The Hired Man Read online

  ‘London?’ I asked.

  She blinked before she cottoned on. ‘No.’ She shook her head.

  ‘Manchester?’

  ‘No, not Manchester either. What makes you ask that?’

  ‘Manchester is the most important city in England.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Man U. Manchester United. The world’s greatest team.’

  She laughed and when she stopped laughing and closed her mouth her lip caught on an eye tooth in a way that made me want to look at her more.

  ‘No, we live near Bristol. A place called Bath. Have you heard of it?’

  ‘Pride and Prejudice. Sense and Sensibility,’ I said, so that she would laugh again.

  ‘Exactly!’

  I watched her and then I said, ‘Let me check your roof and then tomorrow I’ll know which tools to bring. Do you have a ladder?’

  She looked around the room as though in search of a ladder she might somehow have overlooked.

  ‘Perhaps in the outbuildings?’ I said.

  ‘I haven’t dared look in them yet.’

  Pigeons had done their dirty work from the rafters and the first thing I did was tread on a dead bird, the bones crunching underfoot. I kicked the carcass aside. Rolls of rusted wire, a wheelbarrow, an apple press, brittle and broken, stacks of paint cans. In the corner the shape of a car hidden under a plastic cover. ‘I wonder what that is,’ said Laura, pointing at a row of dust-covered bottles on a shelf.

  ‘Rakija,’ I replied.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Like brandy, home-made.’

  A shopping bag stuffed full of papers. Two boxes of paperbacks, their spines broken and their pages splayed or else stuck together in a stiff wave. Cassettes. A box full of household ornaments and an old kitchen clock. A blue-glazed bowl. I picked it up and it fell in two. ‘What a shame,’ said Laura. ‘It’s rather pretty.’ She held out her hand for the pieces but I tossed them aside. I lifted the corner of the car cover. Laura came over. ‘It’s an old Cinquecento,’ she said. ‘I had one once, a long time ago. I had to sell it. I still miss it. How amazing to find one here. Mine was white, but I always really wanted a red one like this.’

  ‘This is like the Cinquecento, but different,’ I told her. ‘Smaller car, bigger engine. More like the Fiat 600, but this one has a 750 engine. Made here under licence. For a long time it was the only car people could buy. We called it a Fićo, because there was a cartoon and the character drove this car.’ Every year you’d see families going on holiday with them, suitcases strapped to the roof, driving over the mountains on their way to the coast. They could pull a caravan, I told Laura, if it was a small one. Hereabouts people often used them to tow farm equipment; more than once I’d seen two of them driving side by side along the road, pulling a potato digger or something else, like a pair of harnessed horses. Then the factory stopped making them and for a long time nobody wanted the cars; they carried too much of the shame of the past, the smell of poverty. Everybody wanted a Golf or a BMW. Now though I’d heard the young people in the cities were crazy for Fićos, young people with money and no memories. I said to Laura, ‘I read in the newspaper people want them again.’ I pulled the cover away entirely. The car was intact, the tyres flat, naturally; the rubber cracked. I opened the boot to look at the engine.

  ‘I’d forgotten the engine was in the back,’ said Laura.

  I unscrewed the radiator cap. There was liquid still inside.

  ‘I wonder if we could get it working.’ Laura peered over my shoulder.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. I replaced the cap and the cover. ‘There’s no ladder here,’ I said. I pushed the heavy wooden doors back into place and slid the metal bolt. We walked around the house back towards the road and the front door. As we passed the ladder I said, ‘Ah,’ and lifted it off the hooks by which it hung on the wall.

  The gutters were thick with composted leaves in which the buddleia had rooted. Some tiles had worked their way loose or were broken, twelve by my count. A simple job. After the building boom a decade ago there hadn’t been too much work around. Some houses had been fixed up fast, but others, abandoned and left to the elements, were in a much worse state than this. People stole the roof tiles. I climbed down the ladder and told Laura I’d be back the next day. She was so grateful she didn’t even bring up the question of the price. At the door I picked up the cardboard box of junk. ‘Shall I get rid of this for you?’

  ‘Thank you. You’ll have to show me where the dump is.’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘See you tomorrow,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, tomorrow.’ I whistled for Kos and Zeka and we walked down the road. Laura stood at the door of the blue house and watched us. I knew this without looking round, just as I knew the exact moment she ducked back inside.

