Constance

She tucked the card away, slung her plastic handbag over her shoulder, straddled the mountain bike and forged out into the traffic. She was looking the wrong way and he almost called Look out. But she veered away from an oncoming bus and wobbled into the left-hand lane, then pedalled uncertainly away. He watched until she was out of sight.

He was sure he would never see her again and the thought left him entirely disconsolate.

His mobile rang and he tore it out of his pocket, allowing a flare of hope.

‘Oh, yeah. Hi, Dad. Yeah, I was there for an hour, maybe a bit more. She was very sleepy. Call me later? Yeah, me too. Bye.’

His father was on his way to the hospital. Noah put his head down and started walking towards the tube.

As soon as she was safely round the corner Roxana peered up at a street sign, then stopped to search in her bag for the street-map book that the man Dylan had loaned her. She found where she was now, after some flipping back and forth through the small grey pages, and also where she had come from. It didn’t look so far, in terms of map centimetres, but remembering the difficulty she had had in getting to the place Dylan had sent her to for the audition, she suspected the return journey was going to cause problems.

Still, she’d find it in the end, wouldn’t she?

She tried to memorise the names and the sequence of the four or five big roads she needed to follow, but before she had even reached the first junction they had jumbled themselves up in her head.

London was a big place. She couldn’t even imagine how far it spread. All these rooms stacked on top of each other, all these tall buildings and streets and glassy shops. All these people. She felt very small in the thick of it, as if she were no more than a speck of dust, a little glinting mineral fragment that the wind might suck away. She kept on determinedly pedalling, bracing herself against a gust of fear as well as the buffeting of the traffic. Buses and trucks hooted at her as they roared past.

It would turn out fine, she kept telling herself, why not? She had a job now, at least.

She had got talking to Dylan on her first morning in London, in the café near King’s Cross Station where she had looked out at the rain and the crowds of people all walking heads down with somewhere to go. She had spent the previous night in a nearby hotel, in a room that was noisy and dirty and had still cost far more than she budgeted. Her savings and the money her mother’s old friend Yakov had loaned her wouldn’t go far at this rate.

The young man, thin as a bamboo pole, asked her for a light and then slid closer along the red plastic bench. He offered her one of his cigarettes and bought her another cup of coffee. It was nice to talk to someone.

It turned out that Dylan lived in a house where there were cheap rooms to rent. When he asked if she wanted him to find out if the room next to his was free, she said yes, because she had no other ideas. Once she saw the place she didn’t want to stay there, not even for one night. But she did stay, because she had no alternative. She promised herself that it was just until she found some work.

The house was a catacomb of rooms, the doors leading off the dim staircase all padlocked and the grey walls daubed with slogans. Apart from Dylan, Roxana didn’t know who else lived there. She rarely met anyone on the stairs, and when she did they hastily drew back into the shadows. It was only at night that they came out. The nights were constantly disturbed by running feet, thunderous crashes and outbursts of wild shouting. A door would be wrenched open to set a jagged burst of music throbbing in the stairwell before the door slammed again. After a few nights she learned to pull her pillow over her ears and not to speculate about who was murdering or being murdered on the other side of her door. She bought her own padlocks, two big heavy ones, and kept the door locked day and night.

Dylan had tried to get inside the room with her, of course he had, but she told him what he could do with himself. He hadn’t taken it all that badly. He was lonely, too. When he wasn’t at work and didn’t have any money for drugs, they sometimes went for a walk or a bus ride together.

She told Dylan that she needed a job and that she was a dancer, not necessarily expecting the two statements to connect. It was true that in Bokhara, where she grew up, Roxana had sometimes gone to classes and then for a whole wonderful term Yakov had helped her and she had studied dance in Tashkent. She had clung to this tenuous historical link to her maternal grandmother, who had died before Roxana was born and who as a young woman had been a professional dancer. The wife of Tamerlane the Great himself had also been renowned for her grace and skill as a dancer. Both these women had been called Roxana.

But it was not easy to live in Uzbekistan. After her brother was killed in the uprising she made up her mind that she would find a way to leave it behind, every broken street and Russian soldier, all the memories, everything her native country stood for and everything that had happened to her there, and live in America, or England. She would become an American girl by sheer force of will.

Or an English one, that would do.

It had taken a long time to get the money for a holiday flight from Tashkent to Luton, but she had managed it.

