her, and she accepted that, since she was not in a position, seated in her wheelchair or staggering and lurching around on her crutches, to venture out with him on his jaunts to the betting shop or the park or the pubs or who could say where else.
He had now been living in her council flat in Dalston for almost nine months – for four of them as her lodger and for three of them as a combination of lodger and what she would call, without any rancour, non-paying guest. ‘ You’re too good-hearted,’ Sylvia would tell her. ‘There you are, finding it far from easy to manage, and you could let that room, that nice room, for at least, oh, fifty or sixty pounds a week. Twenty is a farce. And if he has so much difficulty in finding even that amount, then that’s an even stronger reason for giving him the old heave-ho.’ Meg would then point out how useful Mehmet was to her – getting the electric buggy out onto the road and helping her into it, running out to buy her a packet of cigarettes at the pub when she had smoked more than her ritual twenty each day, lowering her into the bath or hauling her out of it, putting out the dustbin. How had she ever managed without him? If she told him to go, who would ever take his place? At that, Sylvia would purse her lips and draw in her pointed chin.
If he went, she replied, then the social services people would have to pull their fingers out and do more for her, much more.
Meg started up from a sleep at the sound of the front door opening and shutting. A thread of saliva descended from one corner of her half-open mouth, down her chin and on to one lapel of her dressing gown. She raised a hand and brushed it away. Then finding that it was now stuck to her hand, she wiped the hand on a side of the battered armchair. ‘Is that you?’ she called. ‘Mehmet!’
‘Hello, Meg!’ His voice was strong and cheerful, not wispy and weary as Eric’s used to be when he returned home, early in the morning, from the hotel.
She looked at the man’s watch, once Eric’s spare and found in one of his drawers after his departure, which she wore even when sleeping. It was old and cumbersome, with a dial that glowed in the night, in a way that modern watches no longer did. Her first action on waking each morning was to wind it. ‘ Gracious! It’s almost midnight. What have you been doing?’ She shouted the last question, since, instead of coming into the sitting-room, he had at once gone down the corridor without even looking in on her. Probably he was desperate for a pee, she decided. She waited for a while and then, when he did not return and there was no sound of the lavvie being flushed, she called out: ‘Mehmet! Hey! What are you up to?’
‘Just putting some things away.’ he called back. ‘ I be with you in a minute.’
The minute struck her as an extremely long one. When he did at last appear, a gasp of astonishment puffed out of her. ‘What have you done to yourself?’ There was sticking plaster above his left eye and over his left cheekbone, and his face was paler than she had ever seen it before, even when he had had that tummy bug that had laid him low for a whole weekend.
‘Nothing to worry. I leave work and I decide take tube to Manor House and then bus, because so late. Then – then I trip on escalator and – and …’ He shrugged. ‘I cut face, tear new trousers.’ He looked down. ‘ I just change. Others – throw away.’
‘Oh, you poor love!’ He had approached the chair and was looking down at her. When he looked down at her like that, with a mixture of tenderness and amusement, she would feel a sudden easing of the spirit, sometimes even a joy. ‘Did someone see to the cuts for you?’
He nodded. ‘I go Chelsea and Westminster. Wait, wait long time. Many drunks, many peoples with nothing wrong. You know how hospitals are. But it is good there, very good. This old doctor, old man, good. He fix cuts. No expect old man good at sewing! Very good. No pain. A local. Now a little pain, because local wearing off. Maybe I take paracetamol.’
‘Oh, yes, yes! You must do that. Otherwise you won’t get a good night’s sleep. There’s a packet of them in the bathroom cupboard. But make sure you take the right packet. I don’t want you to take my senna pills by mistake! They look so alike.’
‘Yes, I want sleep well. Lot of work tomorrow.’
‘Oh, your friend wants you tomorrow too! Oh, good!’
He made no response.
Mehmet’s work was never regular, and she was never sure what precisely it involved. From time to time, having gathered her courage, she would ask him, sometimes directly but more often obliquely, but always he was vague. Clearly he did not like people knowing too much about his business, and she understood that. She herself always clammed up when solicitous neighbours – like that ever so grand Lady Muck at no. 14 who was perpetually on at her about claiming all her entitlements (that was Lady Muck’s word) from the Social Security people – became too nosey about her affairs. All that Meg knew about his work was that it was something to do with export and import and that he worked no fixed hours but would go when asked to do so, even sometimes in the evenings, to help a friend of his, also an Albanian, who had an office somewhere in Chelsea. Pay was as irregular as the hours, with the result that, with many apologies and with embarrassment as much on her side as on his, he would often either fail to pay the rent altogether when it was due or offer her no more than a small instalment.
