Dirty Work Read online

  We’ve been droning through the hot yellow countryside for hours. I’m dripping with sweat even though we’ve got all the windows open, and now the battery on my iPod has run down I’ve got to listen to Dad’s hippy music – Cream and Fairport Convention – on worn-out cassettes that make the music sound slow and soupy.

  There’s been another heatwave in France this year. La canicule has been in the headlines of all the newspapers. The countryside around here is scorched, the grass brown and dying, trees already starting to shed their leaves. Lots of old people died, according to Le Monde, and now there’s some scandal about them storing bodies in refrigerated trucks, because there’s not enough room for them at the morgue.

  ‘Disgusting,’ Mum said, and then, ‘Thank God for air conditioning.’

  Dad is uncomfortable, shifting in his seat, his face damp with sweat. He looks at me and sees that I’m twiddling my earphones round and round my fingers.

  ‘Battery gone?’

  I grunt.

  Whenever we get in range, his mobile phone goes off like a Christmas display and he has to pull over and bark at people back in London: ‘. . . cash in those share options now . . . we need something liquid here . . . didn’t we negotiate ninety-day terms? . . . can I count on you to set the ball rolling?’

  Business conversations. He sounds like a boss then: tough, demanding. The sweat patches under his arms get darker.

  We’ve achieved a kind of truce where if he doesn’t ask dumb questions or crack racist jokes I don’t give him dirty looks or pretend I can’t hear him, but I’m still not going to get all father-daughter gooey over him. I slouch in the seat with my legs up on the dashboard, and stroke the fine nap of hairs on my knee that I missed when I was shaving. At least I got a tan.

  He looks at me and coughs and allows a lorry to overtake him. ‘So,’ he says. ‘So, how’s your life?’

  This seems like such a huge and random question. How’s my life? What life? Last time I noticed I didn’t really have one. I don’t say this to him of course. Before I can think of an appropriate response he says, ‘Got your eye on anyone yet?’

  ‘Um—’

  ‘Only, you know, you need to be careful. In life. You know?’

  ‘Not really.’ I look at him; he seems to be sweating even more.

  ‘With blokes, I mean men – boys – erm . . .’

  ‘What about them?’ He shifts about in his seat and leans over the steering wheel, staring at the road. I know what’s coming. He’s going to give me the ‘don’t take sweets from strange boys’ kind of speech, but I’m not going to make it easy for him.

  ‘Well, now you’re growing up a bit, people, boys, they start to notice you in a different kind of way.’

  ‘Really?’ I try to sound innocent rather than ironic. ‘Like who?’

  ‘You need to know that you don’t have to do anything with anyone that you don’t want to.’

  ‘OK, Dad.’

  We whizz past a whole line of cars that are waiting at a junction.

  ‘And if you do find someone you think is really special, you feel free to introduce them to me. I mean I know I’m not around a lot, but I’m going to make it up to you, and—’

  Yeah, right. He always says that. ‘Dad, I’m still a virgin. If that’s what you want to know.’

  He makes a funny coughing sound. The queue of cars starts to sound their horns at us.

  ‘Dad! You’re driving on the wrong side of the road.’

  ‘Oh.’ He brakes and swerves back into the right-hand lane. Cars have to move aside to let us back into the queue. One man sticks his fingers up at us.

  He changes the subject after that and puts Coldplay on the stereo. He tells me about the camper van, and how difficult it is to find parts, and then he goes on and on about the Business and how easy it is to make money if you know how.

  ‘Buy low, sell high,’ he says, as we creep along in the queue for the ferry. ‘That’s the first rule of business. And the second rule is don’t be emotional. You want your customers to be emotional, but the businessman, he always has to be rational. That way, your customers will buy things because they want them, not because they need them.’

  2

  Oksana

  I could open the door and jump out. He forgot to lock it, he’s so angry. Since we left Amsterdam he’s been stopping every fifty kilometres to snort coke and that’s made him talkative. He says he’s got to take the rest of it before we get to Calais. Even with the air conditioning on he’s sweating; the car is like a freezer although the computer on the dashboard says it’s nearly thirty-eight degrees outside. He drives as if it’s a race, weaving in between the cars and lorries, speeding up, slowing down. Maybe if I’m lucky he’ll have a heart attack before we get there.

