One of Us (2 page)

“A job?” I said. “I am already working in a job.” I slapped the mop down on the floor. “And you are messing it up with your wet feet.”

“Is that what you call this?” he said, looking around. “A job? Must have been desperate, where you came from.”

“Yes,” I said. “It was.”

I said it with more anger than I had meant to let out, and Daniel did not know quite what to say.

“Yeah, sorry, whatever.” He flicked hair from out of his eyes, and did not look very sorry at all. “Listen, man I work for, he needs your services for the night. But we have to go now, or not at all.”

I shook my head, backed away, holding the mop handle out as if it would protect me. “Fuck off,” I said.

“Didn’t put that well, did I?” He laughed but he was nervous, I could see it in the way that he shifted from foot to foot. “It’s not what you think, sweetheart. Christ, I’m not a pimp. It’s your medical skills, not your beautiful body, that Corgan’s after. But you have approximately, oh, fuck all seconds at all to make up your mind. I mean it, the car’s outside, you come now, do this little job, you get your papers, the works, make you more legal than the queen. Trust me, Corgan can help you go places. He’ll help you, and me bringing you to him will make me look good. We both win, see? Besides, you really, really don’t want to piss him off.”

“What do you mean, medical skills? I was only a student, I—”

“Close enough. You studied hard, didn’t you? Read all the books? Two minutes,” he said. “Up to you. I’ll be right in the shit if you don’t, but hey, it’s your call.” The door banged behind him. I stood for a moment, watching the floor dry to a dull smear. I thought about waiting for my number to be called, for yet another interview. I thought of the noise my brother had made when they were kicking him. I had seen a horse fall once, and break its leg. We were staying out in the country, at my uncle’s house, and my brother and I had been playing in the field. A woman had been riding a horse, hard. It was beautiful to watch, it raced the length of the field with power and grace. Then one foot must have gone into a hole left by a rabbit, and the horse came down in a tangle of legs that were now too long for it, the woman pitched over its head and onto the ground, and we heard the horse’s leg break from where we were standing. The rider staggered to her feet after a moment or two, cursing, but the horse rolled about on the ground, and I put my hands over my ears but I could still hear its terrible squealing. My father and uncle came rushing out. My father led me back to the house, made me tea and held me tight while I cried. He held my head tight against his big chest, and it was only that evening I realised that he held me this way on purpose so I would not hear the shot.

Late that night, when he and my uncle got drunk, and I was supposed to be asleep, I heard my uncle complaining about the woman who had been riding the horse.

“A beautiful animal,” he said. “I had to shoot the wrong one.”

When the men kicked my brother to death, he made a noise like the horse did. And I put my hands over my ears then too, but I could still hear the terrible sound he made.

I walked out into the kitchen and told Peter that I was sick, I had to go home.

“Sick? What the hell do you mean sick?” Peter tugged at his beard, as he always did when something came along that upset the smooth running of things. I often thought that when we had a health inspection at the restaurant, the thing that would get us closed down would be Peter’s beard.

“I mean vomiting. I think I have a stomach flu. There is diarrhoea too, I think, I need to go very bad.”

“Jesus, spare me the details. Don’t want to catch it either.”

“I can manage fine on my own Pete,” Sean said. “It’s not exactly busy. Tuesday, quiet night.” He frowned at me, from behind the coffee machine, his face a question I could not answer.

“Go on then, get yourself away Anna, before you give it to me. It’s coming out of your wages though; if you’re not here I’m not paying you.”

Daniel was waiting in a dark blue car, talking on a mobile phone. When I came near he finished the call, and leaned over to open the passenger door.

“Good girl. You’ve just saved my life. Already told ’em you were coming, had faith in you.”

I got in, and he drove away fast, looking in his mirror a lot. We drove down wet streets that shone orange on black, and I thought, this is how a life changes. A stupid decision, a moment where what you want so badly wins over what sense tells you, and then you are in a strange car, driving in the night and you do not know what waits for you at the other end. I thought of girls from my home, who had wanted so much, and so had gone on journeys across Europe without asking too many questions. And I thought about where they ended up. Because I knew this. I knew this very well.

I closed my eyes for a moment. Then I thought, this is stupid, because when you open them again, nothing will have changed. So I did, and it hadn’t.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Onwards and upwards, Anna, onwards and upwards.”

I did not see the point in asking any more, because I knew that I would not get an answer. We stopped at a quiet row of old houses. They had once been grand, I think, but now next to each front door a rash of bell pushes showed how the houses had been divided and divided and divided, and the sagging curtains at the windows looked as if they would not be opened in the mornings.

“Here we are,” Daniel said, and I could hear the tension in his voice.

“Here we are for what?” I said, but I knew that it was too late to ask the question. Whatever I was here to do, I would have to do. I felt sick.

