by PJ Adams
I woke to sunlight angling in through the open curtains and a seagull screeching from the rooftop.
It wasn’t one of those clichéd moments of disorientation, of waking up and being surprised not to be alone and then slowly remembering the events of the night before that had led to this point.
It was the opposite.
I woke to crystal clarity. A torrent of memories: the touch of my hand on her forearm, of lifting her onto the kitchen table, of pushing inside her for the first time and the look of almost surprise on her face as I did so; of waking in the night and turning to her, kissing her, working down her neck, across a shoulder, an arm, moving to a breast, her ribcage and down; the sense of never being able to get enough of her.
I woke expecting her to be there, but she was not.
I lay there, eyes adjusting to the sunlight, straining to hear sounds from elsewhere in the house – the bathroom or maybe downstairs in the kitchen – but there were none.
She had gone.
I rolled over into the space she’d vacated and told myself I could still feel traces of her warmth. I breathed in her scent, real or imagined. Knowing that even if it was all in my head – the trace of her perfume, the scent of sex – then there was still the sense of breathing in air she had breathed, of absorbing whatever it was of her that lingered when she, herself, was most surely gone.
I got up, and walked over to the window, naked. Leaned on the windowsill and looked out.
No sign of her, so I showered, dressed, went down to make my first espresso of the day.
No note, nothing.
Would she be back later? Probably not today, I guessed. Not to work, at least: she was due to start here in a little under an hour, so why slip away if she intended to come back?
Did she still work for me, or was that just too strange now? Had we moved onto something else, some new phase of our relationship where employer/employee wouldn’t figure?
I downed the espresso, went for my coat and boots and headed outside.
My mind was buzzing, still rushing through a cascade of images from the night before. That thing where you’ve passed over a threshold, where anticipation and hopes – albeit hopes you had fought and suppressed because nothing could come of them – had taken shape; where you now knew what it was like to hold her in your arms, the way your bodies fit as if cast from mirrored molds, the way she pushed her head back and her jaw sagged and her eyes widened as orgasm took its transient hold.
I felt bloody ridiculous. Walking along the top of the cliffs, that sodding stupid bounce in my stride, suddenly understanding what it felt to have a lift in your heart.
I thought of Dean. Had he felt like this at some point with Jess? When he’d passed the point of thinking he would, to thinking how could he not?
And Lee, with the Spanish bird Fearless had told me about.
Did even the hardest, most – to use Maggie’s phrase – ice-hearted sons of bitches start to skip and have cartoon birds fluttering around their heads, or at least feel that way?
Are we all vulnerable to such soppy bollocks?
I didn’t know, couldn’t work it out, but at least I could try to calm down and wipe the stupid fucking smile off my face while I was out in public.
§
I didn’t know when I’d see her again. Whether she would just turn up on my door when she felt ready, or if she would be back at the normal time tomorrow or the day after, returning to work as if nothing had happened.
I didn’t even have a number for her. I’d never needed it before. Didn’t even know if she had a phone. Would she have come from Lithuania with one that would work here? Would she have had any need to buy one since she’d arrived?
I filled the day with not waiting for her.
I did jobs on the house.
I cleared up the debris we’d left in the kitchen, the cutlery and a broken glass on the floor where they’d been swept from the table.
I played my piano, from my seat with the view out across the cliff path where I would see anyone approaching on foot from the direction of Tidingham.
Anything but hang around waiting like a stupid fucking teenager.
By early afternoon I knew she was not coming back during the day.
By early evening I knew she was not coming back tonight, either, and only then did I start to worry that the cold light of day might have confronted her with uncomfortable truths and she might have regrets, that I might have scared her away.
And only then did I start to fear I might have lost her when I had only just, barely, found her.
13
She hadn’t come here for this.
For waking up in a strange bed, the sky outside just beginning to lighten, to cast dim light into the room so that, when your eyes had adjusted, you could see the man lying next to you, start to make out some of the features, the details, and realize that it had happened, you’d let that moment of weakness become a night of something else entirely, a night with him. Owen Bailey. The ruthless crimelord everyone had warned you to be careful of but who had seemed to offer the only clear route to finding your brother, Alfredas.
Even when she’d been getting ready for the evening, choosing her outfit, selecting underwear that matched, that suited her figure and made her feel like somebody more exotic and different... even then, she had not been dressing for Owen Bailey, she had been dressing for herself, to give herself confidence. She had not expected him to see that her underwear matched, that it cupped and shaped in just the right places and its lines were designed to draw the eye in, down.
This man was a means to an end. She could not see him as anything more.
She could not allow herself to do so.
At one point in the night he had woken her with kisses, his face in her hair as if he might breathe her in, and then moving down.