  He’s stressed about Marie, he says. If the boss finds out what happened he’s dead. And now there is only me, his profit margin is cut in half. He’s practising his story. He says he doesn’t know what will come across best with the boss. That Marie ran away, or that a customer took her. ‘Perhaps we could find another girl?’ he says, slowing down a little, scanning the passengers in all the cars we pass.

  He says we have to go via France, because there’s too much heat in Holland. Dead girls mean trouble, questions from the police, investigations.

  ‘I mean it’s not like I killed her!’ he whines. ‘Silly bitch.’

  I think about Marie. I didn’t really know her. We’d only been together for a week. Since Zergei brought me to Amsterdam. A tiny, skunky seventh-floor flat right near the Oude Kerk. She was already there when he pushed me into the room. She had long dark hair and dirty fingernails and she was too skinny. Her bones showed, like she was already dead, like her skeleton was trying to push out of her body. Looking at her made me feel a bit sick.

  When Zergei came in with me she screamed and jumped away from him, flapping her arms and talking in some strange language, Romanian maybe. She didn’t seem to speak any Russian and her English was really bad. A farm girl probably. Zergei told me he was pissed off with her; he said she needed to calm down. He had promised Nikolai quality.

  ‘See if you can calm her down. Tell her this is a holiday. She doesn’t have to work for a few days.’

  Then he threw my bag at me and walked out, double-locking the door behind him.

  She didn’t seem to want to talk in any language. She lay on the bed looking at the wall, her hands together like she was praying. So I ignored her, tried to open the door a few times, tried the tiny letterbox window, too small to throw yourself out of. Maybe you could wriggle out of it, but by then you might have lost momentum and changed your mind. All around us there was noise: people talking, the thud of music from the bars downstairs, and the smells: the sharp scent of weed, greasy fries, beer, cigarettes and the stink from the canals.

  Sometimes she watched me, her knees drawn up to her chest. Her dark eyes took up her whole face. But even when I smiled at her she didn’t respond. All that time she was watching and planning.

  She picked the lock with a hairpin while I was sleeping. Ran out into the street and filled her hooded top with bricks, tied it round her waist and threw herself in the canal.

  Zergei talks about his plan. He says that after the exchange, when they’ve given him the money, I should stay still and wait for him to come and get me.

  ‘That is not a plan,’ I say. ‘How do I know you’ll come and get me?’

  ‘I will,’ he says, banging the steering wheel.

  I know that this is not true. He’s just trying to make himself feel better about what he’s doing. He’s not as cruel as Tommy. But I’m also not as stupid as I was back then. I know that men like Zergei don’t know how to tell the truth. They only know how to watch their own back and it’s really obvious that, right now, he’s in trouble.

  The road passes through fields of dead sunflowers, their heads hanging limp and brown, withering in the sun. I want to get away from here so bad it’s like an ache in my stomach, but I
can’t move; even when he pulls off the road, hunching over to take more drugs, and I could just open the door and run. But where do I go? I’ve got no papers, no money and no clean clothes. And Zergei said once that if I ever tried to run away he’d fly back to my home town, before I could even figure out which way was north, and tell everyone what I was doing and what a dirty little bitch Oksana really was, so even if I did go home no one would want to speak to me any more and anyway, he’d make sure that I was dead before I even got to the airport.

  ‘I have contacts everywhere,’ he said.

  Though I know now that this too is a lie – he’s got no contacts, or else why did we have to leave Amsterdam so quick when things went wrong? The big guys, the ones with real power, they employ men like Zergei to clean up for them. They don’t get stuck on their own in Amsterdam with two girls they can’t keep secure. Zergei isn’t a boss-man, he’s just the delivery boy. He just does what he’s told. He boasts to me, because he thinks I will believe him, but I’ve learned a lot about how to run a business in the last few months. More, probably, than I will need to know my whole life.

