One of Us (3 page)

Everyone in the room had fallen quiet. He stared at me for a moment. His eyes were very pale blue, watery as if they stung.

“Who is she?” he said. He spoke in English, but he was a long way from home.

“She works for me,” Corgan said. “My new doctor.”

The man had not stopped staring at me.

“Is she one of us?”

Corgan was about to say something, then he thought better of it. “Anna, go and wait down by the front door. Paul, go with her, make sure she stays there.”

I would have said something, told Corgan that I was doing the job for him that I was meant to do, and that he could go and look for another doctor if I was not good enough, but I did not. I was scared of the small grey man with the watery eyes, because I saw the way that Corgan had swallowed when the small man came in the room, the way that Corgan had stared at me hard, sending a message. Shut your mouth. Say nothing.

I turned to walk out, but the small man put a hand out and touched my arm. I stopped where I was, not looking at him, just looking at the door. It seemed a very long way away.

“What do you know of what happened to this man?” he asked. There was silence in the rest of the room.

“He was shot in the upper arm,” I said. “There was tissue damage but the bullet passed through the flesh and there were no fragments left in the wound. I think he might have some nerve damage but there are exercises he can do to regain proper use of his arm.”

“That is not the question I asked,” he said.

“It is the only question I have the answer to,” I said.

He kept his hand on my arm for a long time. Then he took it away. I walked out of the room, and started to breath again. Paul followed me down the stairs, to make sure I did not do anything stupid. What, I do not know. I went out of the front door and sat on the little wall outside the house.

Paul lit a cigarette. Then he pulled the packet out of his pocket and offered one to me. I just gave him a look.

“Yeah, I know,” he said. “But I’ve known plenty of doctors who’ve liked a smoke and a drink.”

“You’ll know a few less each year.”

“Christ, you sound like my wife.”

I was not sure whether that was an insult to her or to me.

“Three guesses who that belongs to,” he said, and nodded to a black car parked further down the street, a man who could have been the twin of the circus weightlifter leaning against the side, watching us watching him.

“Who is that man upstairs?”

Paul shook his head. “You don’t want to know.”

“I would not have asked if I did not want to know,” I said. “Corgan looked scared of him.”

“Corgan?” Paul said. “He’s not scared of anyone.” But he took too many drags on his cigarette, fidgeted his feet too much, and I knew that he was lying.

“Tell me,” I said. “If I am to be questioned like that I have a right to know who is doing it.”

Paul blew out a stream of smoke. “No fucker can say his name, so everyone calls him the Ukrainian. And ’cause he is, yeah?”

I made a face: do I look like someone who needs that explaining?

“Uh, yeah. Anyway, he’s the man Corgan answers to. Bad fucker he is. If you have any luck you’ll never see him again, and if you have to, if you got any sense you’ll look at the floor and only speak when you’re spoken to. This is the man who runs our whole fucking operation, you know, and Christ knows how many others like it elsewhere, you can just imagine the sort of things he’s done to get to where he is. Or does to stay there.”

“And this operation is?”

Paul looked at me, down the street at the big, black car, and then back at me. “Be a love. Shut the fuck up. Don’t ask any questions, and hand out the aspirin when you’re asked to. It’s good advice, trust me on that.”

A few minutes later the Ukrainian and his bodyguard came out of the house and walked past. Paul straightened up and sucked in his beer belly, as if he was a soldier being inspected at parade time. The Ukrainian ignored him, but stopped at me. Again there was a long stare before he spoke.

“Where you from?” he said.

“Vladikavkaz,” I said.

“Why you here?”

“Bad choices,” I said.

He stood and looked at me for a moment, and then turned and walked off towards his car. His driver already had the door open. A few minutes after they had driven away, Corgan came out of the house with the man he called Nicky.

“Drive her home,” he said to Paul. Then he turned to me. “You never saw him.”

“I never saw him,” I repeated, like a robot.

“If you see him again, you know nothing about anything. All you know is you heard us say that Kav was shot by some kid who wanted to deal where we didn’t want him to be dealing.”

