The Walk Home (9 page)

Stevie was quiet on the bus, in Lindsey’s arms. It was standing room only on the lower deck, so she carried him up the stairs, while the driver lurched into the rush hour along the Canniesburn Road. The windows up top were misted, and Lindsey couldn’t see out, but she was happy enough, sitting with her boy warm in her lap, thinking over the strange afternoon she’d had. About Eric and his pictures, and the break he’d made with home; all his box files on his shelves, and what he might have drawn the next time she went round.

The boy and Marek were a team now. As the first week wore on, Jozef got used to putting them together, mostly on the top floor; they put up the woodwork in the main room, where Stevie slept.

Tomas didn’t like it much: the boy dossing up there, or him working with Marek either, and he let Jozef know most mornings. He came and found him, shaking his grey head, after the day’s tasks were divided:

“That boy shouldn’t be staying here. You look at him, he’s seventeen, at most. I say he’s lied to us about his age.”

Tomas didn’t want the young ones working together.

“They’ll slow us down.”

He couldn’t have this job running over: he’d been saving to spend all of August at home, seeing his grandkids, and his word counted for something with Jozef. Born the same year as his father, Tomas was of that world-changing generation, and also just very good at his craft. He’d taught Marek how to tile on the last job, at Jozef’s request, and to plumb in a bathroom, and
he’d taught him well, too. But Jozef suspected that was half the trouble: Marek was wasted now doing his finishing, all the boring bits Tomas didn’t want to do himself. So when Tomas said:

“You’ll watch them, yes?”

Jozef nodded, but found himself irked too.

He didn’t need to be told. He’d become a clock-watcher here in Glasgow, much as it annoyed him. The plasterer he’d sacked had started a second job alongside, which he’d done at weekends, so this was fine by Jozef. Except when the man went to buy render, he took to dropping off materials at the other place, adding an hour to every trip. And then he started skimming supplies from Jozef’s orders. As though Jozef was too foreign, or too much of a pushover to see he was being robbed.

Wary of a repeat, Jozef had been keeping an eye on progress in the top flat, and he’d seen how Stevie and Marek got on well, but they got on with the work too, fitting all the skirting boards and architraves. The boy re-hung the doors, swift but careful with the chisel, just as Jozef had learned to be, years ago now, when he was first apprenticed. The boy had been taught by Romek, no doubt, and it had not gone unnoticed by the other men, how this new one kept his tools, neat as any Gdańsk carpenter. He didn’t brag like one, though: Marek was always talking, talking on the job, and Stevie shot back occasional one-liners, bettering his jokes, but mostly he just set the pace, not wasting time on words. The boy kept the windows wide, and his radio on loud, and even on days when Jozef came up straight after breakfast, he’d be well into a task, his bedroll already folded neat in the corner, ancient trainers out on the windowsill. Jozef had searched but found no mess, or belongings scattered, no trace he was taking advantage. But not much
clue as to who this boy was either, so he had only one way to defend him to Tomas.

“He works hard. Just like a Pole.”

“We all do. I still don’t like it.”

Jozef didn’t share Tomas’s doubts, but as the second week started, they had him watchful of the boy just the same. Noticing he ate lunch with the men now: bread rolls that he stuffed with crisps, and whole packets of biscuits at a sitting, and that he ate much the same thing in the evenings. Jozef had lived on toast and biscuits in the months after Ewa went back to Poland; on whatever he could get at the service station, driving home late from jobs. He’d drunk too much as well, until Romek and Tomas stepped in. The boy didn’t drink, not in any quantity, but he was all bony young shoulders and bitten-down fingernails, and he was roughing it, every night, on bare floorboards. Jozef got to thinking that Tomas might be right too, about his age. But then he had to stop himself noticing, or he’d be cooking him meals next. What counted here was the boy’s usefulness.

In London, Romek had used him for plastering, but it turned out he could tile too, if he had someone with him to check the spacing, so Jozef left that to Marek. The developer was due for a first inspection at the end of the week, and even though Tomas complained, Jozef set the two boys to get the top bathrooms tiled, main and ensuite, in time for Friday morning.

