Hand in the Fire

We agreed that people here didn’t want the straight answer all the time. They needed lots of praise. They loved exaggeration. They used compliments like mind-altering substances. She was on commission for skin-care products, so she got used to telling people that they looked gorgeous, cool, brilliant, absolutely amazing – out of this world.

She told me the story of how she came here. She met an Irish businessman who was in Moldova sourcing timber. She ran into him in a bar and he offered to get her a job. Paid for her flight over and put her up. She was nervous because she had heard about girls getting their passports taken off them when they arrived. But her passport didn’t matter as much as her visa, which put her at the mercy of her employer. She could not work for anyone else. So she lived with him and slept with him and cooked for him and worked in the office of his joinery firm.

Once he got tired of her, he allowed the permit to lapse. When he came back from another business trip with a new woman from São Paulo and a consignment of hardwoods that he swore were not from the rainforest, Liuda had to move out and find herself a new employer who would apply for a new visa. Asshole, she called him, and it made me laugh to hear her putting the emphasis in the wrong place. Ass-HOLE.

Inevitably, she was taken out of my hands, as the saying goes.

We were in a bar together one night and this guy came up to me in the jacks, talking about her. He was staggering around the place, pissing dangerously beside me in his urinal, chasing the green, pine-smelling dice around in circles with the force of his flush.

‘Come here,’ he said, zipping up. ‘Is that your girlfriend?’

‘What?’

Out in the corridor, he held my arm and smiled with great sincerity. He had something important to tell me.

‘I just want to let you know that your girlfriend has the most beautiful arse I’ve ever seen. I’m not joking you. I’ve never seen such a beautiful arse before in my whole life.’

What was I meant to say? Thanks?

‘No offence, like. I’m just saying, in case you haven’t noticed.’

He had me cornered.

‘Come ‘ere. Is she a model or something?’

I smiled and tried my best to walk away, but he insisted on shaking my hand to congratulate me.

‘Look, I hope you don’t think I’m coming on to her or anything like that. I’m just telling you the truth, that’s all. Her arse is only fucking amazing. You should be proud of yourself.’

He was right of course. Liuda was wearing incredibly tight jeans with zips across the back pockets like long, silver eyelashes, fast asleep. And knee-high boots. I could never really understand the boots, or the jeans for that matter, but that was the whole idea, wasn’t it, attracting lots of attention to herself.

‘Only messing,’ he said, putting his arm around me. ‘I’m just having the craic, that’s all.’

He leaned on me all the way back towards the bar. I could hardly interpret this as a form of aggression, because he was being so friendly.

‘I was just remarking to your man here,’ he continued, nodding to me but speaking directly to Liuda this time. ‘You have the most perfect arse that ever came into this country.’

He waited for her to smile.

‘There’s no woman anywhere around here to match you.’

I thought she might have been offended, for my sake. But this was really her opportunity to land on her feet at last, so I could not allow myself to stand in the way.

I became a has-been. I felt like shit. All my inadequacies like a tray of cakes on display in front of the world. I tried telling myself that she was the traditional sort of woman, expressing her femininity, enjoying the attention she got, not only from men but also from the jealous eyes of women who wanted to tear their false nails across her face. I told myself that I was the more progressive type, adjusted to the give and take of love, while she was still nostalgic for the time when men were men and women were women. I think she expected me to be more of a man than I appeared to be. Protective. Knowing what to do in case of emergency.

Look, I’m a lover, I wanted to say to her, not a fire-fighter. I didn’t know how to stand up for her in a row.

‘He’s only messing,’ I tried to warn her.

‘Look, Vid,’ she smiled, ‘we both know this is going nowhere, you and me. We’re in the wrong place.’

It didn’t help that I was working in a restaurant at the time, in the kitchens, coming back home every night with a heavy film of grease on my face and the stink of chicken breasts in my clothes. Early bird all night. No matter how much I showered, it would not remove the toxic residue of cooking. Each plate with criss-crossed potato wedges built up like sleepers in a railway yard. And the amount of salt they piled on to make it taste better. Then one night the manager, who must have been only nineteen years of age and looked more like fifteen, came up to me and said it was my duty to clean the toilets. They were covered in vomit. You could read the menu in small print all over the floor and the walls. I told him I wouldn’t do it. He said he understood my position. But then he told me that refusal was not an option and threatened dismissal. He informed me that everyone took their turn cleaning the toilets, so I told him he could have my turn and left.

I walked out along the pier at Dún Laoghaire harbour. I had a small apartment out there, not far from where Kevin’s mother lived. It was handy, because he was giving me more and more work at the house, so I could walk there from my place.

The wind was quite strong that night. The sailing boats were being tossed around and the guy ropes made a ringing melody against the masts. All kinds of things banging and squeaking and set loose. I was wondering if Liuda had already deleted the photos on her phone, taken at the bandstand by the accordion player from Sighişoara. The sea was churned up and as I walked around by the elbow of the pier, the wind was like a hand on my chest. A big bouncer preventing me from walking any further, pushing the words back into my mouth.

9 (#ulink_56c7e04c-26d0-53c8-a956-310237b2b349)

As the date of the trial began to come closer, Kevin called me over to his mother’s house to discuss a bigger job. Something quite substantial. His mother had been complaining for years that the floorboards in the front room were running in the wrong direction. She wanted them turned around so they would run lengthways, towards the front window rather than laterally across the room towards the fireplace. The original builder had made a right mess of things. It made the house feel small and claustrophobic.

I was the first to agree with them for aesthetic reasons, but I knew immediately that it was not worth correcting at this point, purely on financial grounds. I told them so, but the cost was not really seen as a barrier any more. Apparently she had inherited money lately from a relative in the USA, so they felt it was the right time to get it done.

I was thrilled to get back into serious carpentry again, especially a big job like this where I could really prove myself. But I was not sure it made sense. The thought crossed my mind that I was possibly being re-employed each time because of the imminent court proceedings. He was utterly calm about the outcome, but he needed my absolute allegiance to the family. He knew the Garda would never come after him at this point, unless I lost faith and brought the whole story out into the open in the witness stand. He needed me to be completely on his side, and maybe this was a kind of payment in advance for the favour I was doing him.

He reminded me from time to time not to say a word to anyone. And maybe he needed to isolate me a little from the threat of new friends who might start asking questions. He explained things to me about this country, how friendship often masqueraded as curiosity. He tried to teach me the art of answering a question with another question. He told me there was a secret language here, not the old, Irish language or the English language, but something in between the lines, like a code.

‘This is an island,’ he pointed out to me once. ‘You can never completely trust what you hear. You have to forecast what’s behind the words. You have to be able to read people’s inner thoughts. You have to be able to think on your feet and keep ahead of them.’

Perhaps he was speaking as much to himself as he was counselling me. I listened to his advice eagerly. But you can’t learn all that street-wise acumen like a faculty. You can’t pick it up like chess or tennis. So he felt it was his duty to protect me and look out for me.

His mother must have known nothing about the case, otherwise she would not have wanted me in the house. She had her arms folded as we stood in the front room looking around. Kevin half sitting on one of the radiators, allowing the full force of her tenacity to work on me.