Constance

by Rosie Thomas

  Roxana’s reaction was startling. She whipped away from him as if he had seriously assaulted her and her arms came protectively across her chest. She glared at him.

  ‘Whoa. It’s all right,’ he murmured.

  ‘It is not,’ she snapped.

  ‘Roxana, don’t overreact. It was just a peck.’

  ‘Perhaps you believe that because I am just a lap dancer, I am for anyone? Perhaps now you will offer me some money? Or perhaps you think you let me stay in your flat and I am free?’

  He gazed at her in dismay. ‘I don’t think any of those things. I think you’re pretty, and I like you. I’ve got no reason to believe you dislike me, in fact you just told me I’ve got a good heart. We’ve known each other a couple of weeks, I gave you a very quick kiss. It’s what men and women do. At least, they do in London.’

  That touched a chord, as he had known it would. Roxana hoisted her shoulders towards her ears and with a long breath let them fall again.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Here. Let’s sit down for a bit.’ There was a pub with wooden trestle tables and benches set out parallel to the river. They sat down facing each other at one end of a table, both of them reminded of their first encounter further downriver, with the robot man and the borrowed bicycle.

  ‘I am thinking you are the same,’ Roxana muttered.

  ‘The same as what?’

  Her fingers drew a circle in the air.

  ‘My stepfather. My teacher. Dylan at my other house. Mr Shane at my work.’

  Noah was aware that there was a big tangle here that he and Roxana might have to unravel together if they were to go any further. He picked at the nearest thread.

  ‘Mr Shane?’

  ‘He is the man who owns The Cosmos. He likes one of the Brazilian girls, Natalie she calls herself. But last night he came when I was in my break and tried to make some games with me.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  Roxana laughed. ‘I know how to handle this by now, don’t you think? I am pleasant and I make him feel that he is big, but no, he doesn’t get me. Perhaps I can’t say no for ever, though. The worst is that Natalie is now my enemy. Soon I will find that I am given less good times to dance, and maybe some of my belongings will disappear while I am on stage.’

  ‘Roxy, you have to leave that place. You’re bright and lovely. You could get a completely safe, normal job. Even if it was in a bar, or as a waitress, for the time being.’

  Roxana laughed again. She had the gift of good spirits. ‘Not for this.’ She rubbed her thumb against her bunched fingers.

  ‘Money isn’t everything,’ he told her pompously.

  ‘Maybe not for you, Mr Noah Bunting. But I need to make a good life here in England. I work, I save, and some day I will be somebody. I always keep this in mind, you know.’

  They looked at each other, smiling but also weighing one another up.

  ‘Shall we have a drink?’ Noah asked after a moment.

  ‘This time, I’ll buy one for you. What would you like to have?’

  ‘All right, thanks. Just a half, then.’

  He watched her, walking head up with her dancer’s poise through the knot of people at the doorway of the pub. A minute later she came out again, frowning.

  ‘You didn’t tell me a half of what drink?’

  ‘Beer, Roxana. A half of best is what you ask for.’

  She came back with two halves in straight glasses, carrying the drinks as if they were molten gold.

  ‘Cheers,’ she said, and took a long swallow. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘Is that what you say?’

  ‘Yes, it is. Very good. Cheers, Roxana.’

  They clinked their glasses.

  SEVEN

  Andy came back from Barcelona, leaving a lava trail of damp and pungent clothing between his room and the washing machine. He was very large and suntanned.

  ‘Uh, hi,’ he said, when Roxana emerged from Noah’s room early on Sunday afternoon.

  ‘Yes, hi,’ she said quietly. They exchanged some pleasantries but it was impossible not to feel like an intruder while this young man was scratching himself and frying sausages in his own kitchen. Roxana packed her work clothes into a carrier-bag and went out into the bright afternoon. She turned in the opposite direction from the way she and Noah had gone yesterday, and found herself thinking it would be nice if he was with her now. She remembered how amused he had been at the pub, when she hadn’t known what drink he wanted a half of, but he had been laughing about it, not at her. Noah was very kind.

