‘Not like I can go out there with her,’ said Joyce, her voice rising in the nasal crescendo of a woman who had shed tears and now needed to shout. ‘My kids are in schools here. We’ve not got the money. Oh, Jesus …’
‘We need to contact them, calmly,’ said Etta. ‘We’ll explain the situation so that any reasonable person could understand it, OK?’
‘Yeah. Yeah, that would be good. But, you know, my dyslexic brain and all this stress … Your First Welcome thingy, you know all this immigration stuff. You’ll write them for me?’
‘Course. I’ve pretty much finished up here. I’ll grab my bag, let’s go to yours.’
As they neared Joyce’s house, the ordinary terrace on this decent street, Etta’s sense of purpose burgeoned. What they were doing to Cynthia Jackson was wrong. Reprehensible. Beyond beyond. Immoral as hell. She knew how to put a letter together and – the United Kingdom being a just country, one built on fair play – she trusted that would sort it.
‘Mum, we’re back!’ Joyce shouted through the front door as she opened it.
‘Hello, Mrs Jackson,’ said Etta.
In the front room, Cynthia Jackson was sitting in an orange armchair that appeared to be slowly digesting her; the old lady had to have shrunk since Etta’s last visit; she may not even have moved. She raised watery eyes to the guest. The TV was blaring out the wrap-up to a holiday property show. Joyce rested her hand on her mother’s shoulder.
‘Mum’s not been the same since they started up with this nonsense. Have you, Mum?’
Mrs Jackson spoke: ‘It’s not fair.’
‘No, it’s not,’ said Joyce.
‘I was just thinking that,’ said Etta at the same time.
The woman turned back to the TV to watch the credits roll.
‘We’ll go in the kitchen, Mum.’
Joyce nodded towards the door and Etta followed her out.
‘She’s not even going out into her garden these days. You know how much she loves her flowers. It’s really getting to her.’ Joyce shut them into the kitchen. ‘Come. Here, take a look at this bollocks.’
She handed her a letter that had been sitting on the breakfast bar. Etta read.
‘It does sound ominous. I wonder whether—’
‘Thing is, when Mum came over, she thought that was it. Forever. Far as she was concerned, she was English, never mind British. They all grew up thinking the Queen was theirs too, they had this massive photo of her on the schoolroom wall and everything. Back in the day, the UK government said to them, come on over, help us out, we need you nurses and whatnot. Work hard and we’ll look after you, you’re one of us. Next thing? Fuckers are telling the old folk that they got it all wrong, telling our older ones, the first generation – real pioneers, you know? adventurers – that they never were proper members of the club like they thought they were, not like the people born here, and to show papers or get the hell out and it’s just …’
Joyce walked to the window. Etta followed and placed both hands on her shoulders from behind. Joyce was not crying, she was shaking.
‘Thank you, Etta,’ said Joyce. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘What for? Hardly your fault.’
‘Mum is just so hurt. It kills me to see it.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘She’s ashamed. Like she’s done something wrong.’
‘It’s horrible,’ said Etta. ‘Why did they have to bother her after all this time? This whole thing is such a ridiculous lottery, isn’t it?’
‘Is that what it is?’ Joyce turned to face her with a mouth that could have been sucking on a bad tamarind ball. ‘Mum just thought it was her home.’
Etta took the long way back from the Jackson house. She went along Firth Road, then turned left onto Aspen Street.
Etta slowed as she neared the right white gate. The house wasn’t even all that, probably, not to most people. But 31 Aspen Street still soothed her. Aside from the exercise and the chance to clear her head, this street was the reason she chose to walk to and from work rather than drive. Ola had no idea how often she strolled past it, just to feel her pulse slow and her spirits rise higher, above the car exhaust fumes and into the sunwashed air, or the dusk. If this house, this to-die-for dull house, in this great-crap town, could speak, concrete wisdoms would surely pour from its foundations: Strive. Hope. Anything’s possible.
