by PJ Adams
“Jess? What is it? Dean? Lee? They okay? Are you okay?”
I couldn’t hear her reply. That damned lazy wind was being anything but lazy in snatching her words away.
I turned my back to the sea, pulled the hood of my coat up to shield the cellphone clamped to my ear.
“Sorry, Jess. I’m outside. Couldn’t hear. What was that? Are you all okay?”
“Owen. It’s okay.” It was still hard to hear her over the roar of the wind, but the hood helped. How was it that I’d been oblivious to that roar until I actually needed to hear something? “Dean’s okay. Lee, too.”
“So...” I let my words trail away, the question unspoken. No need to ask out loud why she was calling me because she never had before and I knew I wasn’t exactly flavor of the month with my family still.
“There’s been some trouble.”
I remembered what Fearless had said when I called him the day before. Something about a protection racket targeting Dean’s place, but that it was all under control. Was that what this was about?
“You need some help? I don’t have the contacts I used to, but I’ll do whatever I can, you know that.”
“No. No, we don’t need help. It’s Fearless. Owen, I’m sorry, but Fearless is dead. He got into trouble protecting Lee. It would have been over quickly for him.”
Fearless Lloyd. He was like an uncle to us. More than an uncle. One of the few people I’d trust 100%, and in the life I’d led that was a rare thing. Rare to almost nonexistent.
“Fearless?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Jesus, Jess. Fearless?”
I hated that my first reaction was a selfish one.
Fearless. He’d got out of all this back in the late ’90s, when the first wave of East European gangsters had made their move on London. He’d stood solid with my old man and seen the newcomers off, but then when Dad was arrested and put away on a life sentence Fearless had been faced with little choice. He did what he could to set things up for me and my brothers, as we moved in to fill the void in the family business, and then he’d done a runner. Vanished for a year or two before showing up on the Costa del Sol. He’d bought a bar, settled down. He was still a mover and shaker down there, of course – they didn’t nickname it the Costa del Crime for nothing – but it was as close to retiring from the business a guy like Fearless Lloyd could ever hope to achieve.
But he’d done it. Retired.
The call from Jess... It just went to show what a pathetic façade this life of mine was. I couldn’t hide away up here. Couldn’t just walk away from that showdown with Putin and his mob and hope for it all to blow over.
That world, the one I’d walked away from, it could never let you go.
Fearless’s fate would be mine before long. I couldn’t fool myself forever.
“You sure everyone’s okay?”
“I am, Owen. We’re fine. Fearless took care of us all. Lee’s okay – he was pretty shaken up but we’re dealing with it. He’s staying with me and Dean for a while, I think.”
Again my first response was selfish. I should have been relieved that the boys were pulling together, getting each other through this, but lodged somewhere in my head was the knowledge that this was yet another sign that I wasn’t needed any more. Back in the day it’d have been me. Getting them through. Showing the way. Just like when the old man had been put away, and then a couple of years later when Mum had passed on.
Now... I was just on the sidelines. Redundant.
“You take care of those two,” I said, my voice gruff and suddenly close to cracking.
Fearless.
Fuck it.
“He was looking out for you, you know,” I told her. “Fearless.”
“I know.”
“I made sure of that.”
“I know. We all knew.” That fucking wind, ripping her words away when her voice dropped really low, barely more than a whisper.
“You going to be okay?” I asked her, the ‘you’ encompassing all three of them; four if you counted Lee’s new woman.
“I think so. I really do.”
“Maybe...”
“We’d like that.” Again, I’d let my words trail off but Jess had still picked up their meaning. The Maybe I’ll visit.
“Would you? Would they?”
“I think so.”
Bastard.
I blamed Maggie. She’d made me hope again. And now Jess had, too, despite the awfulness of the reason for her call. The things that went unspoken: Maybe I’ll visit. We’d like that.
Standing at the top of a crumbling cliff, that sharp wind passing right through me because it was too lazy to go around, the tears cold on my hard face, I had some hope again.
And maybe that was what hurt most of all.
§
Maggie was there when I reached the house. Waiting for me. She looked as if she was ready to say something, and I feared I knew exactly what it must be: that she could no longer work here, for me. That my behavior had crossed a line. That she could not feel safe around me any more. I knew she had both the decency and the courage to come here and tell me that to my face, rather than merely not show up.
She did a double take when she saw me, though. Must have taken one look at me and thought better of saying anything.
She stepped back from the door that led into the kitchen to let me pass through. Said nothing, just pulled the door closed again, shutting out that lazy Norfolk wind.
I shrugged out of my coat, hung it on the back of a chair, sat in the one next to it, my elbows on that big kitchen table. Always aware of her eyes on me.
She put the kettle on. She’d learned quickly how to handle a Brit in crisis.
“I just had a call,” I said, surprised at how hard it was for the words to come. I never had trouble finding words. Just as I never fell. Just as I never allowed myself to feel.
All these things I never did and now, as Maggie stood with her arms folded across her chest, as if hugging herself, the words failed to come.
