Waiting for Wednesday

THIRTY-EIGHT

Josef looked at the notebook Frieda handed him.

‘And I’ve got some phone numbers,’ said Frieda. ‘From the stickers on the side of the phone box.’

‘So I phone the number,’ said Josef.

‘I know it’s a big thing to ask. But if I phoned, they’d get puzzled hearing a woman’s voice and I’d have to explain things and it probably wouldn’t work.’

‘Frieda, you say that already.’

Frieda took a sip from her cup. The tea was cold. ‘I suppose I feel guilty asking you to phone up a prostitute. In fact a number of prostitutes. I’m grateful to you for doing it. You’ve already done so much.’

‘Too much, maybe,’ said Josef, with a smile. ‘So I call now?’ Frieda pushed her mobile across the table. He took the phone. ‘We take the French teacher.’ He dialled the number and Frieda couldn’t stop herself wondering whether he’d done this before. Over the years, several of her patients had talked of using prostitutes, or fantasizing about using prostitutes. At medical school, she had been at parties, once or twice, where a stripper had turned up. Was that the same thing or something completely different? ‘Get over it,’ she remembered a red-faced medical student shouting at her. ‘Lighten up.’ Josef was writing something in the notebook. The instructions sounded complicated. Finally he handed her the phone.

‘Spenzer Court.’

‘Spenser,’ said Frieda.

‘Yes. And it is by Carey Road.’

Frieda looked at the index of her A – Z. ‘It’s a few streets away,’ she said. ‘We can walk.’

A gateway at the end of Carey Road led into the council estate. The first block was called Wordsworth Court and they went along a ground-floor level, consisting of lock-up garages and giant steel bins. Frieda stopped for a moment. There were split bin bags strewn about, a supermarket trolley lying on its side, a broken TV that had probably been thrown from an upper level. A woman in a full veil was pushing a pram along the far side.

‘You know, I never understood places like this,’ she said, ‘until, one time, I was in a hill town in Sicily and I suddenly did. That was the idea about this sort of estate. It was going to be like the little Italian town that the architect had spent his holiday in, full of squares where children would play, and there would be markets and jugglers, and hidden passageways where people could bump into each other and gossip and go for evening strolls. But it didn’t quite work out.’

‘Is like Kiev,’ said Josef. ‘But these not so good when is twenty degrees cold.’

They reached Spenser Court and walked up a staircase to the third floor, picking their way through old food cartons. They went along the balcony. Josef looked at the notebook and then at the flat in front of him. The window next to the door was barred, but also broken and blocked from the inside with plasterboard.

‘Is here,’ he said. ‘Is difficult to be in mood for the sex.’

‘That’s the way it’s always been. In London anyway.’

‘In Kiev also.’

‘We need to be calm with her,’ said Frieda. ‘Reassuring.’

She pressed the doorbell. There was a sound of movement from inside. Frieda glanced at Josef. Did he feel like she did? A strange nausea and guilt about what was going on in the city where she lived? Was she just being prim or naïve? She knew the ways of the world. Josef looked calmly expectant. There was a fumbling sound, then the door opened a few inches and Frieda caught a glimpse of a face behind the taut chain: young, very small, lipstick, bleached hair. Frieda started to say something but the door slammed shut. She waited for the chain to be unfastened, the door opened properly, but there was silence. She and Josef looked at each other. Frieda pressed the doorbell again but there was no response. She leaned down, pushed the letterbox open and peered through. Something was blocking her view.

‘We just want to talk,’ she said. There was no response. She handed her phone to Josef. ‘Try calling her. Say who you are.’

He looked puzzled.

‘Who I am really?’

‘Say you’re the man who made the appointment.’

He called and waited.

‘Leave message?’ he said.

‘No, don’t bother. She probably thought we were from Immigration or the police or someone who meant trouble.’

‘Is you.’

‘What?’

‘Is you. She see woman, she think we do something to her.’

Frieda leaned on the balcony railing and looked down. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘This was a stupid plan. I’m so sorry I dragged you out here for nothing.’

‘No. It’s not nothing. I keep your phone. You give me the map. I walk you back to café, you sit have nice tea and a cake. I will come back in one hour.’

‘I can’t ask you to do that, Josef. It’s not right. And it’s not safe.’

Josef smiled at that. ‘Not safe? With you not protecting me?’

‘It feels wrong.’

‘We go now.’

When they got back on to Carey Road, Frieda took some banknotes from her purse and gave them to him. ‘You should ask them if they know a girl called Lily Dawes. Lila. That’s what she mainly called herself, I think. I wish I had a picture to show them but I don’t know how to get one. Give them twenty pounds anyway, and another twenty if they tell you anything. Does that seem enough? I don’t know about these things.’

‘Is OK, I think.’

‘And be careful.’

‘Always.’

Frieda left him there. After a few moments she glanced back and saw him talking on the phone. She went back into the café and ordered another cup of tea but didn’t touch it. What she really wanted was just to rest her head on her hands and sleep. She felt she should read, or think about something. She took the sketch pad out of her bag and spent twenty minutes making a sketch of the great plane trees in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. She couldn’t get them right and told herself that she would go back there soon and do it from life. She put the pad away and looked around the café. There was a couple sitting at a table by the door. She met the eye of the man, who gave her a hostile look, so from then on she just stared in front of her. When she felt a touch on her shoulder she started as if she had been asleep but she was sure she couldn’t have been. It was Josef.

