The Road Home

by Rose Tremain

  He jabbed at Sophie again. “You!” he said. “I understand you now. You don’t see anything! You see what is ‘fashion,’ what is ‘smart.’ That’s all that matters to you. Because you don’t know the world. Only this small England. You know nothing, nothing.”

  “Hey,” said Preece. “That’s a bit out of order, isn’t it? What’s the matter with you?”

  Lev was trembling. His arms felt like wires, sparking with electric current. He felt their lethal power. “The matter is, I’m mad,” he said. “Crazy, maybe. But I’m not sick like this play. At home I have a daughter, Maya. I love this daughter —”

  “Who cares?” said Preece. “That’s so not relevant. Who cares if you’ve got a daughter? This is art. This is cutting edge —”

  “Okay. Then I cut!” yelled Lev, passing a finger across his throat. “I cut!”

  “Listen, why don’t you shut up?” said Preece. “You’re just being an arsehole.”

  “Oh yeh?” shouted Lev. “ ‘Arsehole,’ ” like in the play. So funny, uhn? Well, this arsehole can cut! I cut the neck of Portman! I cut everybody! You want to see?”

  Lev grabbed Sophie and locked her body to his with his arm round her neck. Her glass fell and broke. She began to choke and gasp. Preece reached down from his superior height and took hold of Lev by the chin. His huge hand squeezed and squeezed until Lev felt as though his jaw would be crushed to shards. “Let her go,” said Preece. “Let her fuckin’ go or I’ll break your fuckin’ face!”

  Lev stared at Preece, his white, glistening cheeks, his high forehead, his stubbled chin, his fleshy lips, the whole terrifying amalgam of him, and thought, He’s my enemy now. He hated him almost as much as he’d once hated Procurator Rivas. He was aware of people round him, gaping, gasping, almost comic in their terror, but he cared nothing for them. In that moment, he knew that his love affair with Sophie was doomed.

  “Let her go!” shouted Preece again. But already Lev’s arm had freed her. He waited for Preece’s grip on his jaw to slacken, and when it did, he hurled himself away from him and began to walk toward the steps and the foyer and the cold April night.

  Not to think about it, not to feel inside him the finality of what had just happened, that was all he craved now. Nothing else. Nothing beyond or after or yet to come. None of that. Only the feeling of not feeling.

  He was a stranger to this smart bit of London. But he didn’t feel capable of walking far. He turned right out of the theater and went into the adjacent pub-restaurant.

  It was choked with people waiting to be seated at tables, but Lev pushed past them. When he reached the bar, he lit a cigarette and ordered Guinness, then vodka . . . ah . . . his darling vodichka . . . then more Guinness (he had the taste for it now, just like Christy Slane) and more vodichka. Then he went to the men’s room and pissed it all away and returned and began again with the Guinness. He sat in a shiny wooden chair and listened to his bones polishing its surface. He watched the moon faces of his fellow drinkers circling him in a slow, ponderous way, heard the diners chattering and braying behind him. He was a stopped river. He was mute, a puppet or doll. He was a forgotten song: Oh, I’m so lonesome for the moon . . .

  If people spoke to him, he didn’t recognize the words. If there was music playing, who knew the melody? Not him. He knew nothing. His brain was as small as a pellet of bran. And as black, as dark as darkness could be anywhere.

  He knew he was losing touch with where he was. This wasn’t his fault. It was the fault of the world. Because nothing in the world stabilized for long. Nothing was the right way up for long. There was always something, some silently approaching event, such as the opening of a play, which, you knew . . . you knew was going to turn everything on its head. Nothing could, or would, ever be the right way up. Or if it was, it wouldn’t last. One moment you could be flying like a swallow. You could have the world spread out below you. Then it was gone. It was way above you, crushing you again, with all its effluent running into your . . . yes, into your heart, until your heart was black and choked like a sluice.

  Oh, I’m so lonesome for the moon . . .

