The Nick of Time

by Francis King

  ‘Well, cup of coffee then,’ Mehmet insisted.

  Jacek was undecided. On the one hand, he wanted to get to know Mehmet, on the other hand he did not want to put down the money even for a cup of coffee. When he worked days, he always brought with him a packet of sandwiches wrapped in a page of Polly’s Mail or Standard. Ashamed of the thick slices clumsily crammed with hard-boiled egg, cheese or pork luncheon meat, he would eat them surreptitiously behind one of the cars or hunkered down in one of the two malodorous lavatories, the bowls of which were all too often choked with paper and cigarette ends.

  As though he had at once intuited the cause of Jacek’s indecision, Mehmet put a hand on his shoulder and said: ‘My treat.’ When Jacek, not understanding the phrase, peered up anxiously at him with his pale blue eyes, the skin around them grey and shiny with fatigue, Mehmet said: ‘I pay.’

  Jacek was still dubious. He hated to, in effect, live off Polly. He hated even more to accept what he saw as charity from this fellow worker. But his determination to finish his task in each case eventually overcame his reluctance. He nodded. ‘ OK.’

  The café was empty. Was it his tiredness that made the light seem dimmer than usual, Jacek wondered, or had it been dimmed as an economy measure so late at night, when so few people, and those mostly prostitutes, came in?

  The large, sleepy Cypriot woman – it was she who always worked nights, her husband days – yawned as she stretched out a monumental arm for the coffee kept perpetually warm in its Pyrex glass jug on a low flame. She smiled. ‘How’s things, Mehmet?’ Everyone knew Mehmet by name. She ignored Jacek, as everyone tended to do. In his too short, grease-stained grey cotton trousers, his clumsy shoes with their thick plastic soles, and his open-necked check shirt under a worn leather jacket, he stood less than five and a half feet high. Insignificant: that was how, resignedly, he thought of himself and of how other people thought of him.

  ‘Not so bad, mamma,’ Mehmet said. ‘All this night I been thinking of mamma’s coffee. And doughnut,’ he added, pointing. ‘For you doughnut?’ he asked Jacek.

  Jacek shook his head and again lied: ‘Not hungry. Thank you.’

  ‘Yes, for you too doughnut. Two doughnut, mamma.’

  Jacek was now certain that Mehmet had, through some mysterious insight, known at once why he had pretended not to be hungry. Perhaps, through that same insight, he was also now discovering what Jacek had told to no one in England, not even to Polly: that he had undertaken this journey because it was only in that way that he could get himself, his wife Ewa and their ailing daughter Anna (she was now seven but looked four) away both from Ewa’s parents’ house, where the three of them felt constantly oppressed in the low-ceilinged attic room that constituted their whole accommodation, and from Katowice itself, with its miniature volcanoes of factory chimneys vomiting flame and smoke into a sky that, low and leaden, resembled dead flesh raked here and there with lurid orange and red scars.

  The two men sat down at a table so shaky that they soon moved to another. Next to this second table sat two women, each with a plate of spaghetti Bolognese before her. The women ate in silence, coiling the spaghetti expertly round their forks and then sucking it in through their brightly-painted mouths. The lipstick on the mouth of one of these women had been smeared up along her cheek by the clumsy passage of a strand of spaghetti.

  Mehmet nudged Jacek under the table with one of his trainers and tipped his head in their direction. He leaned forward: ‘You know what they are?’

  Jacek was afraid that the women would hear. He shook his head.

  Again Mehmet leaned forward. He mouthed the word: ‘Tarts.’ Then, because Jacek clearly had not understood, he mouthed: ‘Prostitutes.’

  Jacek glanced across at the two women. He felt both disgusted and fascinated. His widowed mother had told him of women like that. It was wicked, she had repeatedly said, to go with them. It could also be dangerous, since they might rob one or give one some terrible disease. But these women looked just like any other women. Polly looked no different from them. In Katowice one could at once recognize such women – they wore brighter and better clothes, painted their faces more vividly, talked and laughed more loudly, puffed at cigarettes more blatantly in the street. How did Mehmet know that these women were what he said they were?