She hadn’t expected him to be a man capable of such tenderness, a man so attentive to her responses that he could play her body like he played that big piano. The way the best music drew you in, the melody delivering notes you expected and wanted and then, just sometimes, surprised you with a flourish you had not seen coming. That was the way he touched her body, with those sensitive fingers, with his tongue and with the planes of his own body.
When she’d come fully awake early that morning he was still asleep, his mouth a little open. She moved, expecting him to wake, but he was unresponsive.
She could easily have remained there. Curled up at his side until he awoke. Or kiss him awake as he had her. Take him in her mouth again and feel him grow and harden in response.
She slipped out of bed, went to the window and looked out at dawn’s silver light spreading over the grassland that topped the cliffs.
Went to the bathroom to freshen up, and then undid the benefits by putting on last night’s clothes.
She’d come by taxi, and had expected to leave by one last night. Hadn’t thought through the possibility that she might find herself outside early the next morning, pulling her coat around herself and negotiating the cliff path in fashionable boots with heels, albeit low and solid ones.
Why leave?
She wanted to get back to her room, get changed, ready for the day before trying to work out whether she would be expected back here to work today, and then she would have to consider the implications of perhaps no longer having a job. There was a phone at the boarding house, too, a landline she could use – she didn’t have a cellphone here in England. She could call the number Owen had given her on that landline.
She could have waited, got Owen to run her back into town in his Range Rover. But she didn’t want to come across as suddenly needy, relying on his goodwill, dependent on him.
She didn’t want to ask.
She had come this far alone – a two-mile walk along a pretty good path on a beautiful morning like this was nothing.
§
She had a room in a terraced house near the station. A gray building with rooms divided by thin partitions, bulging wallpape
r over cracked walls and windows that didn’t quite fit. Eleven people shared this building, including Andrzej who looked after the place for the owner. Although cramped and cold, the tenants kept the house clean and got on well together. Maggie had stayed in far worse places back in Kaunas and Vilnius.
It was still early. Too early to make the call to Owen’s cousin, if she didn’t want to risk pissing him off.
She tidied the room, not that it was in bad shape to begin with. When she was done, she stood at the window for some time, peering out over the rooftops.
It was an attic room, but there the similarities with Owen Bailey’s attic room ended. The ceiling sloped the entire length of the room so that she could only stand comfortably by the door; the window was a slot in the roof streaked with white from the local seagulls. The room itself was barely wide enough for the single bed, a wooden chair and a small table against the wall. Owen’s grand piano would have had to stand on its side to fit into this space.
She hadn’t come here so early so she could make that call, she acknowledged. She had come here to get away from Owen. To avoid the morning-after conversation, the face to face working out of how things now lay.
And maybe... to stop herself from falling too fast, too deep.
She’d needed that walk. The sharp wind whipping in off the North Sea and cutting to her bones. The shock of the real world after a night removed.
So she stood in the narrow strip of floor space by her bed, where she could press her forehead against the sloping glass and peer out over the town.
She hugged herself, but that only made her think of his arms around her.
When she closed her eyes all she saw was him looking back, those dark eyes suddenly alive again – the knowledge that it must be what he saw in her that had reawoken that spark of passion she now saw in him.
She shouldn’t have left. Certainly shouldn’t have slipped away, as if ashamed or scared.
She should have stayed there and allowed herself to drift until they had awoken together, inevitably kissed and touched, and that would lead to the even greater inevitability that they must make love again, tender and intimate, as if for the first time.
She should have stayed so they would be forced to go through that rite of passage, the awkward working out of how things now stood, of what they had done and what this now was.
Not run away, as she had.
It was too late to go back, though. That moment had passed. The opportunity.
Instead, she must return later, the awkwardness transformed into something different because she had run away.
She was over-thinking it, she knew. Something she did when she was stressed.
She could not now change what was.
She would wait until a respectable hour, make the call and see what Owen’s cousin knew of her brother, decide what to do in the light of that conversation, and then return to the cottage on the cliffs later today.
She did not know what this thing with Owen Bailey might be, but she was not one to shy away entirely. She would go back and they would work it out, the two of them. There could be no other way.
§
“Ronnie?” She realized she did not have a last name for Owen’s cousin, just the name ‘Ronnie’. “I was given your number by a friend. I hope that you do not mind me calling in this way. I am calling about someone you might know, who I am trying to find. His name is Alfredas Petrauskas, but I think you would know him as Freddie. Freddie the German?”
A pause, then a voice, harsh and what she had come to recognize as London in accent: “Who is this? What’s this all about?”
She realized immediately how wrong she had got it, how it must seem. This Ronnie had no reason to be anything but suspicious. The world Owen and his family moved in... a phone call like this could be anything from entirely innocent to life and death.
“I am sorry. He is my brother. Freddie. I am looking for my brother. Can you help?”
“How’d you get my number?”
He must sense a trap. Her accent can hardly have helped, given the recent history of open warfare between the Baileys’ gang and the East Europeans trying to take over their territory.
