Down to £50. Junk food churned and blurred onscreen. £40. £30 … cheeseburger, cheeseburger … Five cheeseburgers! Bottles of ketchup popped all over the screen, scarlet globs dripping into one great banner: £7,000.
A bonanza of cash and fake calories in one fat win explosion. She tried to feel joy, or wry amusement: nothing. There was serious work to do. With steady heart, she withdrew £6,900 and prepared to ride her luck for as long as the remaining funds lasted. Ola was downstairs, watching a film she had declared too blokeish to bear before slipping away. Now she rose and walked to the loo. Urgent dialogue drifted up the stairs, the sound of acted heroism; she and Ola would each stay locked onto their respective screens for at least another hour. By then, the whole thing, all of it, could be over. Put to bed.
Etta flushed the moment she heard: feet on the stairs. An ice-rinse of terror. She tugged up her skirt, zipped fast, had to run to check … She had, right?
Ola was at the desk, bent over her open laptop.
The lid was open.
Heart-stopping doughnuts and loaded burgers waiting on the reels, cartoon diner jiggling to the jingle that her headphones, still plugged in, had silenced.
Ola did not turn to face her.
‘Etta. What is this?’
His tone had no give in it; there was no hope. The £100 in the Cozee account balance was there, top right. He had seen it. She had to speak:
‘Oh. That’s nothing, this silly game.’
‘You are spending £100 on a silly game? One hundred pounds that we are trying to save. Eh? Tell me what is going on.’
Etta felt a hot dark blooming low in her stomach; the lie growing from the soured grain of truth. All they had going for them, now, was his good faith and her reluctance to break it.
‘Nothing is going on. I was only mucking about.’
‘You are spending money on these children’s games. Cartoons! One hundred whole pounds?’
Her eyes and mouth started to close against the coming fiction; she opened both wide to let it out:
‘It’s a one-off. I just this minute put in £5, Ola. Just to see. And look: I won £100! I was coming to tell you.’
‘Hnh.’ Ola was considering. His shoulders had dropped, his head was tilting; she had won. ‘Where did you hear about this nonsense, anyway?’
‘On TV, earlier. I wanted to check it out, so I did, but the whole thing is pretty stupid. They probably fix it so you win the first time. I was about to withdraw our money; it’s no big deal.’
‘And it’s real, actual money?’
‘Think so,’ said Etta.
‘Hnh,’ said Ola. ‘OK then, let’s take this £100 out quick, before it changes its mind.’
‘Just what I was thinking.’
She withdrew the £100, knowing that she would have no money to deposit and play with for two days, until both withdrawals from Cozee hit her bank account.
‘Done. See? Nothing to worry about. The £100 is going into our account. Let’s forget it.’
‘Hnh,’ said Ola.
‘Hmm,’ said Etta.
‘Also,’ said Ola. ‘You were right. That film is too predictable. Let us go to bed and entertain ourselves better.’
‘OK,’ said Etta. ‘Let’s do that.’
The inner bloom was turning cold. She had won and withdrawn, yes. She had also diminished and fooled, faked and deceived. Presented with the opportunity to end the lies, Etta had lied more. How could she not? She was powered by a need to spare Ola pain and she could not reveal she was £6,900 better off than minutes before and yet still overwhelmed by debt. They would collapse under the burden of him knowing she contained such chaos.
What had she become in these past few weeks? Who was she now?
Etta whoever.
The next day, as she stepped out of the front door, she was met with a Union Jack waving at her from the tall pole opposite. Jean and Jean Senior had been busy.
It was not a high day or holiday. The Olympics lay years in the past and football was not coming home this year. The women were not dignitaries or army veterans. It was not a national moment of note, or VE Day, or any such momentous celebration of good triumphing over evil – yes, then fly flags! No, what was fluttering in Etta’s face was Jean’s new hobby: the revilement of unknown others.
