The Road Home (33 page)

“Lev,” she said, after a while, when he’d gobbled the first pastry and was warming his hands on the foaming coffee mug, “Lev, there’s only one thing that worries me.”

He looked up at her: about-to-be-mistress of the famous Maestro Greszler, her days of knitting jumpers, subsisting on eggs, behind her. Without her, he’d still be sitting on a plastic chair in the police station. Without her, he might still be delivering kebab leaflets for Ahmed, sleeping in Kowalski’s yard . . .

“Are you listening to me?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Whatever has happened—and I’m not going to make you explain it to me because I can feel that you don’t want to—whatever has happened, you have to stick with your job at GK Ashe. That is what most concerns me. That you’ll give up this job. And then I think you would be lost. So promise me you won’t.”

Lev nodded. Then he said quietly, “I’ve been watching the chefs. Making notes. I’m going to collect all the recipes in a notebook.”

“That’s very good. Very good. But you must stay in
this
restaurant, where G.K. helps you learn. In other places they might treat you like shit and you’d learn nothing. You must keep going on this track.”

Lev was silent now. He wanted to tell Lydia how hard this was going to be, working with Sophie, seeing her day after day, catching the scent of her in the humid kitchen air, obeying her chef’s orders, watching her put on her football scarf to go home to Howie Preece’s bed . . .

“Lev? You hear what I’m saying?”

“Yes.”

“When I’m in Vienna or Salzburg, I’m going to call you up and ask you what the chefs made today at GK Ashe and I hope you’re going to be able to answer.”

“I will.”

“Promise me?”

“Yes. I promise.”

“All right. Well, I’m going to go now. You’re near the tube. You remember? Just turn left out of here. Here’s change for the train.”

Lydia stood up. She put three £1 coins down on the table. Gently, she took her coat from round Lev’s shoulders. Lev reached up, drew her face down toward his, and kissed her cheek, putting his lips softly among the moles.

“Lydia,” he said, “you’ve been my good friend. I hope you’re going to be happy now. I hope you’re going to have the best life . . .”

“Well,” she said, “at least I won’t be Muesli anymore. I shall have a little dignity. Not too much, so that it goes to my head. Just enough so that I can hold my head up.”

“I know Pyotor Greszler will be good to you.”

“Of course he will. Well, good-bye, Lev. I’ll send postcards. Send you pictures of Paris and New York.”

“Good-bye, Lydia.”

Lev watched as she walked away from the table, heard her footsteps, neat and regular as ever,
click-clack, click-clack, click-clack,
till she was out of the door and gone.

It was after one o’clock when Lev climbed the stairs to the flat in Belisha Road. He called out to Christy, but there was no sign of him. Lev ran a bath and lay in it till it almost went cold. He fell in and out of an exhausted sleep. Then he dragged himself to his room, drew the curtains, got into bed, and closed his eyes.

He dreamed about Marina. He was back in the bad time of Marina’s supposed affair with Procurator Rivas. He was fly-fishing, with Rudi, on the river above Auror, on a summer evening, and they could see clusters of gnats, lit by the sinking sun, hovering above the water, and Rudi said, “They only live one day. I read that in a nature magazine. Imagine. They get to late afternoon, like now, and they start panicking and saying, ‘Where did the day fucking
go?
’ ”

They fell into their old, familiar laughter. They were pulling grayling out of the river, happy as herons, and then they saw a figure on the opposite bank poaching on their fishing beat. It was Procurator Rivas.

“Fuck him,” said Rudi. “Why doesn’t he stay behind his desk? I don’t want to see his legs. I thought all those Public Works people ended at the waist.”

“He’s on our stretch,” said Lev. “Tell him to move downriver.”

He stared at Rivas. He wore a cumbersome coat, a kind of padded oilskin, and this made his movements awkward.

“Look at him,” said Rudi. “Look at his pathetic casting. Where’s he ever fished before? In the public drinking fountain?”

Their laughter pealed out across the water and Rivas raised his head and Lev saw on his face an expression of pure spite. So they stopped laughing and Lev said, “Let’s go farther upriver.”

They wound in their lines, began to load up their fishing gear and their bag of grayling, and then they saw that Procurator Rivas had hooked a fish and was trying to land it. His rod was bent in a frightening arc, as though it would snap at any minute, and he was breathing hard, struggling to wind in the fish, which pulled him farther and farther toward the water. He waded in up to his groin. His face was sweating. Then he let go of the rod and reached down into the river and lifted out the head and shoulders of Marina.

