Authors: Belinda Bauer
Then the courtesy car started up. James would have known it anywhere; it was a Citroën diesel that sounded like a suit of armour falling downstairs.
Mr Knight was leaving his Audi for the work to be done. After all that bluster and bullshit. That’s the way it usually went.
James listened to the Citroën bump off the garage forecourt and grind into second gear as it joined the traffic. Then he got up and went back to work.
He walked to the back of the workshop, but Ang was already retrieving the spanner from the layer of assorted rubbish in the bottom of the disused pit. Ang was quick to volunteer for anything and Brian was not slow to take advantage of it. He put him to good use fetching sandwiches, parking cars and dialling phone numbers for him, because he was too busy to waste time on hold. Three years after arriving in England on the axle of a flatbed truck, Ang was still learning the language. So far he’d only really mastered the four-lettered words.
Brian Pigeon calling. Please hold. You have message?
Ang practised his lines endlessly under his breath, but the task was a minefield.
Now Brian directed him from the edge of the pit, hands on hips, the poppers on his overalls starting to gape. James had noticed that lately, when Brian leaned into an engine bay, he had to find somewhere safe to rest his belly.
He glanced at James. ‘Spanner was a bit much.’
‘Sorry.’
Brian shrugged, then said, ‘Did you like the gasket fairy though?’ He laughed at himself, and then added a review: ‘Bloody hilarious.’
James smiled faintly, and put out a hand to help Ang up. He was slim, so he braced himself, but Ang was as light as a feather and seemed almost to float out of the pit.
James followed Brian across the workshop to the office while Ang picked up his broom and turned the radio up, singing along, putting the wrong words to the wrong tune.
‘Ang!’ shouted Mikey. ‘You sound like a randy cat!’
‘Thank you,’ said Ang, and went on singing. He loved that radio. It was on in the morning when they arrived for work, and still on when they left every night.
Brian looked up as James came into the office. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’
‘No,’ said James.
‘So soon after …’ Brian shrugged with his hands ‘…you know …’
‘I don’t mind,’ said James, and he meant it. He didn’t mind about much any more. Nothing was important enough to mind about.
Brian took a crumple of notes from his pocket and tugged free a twenty. ‘Here,’ he said.
James tucked it into his top pocket without a word.
‘Shit,’ said Ang from the doorway. ‘Money for old nuts.’
‘Rope,’ said James. ‘Money for old rope.’
‘So what is money for nuts?’
‘I dunno. Peanuts, maybe? You get paid peanuts? Not much money, you know?’
‘Oh,’ said Ang. ‘OK.’ He hovered at the door.
Brian was on the phone, sorting out the new hydraulic lift. Four years ago when James had first started, they’d had three crappy old inspection pits. Now they had been filled in and replaced with two lifts, with a third on the way, and a new cement forecourt – and they still had to put the coffee against the microwave door to keep it shut. Brian was rich but tight; James figured maybe he was rich
because
he was tight.
He shouted at someone about delivery slots and concrete setting times, then banged the phone down and shouted, ‘Arseholes!’
Ang leaned into the office with his usual good timing. ‘I’s fired for peanuts.’
‘What?’ said Brian.
‘I’s fired. No James.’
‘James gets fired.’
‘But I’s fired for peanuts.’
‘James gets fired,’ Brian repeated. ‘He’s white and English so he gets fired. You’re a Chinaman so I can’t fire you because that would be racist, see?’
‘Shit.’ Ang frowned. He toyed with the end of the broom handle, picking at the wood with his fingernail.
Brian sighed. ‘Are you going to clean the floor or am I going to have to call immigration?’
Ang twitched upright and started sweeping ‘I’s Hmong person,’ he pointed out sulkily. ‘Not Chinaman.’
‘Well, now you’re in England, and in England we work.’
Across the garage, Pavel gave a hollow laugh into the wheel-arch of a Lexus.