Yakov had wished her good luck, knowing that he would never leave Uzbekistan himself.

Roxana didn’t plan to be on the return flight.

In London her intention was to find work looking after children, pink and white cherubs who would be dressed in little coats with velvet collars, that would be nice. Or if not that, maybe she could be a chambermaid in a big hotel. She saw herself in a maid’s uniform, plumping up pillows and setting out white towels and crystal glasses.

But she had soon found out that without references and papers there was no work with English children. The hotels she walked into had all told her that they weren’t taking on casuals at the moment. It was Dylan who had come to her rescue again.

‘Ye said ye can dance.’ His accent was so strange. He told her he came from Ireland. When she first met him in the café she could hardly decipher a word, but by now she could understand him better. ‘There’s a feller ye can go to see.’

He wrote down a name and an address for her, lent her the map book, told her which bus to catch and what time to be there, and advised her not to be late. To make sure she knew where she was going, Roxana traced the route from the house to the place. And on her way out of the house, on a sudden impulse, she borrowed the yellow bike.

It had been in the hallway ever since she had come to live there, leaning in the same place among the litter of envelopes that no one picked up. She had not seen anyone touch it, let alone ride it. There was no lock. Maybe someone had just left it at the house and forgotten all about it.

And she had already worked out that to take it would save her the bus fares. Buses and tube trains in London cost a lot of money.

She had bumped the bicycle down the steps of the house and boldly set off. At first it was exhilarating to be so free. She flew along in the glittering traffic, the wind of her own speed whistling in her ears and pinning a smile to her face. It was a shame that she ended up getting lost. It meant that she was late for her meeting with Mr Shane at The Cosmos. He was a small, elderly man with quick cold eyes. He looked Roxana up and down as if he was pricing her for sale.

‘This is a quality venue, do you understand me?’ was the second thing Mr Shane said to her, after telling her that if she was ever late again she could forget working for him.

‘I understand, yes,’ Roxana answered, glancing around her at the tables and the shuttered bar. Before the club opened for the night it looked sordid, but she supposed that it would be different when the lights came up and it was full of people.

‘Right. Where are you from and how long have you been here?’

She told him.

‘Legal?’

‘Yes,’ she lied.

Mr Shane sniffed. ‘Let’s see what you can do, then.’

There wasn’t any music and the only audience was Mr Shane sprawled in a front-row armchair with his mobile phone pressed to his ear. It wasn’t difficult to envisage what he wanted, but making her body perform the right sequences wasn’t easy at all. Roxana concentrated very hard on making it look as though what she was doing came naturally. The performance seemed to go on for a very long time.

At last he held up his hand. ‘All right. That’ll do.’

‘I could do some more, something different if…’

‘You can start on Friday,’ he said impatiently.

Roxana could hardly believe her luck. ‘Yes? Friday. Thank you. Thank you, I…’

‘Seven o’clock sharp. Five minutes late and you can go straight home.’ He didn’t have time for her gratitude. He was already on the phone again, and gesturing for her to get dressed and leave.

She came out of the cavernous dimness of The Cosmos and into the fluttering air, breathing deeply with relief. She had a job. She was on her way.

She did get lost on the way back from the river, but not quite as badly as the first time. She had the first inkling that instead of being fragments of a puzzle, the few pieces of the city that she was beginning to recognise might even be logically and manageably connected to each other. She was whistling as she pedalled into the street and even the sight of the house, with peeling paint and torn curtains and the rubbish sodden in the basement area where the windows were boarded over, didn’t depress her spirits too much. She hauled the bike up the short flight of stone steps and leaned it against the broken teeth of the railings while she groped for the key to the front door. Before she pushed it open, she had a brief premonition that there was something waiting for her on the other side.

The flurry of violence was so sudden that she didn’t even have time to scream.

The bicycle was seized and hauled inside, dragging her with it. One of the pedals bit deep into her shin at the same time as the man grabbed her wrists and forced her up against the wall. The door slammed shut, cutting off her escape route.

‘Did I miss something? Did you buy that bike off me? Or did you say to me, “Mr Kemal, I need to borrow a piece of your property”? Or did you just nick it out of here without a word to no one, like you own the world?’

She tried not to inhale the smell of cigarettes and unwashed skin.

‘No,’ she said. Her teeth rattled in her head as he shook her.

‘No what?’

‘I didn’t buy it. I didn’t ask. I thought it wasn’t anyone’s.’