  Suddenly, to Jacek’s amazement, Mehmet was leaning across to address the women. ‘How’s business?’ he asked, in the same conversational tone of voice that he used when asking the same question of some taxi driver.

  One of the two women turned and pulled a face, drawing her mouth together so that small, cobwebby lines radiated out from around it. She was both older than the other one and older than she liked people to think. ‘Poor.’

  ‘You don’t get so many punters on the run-up to Christmas,’ the other said. ‘Saving up for toys for the kiddies.’ She laughed and then raised the cigarette that she was holding between middle finger and ring finger and dragged on it, eyes half closed.

  ‘How about you two?’ the other asked. ‘Ready for a bit of fun?’

  ‘Sorry. I wish possible. But we must go back work.’

  ‘Work! What you doing then?’

  ‘Car wash.’

  ‘Oh, that place! We get the occasional cabbie from there. While their cabs are being done – so it has to be a quickie.’

  ‘You look too good for that kind of job,’ her companion said. ‘They employ a real ragtag and bobtail in that place. All foreigners by the look of it. Pity! We could have enjoyed ourselves.’

  People never tipped in the café, since it was self-service. But, as he got up to go, Mehmet took some loose change out of his pocket and placed it by his empty coffee cup, neatly stacking the coins on top of each other. Jacek was to learn that Mehmet was always both generous and meticulous.

  ‘So – goodnight, ladies. I hope business go well.’

  ‘Goodnight, love.’

  When he had shut the café door behind them, Mehmet laughed: ‘Terrible! So ugly! And one with black hair – so old, hair dyed! Terrible! Of course business bad for them. What they expect?’

  Jacek was amazed. So far from thinking them ugly, he had been overcome by their allure. All through the encounter he had been aware of the scent, heavy and musky, that had wafted over from the other table. It had made his head swim and his heart accelerate.

  The two men were due to knock off at six o’clock. Selim, not for the first time, had failed to turn up at that hour and so Mr Klingsman asked if either of them would like to stay on – ‘night rate, of course’ – until some of the other workers had turned up at nine. Mehmet shook his head decisively. ‘ Sorry, Fritz. I must get home. I’m finished.’ He did not look finished. He looked as fresh as his overalls.

  ‘What about you, Jack?’ Mr Klingsman had a way of converting foreign names into more manageable English ones.

  Jacek’s exhaustion was making him feel as if he were stumbling through a sea of viscous, clinging mud; but he thought of his task and all the months that it was taking to fulfil it and he nodded: ‘OK.’

  ‘Good man!’

  When, bleary-eyed, Mr Klingsman had returned to his office – unusually, he had been on duty that night because his night manager was ill – Mehmet said to Jacek: ‘You crazy? Let him do work himself!’

  Was he crazy? Sometimes Jacek thought that, in setting himself his task and then pursuing it so single-mindedly, he was. ‘I need money,’ he said. ‘Good money.’

  ‘You must sometimes think other things than money.’

  Jacek sighed and then turned at the sound of a taxi being driven in.

  Mehmet put a hand on Jacek’s shoulder and squeezed it. It was the first time, since Jacek’s arrival in England seven months before, that anyone in England, apart from Polly, had shown him any affection. He wished that he could respond in some way, but from a combination of awkwardness and exhaustion he found that he could not do so. An essential part of himself – that part that in Katowice made his fellow workers in t
he factory regard him as a good sport and good fun – had mysteriously drifted off and no effort, however frantic, availed to summon it back.

  Jacek now thought of Mehmet as his mate. From time to time, he would experience a sharp pinch of jealousy when he would see him chatting to one of the other workers. He would even occasionally break his rule of never entering a restaurant, café or bar, and instead would follow Mehmet to the greasy spoon, where he would insist: ‘No, this time I pay, I pay!’ Carefully he would count out the coins in a palm and then hand them over to the Cypriot woman. ‘ Thank you, madam.’ Unlike Mehmet, he never tipped.

  To Mehmet he began to reveal all the things that were secret even from Polly: that his wife’s parents had been furious when she had announced that she would marry him and had attempted to make her change her mind – he wasn’t good enough for the daughter of a master baker, they said, he was so squat and ugly, half-educated, grubby, smelly; that Anna had been born with a malformation of the spine, eventually corrected by a drastic operation for which the parents, blaming Jacek’s ‘heredity’, had reluctantly paid; that they constantly threw in his face his inability properly to support his own people, so that even his mother, now nearing seventy, was working in a laundry.

