Exposure Page 34

  Luke wondered if he would try this and he put the pills in his desk drawer, inside his old school pencil case.

  Then he put on a clean shirt and went out in search of Arianne.

  Chapter 17

  Once, when he was eight, Luke had 'watched' a boy called Carlos Navarro, who was two years older than him. Carlos was the best at their prep school at tennis and swimming. Luke was the second best. They were both singled out for extra sports tuition, better to represent the school, and often raced or played against each other. Had it not been for the classes, Carlos would not have dreamt of talking to such a junior boy, but during these extra-curricular hours, they fought and dived and laughed together in private. Afterwards, in the echoing changing rooms, they passionately discussed the teachers—who was 'decent' and who was 'a complete bastard' - while they pulled on their uniforms, their eyes red with chlorine, their hair still streaming wet on to their school shirts.

  It was still embarrassing and unsettling for Luke to remember the obsession he had developed for this dark-haired, prematurely muscular child. He could still recall the exotic refinement he had perceived in Carlos's habits: eating a plate of dressed green salad at school lunch (the way parents and teachers did); reading comics in Spanish, and punching anyone 'for my family honour' if they said his sister was fat. Carlos was as mysterious and beautiful as his name: a Spanish king's name, which made you think of golden palaces and scuttling footmen. Even now Luke could picture the thrilling contrast of the white school shirt against the strong, caramel-brown neck.

  And it had been Carlos who had delivered the first ever knife wound to Luke's heart. One Saturday afternoon, when Rosalind had left Luke waiting outside Peter Jones while she popped in for Sophie's new hockey skirt, he had spotted Carlos out with a few other older boys. They appeared to be heading away from the cinema—perhaps they had seen the new kung-fu film because they were doing karate kicks at one another.

  In a rush of surprise and joy, Luke called out, 'Hey! Carlos! Did you see McEnroe win the semi-finals?'

  But, after an outraged flash from those fierce brown eyes, he found himself ignored. For a moment, he stood waving idiotically across the road at thin air while the laughing group moved on.

  The darkness was warm and loving; it was velvety and jasmine-scented. The lights in restaurants and cafés gave the dark streets a twinkly, roguish look. People were eating late suppers at outdoor tables—salade Niçoise and fruit sorbets. It might have been a scene in a city in France or Spain or Italy. The faces were sunburnt and laughing, culturally altered by the good weather. There were tall glasses of rosé and of iced water; waiters carried small bowls of olives and of oil and balsamic vinegar.

  To Luke, just walking out into this soft night with his secret purpose was erotic. Just setting off to visit some of Arianne's favourite places—Noise, Shanghai Sam's, Zaza's, Blue Monkey, even Lanton's, where Dan had wanted to take her, made him happier than he had been for weeks.

  He drank and he watched and he waited for her to come in. Why shouldn't it happen? No one could ever have predicted that he should lose the vision of the girl on the table—only to find the woman herself in the back of his best friend's car. By ten, after three apple martinis, he had reached a state of luxurious submission to Fate. He settled at the long white bar in Zaza's and lit a cigarette. There was an empty glass a few places along from him, pink lipstick on the rim. Was it hers? A jolt of lust passed through him. Perhaps she had set it down and left, giggling, swinging her bag behind her, just seconds before he arrived. And at Lanton's, was that a faint trace of her perfume outside the ladies' loo? Women jostled past him, soused in Chanel and Dior, confusing the whispering air. And later still, in the red room at Blue Monkey, perhaps the characteristically half-smoked cigarette butt, still sending up a wisp of smoke from the ashtray, was still slightly damp from her lips. When he got home at five a.m., he could not sleep for cocktails and sexual excitement.

  Searching the Internet, trailing the street, interpreting signs was a slow striptease in the mind, and each titillating clue brought him closer to Arianne. It was pornography for the sixth sense and it became his full-time occupation. It was a night shift and he kept the same hours as Goran.

