‘Yes,’ said Frieda, looking
beyond him at the list of food and prices on the wall. ‘Can I have a green salad?
And a bottle of water.’
‘Salad,’ the man shouted. He
leaned down and took a plastic bottle from a fridge. He placed it on the counter.
‘Anything else?’
‘That’s fine,’ said
Frieda, handing over a five-pound note.
The man slid the change across the counter.
‘The salad’ll be a minute,’ he said.
Frieda took the flyer and put it on the
counter. ‘I got your flyer,’ she said.
‘Yeah?’ said the man.
Frieda had worried about this. All it would
take was one wrong question, one that made it sound as if she was from the council or
the VAT office and they’d clam up and that would be that.
‘I wanted to ask you,’ she said.
‘I was going to get some flyers done myself. I’ve got a little business. I
thought I could print some up like you’ve done, get some publicity.’
The phone rang. The man picked it up and
took another order.
‘What I was
saying,’ Frieda continued, when he was done, ‘was that I was interested in
getting flyers like that. I wondered where you got them done.’
‘There’s a printer along the
road,’ said the man. ‘They done us a few hundred.’
‘And then what happens? Do they
deliver them for you?’
‘They just print them up. My cousin
dropped them off.’
‘You mean he pushed them through
doors?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Do you know where he did it?’
asked Frieda.
The man shrugged. Frieda felt a sense of
hopelessness, as if she were trying to grab something and it was slipping through her
fingers.
‘I’m just curious,’ she
said. She took the
A–Z
from her bag and fumbled for the right page. ‘You
see, I’d probably end up delivering them myself, so I wanted to know how big an
area you could cover. Could you just show me on the map where he went? Or did he just
wander wherever he wanted?’
She pushed the map across the counter
towards him. A sound came from behind him and a polystyrene container appeared in the
gap. The man took the salad and gave it to Frieda. There was chopped cabbage and carrot
and onion and a slice of tomato, with a swirl of pink liquid across it. ‘Thank
you,’ she said. ‘About this map.’
The man sighed. He leaned down and put his
forefinger on the page. ‘I told him to go along Acre Lane and do all the streets
along it on that side.’
‘Which streets?’
The man circled his finger around.
‘All those,’ he said. ‘Until he ran out.’
It looked like a lot of streets.
‘And there were three
hundred?’
‘Five, I think. We’ve got a pile
in the shop.’
‘And this was about
a fortnight ago?’
The man looked puzzled. ‘What do you
mean?’
‘I wondered how well it worked,’
said Frieda. ‘Whether it made lots of people ring up for pizza.’
‘I don’t know,’ said the
man. ‘A few, maybe.’
‘All right. Thanks for your
help.’ She turned to go.
‘Hang on. You forgot your
salad.’
‘Yes, right.’
She walked out of the shop and, feeling
guilty, waited until she was thirty or forty yards away, well out of sight, before she
crammed the salad container into an overflowing bin.
As she sat on the underground train,
returning north, she looked at the back of the flyer once more, though she knew the
words by heart. It was laid out like a shopping list. String. Straw. Cord. Stone. Why
would you buy those? What would you use them for? Why would you need to buy both string
and cord? Were they actually different in some technical DIY sense that she didn’t
recognize? Was there a job that string couldn’t do for which you needed cord? It
sounded like something outdoors, unless this had a medieval theme. Weren’t
Elizabethan taverns scattered with straw? Or perhaps it was a drinking straw. Frieda
stared at the list until her head hurt. When she came out of Warren Street station she
kept going over and over it. Was she missing an obvious connection? She played mental
games. You could tie straw with string. Or a cord. What about the stone? She thought of
David and Goliath, except that that was a sling and a stone.
What would you do with those four things?
Who might know? One name came straight into her mind. She couldn’t meet him but
she could phone him; in fact, she should have phoned him long ago, just so that he knew
she was thinking of him. As soon as she came into her house, she flicked through the
leather-bound notebook she kept by the phone.
She found the number and
dialled. It rang and rang, and she was preparing to leave a message when there was a
click.
‘Frieda,’ said the voice.
‘Yes, Josef. Hello! It’s good to
hear your voice after all this time. How are you? Are you doing all right there? We miss
you.’