Now, once again, she could not resist the impulse to probe. If you really cared about someone and cared for someone, then it was natural to want to know everything about them, wasn’t it? It was not like that one upstairs who asked all her questions about those entitlements not because she wanted to help but only because she could never keep her nose out of anyone else’s business. ‘Was it a busy day then?’ she asked. ‘You went out so early.’
He nodded. ‘Busy.’
‘I suppose in your line of business it’s more a case of mental tiredness than the physical kind.’
‘Yes. Only physical kind is opening drawer, taking file, working computer. And going to toilet.’ He laughed. Then he pointed at her. ‘Like me to give you hand?’
No, she would never get him to talk. He always changed the subject.
‘Well, just the crutches, dear.’
He stooped, picked them up and then placed them on the table beside her. As he did so, one of them dislodged some of the cards of the patience that she had been doing when she had dropped off. ‘ I never used to have the patience for patience, but I now have all the patience in the world,’ she had once told him, as she often told others.
‘Oops! Sorry!’
‘Doesn’t matter. I’ll start again tomorrow. It was a devil, that one. That’s why I gave up on it and had a kip instead. I only hope I haven’t ruined my night’s sleep.’
He put out one of his hands – how strong the fingers were, not at all like Eric’s spidery ones, and how cool the palm – and she took it in hers. She could still exert a grip but she knew, each time that that Chinaman held out his hand and ordered her ‘Now grip my hand as hard as you can – hard, please, hard, hard!’ that that grip was weakening. One day she would not be able to grip at all, she knew that.
‘There we are!’ He had learned that phrase from her, since she oft
en used it – ‘ There we are!’ as he set down a cup for her, as he appeared in the doorway, as he helped her out of the bath, as he switched on the television set or the lamp beside her chair.
‘You are good to me!’ she said, as she so often said. ‘What would I do without you?’
‘And what I do without my Mamma?’
She did not really care for him to call her that. But then, having suffered a momentary exasperation at the words, she would tell herself that it was sweet really, it showed how fond he was of her and how close they were.
‘Eric and I saw a film once, called The Odd Couple. I sometimes think – that’s what we are. The Odd Couple.’
‘Nothing odd if two people care each other, help each other. Yes?’
She smiled up at him. ‘No, of course not, love. Of course not!’
Chapter Four
Audrey’s father, Laurence, would often describe her, with a mixture of grudging admiration and guilty derision, as a good woman. When he was exasperated with her, he would exclaim, sometimes to her but more frequently to himself ‘God save me from a good woman!’, but when he was reluctantly grateful to her for something that she had done for him, he would often tell her, with one of his quizzical smiles, what a good woman she was. To that she once responded: ‘ Is it a compliment to be called a good woman? Sometimes I rather wish that someone would call me a bad one.’ But no one would ever do that.
It was goodness that had propelled her out early that morning, the pavements spiderwebbed with frost, even before her sister-in-law Marilyn had left for the surgery, to sell flags ‘ for my children’ – as she referred to the charity, set up to help children orphaned in Rwanda, for which she worked voluntarily, as she also did for Oxfam. Later, it was goodness that, as she was making her way from her beat outside Kensington High Street station to the Oxfam shop, made her pause and then turn back to where, in the doorway of an empty block of offices, a young man with a ponytail and blond stubble pricking through the slack, grey skin over his jaws, had positioned himself with an elderly, rheumy-eyed mongrel bitch and a shoebox containing some twenty, ten and five p pieces and a single pound. Propped against the shoebox was a ragged piece of cardboard on which he had scrawled in capital letters: STARVING, PLEASE HELP. Fearful of being late at the shop, Audrey had just hurriedly bought herself two packets of sandwiches, tuna-and-salad and tandoori chicken, in Marks and Spencer. She hesitated, dipping her hand into the plastic bag containing them, jerking it out as though it had encountered scalding water, and then thrusting it in again. Finally, she stooped and held out the sandwiches. The dog gazed up at her with its vague, constantly blinking eyes and then extended its greying muzzle to sniff at the offering. ‘Perhaps you might like these?’ Audrey said. That STARVING had moved her; but since she was always in control of herself, her matter-of-fact tone did not betray that.