The Debt

by Natalie Edwards

The yellow fluorescence of the bathroom’s strip lighting was harsh, unflattering; seemingly designed to deter all but the most determined from lingering too long. She crouched for five minutes in a cubicle, reviewing the pulse points of Croft’s confession and planning her follow-up, the right word in the right moment that would seal the deal. Two more minutes, and she made her exit, shoulders back and chin jutting, sweeping imperiously through the swinging bathroom door and back into the cafe towards Croft.

  He wasn’t alone. There was someone else at the table with him - opposite him, body spread across the chair El had just vacated.

  She was old - that was the first thing El noticed. Couldn’t help but notice. Her back was hunched, drawing the loose skin of her jaw down into her chest, which was covered by a dirty green shawl pinned in place by a dusty brooch. Her hair was long and grey, unexpectedly thick for her age, breaking free of its bun and falling in strands across the deep-cut lines of her face. Her mouth sagged, saliva visible at its corners; her eyes were blue but unfocused, her expression glazed. She smelled, even from a distance, of dried lavender and stale urine.

  She spun around in her chair - El’s chair - as El drew closer, and looked up at her mistily.

  “Have you seen my Graham?” she asked, her voice a dry, creaking Cockney vibrato.

  El glanced over the woman’s head at Croft, who shrugged helplessly.

  I don’t know where she came from, he mouthed. She just sat down.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know any Graham,” said El, not unkindly.

  “He went out for a pint of milk this morning, and he’s not been back since,” said the old woman. “I’ve got his supper on the table but it won’t keep warm.”

  “Perhaps we ought to… find someone,” said Croft to El, studiously avoiding the old woman’s gaze.

  “It won’t keep warm!” said the old woman, more loudly this time. “What’s he going to have for his supper if his pie goes cold?”

  “Find someone?” said El to Croft.

  “To help her,” he said. “Take her home.”

  “We don’t know where ‘home’ is,” said El.

  Croft nodded.

  “Where. Do. You. Live?” he asked the old woman, enunciating carefully.

  “I live next door,” said the old woman more sharply. “Number 65. Why, where do you live?”

  “I very much doubt it,” said El. “We’re on the Southbank.”

  “What does that mean when it’s at home?” said the old woman.

  “It means,” said El, “that there is no number 65. At least not in any residential sense. ‘Next door’ is the Royal Festival Hall.”

  The old woman’s face crumpled. Tears formed in her eyes.

  “I want to go home!” she said, even louder than before. She banged one gnarled fist onto the tabletop, attracting stares from a trio of black-haired teenagers in heavy boots and combat trousers slumped over textbooks at the other end of the cafe.

  “I should go and see…,” Croft began, pushing himself up into to a squatting position behind the table like a sprinter waiting for the starting pistol.

  “No,” said El, with such authority that he sat immediately down again, tailored thighs slapping dully against the varnished wood of his seat. “You stay with her. I’ll go and find someone to help.”

  She glanced back at the old woman.

  “I daresay she’ll have a carer around here somewhere,” she added, the back of her hand brushing lightly against the hump of the old woman’s back. “She probably just wandered off on her own, poor thing.”

  The old woman’s eyes met hers; they dripped acid.

  “You get away!” she hissed, enraged. She lashed out at El with the toe of an orthopaedic shoe. “Don’t you touch me!”

  El took a step back.

  “Are you sure I ought to…?” said Croft, alarmed.

  “Stay with her,” El repeated. “I’ll be back.”

  She pulled her jacket free of the old woman’s substantial buttocks and, ignoring the low-pitched growl she received in return, carried herself away from the table.

  ———

  She didn’t go for help.

  She left the NFT through the back entrance, circling half a mile of brutalist concrete before emerging back onto the Southbank. From there she headed towards Waterloo, hailing a black cab just shy of the station and making polite, unmemorable conversation with the driver until they reached the Finchley Road. She directed him to a side street around the corner from the Golders Green underground, then asked him to stop; tipped him an equally polite but unmemorable £5, and stepped out onto the street.

