Aminatta Forna - The Hired Man

The phone stopped ringing.

The door of the room at the top of the stairs where the parents had slept was solidly shut. At the end of the corridor was Krešimir’s old room, which Matthew now used. The door was open and I stepped inside. Empty except for a new pine chest of drawers and a pine bed. A suitcase lay open. Matthew’s belongings scattered across every surface, the bed unmade, the window tight shut and a smell of unwashed clothing.

Krešimir had been exactly the opposite. Every object had its place, exact to the millimetre. If you moved anything, he grew mad. He even stored his records alphabetically. Like most of us he had a collection of porn, though his was ordered by date and hidden on top of the cupboard in a briefcase given to him by his father. Covers so pristine, hard to believe he used them for their intended purpose. The rest of us swapped magazines, but Krešimir would never lend his, just the way he never brought his Springsteen album to parties but only let you listen to it in his room. Do you know that in the top drawer of his dresser he kept a list of items he had loaned to his friends? A list of names written out in his crabbed, very neat and yet curiously almost illegible writing. If you ever broke something of his he’d make you pay for it.

I had forgotten these things about Krešimir. For some reason we all put up with it, I more than anyone, because back then I was his friend. We became friends, I suppose, because we lived close to each other and it suited us and because when you are young friendships go unquestioned.

The Pavićs’ old bedroom smelt of Laura’s perfume and the skin cream she used. A vase of wild flowers sat on the dressing table. Laura liked flowers. So many fields and fields, she said one day, left for the wild flowers to grow. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’ Nor, in fact, had I. All the time I grew up here those same fields were planted with crops. The flowers were recent, a matter of years. These were some of the things I didn’t tell Laura. Instead I showed her which fields she might walk in and which she should not, I hinted at difficult owners. She thanked me and I knew I’d been right. For somebody who spends as much time alone as I do, sometimes I can tell a lot about people. I guessed that Laura was one of those people who preferred the music of a lie to the discordance of truth.

A chair with some clothes draped on the back. A small heap of unwashed clothes and a screwed-up tissue on the floor. On the bedside table: a tube of Vitamin C, the effervescent kind, hand cream (I unscrewed the top and tried a little), two design magazines, a spiral-bound notepad. I picked it up: shopping lists for the house as well as the kitchen, a list of the names of towns and villages in the area. Some had ticks against them. A hairband.

Anyway I never lied to Laura. I simply let Laura believe what she wanted to believe. I told you I can’t imagine coming to Gost and seeing the town and the people for the first time and it’s true, I can’t. But I knew Laura had a story about us, this place, the house she’d just bought. It was her story, one she told herself long before she came here. And if her story brought me work, then I’d help her hold onto it.

Never ask a question you don’t need to, my father told me. To which he may as well have added: and never answer a question that hasn’t been asked.

‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’. Once.

From the side table next to the bed Laura’s mobile phone flashed. I pressed the button. Are you getting my messages? Laura’s husband. It’s ironic the network reception around Gost is so bad. The man who invented radio waves and three-phase electricity was born right near here. There’s a big centre with wooden huts containing reproductions of all his equipment and showing the experiments he conducted, although all that’s a bit of a lie. Most of his work was done in New York, where he died penniless while Thomas Edison walked away with all the credit.

They say it’s the mountains; sometimes the clouds clear and messages arrive, arrows out of the blue.

Scrolled back through the other messages. Conor. Conor. Conor. Sorry, darling. Doesn’t look like it’s going to happen any time soon. Know more Friday. Sorry again. Going to have to hold off travelling. More later . I scrolled forward. Sounds like you’re doing a wonderful job. Can’t wait to see it. Once I wrap this up. Miss you . The most recent said: Looking at flights .

Laura’s messages to Conor. Missing you. More to do on house than we thought. Try to get here soon . Several saying more or less the same thing. All swam in the river. Cold . She didn’t mention me. Only one text contained my name. Hired man. Duro. Wonderful find. Absolutely all local info .

From the window I saw Matthew walking down the road towards the house. I replaced the phone and went back down the stairs, picking up my tools from where they stood by the door. I waved to him from my ladder as he entered the courtyard.

Seventeen years old.

A wall, near the railway; from there you can watch the trains pass by on their way from Bihać to Split and from Split to Bihać. Six trains an hour. They carry grain and people. Now there are far fewer trains, Luka was right. And borders where there didn’t use to be borders, so now the trains only carry grain. They travel through fields that used to be ploughed, but are now full of wild flowers because nobody dares to walk in them in case they put their foot on a mine and are blown to pieces.

We sit on the wall: Krešimir and I, Andro, Goran and Miro. We hold cigarette stubs pinched between freezing fingers, blow smoke rings without ever inhaling. Sometimes we share a beer between us. We have no trouble getting served in the bars, because around here nobody cares if you’re underage, our trouble is we have no money. Girls walking alone cross the street rather than pass us by. Sometimes we throw comments, timed to coincide with the exact moment of passing, so that if she’s to answer a girl has to turn round and confront us, which hardly any of them dare.

Because we are all virgins we talk about sex all the time, covering our ignorance with stories about other people caught doing it. We swap magazines and trophies.

A photograph of a blonde sprawled across an unmade bed. Pubic hair on her thighs. In the corner of the frame is a drying rack covered in kids’ clothes. A pink bath mat on the floor by the bed, an overturned shoe. Miro says the woman is his aunt who lives in Split. We are appalled by the stretch marks across her stomach and joke about having sex with her. Someone makes a crack. What do you call a woman’s twat after she’s had kids? A manhole. Andro asks if he can borrow the picture, promises Miro he’ll bring it back tomorrow.

Another day Miro’s brother holds his right hand under the nose of each of us in turn. Faint, sweet, briny. Pussy juice, he says. He laughs and walks away, waving his right hand in the air like a politician.

Miro’s brother is older than us. He has his own car, a Fićo of course, like everyone else, except his is painted with stripes down the sides. Another day Miro’s brother produces, with a flourish, a pair of panties he claims to have removed the night before. In front of us he sniffs them deeply. Andro grabs the panties, rubs them in Goran’s face. Goran lunges at him and misses, grabs the waistband of Andro’s jeans and slaps him on the back of the head, too hard. Goran gets angry and tells Andro to go fuck his mother. Then Andro gets angry and walks away. At the corner he turns round and rushes towards Goran with his head lowered, straight into Goran’s gut. Goran is winded; bent double he sucks the air and dry-heaves. A passing car blows its horn; a couple walking towards us cross over.