East Fortune (4 page)

‘Yes…'

‘Was it clear? That he wanted to do this?'

Jack remembered the night again.

‘It seemed so. But I keep thinking I should have swerved.'

‘He would have done the same,' said Krystyna. ‘Like in football. They go the same way. Sandy did it in the streets all the time. It was always an accident. But he kept doing it. If someone was walking towards him and stepped out of his way, Sandy would move in the same direction. It was so confusing.'

Jack wanted to ask how long Krystyna had known him and if she had seen the body. He could not picture what the undertakers might have done to such a battered head, or to the chest, to make the corpse look at rest. He remembered the policewoman telling him that Sandy had died, and that no one since then had used the word ‘dead'. He had ‘gone', or ‘passed over', he was ‘no longer with them'. But he didn't seem to be dead.

‘You were brave,' Jack said. ‘In the service.'

‘You saw me?'

‘I didn't mean to stare. I thought you might have been his sister.'

‘No.' Krystyna smiled. ‘He did not have a sister…'

‘Yes. The police told me. I remember now. I'm sorry.'

‘I could feel people were looking at me the whole time. I did not know what to do.'

‘I suppose you just have to get through it,' said Jack. ‘You cannot do anything else.'

‘Yes, it is like that.'

‘I am very sorry.'

‘We should have known,' said Krystyna. ‘All of us. We should have stopped it happening. We didn't have enough patience. None of us did.'

‘You mustn't be hard on yourself.'

‘No,' said Krystyna. ‘That is where you are wrong, I must be hard on myself.'

‘I understand,' said Jack.

‘Really?' Krystyna's tone was brittle, as if she was ungrateful for Jack's sympathy. ‘I do not think you do,' she said. ‘I do not think you can understand at all.'

Jack stepped away, preparing to leave.

‘I'm sorry.'

Krystyna leaned forward, swaying slightly. For a second Jack thought she was about to faint. He wondered if he was going to have to catch her, explain what had happened, be responsible once more.

Krystyna held up her hand, apologising with her body before she said any words.

‘I am sorry. That was not polite. I did not mean to be rude. I only mean that we cannot understand what it is like for each other. I cannot understand what it is like for you.'

‘You can imagine.'

‘I can try to imagine. It must have been horrible. To drive that car; for all of this to happen.'

‘I keep remembering it,' Jack said, ‘and then I keep trying to forget it. Perhaps it is the same with you.'

‘Yes, sometimes…'

‘I cannot know,' Jack said. ‘Neither of us can. I cannot know what it has been like for you at all.'

‘No. Perhaps we are the same.'

‘We try to understand…'

‘And then we understand that we cannot understand,' said Krystyna. ‘I'm sorry, I must go. I must see other people.'

Krystyna walked away. Jack looked at her and beyond her; at the sawflies on the roses and at the haar drifting in from the sea.

He knew that it was ridiculous to want to see her again. He tried to tell himself that he should forget Krystyna altogether, but he wandered round the Polish areas of Edinburgh, hoping that it would seem accidental if they met.

He looked at buses pulling away, crowded with people starting or finishing their days, men and women who simply got on with the sheer business of living.

Jack wished he could feel part of it all but how was he supposed to stop thinking about the night, the boy in the road and the light rain falling?

He looked in Polish cafés, delis and restaurants. He tried to keep on the move, maintaining the illusion of knowing where he was going. He realised that it might take weeks to find Krystyna.

He finally saw her in a queue for a bus at the top of Easter Road. She was with a group of friends but stepped away as soon as she saw him.

‘It is you,' she said.

Jack asked Krystyna if they could talk. They might both find it helpful, he said. He wasn't sure. But he thought he should offer. He wanted to do something to acknowledge what had happened. He realised that, because of his nervousness, he was saying too much, speaking too fast. Perhaps they could go for a drink.

‘I am not sure this is a good plan. I am not sure it would be good for us to talk about it.'

‘I keep thinking about it,' Jack said, avoiding the truth of
I keep thinking about you.

She looked at him and he thought that he could detect pity.

‘All right,' she said, ‘if it is polite…'

‘You don't have to.'

‘I could maybe see you Thursday. If you like.'

They met in a pub on Leith Walk. A group of students were discussing what they took to be some of the great mysteries of life: why twenty-four-hour shops had locks on their doors when they were open all the time, what was the best thing before sliced bread, and how did Danish pastries, English muffins, French fries and Scotch eggs come to be named?

Jack asked for a vodka and tonic and a pint of lager. He knew that he was too old for all this. Even when he was at his smartest, in slimming black, his older daughter told him that he looked like a minister who had seen better days.

Krystyna had found a table in the garden under a large green umbrella. A barbecue was starting up. Jack remembered when they had last had one at home. Annie's friends had come round and used a vocabulary that he could only partly understand. They told stories about their racist grandparents counting the number of black television presenters and used incomprehensible phrases such as ‘buff', ‘scran', ‘bang-off' and ‘allow that!'.

A group of Krystyna's friends called over –
‘Cz
ś
ć
!'

‘Would you like to join them?' Jack asked.

‘I do not think so.'

‘I hope you're not embarrassed to be seen with me.'

‘They probably think you are a friend of my father.'

Best get that out of the way, Jack thought.

‘Don't look so worried,' Krystyna said.

‘I'm sorry,'Jack said. ‘I don't normally do this. I tend to avoid my students.'

‘I am not a student. It is fine.'