  There, sandwiched between a kosher sushi bar and a run-down discount bookshop, stood a Greek restaurant, recognisable as such only from its blue and white awning and the faded script that advertised meze and souvlaki from the window.

  The neon Open sign was unlit, but the door was unlocked. She turned the handle and walked inside.

  Ignoring the stacked chairs and the raised eyebrow of the lone waiter perched on a stool behind the bar, she made a beeline for the bathroom.

  Unlike the NFT’s, it had neither fluorescent lights nor cubicles - was in fact a single room separated from the restaurant floor by a broken lock and furnished with a bare lightbulb that illuminated a toilet, a small cupboard built to house toilet roll and urinal cakes, a cracked sink and a mirror spotted with fingerprints of every size. It reeked, as always, of cheap disinfectant and old-fashioned greasepaint - the stink of a fastidious clown’s dressing room.

  She thrust her face forward, six inches from the mirror, and began to change.

  First came the makeup: a few handfuls of water, a scrub of soap and a careful reapplication of eyeliner, and her face was her own again, two shades darker than before as the olive of Alison Miller gave way to the light brown of her own skin.

  Then the clothes. She quickly unbuckled the heels; untucked the white blouse, unbuttoned it at the neck until it could pass for a shirt and stepped fluidly out of the pencil skirt, pulling the black tights to the ground with it. She thrust an arm into the cupboard, retrieved blue jeans and a pair of canvas trainers and stepped happily into them, throwing the discarded fabrics and the redundant shoes into her open bag.

  She brushed her teeth, trading the residual traces of Alison’s Christian Dior for fresh mint and eucalyptus - then, satisfied she was herself again, she walked back out into the restaurant.

  In the absence of adequately-arranged chairs and any cutlery or tablecloths, she settled for a seat at the bar. The waiter stepped down from his stool, poured gin and tonic water into a glass and handed it across to her, unbidden. She took a sip and nodded her thanks.

  Ten minutes passed; fifteen. She leafed through the pages of a tabloid someone had left open on the bartop, taking in updates on the royal divorce, the tragic breakup of a boyband, the scandal surrounding another cabinet minister discovered in bed with the au pair at the family holiday cottage. She lit a cigarette, finished her drink and was considering asking the waiter for another when she heard the door open behind her.

  She looked down into her empty glass. Waited.

  A few seconds later, a woman sidled up onto the stool beside her, grey-haired and familiar. Her face was as lined as it been an hour earlier, but her posture was straight, her blue eyes were clear, and she seemed to have shed two decades between the NFT cafe and the restaurant. The dirty shawl was gone too, replaced by a denim jacket and silk scarf. Even the urine-and-lavender smell had dissipated.

  “You took your time,” said El.

  “Couldn’t find a parking space,” said the woman. Her voice was different too, now: still identifiably East London, but husky rather than creaking, and no quaver in it at all. “You know what it’s like when the schools come out round here. It’s bloody carnage.”

  El knew. The bar was where they always met, when they needed somewhere quiet to talk that wasn’t either of their homes; where they knew to meet, without it needing to be said.


  The woman beckoned over the waiter, who slid down from his seat again with a resigned sigh.

  “Orange juice and lemonade, love,” she said. “And a Coca-Cola for my girl here. I’m going to need her firing on all cylinders later.”

  “You know I was on the job before?” said El, with no small amount of recrimination.

  The waiter turned his back to them, busying himself with the drinks and pointedly not listening to their exchange.

  “I sort of got that from the clothes and the accent,” said the woman. “Spanish Prisoner? He looked the avaricious type to me.”

  “Exam papers,” said El. “For his son.”

  “Ah,” said the woman dismissively. “One of them.”

  The waiter placed two over-full glasses on the bartop - one dark brown and fizzy, the other a vivid orange.

  “I’m going out the back,” he mumbled.