It was vital to dream. What did she think she was doing with herself these days? Scraping a living on a business park, in warehouse-style offices designed to depress: all those high utilitarian ceilings and low aspirations; at least it depressed the hell out of the auxiliary staff like her, the ones without titles and side offices. This was her tribe: the hot-deskers. The quirky-coffee-cup obsessives and parking-space fetishists. When you were stuck in the margins of suburban life (suburbia already being, to Etta, the margins of Life), and when success yawned daily in your face, you needed distractions. You needed a 31 Aspen Street and memories of forays into the wider world, and Cozee Bingo: bright bursts of light from the past and present to shine promise onto your future.
Etta hurried on. Tonight, ‘Spring Wins’ kicked off: three hours of back-to-back games with jackpots ranging from £1,000 to £10,000. A genuine opportunity. Moreover, it was the beginning of the month, her salary was in the bank. Funds to process!
She stopped dead.
Damn.
All of her salary had gone into their joint account, as usual. She had signed up to gamble only with money coming from her personal account, so that no joint statements would ever shout ‘Cozee!’ She needed to move money. But should she transfer one great lump sum across to her personal account now, it would stink up Ola’s senses higher than a catch of crayfish left out in the West African sun.
Unless.
She turned back on herself and took several turns, left-left-right-left, right into the heart of town, hurrying towards the high street where, without pausing long enough for a better idea to occur, she plunged the purple card into the cashpoint’s mouth. Just £100. Then £80. Then £120.
Etta crossed the road with £300 in notes smooth in her hand and went to the other bank, the one where she kept her personal account, which by now held little more than a tenner. She would feed this personal account with cash, taken out in innocuous amounts, these little sums that might slip under the radar, or be explained away as a hairdo, or market shop, even though withdrawn in one day. It was for his own good, a temporary deception; not for long, not too much. Just funds, now and then, to tide her over.
As she walked back towards Sycamore Road, through the all-day waft of bacon from Teddy’s Café towards home, she tried on successive emotions: triumph, dismay, glee, alarm, guilt. She ought to feel horrible. But then again, Zagreb. Ola took risks, he had risked screwing everything up. So why shouldn’t she?
As she neared the house, she saw that Jean over the road had beaten her home: her houndstooth-clad shoulders and that lethargic hair were hunching towards the front door. Poor cow, had to be a tough gig with that ancient mother. As far as she knew, Jean had never married or left her mum’s side, had spent fifty-five years as a devoted daughter and little else. And apparently the mum had dementia. The two old ladies shared a crepuscular companionship, the inside of their house bathed in a semi-permanent twilight. They were no doubt saving on light bills.
Etta watched Jean fiddle in her bag for keys.
Etta had always thought of the concept of spinsterdom as a misogynistic, anti-feminist construct, until she had come across Jean. Dana fancied herself an authority on the whole FrameTech team and sang it this way: Jean had reached an age when she felt free to spit her sourness with impunity; something in her had turned bitter, like a lime past sucking. Not her femininity or her fertility, nothing so sexist: her humanity. She knew herself to be dull, deadened, and that knowledge now curdled in her soul, lime in milk, adulterating all her thoughts and deeds. Still, Jean knew how to work a badass spreadsheet and could take out a whole row of colleagues with o
ne well-aimed decimal point.
As Jean turned to push the door shut, Etta waved. Jean paused, recessed in her doorway, a shadow within a shadow. She shut the door without waving back.
Etta turned to enter her own empty house, poured a glass of red, went to the spare room and glanced at Ola’s papers – chemical flood … chain reaction from cell to cell – then pushed them aside for the interesting stuff: she maxed out on as many bingo games as she could for the next three hours.
The first game started up almost before she had made the psychic shift from worker to player. She did not win, but she did receive the consolation of two pregasmic seconds: the heartbeat sound, the flash. So damn close; worth it.
