Someone Else's Conflict

by Alison Layland

  ‘Of course.’

  Jay smiled, handed his new gadget over. ‘Stick your number in this for me. And take mine while you’re at it.’

  Vinko halted and Jay watched him tapping the numbers in with practised ease. Even to his inexperienced eye he could see the lad’s was far more sophisticated than the simple model he’d just bought himself.

  ‘Cool phone,’ he remarked.

  Vinko passed Jay’s mobile back sullenly and set off walking. He strode to catch up, wondering how a remark intended to put him at his ease could have offended him.

  ‘I saved up,’ he snapped as Jay drew level. He recognised the lie, remembering he’d first seen him standing next to Polly when her purse went missing, but decided not to push him further. It was hardly surprising, given the lad’s circumstances, and he merely hoped for now that it was only petty theft and he wasn’t involved in anything more serious.

  They reached the bus station and Vinko followed him to the Holdwick stop, watching over his shoulder as he examined the timetable.

  ‘What time is it?’ Jay asked. He’d given up bothering with watches and clocks years ago.

  Vinko scarcely lifted his sleeve, but it was enough for Jay to notice that the watch was more flashy than he’d have expected, too. This time he hardly registered it, or the lad’s defensiveness, as he swore in his frustration at missing the last bus.

  ‘Why don’t you come home with me?’ asked Vinko cheerfully, his annoyance forgotten as quickly as it had flared.

  Jay nodded, forcing a smile back. ‘Thanks.’

  He wanted to get to know the lad better, and in any case he stood next to no chance of hitching in a place like that, at that time of day. As they made their way to the Bradford stop he recalled what he and Polly had been talking about the previous night and hoped he’d managed to convince her that he had no intention of leaving, at least before he’d finished the job.

  ‘You are living in Holdwick?’

  Surprised by Vinko’s halting, accented English after an afternoon of hearing the fluency of his own language, Jay had no ready answer. ‘For now,’ he said.

  ‘You are… You have a wife?’

  ‘No. Not yet,’ he added to soften the abruptness.

  ‘But you love a woman.’

  Jay smiled. ‘I’ve got a girlfriend.’

  Vinko grinned back as if he somehow knew he was the first person Jay had told.

  ‘I think you did want to see her now.’

  ‘Never mind. Is there anyone waiting for you?’

  Vinko shook his head. ‘There are girls, sometimes. But it is not love. I am hoping always.’

  The bus rattled in, saving Jay from having to think of a suitably profound reply.

  ‘So why English all of a sudden?’ he asked as they pulled away.

  Vinko shrugged. ‘I need practising. You help me. You are helping with the money, I think you will help that I am staying here, making the good life. I must learn gooder – best – English.’

  ‘Better,’ he corrected. ‘I’ll do what I can.’

  He glanced round, saw they might be overheard, and decided against saying anything right then about Vinko promising to live within his means before he helped him any further.

  ‘You will phone her?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your girlfriend.’

  Jay shook his head ruefully. ‘Her phone’s off – not working.’ He didn’t want to admit he didn’t even have her number. ‘I hope she’ll understand.’

  He tried not to think how bad he was feeling about it and wondered if he should have splashed out on a taxi. How had he let it get so late? He tried to look on the bright side, telling himself he should be relieved at the postponement. He’d have to tell her about meeting Vinko and dreaded the further explanations that would lead to. He came to the conclusion that perhaps some situations just didn’t have a bright side.

  Chapter 16

  Vinko’s place was much as Jay had expected. The decaying house, once-garish paint flaking from windows that were more filler than wood, was the end of a terrace reached via a small patch of willowherb, bindweed and scattered rubbish from an overflowing bin. As Vinko opened the door and they stepped over a collection of flyers, Jay saw a dark hallway lined with textured wallpaper held in place by layers of uneven paint. The smell, a combination of damp house, spicy frying, cigarette smoke and unemptied bins, was familiar to him. He’d known plenty of similar places – the pads of temporary acquaintances, squats shared or bagged for himself. Vinko’s room was on the second floor and he led the way towards the sort of creaky stairs it was always a relief to climb without a foot sinking through.

  ‘That you, Vin?’ a voice drifted to them on a tinny wave of bhangra music from the shared kitchen.