  “Good boy,” said the woman. “We’ll call you if we need you.”

  “You didn’t have to come barging in like that,” said El as the waiter slunk away. “You could have waited ’til I’d wrapped up with him.”

  “And miss all the fun? You should have seen the look on that great lump’s face when you left him alone with me. Priceless.”

  El smiled and lit another cigarette.

  “Them things’ll kill you,” chided the woman.

  “What were you doing round there, anyway?” El asked, keen to keep her on topic. “Were you on a job?”

  The woman chuckled.

  “I had a spot of business down in Pimlico,” she said. “Went for a walk along the river once I’d finished to clear my head. I needed to talk to you anyway, and when I saw you through that window… well, I couldn’t help myself.”

  “And the shawl? Where did that come from?”

  “Bought it off a beggar by the bridge. Best £10 I’ve spent this week. Though it didn’t half pong - I had to spritz it with half a bottle of eau de toilette before I could bring myself to put it round my neck.”

  “I hope you found a good home for it after.”

  “I left it with your friend in the cafe. Thought I ought to give him something for taking care of a little old lady in her hour of need.”

  This time El laughed.

  “So what did you need to see me about?” she asked, when the image of Croft cradling the shawl had finally left her. “What was so important you couldn’t say it over the phone? I’ve got one of these now, you know,” she added, pulling her mobile phone from her bag.

  The smile evaporated from the woman’s face.

  “You’re not going to like it,” she said sombrely.

  El stared, waiting for her to elaborate.

  “I’ve got… Bloody hell, girl, there ain’t an easy way to say this…”

  “Just say it,” said El, immediately fearing the worst. Cancer. Heart disease. A death in the family.

  The woman paused; threw back her orange juice and lemonade like a whiskey sour.

  “The truth is,” she said, and paused. “The truth is… I’ve been done over. Really done over.”

  “How much?” said El, suddenly aware of where all the talk was heading.

  “A lot,” said the woman quietly. “100 grand. And, look - you know I wouldn’t ask if I weren’t desperate, absolutely desperate. But I need you to get it back for me.”

  Chapter 2

  Edgware

  1978

  El raised the hammer above her head and brought it down onto the bag. There was a crack, mostly muffled by the cloth, a soft baize the colour and texture of a snooker table. She pulled the bag open by its drawstring; peered inside. The glass had broken, she saw - not shattered completely, the way she’d hoped it would, but definitely in pieces, the thick pane now sectioned into half a dozen rainbow shards.

  A bit more effort, she told herself; that was all it needed. Steeling herself, she closed the bag, raised the hammer higher, and brought it down again onto the cloth. Harder, this time.

  Fifteen feet above her, a woman in high-waisted flares and holding (though El couldn’t have known it at the time) a very expensive pair of Francois Pinton glasses stared quizzically down at the courtyard from her balcony, watching the skinny kid with the toffee hammer and the Scrabble bag and the determined look in her eye with a curiosity that was half-personal, half-professional. She watched her go at the glass over and over with the hammer until it was nothing but tiny slivers; watched her pour the slivers into a flat brown presentation case sitting next to her on the bench and secure a glossy red bow to the case’s front. Watched her leave the courtyard and head purposefully out towards the main road, case in hand - the hammer and the bag stowed away in what looked to the woman very much like an old school satchel. Then she pushed the sunglasses up onto the bridge of her nose, tied a lightweight sweater loosely over her shoulders and went downstairs into the courtyard, where the girl had been.

  ———

  Outside the train station, the street was busy, the pavement packed with tired-looking white men in raincoats, all slicked-down hair and briefcases. Commuters, El’s Uncle called them; men - and the occasional woman - who worked in London but lived in Edgware and beyond it, scurrying out from Northern Line carriages every night at 6 o’clock in the race home to their wives, their children and a chilli con carne on the dinner table.