  Mehmet at first listened to these confessions with sympathetic interest; but when Jacek went over them again and again in conversation, just as he also did in his feverish, disjointed reveries while working on a car, Jacek would notice, with dismay, that his attention was straying. His eyes would follow some woman passing their table, stare moonily out of the window beside them, or suddenly shout out something to the Cypriot or his wife behind the counter, or to some other worker also taking a break in the café.

  One day Jacek revealed the circumstance of his admission to the United Kingdom. A cousin of a cousin, who had once worked illegally as a builder’s labourer in Brighton, had told him what to do. He should register at a school of English run by a Pakistani in Clapham. The school was cheaper than most, the Pakistani did not care whether those who registered at the school attended classes or not. The Pakistani would give Jacek a letter, and with this he would, with luck, get a temporary permit to stay in the country. Jacek had that luck. He had then found work with a builder, a Pole married to an Englishwoman and therefore possessing both residence and work permits. The Pole paid his illegal workers far less than his legal ones, just as Mr Klingsman did. The advantage of working for him was that over his workshop, under a roof covered with corrugated iron, was a long, narrow attic, a single window at one end, where he let his foreign workers, most of them Poles like himself, live for nothing. In the summer, when Jacek arrived, the heat and stench there was ghastly. But at least he was earning a regular wage, had virtually no expenses, and was surrounded by people who, for the most part, could speak his own language.

  One day, early in the morning, while the men, a few of them in pyjamas and the rest of them in their underwear, were still sleeping, uncovered because of the heat, in the two congested rows of mattresses supplied by the boss, the police burst in. Jacek’s place was the most coveted, under the window, and at once, without any thought, he first leapt up and perched on its ledge – ‘Watch out for that one!’ he heard one of the intruders shout – and then launched himself from it, down on to some bushes below. He felt an agonizing jolt to his spine, and at the same time a pain that shot, like a surge of molten metal, up one side of his leg. Somehow, barely able to run, he managed to escape, first crossing the next-door garden, then stumbling down a ginnel, and then miraculously managing almost at once to thumb a lift in a small white van driven by a sturdy woman with close-cropped hair, wearing jeans. Later, when, with extreme caution, he returned in the late afternoon to the workroom, the Pole, so far from welcoming him, told him to make himself scarce. What had happened to the other men? Jacek asked. The Pole shrugged. They would be detained and then deported. He himself would probably face prosecution for employing them. That was what happened when you tried to do other human beings a good turn. His face was stony and haggard; he had been through all this once before, though Jacek did not know that.

  Having collected his few pitiful belongings from the attic, Jacek slept rough that night. Then he trailed from place to place in search of work. Limping, dirty and unshaven, he made the worst possible impression. One or two people were at first prepared to take him on but then, inevitably, there was the question of whether he possessed a work permit or not. He would have to admit that he didn’t and that was the end of it.

  Briefly, he got a job as a part-time cleaner with a firm that was short of staff. An old drunk, encountered on a bench in Battersea Park, had suggested it to him. The job was a night-time one, as part of a gang, many of its members from Africa, who swept up the rubbish on empty and eerily echoing Underground platforms and passages.

  Eventually, he heard, again from someone met by chance, this time a Romanian in a café, about the car wash. Once he had persuaded Mr Klingsman to take him on, things continued to improve for him. After only a few days in his new lodging, a Brixton dormitory which he shared with five other men, all of them black, he had been travelling to work on an empty night bus and had found himself sitting opposite two chattering, giggling girls, both of them pleasantly tipsy, who were clearly returning from a party or a disco. When the older and plainer of the girls – she eventually turned out to be Polly – jumped off the bus, she was so absorbed in talking to her companion that she forgot the bag that she had set down on the seat between them. Jacek at once saw it, snatched it up and jumped off the platform of the by now accelerating bus in pursuit. ‘Hey! Hey!’ he shouted at the girls, who halted and, arms linked, stared back at him in alarm, their mouths open. Then Polly saw that he was waving her bag at her and at once ran forward. ‘Oh, thank you, thank you. What an idiot I am! That’s what comes of drinking too much.’ He handed it to her. She was breathing heavily, and her square, stolid face, with its shiny, bulging forehead over small eyes behind granny glasses, was flushed with relief.