Etta eyed the vast flag, flapping above its narrow driveway. This was not the first: on the coach to Waysford Place she had spotted at least two domestic flags which she had not seen before, plus one cross of St George above a builders’ merchants. No one was going to tell them not to fly their flags, no one could, that was the point. They – the ‘you people’ – could do little but watch the flagpoles go up in the front yards of semis across the land, and keep schtum.
Etta attempted to stay numb in the face of all quandaries, irritations, mental assaults and homicidal thoughts for a whole day. That in itself was murder so, with Ola’s encouragement, she drove an hour to her mum’s for some time out. There, she spent another twenty-four hours sharing nothing of her real life and feeling like even more of a fraud until she could return home just before the £6,900 hit her account. When it arrived, life started tingling back into her financial prospects, reawakening her dazed gut.
Her phone went. Joyce.
Etta’s mouth flooded with saliva, tinged with a metallic taint: guilt.
‘Hello, Joyce?’ she said.
‘So,’ said Joyce. ‘You’re alive then.’
‘Hon. I’m so glad you called.’
‘Days, I’ve waited. Fucking days.’
‘Joyce, I’ve been meaning to explain to you exactly what—’
‘That’s the only reason I’m phoning. To tell you not to bother.’
‘Joyce! I’m—’
‘Of all the times you choose to let me down, Etta Oladipo, it has to be the day I can’t stop crying for my dead mother. Cheers, babe.’
‘I know, I feel terrible. But so much has been happening at once, you know? You won’t believe it and I—’
‘Yeah. You know what else happened? My mum died. I’m broken.’
‘Joyce.’ It came out as pleading.
‘Look, don’t bother coming to find me when you’ve got less going on, OK? Let’s just leave it.’
Joyce hung up.
The shame. Etta’s facial muscles tightened as two hot tears ran down. Just two. Not much to shed for a woman who was let down – by them, by her – right at the end. These days, even Etta’s tears were not enough.
This had to stop. She was neither the woman she had been, nor the Child of any Destiny that she wanted. She had to climb out of the hole, somehow. Wasn’t it God – or maybe Bob Marley, or the Beatles, or the Brownie Guide Law – who said the truth would set you free? She needed to own up. If Ola loved her, he would forgive her. She would make amends. Right now, it all had to stop.
I will never gamble again.
Once she had formed the words in her mind, five soundless strikes of a gong, she felt cleansed. She was no addict: she had always been free, a woman possessed of agency. She had stumbled down one wrong turn and was now choosing to step back onto the straight path, which she knew would lead to marriage. The first step would be the hardest; she needed to put some serious thought into the best way to articulate their losses to Ola.
Could she tell him at last? Stick two fingers up to Chris Wise’s blackmail?
Was she strong enough to tell him before Chris Wise did?
Was she strong enough not to?
She clicked onto Cozee, went onto My Account. She clicked on every message she had received:
DELETE
She clicked on every message ever sent:
DELETE
She hovered the cursor over Delete My Account. No more withdrawals were pending.
now
Could she kill all access to her dreams, finish off this loaded friend called Cozee who was meant to save her?
Could she finish off Chris Wise?
DELETE DELETE DELETE
Risk IV
OGULIN – FEBRUARY 2016
At last, the time has come.
She had been too smart to simply hand over her money and hope for the best. She had traipsed down the steep stairs to the closed blues bar tucked away in Petrinjska ul. having texted her mother first to tell her the what, the where and the who, as far as she knew. (Her mother took her word as gospel, and her occasional donations as a gift, and never tried to stop her escapades.) She had called the mobile number at the door and waited. When the squat chunk with the beard had let her in, she had smiled enough to soften his gaze, but not too much. She had not chatted too freely, just followed him to the back room and nodded at the spiel of a larger man who told her ‘two days to Dover, leaving in ten hours’. She had committed, paying the vast deposit. She had dropped the names of ‘friends’: two powerful men who had watched her dance in the club – she had danced well, despite the cramping stomach – and had bought her drinks after. Men rumoured to hate Josip. She had made the traffickers laugh, brief surprised grunts, about the food and the weather that awaited her. She had reapplied her lipstick in her phone camera to snap a secret selfie that captured the head man, whatever good that might do her. As she left, she had looked back, sharp and sweet as the Malvazija wine with which she would toast her departure, at last, from Marta’s shitty sofa, her hideout in this shitty place.
