Transit(39)

‘Nothing come out,’ he said with a small, ashamed smile.

He had been meaning to tell me, he added, to lock my windows at night: he had arrived early one morning and seen the front window was open. Also, he wondered whether I would allow him to put a chain on the door, so that I would be safer here when I was alone. He advised me to accept; it would take him five minutes.

I could hear my phone ringing downstairs and I asked Pavel to excuse me so that I could go and answer it. It was my son, saying that he had lost the key to his father’s house and was locked out. He was standing on the doorstep, he said. It was cold and there was no one at home. He began to weep, harshly, inconsolably. I stood and listened to the sound as though paralysed by it. I remembered how I used to hold him while he cried. Now all there was was the sound. Then abruptly the crying stopped and I heard him call his brother’s name. It’s all right, he said down the phone to me. Don’t worry, it’s all right. He could see his brother coming along the road, he said. I heard scuffling and laughing sounds in the background as the two of them met. I tried to say something but he said he had to go. Bye, he said.

The front door shut and Tony reappeared and picked up his drill. He was reticent when I asked what the neighbours had said. He looked me up and down.

‘You go somewhere?’ he said.

I said I had to go and teach a class and I wouldn’t be back until late. He nodded his head.

‘Better you not here,’ he said.

I asked whether he had managed to get any agreement from them about the noise. He was silent. I watched while he levered away a new section of plaster, releasing it in a shower of rubble and dust.

‘Is okay,’ he said. ‘I tell them.’

I asked him what exactly he had told them.

He yanked at the wall and a big broken piece of it came away with a crunching sound while a wide grin slowly appeared on his face.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘they treat me like son.’

He had acted, he assured me, on my behalf by telling the neighbours that they had his full sympathy, that I worked him and Pavel like a slave driver, that they were all of them my victims and that if they would only let him finish the job quickly he would be free.

‘Is best way,’ he said.

They had responded well, he added: he was given cups of tea and even a packet of sweets – the mixture of Dolly – to take home to his daughter. He wanted me to know that he had not of course meant the things he had said – it was a game, a strategy, using the force of their hatred to attain his own ends.

‘Like Albanian politician,’ he said, grinning.

There was something false in Tony’s manner that suggested he was not telling the truth, or at least that he was trying to impose his interpretation on a series of events he did not entirely understand. He avoided meeting my eye: his expression was evasive. I said that I could see he was trying to help. The problem, I said, with whipping up the neighbours’ hatred was that I had to continue living here with my sons after Tony had gone. I told him about an evening over the summer, when I had been sitting in the dark kitchen watching the international family next door in their garden, and had seen Paula come out of the flat below me and walk up the steps. She had talked to them over the fence: loudly, I had heard her telling them about me and about the terrible things I had done; I had watched their polite, embarrassed faces and knew that while they wouldn’t necessarily believe what she had said, they wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me either.

Tony put his hands out, palms up, his head to one side.

‘Is bad situation,’ he said.

I felt him looking at me furtively while I put on my coat. He asked me what I taught, and whether the children were well behaved – a lot of the children at his daughter’s school behaved like animals. They had no discipline, that was the problem. Life was too easy for them here. I told him that I taught adults rather than children and he laughed incredulously.

‘What you teach them?’ he said. ‘How to wipe their behind?’

The class was a fiction-writing class: I taught it each week. There were twelve students who sat around tables arranged in a square. The classroom was on the fifth floor: at the start of term it had still been light at that hour, but now it was dark outside, and the windows showed us our own reflections etched in glare against an eerie backdrop of overblown, dirty yellow clouds. The students were mostly women. I found it hard to attend to what they were saying. I sat in my coat, my eye continually drawn to the window and to the strange cloudscape that appeared to belong neither to night nor to day but to something intermediary and motionless, a place of stasis where there was no movement or progression, no sequence of events that could be studied for its meaning. Its yellowed formless components suggested not nothingness but something worse. I heard the students speaking and wondered how they could believe in human reality sufficiently to construct fantasies about it. I felt them glance at me often as though from a great distance. Increasingly they were speaking, I realised, not to me but to one another, building among themselves the familiar structure that I had accustomed them to, in the way that children, when they are afraid, will retreat to the rules and regulations of what they have learned to regard as normality. One of the students, I noticed, had taken the role of leader: she was asking each of the others in turn for their contribution. She was acting my part, yet there was something wrong with her execution of it: she interfered unnecessarily; instead of proceeding by instinct the students were becoming self-conscious and halting. One of the two men in the room was trying to talk about his dog. What was it about this dog, my understudy asked, that he thought was so interesting? The man looked uncertain. It’s beautiful, he said. My understudy made a gesture of frustration. You can’t just tell me it’s beautiful, she said. You have to show me that it is. The man looked quizzical. He was somewhere in his forties, with a small, slightly elfin appearance: his large head with its domed, wrinkled brow on his neat, diminutive body gave him the appearance of a strange elderly child. My understudy urged him to describe the dog so that she might be able to see its beauty for herself. She was a loud-spoken woman arrayed in a resplendent series of coloured wraps and shawls, who wore a great quantity of jewellery that clanked and rattled when she gesticulated with her arms. Well, the man said doubtfully, she’s quite big. But she’s not heavy, he added. He paused and then shook his head. I can’t describe it, he said. She’s just beautiful.