Jack could see that Krystyna was being brave, putting in her defences, lest he ask her too many direct questions.

‘Thank you for seeing me,' he said.

Krystyna lit a cigarette.

‘I do not know what you want.'

‘To talk…'

‘What do you want to speak about?'

‘It's hard.'

‘Of course it is hard.'

‘There is so much to say but I cannot sort out my thoughts,'Jack said.

‘You are worried about asking too much?'

‘Yes, that's right.'

‘It's OK.'

‘I'm not sure that it is.'

Jack wanted to know how much Krystyna blamed him for what had happened. Perhaps another driver would have avoided Sandy, or only wounded him.

‘Do you think about it all the time?' he asked.

‘Of course.' Krystyna took a sip of her drink.

Jack wondered if she was hoping that the action alone would fill the silence.

All he wanted was to find out if she thought as he did; that they had been involved in an event that no one else could understand. They were responsible and yet they were also victims; forced to stop their lives without knowing how they could recover or continue.

‘Normally I know what to say,' said Jack, ‘but I can't find the right words at all.'

‘We have time,' said Krystyna.

‘I hope so.'

Jack noticed the birthmark on the inside of her upper arm, just above her left elbow. It was like a splash of dark-brown paint or a smear of chocolate. On her engagement finger was an amber ring.

‘Do you have enough people to talk to?' he asked. ‘About what happened?'

‘I have friends. They are mostly Polish. I know I have to be strong.'

‘What about your family?'

‘My mother is dead. I have not told my father. He is too far away. He did not know about Sandy.
Jednakze,
he does not like failure.'

‘It's not failure.'

She pushed away a strand of her hair.

‘I see Allan: his brother. Other people do their best but I think they are a little bit embarrassed. Why did you want me to come here?'

‘To see if there was anything I could do to help.'

‘To understand?' she asked.

‘I don't know. Perhaps one can never understand these things. Was there any warning?'

‘So many. But I did not believe Sandy.'

‘You can't blame yourself.'

‘I can. Trust me.'

‘Then I'm sorry,' said Jack.

Krystyna began to tell her story.

‘Before, Sandy came to see me all the time. He did not stop. Even when I asked him. He said he wanted to check that I was real, that I had a place in the world, and that he was not making me up. If he could see me then he knew that I was real.

‘“Sometimes,” he told me, “I am not sure we are alive at all.”

‘He said it was like being in a coma or a dream, because he could not do anything about the world. Nothing he did made any difference. It did not matter what he said or did. The world ignored him.

‘I did not know what to do. Then the policewoman came with a note in her hands. I saw Sandy's writing and a strange word I did not know,
weary – even the weariest river finds somewhere safe to sea.
I did not understand what he meant.'

‘I wanted to go to the inquest,' said Jack. ‘But it didn't seem right.'

‘The policewoman gave me the note. “We will need you at the hospital,” she said. “When you've had a moment.” I did not know
what she meant when she said “moment”. What is a moment? How long is a “moment”? The last time I had been in a hospital was when my mother died. Then she said, “You might like to bring a friend.”

‘I did not know who to call or what to do. I do not know how you do things in this country. I had no idea. So I called his brother.'

Jack remembered Allan in the middle of the wake, drinking from a can of beer with a girlfriend in a silver dress. His suit had looked too small for him.

Krystyna was still speaking.

‘He had this blackness, Sandy kept telling me. It was always there, over his shoulder, behind him. He said he sometimes felt he was being followed by his own illness. The only way he could stop it was to lie down. I could not understand. “You can't be followed if you're lying down,” he said.

‘Then I was in hospital myself, lying down, next to his body. I kept my eyes open and on the light in the ceiling. I was thinking that I was going to be there for ever, everything had stopped, and there was no escape from anything. Just the end. And melancholy – is that the right word?'

‘Grief.'

‘Ah yes, grief.'

‘I'm sorry,' Jack said. ‘I didn't mean to go into all this.'

‘I think you did.'

Krystyna looked down at her empty glass and lit another cigarette. Jack offered her a second drink and returned to the darkness of the bar. The students waiting in front of him were talking about great nights out, the end of exams, weekends away in Dublin.

‘You must not be upset with yourself,' Krystyna said when he returned. ‘It was an accident. Nobody blames you, I promise.'

‘I know … well … no … I don't know.'

‘You were in the wrong place. That is all. It cannot be your fault.'

‘I can't help thinking about it. I worry you'll blame me, that you are angry with me, that you think I could have avoided him.'

‘I don't. I am angry with Sandy. I am angry with myself. I do not have any anger left for you.'

‘Can you think about anything else?'

‘We cannot help what we think.'

‘I'd like to see you again,' Jack said.

Krystyna was surprised; almost amused.

‘Why?'

‘If you need help; or if you want to talk to someone.'

‘To jest los
…'

‘I'm sorry?'

‘It is fate.'

‘What will you do now?'

‘Go on. What else can I do?'

‘I thought you might like to go home – have some time away?'

‘I don't know what “home” is any more. If I have a home it is here.' Krystyna stood up. ‘I am sorry. I have not been polite.' Then she stopped, opened her bag and tore a page out of a notebook. ‘Here is my phone number. In case you want it. I must go now. I have to work.'

She held out her hand so that Jack could shake it: a formal farewell.

‘It was nice to meet you,' she said, speaking as if it was a phrase she was remembering from her first English lesson. ‘I hope we meet again.'