‘How am I?’ he said. ‘That
is a big question. I don’t know the answer.’
‘Has something happened,
Josef?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Frieda, how
are you? How are things with you?’
‘Just the same,’ she said.
‘On the whole. But I want to hear about you. I should have called. I’m sorry
I didn’t.’
‘That is OK,’ he said.
‘Life is busy for all. Many things happen, things that do not do well on the
phone.’
‘I keep looking at the weather,’
Frieda said. ‘Whenever I get the chance, I check the weather in Kiev. That’s
you, isn’t it? The last time I saw, it was minus twenty-nine. I hope you’re
wrapping up warm.’
There was a long silence, followed by a
strange sort of moan.
‘Are you all right?’ asked
Frieda. ‘Are you still there?’
‘Frieda, I am not in Kiev at the
moment.’
‘Oh. Where are you?’
He said something she couldn’t make
out.
‘Sorry? Is that somewhere in the
countryside?’
He said the name again.
‘Can you speak more slowly?’
He said the three syllables one by one.
‘Summertown?’ said Frieda.
‘You mean, like Summertown in London?’
‘Yes,’ said Josef. ‘Not
like. The Summertown in London. That one.’
It was several seconds
before Frieda could speak coherently. ‘You’re … you’re only
about five hundred yards away.’
‘It is possible.’
‘What the hell are you doing
here?’
‘I have been in
complications.’
‘I need to see you.’
‘No good.’
‘I’m your friend,
remember?’ Frieda said. ‘Come to my house. Right now.’
Frieda hadn’t seen Josef for nearly
two months. The last occasion had been shortly before Christmas when, in memory of the
previous Christmas they had spent together, he had made some traditional Ukrainian food
and carried it to her house, wrapped in white linen and placed inside a ribboned box, as
a parting gift: little cakes made of wheat, honey and poppy seeds. She remembered him as
he had been then, beaming with pride, expansive with generosity and full of solemn
excitement. After many months of absence, he was returning to his country to visit his
wife Vera and his two sons. His usually shaggy hair was cut short and he wore a new
quilted jacket for the cold Ukrainian winter. He had bought his sons T-shirts saying
‘I love London’, small Union flags and snow domes with miniature London
scenes inside.
It was a very different Josef who came to
her door now. His hair was long, dirty and full of dust; he had the beginnings of a
beard that looked like the unintended result of not bothering to shave. He was wearing
an old pair of canvas trousers, held up with a plastic belt, and a thick jersey. Over it
was that quilted jacket, but it was torn and filthy. His boots were cracked. His hands
were chapped and blistered. There was a fading bruise on his neck and a plaster across
his grimy forehead. Above all, his face was slack, his eyes were dull and he
wouldn’t meet Frieda’s gaze: he stood in the doorway, twisting his woollen
hat between his hands and shifting from foot to foot.
Frieda took his hand and pulled him into the
hall, shutting the door behind them. She caught a thick whiff of body odour,
tobacco and alcohol. She pulled off his jacket and hung it next to
her coat. There were holes in the elbows of his jersey.
‘Do you want to take your shoes
off,’ she said. ‘Then we can go through and sit down.’
‘I not stay.’
His English seemed to have deteriorated in
the short time that he had been away.
‘I’ll make you tea.’
‘No tea.’
‘How long have you been back,
Josef?’
He held up his palms in a familiar gesture.
‘Some weeks.’
‘Why didn’t you say?’
Josef’s eyes lifted to her face then
dropped again.
‘All your things are at
Reuben’s. Your van’s there. Where have you been staying?’
‘Now? On site. In house that must be
built. Is cold. But is roof.’
Frieda considered him. His entire body spoke
of misery and defeat. ‘I want you to tell me what happened,’ she said
gently. ‘But don’t worry – you don’t have to do it all at once.
Whenever you’re ready, I’m here. I’m glad you’re back. So will
Reuben be. His house needs you. And I need you.’
‘You only say.’
‘No, it’s true.’
‘I have no uses.’
‘Here’s the plan. I’m
going to call Reuben and you’re staying there tonight. He has things wrong in his
house. You can mend them. When you feel like it, you can tell me – or him – what’s
happened. In the meantime, you’re going to sit in my kitchen, drink tea, and I
have a question for you.’
