The Road Home (11 page)

Lev rang the top bell, beside a card marked
C. Slane
.

He waited. He placed his bag on the step beside him. Down the street, he could hear a dog barking and see a child kicking and shrieking in a pram. The berries on the rowans were beginning to turn gold.

When the door opened, Lev saw a small, elfin kind of man, with pale, nervous eyes and a flare of eczema across his nose. He wore an old white T-shirt and faded jeans too loose for his narrow frame.

“Mr. Slane?” said Lev.

“Yes. Christy Slane. Come in, come in. I was expecting you. Your friend Lydia telephoned about the room.”

In the dark hallway several pairs of sneakers lay in a sprawling heap, under a line of hooks, where anoraks, scarves, backpacks, fleeces, and leather jackets hung.

“None of this junk is mine,” said Christy Slane. “It belongs to the downstairs people. They don’t want the stink of the shoes inside the flat, so they leave them outside for me to trip over. They’ve no consideration and, of course, no imagination whatsoever.”

Lev followed Christy Slane up the stairs. He saw that the door to Christy’s flat was painted white and taped to it was a child’s drawing of a house. “My daughter, Frankie, did that,” said Christy. “She doesn’t live here anymore. That’s why I have the room to let. I should take the picture down, but I can’t quite come up to doing it.”

Christy closed the white door and Lev saw that the flat he was in was also painted bright white and it smelled of this fresh paint and of something else, which Lev hoped he’d recognized as cigarette smoke. He looked round at the doors leading off the small entrance hall they were in. He glimpsed a sitting room with a gas fire and two wicker armchairs and a dining table and a TV. A dented paper lampshade hung from the ceiling. The windows were uncurtained.

“Bare minimum furniture now,” said Christy. “My wife took her share and then she took
half of my share.
That’s Englishwomen for you. But she wouldn’t take any of the things I’d given her. Nor the things I’d given my daughter. So you’re going to share your room with a Wendy house and a little plastic shop I brought all the way over from Orlando, Florida, and a cuddly toy or two. I hope this is all right. If you get peeved with them, you can help me get them up into the loft.”

Now Christy opened the door to the child’s room and Lev saw wooden bunk beds and a ladder leading up from one to the other, and bed linen patterned with giraffes. On the window ledge sat a huddle of soft toys. The floor was carpeted green. On it stood a tiny wooden house with red chimney pots and flowers painted over the door. By the bunks there was a multicolored rug, which reminded him of the rag rug in Maya’s room.

“Is it all right for you?” asked Christy. “It’s been cleaned and aired. Beds look small, but they’re full size. I’ll chuck your laundry in the washer once a week, all included in the ninety quid. You can be comfy here, can’t you? Not so different from my own little room. When I was a boy in Dublin, I had animals on me pillow. But if they bother you, we can get some other covers, cheap, on the Holloway Road. Okay?”

Lev walked into the room and set down his bag. He hadn’t understood all of what Christy Slane had been saying, except that he knew this had once been Christy’s daughter’s room and now that daughter was gone. He looked round at all the child’s possessions and then out of the window at a sycamore tree, whose wide branches almost touched the glass. Then he looked at Christy, standing in the doorway, as though not wanting to come into the room, his hands held at his sides in a helpless way, and Lev was transfixed for a moment, recognizing something of himself in the other man, some willingness to surrender and not fight, some dangerous longing for everything to be over.

“The room is very good,” said Lev. “I will take.”

“Right,” said Christy. “Good. Well, at least Angela left these curtains. And this is the quiet side of the house. Except when they have a barbecue in the garden, if you can call it a garden, the way they keep it, and they’ve got a puppy there right now that whines in the night sometimes, when they don’t bring it in, but otherwise it’s quiet. Now I’ll show you the facilities.”

The bathroom was also painted white and was brightly lit. The bath, basin, and lavatory looked new. Lev saw a wry smile cross Christy’s face. “The
pièce de résistance.
Angela would have nabbed it if she’d known how to uncouple the piping, but luckily she didn’t.”

“Very nice toilet,” said Lev.

“Yes, glad you noticed it. Put it all in meself. That’s my trade: plumber. But I’m freelance now—if that’s the word for more or less unemployed. Couldn’t keep to me job after Angela left. But at least we’ve got a nice environment to shit in. I’ll find you a towel.”

