by Nina Allan
The phone was answered almost immediately and after a brief misunderstanding a woman with an Indian accent informed Margery that the family were away on holiday.
“They left last weekend,” she explained. “I’m Meesha’s sister. I thought that was her calling, actually. I’m looking after the house for them while they’re away.”
“Sorry to bother you,” Mum said. She replaced the receiver. Her mouth was set in a hard line.
“Something’s happened, I know it,” she said. Her eyes, Selena noticed, had a curious glassy hardness to them. They seemed not to be looking at anything.
“I’m sure there’ll be an explanation, love,” said Dad. “She’s lost track of time, that’s all. You know what kids are like at her age.”
“Not like this, not Julie.” She turned to look at him then quickly glanced away. Selena couldn’t remember the last time either of them had called the other love, not in her presence anyway.
“Are you sure she said she was coming home?”
“Of course she did. I told you before. I’m not stupid.”
“Don’t let’s get upset, Mae. We need to think this through properly, work out what’s happened.”
“I heard her tell Mum she was going to Catey’s,” Selena said. “I heard her.”
Both Ray and Margery looked at Selena as if they’d forgotten she was there.
At twenty past midnight Margery Rouane called the police. The duty officer said she shouldn’t worry too much at this stage – it was still early days – but they were going to send a car round, just in case.
3
Selena fell asleep surprisingly quickly. She woke with a jolt in the small hours, convinced she’d been having a nightmare, although what the nightmare had been about she couldn’t recall. She lay quietly in the dark, staring at the green fluorescent display on her beside clock radio and wondering if Julie might also be awake, and thinking of her. She drifted into a kind of half-sleep, and the next time she opened her eyes it was already light. It was raining out, but not too hard. Selena washed and dressed, trying not to think about Julie but thinking about her anyway: how she was feeling, what she was doing, what time she started work. What she looked like, even. She imagined Julie showering and having breakfast, the same as she was doing, the two of them mirror images of each other. Did Julie live alone, or was she with someone? Julie had always been a loner, but then so had she, and she had lived with Johnny, for a while.
You got out when things started to get serious though, didn’t you? she thought. Easier to shoo him halfway around the world than to let him into your life on a permanent basis.
A psychiatrist might say that losing Julie had made her suspicious of permanence, afraid of embracing it, doubting of its existence, even. Perhaps it was true, but then again perhaps it was shit. A convenient excuse, a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Not that it mattered now, anyway – Johnny was gone, racing monster trucks around a private circuit in Kuala Lumpur. Selena hoped he was happy. Really she should call him, clear the air, but she was nervous of doing so because she was worried it might make things worse.
* * *
Selena arrived at the shop just after eight-thirty. She made a point of getting in early on Mondays, even when Vanja didn’t ask her to – Vanja’s weekends had a habit of overflowing, though Selena suspected this was mostly down to Vasili. Selena guessed that Vanja’s husband had affairs – men like him always did. Whether Vanja minded she had no idea.
She unlocked the door and slid back the shutters, disabled the triple alarm – beep-beep-beep-thrum – then set it to standby. Selena remembered the time a year or two back – Christmas week it had been, Vasili was away on business in Amsterdam – when she and Vanja had been for a drink together after work and ended up holding a drunken competition to see who could disable and reset the alarm in the fastest time.
It was more complicated than it sounded, because there were three different sets of numbers to remember. Selena won, easily. Vanja kept putting the third set of digits in back to front, and would have had the police turning up if Selena hadn’t keyed the correct numbers just in time.
“Oh my fucking God,” Vanja had screeched. Her laughter bounced off the surrounding buildings like shards of shrapnel. “You would make a top-level thief, Selena, the absolute best. We mustn’t tell Vasili, or he’ll want to hire you. Hire you or have your ass killed, whichever.” Vanja shrieked with laughter again, grabbing at Selena’s arm in an effort to prevent herself from falling over.
Once they were finally inside the shop, Selena had brewed coffee for them both in the back office. Vanja had sobered up more or less immediately, her incoherence perhaps more affectation than inebriation.
Vanja was different when Vasili was away: more serious, more reflective, though she would invariably try and conceal it. Hence the after-work binges, the manufactured bouts of drunken hilarity.
“If you could live your life again, what would you do?” Vanja said, suddenly earnest in that way she had, what Vanja jokingly referred to as her Russian soul. “I’m not talking about fantasies, I mean if you could know yourself from the beginning and plan things differently. You wouldn’t be working here with me, I’m sure.”
“I don’t know,” Selena said. “I like working here.”
She’d met Vanja completely by chance, when Vanja came into Leggett’s to buy cosmetics. Selena had succeeded in sourcing a discontinued line of a particular mascara, and Vanja had reacted with surprise and an unconcealed delight which Selena would come to learn was characteristic of her.
“Most people can’t be bothered over the little things, you know? Good business means caring about the details. You should come and work for me. I bet I’d pay you better than these arseholes.”
She lowered her voice on the last word but not by much. Selena laughed. The idea that someone might walk in off the street and offer you a job seemed bizarre to her – she didn’t even know what nature of business Vanja was involved in.