Daniel did not answer. He got out of the car, then walked around to my door.

“Come on, it’s this one,” he said, and we walked up a cracked concrete path. Daniel used a key to open the front door, and I followed him in. The hallway was lit by a single dusty bulb that hung without a shade. A table inside the door overflowed with free newspapers and junk mail. A pay phone hung above the table. Someone had patterned the wall all the way around the phone with cigarette burns. Daniel walked up the creaking stairs, and I followed him. I could smell burnt food, and cigarette smoke, and sweat. We stopped on the first floor, and Daniel paused in front of a wooden door that was all pits and splinters.

“Keep your mouth shut,” he said in a low voice. “Keep your eyes on what you’re doing, say nothing. Just do what you’re told, and it’ll be fine. Promise you, sweetheart.” He tapped on the door. It opened a fraction straight away, as if someone had been standing there all along, and I saw a shadow inside. Then the door opened all the way, and Daniel put a hot hand in the small of my back, and I walked in to get away from it.

A man with an expensive suit stretched over big shoulders leaned against the wall by the door. He looked me up and down with the cold eyes of a shark. I could smell violence on him, like sweat. Another man lay on a bed, naked from the waist up, with a sheet wrapped round and round his arm. The sheet was stained dark red in the middle. The room stank of whisky, and an empty bottle lay on the floor by the side of the bed.

“This it?” the big man said, and it took me a moment before I realised that he was talking about me.

“Yeah,” Daniel said. “Don’t worry, Corgan, she’s cool.”

“Oh, thanks Danny boy,” Corgan said. “If you say not to worry, that’s OK then. I’ll stop worrying.”

Daniel looked as if he wanted to speak, but he did not.

Corgan said, “You waiting for something?”

Daniel walked off without a word.

Corgan reached out a hand and slammed the door shut. Then he turned the key. He was no taller than me, but he was wide, powerful, and a man who would never be afraid to use that power.

He looked at me for a long time and I felt like a fish on a slab in the market. “Well,” he said in the end. “Here’s our new doctor.”

CHAPTER TWO

“I am not a doctor,” I said. “I was a medical student.”

Corgan studied me for a little while. He took up more of the room than his body occupied. His hair was cut short, very short, the look of a soldier, a policeman. “For more than a few weeks, I hope,” he said. “I was told you were the finished article.”

“I had taken much of my academic study when—when I left my country. Had to leave my country. And I have two years of clinical practice, but I still had my last year to do, and some of my practice was spent in gynaecology and paediatrics, and looking at him I do not think that will be much help.”

“In your last year? That’ll do me. Now listen: I need you to do two things. I need you to sort him out—” he jerked his head towards the man on the bed— “and I need you to keep your mouth shut. Can you do both of those? Because if you can’t, go now.”

“I can,” I said. “And in return I get what I am promised?”

He stared at me for a moment. “You’ll get your papers.” Then he stooped down, slid a black case across the floor to me. “The gear you need should be in there. If anything isn’t, tell me what it is you want and I’ll get someone to bring it here within half an hour. He’s been shot, right arm, small calibre handgun. Looks like it’s gone right through, but he’s lost a fair bit of blood.”

I unwrapped the sheet from the man’s arm. I could hear him breathing, a shallow, rapid, whisky breath. I opened the bag. It looked like someone had been round a hospital supplies cupboard. And the pharmacy. I turned a tap on a tiny sink that hung off the wall. Somewhere, a pipe coughed, and after a moment warm water came out. I scrubbed at my hands as best I could. I went back to the bag, opened an instrument case. “Are these sterile?”

“I’m told they are,” Corgan said. “We’ve got a proper doctor—
had
a proper doctor—worked for us for years, all this is his. Too fond of his own prescription pad though, and just when we need him, useless bastard, he couldn’t even walk down the path tonight without falling over. He’s finished with us. But he swears this bag is fine. And knows what I would do to him if he told me wrong. So we had to find a stand-in, and when we phoned around, Danny boy came up with you. Turns out he’s good for something after all.”

The man on the bed stirred and moaned, and occasionally when I did things he screamed but then Corgan leant forward and held his hand over the man’s mouth, and they were not loud screams anyway, more like the sounds that someone makes when they are having a nightmare.

“He should be in a hospital,” I said, when I had inspected the wound. He had a ragged hole torn in the flesh of his upper arm, another hole on the far side where the bullet had passed through. “The wound is not too bad, but there is much risk of infection.”

“If he could be in a hospital, he would be in a hospital, and you wouldn’t be here,” Corgan said in a gentle voice. He was bent over the bed, next to me, and I could feel his breath warm on my cheek. “So let’s not have a pointless conversation, eh.”