James reached up and continued undoing the nut on the Golf’s exhaust clamp. It was the thirteenth time he’d been fired. Two hundred and sixty quid’s worth of humiliation. Brian Pigeon was some actor – he should have been in the West End, not running a grubby MoT garage in south London – and his anger was convincing, even when you knew it was fake. Sometimes Mrs Pigeon came to the garage, although she rarely got out of her sleek Mercedes – just issued orders to Brian through the window, as if she were at a McDonald’s drive-thru. Brian never got angry with her though, and sometimes James wondered whether that was why he had a reserve of that emotion, all locked and loaded and ready to direct at him whenever a customer looked like getting litigious.
It always worked. Nothing appeased a rich bastard faster than seeing some grease-monkey fired on the spot for screwing up a job. Nothing made them feel more important.
It wasn’t for real, but James still found it unpleasant. There was the embarrassment of publicly claiming a cock-up that was never his. There was the forced apology. There was the shouting and the submission and the spittle in the face.
It all made him feel like shit.
Even the twenty quid he got made him feel like shit. Brian always gave it to him as if he was doing him a big favour, singling him out for special treatment like a favourite son.
‘Jesus,’ said Brian Pigeon quietly.
Ang stopped singing and stared sadly out of the double doors.
James followed their gaze and his heart sank even lower.
His wife was out there, sitting cross-legged on the edge of the forecourt, like Buddha in a blue anorak.
It only reminded him that feeling like shit was exactly what he deserved.
ANNA BUCK WAS
crazy. Anyone could see.
Every morning she sat in the street. Not against the wall like a homeless person, but right in the way, where commuters had to split around her with their phones and iPods plugged into their ears, and children circled her idly on their bikes like little Apaches.
Once a day, come rain or shine, Anna opened the grubby front door in the Victorian terrace and edged outside. No sooner had she opened the door than she slipped through and closed it again, fast, checking behind her as if she were trying to keep a cat in the house.
She always wore the same thing: a big blue waterproof, with sleeves that covered her right down to the fingertips. She kept her eyes down and the hood up, so that her face had an undersea pall. Head covered and bowed, Anna didn’t need to look up to know exactly where she was going – diagonally across the wide pavement and on to the cement of the garage forecourt.
There she sank slowly to her knees and started to clean.
Every day, Anna Buck brushed the cement with a toothbrush, wiped it down with a cloth, and then polished it to a gemstone shine.
Nobody stopped. People were busy and had other places to be. If they looked they just glanced, and only if they glanced again might they have noticed what it was that she was cleaning.
Five footprints in the cement.
Five little footprints leading away from the sooty houses to who-knew-where …
Today was dry and the prints were dusty, and Anna used the toothbrush to clear the grit and dirt from the little rounded indentations where the toes had been. When the large pieces had been brushed away, she pressed her forefinger into the big toe-print, to lift away the dust. She thought of Daniel’s toes – so small and pink and wiggly.
This little piggy went to market …
Pink and wiggly-giggly. She’d only had to start the rhyme to make him squirm with anticipation – his eyes made sparkling crescent slits by his chubby cheeks, and his small white teeth showing top and bottom with his squeals of laughter.
Her finger fitted cosily into the next toe-print.
This little piggy stayed at home.
She was still on the second toe – the tip of her forefinger fitted the second toe perfectly, all snug and cosy.
This little piggy stayed at home.
Daniel hadn’t stayed at home. Daniel had gone and he hadn’t come back.
No roast beef, no none, no
weee-weee-weee all the way home.
Just.
Gone.
Anna pressed her pinkie into the third indentation, then the fourth.
The fifth – the little toe – was too small even for her pinkie, and she lowered herself like a supplicant to blow the dust from it, before wiping the rest of the footprint clean – careful along the inner arch because Daniel was so ticklish, and then around the heel, dabbing the last of the dust out with the cloth. As she did she could feel his heels in her hands again, cupping them in her palms during all those long-ago nappy changes, making his little legs pedal bicycles in the air, as he giggled to the scent of talcum powder.
He would laugh and she would laugh and James would laugh. It seemed impossible now – the very idea of laughter.
He’ll be a sprinter – look at those thighs. He’ll be a dancer, pointing his toes. He’ll play for Spurs – what a kick!