“I don’t think I can,” she said, and smiled, hoping she didn’t sound too rude. She found herself drawn to Vanja, who wore knee-high Doc Martens with a plain black jersey dress that was obviously couture. She was clearly used to speaking her mind and Selena liked that, too. But she had worked for Leggett’s department store since leaving college. She was used to the routine, even if the endless bitching between departments sometimes drove her crazy.
“Take my number anyway,” Vanja said. “In case you change your mind.” She handed Selena a business card, white with silver lettering: ALMAZ. Selena stashed it away in her purse, relieved that the conversation had taken place out of the earshot of Sandra, who was busy serving a customer at the other end of the counter.
A week after Vanja’s visit to Leggett’s, Selena found herself taking a detour past Almaz during her lunch hour. It turned out to be one of those high-end jewellery emporiums you expect never to go inside: situated in a grubby side street in the northern quarter, the exterior paintwork was rubbed and chipped in what appeared to be a deliberate contrast with the merchandise in the window. The watches and jewellery on display were all without price labels, and Selena remembered something her Aunt Miriam once said: if you need to ask the price you probably can’t afford it.
The idea of handling the gemstones on a daily basis felt oddly alluring, not to mention escaping the escalating war between the post room and fourth floor admin back at Leggett’s.
Two days later, Selena telephoned the number on the Almaz business card and told Vanja that if she’d been serious about the job, she would like to know more.
“Oh my God that’s amazing,” Vanja said. “When can you start?”
“Don’t you want to interview me first?” Selena asked.
“Only if you want. I don’t care about interview, though. Not when I like someone.”
Selena’s first sight of Almaz’s back office, the piles of trade catalogues and art books and dirty coffee cups, left her with the feeling of having arri
ved on another planet. She thought of Leggett’s – the new staff toilets, the accounts office with its jealously guarded, individually styled work stations. She wondered if Vanja kept her tax records up to date, if she cared even the tiniest damn for such minor inconveniences as the Inland Revenue.
The combined contents of the three double-locked floor safes looked valuable enough to purchase a small European principality. The computer, with its ancient and discoloured big-box monitor, wasn’t even switched on.
“You’ll soon get the hang of things, I’m sure,” Vanja said. She broke off what she was saying as the shop doorbell rang, one of the old-fashioned jangling kind that sounded as if it belonged to a village sweetshop. “Come,” Vanja said, steering her out of the office and into the shop proper, a narrow, boutique-like space with polished mahogany counters and a ruby-coloured deep-pile carpet that looked as if it might have been filched from a casino. A woman was standing just inside the doorway in a coppery Aquascutum raincoat with clumps of flickering diamonds in her ears. To Selena, she looked like a minor film star of the silent era. She would not have believed with any certainty that money like this – shipbuilding money, shipping-line money – still existed in Manchester, that such connections still flourished. Most of the money that walked into Leggett’s was newer, brasher, swiftly earned and swiftly spent, only to pour forth somewhere else, pasting the pavements and storefronts with that grab-it-now Manchester energy that pummelled you senseless through the course of an evening then dropped you legless into a corner to sleep it off.
The woman in the Aquascutum coat looked as if it had been quite a while since she’d sat slumped in a nightclub lavatory puking her guts.
Vanja approached the woman, her distracted diffidence replaced immediately with a courtesy so professional, so perfectly poised between warmth and respect that Selena found the transformation almost mind-altering. It was as if the woman’s intrusion had triggered a biological process, something akin to metamorphosis, or the constantly shifting colour patterns of the chameleon.
Selena watched as Vanja talked the woman through her requirements – a graduation present for her granddaughter – and then began laying out items of jewellery for her inspection. Vanja handled the various pieces – a jade and ruby broach, a gold locket with a diamond escutcheon, a series of gemstone rings – with a casual confidence. She seemed to have an uncanny instinct for noticing when the woman’s interest began to wane, moving the redundant item quickly aside, replacing it with something else, something other, something to make the woman forget that she had been, however temporarily, bored.
Only once, when the woman seemed about to decide on an amber and onyx writing set, did Vanja assert her own opinion. Selena noted the expression of pity on her face – for the unknown young woman, perhaps, who had dreamed of a sapphire ring and ended up with an ostentatiously expensive pen set instead.
“I don’t think that’s quite right for Zoya, do you?” she said. “It’s been in stock a while, anyway.”
Selena tried to imagine this girl, this Zoya, a shinier if more prosaic version of her grandmother, eyes narrowed and hair upswept, a degree in marketing or economics or world domination poking casually from the outside pocket of her leather documents case.
She would have plenty of pens already. She would want the ring.
“Do you think?” the woman said, the gems on her own fingers trembling with renewed uncertainty. Vanja was showing her another ring, a piece she’d most likely kept back for precisely this moment, a platinum band set with an oval-cut tinted stone that Selena thought might be a topaz but that Vanja identified a moment later as a yellow diamond.
“It is rather unusual,” Vanja said, drawing the word slowly from between her lips as if she’d only just thought of it. “Which is nice, don’t you think, for a young person? And of course the platinum makes the whole piece lighter and more modern. Less of an antique?”
