Exposure (45 page)

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 embarrassed 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.

Sometimes he collected couples and he was equally amazed that they thought it was fine almost to have sex in the back of the car. Goran fixed his eyes dead ahead and wondered why the women weren't ashamed, why the men didn't have more respect in front of another man. And yet it was fascinating and exciting, particularly since Mila was often too exhausted from cleaning to make love. Sometimes he couldn't help looking. He saw a fragment of a scene in the rear-view mirror: a tangle of legs, a male hand unbuttoning, unhooking, a more precise female hand helping it out. On one of these occasions, Goran had been deeply embarrassed. A boy of about seventeen had caught him watching and said, 'Hi there,' into the mirror. There was lipstick smeared on his face. Goran's eyes darted back to the road. The boy said, 'That's OK, keep looking, friend. It's the closest you'll ever get to a girl like this.'

The girl giggled, pulling her top down to cover her bra. 'Oh, shut up, Gus, you wanker.'

Gus pulled up her top again. 'Come on, baby, share a little with the poor,' he said.

On one of his shifts, quite unexpectedly, Goran saw Luke. It was peculiar to discover him in his real life. Zigana had just radioed a pickup from outside a bar called Blue Monkey, off Kensington Church Street, at the Notting Hill end. Goran was just round the corner. He said he would do the job and he took the relevant left turn. He drove along the empty street, past the darkened restaurants, their tables all neatly laid for the next day's lunch, their windows flashing his reflection back at him. He looked at it—now higher, now lower, now stretched across two long windowpanes. Who are you? he asked this picture of himself. He was a man in a maroon car, wondering if he had made a mistake. Should they have stayed in their own country?

Then he saw Luke standing—or, rather, supporting himself—against the wall beneath the huge neon monkey sign. Goran was starting to worry about him when a girl rushed up and tapped on the car window, giving him a shock. 'Kwik-Kabs?' she said. 'For
Claire?
'

'Yes,' Goran told her. 'I am Kwik-Kabs.'

'Cool. Just be a sec.'

As she got into the back, first giving repeated kisses to one of her friends ('No, seriously, we
will,
we'll do it again
soon,
sweetheart'), Goran asked himself whether he should call out to Luke. But there was something humiliated about the way Luke was standing, not just the indignity of his drunkenness but something deeper. It occurred to Goran then that Luke had developed the comical snarl of a kicked dog, a dog that cowers and growls at the same time, convincing no one.

A group of laughing friends were all kissing one another goodbye on the pavement and a black cab pulled up in front of them. An astonishingly tall, good-looking couple separated themselves from the rest and got into it. As the cab set off, the girl leant out of the window and waved at Luke. It was then that Goran decided he must drive away: these glimpses of private trouble were not meant for his eyes.

'Just off the Old Brompton Road, please,' the girl in the back said.

Goran drove in silence, longing to get back to Mila and to the reassurance of her sleep-warm arms. He checked the clock. She would be off out to clean in three and a half hours.

Cleaning
and
driving, cleaning
and
driving,
he thought. The days rolled over into one another. Perhaps Luke would be too drunk to come today and they would have time alone to make love. With horror and concern, he remembered Luke's face as the beautiful girl in the taxi waved.