  ‘Yeah,’ he called from the first step. ‘I come talk soon.’

  He took another step.

  ‘Hang on, we’ve got a message for ya.’

  Vinko sighed and headed for the kitchen. Jay followed. The room was a mess of heaped dishes in the sink, all manner of packets and tins on every filthy surface – Jay knew from experience most would be almost empty – and a table piled with advertising leaflets, empty take-away cartons and overflowing ashtrays. The soles of his shoes clung stickily to the worn lino. Three men, two fairly smart Asian lads about Vinko’s age and a white guy with greying hair and a face that looked prematurely lined, were sitting round the table with mugs in front of them, recently-cleared dinner plates pushed to one side. They all looked past Vinko at Jay with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion.

  ‘Hi,’ said Vinko without introducing him. ‘What message is there?’

  ‘You had a visitor,’ said one of the younger lads. ‘That bloody fella again. Novak. Said he was waitin’ to hear from ya.’ Vinko shrugged. ‘Just bloody talk to him will ya, Vin? So you don’t want to know him – then phone him up an’ tell him. And while you’re at it you can tell him to piss off an’ stop botherin’ us, yeah?’

  ‘I did tell to him I’ll ring him,’ Vinko said irritably.

  ‘Whatever. So who’s your friend?’

  ‘Dan,’ Jay said, ‘Dan Freeman.’

  ‘He is…he plays music…’ Vinko glanced at Jay.

  ‘Busker,’ he said helpfully.

  ‘I know him longtime. He needs a place to stay. I say he can sleep on my room floor.’

  ‘Busker eh? You could give us some home entertainment,’ said the trio’s spokesman, making exaggerated dancing movements with his arms. ‘Sing for your supper.’

  The three of them laughed, not entirely pleasantly. Jay grinned. ‘You never know your luck.’

  The lad shrugged, looked at his housemates in turn. ‘He looks harmless enough, don’t he? You do what you like in your own room, Vin mate.’ He winked and the others chortled. ‘I’m not the landlord.’

  ‘I like that you will clean those.’ Vinko waved irritably towards the sink. ‘I’m wanting to cook food for my friend.’

  Amidst general laughter, which Jay might have been tempted to join in under other circumstances, Vinko strode to the door.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m not as fussy as he’d have you believe,’ Jay said with a wink over his shoulder as he followed him. ‘See you, lads.’

  ‘They are animals,’ Vinko muttered on the way upstairs. ‘I don’t want to live like that. You don’t think I am like that, please.’

  His room bore out his words. The uncluttered floor had a threadbare but colourful cotton rug, the washbasin with its cracked tiled surround and the mirror above it were clean, curtains moved gently in the breeze from an open window. Vinko hung up his jacket behind the door and gestured for Jay to sit on the neatly made bed. He bent to pick up the kettle from a tray on the floor and Jay noticed the mugs beside it were clean and tidily arranged. As Vinko filled the kettle at the washbasin, he looked around at the walls. There was a framed photo of Marta and Ivan; it felt strange to see the image of his friend in this new context. There were also a couple of large poster
s, a fantasy cityscape and a Salvador Dalí, but it was the drawings that were the most striking. Lots of drawings – faces, buildings, strange hybrid animals, all in bold pencil strokes, depicted in varying degrees of abstraction. There was an open sketch pad on the table beneath the dormer window.

  ‘These yours?’

  Vinko nodded. ‘They hide…’ he waved a hand, ‘ugly walls.’

  There were plenty of damp stains and cracks still showing, but they seemed not to matter beneath the magical papering-over. Jay reached out to press a curling corner back in place on its wad of blu-tack.

  ‘They’re amazing.’

  ‘Thank you. I told you I wanted to do something worthwhile with my life.’

  He’d slipped back into his own language as if practising English no longer mattered in the privacy of his own space.

  ‘That one’s my home.’ He pointed at a drawing of an intricate stone folly of a building, with a shadowy figure that could have been partner, child or self-portrait, the whole perfectly placed within an intricate geometric border. There was a darkness to the beauty of the scene, something about the impossibility of telling whether it was day or night, that Jay found intriguing. ‘I’ll find it one day.’

  ‘I hope you do.’