That gave them three days, which Jozef thought would be fine, except on Tuesday morning the supplier sent the wrong tiles. The right ones were stone and expensive, not easy to get hold of,
and it was lunchtime before the shop admitted their mistake. Jozef ended up taking Stevie with him to argue it out; not to talk for him, the boy was no talker, but the supplier wouldn’t make poor excuses with a native speaker there to hear him.

The tile delivery was just a stupid mistake, the kind that happened on every job, but Jozef had started to feel they dogged him here in Scotland. And then the supplier could only find half the meterage they needed on the shelves, which didn’t help his mood. Jozef thought the man had been lying all the while, so he stood and swore at him in the wide warehouse aisle, while Stevie loaded the too-few boxes into the van in silence.

The tiles were the same as Jozef had used on his last job, the one he’d had to abandon when the money ran out. Still riled, he found himself telling Stevie about it on the drive back to the South Side: how he’d persisted, wanting his men paid for the weeks they’d done before the developer pulled the plug. It was hard to say how much the boy was listening, but it was a release, in any case, to have that short harangue, and they got across the river quicker than he expected, so then Jozef drove a short detour to take a look at the Mount Florida tenement. Four storeys, unfinished and still covered in scaffold; he stopped the van outside, between the rows of parked cars, and narrowed his eyes at the poles against the afternoon sun.

“So the scaffolder hasn’t got his money yet. He told me he will leave all that up until he gets the cheque. Make the place look ugly, yes? Make sure it won’t sell, or not for a good price.”

Jozef shook his head. Who did it help if the tenement looked desolate? He was still waiting for payment himself, for materials he’d bought, and he told Stevie there were boxes of tiles locked inside there: enough to finish the South Side bathrooms, perhaps.

“I still have the keys, even.”

But the doors and windows were all boarded over, ground floor and first, and keys were useless with all those steel grilles in place, so Jozef shook his head again, and put the van in reverse. Stevie squinted through the windscreen at the upper storeys as they drew away, but made no comment.

It was Wednesday and halfway through the morning that Jozef realised the boy’s radio wasn’t playing. He went upstairs and found no trace of him or Marek, and no sign of the van on the street below. No answer from either of their mobiles. Tomas was quick to carp:

“Now it starts, see? You put Marek with me again tomorrow.”

And Jozef thought he might, but then the two wanderers returned, grinning, at lunchtime. They came into the ground-floor kitchen where everyone was eating, back door open to the sunshine, and Marek pointed over at Stevie in the hallway, who had a tile box in his hands.

“He climbed. He climbed into the tenement.”

Marek spoke loud, in a rush to get the news out.

“Stevie went up the scaffolding and in through a window. Second floor. He got into the stairwell, easy as anything.”

Jozef’s nephew, said they’d taken a crow bar, and Stevie had splintered the window frame. But they’d taken the keys from Jozef’s room as well, and the boy turned to him to emphasise:

“I’ve done nae damage inside, aye?”

Jozef was speechless. But Tomas wasn’t: he threw down his fork, and shouted at Marek in Polish.

“You want to bring the law here? See us out of work?”

Marek put a hand up in protest, but Tomas wasn’t to be halted.

“What will you tell my wife then? And Jozef’s sisters? How will you explain it? You’ll have to tell them it was your fault. And then what will they say to your mother, when they see her at mass?”

They all lived in the same Gdańsk neighbourhood, pretty much, and most of the men in the kitchen knew Marek’s father, so news would get back to him fast, especially if it was bad. But then Stevie spoke out:

“What you tearin intae him for? It was my idea.”

He was still in the hallway, his eyes on Tomas now, defiant.

“They tiles are his anyhow.” The boy pointed at Jozef. “Bought an paid for. Am I right?”

Stevie turned to him again, this time for confirmation, and Jozef thought he’d given no sign at the time, but the boy had picked up on everything he’d said driving back from the warehouse. The tiles would finish the job, and the receipts must be in the other room, somewhere inside his boxes. But then Jozef waved the idea off, sure receipts wouldn’t be much use against the police. Or the developer, if he found out. The developer was coming in two days, and then all Jozef could think was that they were behind.

