by Alison Bond
She learnt how to steal food from the room-service tray before it got to the room rather than waiting for the leftovers. What to steal from which mini-bars that would go onto a guest’s bill unnoticed. Always the corporate clients, never the holidaymakers. Holidaymakers checked their bills meticulously; businessmen generally didn’t give a shit. She learnt how to increase her chances of a big tip from any long-term male guest by making sure that she met them, preferably when they were only partially clothed so that she could blush and avert her eyes and make sure they developed a little crush on her.
And of course she called them ‘sir’ whenever she could.
Little things, but they all added up.
Gradually she became more dishonest. She learnt when to take a fiver here, a few coins there, a twenty if she thought there was little risk. If someone had had too big a night to remember. She could always tell if a guest had been drunk the night before, an opened blister pack of painkillers by the sink, the tell-tale disarray of a frantic over-sleeper. If there was a used condom in the bin or lipstick on the rim of a glass she knew there was someone else who could be blamed if a twenty-pound note was missed.
She got so drunk on her eighteenth birthday that she split her lip falling down the stairs at Leicester Square tube station. At the time she thought it was hilarious. Even as her mouth puffed up she was laughing.
‘It’s all your fault,’ she said.
Liam assumed a look of mock outrage. ‘My fault? Why?’
‘If you hadn’t scored that speed I’d have stopped drinking hours ago.’
‘No you wouldn’t,’ he said. ‘But you might be unconscious by now. Here, try rubbing some speed into that cut.’
‘Why?’
‘Just to see what happens.’
She laughed some more and dipped her finger into the little bag of white powder, yellowing and damp in places, which made her think it had been cut with some kind of bathroom cleaner. She touched her powdery finger onto her sore lip. ‘It’ll make it go numb,’ she said.
‘That’s a good thing, right?’
The first pub they tried wouldn’t even let them through the door.
‘But ’smy birthday,’ she pleaded with the tuxedo on the door. ‘My eighteenth.’
‘Maybe you should think about taking your girlfriend home, eh?’ he said to Liam, not unkindly.
‘She’s not my girlfriend, she’s my little sister,’ said Liam.
‘We take care of each other,’ said Samantha, still hoping they might get past the bouncers.
‘Not very well by the looks of it.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ said Liam, the alcohol and the speed making him belligerent, totally unaware that he was slurring his words and swaying from side to side.
‘She’s had a skinful, mate,’ said the bouncer. ‘If you weren’t holding on to each other you’d be crawling on the floor by now.’
‘I’m not your mate,’ said Liam.
‘Please?’ said Samantha, smiling in a way that she thought was sexy but looked grotesque, her lip bleeding and make-up smeared across her face.
She wanted to get into the pub and up to the bar. They could have another drink if only they could get inside. They still had some money left and even then she could tell people it was her eighteenth birthday, which had worked wonders in the last place.
Where was that again?
‘Not a chance, sweetheart,’ said the bouncer, nodding through the people behind them.
‘She’s not your sweetheart,’ said Liam. ‘You fucking people are all the same, bunch of power-crazy Nazis. What happened? Fail the police entrance exam, did you? Get chucked out the army for being a lardarse? Well?’
Suddenly the pavement dropped away from under his feet and he found himself moving backwards into the wall. The bouncer had picked him up by both shoulders. His back slammed into the damp brick and he struggled to get loose.
‘One more word, mate, and you and little sis here will be singing happy birthday down the police station. All right? You got that? It’s time to go home.’
In the end they walked to Primrose Hill.
‘Should have had champagne,’ said Liam. ‘How’s your lip?’
‘It’s okay,’ she said.
London stretched in front of them as far as she could see. The Post Office Tower, Centre Point and in the distance the floodlit dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, and the blazing lights of the Square Mile office buildings, and everywhere the rooftops of eight million people that called this city home. The light atop the brand-new Canary Wharf development winked at her.
‘I love you, Sammy,’ said her brother.
‘I love you too.’
Neither of them noticed that it was cold, and that the bench where they sat was covered with the lightest dusting of frost. They were too wasted to feel much of anything.
‘I used to dream of living in London,’ she said.
‘Nothing to it,’ said her brother.
Somewhere beneath the long night she could feel a trace of disappointment. If this was her dream come true then why were tears always close to the surface? Not just today, but practically all the time.
Perhaps she was just born to be unhappy. Some people were lucky and some were not.
He reached for her hand. ‘Have you had a good birthday?’
‘The best,’ she said. And she meant it. Not that she had much to compare it to. Past birthdays had involved curfews and, except for that handful of happy years in Nottingham, the company of strangers.
‘Let’s get a tattoo,’ she said impulsively.
‘Excellent idea,’ said Liam. ‘What’ll we get?’
They went back into Camden where they found a late-night tattoo parlour doing reasonable business and while they waited they browsed designs. She thought she was looking for a heart and dagger, something raw and dramatic, at the very least a Chinese character meaning strength or fighter or something tough. Liam pointed out a jet black Celtic symbol meaning ‘fraternity’ and suggested that they both have the same. She loved the sentiment and agreed, but her eye kept getting drawn back to a small pretty picture of a bluebird and no matter how hard she tried to like the stark Celtic symbol she felt the bluebird was singing to her.