“I... A friend gave it to me. He said I should call you, that you could help. Do you know Freddie? Is he still in London?”
“I don’t know anybody.”
“Can I come to see you? Is there any way I can prove to you I am who I say and all I want is to find my brother and tell him his father is dead?”
She hated playing that card. Using her father’s death as a negotiating tactic.
“I don’t know anybody, you know what I mean?”
“I do. I think I do. I am not in London now, but I could be in maybe two hours. Can I find you and ask you again in person? Where would I find you?”
§
It was still early. Trains from the town’s small station took an hour to reach Norwich, from where it was another couple of hours down to London. Her guess that she could be with Ronnie within two hours or so had been optimistic, but she could still reach the East End by lunchtime.
She rushed across the road, paid cash for her ticket and waited impatiently for the next train.
She was going to London. By this afternoon she might have found Alfredas!
Suddenly last night seemed a long way away, a thing that had happened to a different person.
She had to remind herself that was real, too. Very real.
What a day! To think that by tonight she might be back in Owen Bailey’s arms, and by then she might have found her brother again...
It was almost too much to take in. Too much to believe that finally some things were beginning to go right in her life.
The train came in. Maggie waited as a few passengers disembarked, then found a window seat and settled in for the first leg of the journey between two very different worlds.
14
The next morning, when I had convinced myself Maggie wasn’t going to show up for work for the second day in succession, I couldn’t help but worry. I’d scared her off. That must be the explanation. She’d had time to consider what she was getting into, time to regret, and she’d taken the opportunity to get as far away from me as possible.
And I would be the last person ever to blame her for that.
But... what if something had happened? I didn’t know what that could be, but I’ve always been the kind of person around whom shit happens. It goes with the territory.
I had to at least know she was safe, that it was not something sinister and merely a case of regret and rejection, painful as I now understood that to be.
§
I went into Tidingham.
I didn’t know what I was looking for, or where I might find her, but I knew how to ask.
Lunchtime in a pub called the Bricklayer’s Arms, there were three men sitting at the bar. They looked like regulars, like they were sitting in their favorite seats, hollows worn into the bar where their elbows customarily rested.
This wasn’t one of the gastro-pubs lined up by the harbor, the kind of places that get by on a few months’ tourist trade in the summer and then limp through the rest of the year. This was a pebble-dashed gray building on the Norwich road, a trailer park to one side of it and a boarded-up industrial unit to the other, and the three regulars looked about as gray and pebble-dashed as the building itself. With tattoos instead of graffiti.
They all turned to stare at me as I paused in the doorway.
I met the barman’s look and went over, shaking my head when he asked what it would be.
“I’m not here for a drink,” I said. “I just want to know where the Poles are.”
I left it at that. This wasn’t the kind of place to make fine distinctions between Poles and Lithuanians, and besides, I knew that at least Tomasz lived in Tidingham, and he was a Pole – if anyone could tell me where to find Maggie then maybe Tomasz could. I’d tried calling him already but he hadn’t answered.
The barman shrugged a
nd turned away, but one of the men at the bar caught my eye.
“Fucking Poles,” he said, his tone challenging, as if to ask what anyone would want to do with them. “Fucking scroungers, the lot of them.” He was a big guy, his head shaven and tatts down both bare arms, enough to put the frighteners on anyone in their right mind.
“Where do they live? I’m looking for Tomasz, the builder, or a girl called Maggie.”
The guy shrank back into his seat. Maybe it was something in my tone, or in my ice-cold eyes.
He shrugged. Seemed to have lost his voice. Then the skinny older guy next to him said, “There’s a boarding house by the station. Might be there. Cannon Street.”
§
She’d gone. Vanished.
The guy who looked after the overcrowded boarding house where she had a room said he hadn’t seen her for a couple of days. When I persuaded him to let me see her room up on the top floor it was hard to tell when she’d last been here. The place was immaculate and most of her stuff appeared to be still there, although it was possible she might have taken a few things. My best guess was that the bed hadn’t been slept in for a couple of nights – one night at mine and then last night.
Where had she been? Where was she now?
It was understandable that she might run from me as regrets kicked in, but not that she would abandon her belongings. When she’d left here she’d fully intended to return.
It’s hard for someone like me not to assume the worst. In my world, things don’t generally happen by chance.
Maggie hadn’t just shown up on my doorstep having talked her way into being my new cleaner, she’d been there for a reason.
And now... she hadn’t just slipped away because she was scared of what she was getting into. She’d gone for a reason, and now she was missing for a reason.
And it was hard not to think it must be bad.
I went back to my car and sat there for a few long minutes, my fingers drumming the wheel.
Funny how the old instincts never leave you. For most people, that point when the shit hits the fan is a trigger to panic, to over-react, to lose all sense of proportion and reason. In my game you won’t last five minutes if that’s how you handle things.