Christy went away and Lev heard him opening a cupboard in another room. Lev looked down at the miniature plastic shop standing by the miniature house. A sign on the shop’s door read:
HI! MY STORE IS OPEN
.

Christy returned and handed Lev a green towel. “So,” he said, “tell me your first name.”

“My name?”

“I’m Christy. I’m Irish, in case you hadn’t noticed. Baptized ‘Christian,’ but that was too much to bear, too much of a yoke, you know what I mean? But ‘Christy’ is all right. Just call me that.”

“Yes,” said Lev. “And I am Lev.”

“Right,” said Christy. “Now I’ll make a pot of tea, Lev, and we can get the money side of things done. Terms are one month’s rent in advance, or if you can’t manage that right now, I’ll settle for two weeks.”

“I prefer two weeks,” said Lev.

“That’s okay. I can live with that, fella.”

Lev began counting out notes: almost all the money he now possessed. Once again, he thought about Rudi’s assurances that he’d be able to live on twenty pounds a week. “I’m
informed
about the world,” Rudi had often said. “I don’t just watch the news, I
interpret
it. My judgments are backed up by hours of
further reading.
” Lev also knew that Rudi would argue about the ninety pounds and, in all probability, get Christy to lower the rent by some percentage or other, but that he, Lev, was incapable of such an argument. And he felt lucky to have found Christy Slane, to have been given a child’s room. He wasn’t too embarrassed or proud to lay his head on a pillowcase printed with giraffes.

“Pity the men, I say,” said Christy as they drank the tea. “Women have got us by the balls in this century, that’s what I feel.”

“Yes?” said Lev.

“I’ll admit, my drinking got bad, and it’s not so fantastic trying to share your life with me when I’m like that. Drink lets loose the shite in me. There’s shite in every man—and every woman—it’s the nature of being human. But most of the time, it’s kept in, you know what I mean? Most of the time, you’re not looking at a steamin’ pile of manure.”

Lev nodded. Both he and Christy Slane were smoking, and the butts in the cheap ashtray were piling up.

“So I have some sympathy with Angela,” Christy continued. “I can see her side of it all. But then she gets so nasty. You know? She tells me I’m a piece of nothing. And she tells me in front of Frankie, my daughter. Then Frankie won’t talk to me, won’t let me kiss her good night. I go in there—in your room—and she turns her head away. I get one of her toys and I say, ‘Look, Frankie, Sammy the Clown wants you to say good night to your daddy . . .’ Pathetic this was, because she takes no notice. She pulls the covers over her head, like I’m going to hurt her. And I never hurt her. I swear to God. It was only Angela made her act like that.”

Lev nodded. He saw that Christy didn’t really care whether he understood what he’d been saying. Perhaps, he thought, it’s easier for him to talk if he knows I don’t understand. Because now he was started on the story of his recent life, he didn’t seem to want to stop. And Lev didn’t mind. He was gradually coming to understand that the Irishman’s loneliness was nearly as acute as his own. They were the same kind of age. They both longed to return to a time before the people they loved most were lost.

“What a mess,” sighed Christy. “Will it ever be cleaned up? I don’t think so. I think Angela’s got me in a noose. I go to Frankie’s school, in their playtime, and I watch her in the playground, I watch her skipping and jumping. But I’m not allowed to go near her. The teachers have instructions: I’m not to try to make contact with her. I’m considered some kind of ‘unacceptable risk’ because I once broke a few plates and glasses. So now I have to go to court to get my rights back, my rights as a father—my rights as a human being. And what if I lose? I’m trying to stay clear of the booze. You can help me, Lev. You’re a disciplined man, I can tell this. I’d like you to help me. Don’t let me go to the pub. And if I open a bottle of Guinness at home, try to get the fucking thing away from me. Right? Just take it and tip it down the sink.”

“Yes,” said Lev. “I try. But I have many hours at GK Ashe to work.”

“Sure you do. I’d forgotten that for a moment—like I was thinkin’ we could just sit here for the foreseeable future drinking tea! I like it when things are nice and quiet like this. Cuppa tea. Smoke. Quietness. I like that.”

“Yes,” said Lev. “I like also.”

“Tell me about your daughter, then.”

Lev took out his wallet and found the photograph of Maya that he carried there. He passed it to Christy. He could remember with absolute clarity the soft texture of the woolen dress Maya had been wearing that day. He watched Christy look tenderly at the picture.