“That’s what I have heard,” I said. “I remember it. Some kid.”

“Good girl,” Corgan said. He looked very tired. “Now go home.”

~

At my next visit, I was told to sit in a chair against the wall, and I did so, scared of what was about to happen. Another man came into the room, and he told me to relax, and look happy, but don’t smile, even though I would be so much prettier if I smiled, and he took some photographs of me with a Polaroid camera and then he left.

When I told Kav that I would not need to come back any more, he grinned, blew smoke out of his nose, and shook my hand. “You’re a diamond, pet. Just what I needed. Whenever I touch the scar, I’ll think of you. You can nurse me any time.” He grinned again, and I thought to myself: I am a whore.

I asked how I could get in touch with Corgan for my payment and he just laughed and said, “You don’t, love. He’ll find you. Just relax and wait. Chill.”

So I waited, and still I worked for Peter and still I ate the leftover food, and saved up my money. I had not told Sean what I was doing, but he knew that something was going on, all the same. He would ask me how I was, whether everything was all right, and he would hold my gaze for just a moment or two longer than was needed. Sean was never very good at looking anyone in the eye, so I guessed that this was his way of letting me know that he was concerned, without putting me under any pressure. Or perhaps, without getting himself too involved.

One night, we were clearing up after the place had closed. It had not been busy. Pete was in the back, in the cupboard that he called his office. He often disappeared into there and said that he was doing the accounts, but Sean and I knew that he was reading the racing paper, or dozing for twenty minutes, looking at girlie magazines that he kept in the filing cabinet or just sitting back and breaking wind long and loud when he thought that we could not hear.

I was wiping down the counters, and Sean was pushing a mop around the floor, chasing some spilt shreds of onion that had escaped the sweeping brush. Everywhere smelt of bleach. My feet hurt, and my lower back felt as if someone had been kicking me there. The streets outside had emptied, apart from the occasional drunks who still had not found their way home. Every so often, one would bang on the glass, but we just ignored them. The doors were locked, and the sign said closed, and if we started to talk to them through the glass they would never go away. So we pretended not to see them, and then they went away after a while. Sometimes a homeless man came and slept in our doorway. We never disturbed him, and we turned the front light off so that Peter would not see him. But once, I went back because I thought I had forgotten to turn the light off, and I saw Peter opening the front door, and handing the man a bag of food. I crept back through the kitchens, and did not say a word.

“Anna,” Sean said, whipping the mop around in great circles, as if he was fighting something off. “I heard something the other day. Sorry, probably out of order telling you this, I’m not trying to pry into your situation.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. Sometimes Sean got caught up in apologising for his apologies. I wiped grease and smears of sauce from the counter.

“My landlord, he owns a few properties.” He kept his eyes on the floor, following the sweep of the mop. “And he was talking, the other day. He said there were going to be some vacancies in some of his flats. And I didn’t really say much, you know, I was just trying to ask him to fix my window because when it rains and the wind’s in one direction, the water comes in, and he’s one of these blokes that if he gets started on something, he’ll stand there for an hour boring you to death. Sorry, getting off the point.” He put the mop into the bucket, swirled it around, then slapped it back onto the floor.

“Anyway, he goes on, says he knows there’s going to be these vacancies because his girlfriend—well, her sister—she works for the Borders Agency. And she says there’s a right panic on, quotas and targets to meet, or something, they’ve been told to get their numbers up or else. So they’re doing a whole bunch of raids, rounding up overstayers, asylum seekers who’ve got all the way through the appeals process but not gone, that sort of thing. My landlord, all he’s bothered about is filling the vacancies so he doesn’t lose any money, he couldn’t give a toss. But you know, I don’t, I don’t know your, uh, your status. You know. So I thought I ought to warn you that stuff’s going on. In case. I’m not trying to say—”

“Thank you Sean,” I said, before the apologising started again. “I appreciate that. But I think I may be OK, I hope.” I dropped the cloth back into a plastic white tub of bleach and water, and wiped the counter dry with a paper towel so that it did not smear.