I worked hard in the dim light of the room, making sure that the wound was clean and that there was no foreign matter left in, because no matter how well I stopped the bleeding and stitched up the wounds, it would be for nothing if the wound became infected. I do not know how long it took me, kneeling beside the sagging bed with Corgan standing silent at my shoulder, but I know that I did a good job. My hands moved, my brain worked, and I did the things that I had been trained to do and I did them well. After weeks of turning burgers over and pouring coke, I felt good to be doing what I was good at. In the end I was satisfied with my work, and I was done. I stepped back from the bed, and realised that every muscle in my neck and shoulders hurt, as if I had been beaten. I took a deep breath, and tried to let the tension seep away from me. I wanted to breathe deeply, but the room smelt of sweat, and blood, and a thousand old cigarettes. I had blood on my hands, on my blouse. There had been no plastic gloves in the case. I tried not to think about what might be in the blood.

“That is everything that I can do,” I said, washing my hands again. My blouse I would throw in a bin, even though I could not afford to do so. “The wound is clean and he should not bleed any more. Get me some paper.”

Corgan looked around the room, pulled an old envelope from the bin. I wrote down on it what was needed, the antibiotics, the iodine pads, the dressings.

“He will need these. The dressing will need to be changed—”

Corgan held up a big hand, and I stopped talking.

“Write your list. It’ll all be here for the morning,” he said. “For when you come back.”

I stepped forward, waving a finger at him. “There is no coming back. I was asked, I came here, I did what I was asked. I have done it.”

He looked at my finger amused, and pushed it very gently so that it was not pointing at him. “Job’s not finished, is it? You know that. Come back every day, do whatever needs doing, and when he doesn’t need it any more, then you get what you want. Only then. Take it or leave it.”

“In the day time,” I said, after a moment or two. “In late afternoon. Evenings and nights, I work. Mornings, I sleep. It must be late afternoon.”

The big man laughed. “There’ll be a car for you. Two o’clock. You’ll have slept enough by then.” He looked at me, a long stare which made me feel as if I had just been weighed, assessed, dismissed. “I don’t need to tell you not to talk about this to anyone, do I? I can see it in your eyes. You know how it works.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know people like you. I know you well.”

“Do you, now? See you then, doctor.”

“Student,” I said, and Corgan laughed and unlocked the door. “Wait by the front door,” he said. “There’ll be a car round in five minutes, run you home.”

I walked down the stairs and out of the door and into the beautiful clean air. I kept walking, down the quiet street, out into a tangle of roads that I did not know and that all looked the same. I did not care, I just kept walking, breathing in hard so the cold air could freeze me inside, make me a puppet that just walked along, arms and legs moving like so, little puppet running away. I had practice at that.

When I fled my home, my plan had been simple. Go to the airport. Get a plane. Fly to another country where the police could not reach me and stay in a hotel while I mourned my brother and thought about what to do. But in a taxi to the airport, I realised my stupidity. Those who would want to hurt me were the police, and if they wanted to they could see every time I used my credit card, where I went. They could find me. And once they realised I had been a witness, they would want to find me. And they would find me. Even if I was in another country. No loose ends.

“Take me back,” I said. “I want to catch a train.”

“You’re joking,” the taxi driver said. “Scared of flying, eh? Lost your nerve?”

“Yes,” I said. “So take me to the station.”

I caught one train, and then another, and then another, doubling back, paying cash, buying tickets to a station but then getting off early. They were the police, they could find out who bought tickets to where, they could make people talk. Old habits die hard, and in my country, those habits were not so old.

I started to run out of money, and I needed to save what I had for things other than train fares. The first of these things took me across the border.

“If I get caught, I’m right in the shit,” the lorry driver said, scraping his hand over the stubble on his chin.

“You won’t get caught. And if you did, which you won’t, I will tell them you didn’t know. You tell them you didn’t know. But you won’t get caught.”

“I could lose my job,” he said, digging a finger in his ear.

“I will pay you twice what I offered,” I said. “But that is all the money I have, I can not pay any more.”

He thought for a moment. “Maybe not money, no.” His eyes dropped to my breasts, down to my thighs, dawdled back up.

“I am on the run,” I said. “My husband is in the FSB, he beats me, he is a bastard. I have cousins in Poland, I can go to them. If my husband finds out I was in your lorry, he will do nothing, he understands money talks, he won’t care about you, just about finding me. If he finds out you touched me though, he will cut your balls off and make you eat them.”

He backed away. Too much, Anna. You have lost your chance.

“Half as much again,” I said. “Who will know? Who will care? It is not you he is after. And I need help, please.” I tried to make my eyes big, like a kitten. I probably looked like a mad woman.

The driver scraped at his chin again. “You get caught, you say you broke in to the back while I took a piss.”