‘Is it an hour already?’ she said.

He looked down at the phone before handing it to her. ‘An hour and a half,’ he said.

‘What happened? Did you find anything out?’

‘Not here,’ said Josef. ‘We go to pub. You buy me drink.’

They could see a pub as soon as they were back on the pavement and they walked to it in silence. Inside there was noise from a games machine, with several teenage boys clustered around it.

‘What do you want?’ said Frieda.

‘Vodka. Big vodka. And cigarettes.’

Frieda bought a double vodka, a packet of cigarettes, a box of matches, and a glass of tap water for herself. Josef looked at his drink disapprovingly.

‘Is warm like the bathwater,’ he said. ‘But budmo.’

‘What?’

‘It means we shall live always.’

‘We won’t, you know.’

‘I believe you will,’ he said sternly, and drank his vodka in a single gulp.

‘Can I get you another?’ she said.

‘Now we go for the cigarette.’

They stepped outside. Josef lit one and inhaled deeply. Frieda thought of long-ago days outside the school gates at lunchtime. He offered the packet to her and she shook her head. ‘So?’ she said.

His expression was sad, as he answered: ‘I talk to four women. There is one from Africa, I think maybe from Somalia. She speak English like me but much, much worse. I understand little. Man there also. He want more than twenty for her. Much more. Angry man.’

‘Oh, my God, Josef. What happened?’

‘Is normal. I explain.’

‘He could have had a gun.’

‘Gun would be problem. But no gun. I explain to him and I go. But no use. And then I see a girl from Russia and then one girl I don’t know where from. Romania, maybe. The last girl, the girl I just see, she say a few words and I have a strong feeling and I talk to her in Ukrainian. She have big shock.’ He gave a smile but there was harshness in his eyes.

‘Josef, I’m so sorry.’

He stubbed out his cigarette on the pub wall and lit another. ‘Ah. It’s not so big a thing. You expect me to say, “Oh, it’s little girl from my own village.” I’m not a child, Frieda. It’s not just the plumbers and the haircutters who come here from my country.’

‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘I do not say that it is a good job. I see her apartment. It is dirty and damp and I see the signs of drugs. That is not good.’

‘Do you want us to do something to help?’

‘Ah,’ he said again, dismissively. ‘You start there and you finish nowhere. I know this. It is bad to see but I know it.’

‘I should have been the one doing all of this. It’s my problem not yours.’

Josef looked at her with concern. ‘Not good for you to do right now,’ he said. ‘You not well. We are both sad about her, about Mary. But you were damaged too. Not all better.’

‘I’m fine.’

Josef gave a laugh. ‘That is what everybody says and it means nothing. “How are you?” “I’m fine.”’

‘It means you don’t need to worry. And I also want to say that I’m sorry I wasted your time.’

‘Waste?’

‘Yes. I’m sorry I dragged you all the way down here.’

‘No. Not wasted. The one woman, the Romanian. I think Romanian. She also have the drugs, I think. You see it in the eyes.’

‘Well, not always …’

‘I see it. I talk to her of your Lily. I think she know her.’

‘What do you mean you think?’

‘She know a Lila.’

‘What did she say about her?’

‘She know her a bit. But this Lila, she was not completely … What do you say when someone is a bit part of it but not complete?’

‘A hanger-on?’

‘Hanger-on?’ Josef considered the phrase. ‘Yes, maybe. This girl Maria knew Lila a bit. Lila also with the drugs, I think.’

Frieda tried to digest what Josef had said. ‘Does she know where we can find her?’

Josef shrugged. ‘She not see her for a while. For two months or three months. Or less or more. They are not like us with the time.’

‘Did she know where Lila had gone?’

‘She did not.’

‘She must have moved away,’ said Frieda. ‘I wouldn’t even know where to start. That’s fantastic, Josef. But I guess it’s the end of the trail.’ Then she noticed a faint smile on his face. ‘What is it?’

‘This Lila,’ he said. ‘She have a friend. Maybe a friend with the drugs or the sex.’

‘Who was it?’

‘Shane. A man called Shane.’

‘Shane,’ said Frieda. ‘Does she have a number for him? Or an address?’

‘No.’

‘Did she know his second name?’

‘Shane, she said. Only Shane.’

She thought hard and murmured something to herself.

‘What you say?’

‘Nothing, nothing much. That’s good, Josef. It’s amazing you found that out. I never thought we’d get anything. But what do we do with it?’

Josef gazed at her with his brown, sad eyes. ‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

‘I know you need to rescue this girl. But you cannot do this. Is over.’

‘Is over,’ repeated Frieda, dully. ‘Yes. Perhaps you’re right.’ That evening, Frieda put the plug in her bath. She had bought oil to pour in and a candle that she would light. For a long time now, she had imagined lying in the hot foamy water in the dark, just the guttering candle and the moon through the window to give light. But now it came to it, she found she wasn’t in the right mood. It would just be a bath. She pulled out the plug and stood under the shower instead, briefly washing away the day. The bath would have to wait. It would be her reward, her prize.