  I have to get away from Zergei soon, before he takes me to London and makes the deal, but I need his help to get me into England first. I’m no good to Adik stuck in France. I have to go along with whatever Zergei says until we get across the water. I dig my nails into my palms and think of Adik. He better better better bloody be there.

  It wasn’t always like this. Once I had a mother and father, somewhere warm to sleep: a family. Even in the winter, when it got so cold your spit froze before it touched the ground, there was always a glow in our apartment.

  People gathered around my mother, they couldn’t help themselves. When Adik broke his toe playing football only she knew how to make him lie still and stop crying. And the way she would always remember everybody’s birthdays and cook blini especially, even when there was not enough flour in the shops to make a small finger of bread.

  All the time there was someone knocking on the door, wanting to borrow something, wanting to pay something back. She always knew someone who had just been paid, who owed her a loaf of bread, or someone who had been first in the queue at the shops who had a spare piece of meat for a stew. She had a way of hiding things. And then forgetting where she’d put them, and then when she, or someone else, needed them most, she’d suddenly remember where they were. When everyone else was complaining because there was nothing except potatoes to eat, she would serve up solyanka and dumplings, still bubbling when she brought the pot to the table.

  ‘My witch.’ That’s what Father called her and he would slap her on the bum and laugh like he was pleased with himself.

  I asked her once if she could do magic and she laughed.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Every woman knows how to cook spells.’

  She was making biscuits, her fingers nipping and pleating the pastry into spidery human shapes.

  ‘Like proper spells that can change people into frogs?’ I thought of the stories she used to read me, of the prince who was turned into a frog, or of the witch in the woods who turned her hut into a gingerbread house just so she could tempt little children to her and eat them all up.

  ‘I don’t know that I’m very good at those kinds of spells,’ she said. ‘I haven’t turned anyone into a toad for a long time. Tell you what, I’ll make you a potion.’

  She shook some flour into a bowl and added a spoon of honey and some warm water. ‘Now I add the magic ingredient.’ She crumbled some yeast on top and stirred it. ‘Hubble hubble, make my potion bubble!’ she said in a silly voice.

  I looked at her and the bowl of floury water. ‘So?’

  ‘You’re disappointed, kroshka?’

  ‘Nothing’s happening.’

  ‘You have to watch, and wait.’

  ‘What will happen? Will it turn Adik into a frog?’

  ‘No, kroshka, it will turn him very fat.’

  ‘Cooool.’ I imagined Adik swelling up like a berry, and watched the floury water, waiting for a sign – a waft of blue smoke maybe, a dark and gloopy farting.

  ‘I can’t see anything,’ I said after a minute.

  ‘Hmmm.’ She looked at the mixture. ‘Look, see, it’s bubbling.’ Small air bubbles were rising to the surface giving off a sweet, yeasty scent.

  ‘It smells like bread,’ I said. ‘That’s not proper magic. That’s not like turning water into wine.’ She’d recently been reading me Bible stories too.

  ‘That was a miracle, kroshka, not magic.’

  ‘But what’s the difference?’

  She thought for a moment and then said, ‘Miracles, that’s God magic. People magic, like in the story books, is not real, it’s an illusion.’ She waved her floury hands around her body. ‘People magic is making people see what they want to see. And every woman knows how to do that,’ she added under her breath.

  This still puzzled me. ‘So how is that –’ I pointed at the bowl – ‘an illusion? How will it make Adik fat?’

  ‘Oy!’ She sighed and tweaked my ears. ‘You’re like your father, aren’t you? You always have to know everything exactly. Too many questions for today, kroshka, go outside and play.’

  I know she sees me now and can’t bear to look at me. I see her in my dreams. Looking down at me, her face sad and disappointed. I know she can see all the things I have done since she died, and she’s mad at me. I know I’ve let her down. That I deserve to be here.

  Zergei says he has a new plan. He tells me as we slow down to a stop in the queue for the ferry, that he needs to find another girl. Any girl.

  ‘How?!’ I ask. ‘We can’t just kidnap someone. People will see.’

