Aminatta Forna - The Hired Man

Instead I prayed for the one thing I wanted more than anything else. I didn’t care if it was blasphemy and if it was, then God could strike me down. I prayed for the death of Krešimir.

The restoration of the mosaic and the fountain caused a great deal of excitement in Gost. If you’re new to Gost you might not know that we are people of muted emotions, unless we’re drunk. Then of course, anything might happen. But that’s as true everywhere. Monday, midday, in the queue at the post office where I waited to pay my electricity bill, a man in a blue boiler suit turned and asked me if I’d seen it for myself. He was a builder’s foreman I had worked for occasionally and stank of cigarettes. He didn’t wait for me to answer but went on, ‘I drove past this morning and I saw it with my own eyes. That great big bird is back on the wall. It was gone and now it’s back.’ He shrugged.

Nobody in the bakery except the woman who had been married to my cousin behind the counter, who on this day looked unusually pleased to see me. As she served me she said, ‘So, Duro, tell me about the house.’

I replied that I had nothing to tell. For this my cousin’s ex-wife withheld my loaf, passing it from hand to hand like a thug wielding a baseball bat. She tilted her head to one side and gave me a malevolent little smile. ‘I thought she was your friend.’

‘I helped her.’ I shrugged. ‘If that makes us friends.’

‘You’re the nearest neighbour.’

‘OK, so I lied. We’re the best of friends. What do you want me to tell you?’

‘What’s she doing?’

‘Nothing. They’re English. They like old houses.’

My cousin’s ex-wife raised her eyebrows. Then she repeated her chilly little smile and passed over my loaf. I left the bakery. I felt sorry for my cousin: no wonder he’d divorced her.

More talk in the Zodijak an hour later where I stopped for a coffee. Two guys, one I had seen there before, the one who worked in the municipal offices: the guy with the jug ears who’d been the one to confirm the sale of the house here in the Zodijak only weeks ago, a pen pusher who enjoyed the authority it gave him. He said, ‘No planning permission would be necessary, you see. Now, if they wanted to build an extension, but even then. a lot of people don’t bother. That’s when the problems start.’

His companion interrupted him. ‘Where did you say they are from?’

‘England.’

‘They say there are a lot of our people in England,’ said the other man, more or less to himself because his companion was still talking permissions.

I looked for Fabjan’s reaction, but there was none. You had to give it to him. He must have felt like somebody was walking on his grave. A few weeks ago Fabjan had been suffering from toothache. He has terrible teeth, I told you that already, I think. I’d kept forgetting to ask how he was feeling. Now I said, ‘How’s your tooth? Been to the dentist?’

‘Piss off,’ said Fabjan. He cracked his knuckles. Bad habit. Carry on like that and he’d end up with arthritis. Briefly I imagined Fabjan old, failing, being pushed around by his sons whom he had raised to be men as merciless as himself. The thought gave me a tiny twang of glee.

Laura and I were in the old courtyard of the house. She stood with one hand on her hip, the other shielding the sun from her eyes. She had been to the hairdresser’s and now she looked different. Her hair was much shorter and curled under her ears and it was several shades darker too, something like the colour of good earth. The biggest change was that she had a fringe, which made her look a great deal younger. I’d helped her carry things from the car. Laura checked her reflection in the car window. Grace, who was sitting at the kitchen table examining the detached wing of a dragonfly, looked up. ‘Wow, Mum!’

‘Is it all right?’

I said, ‘I think it suits you very well.’

Matthew came down the stairs, he raised a thumb. ‘Duro’s right. Looking good, Ma. What do you call that?’

‘A bob,’ said Grace.

Laura smoothed hair down on either side of her face and tugged lightly at the fringe. ‘You don’t think it’s too young?’

‘You look lovely, Mum,’ said Grace.

‘Well thank you all!’ Laura gave a small curtsey.

That was two hours ago. Now we were discussing the future of the outbuildings. Laura had had some ideas while she was under the dryer at the hairdresser’s. She said it was a good place to think. ‘One could be a place for guests to stay. Or we could put Matt in there. He’d love his own space. He’s old enough,’ she said. ‘We could have a den, or a studio of some kind. Turn this space into a courtyard garden.’ She showed me a magazine, full of pictures. Tall windows. Brick-laid floors and wooden beams. The kind of cushions on the floor Laura liked. ‘There’s a lot to think about. Obviously we can’t get it all done straight away. I wanted to ask — I was thinking, say we set up some sort of system of payments — would you manage the work for us? I mean you’ll do as much as you can yourself, but some of this is going to need extra labour.’

‘I thought you had planned to sell it.’ As I spoke I looked at Laura. The afternoon was still new and in the bright sun her hair looked even darker than it had in the house. Strange how a change of hairstyle can make such a difference to some people and none at all to others. An uncle of mine once shaved off his moustache after many years and nobody noticed, not even his wife, or so it was said anyway. With Laura it was more than just the hair. She looked completely different; in the light and with the blue sky reflected in them, her eyes glittered and she seemed to shine. With her tanned skin she could pass for a local.

Laura carried on. ‘I’ve been thinking. we use this as a base and choose the projects we do. There are plenty around here. So many houses, so many gorgeous villages, and of course, so many summers. People are looking for just this kind of thing. I was going to wait to talk to you about it, but since we’re on the subject, I was wondering what you thought about the idea of working together. We’d have to sit down and talk about it properly, thrash out the details, but I thought I’d raise it in principle.’

This came as a complete surprise. I’d no idea what to say, of what it meant. To take over houses in other villages and change them, sell them to people from outside to come here for their holidays. People with money they were so anxious to spend they scoured the whole of Europe looking for houses, who would come here and be overwhelmed by the beauty of our mountains and rivers, who would drive into a town like Gost and think the fields around had always been full of wild flowers. People like Laura. I liked Laura, yet I couldn’t stomach the idea.

Laura was waiting for an answer. I looked up but the sun struck my eyes, I couldn’t meet her gaze. Blood pounded in my temples. The conversation bothered me. The heat bothered me. Laura’s new hairstyle. Everything bothered me. Something said in the Zodijak, it had bothered me too, ever since I got back from town. The jug-eared man — I don’t mean him — the man he was talking to, his words whirled around the back of my brain, like a tune half remembered that you can’t quite catch. It happened every time I looked at Laura. And now, in that moment I remembered what it was he’d said. He said something like, ‘There are lots of our people living there.’ He’d been talking about England.

‘Even after last night? You still like it here? You still like Gost?’ I asked Laura.

‘I’m certain you’re right. They were just drunks.’

I didn’t know what else to say. What I really wanted to do was go away and think. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I said, ‘Okay.’