  There was a McDonald’s in the main street, with a lot of empty cartons outside blown into the gutter and against the gritty walls. She went inside and bought a burger and a waxed cylinder of cola and sat in the window to eat her meal. The seat was uncomfortable because it was sloping, and a girl in a nylon uniform was wetly mopping the tiles close to Roxana’s feet. She was troubled by the thought that in Uzbekistan a visit to McDonald’s had been a rare treat, whereas in London it seemed a less satisfying experience. She was realising that to become an English girl might just mean exchanging one set of things that you wanted for a different set.

  ‘Excuse me,’ the girl with the mop said to Roxana, and Roxana answered her in Russian.

  The girl shrugged wearily. ‘Polish,’ she muttered, and went on mopping.

  Roxana ate slowly but the meal only took fifteen minutes to consume, which left her with three hours to fill before she need even think about taking the tube to The Cosmos. She went out into the sunny, cheerfully dirty street again and saw an open shop with a lot of pictures of apartments in the window. On impulse she went inside and was waved to a seat across a desk from an Asian boy wearing a smart tie and a very clean, large-sized shirt. She told him that she was looking for a place to live.

  Yes, near here.

  It would be good to be close to Noah. It was dawning on her that Noah might after all just want to talk and laugh and have fun at first, the way people did in some of the movies she had seen. Maybe the way he had kissed her meant that it was just a kiss and not a prelude to something worse. What had he said?

  In London, it’s what men and women do.

  Roxana’s experience in Uzbekistan was entirely different, and she would not think about that just now. Even in London, with Dylan and Kemal and Mr Shane, and the men at the club, it had been much the same as back there. But, just conceivably, Noah might be like none of these men and more like a guy in a film.

  She felt full of a sudden longing for a new world that for the first time since she had left Bokhara seemed three-dimensional, and close enough to grasp.

  ‘One bedroom please,’ Roxana heard herself grandly saying. She hadn’t been able to specify what her price range was because she had no idea, none whatsoever, how much it would cost to rent a flat that was like Noah’s, and also close to Noah.

  The Asian boy stabbed at his computer keyboard.

  ‘Here you go. Brook Green, yeah?’

  He turned the screen to face her. Roxana saw photographs of a gleaming steel kitchen and a bed with layers of covers and pillows.

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Four nine five. Might take a near offer.’

  ‘Pounds?’

  ‘This is London, innit?’

  ‘Pounds, is that, a month?’

  Roxana saw a flash of contempt. In a much less polite voice he said, ‘A week. Two months in advance, plus one month deposit. Minimum one year, six-month break clause.’

  She did the mental arithmetic, then hardened her voice.

  ‘I want something cheaper.’

  ‘Not a lot round here. If you’re looking at a small studio, maybe.’

  ‘I see.’

  Half out of his chair, he was looking at his watch.

  ‘We close at four, Sundays.’

  Roxana stammered, ‘Where do people live who are not rich?’

  He hesitated, then took pity. ‘Rent a room in a shared flat, innit? Look online, or in the free sheets.�
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  Roxana stood up, hoisted her carrier-bag, squared her shoulders.

  ‘Thank you.’

  She walked quickly away from the place so that he wouldn’t be able to watch her through the big windows, then slowed her pace to an aimless meander.

  A bus came towards her, trundling over the McDonald’s litter that blew into the road. A small file of people stepped forwards as the doors swished open, and Roxana joined the line. She made her way up to the top deck and found a seat next to the window, near the front. She had no idea where the bus was heading, but she had time and nothing else to do. She rested her temple against the glass and stared out as they began to sway and rock through London. The traffic was lighter than usual because it was a Sunday, and the bus seemed to move quite fast. She could see over a hoarding into a parking lot chequered with cars, and over the hooped roof of a big supermarket, and into a little park with tennis courts behind wire lattices and boys playing football with clothes for goalposts, just like the boys did in the evenings in Bokhara.