  Vinko made two coffees and sat on the room’s only wooden chair. He rolled and lit a cigarette and offered Jay the tobacco. He shook his head, took out his pipe instead and sat back comfortably across the bed as he filled it.

  ‘Why Dan Freeman?’ asked Vinko.

  ‘What?’ Jay looked at him in surprise. ‘Where did you hear that?’

  ‘That was what you told them you were called.’

  ‘Did I?’ He laughed to cover his unease. ‘Force of habit. I tell people my real name when I think they need to know. Sometimes that’s immediately, sometimes… never.’

  ‘You don’t have to worry about that crowd.’ Vinko smiled. ‘They live like pigs but they’re my friends.’

  ‘I could see that. It was more…that visitor they’ve been getting. And your nervous look as they mentioned him. Who is it?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ He picked up his mug and tried to sip the too-hot coffee. ‘Someone I met. A deal. I was drunk. Don’t want to get involved. It’s not important.’

  Jay lit the pipe. ‘What kind of deal?’

  ‘Nothing. Selling things. I don’t earn much, I always need extra.’ He glared defensively at Jay as if it were his fault.

  ‘Shouldn’t you do as your friend says, phone him and tell him you’re not interested?’

  Vinko flicked ash into the ashtray in an agitated gesture.

  ‘I have and I’ll tell him again.’ He picked up his mug and blew across it so he could drink. ‘If he doesn’t go away I can always disappear – find somewhere else. You help me, Šojka, you help me to be a proper person here – then I won’t have to do things like that.’

  Jay stayed silent, feeling as guiltily helpless at this display of faith as he had at the first mention of Šojka the war hero. Vinko crushed his cigarette out and stood.

  ‘I have to go to the shop for food. Are you coming?’

  ‘Why don’t we eat out? I don’t want to spend all evening washing up to make space in that kitchen.’

  ‘You don’t have to – you’re my guest.’ The lad looked wounded.

  ‘Watching you wash up, then.’ Jay grinned. Vinko continued scowling. ‘That was meant to be a joke.’

  He nodded with a wary smile.

  Over a meal for which Vinko insisted on paying his share, and a number of drinks afterwards, Jay found himself telling the lad tales from his restless life, more than anything else to avoid the subject he knew the lad was burning to hear about. But when Vinko asked directly about Ivan, he felt he had to try. He deserved to hear about his father.

  ‘He was like the brother I never had. An older sister doesn’t count. We’d always moved around a lot and I’d never fitted in, never found close friends. The butt of people’s jokes, the outsider.’ He looked at Vinko guiltily. He’d have had it far worse. ‘I got so’s I could look after myself and kept my own company most of the time. Sounds daft but I never really realised I’d been lonely, never thought any of it bothered me till I met your dad. Ivan and I clicked from the start.’ So far, so straightforward. ‘He was fun to be with, we shared books, music… We were both into the sort of stuff you’d get laughed at for liking. And walking. We often took ourselves off, walking and camping together. We felt a deep connection to the countryside. Better, closer than anyone else. Of course – we were young.’ He reminded himself Vinko still was. ‘What I mean is, Ivan believed passionately in everything he did. And he was keen on politics, which is more than I was – I’ve always been too much of a dreamer – and I learned a lot from him. Most of all, he always felt a strong connection to his roots. Again very different from me. We’d always moved around. I didn’t have any. With Ivan I liked having somewhere special I could feel an attachment to, even if it was…kind of borrowed. At first. Not later. Definitely more than that later. So anyway, it suited my sense of adventure to go with him when he visited Croatia.’

  ‘That was why you went? Adventure?’

  The critical tone of his voice made Jay look away. He picked up his glass and drank.

  ‘The first visit, perhaps. A holiday, to stay with your great-aunt, Zora. I loved it there and wanted to go back. But the second time was more than mere curiosity. It was the year we finished school, 1990. We’d seen the wave of change across Eastern Europe, the demos, the air of revolution, the fall of the Berlin wall. I guess you heard something about it, from your mum?’ Vinko nodded. ‘We’d watched it all happening on TV and, well, if something similar was going to happen in Yugoslavia, we wanted to be there, to be part of something big. So we both planned a gap year, and…’ He paused; if Vinko was unfamiliar with the concept of a gap year he didn’t show it. ‘Even as young, idealistic lads, we knew it wasn’t as simple as an enthusiastic crowd waving šahovnica flags and having a great big party on Zagreb’s Jelačić Square. But we had no idea it would get as bad as it did. No one did. Though…in the end there was no question of us not getting involved.’