  At home I reviewed the contents of the box: most of it was indeed junk. Bottles and jars were always useful, I rinsed them and set them aside. At the bottom of the box I found a small number of blue and green mosaic tiles. I turned each one over in my fingers, relishing the contrasting textures: the rough edges of the clay, the slippery glass. I placed them in a line on my windowsill.

  That evening I went into town for a drink, now with the prospect of several weeks of paid work to look forward to. The air was dense with the heat of unbroken storms. Zeka and Kos accompanied me. I bought a glass of wine at the bar and took a seat outside. Though it was Sunday the streets were more or less empty. People had lost the habit of walking at that hour, to exchange gossip, the men to covet the pretty wives of their neighbours, their wives to cold-shoulder those same women. People stay home, they say it’s the same everywhere. The sky was full of starlings, carving their speckled shapes in the sky. There must have been a hawk or a kestrel about and sure enough as I watched I caught a glimpse of her sweeping into the flock. It seemed impossible for her to miss and yet the starlings, thousands of them, seemed effortlessly to reshape around her.

  I watched the birds for a minute or two and when I looked back at the street – there was Krešimir. Mostly he keeps himself to himself and so do I, so it had been some months since I’d seen him. Gost is neither so large nor so small that his being there was anything more than an ordinary occurrence, I mean you might see the same person twice in one day or hardly lay eyes on them in a year. It is the way of things. This is not the metropolis, but a small country town. All the same it was a coincidence, on this of all days. He’d begun to walk with a stoop, I noticed. It made him look like he was searching for coins on the ground. We’d both held onto our hair, though Krešimir wears his swept back; it reaches his collar and is run through with streaks of grey. Mine is short and black. He wore his shirt tightly buttoned to the neck and at the cuffs. He always dressed carefully, for example he’d never wear anything the least bit scuffed, stained or frayed. Krešimir was especially particular about his clothes and his family were a good bit wealthier than mine. He looked neither left nor right, but walked deliberately along the street, more slowly now than he used to. He didn’t see me. As I watched him I had a sense of déjà vu, of having been in this exact place before, starlings in the sky and Krešimir, my old adversary, in my sights.

  We used to hunt for birds together, Krešimir and I: many, many years ago.

  Krešimir, Anka and I: out shooting pigeons before school. Walking home once, Krešimir inexplicably furious as he so often was. It is raining and only just light. We are coming from the back fields where there wasn’t a bird in sight. After forty minutes we have returned home.

  Krešimir doesn’t like it when things go badly. He has a temper, and when he has a temper on he walks very fast and his arse sticks out and sometimes I laugh, which only makes him angrier. This time Anka and I are not laughing; though we are walking at our own pace, we’ve stopped trying to keep up with him, which is not what Krešimir w
ants. Walking fast is his way of humiliating us because I am so much smaller than he and Anka is a girl and younger. Krešimir’s walk and his swift, unexpected movements are some of the ways he demonstrates his physical superiority. I don’t know what’s making him so angry this morning, because it’s not as though we haven’t come home empty-handed before. We’ve always enjoyed the hunts for their own sake, but not today. Something about the whole enterprise has served to enrage Krešimir.

  At the corner by the bakery I peel off to go home and change my soaked clothes before school. At the corner I turn to wave, but no one is looking. Anka is running to catch up with Krešimir, wiping rain and hair from her face and calling his name. Her voice is high and bright, it carries on the wind, but her brother acts as though he is deaf.

  The memory came to me with the wine and the starlings, the sight of Krešimir who can no longer walk as fast and the darkening sky and the chill of unfinished business. On a sudden whim I stood up and called his name and watched him turn unhurriedly, with a deliberate lack of surprise. Krešimir never likes to be caught out and has trained his responses accordingly. I called for him to join me for a drink, though the truth is I didn’t think for a moment he would say yes, and yet he came over, marking a semicircle around the dogs. Kos caught a scent of him and lifted a lip. ‘She’s just smiling at you,’ I told Krešimir. Krešimir had a dislike of dogs, of all animals actually – it was one of the reasons he hunted.

