We want what you have
. Petunia thought about that strange card for a moment. She still found it hard to imagine anyone saying those words to her face.
B
ogdan the builder, whose name was not really Bogdan, sat at the kitchen table in the Younts’ house. He was drinking strong tea from a mug; he had come to like tea and fully understood why the English took it seriously. In front of him was a sheet of paper with numbers on it and a pen and a plate with a biscuit which he had taken out of politeness but did not intend to eat. Across from him sat Arabella Yount, who was drinking weak Lapsang Souchong out of a cup and adjusting her hair behind her ears. She was wearing make-up, tiny diamond earrings, and what she called ‘non-going-out clothes’: a pink velour tracksuit.
‘Don’t spare me, Bogdan. Is it horrible? Just how bad is it? I can’t bear the suspense. Is it truly awful? It is, isn’t it?’ said Arabella happily.
Bogdan, whose name was Zbigniew Tomascewski, put his pencil next to the first line of items on his list and said:
‘It is not too bad.’
Arabella sighed in relief.
‘But it will not be cheap.’
Arabella picked up her cup of tea, sipped it, and shrugged. Zbigniew said:
‘I find some things cheap, I am careful but not too careful, eight thousand. I buy new, everything top-spec, five-year guarantee – you know me Mrs Yount, my personal guarantee – twelve thousand.’
‘Does that include the thingies, the electricity thingies?’
‘The wiring. Yes, it includes everything we discussed.’
Arabella was having some alterations made to her dressing room and to Joshua’s bedroom. The lighting in the dressing room was unsatisfactory. Arabella felt that the bright lights around the mirrors flattened the planes of her face and made her look like an Eskimo.
‘I should probably check with Roger. I should, but I can’t be bothered. That’s fine. When did you think you might be able to start?’
Zbigniew was a sharp student of his British customers and knew that in this country builders had a reputation for specific things: they were expensive and lazy; they were never available when you wanted them; they took over your house and behaved as if it were theirs during the work; and they left things half-finished and went off to another job so that the last phase of the work dragged on for months. He set out always to be the opposite of all those things and to stick to this policy at all times. So although he had a few things due to start, he said, ‘Next week.’
‘Oh, fantastic,’ said Arabella, adjusting her hair behind her ear. ‘Fabulous! That’s so great!’
Arabella had a habit of overstating things, one that she had so much internalised that it was not always easy for she herself to tell when she was mildly pleased about something and when she was genuinely delighted. Gresham’s Law was at work: the cheap money of overstatement was gradually driving out the good money of true feeling. But she was in this case genuinely pleased. She wanted the changes made to her room and she wanted them soon and was pleased that Bogdan would be able to do them, because, beneath the hyperbole, she liked and trusted him.
‘I think I should go now,’ said Zbigniew/Bogdan. He took up his pad and pencil and put them in his bag. ‘Next week?’
‘Thank you so much. Next week it is. Crack of dawn. Lovely! Thanks, Bogdan.’
He slung his bag over his shoulder and went out into the street. It was raining but not cold in a serious Polish way. Some of the houses had Christmas decorations up; a couple of them were places where
Zbigniew had done some work over the past year. He liked walking past places where he had done things. He never forgot a work project, the bathroom conversion over there and the loft conversion where they’d put a shower in against all advice and then had to run cables up to the top floor to power the immersion heater. The memory of the work on these places was a muscle memory, a physical sensation: he could feel it in his bones, the effort, the exertion, the tired fingers and aching back at the end of the day. But it wasn’t an unpleasant feeling. Real work never left you feeling worse.
His first job in London had been on a crew in the next street, Mackell Road, and someone had recommended them to number 54 in this street; the job was for one man and his old friend Piotr had let him take it, for which Zbigniew was and always would be grateful. That was when he had acquired his London nickname, too, because there was a Bogdan on the crew and the man in Pepys Road had got the names mixed up, and Zbigniew had never corrected him. He quite liked being called Bogdan because it left no doubt in his mind that he did not really live in London, that his life here was a temporary interlude: he was there to work and make money before going home to his real life in Poland. Zbigniew did not know whether that would be in a year’s time or five years or ten, but he knew it was going to happen. He was Polish and his real life would be in Poland.
