Aminatta Forna - The Hired Man

Sleepless in the dark later the same night I had dinner with Laura. The new knowledge that Krešimir had sold the house five years ago was like a rat gnawing at my gut. I clenched my fists beneath the sheets. All this time he’d been sitting smugly on his secret, making fools of us. The number of times I’d passed him on the street, he knew he had one over all of us. Fuck you, Krešimir, you cunt! The blue house was never yours to sell.

There are some things in life you don’t set out to do. The arrival of Laura, Grace and Matthew was nothing to do with me. Krešimir sold the blue house to Laura’s husband. Five years ago, I now knew. I went there because I needed work. I’d no choice but to do the things I did. I knew the house better than anyone and it made sense that if somebody was going to work on restoring it then that person should be me. I led Laura to the mosaic in order to divert her from doing the jobs she could be paying me to do.

So it irritated Krešimir to see the house looking as it once had? Fine. What did he expect? I enjoyed rattling the bars of the cage that was Krešimir’s heart. The truth is, I hated Krešimir, I loathed him, and the years of loathing far outnumbered those we’d ever been friends.

Krešimir waits for my approach, he slips out of the door and intercepts me halfway down the road, then he walks very fast until we are out of sight. I’ve told you how the pace would alter his gait: pitch his body forward and make his arse stick out. This time I laugh, which of course irritates him. He never explains what we are doing and at first I think the whole thing is a huge joke. It dawns on me only later that he was trying to leave Anka behind.

On the way back from our hunt, which has been successful this time, Krešimir has me in a headlock as we stagger towards home. We pass the Tomislav house, a modern bungalow painted a strong shade of pink. Outside, tied to the revolving clothes dryer, is the Tomislavs’ dog, a shaggy black beast called Lujo, whom I made friends with when the Tomislavs first got him. When Lujo was little they let him run free, but now he’s older they leave him tied all day, whatever the weather. On a hot July day I’d found the dog tied to the revolving clothes dryer with a rope so short he couldn’t sit, or reach the shade or his water bowl. I untied him and took him home, and my father, when he returned the animal, had words with Tomislav. Our families hadn’t been on speaking terms too much since.

‘Hold on,’ says Krešimir. He slings the rabbits at me. ‘I need a piss.’

I do too. I leave the rabbits on the roadside, turn to the hedge and unzip. Before I finish I hear the sound of Krešimir’s laughter. He has pissed all over the dog, which is shaking itself and wagging its tail at him. Krešimir still has his dick in his hand. I pick up the dog’s water bowl and douse it in cold water. Lujo retreats from me, making the clothes dryer spin; he barks.

‘He prefers piss,’ says Krešimir.

I wonder if all this is because I laughed at him. He knows about me and the dog, Tomislav and my father.

That was maybe two months on from the day we returned empty-handed from our early morning shoot and were caught in the rain; Krešimir walked so fast he left us both behind. At the corner by the bakery I gave a backward glance and saw Anka running to catch up with Krešimir. He was angry at the failure of the shoot, angry at the rain and the absent birds, angry at me, but most of all angry at Anka who’d become somehow responsible.

That was a turning point, I saw it later, when I tried to remember the order of things. Even now it’s hard. How do you trace your way back to the place where a feeling changed, the course of a friendship turned a corner and became something else?

— mumps

— their father’s new job

— move to the house in town

— hunt birds in the rain

— K pisses on the dog

No, I have forgotten something. Their father died. Such a big thing. I don’t mean I have forgotten it, only the order of events. Some months before the bird shoot in the rain, I don’t remember, six, seven, eight months, their father had died: an aneurysm.

Anka cries; Krešimir’s sorrow has a different texture. His relationship with his father had already changed and the change was sealed by old Pavić’s fate. The shift went back to an argument between his parents in the year before a blood vessel bloomed and burst in Pavić’s brain.

The argument was over a Licitar heart. I remember seeing it on the kitchen table a day I came to visit. In an earlier time Krešimir and I had seen it as our seasonal duty to steal and consume as many of these festive items as possible. We stole from shop windows, from the communal Christmas tree outside St Mary’s Church, from school where every pupil was detailed to bring in a Licitar of their own making during the final week of the winter term. The hearts were used to decorate the school hall. They were never really meant to be eaten: the dough was rock hard and the icing was bitter with food dye. But for whatever reason we forced them down. So the sight of a heart there on the Pavićs’ kitchen table came with both the lure and the ghosts of sins past.

That day the television in the room was showing an episode of Čkalja . Depending on how old you are, you might remember Čkalja , it was everybody’s favourite show. Čkalja wearing a beret and a huge, patterned tie was sitting at a table with a man with a Hitler moustache, a woman in a fur coat and another man with an accordion. He always wore funny hats, it was like a kind of trademark. Krešimir wanted to get out of the house. I wanted to watch the show. I took off my anorak. He told me his parents had argued over the Licitar heart, which sounded silly to me and not very serious. I went to turn the sound up, but Krešimir said we had to go and made me put my anorak back on.

Anyway, the sum of it amounted to this: the heart had been bought by Vinka Pavić as a Christmas gift for Krešimir’s father’s boss in his job, which he had been in for a year or two by then. There’d recently been some disagreement between the two (the boss and Krešimir’s dad) and Mr Pavić thought the gift was overgenerous — amounting to an apology. The heart sat on the table for some days. I have no idea what became of it after that.

Then one day, many months after Christmas, we sat upstairs in Krešimir’s room and listened to Krešimir’s parents argue. This time they were arguing over another promotion in the father’s office that had gone to someone else. A promotion Mrs Pavić was convinced belonged to her husband.

Mrs Pavić thought her husband had let the family down through his naivety. Not deliberately, but because of a flaw, a flaw in his way of seeing. Too much faith in the world, said Vinka Pavić to Krešimir after her husband’s death. Mrs Pavić was a survivor, who survived by giving gifts of bright, brittle hearts to people in positions of influence. She kept up appearances on her widow’s pension, even though common sense might have suggested she rent out the town house and move back to the blue house, but Vinka Pavić couldn’t bring herself to do it. Wild boar couldn’t drag her back to the little blue house with all its rustic shame.

And time and death changed nothing, only hardened the judgement on poor Pavić.

So the order of events went like this:

— mumps

— their father’s new job

— move to the house in town

— Licitar heart

— old P dead

— hunt birds in the rain

— K pisses on the dog

There was more to come, of course. I have thought about it a lot, and I am still thinking about it. There must be a great deal I have forgotten.

I was in the outbuilding looking over the Fićo when I saw Matthew pick his way across the courtyard: his hunched shoulders and loping gait. I watched him for a few seconds and then I said, ‘Matthew!’ quite loudly. It was perhaps the first time I had addressed him directly and he froze, then half turned as though in doubt that he had heard correctly. I said his name again. Cautiously he came to the door of the outbuilding and peered inside.