Aminatta Forna - The Hired Man

Paint all over the mosaic: white gloss paint. Loops of it cover the rising bird, sliding immensely slowly downwards. Clots of paint lie under the water on the mosaic of fish and weeds. A trail of white between the wall and the fountain. No sign of the can. Whoever had done this had brought the paint with them, because it wasn’t mine. The gloss paint I’d been using was locked away in the outbuilding and anyway was blue. It must have happened the night before or very early in the morning, while they were all asleep. Not one of the family heard a thing.

‘How could this happen?’ asked Matthew.

‘You wouldn’t have woken up anyway,’ said Grace. ‘Maybe none of us would.’

‘I mean there’s no one else around here. They’d have had to come in a car or else it’s a very long walk.’

‘Probably they parked somewhere and walked the rest of the way,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Laura. ‘That would figure.’

‘But why?’ asked Grace. She rubbed an eye leaving a streak of white across her cheek. Paint on her face and hands.

‘They’re louts. Too many young men who don’t want to work and then don’t like it when other people have some money,’ I said quickly.

‘We’re going to have to go to the police,’ said Laura. ‘I mean, this is awful.’

I doubted, I said, they’d be moved to mount much of an investigation, though I could be wrong. It would be very interesting to see what they would do, certainly nothing that they thought would be bad for tourism. It was an idea in which people had never lost faith: the hordes of tourists who would one day return to fish and cycle and hike in the hills, transform the grey fate of towns like Gost. On the other hand they would want Laura to feel they were taking her seriously. They would make a show of investigating, but they had no interest in actually finding the culprit.

‘How do you get this stuff off?’ asked Grace.

‘We’ll do it. Easier before it dries too much.’ I touched the paint lightly with my forefinger. The skin was still quite thin and the paint was wet beneath, meaning it hadn’t been thrown all that long ago. If I’d gone up into the hills that morning, as I so often did, I even might have caught them in the act. Because so many of the tiles were glazed the paint wouldn’t be too hard to get off. On the whitewashed surface of the wall, white on white, it barely mattered.

‘What about the police? They’ll want to see it,’ said Laura.

I said most likely a photograph would do and so Grace went to fetch her camera.

A few hours later you could hardly tell it had happened. I fetched some soft rags from my house and we wiped away the worst of the mess. On the glass and glazed tiles the paint hadn’t taken. Worst affected were the cream-coloured tiles that made up the background, which were some kind of soft stone. For those we had to use stripper, trying not to do too much damage to the surface. I only had a third of a can remaining and so I left Grace at work while I headed into town to pick some up.

In town I went to the hardware shop (the one which is not part-owned by Fabjan, of course) and on my way back I caught sight of Krešimir. This time I made sure he didn’t see me: the last thing I needed was a repeat of the other day when he’d lost his temper with me at the Zodijak. Most probably he was going home for lunch. He was dressed for the office in a jacket and trousers, a pair of loafers. I watched him for a while, more or less to enjoy the sight of him. I wondered how he was feeling. The talk and the rumours slid through every street and house in Gost and, whenever the blue house was mentioned, so was Krešimir’s name. Krešimir Pavić. People would fall silent at his approach and drop their gaze, begin to talk again once he was (almost) out of earshot. They’d be enjoying it. Of all of this I was certain. He walked like he was in a bit of a hurry, with his shoulders square and his chin out. To look at him you’d think everything was fine. But I know Krešimir like nobody else. He hates to be shown up, he hates it. So he puts on a bit of bluff, meaning the more confident he looks the worse it is. At the door of the house he stopped and searched for his keys, but not finding them he rapped on the door. I expected to see his wife, but when the door opened there was Vinka, her black hair pulled back in the style she’d worn all the time I’d known her; from where I stood I could see the sharp divide of colour at the roots. Her face was skeletal, skin like uncooked fish. She was without lipstick but her eyebrows were crayoned sloppily and comically high on her forehead. Unsteady on her feet, she almost fell out of the door as Krešimir shouldered past her and would have, but for the fact she managed to catch the doorframe. Unseen, I watched as she turned to follow Krešimir, patting her hair like a faded belle and closing the door behind them.

I fried sausages and onions for my supper and peeled and boiled some potatoes. It occurred to me I would miss Laura and the family when they went. In four weeks I’d grown used to having them around. That moment I decided to call my mother and Danica. My mother had finally moved into her own flat, the years on the waiting list had paid off. All the same it was she who picked up the phone when I telephoned Danica and Luka’s place. Over the sound of the television in the background she began to complain. ‘The bedroom’s damp. It makes my legs hurt.’

‘Won’t the social housing people come to fix it?’

‘They say they will, but they make me wait. If you were here you could do it for me.’

‘I could, but then so can Luka.’

Silence. Then, ‘I don’t like to ask. He’s busy.’

I said, ‘Let me talk to him for you.’

‘Thank you,’ said my mother, not really satisfied. She’d never stopped asking when I was coming. To stop her doing so again I asked to speak to Danica. Danica came to the phone. I heard her telling my mother she’d take it in the bedroom.

‘She’s watching her television programmes. Those Brazilian soaps.’

‘How is she?’

‘Getting older, she misses you.’

I didn’t reply and when Danica didn’t say anything either, I said, ‘She says there’s damp in the bedroom of her new flat.’

‘I know she does, but the flat is fine. I think she’s lonely there on her own.’ She paused. ‘I was going to call you. There’s something I need to talk to you about.’

‘Well here I am.’

‘Luka and me, we’ve been accepted to go to New Zealand.’

The news winded me. Danica told me the application process had taken a year, but they had almost reached the end now. All they were waiting for was the official letter.

‘When will you go?’

‘Before Christmas.’

‘And Mother?’

‘She wants to come with us. She’s a dependant, so she’s allowed so long as we take care of her. A lot of families have moved to Auckland. She’ll probably even know some people.’

I was silent. Down the line I could hear Danica breathing and, faintly, the sound of the television in the other room. Then she sighed. ‘Life goes on, Duro.’

After the phone call I ate the food I’d cooked and tidied up the house. I found the strip of braided thread Grace had given me the day I killed Kos. I put it in a drawer where I saw the green and blue tiles I’d brought from the blue house. I thought about the attack on the mosaic. For all that I disliked Krešimir it would be too easy to blame him. Krešimir’s methods are far more underhand. He likes anonymous letters and poisonous words. Though I was not at all tired, for some reason I remained ravenously hungry even after I’d eaten. I fried more sausages and drank several glasses of wine. I tried to read the newspaper, but I wasn’t really in the mood, I was restless. I turned on the television and let the pictures and canned laughter blot out my thoughts. I ate the sausages with my fingers straight from the pan, sitting in front of the television. I flicked channels. A re-run of ’Allo ’Allo , which had been one of the most popular television programmes in the country twenty years ago. I watched it for a while and even laughed, helped by the wine. Also now for the first time I could understand the joke of Officer Crabtree’s accent. ‘Good moaning,’ he says to René. ‘Good moaning.’ I laughed, but the joke quickly wore off. I switched channels, pressing the remote control over and over, until the television stopped responding. I still didn’t feel the least bit tired but I could think of nothing I wanted to do, so I prepared to go upstairs to bed and a night of sleeplessness.