  He wanted more Guinness, more vodichka. He tried to tell the man behind the bar to keep the drinks coming, but now there was a problem: he was being asked for money. He searched his new jacket for his wallet. This pocket. That pocket. The bartender looked at him, square and ugly. This pocket. Another pocket. No wallet. Nothing there in the beautiful suede: only a cotton handkerchief, a comb for his thick hair, his mobile phone. There were two barmen staring at him now. He could hear their breathing. He thought, Everything multiplies. Sorrows. Accusers. Woe. And he held up his arms to the barmen, the gesture of an innocent man, a gesture that said, “I have nothing. Everything’s been taken from me. Do what you have to do.”

  They were leaning right into his face and shouting at him. He could smell their brandied breath. And he wanted to be away from this now, go out into the night air, breathe in the darkness. So he renewed his search for his wallet. Trouser pockets. Shirt pocket. Hip pocket.

  There it was.

  Its leather worn and curved and stained. Inside, his picture of Maya. His beloved daughter. Innocent, innocent child. He tugged out the photograph, tugged with trembling hands, and set it down on the bar top. And he looked at it and saw that it had faded. All the once-bright colors were vanishing, leaving only a trace of themselves, tinged with green, with the bluish green of the sky . . . when evening was coming . . . the sky behind Auror . . .

  Now the cold wind was blowing him along the pavements. Blowing everything north. Dust. Leaves. Garbage. Which? Who cared? Everything blew north in time. Everything came to its icy destination.

  He knew he was lost.

  His bladder ached. He clung to a tree and pissed onto the ground, and his hand, holding his cock, was frozen. And he told himself, when parts of his body began to freeze like this, it was time to creep away somewhere, find shelter, somewhere unseen, and lie there till the earth turned and brought whatever it brought in the form of light . . . whatever it was that would have to pass for morning.

  Down. It was better to creep downward, inward, toward the center of things, like a fox. So silent, so like an animal, that nobody would see or hear. Down and down. And here, in this city, this London, there was always, sooner or later, such a place, and then . . . well . . . there you could lie, with the traffic above, with the road bearing the weight of all that it had to bear, with steps ascending and descending . . . And this was all that was asked of you . . . that you lie there and be still.

  Here they were, the steps, not the same ones as before, yet similar, found once again, ascending, descending, with iron railings above, as though the old spirits might have need of a handhold, to pass from one world into another . . . the spirits no one cared about anymore, the ones who used to flit round in the brains of the aging men who sat on hard chairs in the lumber yard, blithering about this, yammering about that, full of hurt, used up by work . . . the spirits of Stefan.

  But these steps were not properly aligned to Lev’s sight. He knew he was about to fall, but he couldn’t let himself fall there, into that slippery void.

  He lay down where he was, on the street.

  15

  Nine, Nighttime

  SOMEBODY SHOUTING AT him. A smell so foul it might have been the stench of a cancer ward. But no memory of any ward, no memory of where he was or why these things were as they were . . .

  Lev opened his eyes. Far above was a man’s face. Lev’s gaze flickered downward and he understood that the face was attached to a heavy, uniformed torso, and this torso to a black leather boot. Then the boot seemed to shuffle away and the face came nearer and was staring at him.

  Next, a memory. Rudi’s stricken look, once, remembering a violent arrest in the night: “If you wake up with a man’s face in yours, Lev, it’s not a faggot dream, it’s the fucking militia.”

  Now, an arm on his, helping him up. Bright light, hurting his skin. A voice very close to
him, but not unkind: “Right, sir. You okay now? You’ve been sick. Do you want me to call an ambulance?”

  Lev looked down. He’d puked all over his suede jacket. But why was he here, in this harsh daylight, in this street he’d never seen before?

  A woman’s voice now, high and anxious. “Can you get him away now? Please take him away.”

  “He’s going, love. He’s on his way.”

  Lev saw the woman now. She was standing on her front steps, regarding him with a look of terror. He was led toward a police car. Two police officers with him.

  “Do you have a home to go to?” asked one of them.