They had no time to waste on arguments, so he turned to Marek—one of Ewa’s, in his charge—and he searched for words to put an end to the matter; English ones, so the boy would understand too. They had to keep in mind the other men, and their families, they had to think beyond themselves. Only then Stevie cut in:

“We can get on wae they bathrooms anyhow. Catch up wae oursels.”

Tomas made a noise in his throat, but he said nothing. Jozef knew he was thinking of August, of time with his grandsons.
And then he saw that no one was eating any more: all the men in the kitchen were packing away their boxes and flasks. They were embarrassed, Jozef could feel it, at his lack of command, and he looked to Tomas, but Tomas gave no help, he just picked up his coffee and took it out to the back step.

So then Jozef threw his hands up.

“I don’t want to hear more.”

He had to take charge here. He told his nephew:

“Just get those walls done.”

Marek nodded, relieved. Probably thinking his family wouldn’t be told.

Stevie nodded too, but he kept his eyes on Jozef, as if he was expecting something more. It was a strange look: what did he want? What else was there to say now? Jozef couldn’t threaten to call his family. He didn’t even know if that would keep him in check, the way it did with Marek. Unsure of him and the wisdom of hiring him, Jozef turned away from his worn clothes, and his worn young face, and the stolen tile box in his hands. What on earth kind of family did he come from?

Saturday morning, and Brenda had to work, so she was glad to have Lindsey with her, and Stevie too, on the bus off the scheme, headed for the leafy West End streets.

Brenda didn’t have their company so much on cleaning days now, not since Lindsey had started going to Eric’s house. The girl had stopped taking Stevie out of school—she said it was learning that would get him on in life, and Eric was proof—and she didn’t rely so much on Brenda for jobs, Lindsey found herself houses to suit the shape of the school days. She had a new purpose about her altogether, forever filling in forms for council transfers, and showing her face at the housing office. She told Brenda on the bus:

“Our names have been on that list long enough.”

So she was going to push them further up.

“Somebody has to.”

Brenda had to smile at that drive of hers. It did a soul good to have Lindsey around, and not just hers and Graham’s, the girl
had been a blessing for Eric too, these past few months. She’d put a fire under her brother that Brenda hadn’t seen for ages.

Eric looked forward to the Tuesdays that Lindsey came. Brenda was mostly first to arrive, and he’d be busy in the kitchen, getting the tea brewed for when the girl turned up. He set out the mugs on a tray, and a whole pile of biscuits meant for her boy, hungry after his school day. Eric liked to spoil his wee nephew, whispering jokes and stories, elbow to elbow on the sofa, while Lindsey and Brenda got on with the housework. He showed Stevie pictures in books, of what the Clyde used to look like with all the docks, and famous paintings as well; Eric had told him all about the Glasgow Boys and others, and about the ships he’d drawn at Greenock that went on to sail the oceans. He gave Stevie bread spread thick with butter too, deep enough to see the bite marks. But Brenda knew the main event was Lindsey, so mostly she just told the girl to finish up after they’d dusted:
I can manage the rest, hen
. Better she went and sat with Eric and her boy.

Lindsey got Stevie to show her Eric’s library books, and tell her what he’d learned here, on the sofa with his uncle: testing him on the names of the shipyards, the seven seas and all the continents. Stevie could remember most stuff he was told, so he could say what paintings were called too, and who they were by, and how they were kept in museums and galleries.

“Aye, they’re far from here, son.”

“He’s seen them, but.” Stevie spoke like Eric was a man of the world.

“I’ve seen some ae them, aye.” Brenda heard her brother’s smile. “The wans in Edinburgh, an in London.”

Eric had gone all over in his years with Franny, so he’d been to more places than most in the family, and Brenda knew that
counted for something with Lindsey. It was talk of cities the girl liked best, and she was glad when her brother cottoned on to that; when she heard him asking:

“Where would you go, hen? If you could go anywhere.”

And then Lindsey laughing. “Ach. Where do I start, but?”

It was a game they played on her visits: places to see, places to live. Lindsey had whole lists, Scotland and beyond. Further flung than she’d ever let on to Brenda, who only heard her talk of Glasgow, of housing associations and part-ownership. But everyone needed a dream in life, so it was good to hear Eric indulge her. And to see how Lindsey repaid him.