No life-changing wins yet, but she did not require a mountain of money; a hillock would do. All good things … She who waits. A stutter of her heart: the letter. She would write Mrs Jackson’s reply to the government now and post it off first thing. Had to be done. She pulled the Home Office letter out of her bag and scanned it again. There was an email address, better still.
The Cozee page winked myriad pixels at her, a seduction in pink and gold. She blinked at Cozee. It winked and winked.
She minimised the page and opened a blank email:
Dear Home Office,
I am writing to you because of my friend, Joyc—
[DELETE]
Dear Home Office,
I am writing to you on behalf of my mother, Cynthia Jackson, to whom you sent a letter (Ref: HOCMJ1092846). You have requested that she sends proof of residency to your department without explaining why she needs to prove she has the right to stay in the UK. Could you please clarify? I can assure you that my mother had all the correct paperwork when she entered the UK in 1966, as your own records must show.
Thanks for your help in clearing up this misunderstanding.
Yours,
Joyce Jackson
On behalf of Cynthia Jackson
Short, fair, to the point. She hit send.
Within seconds an acknowledgement had popped up in her inbox, reassuring her that her email had been received and would be dealt with. She shrugged and lifted her shoulders as if they had indeed been lightened: duty done.
Ola was interval-training at the gym, as he did most Tuesday evenings, enjoying some energy-boosting fun.
Time to play.
Though eager, Etta was no fool. She could see the mechanics that worked under the slick skin of the Cozee money machine. Of course, their corporate multimillions took some making. Of course, they banked on attracting people with low incomes and high hopes. She had read the scrolling, misspelled chat. Sexykezzas and Luckyjezzas and Shazza69s would deposit the £5 minimum, buy a couple of tickets for each of the cheapest games, eke it out over woeful hours of pathetic odds, lose, lose, lose … plz come on 3444444 … Not her. She had more funds than most on the site, it would seem. She could play the bigger money rooms, max out on every worthwhile game, up the odds by … quite a lot. Winning, as someone rich had once said, was for winners.
She had no choice. She could not face any more anniversaries like the one all set to wind her up at the end of next week. The romantic scenario was static and stale: he would take her out to an unambitious Rilton restaurant, and he would roar and joke and not understand a bloody thing, and fail to propose to her in front of a hundred strangers eating off the same set dinner menu, and she would be forced to choke down disappointment for dessert.
It would be the last time. They needed money to marry.
They had far more to lose than cash.
At 4.13 a.m., the security light outside their front door came on. Etta did not know whether it had woken her, or whether she had been staring into the dark, and seen it. Ola was still sleeping.
She rose and padded to the bedroom window, which overlooked the path. No pounding feet, no barking dog. Nothing below, although she would not be able to see someone right on their doorstep, hidden as they would be by the porch. Not breaking the silence of the night with her breath, she waited for the light to go out. A movement across the road caught her eye: a bending body wrapped in a flannel robe, reaching into the wheelie bin by their front wall. Was that Jean, or the mother? The dark and cold did unkind things to faces, Etta could not tell. Was she taking something in or pulling it out? At some point the old woman succeeded, or maybe gave up, and walked back along her path to her house. From where she stood Etta could see that their front door was open and the head of another woman with limp white hair – Jean, or her mother – was nodding at the first to come inside. Both of them up at quarter past four. The door closed, the security light died at last and everything sank back to shades of pewter.
Etta drew back from the curtains and lowered herself into bed.
Risk I
PLITVIČE – AUGUST 2015
She is waiting for her piece of good fortune. Leaning up against the wall, at the entrance where they bring in the cabbages, the beef and the crates of beer, hoping to catch the manager before he has given all the work away. It comes so easily to the others, the locals first, always, but surely it has to be her turn at last. She is a woman to whom things ought to come more easily. One day soon. This she trusts when she studies her dark curling hair and the taut face that does not reflect its troubles back at her in the mirror; she trusts it with every glance returned, whether in her cheap long-handled glass or in the street.