That had been nine hours before. Now it is nearly time and she is doing everything right. She is early, ready with her backpack, wearing her mashed-up Adidas. The same men are there, standing before a white lorry; they tell her to pay the rest of the cash – all her savings, some borrowed, most of it stolen from Josip as he snored – twenty thousand in the local currency, all in. She is warned that the wrong eyes might clock them. Told to stand aside, get back, wait at the café.
During the next twenty minutes, seven more come to pay up and hang back in the café; they sit at pavement tables next to her, texting and smoking, not wasting their money on coffee, hoping not to get shooed off by the flapping owner.
The sun grows stronger as they sit and wait, warming like hope. Then, movement across the street: men frowning into mobiles, gesticulating, husking blunt words at each other; not looking at their charges, watching them from the café; not opening the vehicle’s back doors. Getting into the cab of the lorry. Starting the engine. Moving off.
‘No!’
She needs to break them, as they are breaking her.
She snatches up the loose chunk of cobblestone and lobs it hard and fast at the lorry. The crash of wing-mirror glass as it explodes into shards; the stone hits it dead on. Hey! and oi! and cursing; the other dupes, leaping up and waving. The men swear out of the window, revving up big as if to say: ‘We could end you, bitch,’ and drive off. Acid shock smarts in her gorge. Now she has nothing.
She watches the lorry grumble away up the street, taking its own sweet time because what are that bunch of goddamn losers going to do about it, anyway? The lorry is leaving, its drivers newly rich, carting its cargo of washing machines, tumble dryers and cookers but without the humans. Humans who had begged, shafted, borrowed, blagged, thieved and sold all but their souls to crouch in the spaces between the cheap white goods, covered in plastic sheets, hushed and yearning, on their way to new English lives. The lorry men are liars and cheats.
The light refracts, a prism of tears; her future glinting from the tarmac in twenty thousand broken pieces.
She is dead.
Chapter Ten
THURSDAY, 26 JULY 2018
Every day Etta waited for a message from Chris Wise and every day nothing came. She could not pay him, could not forget about it, could not dare to hope he had changed his mind. When it came to the last Thursday of the month, she was relieved that she was scheduled to work at the First Welcome Project.
She turned up early, ready to drown herself in other people’s sorrows. Janie met her at the door.
‘Just so you know, we were broken into last week.’
‘What, really?’
‘I know, bizarre right?’
‘Horrible. Is everyone OK? What did they take?’
‘We’re all fine thanks, and that’s just it: they took nothing you’d expect. Our computers were untouched, nothing smashed. They just took our paperwork: a load of client files, staff files, forms and that.’
‘Damn, OK. At least no one was hurt or anything.’
‘Exactly. No one was here. It has been creeping me out though. Glad you’re back!’
Etta spent the shift talking to clients, handing out leaflets and filling forms as usual, but all the time she wondered when she could next check her mobile for a message from her blackmailer. She got through, while waiting for the axe to fall.
It came to the last Friday of the month. Payday. Ola’s quarterly savings statement was due any day; she would have to destroy it. Also due were the loan repayments. Payday profligacy versus payday pledges: her salary was, in the best of times, gambling funds. But she should reduce her debt. She should not gamble. All action seemed to incur privations and consequences. The struggle followed her on the walk to work, through the whim of a detour to the park to find the puzzle man, who was not there, and into the office; it was crippling, a killer. She got through the morning, but the afternoon was a walk in the fog. At around 3 p.m., a short-circuit, something shut down in her. She did not want to speak, or look out at her colleagues, or tap on a keyboard. She sat, eyes open, seeing nothing.