  Lev nodded. Slowly, agonizingly, it was creeping back into his memory: the hurtful play, his fury in the theater bar . . .

  He began hitting his head. “Sir,” said the second policeman, “I wouldn’t do that to yourself if I were you. Suggest you go home now, right? Go along quietly, or we’ll have to charge you with causing alarm and distress.”

  Alarm and distress.

  He understood the words.

  He walked away. The street seemed to tilt under him, like a boat on a queasy sea. He had no idea where he was walking to. Which way was north? He knew he had to walk north, but how far? In this labyrinth of London, where was the haven of Belisha Road?

  He had no idea. He was lost once more. He’d brought this dereliction on himself. He’d sworn, in England, to keep his temper under control, but he’d failed. Now he was cast out.

  He came level with a garbage bin, overflowing with the obscene bags of someone’s leavings, and he thought, I’ve made my life obscene. He kicked out at the bin, wanted to see it fall, wanting to see everything spill out onto the pavement, but it didn’t fall. He began swearing. He snatched the lid off the bin and hurled it into the road. Heard footsteps thundering toward him.

  The policemen seized his arms. He felt the icy pain of handcuffs going on. Then hands searching his pockets and one of the voices again, loud in his ear: “Right. You are now under arrest. We warned you. We suggested you go home without causing any more trouble, but you didn’t listen, did you? So you are under arrest for an offense under Section Five of the Public Order Act.”

  In the police car now. Unfamiliar streets going by in the still-early morning. An ache in his skull. Shivering with cold and fear, yet finding it difficult to bear his suede jacket on him because he’d fouled it. Unable to take it off because of the handcuffs.

  The voice of the law saying what the law required it to say: “. . . detained to enable the investigation of this offense. You do not have to say anything . . . anything you say may be given in evidence. Do you understand?”

  Lev shook his head. He had no idea what law he’d broken. He’d thought he was free and walking away, and suddenly he wasn’t free but handcuffed and pressed into the back of this car.

  The two policemen were talking to each other now. Lev strained to hear, couldn’t understand them, but knew that his fate was in the hands of the law and things might go better for him if he was contrite.

  “I am sorry,” he said.

  One of the heads turned. Lev saw the face close up, death pale after winter, scarred with old acne burns.

  “You speak English, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “How much English?”

  Lev stared out at the traffic and at the gray sky.

  How much English?

  Enough to understand a play. Enough to know that his girl with her strawberry curls was no longer his girl . . .

  “I speak good English,” he said carefully. And he heard something peculiar in his voice: a kind of inappropriate pride.

  He was led into a police station, still clutching his fouled jacket. He saw flecks of vomit on his shoes. He tried to cradle his aching head.

  He was told to wait on a plastic chair in a drab corridor. The door to the toilet was pointed out to him. Near him, three youths, two white and one black, also waited, glancing up at him from the depths of the hoods of their fleece jackets, giving him a stare of pure indifference, a stare that said, “We’re on our own chairs, motherfucker, with our own reasons for being here, locked away in our skulls, and we don’t give a fucking toss about you or anyone else.” They were half Lev’s age.

  Lev got up and went to the toilet and pissed, then ran hot water and washed his hands. He turned on a cold tap, stuck his face underneath it, and drank, prayed this was drinkable water and not tainted.

  His suede jacket hung over the edge of a washbasin. Lev looked at it, all £170 of it. He emptied the pockets of everything they contained, which turned out to be nothing at all except a comb. Then he rolled up the stinking jacket and put it into the plastic waste bin, knowing that, even if it could be cleaned, he’d never wear it again. Never.

  Lev returned to the corridor, where the youths still lounged, airing their groins. He turned away from them and counted four fire extinguishers bolted to the gray wall. A digital wall clock told him that the time was 9:47 a.m. Six hours before he had to go to work at GK Ashe. Six hours before he had to see Sophie again . . .

  A door opened and a fair-haired constable beckoned Lev forward. He got up and was shown into a room with no window, furnished only with a table, two chairs, and a radiator that gave out heat of a disproportionate intensity, as though it were filled with burning sulfur.