  More than a few looked likely candidates to her: almost all of them had that pinched, anxious look that said they’d do anything to get through the last leg of their journey uninterrupted. That they were absolutely frantic to shake themselves out of the raincoats, pull their exhausted feet out of the tightly-laced shoes that had imprisoned them all day and settle down by the fire with the paper and a mug of something hot and strong.

  One stood out to her, though. He looked even more tired than the rest, more ground-down. About her Uncle’s age, but stooped, as if the weight of the world was too much for him. His face was grey; his hair stuck up in sad clumps at the back of his head, exposing a circular bald patch he’d tried, unsuccessfully, to cover.

  He took a left out of the station exit. She followed him, the box clamped tightly between her fingers; close enough to keep him in view, but not so close that she’d arouse suspicion. He turned off the main road, towards the leafiness of Penshurst Gardens; she turned with him, closing the distance between them. On Penshurst Gardens she crossed the street, accelerating her pace until she was a few feet ahead of him on the other side of the road. Then she crossed back, still moving quickly, putting herself directly in his path.

  They collided on the pavement. As her shoulder met his chest, she let the box fall from her hands. It made a satisfyingly loud crunching sound as it hit the pavement.

  He froze. She dropped to her knees, picked up the box from the pavement and shook it, gently. The shards inside rattled. Gingerly, she lifted the lid, revealing the tiny, shattered pieces of coloured glass inside.

  The man looked down at the box in horror.

  “It’s broken!” she said loudly.

  “It’s… what?” said the man, dazed.

  “The jug,” she said, injecting a bass note of sorrow into the words along with the initial alarm. “It’s broken.”

  She looked up at him; wrinkled her nose to allow teardrops to form, thick and heavy, in her eyes.

  The man bent down beside her, one knee scraping the paving slab. He peered into the open box.

  “What… was it?” he asked. He had a stutter, she noticed. A posh accent and a stutter. She wondered whether he was always this nervous, or whether the stutter was a consequence of the strange girl barrelling into him out of nowhere in the street.

  She wiped a tear away with one finger.

  “It was my Gran’s,” she said. “She left it to me when she…”

  She let her voice catch.

  “We had the funeral this morning,” she said, sniffling. “We all went back to her house after, and I was looking at it on the shelf, and Dad said Gran had always wanted me to have it, because I’
d always thought it was pretty, so she wrapped it up and put it in a box for me…”

  She trailed off into a barely-suppressed sob.

  “It was made of special glass, Dad said,” she added. “From Venice.”

  The man looked so distraught, she almost regretted what she’d done - what she was about to do. But not quite enough to stop, not now she’d started.

  “Perhaps we can… fix it,” he said. He moved a slow hand towards the shattered pieces - then, realising the futility of the gesture, withdrew it again.

  “I don’t think we can,” said El, quietly.

  “Is there anything I can… do?” he asked.

  “Like what?” she said. “It’s all broken.”

  “We could… replace it,” he suggested. “I know it won’t be the same, but…”

  El glared at him.

  “It was Gran’s,” she said, with venom. “You can’t just replace it. Besides,” she added, “it cost twenty pounds, Dad said. Where am I supposed to get twenty pounds from?”

  The man blinked. Something twitched at the corner of his mouth. He’d seen a way out, El realised - a possible solution to this unexpected problem, one that might yet lead him back to the dinner table with a clear conscience before dusk.

  “I understand it must have had… sentimental value,” he said slowly, “and that you can’t just… replace something like that. But if money’s the problem…”

  “What do you mean?” she said, quickly. Too quickly, she thought. She’d need to sort that out, next time. If there was a next time.

  The man reached into the folds of his overcoat and withdrew a fat black wallet.

  “I could… give you the money,” he said, unbuckling the wallet. El saw notes inside - a wad of them, more money than she’d ever seen in one place. “For a replacement. It was… my fault, after all. That it got broken.”

  “It won’t be the same,” she said, parroting his words back at him. Repeating things like that built trust, she’d read; made people open up to you.

  He laid a consolatory palm on her back. She glared at him again, and he quickly removed it.