Marina was naked, and her body was gray and slippery, like the bodies of the grayling. Her hair trailed on the shimmering surface of the water. Procurator Rivas tried to gather the slippery, gray-blue body to him, so that Marina’s head rested on his shoulder and her breasts sank against his barrel chest in the oilskin coat. He kissed her forehead, called her name: “Marina. Marina.” But she was a dead weight in his arms.

“That’s ridiculous,” said Rudi. “Why can’t he see she’s been dead a long time? What an idiot. Why can’t he fucking
see
it?”

Lev woke and it was dark in the room. A voice was saying his name. With the nightmare still filling his mind, he turned his head and saw Christy bending over him.

“Lev,” he said. “I just got in, fella. Didn’t you oughta be at work?”

Lev hurled himself up in the bed, slamming his head against the bottom of the upper bunk. “What time is it? What time is it?”

“Well,” said Christy, “it’s after nine.”

Nine?
How could it be nine? How in the world could it be nine o’clock?

“Nine, nighttime?”

“Yes. Or perhaps you got the night off, did yer?”

Lev switched on his light, rubbed his head. “Oh God . . .” he said. “Did G.K. call?”

“Haven’t checked the voicemail yet. Shall I do that now?”

Christy went to the living room. Lev grabbed his mobile and stared at the screen. No indication of a missed call. He dialed 901 and was told he had one saved message. Before he could switch this off, he heard Sophie’s voice—from weeks ago—saying, “
Hi, sexy. Hope you can still move. Are all the guys in your country as wicked as you?
”

Lev deleted the message, slammed down his phone, began to tug on clean clothes.

Nine o’clock.

He was
five hours
late! The service would be coming up to full pitch. But everything would be slow, fatally slow, because the chefs would have had to do their own veg prep and G.K. would be going crazy . . .

“No messages,” said Christy, at the door. “Only one from you, saying you had a problem, like. What was the —”

“No time, Christy. Tell you later. Lost my wallet. Can you lend me some bus money?”

“Sure,” said Christy, rummaging in his trouser pocket. “Full of cash, I am. Went out to Palmers bloody Green to fix a boiler. Took me all day, but it was worth it. Indian woman. Wearing a sari with all the trimmings. Disconcertingly beautiful, I found it. And she smelled delicious—sort of like bread sauce, you know? Her boiler should have been junked in about 1991, but I got it going. Jasmina, her name was.
Jas-meena.
She was so grateful she hung money on me, like on a bride.”

“Good, Christy. Good.”

“
Jas-meena
. Now I can get that Spider-Woman outfit Frankie wants.”

Lev arrived at GK Ashe at ten minutes to ten.

He entered the kitchen, tugging on his whites. G.K. whirled round and stared at him. Held high in his hand was an egg whisk, which began to drop cloudlets of beaten egg white onto the floor.

“Chef . . .” stammered Lev, “. . . I’m so sorry. I fell asleep. Please forgive me. Will never happen again . . .”

Lev saw G.K. look toward Sophie, who was engaged in some elaborate flambé. She didn’t glance at Lev, or at G.K.

“So what’s fucking going on?” said G.K.

“My fault, Chef,” said Lev. “I promise you, will never happen . . .”

G.K. looked at his watch. More blobs of egg white dripped from the whisk. Then he said, “It’s nearly ten o’clock. Do you imagine we’ve sat around waiting for
six hours
for you to depith a marrow? You can take those whites off. And go home, as far as I’m concerned. We’ve done your work for you.”

Lev looked helplessly around. Sophie now had her back to him, ostentatiously turned, the familiar sweet curve of her, with her arms moist in the kitchen heat.

“You didn’t call me, Chef. Why you or Damian didn’t call?”

“I’m not a fucking alarm service! I expect my staff to get to work without needing to be
woken up
. Now go home.”

“No, Chef . . . I help Vitas with the wash —”

“Vitas? He’s history. Gone to pick cabbages in East Anglia. Got a new nurse from Bongoland or somewhere. Hey, Nurse, where did you say you were from?”

“Niger, Chef.”

“That’s it. Pronounced
Nee-shair.
Unused to so much water. Rains unreliable there. But he’s doing okay. So leave him be, Lev. Just get in here tomorrow at three thirty and see me, right?”

“Please, Chef. Let me do some work.”