‘I’m getting that,’ she said, pointing.
He looked at it in surprise. ‘Really? But I thought we’d get the same.’
She shrugged. ‘So get a bluebird.’
‘Okay.’
She went first in the tattooist’s chair. It looked like an old dentist’s chair and was stained with all the colours as if a rainbow had exploded there. The ink was drilled into the yielding patch of soft flesh on her back just inside the shoulder. A clear cerulean blue, the colour of a sunny sky. The punching motion of the needle wasn’t unbearable, but it made her wince. Liam was quick to notice.
‘Bite down on this,’ he said, offering her an empty cigarette packet. She put the cardboard between her teeth and tasted fresh tobacco, bitter and bracing. Lyrics from The Wizard of Oz played in an endless loop in her head, Judy Garland’s distinctive voice keeping her company as the grinding pain of the needle went on and on.
When they walked out again the sun was rising. A greasy-spoon café nearby was crammed with late-night people filling up on alcohol-absorbing carbs before going to bed with the dawn. They bought two fried egg sandwiches to take away and munched contentedly as they waited for the tube trains to start running.
‘Are you happy, Liam?’ she said.
‘Yeah, I think it looks cool.’
‘I didn’t mean the tattoo. I meant everything.’
‘Everything?’
‘You know, life.’
‘Oh, that. Yeah, I suppose. What more do you want?’
The cool air and the dull pain from her shoulder had sobered her completely and she knew that if she was to be happy, a truly happy little bluebird, she would need to do more than merely change strangers’ sheets and steal petty amounts of cash from their wallets. She
was eighteen now. She was a grown-up.
It was time to change.
The bluebird on her shoulder would sing to her for the rest of her life.
13
One of the many things Gabe Muswell had always liked about his wife was that she coped well with change. She packed away her dreams of Milan or Madrid just as easily as she had buried the dreams they’d had long ago of a family. She had shelved her continental fantasies and replaced them with visions of edgy Eastern Europe cool. After all, Krakow was the new Prague – that’s what everyone was saying.
Thanks to Samantha’s latest killer deal, Gabe would now be earning in a week a sum equal to their annual mortgage repayments. Not bad for a baker’s son.
He knew his wife thought he was obsessed with football, and that she’d previously blamed this obsession for holding them back. She thought that devoting two evenings a week and every single Saturday to something which in her eyes amounted to little more than a hobby was too much, and it was time and energy that could be better spent elsewhere.
Now he didn’t know what she thought at all.
This was a new start for them. They needed it. Badly.
Walking into their temporary new home at Hotel Copernicus made him feel like a rock star.
‘Do you like it?’ he asked.
She paused, and for one frightening moment he thought she would complain. Then she gave a little jump of delight.
‘I love it!’ she squealed. She sounded more like a twenty-year-old disco chick than a thirty-four-year-old wife.
Then as well as sounding like an overexcited twenty-something she started acting like one too.
She pushed her husband back onto the bed, straddled his waist and began popping open the buttons on his shirt.
‘Hotel rooms make me feel sexy,’ she said.
They had shared countless hotel rooms over their fourteen years together. As far as he could remember there had never been one that made her act like this. But he wasn’t about to contradict her.
So far he liked being a professional footballer.
A lot.
After they had christened the room he lay back on the bed and watched his wife walk naked around the room admiring everything she saw. The old-fashioned decor was offset with every modern convenience, a giant plasma in the bedroom, a tiny one in the deluxe bathroom. The antique bed was piled high with heavy white cotton and delicately patterned silk. The view from the window, of a gothic church and adjoining convent garden, was like something from a classic fairytale. He liked to see her happy. She still had a cracking figure, a bum she moaned about but he loved and tits she liked as much as he did.
‘Come here,’ he said, and she flopped onto the bed beside him. ‘I’ve got an idea.’
‘What?’ Something shone in her eyes. Love? He hadn’t seen that for a while.
‘We’re pretty good at that, aren’t we?’ He raised his eyebrows. Sex with his wife was still horny, but infrequent. ‘I think, in Krakow, every day.’
‘Every day?’
‘Every day,’ he confirmed.
‘What if we do it twice?’
He rolled on top of her and started trailing kisses over her collarbone the way he knew she liked him to. ‘Let’s call that extra time.’ For an instant he regretted using the football metaphor, but then she started to respond beneath him and he realized that football references were one more thing his wife wouldn’t complain about any more.
Thank you, Samantha Sharp.
The next day he was due at the White Stars training ground at 10 a.m. He decided to walk even though fresh snow had fallen overnight and the chill in the air was not so much bracing as numbing. Within fifteen minutes he could no longer feel his toes and his unsuitable canvas trainers were damp and cold. He picked up his walking pace to a jog, fearful of turning up to his first day’s training with ice blocks for feet. He ran through the snowy park, hardly noticing the quaint street lights or the impressive statues that dotted the path here and there. He was alarmed by a pull in his chest after only a few hundred yards.