I met her look. Shrugged. Spread my hands briefly, then put them flat on the table.
“A call?” It was the hesitancy in her words as much as anything else that broke through. A nervousness in someone who had always been so natural. Had I scared her that much?
I don’t always mean to be a bastard.
“A friend of mine,” I said, trying again. “A friend of the family. He died. A close friend.”
Not a flicker. She was keeping things in rein. Controlled. Trying to work out how to respond, and only making me feel even more of a bastard by doing so. There had been a time when I barely even noticed the caution I inspired in others.
“I only spoke to him yesterday. That’s who I called. After we’d talked – about family, about not letting the damage last. You said I should call my brothers. I couldn’t do that, there’s been too much shit between us, but... this friend. He’s been keeping an eye on them for me. Making sure they don’t get into too much trouble. Making sure too much trouble doesn’t get to them, if you know what I mean. Then... well, trouble got to him.”
As I spoke, those gray eyes were fixed on me. I tried desperately to read something into that look. Something that would keep alive that hope Maggie had so recently awoken in me. Her next words dashed that.
“I came here to tell you I’m leaving.”
Silence. I didn’t know what to say.
“My timing... it is not good. I am sorry for your news. Really I am. But I came to this country to look for something. For someone. Now... now I must leave. And then yesterday... I did not... That was a mistake. I must go. You cannot be interested in me. It would not work.”
I’d screwed it up. Pushed things too far, and broken what fragile rapport we had built up.
“I didn’t mean that to happen. I didn’t plan it. I didn’t expect it. I didn’t want to upset you.”
“I... I cannot do that. I do not even know you.”
“You don’t want to know me, be
lieve me.”
And with that we were suddenly back to the beginning. The barricades were up again and I was fending her off, keeping her out of my dark, violent world.
I should have left it at that. Retreated again. Let the bitch go.
I might even have convinced myself that was the best thing.
“I think I might,” she said.
And the barricades came tumbling down once more. Why would she ever want to know me?
“That’s what scares me,” she added.
I should have told her she had every right to be scared, that she should do what she had planned to do, quit, walk away, never even glance back.
I should have told her to just keep everything clean and simple and fuck off out of my life while we both still had a chance.
“Go,” I said. “Back to... is it Tidingham where you live? Do whatever you do there. Have the day to yourself. And then come back here for dinner.”
I don’t think I’ve ever studied someone’s face so closely before. Trying to divine a reaction. Her skin was pale, a cluster of freckles on each high cheekbone, a furrow between her eyebrows, deeper than I’d noticed before.
She should say ‘no’. Stick to her plan. Get the hell out.
“I bring ingredients?” she said. A flicker of a smile.
I tipped my head back and gave a brief laugh. Hadn’t thought this through, any of it.
“No. I’ll cook.”
That made her laugh, those pale gray eyes flickering towards the microwave and back.
“Don’t look so scared.”
She had plenty of reason to be scared, getting hooked up with a monster like me. My cooking was only one of them.
§
It couldn’t be that hard.
That’s what I thought until I Googled Polish food and realized I didn’t know what any of it was, and didn’t stand a chance of even knowing if I’d got it right or not. Borscht and pirozhki and pierogi and all sorts of other things I’d never even heard of. So many different kinds of cabbage, dumplings and stews. I wouldn’t know where to start.
Maybe there was a reason why I’d mostly eaten out back when I’d lived in London, trusting my food to people who knew what the fuck they were doing.
I hadn’t expected her to say ‘yes’. If nothing else, the threat of me trying to cook must surely scare her off.
But no, she’d accepted, said again that she was sorry about my friend, and then, moments later, I’d been watching her head back along the cliff path towards Tidingham.
I settled on lasagna, and copied down the ingredients from a lesson I found on YouTube, not recognizing the man I’d so abruptly become.
A short time later, I’d pulled up in the parking lot of a local supermarket, the first time I’d ventured here – in all the time I’d been in Norfolk, I realized, apart from a few items my shopping had always been done online, delivered to the door by drivers who invariably grumbled about the state of the track they’d had to traverse in their truck.
The supermarket was... bright. Loud. Big like a warehouse. All these aisles stacked high with shit no-one could ever surely want. The way it was organized... it was a language that was alien to me.
This was the first time I’d set foot in a supermarket in years, other than to threaten the owner of one down in Plaistow, and that didn’t count, it was business.
So this was life, for most people. Reality.
I found what I needed, eventually. Went to pay and found that most of the checkouts were some kind of automated thing that I’d never seen before. Found a real person, paid, and went back out to the Range Rover. And only then did I start to think about what Maggie had actually said, and only then did I start to wonder at my own behavior.
Rushing in like this. Not thinking straight. Not being sensible.
In all my life I’d learned never to let people in. Never to trust. I’d learned that curiosity about other people was a survival thing and a maneuvering thing, not a fucking recreation.
It made you vulnerable, and no good could ever come of that.
She really had got to me.