Arabella would have been disappointed if she had known what her Bogdan thought of her, because the truth was, he thought very little. He didn’t have a negative impression of her, or a positive one; he neither fancied her, disliked her, was interested in her, or had any other feeling about her at all. She was a client and that was it. Zbigniew thought of all his clients the same way: they were people who paid him to do work and had certain expectations which he set out to fulfil. There was no more to it than that.
As for their wealth – Arabella’s wealth, the wealth of all his clients – he did not dwell on it but he did notice it. A boy who grew up in a tower block on the outskirts of Warsaw could not fail to notice marble worktops, teak furniture, carpets and clothes and adult toys and the routine daily extravagances that were everywhere in this city. You also
couldn’t fail to notice the expense, the grotesque costliness of more or less everything, from accommodation to transport to food to clothes; and as for going out to have some fun, that was almost impossible. The feeling of this cash leaking away just in ordinary life depressed Zbigniew. But in another sense it was the reason he was here: everything was so expensive because the British had lots of money. He was there to earn it from them. There was in Zbigniew’s opinion something fundamentally wrong with a culture that had all this work and all this money going spare, just waiting for someone to come in and pick it up, almost as if the money were just left lying around in the street – but that was not his concern. If the British wanted to give work and money away that was fine with him.
His mobile rang. It was Piotr.
‘Your turn to cook tonight,’ Piotr said in Polish. ‘I got some kielbasa from the shop, they’re in the fridge. Don’t eat them all before I get back, OK?’
Zbigniew, Piotr, and four friends lived in a two-bedroom flat in Croydon. The flat was sublet from an Italian who in turn sublet it from a British man who rented it from the council, and the rent was £200 a week. They had to be careful about noise because if the other residents reported them they would be kicked out – but in fact the polite, well-built young men were popular tenants in the flats, whose other occupants were old and white and, as one of them once told Zbigniew in the hallway, ‘just grateful you aren’t Pakis’.
‘You’re seeing Dana,’ said Zbigniew – Dana being Piotr’s latest potential love interest, a Czech girl he’d met in the pub. ‘If you’re not back by ten, no kielbasa.’
‘If I’m not back by ten …’ said Piotr.
‘
Czekaj, tatka, latka
,’ said Zbigniew. You can wait until the cows come home. He laughed. He had known Piotr since they were both tiny children, and his friend was a chronic romantic who constantly made the mistake of falling in love with women before sleeping with them. Zbigniew prided himself on avoiding this error.
Now there was the wait for the Tube. Five minutes, said the board, but that meant nothing. One thing about London which was like
Warsaw was the difficult transport and the grumbling stoicism of the people who used it. The other guys at the flat were all out on the same job today and would be coming back in Piotr’s trashed Ford van, which he had bought for next to nothing and had sort-of fixed up; Zbigniew hated using the van because there was such a strong feeling there was no reliability about getting to where you wanted to go. Zbigniew liked to feel in control.
A crowd of black kids arrived on the platform. Zbigniew had nothing against black people but after three years in England he had not yet got to the point where he did not even register their presence. He had a tendency to assess whether or not they looked likely to be trouble. These kids, seven or eight boys and girls, were loud – the girls more so than the boys, as if proving a point, which in this country often seemed to be the way. They were all simultaneously teasing each other about something.
‘You never—’
‘He never—’
‘Batty man—’
But Zbigniew could see that these were good kids being noisy rather than bad ones on the verge of causing trouble. The old lady beside him, who had been waiting on the platform when he got there, wasn’t happy. She would be thinking about her journey in the company of these shouting children. She was probably also wondering about walking off down the platform to somewhere else and worrying about that looking too rude. She wouldn’t want to seem racist. Zbigniew knew that it was a big thing in this country not to seem racist. In his opinion people made too much fuss about it. People did not like people who were not like them, that was a plain fact of life. You had to get on with things anyway. Who cares if people don’t like each other because of the colour of their skin?