“No. I told you. We
did
your work. You’re superfluous. Go home.”

G.K. turned back to his egg whisking. Lev stared at Sophie, paralyzed. She was now plating up her flambéed duck breasts, head bent low over her task. By each duck breast lay a julienne of carrots and zucchini. He watched her spoon juniper berries from the flambé pan and arrange them on the golden skin of the duck. She lifted the plates onto the hot counter. “Table four!” she called, and turned away.

Lev took off his whites and hung them up. He saw the boy from Niger turn and stare at him. He walked out of the kitchen and stood by Damian’s bar, from where he could see into the restaurant. It was the usual Monday “clientele lite,” but at the far end, among a group of six or seven, with Damian fussing over them, he saw what he had expected to find: the big, gloating face of Howie Preece.

16

Exeunt All but Hamlet

“IF PEOPLE DO lovely work and get paid a royal ransom for it, I’m fine with that,” said Christy Slane, “but look at this. Reminds me of the stuff they used to make with milk-bottle tops on Blue Peter.”

Christy pushed a copy of a weekend color magazine across the table where they sat, drinking tea. It was late.

Up Belisha Road came the sound of a posse of drunk youths kicking their way homeward round the rowan trees and through the litter. Lev read the headline:
PREECE WRAPS IT UP
. Underneath there was a photograph of a curved white panel into which had been inserted hundreds of lightbulbs. Lev stared at it. Then his eye moved down to the caption:

Bubblewrap
by Howie Preece, one of six new works on show at the Van de Merwe gallery. Preece employed two studio assistants to assemble this complex asymmetrical construction out of epoxy resin and 60-watt bulbs.

“Its fluid shape,” comments Nicholas van de Merwe, “suggests a cunning absence of rigidity. Preece’s explorations of the way one object, by mimetic appropriation, gives new meaning to another confirm him as one of the most interesting artists working in Britain today.”

“See what I mean?” said Christy. “Frankie could’ve made that. Feckin’ lightbulbs!”

“Preece didn’t even make it,” said Lev. “Studio assistants made it.”

“Well. And that gets on a man’s tits, doesn’t it? Won’t get his fingernails dirty. Won’t put in the hours.”

Lev turned the page of the magazine, saw a photograph of another work by Howie Preece, entitled
Wimbledon
. At first glance, it looked like a square of bright green turf, striped by the heavy roller of the lawnmower. He read the caption.

Arduous hours went into the making of
Wimbledon,
assembled with more than eleven thousand one-inch nails. Preece comments: Nails present as a powerful signifier for the lawn tennis championships. What you have here is lethal grass.

Lethal grass. Lev ran his fingers over the photograph. Had to admit there was an illusion of softness in it, even a kind of silky shine, such as a lawn wears after a night of dew. He turned the magazine round and showed it to Christy. “This one is better,” he said, “maybe quite clever . . .”

Christy glanced at
Wimbledon
as he sipped his tea, and a drip from his cup fell onto the picture. He blotted it with his thin, scabbed hand. “What’s with Preece and Wimbledon?” he said. “He used tennis balls to make that DNA piece of shite. My guess is the man can’t master his top spin.”

With the tea, Lev and Christy were eating chocolate digestive biscuits. They took one biscuit after another till the plate was empty. Then they stared at the plate. “I think that’s it,” said Christy. “I think we finished the packet. Got it from me ma, love of those. She used to be munching chocolate digestives in the dead of night. Said to me, ‘Life’s taken away me appetite, Christy, so it has. But somehow, I can still swallow those.’ ”

“Yes? They’re nice and soft, that’s why.”

“Comforting, they are, I suppose. Crumble to mush in yer mouth. But there was always mice in that house, scuttling round after the cookie crumbs. And she wouldn’t set traps. Said there was too much cruelty in the world without her adding to it. Alley cats used to creep in the back door, sniffin’ the vermin, but me ma would shoo them away. It was how she was.”

“When did she die, Christy?”

“Long ago. She wasn’t even fifty. Just ate her biscuits and closed her eyes . . .”

Though Lev was tired, he didn’t want to move from the table. To lie in his bunk and be haunted by all that had happened in the last twenty-four hours: the mere thought of this made him feel empty, lost. “Tell me more about your ma,” he said.

Christy rubbed his eyes. “Well,” he said, “what can I tell you? She was the daughter of a pig man in County Limerick. Know where that is?”