“Cool, you mean they’ve made you legal? You got your refugee status? Oh Anna, you should have said.” He did a little dance, with the mop as his partner, whirling it around the room. “That’s fucking brilliant news. You should have told me, we should celebrate or something.”

“Not quite that,” I said, and then I thought: did I want to say that? Was it not easier just to tell Sean what he wanted to hear? It would make him happy, and it did not seem like there were many things in Sean’s life that made him happy. It would save me having to explain any further, or not explaining enough and leaving Sean hanging as if I did not want to tell him.

He heard something in my voice, and straightened up. The grin fell from his face. “OK,” he said. “Look. If it’s something—if you want to talk. If you don’t, you know, it’s no problem.”

All of a sudden, I felt like I wanted to cry. All the time I had spent in the terrible journey here, I had not cried. When the other women in my room had cried themselves softly to sleep, I had lain in my bed and dug my nails into my hand and thought to myself: you must not cry. I do not really know why. Maybe because I thought that it was weakness, and that if I was not strong I would go under. I came out from behind the counter and sat down in one of the hard plastic chairs bolted to the tables.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”

Sean dropped the mop, and vanished behind the counter. I blew my nose on a rough blue paper towel, and took some deep breaths, grateful that he had gone, but also hoping that he was coming back. I was starting to think that he had gone home, disappeared out of the back door into the cold air of the early morning because he had taken offence that I was not sharing with him. But a minute or two later, he came back, with two polystyrene cups of coffee and a handful of paper napkins. He sat down at the table with me, slid across one of the cups and all of the napkins.

“Just in case,” he said. “I’ve checked in on Pete. He’s fast asleep, snoring up at the ceiling tiles. Office reeks of brandy. I think he stays the whole night in there sometimes, you know.”

“I thought he had a wife at home.” This was safe, conversation about someone else.

“Yes, he does,” Sean said. “I think, you know. Maybe that’s why he stays here sometimes.”

“Oh.”

“Yes.”

We sat in silence for a little while, and I drank some of my coffee, even though it was too hot.

“I’m so scared of being sent back, Sean.”

“Of course,” he said. “I mean, would you be here, doing this—” he gestured at the plastic and grease around us— “if you had any choice?”

“No,” I said. “I would not.” And I wondered whether he had a choice, but I did not ask.

We drank some more coffee.

“I cannot go back,” I said. “My family were on the losing side. And so, I cannot go back, because I am on the losing side too, and the winners, they do not like loose ends or people who might want revenge. And anyway, there is nothing to go back for. They took the best things that I had. My family. My place in the medical school. I cannot go back, Sean.”

“I understand,” he said. “They won’t make you, they can’t.”

I laughed, as if he had just suggested that we applied for a Michelin star for Peter.

“Not with a story like yours,” Sean said. “They can’t.”

“Sean, my story is just another story,” I said, and I thought, yes, this is true. “All these things are hard to prove, here in England, when the people in your immigration offices hear so many stories, from so many people. Everyone has their own story to tell, some of them true, some of them not, and I think it is easiest for the people in the offices to believe that all are not true. Easiest not just because it helps them reach their numbers, but also because it is easier when they go home at night and have to be with their families and be normal people.

“I have nothing to show that my story is a true one. So I am just like everyone else, taking my turn, scared that this week it will be the end for me and I will be put on a plane. And I cannot do that. I cannot. So, I am made an offer which will make me safe. Which means I will not be sent back. And in return for this, I will have to do some things.”

Sean looked up at me.

“No, not bad things,” I said. “Medical work.”

“Well, that’s OK then, isn’t it?” Sean said. “If you’re not doing bad things. You were trained to be a doctor, Anna, it’s the fucking crazy system here that makes you waste that talent and work in a shitheap like this, instead of doing what you’re good at. So using that training, that’s a good thing, yeah?”

“Yes. But this good thing, I am doing it for bad people.”

“Uh—OK. Right.” He sat back in his chair. “What do you mean, bad people? It’s cool, you can tell me.”