Daniel had been easy to potty train. They said boys were harder than girls but Daniel had been out of nappies by his second birthday, and loved his big-boy jeans and his Batman pants. He called them his Bad Man pants and she and James had never corrected him because it was just so cute, and gave them a ridiculous level of pleasure every time he said it.
Anna sobbed. It happened sometimes without notice and she didn’t try to stop it. She couldn’t. Her tears were like breathing; there was no way of damming them. She’d tried in the early days, but it hadn’t worked. Now she bent to her work and sobbed openly and didn’t even care where she was or who saw her.
One tear plopped into the footprint and she cursed in her head and quickly soaked it up with the cloth. Salt and acid rain were death to cement and concrete.
After she’d got all the soot and dirt out of the prints, she opened the wax and started to polish them, to protect them.
Further up on the edge of the forecourt someone called Big Mike had written his name in the same wet cement. But nobody had ever cared for Big Mike, and already the shallow letters were starting to wear and fade, the edges softened by rain and passing feet.
That wasn’t going to happen to Daniel’s prints.
Never.
The fierceness of the thought stopped Anna’s tears for a moment and she wiped her nose on a blue sleeve and drew a deep new breath, enlivened by her own determination to keep her son’s last known steps as fresh and clean as on the morning they were made, exactly four months ago.
She couldn’t stop people walking across them – not once she returned to the flat, at least. But she could make them shine, and she did every day that it wasn’t raining. When it was raining, she just came out and sat leaning over them for a while, head down, like a dying squaw – saving the footprints from wear for a short while, before hurrying back indoors before the baby could wake up.
At other times she placed a tea-light there, and lit it with an old Bic lighter. Once a policeman blew it out and told her it was a fire hazard. Anna had screamed in his face – some crazed incoherence about Daniel and wasting time and catching real criminals – and the policeman had backed off and scurried away. After that he walked his beat on the other side of the street and let her light her candles.
Now Anna put out her finger and traced the outline of the last footprint. It was her favourite. It was the print where she could tell Daniel had realized he was running across the freshly poured cement and had changed direction. The print was twisted and a little misshapen, and the heel was shallower, and the ball of the foot and the toes much deeper, as though he’d raised himself on to his tiptoes and pushed off at an angle … ‘What are you doing?’
Anna looked up briefly and saw a girl. She was in school uniform – black trousers, black shoes and red sweatshirt,
St Catherine’s Academy
embroidered around a cross on the left side of the chest.
Sometimes kids shouted at Anna as they went past in unruly groups, or called her names. Weirdo and Nutter and worse.
She bent and went back to her work.
‘What are you doing?’ the girl said again.
It was weeks since Anna had spoken to anybody but James. Maybe months.
‘Cluh—’ she started and then had to clear her throat of tears and disuse. ‘Cleaning.’
‘Oh,’ said the girl.
Anna polished the heel of the last footprint, making the cement as smooth and shiny as glass. While she rubbed, her anorak’s nylon hood scraped synthetically back and forth against her ears, cutting out everything else.
Scri-scri-scri
Anna went on rubbing long after she knew the footprint was done, just to maintain that noisy silence.
‘Why?’ said the girl.
‘What?’ said Anna.
‘Why are you cleaning them?’
‘Because—’ She stopped and thought and then went on. ‘My son made them and I don’t want to lose them.’
‘Why?’
Daniel had wanted to know
why
too. All the time. Why this, why that, why the other. It had driven her mad. Although – of course – at the time she’d had no idea what mad was; not the faintest idea. Now the lack of Daniel was showing her the true meaning of the word. Anna knew that. She knew she was going mad, but she didn’t know how to stop it any more than she knew how to stop crying or breathing.
‘Why?’ The girl was still there. Still asking. ‘Why don’t you want to lose them?’
Anna shrugged without looking up. ‘Because I lost
him
.’
‘Really?’ said the girl, and her forehead wrinkled with mystery. ‘How?’
The
how
spun inside Anna’s head so often that she knew it off by heart, the same way she’d once known every frame of Daniel’s DVDs –
The Lion King
and
Toy Story
. She didn’t want to replay the how, but once it had started, she could never stop it.