Constance Page 8

  They walked through mild summer sunshine back to the flat. Noah carried the suitcase. It wasn’t heavy.

  ‘Is this everything, or have you got more luggage?’

  She looked surprised.

  ‘This is all.’

  He was briefly wondering, now that it was too late, whether he had been over-hasty in asking a girl he hardly knew to stay in his flat while she searched for somewhere else to live. Even a girl who looked like Roxana. But his flatmate Andy had just gone to Barcelona for a week. There was plenty of room, for the next few days at least. Was he really going to say to her, no, I’m afraid I can’t help you?

  Apparently reading his mind, she said, ‘Thank you, Noah. You are kind to do this. I am not going back to that house. It is a really bad place.’

  ‘Are you going to tell the police about your money being stolen?’

  ‘Police? No. I don’t like to deal with the police.’

  She would have her reasons for that, Noah realised. Probably to do with her immigration status. He glanced at her as they walked. He did have a suspicion that he had just invited into his life someone who would not disappear as quickly as she had materialised, but the thought didn’t bother him too much. On the contrary, new beginnings might be just that, and they would be welcome. Elsewhere in his life he was hobbled either by anxiety or routine.

  ‘How’s the dance job working out?’ he asked cautiously.

  ‘It is okay.’

  When they reached the house she followed him up the communal stairs and stood silently while he fumbled with his keys. Once they were inside she glanced round then her shoulders slumped with relief.

  He apologised automatically. ‘It might look a bit of a mess. You know, two blokes sharing. But it’s all right underneath.’

  ‘It is beautiful,’ Roxana said.

  Noah knew that it wasn’t anything of the kind, but the word gave him a dim picture of what she must have left behind.

  ‘Here’s the kitchen, and that’s the living room. Bathroom there. This is Andy’s room, and this one’s mine.’ He opened the door. ‘You can sleep in here. I’ll just dig out some clean sheets and stuff.’

  He’d better not put her in Andy’s room, he thought. She could sleep in his bed, and he’d camp out in Andy’s.

  ‘Thank you,’ Roxana said again. She dragged her suitcase towards her and sat down on the edge of his chair. ‘I am not sure what to have done if you couldn’t help me.’

  Her accent was thicker than he remembered, and although her English was competent she sometimes constructed her sentences oddly or was at a loss for a word. She seemed less enigmatic than when they had met by the river and more fleshed-out, now she was in his flat, a proper person with a history and problems to solve. He was drawn to her even more strongly.

  Noah fetched a clean sheet and a duvet cover. He bundled up his own linen, relieved that it didn’t look too bad. She helped him to make up the bed, and this domestic collaboration made him smile and remember Lauren, his most recent girlfriend, who had gone travelling two months ago. Before she went she told him that she thought they should have a year’s break from each other, but when she got back, well – you never knew. He had found this degree of uncertainty disconcerting and inhibiting. Until now, at least.

  The room was right at the top of the house, under the roof. There were no proper windows, only a skylight over the bed. Roxana looked up into the rectangle of blue.

  ‘I like this. It feels safe here.’

  ‘You’re safe. No one’s going to break in. There are four giant Kiwis living downstairs, anyone tries to get in the house they’ll be kicked straight into touch.’

  Roxana’s eyes travelled to him.

  ‘Rugby,’ he explained lamely. She laughed for the first time that day. For Noah, it was like a firework going off in his chest.

  ‘Now, what are we going to do?’ she asked.

  ‘I have to go in a minute. I’m late already.’

  Her eyes widened. ‘That is a shame. Where are you going?’

  ‘Home, to see my parents. My mother’s out of hospital now, but the news isn’t very good. She’s only got about six months to live.’

  ‘I am sorry for that. But I thought you said before that she would get better?’

  ‘I was wrong. I didn’t know, then. Are your parents in Uzbekistan?’

  ‘My father and mother are both dead. I have a stepfather still alive, but I don’t care for him. He is a bad man.’ Roxana shrugged, dismissing this as a topic.

