by Stuart Evers
Maggie found him standing by the generator. She put her arm around him.
‘How did you ever cope?’ she said.
He kissed her on the top of her head.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We should catch up with the others.’
They met James, Andrea, Gracie and Gibbs at the foot of the stairs, crowded by a door.
‘Who’s coming in?’ said Gibbs.
‘Are you serious?’ Maggie said reading the warnings written on the door.
Gibbs and Don laughed.
‘Well, I’m not going in there,’ she said. ‘It gives me the creeps, the very idea.’
The rest followed Gracie who, realizing there were no spy mice inside, was heading down the corridor holding the sheet of paper, intent on capturing Boris the Rat. The two friends remained by the door.
‘After you,’ Gibbs said. Don nodded and pulled the handle.
Inside, the smell was heavy and right; its size, its contents, the small lavatory, a pair of benches, also right. On the wall there was a large red button. They both sat and Don pushed the button. The room filled with static. There was an alarm, one that they both recognized; a female voice they didn’t.
‘Rose did this part the best,’ Gibbs said. Don nodded.
‘This is not a test,’ the voice said. ‘Repeat, this is not a test.’
The bombs were on their way. The voice started a countdown. At the word ‘impact’, the recording crumpled and there was a low roil, the first inkling of explosion. The lights flickered on and off and the rumble began. Gibbs looked at him, but Don had his eyes closed. The attack went on. The thick doors, the lavatory, the benches all shaking. Then a respite and just a low whistling. Their jobs would start now. After the blast and everything else.
‘Tasteful, isn’t it?’ Gibbs said.
After the bunker had been decommissioned, Don had got a job locally. Jayne was over forty. Too late now. Too late for so many things. He missed Maggie and he missed the Bunker. Jayne lost all patience with him. If you’d have asked him then, Don would have said the Bunker had been taken out just at the right time. It would be better to start again than save the world they lived in now.
Jayne left him for someone else and he spent years in itinerant contracts, jobs here and there. He did not go looking for Maggie. He wanted to, but he had promised. Eventually Maggie found him, tracked him down with surprising ease. He was reluctant. There was nothing to salvage. It would just be the two of them, divorced, eating dinner. Yet more time wasted. But then he let her win. Because he still loved her, he let her win.
The room stopped shaking. The recording finished. The experience was over. Gibbs stood up and opened the door. Don stayed where he was. Gibbs nodded and let the door slam shut.
Don looked at the door and then at the red button. He pressed it again.
‘This is not a test,’ the voice said. ‘Repeat, this is not a test.’
As the low roil started, the door opened. Maggie sat down on the bench next to him. They let the door slam and the world end around them. They sat side by side until the world stopped ending. The rumbling stopped and there was silence. Then Maggie pushed the button one more time.
WHAT’S GOING ON OUTSIDE?
Karel sat at the card table peeling his third orange. His hands were large and powerful, his fingers nimble. By the time he’d finished, the orange flesh was clean and perfectly round. He admired his handiwork, then split the orange into segments. He ate them quickly, as though one might be stolen at any moment. When done, he sucked the juice from the fingers of his left hand and with his right removed another orange from the plastic sack at his feet.
‘For the love of God, Karel,’ Eugene said. ‘How many oranges can one man eat?’
Karel looked up from his fourth orange, his nail already under the peel. The older man – canted, pocked face, grey-eyed – was stretched out on the right-hand bed, a newspaper just below his eyes.
‘Would you like one?’ Karel said. ‘I have plenty.’
‘Speak Russian, Karel!’ Eugene said. ‘It’s almost midnight. It’s much too late in the day for English.’
‘Would you like one?’ Karel said in Russian. ‘I have plenty.’
‘You know I can’t abide oranges,’ Eugene said. ‘You know I can’t stand the way you peel your oranges. So just be quiet, okay? Be quiet and eat your fucking oranges.’