Josef’s brown eyes stared at her for a
moment. ‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why you help me? I am bad man,
Frieda. Bad, sad man.’
Frieda put a hand under
his elbow and steered him into the kitchen. She pulled out a chair and he lowered his
body into it. She boiled the kettle and, while the tea was brewing, toasted two pieces
of bread for him, which she spread with butter and honey. ‘There. Get that down
you.’
He took a hot gulp of tea and his eyes
watered. He picked up a piece of toast and she saw how his hand trembled.
‘Now. I need you to help me.’
She put the flyer in front of him, face down, and pointed to the letters. ‘If you
had to guess, what do those letters mean?’
Josef put his toast back on the plate,
dragged his sleeve across his mouth, and peered at the words. ‘String, straw,
cord, stone.’
‘They’re things you could use in
building. But why string and cord together? Karlsson said strawberry planting, but I
don’t think so. He wasn’t giving it serious attention.’
‘Is easy.’
‘What?’
‘Is easy,’ repeated Josef. For
the first time, his eyes looked brighter.
‘So?’
‘Is paint.’
‘Paint?’
‘Names of paint. Gloom colours – like
colours in your working room. Pale, dim colours. String, straw, cord and stone.
So.’
‘Oh,’ said Frieda. ‘Josef,
you’re brilliant.’
‘I?’
‘What about those letters: C, SB,
WL.’
‘Is easy,’ Josef said again. For
a brief moment he sounded almost happy. He pointed a finger upwards: ‘C is
ceiling.’ His finger moved like the hand on a clock. ‘WL is left wall.
And …’ His finger moved down.
‘Skirting
board,’ supplied Frieda. ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’
‘You are doctor, not
builder.’
‘So someone was having their house
painted.’ She looked at her watch. It was nearly half past four. ‘If we go
now, we might get there before five. Will you come with me on an errand?’ He
didn’t reply at once, so she added, ‘I
need
you to help me, Josef.
Like you did before.’
It was beginning to get dark and the rain
was turning to hail. Frieda thought that Josef looked like a large, helpless child as he
trudged along the streets, his hat pulled low over his head and his hands thrust deep
into the pockets of his shabby trousers. She had called Reuben and told him that she and
Josef would be there in the evening and he should make up the bed and perhaps put some
baked potatoes into the oven.
‘Why we look?’ Josef asked
now.
‘I’m trying to find someone.
It’s a bit of a long story and I’ll tell you later.’
‘So how we look for walls of stone and
straw?’
‘We can’t knock at every door of
every house. But I thought if we see any external signs of building work we can knock at
that door.’
‘So you take this road and I take
that.’ Josef held up his phone. ‘I call you, you call me.’
Frieda was glad of these signs of
engagement. She nodded, and they set off in different directions, met at the top of the
streets without progress, and separated once more down another pair of parallel streets
that led off from the high street and that Andy’s Pizzas flyers had apparently
been delivered to.
Frieda was two thirds of the way along Tully
Road when her mobile rang. ‘Josef?’
‘“Painting and Decorating, No
Job Too Small”. Van here by
me now, one tyre looks flat. Outside
thirty-three Owens Close.’
‘Don’t move. I’ll be
there.’
But there were no lights on in Owens Close
and no one answered when Frieda rang the bell. She tried thirty-one, stood back from the
door and waited. She heard footsteps and the door opened. A young man with a shaved
scalp stuck his head out. She saw he was wearing a suit, and had a phone in his hand.
‘Yes?’
‘I’m sorry for bothering
you,’ she said, conscious of Josef hovering on the street behind her, ‘but I
was hoping you could help me. Do you happen to have decorators with you?’
‘Yeah. Hang on, let me just finish
this call. Sorry, Cas, I’ll call back, OK? There. Sorry, decorators. Yes. Doing us
top to bottom. They’re in the front room at the moment, I think they’re just
finishing up for the day. But why do you want to know? Do you live nearby? Want a bit of
painting done, maybe, because if so I can’t honestly say I’d recommend
–’
‘No. It’s hard to explain.
I’m looking for someone and I think you can perhaps help me.’