The train came, heading for Morden. The rowdy children got on first, pushing past people who were trying to get off. There was nowhere to sit. The kids went to the other side of the compartment and a couple of them took seats. The others were standing around them and they were all still talking and yelling and showing everybody
their high spirits. Most people in the train succeeded in ignoring them. Another of the ways in which London was like Warsaw was the way in which people occupied their own spaces, went inside themselves, on public transport.
Zbigniew got off at Balham and crossed to the train station. Miracle – a train was on the platform and about to move off. He got on. There were no seats but so what? All the people on the train were heading home from work, wrapped up in newspapers or themselves. Zbigniew leaned against the partition and swayed and bounced as the train racketed along. It was hot and crowded and uncomfortable in the compartment, but again, so what? Zbigniew was well aware that people here complained about public transport a lot. In his view they should just shut up. Yes, the transport was shit, but lots of things about life were shit. None of them was improved by complaining. They should live in a place where life really was hard, for a while. Then they would begin to have an idea.
These thoughts made Zbigniew turn to wondering about his father. He, Michal Tomascewski, was a mechanic. He had worked for thirty years repairing buses for the city of Warsaw: hard and honest work. At the age of fifty he was too young to have much sense that the future would bring any pleasant surprises and nowhere near old enough or rich enough to retire – but there was, thanks to Zbigniew, the glimpse of a plan. Michal had for most of those thirty years had what amounted to a second job, looking after the lifts in their block of flats. Not quite every day, but never less than once a week, he would do some work on one or other of the three small metal boxes which were the lifeline and support mechanism of everyone in the block, especially the families who lived on the upper floors and especially especially the ones who had very old or very young members. News of his expertise in this area – and just as important, but perhaps even rarer, of his willingness to take responsibility – had got around and friends in other blocks had sometimes asked him to help them too. But there were only a finite number of hours in the day and Michal was now in his sixth decade and although he was willing to help people he was no sucker, so he did what he could comfortably do and no more.
Zbigniew’s plan was as follows: to make enough money in London to go into the lift-maintenance business with his father. Warsaw was going to grow rapidly, anyone could see that, and modern cities grew upwards, and that meant lifts, which were – he could hear his father saying the words – ‘the most reliable form of mechanical transportation in the world’. With capital they could set up together: his father would work less, earn ten times as much money, and within a few years he would retire or semi-retire in comfort. He could buy a cottage somewhere and shuffle around doing things in the garden and wearing slippers and on warm days he could have lunch outside with Zbigniew’s mother. His father did not complain – Zbigniew had never heard him complain about anything, not one time – but he knew that his father loved the countryside, loved getting out of Warsaw to his brother’s house in Brochow, loved the country air and the space and looking at farm animals instead of cars and trucks and buses. So he was going to earn his father the chance to enjoy that. Instead of sending the extra money he was earning home, Zbigniew was saving it, about half his sterling income, against the great happy day when he could turn up unannounced at his parents’ apartment and tell them his news and his plan. That was a scene he often played in his head.
The train came to a stop at South Croydon and Zbigniew got off. The next leg of his journey was the M bus for about two kilometres, then the walk home. Kielbasa to cook and then he would play a few games of cards with whoever was hanging around the flat. Or if everyone was out he might get to use the PlayStation 2 and do a couple of missions of
San Andreas
. Some of them would go out to the pub but that was so horribly expensive that Zbigniew only allowed himself to do it one night a week and then went to one of the bars which had a ‘happy hour’ offering two drinks for the price of one. ‘Happy hour’: that made him laugh. There would be girls there; he had met his last girlfriend in a place called Shooters during happy hour. She eventually broke up with him after complaining that he never wanted to go anywhere and never wanted to do anything. That, Zbigniew still felt, was not fair. He had never wanted to go anywhere and never wanted to do anything
that cost money –
an important difference.