The answer was nine: one man – or at least the man who was Karel – could eat nine oranges in one sitting. The last two are not pleasant: too sweet by that point, too sticky on the fingers no matter how many times you wash them. And their room is the furthest away from both bathroom and kitchen. Those last two oranges are something like an ordeal; but Karel always likes to push things. That’s what his father used to say. What Eugene says too.
‘Does it not give you a stomach ache?’ Eugene asked, setting aside his newspaper and tapping a cigarette against the wall.
‘They’re on special offer downstairs,’ he said. ‘A whole bag for a pound. And they’re good oranges too.’
Karel held out a segment of orange, Eugene pointed to his lit cigarette.
‘They’re good for you,’ Karel said. ‘Vitamins and things.’
‘Nothing’s good for you,’ Eugene said. ‘Everything’s going to kill you one day. Don’t you read the papers? Don’t you watch TV?’
‘No one’s ever died from eating oranges.’
‘Perhaps no one’s eaten as many as you. Maybe you’ll be the first man to die of oranges. The first man to eat his body weight in oranges and then drop dead.’
Karel laughed. His shoulders went down and up like he was working the jackhammer. He stopped and went back to his orange.
‘Your father would never have eaten fruit the way you do.’
Karel looked up from peeling. He smiled.
‘No, he’d have eaten the peel as well,’ Karel said.
‘Don’t you be disrespectful,’ Eugene said.
Eugene shook his head and picked up his newspaper. Karel watched him move from the bed to the window. It was a broken sash, three floors up. They had the best room because Eugene had been there longest and had got to choose both his roommate and where he slept. When Karel had first arrived, he’d shared a bedroom with five other men, sleeping in shifts, the smells and noises like a farmyard. Now there was a wardrobe and a dresser, a card table and two single beds. Eugene opened the sash and hung out, smoking his cigarette. He could smell exhaust fumes, sweet pastry being baked. Most of all he could smell Karel’s oranges.
‘What’s going on outside?’ Karel asked.
Their room was above a greengrocer and looked out onto the main road. The shops were Turkish, Kurdish, Greek; open all hours. There was always something to see, either down at street level or in the flats and bedsits opposite. In the smaller window at one o’clock to them, a man was jigging a small child up and down. He wasn’t wearing anything on his top half and was animatedly, though to Eugene mutely, singing as he bounced the child around.
‘There are a few lights on. The man with the baby’s there.’
‘The wife?’
‘No. No ladies tonight.’
‘There never are any ladies, are there?’
‘No. They’re all such teases, aren’t they?’ Eugene said.
Karel peeled his fifth orange. He admired his handiwork, then split the orange into segments. He ate them distractedly.
‘I’m not sure I can take another night of this,’ Eugene said.
‘You say that every night,’ Karel said. ‘Every night the same.’
‘Is it any wonder? And stop with the English again. Talk Russian! You sound like a dope in English.’
Karel said nothing in either language. Nothing twice. He ate the sixth orange slowly.
‘So out with it,’ Eugene said eventually. ‘You look like a fish. A big stupid fish.’
‘There’s nothing to say,’ Karel said. ‘Nothing important at least.’
Karel started on the seve
nth orange. The peel did not come away in a perfect roll. The peel looked ragged, like a label picked from a beer bottle.
‘How long have we lived together? How long have we known each other? You are my son. My blood is not your blood, but you are my son, as close as is possible. Like Joseph to Jesus. I know, Karel. I know that something is on your mind. Your father looked the same way when things were on his mind.’
Karel put down the half-peeled orange and stood. Triangular torso, bullet-headed, smooth pink skin. The woman he did odd jobs for called him Tank. She liked to watch his forearms as he moved gravel from one part of the garden to another, drinking tea with her friends as he worked. She was a good woman. She reminded Karel of his mother.
‘It’s nothing, Gen. Nothing really.’
‘Say nothing then. Say nothing for the rest of the night. Let’s sit ourselves in silence! You can look like a dopey fish all evening.’
There was half of the orange left. It sat on the plate by its torn peel. He looked up at Eugene and then back down at the orange. Were he to say something the conversation would last the night. The thought tired him enough to leave the last of the orange.