  This is a stupid plan, a desperate plan. I look at him – his eyes are bulging in his head, his teeth are clamped, his nostrils red and flaring.

  ‘No they won’t,’ he says. He thinks it will be easy – after all, its not like we’re really kidnapping someone. ‘We’re just borrowing them,’ he says. ‘After I get my money I’ll come and get you both. And she can go free. No harm done.’

  ‘But what if she screams? What if she tries to get away? What if she tells the police?’

  He grits his teeth at me and stalls the car. I’m not sure how, because it’s a brand-new Lexus. Then he gets in a mess with the gears and the car crunches and lurches forward.

  ‘Now look what you did!’ He grabs me round the wrist, crushing my bones in his huge hands. ‘Don’t make me hurt you.’

  He says this a lot, usually before he’s about to hit me. But it’s not like I’m attached to him, forcing him to move like a puppet. He could let me go if he wanted – but instead he’s still trying to make out like he’s doing me a favour. ‘I’m helping you, Oksana. Who are you without me? Eh?’ He curls his lip and throws his arm back on my lap. ‘I’m watching you,’ he says.

  One time, early on, in Italy, I tried to steal a mobile phone. I thought maybe I could call home, tell Father to send someone to come and get me. I got it out of his jacket pocket while the man was turned round, stepping into his trousers. The phone was hot in my hand like a lump of burning coal, and my hands went suddenly heavy and slow. I couldn’t hide it and when he turned, buttoning his shirt over his hairy belly, he saw it.

  ‘Must have dropped it,’ he mumbled, looking at the carpet, darting out a hand to snatch the phone back.

  Later, Antonio hit me. He said I should know better than to steal from customers. I would give him a bad reputation, get him closed down. I wouldn’t look at him even when he was shouting. He kept calling me Natasha, Natasha, you stupid Natasha. Like that was my name.

  After that I always tell them, whoever asks, that my name is Natasha, although Oksana is my real name. Natasha is who I am for them because Natasha is stupid and ugly and dirty. She’s the one who got tricked, who thought life could be different, who wanted more than she deserved. Natasha is a nightmare, a bad dream of a life. Oksana is my real name.

  3

  Hope


  I lean over the rail, and look at the thick spew of water that is churned by the engines of the boat. Dad’s asleep in the first-class lounge, his complimentary copy of the Telegraph across his chest. We’re on the Berlioz this time; on the way over it was the Manet. Mum thought it was really cheesy to name the ferries after famous French people.

  ‘Honestly, these places are so tacky and full of the worst kinds of people.’ And she wrinkled her nose at a family that bustled past, hands full of milkshakes and bags of Big Macs.

  She thinks that being rich should mean that we travel everywhere in style. ‘Well, what’s the point of having money if you can’t be exclusive?’

  She’s already phoned Dad three times to update him on the progress of the new hot tub. She’s mad apparently because they’ve trampled through two flower-beds getting the parts round the back of the house.

  ‘Excuse me . . .’ The voice has a weird Euro-English accent. ‘Do you have light?’

  I turn round to face a thin girl in a denim jacket with dark, flat hair that’s got streaks of orangey blonde in it. Her skin is grey and pasty but her lipstick is the colour of a post box or a fire engine. The contrast makes her look weird, like she’s out of focus. She puts her hands on her hips when I don’t reply, and smirks.

  ‘English? Nederlands? Français? Italiano?’

  ‘Oh. English.’ I pass her my lighter, the one I bought in Cannes with a cannabis leaf on it. I’ve been hiding it from Mum all holiday. I bought it to show to Amanda, because her new boyfriend smokes.

  She smiles and looks away as she takes it, which makes me feel nervous and reminds me of some of the older, meaner girls at school. The way they look when they’re secretly laughing at you behind your back.

  ‘Natasha,’ she says, blowing smoke as she speaks, ‘says thank you.’

  I shrug and wonder for a second why she talks about herself in third person. ‘Hope,’ I say.

  ‘What is your name?’ She pronounces each word precisely, like she’s learned it from a teach-yourself CD.