  Now they were passing red-coloured apartment blocks with heavy white facings round the windows, and she could see over net half-curtains or between grey loops of torn material into crowded rooms with the tiny busy screens of televisions and lines of washing and a bed all stirred up after a long night.

  To her surprise, Roxana didn’t feel as lonely looking at all this as she had done when she first came to London. She was curious, even affectionate, as if she had suddenly slipped from the outside into familiarity.

  The bus turned a corner and the scenery changed. Here there were trees, big ones, taller than the bus, all together in a leafy clump like a slice of forest, but set around with high white houses. The houses had steps up to grand doors, and little lacy iron balconies, and window boxes planted with green and silver leaves. Parked all round the squares were BMW and Mercedes cars. Roxana had never seen this part of London before and she stared out on it as hungrily as if she were going to eat it.

  Then everything changed again and they were passing the plate-glass windows of glittering shops. Here elongated mannequins stood in hips-forward poses, and there little velvet recesses contained a spot-lit blaze of jewels. All the abstract wealth and beauty and grandeur that she had dreamed of in London seemed scooped together and made real in one place, with majestic trees and glimpses of polished houses giving way to the rows of prosperous, shining commercial facades.

  It wasn’t even a matter of wanting in much the same way but on a different scale, as she had suspected earlier in McDonald’s. Roxana was suddenly quite certain that whatever had happened in the past, whatever was written in her passport or bred in her bones, whatever history or heritage might otherwise suggest, here in these wide streets was where she belonged. The Cosmos, Mr Shane, a room for herself, her illegal status, what to do next, all of these were just details and she would find a way to deal with them.

  She was at home. Just to know it was almost as good as possessing it, she thought.

  She smiled as she looked out at the gilded day. London was a wonderful place, so wonderful that she would have liked to share the discovery with someone who would understand how far she had already travelled. Most of all, she wished that person could be Niki, even though he would disapprove of all these material goods.

  Niki. Roxana’s smile faded. It was still hard to come to terms with a world that didn’t have her brother in it.

  There was always Yakov. She owed him a letter because he had helped her to get here. She thought of him in his curtained room, always reading, with the books piled up to the ceiling and stacked in pyramids on the floor. Yakov had been her mother’s friend, though. He was well-disposed to Roxana, even though she sometimes had to move out of range of his plump hands, but it wouldn’t be like telling someone of her own age.

  Then she thought of Fatima, her old friend from school, who she had last seen when they were both briefly studying in Tashkent. She had an email address, Roxana knew that; Fatima was very proud of her business skills these days.

  Maybe, Roxana thought, she would find an internet café and send her a message.

  It was 4 a.m. when she returned to the flat in Hammersmith. She tiptoed in without turning on a light and almost immediately collided with the sofa end. Noah was wrapped in a blanket, his large bare feet sticking up over the low arm, and he was gently snoring with his broad, good-humoured face creased up against a cushion. Roxana went into his bedroom and climbed into the now familiar bed.

  The next afternoon she left the flat early, before either Noah or Andy were home from work. She had bought a copy of the newspaper and circled some rooms to let that she reckoned she could afford. Until she had found a place, she thought, it might actually be possible to live at Noah’s without him or Andy ever having to bump into her. Except for Noah on the sofa, it was a good arrangement. She decided to tell Noah that it would be better if she took the sofa.

  On Tuesday, she discovered the Best Little Internet Café on the Planet. It was in a side street, a very dingy street that was full of bagged refuse from fast-food restaurants. The pavement outside was slippery with grease and the air was rank with the breath of kitchen ventilators. But still, the café itself looked inviting. The funny name was printed above the window, in square red letters. Inside at the front there was a handful of small wooden tables, with mismatched chairs and old-fashioned glass salt and pepper sets. At the back, on a slightly raised section of the floor, she caught a glimpse of a row of terminals. Some young men who looked like Asian students were perched in front of them.