‘Cat got your tongue?’ Dana, a cream-and-blue blur barging into focus.
Etta started from her trance as if caught in an illegal act.
‘Sorry, sorry.’
She was not sorry. She was sad, confused and somewhere else, somewhere not good, but better than reality. It was happening to her more and more.
She got through to the end of the day and rushed home to not gamble and to not pay debts and to not function in privacy.
Although a month of silence had passed since the VIP party, when the world had turned upside down, the thought of Chris Wise was still pure fire, flaming her multifarious fears so that they jumped and popped like corn in a pan. The central deception, while not undone, was undiscovered. It was agony.
She was fighting, at every moment, not to lose more money, not to lose it. Her mind had rewired itself into a tangle of fear superhighways and mad B-roads, dead ends and twisting paths that could only lead to another calamitous error of judgement.
Etta whoever
No Cozee, no gambling. Hours of strenuous effort; unending minutes of forgoing and refraining, stretching on through her fretful sleep and into Saturday morning when Etta woke up late, alone and hungry.
She dialled:
‘Hi, Ola.’
‘Hi, sleepy-head.’ He sounded like he had been running. ‘You did not move an inch when I got up.’
‘Where are you?’
‘At the gym, of course. I will be back in two, three hours, or about that.’
‘OK. Enjoy.’
Within the first minute of waking, she was craving a solid hit of brunch: a hot bacon bap with egg moin-moin and fried plantain, plus bottomless orange juice, as if she had done the workout. By the second minute, her throat itched, with disregard for the stomach’s health, for gin; the gin, also bottomless, would soothe her palms, which were also itching.
Her palms were aflame, the skin of each hand tingling. It was not her new hand cream, no antihistamine would help. This itch could be cured and she knew how to cure it.
Her abstinence had now lasted almost a month: surely, she was no addict. Not indulging was not stasis, after all; she still had to decide, twenty thousand times a day, not to gamble, or worse. She had been fighting. Trying and fighting, with no let-up. That had to say something encouraging about her character. She was no animal, she had mastered her baser instincts, she – surely – had nothing more to prove.
But now, this itch …
She had to get out of the house. She would do something she had n
ot done for weeks. She dialled:
‘Hi, Jada? Yeah, hi, it’s Etta. Could you fit me in this morning, please? Perfect, thanks. See you in a tick.’
She ditched breakfast. Ten minutes later, she was around the corner, on the ninth floor of the flats on Wellington Road.
‘Babes!’ cried a woman with a wide smile and a short burgundy wig. ‘Get yourself in here, it’s been ages. Need a steam, is it?’
‘Yes. I look a mess, right?’ said Etta, lifting her head, searching her friend’s eyes. At last, she was being seen.
‘No, come, come. Make yourself comfortable. Want a coffee?’
Jada made her a drink and set about her work.
‘I’ve been wondering where you’ve been. All OK?’
‘Been better.’
‘Oh, sorry, love. Why, what’ve you been up to?’
Etta swallowed hard:
‘All sorts. Nothing special. It’s been OK, I suppose.’
Jada hovered her hands above Etta’s head.
‘OK. We’re going to sort you out, babes. Leave it to me.’
Jada stroked and pulled at a curl to test the strength of her hair.
‘Your hair been breakin’?’ she asked.
‘A bit,’ said Etta.
‘You should look after it, you know. You’ve got good hair. And your skin’s beautiful. You’re lucky.’
‘I’ve been a bit … under the weather.’
‘OK,’ said Jada. ‘No need to worry now. Put your head back.’
Etta leant her head into the freestanding sink in the front room.
‘D’ju remember that guy, Matteo? Hardly my type, right?’
‘Mm,’ murmured Etta.
‘No, so that was a pain in the arse and then what was worse, his dickhead mate decided to try it on …’
‘Mm.’
Reading her friend’s silence, Jada wound up her chat.
‘OK, we’re gonna wash you now. Just lie back a bit more. That’s it.’
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