“I will.”

“You pay double.”

“I will.”

They stopped him, at the border. I heard the engine stop, the sound of voices. I burrowed under boxes, did not dare breathe. Then the engine started, and we moved and we did not stop.

He let me out at a truck stop, bought me coffee.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “About the other thing. I couldn’t have, anyway. Got a daughter your age. Beats you, does he? You should be cutting his balls off. If he had any.”

I washed in service station sinks, I slept on hard benches and among crates of fruit, the air thick with the stink of lemons and of me, I slept leaning against boxes filled with giant televisions, all the time waiting for a rough shake into wakefulness, a hand over my mouth, worse. I paid out what little money I had left, I pretended that I did not see the way that some of them looked at me, and I kept on running. I could have stopped anywhere, I suppose. But I could speak English, I had been taught at school and my father had paid for lessons at home. “You could study abroad, London, Los Angeles, where the hospitals have money and the best of everything,” he said. So I learned about Mr Benson, who was a civil servant, and his wife Jane and their children and their dog, Max. And so here I was. The street signs were in a different language, but the men like Corgan were just the same.

I hurried on to the other side of the road so I did not have to walk past the drunken men who were standing outside the window of the all-night garage and shouting in, laughing and pretending to fight, and then kept on walking towards home until the sky began to lighten, and at last I was back where I lived. I stood in the shower for a long time, even though it was only lukewarm. It was only ever lukewarm. There was no blood left on me, but even when I came out of the shower, I still did not feel clean. Yes, I had treated a patient, done what I had spent years training to do. But I knew what he was, and I knew what Corgan was. They were the men who came for my father, the men who killed Aleksey. Different voices, different passports, same story. And I had worked for some of these men, so that I could avoid being sent back to the others. You do what you have to do, I thought to myself. You do what you have to do.

It still took me a very long time to get to sleep, and I still did not feel clean.

~

The next day, at two, a man who I had not seen before was outside my house, leaning against a car, one arm stretched lazily out over the roof, fingers drumming. He wore sunglasses like mirrors, so that I could not see his eyes, even though the day was cloudy. I think that he thought that he looked good like this, but he was fatter than he thought he was, and his clothes showed it, and when he looked round at me his sunglasses slid down his nose.

“You must be the doctor,” he said. “I’m Paul, your chauffeur for the day. Fuck happened to you last night then? I was hanging around for half an hour waiting for you.”

And so it went on. I was taken to the flat, changed dressings, checked the wound, did what I was told to do. The first time I went back there, the man who had been shot was conscious. There were two other men there, not Corgan, but ones like him. They were talking to my patient in low voices and stopped when I came over to the bed.

“So you’re the one that patched me up,” the man on the bed said, smoking a cigarette and blowing the smoke up to the ceiling. “Cheers, pet. Hurts like hell, mind, but you’ve done a canny job there.” He was still pale beneath his tan, and little crusts of matter had formed at the edges of his mouth, almost hidden by the edges of his little beard that did not go further than around his mouth.

“It will hurt,” I said. “That’s why I asked them to get these tablets for you to take. They will make the pain less.”

“Can I mix them with alcohol?”

“No.”

“Oops.” All the men laughed.

“You’ll have to give up the tablets then, Kav man,” one of them said.

“I want you to stay here for a few days, lie down, take it easy,” I said. “You lost blood, and you will be weak.”

“Aye. Not as much blood as the bastard who did this will lose, mind.”

“One day,” one of the other men said in a low voice.

“Aye, one day, Nicky,” my patient said. “When we’re not having to pussy around keeping these fucking foreigners sweet. Not you, love. You’re sweet already.”

I ignored them, held a dressing down, wrapped tape around it. I did not hear, I did not see, I did not understand. Life lived as furniture.

On the second day, Corgan was there again, leaning against the wall, his presence filling the room. He did not say much, asked a couple of questions about what I was doing, how long things would take, how soon I would know if the wound was infected, what I would do if it was, when they could move him. Then he said nothing else, just watched, and I felt as if a spotlight was shining on to me and I was clumsy and my fingers fumbled everything.

I worked, I slept, I was driven to the flat, I tried hard not to think much about what I was doing or the people that I was doing it for. One day, a man even bigger than Corgan opened the door without knocking. He stepped in, looked around. I could not have wrapped my arms around his chest. He should have been in a circus, lifting barrels full of showgirls, or fighting in a barn, with bare knuckles. He nodded to the corridor, and another man walked in. This man had nothing interesting about him at all. He was short, but not too short, slim but not skinny, his skin pale and his hair grey. His suit was expensive, his shoes looked even more so, but if he had walked straight out again I might have been able to remember the cut of his suit and the shine of his shoes but I do not think that I would have been able to picture his face.