  ‘Brothers and sisters?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nor me.’

  ‘I had one brother but he was killed,’ she said without expression.

  Noah looked harder at her. He didn’t know anything about her and he was becoming aware of how much there was to find out. With Lauren and with other girls, he had been starting from the same place: eighty per cent, he reckoned, of their experiences were comparable with his own even if not strictly in common. Not so with Roxana.

  ‘That’s really very sad. I’m sorry. Was it some kind of accident?’

  ‘In my country there was an uprising, in Andijan, and he was shot by soldiers. Niki came to see me one week before this and told me that there would be violent times, and I told him to be careful because we only had him and me, the two of us, against the whole world. After that I did not see him again.’

  As an only child Noah had longed for brothers and sisters. He had envied those of his friends who had the shoehorned-in, day-and-night constant narrative of close siblings, even though they quarrelled and fought with each other. He could barely imagine the pain of having had a brother and then losing him.

  He would have liked to offer Roxana some protection, maybe to tell her that he would be her defender from now on, if she would like it, but he couldn’t think of a way of saying it that didn’t sound either comical or entirely fake, as if he was trying to set himself up as some kind of hero. He was also quite conscious of his own inadequacy. Whatever he offered, he would be unlikely to be able to actually deliver it satisfactorily. He knew this because Lauren had often told him that he meant well, but meaning and doing were two different things as far as she was concerned, right?

  Instead of any of this he put his hand awkwardly on her arm, above the elbow, where the short sleeve of her strange top protected her pale skin.

  He said as simply as he could, ‘I’m very sorry, Roxana. It must have been terrible for you. And you must be lonely without him.’

  Noah knew that he had been sheltered. Popular at school and university, good at games, adequate at academic work, he had never been without protection and had never felt significantly lonely in his whole life. Bill and Jeanette had seen to that.

  Roxana’s eyes had acquired the red-rimmed look that preceded tears.

  ‘Why are you here, in England?’ he asked.

  She rubbed her nose with the back of her hand and at the same time moved out of his grasp. Noah let his hand fall to his side.

  ‘I am working, earning good money, saving it up when I do not get robbed. I am going to be an English girl.’

  She said it with such fervour that he had to laugh.

  ‘Really? Are you sure that’s what you want?’

  She blinked at him. ‘Why not? Where I came from there is no work, people are poor, ignorance is everywhere.’

  Noah collected his thoughts. He said, ‘I suppose, wait a minute – Uzbekistan is your home, the culture is yours, the language and traditions. All that has made you what you are, as well as your family, and everything that’s happened to you since you were born. Why do you want to turn your back on it? I mean, by making yourself English you’ll only be a replica, whereas what you are already is the real thing.’

  Roxana unzipped her suitcase. She took out a few clothes and laid them on the bed, then propped a picture postcard of a beach beside the magazines and piled CDs on Noah’s table.

  In a tone that denied the possibility of contradiction she said, ‘I bel
ieve that you can be whatever you want.’

  Yes, Noah had to concede, Roxana probably could be. He had the impression there was determination in her, strong as a rib of steel.

  He checked his watch.

  ‘I’ve really got to go,’ he sighed. ‘I promised my dad I’d be home for Sunday lunch. But I’ll be back here this evening, we could maybe go out for a pizza or a drink, and we can talk some more. Shall we do that?’

  ‘I have to go to work this evening.’

  ‘Really? You do a performance on a Sunday night?’

  He was envisaging a contemporary dance ensemble, something very avant-garde with dancers in white face-paint and stylised costumes. The image loosely connected in his mind with Roxana’s interest in the robot beside the river.

  Roxana frowned and hesitated, obviously trying to come to a decision. Then she said flatly, ‘I work in a club, I think I had better tell you. It’s called The Cosmos. It opens every night of the week. You live here in this very nice apartment, you have a good job, a nice family I’m sure. Perhaps you don’t like to have someone doing this type of work staying with you?’