He wasn’t out of shape, surely?
Okay, the last month or so had seen less in the way of sport and more in the way of stardom, but still he had been out running whenever he’d had a chance, and training with St Ashton regularly.
A few more yards and he realized it was the cold, biting down into his lungs, a dry kind of cold, wholly different to the soggy winters of England. Far more disturbing though was the way the cold was nipping at parts of his body he had never even considered. His bum was going numb beneath his short jacket, and the chill was creeping down the open neck and up the sleeves. Only when a third person stopped and stared at him did he realize that this morning he was the only bare-headed, barehanded, bare-necked person on the street. Everybody else was trussed up like they were going skiing.
And didn’t they look nice and warm too.
Eventually he made it to the stadium on the eastern side of the city, found the correct entrance and walked into his first day on the job as a pro.
The dressing room was practically empty. A handful of players looked up briefly when he arrived but didn’t bother to give him a second glance. He noticed that they were wearing long sweat pants and undershirts, most of them had fingerless gloves.
He admitted to himself that he had been expecting more of a welcome. He didn’t need ‘Welcome to Poland’ banners exactly, but a little acknowledgement would have been nice. He was Gabe Muswell – last week in England he had been a hero, and last night his wife had screwed him like they were on their honeymoon all over again, but now he felt quite unsure of himself, not unlike being the new kid at school.
He stripped to his shorts and training top, prepared to show them how they did things in England. So it was brisk out there. So what? A few laps, a kick-about, he’d soon work up a sweat. One of the other players said something in Polish and made the rest of the room laugh. He tried to fight the paranoid feeling that they were laughing at him.
He packed his outdoor clothes away quickly, not wanting to be last out onto the pitch. The truth was he wasn’t quite sure which way he was supposed to go.
Standing by the goal the rest of the squad watched him walk out.
His eyes took in his new team mates and it took him a moment to realize what was wrong with the picture. Apart from the two young lads that were loaded down with nets full of footballs, every last man was smoking a cigarette. Now there’s something you didn’t see in England. He felt a pang, his first in months, for a puff. So he could fit in. Instinctively he did as he had always done during the early days of being a non-smoker: he filled his lungs with fresh air and thought of them working for him. He was a professional sportsman, an athlete, a champion. He wasn’t the new boy at school. He had scored a hat-trick in the FA Cup – that was impressive enough; he didn’t need a cigarette to feel like he belonged here.
In the end he moved away from the group and started some warm-up stretches on his own. He wasn’t here to make friends; he was here to play football.
The training session was hell on his unpolluted lungs. Annoyingly the others seemed to take it in their powerful stride. It was the cold. It would take some getting used to. The pace of the training was no tougher than at his little club back home, but the searing air was merciless. There were forty minutes of drills and then a kick-about. He wanted to impress, but he would have to be satisfied with not embarrassing himself.
The ground underneath his feet was frozen solid. Obviously they had yet to install under-surface heating. He was terrified of falling over on the unforgiving earth and hurting himself, breaking a leg or something – his professional career over at the very first training session. But he didn’t fall. He didn’t score either, but he felt that despite the conditions he had performed pretty well for his first run out. At least he hadn’t made any howling errors.
Afterwards he hit the showers. He listened to the indecipherable snatches of Polish and wondered if he’d ever get to grips w
ith the language. Samantha had made it pretty clear that he should try. He wasn’t looking forward to it, but as he looked at the training schedule he could only hope that he was translating it correctly and a few lessons would make sense. After all, when he scored three goals on his debut he should know how to count them. The thought cheered him and he was just about to leave and make his way back to the hotel when the door of the changing room flew open and the imposing presence of Aleksandr Lubin walked in.
‘Where is the new boy?’ he shouted, and with a few deferential grunts the men between Gabe and his new boss fell away.
He felt suddenly, inexplicably, that he should bow.
It was a ridiculous compulsion. The kid might be his boss, but he was still unquestionably a kid. Gabe had Saturday staff working for him at the supermarket with more maturity. Used to, he reminded himself. That wasn’t his life any more. This was his life, fresh from the shower after his first pro training session, his bare torso still dripping with water, meeting his new boss for the first time. Aleksandr had a powerful presence, sure, but Gabe was determined not to bow to it.
‘Gabe Muswell!’ Aleksandr declared, clasping Gabe’s hand in a double-handed shake, then clapping an arm round his shoulder. ‘We meet at last. Come, finish dressing, I want us to have lunch. Everything has been okay today? Somebody was here to greet you and to show you around?’
‘Actually, no, but I managed.’
Lubin’s face clouded over and he rattled off a harsh burst of Polish to one of his staff. ‘Peshka,’ he growled, and the unfortunate subject of his wrath cowered under the attack.
He turned back to Gabe. ‘That is regrettable,’ he said. ‘I apologize. I intended to meet you myself, but circumstances were against me. Ice on the runway, you know? However, I did send someone in my place.’
Gabe started to say that it was no problem but was cut off.