  Roxana went inside and ordered a Greek coffee, as the menu described it. The café proprietors were Greeks, obviously. One of the Asian boys got up from his terminal, tapped the others on the back, and paid some money to the owner.

  ‘See you,’ the man called after him.

  Roxana asked if she could use the terminal that was now free.

  ‘Sure,’ the owner answered. ‘Half an hour, or one hour?’

  She sat down in the still-warm seat. There was a laminated card with printed instructions taped to the tabletop. Roxana read it carefully.

  Fumbling with the English keyboard, she chose an Uzbek-language portal offering news and cultural commentary. Obligingly it came straight up, headed by a tourist-brochure picture of four sky-blue tiled majolica domes surmounting four brick minarets. It was the Chor Minor, gatehouse to a ruined madrassah, one of the most famous of the many famous buildings in Roxana’s home town of Bokhara.

  Roxana blinked at the domes, and at the sky behind them that was even more brightly and intensely blue with the heavy pulse of heat within it. The view was very familiar, but she needed to feel her distance from the alleys and concrete blocks and the hot white light of Bokhara. Outside the café, taxis reassuringly rumbled in the city street.

  There was a boy leaning back in the next seat and covertly eyeing her.

  ‘Excuse me?’ Roxana said to him, quickly closing the window. ‘How do you send email from here?’

  That night at The Cosmos was the worst yet. None of the men had wanted a dance from her, however hard she worked at making eye contact from the pole. There had been a sour, uneasy atmosphere in the club and Mr Shane had been vicious to all the girls, even Natalie.

  Roxana was about to get her period, so her face looked pale and spotty and her stomach was distended. She felt ugly and bone weary and contemptuous of the men who lined the bar at the back of the club, staring at her as she went through her routine as if she were meat in a market. If she couldn’t make them do what she wanted, she felt naked instead of clothed in self-confidence.

  As soon as she closed the front door of the flat with the softest possible click, she knew that Noah was awake. She moved as silently as she could, to the bathroom and from there into the bedroom. When she lay down in the darkness, she saw a stripe of light under the door. She suddenly wanted very much to see Noah and talk to him.

  She sat up abruptly, swung her legs out of bed, adjusting the
vest and shorts that she wore to sleep in.

  Noah was in the kitchen, two hands wrapped round a mug. His hair stood up at the back of his head and he was yawning and blinking. He took a gulp from the mug, looking at Roxana over the rim.

  ‘I knew you were awake,’ she said.

  He nodded. ‘You should get to bed, though. You look really tired.’

  They looked at each other under the twinkling, over-bright kitchen lights.

  ‘Do you want some tea?’ he asked. They were speaking very quietly, not wanting to risk disturbing Andy.

  ‘Tea? Okay, why not?’

  He juggled with a teabag and a mug and the kettle, then handed the mug across to her. They sat down at the kitchen table.

  ‘How are you?’ she asked. ‘I have missed speaking to you.’

  ‘I come home at the usual time, hoping to see you, but you’re never here.’

  Roxana pushed out her lower lip and he studied the faint indentations in the fullness where her teeth had rested.

  ‘I don’t want to be in the way, for you and Andy.’

  She drank some of her tea, put the mug down and spread her hands flat on the table. Noah matched the gesture and without speaking or looking directly at each other they slid their hands closer until the tips of their middle fingers were just touching. After a moment of this most tenuous connection Noah ventured to raise his hands to cover hers. When he glanced at her face he saw that she was blushing, and the contrast between what she did and what she was like touched him deeply.

  Behind her the fridge shuddered and the motor began its low hum. Roxana stirred herself and withdrew her hands from beneath his.

  ‘It is very late.’

  ‘When can we see each other?’ he asked.

  ‘We are seeing each other now.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  She said abruptly, ‘Yes. Of course I know.’