  ‘You adopted our country?’

  So like Ivan – “our country” when, as far as Jay knew, Vinko had never even had the chance to set foot there.

  ‘You could say that.’

  He swallowed. It was getting harder.

  ‘Could? You mean you didn’t really?’

  ‘No, no. I did. Zora, she…she said there’d be chaos, and yes, there was talk of civil war – some said it was inevitable, others that it couldn’t possibly happen. She suggested we waited before going. But we were determined and she didn’t try for long to dissuade us. She even made special arrangements for us. She’d moved permanently to her old family home by then, in Dalmatia. She’d got herself a transfer from Zagreb to the university in Zadar because, well, things were getting uncertain, and if she was going to be stuck anywhere she wanted to be there, at what she thought of as her home, rather than anywhere else. She told us the train would be hopeless – we’d have to go through Knin and that would be…difficult, even then. By road, too. There were roadblocks in parts of Dalmatia; that was how it started. So she arranged for us to come by boat from Trieste. Imagine that. Talk about adventure!

  ‘That should have been it; we should have known, but we talked each other up. Even then, at first Ivan and I were disappointed; we thought it (whatever “it” was) would all be happening in Zagreb. But as it turned out, we were in the thick of things. The Krajina, the area the Serbs were claiming as an independent region, was only a few miles east of us. There was trouble; even then people who’d lived side by side, been friends for years, began to suspect and even hate one another.

  ‘People, Croats, were forced from their homes in the Krajina region and Serb families were driven out of Zadar. Zora used to get mad at us: “Look, people are leaving and you two idiots decide to come.” But we knew she was pleased w
e were there and, well, deep down I guess we thought it’d be no more than a bit of unrest before…before things settled down. At first the worst of the trouble – we watched it every night on the news – was happening far away, in the east, Vukovar. It didn’t involve us. We were just there because we couldn’t leave Zora alone in that house, in that volatile region. Weren’t we? That was all. But of course we got involved.’

  The flood of words dried up and the noise of the crowded pub swirled in to fill the silence. The air around him felt increasingly bright and strange and he closed his eyes to ward it off. He wondered how he’d got this far.

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘The war happened,’ he muttered.

  ‘But what—’

  ‘Enough!’ He looked up and for a moment saw Ivan sitting across from him, all reproach and contempt. He rubbed his eyes and it was a young lad dying to hear about his father. ‘I’m sorry. Another time, all right?’

  His voice didn’t come out as conciliatory as he’d intended. Vinko stood abruptly.

  ‘I go outside for smoking.’

  Jay took out his own tobacco and slowly began to fill his pipe, watching Vinko disappear into the pub’s Saturday night crowd. Best give them both a few moments’ breathing space. Perhaps now would be his opportunity to walk away. He shifted in his seat as if to rise, but sat back, shaking his head at his own cowardice. He let his mind wander for a while. Realising he was beginning to think through a haze of alcohol, he tried to count back how many they’d had, coming to the conclusion this was the fourth. Which meant it was probably the fifth. Too many, whichever way he counted. He attempted to convince himself his head was perfectly clear and his legs were steady as he picked up their half-empty glasses and elbowed his way towards the door.

  Outside the air was fresh, but though he breathed deeply, greedily, he found the orange light of the city street and occasional swish of passing cars oppressive. A crowd of drunken lads approached; their incoherent shouts to a similar gang across the road made him tense up. They passed without even noticing him. There was no sign of Vinko. Jay was surprised at the strength of the momentary concern he felt for him. He saw a covered passageway set aside for smokers and went over to look up it. A slight figure was sitting alone by an upturned-barrel table at the far end and he wove his way between noisy groups of people towards him, relieved. As he approached Vinko was tucking something away in his pocket. He looked up guiltily as he registered Jay’s presence. Jay glanced back over his shoulder, trying to remember whether he’d seen anyone Vinko could have been meeting.