It is more a question of when. She is young enough – still, just – to believe. She had travelled here, so far from home, first off to visit the famous lakes. Now look at her, running low on money so soon, a foreigner, alone in Croatia. When will she be given her allotment of luck? Would it simply be slopped into her life’s dish like a portion of the fishy brudet these people so adored? Or would it fall from the sky like one of their endless goddamn downpours? When, already?
There is a man in front of her with grey hair. His shoulders slope, ruining the lines of a cheap leather jacket; he does not turn to chat as she stands behind him. She hopes he’s a kitchen man, a porter or dishwasher, maybe. She needs to finally get onto the restaurant floor: the promise of tips gleams silver bright; hope rustles in her ear like a clutch of notes.
A door opens. It sways, slows, then falls closed again with no one coming out.
All this queueing, this waiting. She needs to enlist help. She is a stranger, after all, miles away from where she was born. Everyone knows that she has come here for a job, that she is alone and hoping on foreign soil. At least, she has had work for three days, cleaning up in this same fish restaurant. It is a good one, well-reviewed online: she knows it, as does the man ahead of her in the queue. Work has panned out these past few days, thanks to some locals who do not mind her, pointing her in the direction of that dirty office, this café where they pay in cash, but she has yet to stumble upon her particular piece of luck. If she gets another shift tonight, that will be something.
The man ahead gives a snort of impatience; spits at the base of the wall.
She will know her true luck when it comes: it will not be scuffing along in a restaurant’s back alley. It will be outsized and as showy as her smile, and it will know her in return.
Her luck will come. There is a beauty and a pain that weaves through it all: the searching. There are lessons to take away from the daily condescensions and disappointments and the failure of favours to materialise and the bad ideas at the bottom of deep glasses which leave rings on tables she must wipe. There is rich knowledge to be gained from living life under a hostile gaze, a gaze that only softens upon catching the generosity of her lip and her meanness of thigh. But that softening is a powerful force. It gives her hope.
For now, she will watch and wait for a sign. When it is time, she will make her move.
Now he comes out: the manager.
‘One more!’ He looks at the man’s grey hair. ‘We need a waiter.’
She should stay quiet, blend in, wipe and scrub unnoticed. The kitchen team are a blur of shadows and everyone likes it that way. Sh
e has none of the right documents. Speaking up to serve would mean trouble, one way or another.
One cool surge of courage and she straightens up from the wall, and edges out, hip first, from the queue so she can be fully seen.
‘I’m the most experienced waitress I know in town,’ she says, which is no lie.
The man looks, the gaze heats and softens, but still his eyes dart right to query the man before him.
‘Potwash,’ says the grey head, already turning back the way it had come.
‘There you go,’ she says, walking past both men into the kitchen entrance.
To get lucky, you have to take risks.
Chapter Three
SATURDAY, 14 APRIL 2018
This evening could only end in disaster and disdain. He was going to hate her. Why the bloody hell had she done it?
They should not be here.
The Royal Delhi seethed with commitment: couples celebrating, couples arguing, couples ignoring each other. The pair on the nearest table were doing all three in swift succession and out of sync, although the blue-green flourish of matching neck tattoo did suggest a rough stab at living in harmony.
Outside, it was raining harder than Etta could remember it ever doing before; any romantic spirit had been dampened on the run from the car; she was drenched in shame. She speared more lamb as if it might save her, all appetite murdered, the guilt hard to swallow.
‘Great, isn’t it?’ said Ola, reaching for the sag aloo, fibrous in its copper bowl.
Her forehead dipped. ‘Mm.’
‘I was just thinking,’ he went on. ‘A bit suspicious how they always call it “having an Indian”, isn’t it?’
She raised her fingers in front of her lips, humiliated by the act of chewing. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well,’ Ola put down his knife and fork and cupped both hands, weighing the gravity of his point. ‘You know, as if they’re actually possessing some poor bastard Krishna or Dev. Colonial throwback, am I not right?’
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