  To Luke there seemed to be no reason why Goran and Mila could not live secretly in the annexe for just a little longer. They were invisible and soundless, and his parents had no reason to go down there since, as Jessica had rightly observed, they would hardly be doing the famous Langford garden party this year.

  Luke had the key copied and a way of life—parallel to the life of the house—established itself. In the mornings at around six, Luke would go down the side passage (even at this hour he took the precaution in case a sleepless parent should happen to look out at the lawn as he crossed it) and give a beer to Goran, who had just got in from work. The men would have a cigarette together. Mila had found work at a cleaning agency. She woke up around then, finished dressing in the little shower room, and then she would sit and watch them for a while before she went out to clean.

  She had become healthier, prettier. Her face had lost its endangered look and sometimes, when she laughed uncontrollably at Goran, whom she apparently found ridiculous in almost every way, Luke could see why he had thought her attractive. It was hard not to laugh when she did—particularly when it irritated Goran so much. He could be terribly proud and serious in a way that Luke thought foreign and rather comical in itself.

  He had asked Goran if he and Mila found it difficult to see so little of each other, what with their different working hours, but Goran refused even to address the subject. He waved it off. 'In few weeks we will have enough money for buying one passport and one National Insurance number. Then I will take a bank loan and then we will begin. You know I will be Spanish man?' he said.

  'Really?'

  'Spanish and Italian passports are cheapest. I think maybe I will be called Juan. Do you like it? Juan! Goran repeated, trying out his new name, excited by its novelty. He sighed. 'Luke, can you believe we will rent a flat in London? And you will come and eat with us!'

  'That would be great,' Luke said, clinking his beer bottle against Goran's. 'I just hope you won't mind if I bring someone with me.' He smiled secretively. From the bar across the street he had caught sight of Arianne getting into a taxi outside the theatre the night before. She had been talking—or, rather, shouting—into a mobile phone: 'I know. He's a possessive bastard, Georgie,' he had heard her say before she slammed the door. (He had time to note a tight white T-shirt, a mossy green suede skirt and beige leather ankle boots. Legs: bare and brown and long and long and ... Also, there was something sparkly on her wrist, which he had tried to put out of his mind.) He had decided then that he was almost ready to go and see her play. Two and a half hours of watching her from the anonymous darkness: would it really be allowed? He could hardly believe he would not be arrested for it. UN troops would escort him out, as they did in his dreams. As it transpired, it was sold out.

  Goran shook his head. 'Oh, Luke. You talk about her always. You know what I think of this girl. I do not understand you.'

  'I know. Look, it's complicated,' Luke said.

  Goran did an impression of Luke: 'It's terribly complicated,' he said. 'It's just so complicated with my complicated French girl.'

  Luke laughed self-deprecatingly.

  ' Goran! Mila snapped unexpectedly. 'You do not know all what he feels.' She glared at him and then laid her hand on Luke's arm. Her fingers were soft and warm. Luke smiled back at her, mystified by this act of defiance, and by her sudden fluency. She was powerful even though she looked so frail, he thought. It felt good to be taken seriously.

  The next day it was decided that Goran and Mila would stay in the annexe until the end of the month. When Luke told them this, Mila began to cry. She stood up and sat down again three times, then rushed over and kissed him, laughing at her tears and saying, 'Thank you. Thank you, Luke. Thank you sincerely.'

  He felt both embarr
assed and proud. It was lovely to have a girl's arms round him again, though, because his loneliness was a bodily ache.

  'Really, Mila, it's OK,' he said, leaning forward so she could kiss his other cheek. 'It's nothing. I'm glad I can help.'

  'Kind man. You are kind man', she said, rushing away into the little shower room to compose herself, tugging the door shut behind her.

  There was silence between the two men for a moment. They listened to Mila's crying subside and then water started running into the basin. Luke said, 'D'you want another cigarette?'

  Goran shook his head and turned away. 'No.'