  ‘Cosmos? I’ve never heard of it.’ Noah believed that he had a good working knowledge of London clubs. ‘What do you do there?’

  ‘I am what is called a lap dancer.’ Roxana tilted her chin up as she announced this. She looked even more like a primitive carving. ‘Do you know what this is?’

  ‘Of course I do.’ Noah was assailed by a series of images. For a moment he thought it best not to say anything more.

  ‘You are shocked?’

  ‘No,’ he managed to say. Shocked wasn’t it at all.

  ‘So?’

  ‘I bet you’re really good at it.’

  Roxana began to laugh. Soon Noah was laughing as well. They laughed until they were both breathless.

  ‘So I’ll definitely be coming to see you.’

  She turned serious at once. ‘No, please, don’t do that. I would find it very embarrassing if you were there.’

  ‘Embarrassing? Would you?’

  ‘Of course. It doesn’t matter when I dance for men I don’t know, it doesn’t mean anything. But with you, because I like you, it would be different.’

  Noah was disarmed. There was such a contradiction in the idea of this girl doing a lap-dance routine in a room full of punters, and at the same time being shy enough not to know where to look as she paid him a mild compliment.

  He tried to think what Lauren or one or two of her friends might say if they were included in this conversation.

  Almost certainly it would be something correct about how places like this Cosmos club were degrading to women. This judgement didn’t quite connect, though, with what he had already learned about Roxana. She needed the money, yes, but it was quite likely that she went about getting it in a way that didn’t damage her too much. She would probably wield more power in the transaction than the men did.

  Noah admired her.

  She was also beautiful, she was like no other girl he had ever met, and now they were looking at each other in the equivocal aftermath of her confession and their shared laughter.

  ‘Will you be all right here while I’m out?’ he asked. ‘I’ll give you the spare set of keys.’

  She beamed back at him, suddenly full of confidence.

  ‘I am safe here with the men downstairs who play rugby. You told me. All I will do is lie in your bed and go to sleep.’

  Noah swallowed hard. ‘Good. I’ll see you later, then.’

  After he had gone, Roxana put her clothes neatly aside. Noah’s room was tidy, she liked that. She curled up under the crisp bedcover and fell asleep.

  The garden looked to be at its summer peak, to Noah’s uncritical eyes. There were the roses, and tall pale-blue spikes of flowers, some other round shaggy pink ones, and metallic clumps of silvery leaves spilling on the mown grass. But Jeanette was shaking her head as they made a slow circuit after lunch.

  He told her, ‘Mum. It looks beautiful. Don’t sweat it.’

  – There is so much to do.

  ‘Like pruning the effing roses?’

  Her hand touched his arm. The skin on the back of her hand looked thin, and as finely crinkled as an old leaf. Noah thought that she was ageing and fading before his eyes. He wanted to reach inside her and tear out the black tumour and crush it in his fists, and the fierceness of the impulse balled up in his chest like terrible anger.

  She signed again – You don’t prune this time of year.

  ‘Whatever.’

  – It’s dead-heading. Chopping off dead blooms. Like me.

  ‘Is that what you are thinking?’

  – I’m still getting used to no next year. But there will be for you and Dad. I think of that. I love you both very much. Do you know?

  They had turned back towards the house. Bill was sitting on a patio chair reading the Sunday newspapers and Jeanette’s eyes rested on him. Noah had always been aware that Jeanette loved his father unequivocally and possessively. His friends’ mothers didn’t do the ironing and suddenly press their faces blindly against a shirt or a pair of gardening trousers, the way he had seen his mother do, for example. His childish suspicion was that Bill didn’t know she did things like that.

  For himself, Noah knew that Jeanette loved him and he accepted it without question. Mothers always did love their children, didn’t they?

  ‘I do know,’ he said.

  – Good. Will you remember?

  ‘I promise. But I don’t want to talk like this. We’re still here, the three of us. Now is what matters, here, today, this sunshine, not next year or next month.’