  ‘And now you’ll have to take another bus,’ the other girl said. ‘It may be an age.’

  ‘Let me give you the fare for a taxi,’ Polly suggested, opening the bag.

  Jacek frowned, then slowly realized what she was offering. He shook his head. ‘I walk. Not far. OK.’ But the jump from the bus had made his leg, damaged in the frantic leap from the workroom attic, throb again.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  He nodded. ‘Sure.’

  Polly would often say later that, if she hadn’t been so pissed that night, she might not have gone on talking to him, and then where would they have been? ‘You’re foreign, aren’t you?’ she said. That he was foreign must have been obvious even to someone as pissed as she was.

  He nodded. ‘Pole.’

  ‘Oh, I used to work with a Polish girl. She was a cashier. I don’t know what’s happened to her now. She left to have a baby and never came back.’

  He nodded, smiled, not understanding.

  Still chattering, the girls accompanied him back to the bus stop and stood there waiting with him. Jacek took his worn pocket dictionary out of the plastic bag in which he carried it along with his work clothes, his sandwiches and Thermos. With its assistance – in turn, they held it up to the light from a lamp post and leafed through its pages – the two girls and he somehow managed to communicate. Eventually, Polly said ‘We should get together some time.’ She had had rather a dismal time at the disco, she was later to tell Jacek after he had moved into her flat, with the boys clearly interested only in her companion, so that she was soon made to feel that she was merely tagging along. When she had seen Jacek opposite her on the bus, looking so sleepy and awkward, she had therefore been in the mood to think him really sweet and to take to him at once.

  Jacek nodded eagerly. ‘Meet,’ he said. ‘Yes, yes!’ Then he held out the dictionary, which he had opened at its flyleaf and said: ‘Telephone, telephone.’ The girls searched for a pen or pencil in their bags, until the y
ounger one eventually, with a screech of triumph, jerked a biro out from the bottom of hers. Polly wrote down her name and her telephone number. The younger one made no move to do so, and Jacek, having already decided that she was far too attractive and self-assured for him ever to get anywhere with her, did not urge her to.

  Having repeatedly confided in Mehmet, Jacek eventually made an effort to get Mehmet to reciprocate. The return seemed essential if they were truly to be mates. But Mehmet remained evasive.

  ‘Was it difficult for you to come?’ Jacek asked.

  ‘To come? To England?’ Mehmet shrugged, raised his coffee cup, sipped from it, sipped again. ‘Comme ci, comme ça.’ He shrugged again. Jacek knew no French.

  ‘You have permit – work, stay?’

  Mehmet waved a hand back and forth as though to dissipate cigarette smoke or some unpleasant smell. ‘All OK.’ He nodded: ‘Yes. Mehmet OK.’ Jacek had noticed that he often spoke of himself in the third person.

  There were to be other clumsy attempts. All were equally fruitless. All that Jacek ever learned about Mehmet was that he was from Albania, that he was not married, and that he lodged somewhere in North London. None of the other people at the car wash, not even Mr Klingsman, knew more.

  One evening, Jacek stood eating some cereal, the bowl held under his chin, in the tiny kitchen, and Polly, who was obsessively tidy, was rearranging some cutlery in a drawer. It was then that he suddenly found the courage to tell her of the plan that had been forming in his mind over the past few days. She knew that chap he had told her about, that Mehmet, the one that was always so friendly to him? Polly nodded and muttered, head bent over the drawer, ‘H’m, h’m.’ She had never met Mehmet, never even seen him, but she had confided in Renée that she did not at all care for the idea of him. Jacek would go on and on so about him, he thought that the light shone out of his arse. But she got this feeling, she could not say why, that he wasn’t right for Jacek, that he could only be bad news. In a peculiar way, she was jealous of him, she told Renée, and that worried her. Why on earth should she be jealous of a bloke?