  The constable set up a laptop computer on the table and, without glancing at Lev, without acknowledging by a single gesture that there was another person in the room, began to punch in codes or numbers. Lev waited. He noticed that the only object on the table, aside from the constable’s laptop, was a box of Kleenex tissues.

  “Okay,” said the constable, looking up from the laptop at last. “You speak English, I gather?”

  “Yes.”

  Lev was asked to give his name, age, country of origin, and address in the U.K. While the constable typed these in, a robust-looking black woman in a green overall came into the room and put down a cup of tea in front of Lev. He thanked her. On the saucer were four sugar lumps and Lev put all of these into the tea, stirred it, and began to drink. As he drank, the woman, pausing at the open door, winked a seductive brown eye in his direction. Then the door closed.

  “Date of entry into the U.K.?” asked the constable.

  Lev thought that this should have been engraved on his memory, but the date felt so long ago, it had gone from his mind.

  “July last year,” he said. “I can’t remember which day.”

  The constable’s hands caressed the small black keyboard. “What means of support do you have in the U.K.?”

  Lev began to feel the blessed, sugary tea enter his bloodstream.

  “I work at GK Ashe,” he said.

  “Cheeky Ash? What’s that?”

  “The restaurant,” said Lev. “GK Ashe. You don’t know this?”

  The constable didn’t reply or move a muscle of his face. He disregarded the question and just went on typing, with diligent care, as though the computer were the vulnerable living thing and Lev the inanimate piece of technology.

  “What’s your wage at Cheeky Ash?”

  “Not Cheeky. Letters: G.K.”

  “I didn’t ask for comments, sir. Please tell me your weekly wage or your hourly wage.”

  “Seven pounds an hour; two hundred eighty pounds a week after tax. I send money home to my family.”

  More typing. More communing with the clean, obedient little machine. Then the constable looked up at Lev, face to face. His pale eyes held Lev in a steady, unfrightened gaze. “Right. So, you understand that you are being issued with a PND: a penalty notice for disorder.”

  “I told the policemen in the car I was sorry.”

  “Yes? Well, I’m sure they were glad to hear that. Now, a PND carries with it a fixed fine of eighty pounds, which must be paid now. Are you with me, sir?”

  Lev was silent. He wished there was a window to look out of, a view of the sky or birds coming down to settle on a tall roof. His mind made a terrifyin
g addition: £170 for the suede jacket; £42 for his unnecessary shirt; now an £80 fine. A total of £292 wasted.

  “Are you listening? Did you hear my question?”

  “Yes,” said Lev.

  “Then answer it, please. Do you understand the charge and the fine accruing?”

  “Yes.”

  “So how are you going to pay?”

  Now a terrible image swam into Lev’s mind: his wallet on the bar counter, and near it, among the beer slops, his precious picture of Maya . . . He began to search the pockets of his trousers. Side pockets. Right. Left. Hip pocket. Side pockets again. Right. Left . . .

  “I’m waiting, Olev. Just tell me how you wish to pay. Cash or credit card?”

  Nothing in any pocket. Only a few coins, some crumbs of tobacco, and an old packet of Rizla papers.

  Lev put his head in his hands. No money. No picture of Maya. No credit card. No phone. He felt a sob welling up in his chest, pressed his palms into his eyes.

  No Sophie.

  He let the sob break. It reminded him of a wolf cry.

  “I don’t know how to pay,” he stammered.

  “Cash or credit card.”

  “I have nothing. My wallet is gone.”

  The constable waited, staring at Lev’s distress, as though it might have been a TV program that bored him. He pushed the box of Kleenex toward Lev and sighed and said, “If the accused is unable to settle the fine, we suggest recourse to a third party.”

  “Sorry?” said Lev.

  “We call it ‘phoning a friend.’ ”

  “Sorry?”

  “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, on TV. Don’t you watch it?”

  “No. I work in the evenings.”

  “Never mind. Want to phone a friend, d’you?”