The merest hint of a question mark, just enough to suggest that the customer, whilst being discerning enough to recognise the value of antiquity, would also be sensitive to the tastes and needs of a somewhat profligate yet nonetheless adored and therefore forgivable younger generation.
“I think I’ll take it,” said the woman. “Yes, I will.” Grudging, then suddenly agreeable, the decision that had been arrived at firmly her own. The remainder of the transaction did not take long, and was carried out with minimal reference to the sum involved, a sum that seemed to Selena incredible, the proverbial king’s ransom, enough to buy a car with. A used one, anyway.
Zoya owned a car already, no doubt.
Selena was amazed to find the woman had been in the shop for almost an hour.
“You think you can handle these people?” Vanja said once she was gone. Her expression was teasing yet also serious. Selena realised that if there was to be an interview at all, then this was it.
“You know a lot about diamonds,” she said. She felt foolish for stating something so obvious, yet it was the knowledge of Vanja’s, carried so lightly and utilised so keenly, keenly as a fencing blade, that had most impressed her.
“I know it because I love it,” Vanja said. “And you can learn – learning is easy, if you have the desire. The main thing is can you handle these people, because some of them can be bitches, but you must love them anyway.”
Selena knew about difficult customers – you couldn’t work the Leggett’s cosmetics counter ten Christmases in a row and not – but in the items of jewellery Vanja had shown to the film-star woman, the opaque duality of Vanja herself, Selena had glimpsed something she did not know, had scarcely guessed at and wanted to learn more of. On her way home she stepped into Waterstones and purchased a basic guide to gems and minerals. Later that same evening she read about the Mohs scale for measuring the hardness of precious stones. She read that the yellow colouring in the diamond Vanja had sold to the Aquascutum woman came from impurities in the diamond’s structure, in this case nitrogen.
Lattice, crystal, allotrope, cut: new words like incantations, spells. Selena remembered chemistry lessons in school: sweltering afternoons of abject, sleep-inducing boredom alleviated only by the outrageous misdemeanours of Michael Robson, the class clown, who had gained instant notoriety and closet hero status by once, at the end of a particularly gruelling double-period on polymers, setting light to a gas tap.
(“The headmaster’s office, Michael. Now.”)
Gemmology: the study of gemstones. She had not known until that day that there even was such a word. Selena could barely remember the two years she’d spent at college – years that were miserable mainly because she could never explain to herself why she’d enrolled on an English course in the first place. Because English was what Julie had been intending to study? Because her other A level results had been so poor she was out of options? Either, or neither, or both. She’d dropped out of the course before she was pushed, come back to Manchester, landed the job at Leggett’s in less than a fortnight. She’d felt relieved to the point of tears to have somewhere to be, something to do, money at the end of each month that would pay her rent.
She knew her mother was disappointed in her, mainly by the fact that the subject was never mentioned. Selena didn’t care much. For a long time the act of survival – of negotiating the world under her own steam – felt good to her, and unexpected, and achievement enough.
This though – the discovery that chemistry could glisten, that it could make people’s eyes flash with pleasure and greed, that it was in the world, that the world was made from it.
It was a long time since learning something had made her feel excited. Not in an abstract way, but in a spine-tingling, visceral way that felt as if it might make an actual difference to her actual life.
Selena gave in her notice at Leggett’s the following morning.
* * *
Would a life she had chosen have panned out better than the life she had found? Selena sometimes thought about returning to college, enrolling for evening or part-ti
me study, but she had not done so. Was it inertia that held her back from the decision, or fear? Was it possible that twenty years later she was still allowing her ambition to be curtailed by something that had happened to someone else?
Or was that, like her rejection of Johnny, just an excuse?
She sometimes wondered what kind of a person she would have been had Julie never existed in the first place.
“Go on, then, what would you have done?” she had said to Vanja the drunken evening they’d played the alarm game.
Vanja had shrugged then gulped at her coffee, which was still steaming. Selena had no idea how she was able to drink it so hot. “I’d like to be a cop,” she said. “And not married to Vasili. Can you imagine?”
She spluttered, then shrieked once more with laughter, then closed her eyes.
* * *
Vanja finally turned up for work at around ten-thirty. She seemed preoccupied, quieter than usual.
“I need to make some phone calls, so,” she said, then disappeared into the back office. From her behaviour, Selena knew she shouldn’t disturb her unless it was absolutely necessary. She busied herself with the window displays until a customer came in to ask about engagement rings. He was dressed casually in black Levi’s and a hooded sweatshirt, probably in computers by the look of him. He seemed shy at first, and very young, though whether this was down to him being the only customer in the shop or just the emotions aroused by the purchase Selena couldn’t tell.
“What does your fiancée do?” Selena asked. She wanted to put the customer at his ease but she was also interested. She liked finding out about people. Her secret sales weapon, Vanja laughingly called it. But the fascination was real.
“She writes code.” The young man seemed to relax marginally. “She’s one of the best coders I know. Her name’s Justine.”