Fucked my head over good and proper.
I hated it.
Hated it, and yet I was powerless before such a force of nature.
9
It was a phrase Maggie had learned early in this country. Overheard in a shop, a woman talking about maybe her husband: Oh yeah, darling, he looked like shit.
Owen Bailey looked like shit that morning when she showed up late at the house, only turning up to tell him she was leaving.
She’d seen him out on the cliff path, hunched against the wind. Watched him as he trudged back and then hesitated when he saw her standing there.
She’d even opened her mouth to say she wanted to quit, but then paused, seeing the utterly lost look on his features. She knew he was a man of many moods, but she had never seen that expression on his face.
She stepped back to let him in, went to the kettle. He’d had a call... A friend of the family. He died. A close friend.
She knew a thing or two about losing people close.
She almost didn’t say anything about quitting. But also, she knew a thing or two about the importance of not getting dragged into other people’s crises. She could be a tough, cold-hearted bitch when she needed to, so she told him she was leaving, and that... that thing, the kiss, it couldn’t happen. She wasn’t here for anything like that. She didn’t even know him...
You don’t want to know me, believe me.
Damn him!
Until then it had just been a thing. Something that had happened, that she had put into a box and filed away, but now, looking at him, everything unraveled.
He’d got under her skin.
She didn’t know what it was. Hadn’t even noticed it happening, the acclimatization from curiosity about him and who he really was to that thing of being around someone every day, coming to take for granted their preferences, how they would respond. That strangely distanced dialog of finishing the painting he had started, of knowing you could leave the last few bits of paper to hang and they would be done by morning.
The way those dark eyes fixed on you and seemed to read you deep, as her father had once said of a man who had alternately been an ally and a mortal enemy.
The way they fixed on her as they spoke that morning, wouldn’t let her go.
How could she tell him now?
How could she say she had come here to find out who he really was, to dig and spy on him?
How could she do that?
And so she had said, yes, she would come back tonight, and he said he would cook and they had laughed and it had seemed so natural, and not at all a thing whose origins lay in deceit and betrayal.
§
The cab driver wouldn’t risk the rough track that led to Owen’s house, so she had to walk the last stretch, undermining the whole reason for spending on a cab in the first place.
She wore a slate gray top with a subtle sprinkle of tiny sequins across the front, a mid-thigh denim skirt, and sheer black hold-ups, all beneath her long padded coat with the fleece-lined hood to keep out the wind and rain. By the time she reached the house, her knee-length leather boots were mostly brown with mud, which had also spattered up the bottom of her coat.
This house was not one you could turn up to in all your immaculate glamour. It was, as they say, a leveler.
She hesitated now. She had a key, of course, but what was this? How was one to behave? Just let herself in and hope he was decent?
The place was mostly in darkness, just a dim light up in the attic room, and the hint of lights coming through from the back of the house where the kitchen was. She thought again of his bold promise to cook, and wondered if it would really be a selection from those instant meals that packed the fridge.
She knocked, hard so she might be heard against the wind. There was no bell.
When she thought he must not have heard, she reached to knock again but then the door swung back and
he stood there, haloed by the light behind him.
Her eyes adjusted and she saw he wore black trousers, a white shirt with the top button undone, a dark jacket hanging loose.
He stepped back, said, “Hi,” and then “Oh, thanks... thank you,” as he took the bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon she held towards him.
She hadn’t really known what to expect from this evening, but she probably shouldn’t be surprised at this. At how every step had to be negotiated, worked out. To use her key or not? To step in and kiss on the cheek in greeting, or offer a hand or merely, as she did, shrug her shoulders, sketch a little wave in the air with one hand and say, “Hi.”
She was having dinner alone with a man, so was this a date, as such? Or was it an employer trying to smooth things over after an uncomfortable incident in the workplace? Or maybe it was just two people with some ground to make up, them both realizing that all the time she had worked here had contained little beyond facile greetings and unspoken, distanced dialog through the medium of the paintbrush.
And as her mind rushed through these permutations, she knew she was avoiding the real question.
What did she want this evening to be?
That was way too complicated for her to tackle.
Particularly now, as she stood before him and she couldn’t help but flash back to that moment upstairs, the instant when she had realized they were standing toe to toe, that one or both of them must have moved for them to be standing so close, that all he had to do was dip his head down, all she had to do was tip her face up, and...
She stepped past him, farther into the lobby area at the foot of the main stairs.
Doors opened off here. To the right, a room that would become a living area once the newly restored floorboards had been polished and the furniture and fittings moved in. To the left, a TV room, fully furnished and kitted out and barely ever used.
To the back, to one side of the staircase, another door led through to the big open-plan kitchen-diner, the part of the house that was properly lit, and now Maggie stepped through, fumbling with the zipper on her coat.
Silly. She’d dressed up, made an effort, but in her head she hadn’t expected to see Owen in anything more than his usual jeans and baggy sweater. Certainly not a suit, and so she hadn’t understood how that would transform him. Restore him.