Eugene stubbed out his cigarette on the outside wall. Below him, almost touched by the fading ash, were two men arguing outside the greengrocer’s. One was carrying a large leather Bible. A bus rattled past. A van with a defective exhaust.
‘What’s going on outside?’ Karel asked. ‘What’s the noise?’
‘Two men are arguing,’ Eugene said. ‘I don’t know the language, but it’s an argument.’
‘Anything else?’
‘There are a few lights on. The man with the baby’s still there. His wife now too. They’re all singing. She has a top on, but he doesn’t.’
‘How do they look?’ Karel said.
‘They look tired,’ he said.
Karel sat at the card table. By the time he’d finished, the flesh of the tenth orange was almost pithless.
‘And you’re just going to sit there, are you?’ Eugene said. ‘Eating your oranges? Eating one after another?’
The tenth one tasted of nothing; the eleventh one the same. Karel was not even bothered by the stickiness of his fingers. There had been twenty oranges in the plastic sack and he felt he could eat them all.
‘What’s wrong with eating oranges?’ Karel said.
‘It’s the way you eat them,’ he said. ‘Your father would be ashamed at the way you eat them, the way you peel them, with your long nail.’
‘Nina likes the way I eat oranges,’ Karel said. ‘She says it’s like art.’ He picked up the perfect coil of peel to show Eugene.
‘Does she know how many you can eat, though? Does she have any idea of the smell? And speak Russian, for the grace of God!’
‘She’s normal. She likes the smell of oranges,’ Karel said in Russian.
‘She says that now, but believe me she’ll soon—’
‘Can you just be quiet and let me eat my oranges?’ Karel said and looked the other way. Half of the twelfth orange remained. It would dry up there, pucker in the summer evening’s breeze.
Eugene tapped a cigarette against the wall, went to the window and opened the sash.
‘Are you seeing her tonight?’
‘We’re meeting at ten.’
‘You’re going out that late? You need to be up in the morning. We have a job.’
‘I’ll be awake.’
‘No good will come of this. Let me tell you that.’
Eugene lit his cigarette and looked out of the window, down onto the street. All the men and women, all the boys and girls. He wondered what Karel’s mother would make of it all. What a woman, what Nastia, would make of this house of men. The smells and manners, the grubby nests of sheets. Nastia whose face appeared at the computer screen when he was out. Eugene was always out when Nastia and Karel talked. He did not want to see her, hear her. The way she spoke, the way the words sounded from her mouth. Not like that, anyway.
‘What’s going on outside?’ Karel asked.
‘There are a few lights on. The man with the baby’s there. Jigging him up and down.’
‘He’s too rough with that boy,’ Karel said. ‘Every night too rough.’
‘The child’s got wind. Even I can see that.’
‘He’s too rough with him.’
‘Since when did you think that?’
‘I’ve always thought that,’ he said.
Karel took no time or pride in peeling the first orange. He ate a quarter in one, then a half. Then peeled another.
Outside the Turkish restaurant a woman with tightly pulled-back hair was smoking a cigarette. Eugene watched her take a phone from her handbag and press a button. Karel’s phone rang. He answered it, licking his fingers. Eugene watched the woman speak. He heard her talk into Karel’s ear. He heard the frustration in Karel’s English. His manic corrections. He heard him say no three times; say no three ways. Eugene watched the woman end the call. She looked to the window where he was smoking. He waved and she walked away, up towards the bus stop.
‘Are you not seeing her, then?’ Eugene said.
‘Not tonight, no,’ Karel said in Russian.
‘You go and see her, don’t worry about me. Don’t let me ruin your fun.’
‘You wanted to watch the football together. I told her that’s what I was doing.’
‘But—’
‘No,’ Karel said. ‘We watch the football.’