  Luke lit one for himself. It did not occur to him that this was Goran and Mila's only time alone together. He was afraid of going back to the house and to the broadband connection, which brought news of Jamie Turnbull and Arianne at an unmanageable 500 kbps. At least the bad news he risked learning on his nightly crusades had human proportions, human faces. His web searches felt spiritually dangerous, like consulting a ouija board, and they left him haunted for hours afterwards.

  Even so, the fear was worth it: how else would he have learnt that Arianne's name meant 'very holy one', or that she had (implausibly) played the trombone in the school orchestra, or that she had won a county-level triathlon at the age of twelve just as he had? What a picture that was—even printed out on creased A4 paper! The twelve-year-old Arianne, pink and glossy, crossing the finish line, her hair bouncing up behind her and the grin of victory on her lips.

  Luke took a deep drag on his cigarette and gestured at the shower-room door. 'You think she's OK, Goran?'

  'Mila? Yes. Of course.'

  'She seems very upset.'

  'No. She is not. Thank you, Luke. She is just crazy.'

  Goran stood up suddenly and began to tidy the sheets on the pink sofa, his back to Luke.

  'Oh,' Luke said. 'OK. Well ... good.'

  Goran and Mila worked hard for their money. The more they learnt about the cost of living in England, the more shocked they were by the näivety of their arriving with just fifty pounds to begin their new lives. They thought about the dreams they had worked themselves up on, in Goran's bedroom in PriŜtina, their friend Vasko supplying endless stories: 'This guy in London, man, Andjela's cousin, he has three houses now. No joke. Seriously, Goran, the money's there, the music's there. You two are doing the right thing.'

  Now that they were in England, they did not communicate their doubts to each other as this might have sabotaged the will it took to work so hard, or perhaps it would have constituted a betrayal of their former selves. When they left PriŜtina, Vasko had taken his stories with him to a new life in Belgrade.

  So, all there was to do was work hard and make money, buy a passport and follow their plan. Goran told himself he must remember how lucky they had been to find Luke. Without him, their earnings would have been wasted on rent—and he had seen the place Rajan the Kurdish driver rented from Bogdan's brother, Vuk. It was a stinking bed in a three-room flat converted into a dormitory. Rajan got the bed at night and another guy rented it by the day. Goran knew he would never have taken Mila to a place like that. Not his little Mila.

  Mila's work was lonelier than Goran's. She rarely saw or spoke to anyone throughout the day, except to the occasional delivery person who rang the bell while she cleaned one of her apartments. Often the deliveries were flowers and she would sign an imaginary name for these amazing, rustling confections and put them in the kitchen in some water. Pink roses a foot high—in the city!

  They were all childless homes. Some belonged to single men, some to single women and some to young couples. She looked at the photographs as she dusted them, wondering about the lives she saw depicted. There were sailing-boats and ski-slopes and pretty, laughing girls who held up their hands at the camera to protest at being photographed in their bikinis. She thought it odd that none of the couples seemed to be married—unless English people didn't take photographs at weddings—except one, who had pictures of some kind of barefoot ceremony on a beach, the bride wearing a purple sarong and white flowers in her hair.

  The girl in the sarong was the most beautiful one. There were photographs of her doing modelling shoots in black frames along the corridor. Above the king-size bed, her foot-wide face smiled down, a felt hat pulled over one eye. Mila had never seen so many bottles and pots of cream and powder and perfume. Along the marble shelf in the bathroom there was a Chanel nail varnish in almost every colour of the rainbow. Often there were smashed glasses in the kitchen, their contents splashed against the wall at the point of impact and, as she cleaned them up, Mila wondered what this girl and her husband argued about.

  You could learn a lot about English people from their mess. They drank a lot, that was for sure. They ate takeaway meals and expensive little portions of things out of foil packets and they never used their saucepans—except suddenly on a Friday night when they used every single one and the whole flat would be strewn with napkins and ashtrays and plates and dirty little espresso cups. They had a lot of different medicines in their bathrooms—hundreds of packets of coloured capsules: blue and green and red, bright orange and pale yellow. They were obviously unhealthy people.