  Jeanette nodded.

  – You are right. But I can’t pretend not to have cancer.

  ‘I didn’t mean that.’

  – I know. Tell me about your week?

  ‘Let’s think. Work’s okay. Andy’s in Barcelona. Oh, and I met a girl.’

  – Did you?

  Her face flowered in an eager smile. But Noah was wondering what possibility there was of any conversation about anything that wouldn’t bring them straight up against a blank wall that had six months painted on it in letters higher than a house.

  Jeanette wouldn’t live to see his wedding. She wasn’t going to know her own grandchildren.

  Her head was cocked towards him, her eyes on his.

  ‘Her name’s Roxana.’

  – Unusual.

  He talked, and they made another slow circuit of the lawn. There were wood pigeons calling in the coppice trees. He told her about Roxana being robbed, and how she was staying with him while she looked for another place. He kept any mention of her job to a minimum, and then said that her brother had been killed in Andijan. He only vaguely remembered the news stories of the time about the brief popular uprising against a virtual dictatorship.

  Jeanette nodded. She was interested now and she signed rapidly, occasionally adding a word that came out of her mouth like a bubble bursting.

  – Yes. A massacre. Their government claimed it was only a few. The international human rights organisations accepted that in the end. President Karimov was supported by the West, until he turned the Americans off their bases out there. Bush needs his allies in Central Asia.

  Noah was impressed, but not surprised that his mother knew so much. Jeanette always read everything that came her way, storing up news and comment, fiction and history like bulwarks against her deafness. She had been an early adopter of the internet as a source of yet more information, and her email connections and correspondences were more numerous than his own.

  – Your Roxana’s brother was one of the rebels?

  ‘I think so. She’s not “mine”. Not yet, anyway, although I’m working on it. Her parents are both dead, she told me. Her brother was all she had. How sad is that, to lose your only sibling? The person you grew up with. It must mean Roxana hasn’t got any reference left to the little girl she was.’

  Jeanette waited.

  – Go on?<
br />
  Noah faltered. ‘I wasn’t trying to say anything else, Mum. Not consciously. It must be in my mind, though. You and Connie.’

  – Yes. I know. Me and Connie.

  Here we are again, he thought. Six months.

  He faced her. It meant she could lip-read more easily.

  ‘Dad and I were thinking, Connie would want to know that you’re ill.’

  – You and Dad?

  ‘Well, yes.’

  – Please. Don’t.

  ‘I’m sorry. It was only a brief mention.’

  Jeanette looked towards Bill. Some instinct had made him lower his newspaper and he was watching them over the top of it. She moved close to Noah’s side again and they resumed their slow walk. Jeanette’s face was suffused with sadness.

  – She is my sister.

  ‘Yes.’

  – I should decide what to tell her. And when. Shouldn’t I?

  ‘Of course, Mum, if that’s what you want.’

  Bill strolled across the grass towards them.

  ‘What are you two talking about?’

  Noah hesitated. Auntie Connie was rarely mentioned in the family. Or never, now he thought about it.

  – Uzbekistan, Jeanette indicated.

  ‘Really?’

  – Noah has a new girlfriend who comes from there.

  ‘She’s not my girlfriend yet. I’ve only met her twice.’

  Bill smiled easily at him. ‘I’ll look forward to hearing about her. If and when. Now, does anyone want a cup of tea?’

  Noah washed up the lunch dishes and Bill made tea. They sat out in the sun until it sank behind the trees and the garden receded into shadow. The pale roses began to glimmer against the depths of green. Noah said that he thought he would head back to town. In his mind was the thought and the hope that maybe Roxana wouldn’t have gone off to her club quite this early.

  He kissed the top of his mother’s head and noted the pink channels of scalp visible through her hair.

  ‘I’ll talk to you tomorrow, Mum.’ Talk was by email.

  Bill walked him to the front door and leaned on the open door of Noah’s rusted Golf.

  ‘You haven’t told me about the girl.’