Karel had a laptop and when Eugene was in they watched American cop shows, Russian soap operas, British football. It was a nothing match that night, but they sat on their beds, the laptop propped up on a crate, and drank bottles of Budweiser. At the end of the game, Karel’s phone rang. He answered with apologies, but moved on to anger.
‘Trouble in paradise?’ Eugene said when the call had ended.
‘I’m going to bed,’ Karel said. ‘A long day tomorrow.’
‘Every day is long,’ Eugene said.
‘She’s a beautiful girl, that Nina,’ he said. ‘But the most beautiful women are from Minsk. I remember the first—’
‘I must sleep. Please, Gen, let me sleep now.’
‘It’s not even eleven.’
‘I know, Gen. I know.’
It was a Saturday and so there was vodka. Eugene was by the window, smoking the last of his cigarette, a glass in his hand. Outside three women were hailing a taxi, a kid in a baseball cap was talking loudly to another boy, the windows opposite empty save for nets and curtains.
‘Were you always in love with my mother?’ Karel said.
‘Yes,’ Eugene said. ‘Always. Everyone knew that. Your father used to make jokes. When I was a young man they called me the lapdog. I didn’t care.’
There were piles of rind and pith and ribbons of peel on the plate in front of Karel.
‘Does she ever talk of me?’ Eugene asked.
‘She says you’re the kindest man she’s ever known.’
‘Ah!’ he said. ‘You know what that means.’
Karel took a sip of his vodka and his phone vibrated in his pocket.
‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘in another life you could have been my father.’
Eugene wanted to strike him. To get up from the bed and cuff the boy around the ear. So stupid a reaction; this man, his not-son, was the size of a bear, had arm muscles to make boxers seem girlish. He could never hit him. Would never have hit him.
‘I wouldn’t have made much of a father,’ Eugene said and sat down at the card table. ‘You were lucky there. Your mother was lucky too.’
It had changed nothing: his story, his confession. He’d hoped the boy would understand. That men who wander fall in love easily. That Karel’s mother was just the first and therefore most pungent of memories. That Eugene knew best. Karel peeled another orange and Eugene went to the window, opened the sash.
‘What’s going on outside?’ Karel asked.
‘The man and the woman and the child are there. They—’
/> Eugene looked over his shoulder and Karel was talking on his phone in a low voice. As he listened to Nina, he mouthed sorry in Russian.
Eugene plotted his route again on the small map, though he already knew exactly where he was heading, how long it would take and where to get off the bus. Karel’s laptop was useful now he knew how to use it. He’d been on Google Earth and had seen the road on which Karel lived. There were no shops, no bedsits and studios running like a mezzanine above them; just blocks and blocks of flats, trees outside on the pavement, cars double parked in white-lined bays.
Despite the planning, Eugene was a half-hour early. There was a pub around the corner and he drank an expensive bottle of Budweiser while a large crowd watched the rugby. He ordered a vodka and the bar staff, as accented as him but better dressed, served him his drink. The customers were eating roast dinners, drinking wine and beers and Bloody Marys. The pitch of the referee’s whistle cut through the loudness of their voices. Some of them looked at him. He downed his drink and headed out the door.
There were forty-seven buzzers outside Karel’s block. He pressed number twenty-two and Karel answered as quickly as peeling an orange. He was buzzed through and Eugene took the stairs two at a time. Concrete-grey. A smell of something new, recently fabricated. At the top of the stairs he saw a long corridor with a single door open. Karel appeared, wide smile on wide mouth, waving with his goalkeeper’s hands.
‘Gen!’ he called out down the corridor. ‘So good to see you!’
‘And you, Karel, my boy,’ Eugene said. ‘But speak Russian, boy, it’s Sunday. Don’t you know to speak Russian on a Sunday?’
‘Come on in, Gen,’ he said in Russian after they embraced. ‘Come see my new place.’
The flat was ferociously tidy, three rooms – kitchen/living room, bedroom, bathroom – with laminate flooring and the cheapest kind of furniture. The small table was set for three. Nina was stirring a large pot on the stove. She looked like she had been stirring the pot for a hundred years.