  Some of the men kept weights in their wardrobes. One woman had hundreds of chocolate bars in a bag behind her shoes. Mila thought she deserved to look like a fat pig if she ate all that sweet stuff, but in her photograph she was terribly thin.

  Often there were joint butts as well as cigarettes in the ashtrays. There were bottles of champagne and packets of coffee in the fridges. Huge piles of every fruit you could imagine went rotten in glass bowls and there was always a shocking quantity of bread and cheese and good fish and meat to throw away because, even through the wrappers, it had started to stink out the fridge.

  Sometimes when she saw three packets of the same cheese and knew that she would throw them all out, mouldy, in a fortnight's time, she felt tempted to put one into her bag. But stealing was a sin—in an immediate and a long-term sense. Mila had been brought up, in the tradition of the Serbian Orthodox Church, to believe that if you did something wrong you were punished in the next life, but she had also decided for herself that you were cursed with bad luck in this one.

  The second part of this formulation had been added since the UN strikes in Kosovo, since she had watched her family and friends driven out of PriŜtina by the Albanians they had all oppressed for so many years. She felt almost insane as she remembered how differently life had been structured when she was a child, when Albanian children were not allowed to go to her school. It had not occurred to her then that there was anything wrong in this. Albanians were dirty animals who were always breeding—just as her father, as all the fathers, said. She had thought this along with all of her classmates. She had seen the Serb police bullying Albanians on street corners for years. During the ethnic cleansing, she had watched Albanians forced out of their homes, processions of them going off to the trains, turning the road under her window into a writhing snake ... And now here she was, cleaning a toilet.

  Sometimes there were porno films in the DVD players. In one of the bachelors' flats, the one just off Sloane Square with all the beautiful paintings on the walls, Mila found a stack of magazines with pictures of black men wearing leather jockstraps and thongs. It shocked her but it also made her laugh excitedly about this crazy country they were in, which was not at all formal and reserved as she had been led to expect. She thought about the demonstration in Dover and decided that English people were mostly angry and sex mad.

  On the tube she often got on at the same stop as a person whose gentler she couldn't guess—he or she had long, pink hair and a face covered in rings and bolts and studs. This person had a favourite carriage, just like Mila. Invariably, the other people on the tube just continued reading their newspapers as if someone with pink hair and metal all over them like a robot was perfectly normal. It was hard not to giggle; the one time she did, the person caught her eye and smiled at her. She found herself smiling
back.

  The houses Mila cleaned were all in Kensington and Chelsea and Mayfair. She could not believe how wealthy English people were and it was with a sense of moral indignation that she threw open the women's wardrobes to put in the ironed shirts and saw beauty—such riches and beauty!—and wondered why everyone in her life had concealed it from her. She picked up bracelets and rings and laughed bitterly at the idea that Goran would ever buy her something like this or this or this or this. It was so depressing! She was only twenty-two and she had no jewellery at all now, because Goran had gone and sold it all to a fat Albanian woman.

  Unlike some of the drivers, who smoked heavily and left rubbish in their cars, Goran kept Bogdan's maroon Ford Mondeo in good order. He always asked the customers if they minded him putting the radio on or smoking with the window open. They never cared about any of it: there are few questions of taste that have not been answered definitively by four in the morning.

  He was surprised by how many unaccompanied women he was asked to collect. They were mostly in their late twenties or early thirties, smartly dressed, wealthy-looking, with toned, slim bodies. Often they were terribly drunk and Goran had to help them out of the car or stop so that they could be sick. They said 'fuck' and 'shit' all the time—when they couldn't find their change, when he told them the fare, when they forgot to tap their cigarettes out of the window and dropped ash down their fronts. On two occasions, women like this had run after his car in their crazy high heels, waving and shouting, having left a handbag or phone in the back. He was amazed women would behave like that in a quiet street—a street where they lived and their neighbours might see them and talk.