“Girls,” he said. “So lovely. Aren’t they? So sweet and darlin’. Butter-wouldn’t-melt and all that. And then, bang, they turn away from you. They say they hate you. They break your heart.”

He passed the photograph back and Lev put it away. In the silence that followed, Lev tried to tell Christy about Marina’s death, so that this subject would be out in the open and not there to catch him off guard, at a time when speaking about it would be too hard. When Christy asked him
why
Marina died, Lev tried to explain that cases of leukemia were common in Auror and Baryn, but nobody knew why. Some people said there was contamination in the water, others that the cancer came from eating too little red meat, or too much rose-petal jam.

His own theory was that Marina’s death had something to do with the electricity pylon whose shadow fell over his house in the late afternoons. He tried to tell Christy that this shadow had a chill to it, a gray chill, which was particular to it, and that seeing it laid out across the garden—across the goat pen and the chicken house and the vegetable patch Marina used to tend with such care—had always filled him with rage and foreboding. He was grateful that electricity had come to Auror, but his hatred and fear of the pylon shadow had never left him.

Christy stared at Lev, with his face resting on his hands, which were bone-thin and scarred here and there with the traces of burns. After a while, he said, “Why was it the shadow you feared and not the pylon itself?”

Lev thought about this. He tried to say that the shadow
touched
them. It laid a kind of grid over them. The pylon was a little distance away on the hillside behind Auror, but the shadow fell directly onto them, and there was nothing they could do about it.

Christy cleared away the teacups. The afternoon was gone now and the sounds of evening in Belisha Road began to accumulate around them. Distinct among these was loud, clanging music coming from the flat below.

“
EastEnders,
” announced Christy. “You’d better watch it, fella. Tell you a bit more about the mad world you’re in.”

Christy heated a steak-and-kidney pie for them, and they ate it with some tinned peas, sitting on the wicker chairs, watching the TV, and when he’d eaten, Lev fell asleep to the sound of furious arguments going on and on in a TV place called Albert Square. The sleep he fell into was deep and sound, and when he woke, the TV was off and the room was almost dark and there was no sign of Christy Slane.

Lev walked alone through the flat. The kitchen was tidy, the supper plates washed up and put away. He went into Christy’s bedroom and saw a double bed, unmade, and a bedside table cluttered with paperback books, letters, and pills. Apart from the bed and the table, the room was empty. At the window, a blanket had been hung up for a curtain.

Lev returned to the sitting room. He stared longingly at the telephone. He tried for some time to resist this longing, but it wouldn’t go away, so—without any idea what a phone call to his country might cost—he tugged out some coins from his pocket and set these down by the phone. Then he picked up the receiver and dialed Rudi’s number. When he heard Rudi’s familiar growling voice, he felt warm in his heart.

“Hey!” yelled Rudi. “I miss you! Everybody misses you. What’s happening over there? Are you ready to come back yet?”

Lev laughed. He told Rudi that he’d found a job in a kitchen, that he was lodging in a child’s room, that people in London were fatter than he’d imagined.

“Fat?” said Rudi. “So what? Don’t blame people for being fat, Lev. If we had better food here, I’d be happy to be fat. I’d parade my fat belly. And if Lora grew a big arse, I wouldn’t care. I’d hold it to my face and kiss it.”

“Well, okay,” said Lev, “but I hadn’t imagined people looking like this. I’d imagined them looking like Alec Guinness in
Bridge on the River Kwai
.”

“That film was made back in the Cold War, Lev. It was made
before
the fucking Cold War. You’re way out-of-date with everything.”

“So are you,” said Lev. “You calculated that I could live on twenty pounds a week. The room alone is ninety.”

“Ninety pounds? You’re being cheated, my friend.”

“No,” said Lev. “I looked at about thirty Rooms to Let in the newspaper.
ES
newspaper. This was the cheapest one.”

Rudi went silent. Lev let this silence last for a moment, then he asked after Maya and his mother. Rudi replied, “They’re all right, Lev. They’re fine. Except one goat went missing. Ina thinks some fucker stole it right out of the goat pen. She thinks he’ll take them all, one by one, now that you’re not there.”

It was Lev’s turn to be lost for the next word. What came to his memory was the delicacy with which the goats trotted around their dusty corral.