  Krešimir accepted a glass of wine without thanking me and sat behind his glass, his eyes roaming the street. He picked up the glass, drained half the contents and set it back on the table. He said nothing. Krešimir never bought a round of drinks himself and was disdainful of other people’s hospitality. He acted as though it was he doing me the favour. I had the desire to tease him, all the more for knowing how much he disliked it. ‘So what’s new?’ I asked.

  Krešimir did not look at me. ‘Same, same.’

  ‘You think it will rain?’

  Krešimir looked in the direction of the ravine, where a mass of cloud welled behind the hills. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Maybe tonight. Maybe tomorrow.’

  I indicated to the waitress to bring two more glasses of wine. A drop of rain fell onto the table in front of me.

  ‘I need to go,’ said Krešimir.

  ‘It’s nothing.’ I told the waitress to set the wine upon the table. Unlike, say Fabjan, or even myself – Krešimir didn’t hold his drink so well. ‘So the old house is sold.’

  ‘Who told you?’

  I told him I’d overheard it at the Zodijak.

  He snorted faintly. ‘People talk too much.’

  ‘Then it’s true?’

  Krešimir waved a hand. ‘It was going to ruin.’ Then he smiled nastily and asked me about work. He did it to switch the subject, not knowing my luck had just changed. Krešimir’s job at the fertiliser factory here in Gost is considered a good job for these parts because he works in the offices as a salesman. I am a builder, I work with my hands and find work where I can and not always easily. Krešimir went to college, whereas I never finished technical school. He enjoyed the advantage this gave him over me.

  I told him work was fine. It rained faster, still I made no move, watching the drops land on Krešimir’s head. As I said, he has quite luxurious hair but which, as well as greying, has receded quite considerably above the temples. By way of compensation he seemed to be wearing it longer, as though nobody would notice the front for being so astonished by the miracle that was the back of his head. I said, ‘What will you do now?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘After you sell the house.’

  ‘Must I do something?’

  ‘People generally do – something, that is.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘They do.’

  ‘Well since you ask, I am thinking of going away.’

  ‘Away from Gost?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where would you go?’

  ‘The coast, perhaps. The islands. I’ve heard the living there is good. People have moved on, Duro. Maybe you should, too. The tourists are back. And now I must go home, I have things to do.’ Krešimir stood up and drained his glass.

  ‘Good luck,’ I said.

  ‘Good luck with what?’

  ‘With the move.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Krešimir gathered up his bags of groceries. Krešimir married later in life. His wife, who started out as a pretty blonde thing, full of ideas, even if they were not particularly good ones, now rarely left the house except when she went to visit her relatives, which she did for months at a time, lacking the nerve either to confront her husband or leave him. Maybe she was away visiting now, or equally likely Krešimir had decided to do the grocery shopping himself. Perhaps she had bought the wrong item once too often, or gone over budget. Krešimir was something of a miser, did I mention that? He circled the dogs – and was gone.

  I stayed for a few minutes more to finish my wine, called to Kos and Zeka and started home. It was raining hard: a summer shower. It would be over by the time I reached the edge of town. I thought about the blue house and the new people there. I thought about the leak in the roof. Tomorrow was Monday, a working day. I would go round there first thing in the morning and get started. I looked at the sky, the starlings were gone.

  I walked, I thought: So Krešimir is leaving Gost.

  2

  The buddleia had taken hold both in the guttering and in the pointing. It came free with a shower of powder masonry. Laura, standing at the bottom of the ladder, applauded. I threw the buddleia to the ground and climbed down the ladder.

  ‘Do you have a bucket?’ I asked. ‘Two even better.’

  She disappeared and returned with a pair of old metal pails. I climbed back up and began to clear the guttering.

  I’d arrived early in the morning and ready for work, but Laura had made coffee and offered me a pastry. The pastry was stale and Laura apologised. ‘I need to get to the supermarket.’

  ‘There’s a baker. They make pastries of all kinds. I’ll show you.’ I had finished my coffee and rose. ‘I’ll get started.’

  Now she stood below, watching me as I ladled rotten leaves and twigs into the bucket. When the first bucket was full I climbed down and exchanged it for the empty one. In this way and with her help I worked my way from left to right across the front of the house, repositioning the ladder every metre or so. Once I looked through one of the upper windows: there were no curtains – and saw asleep on the bed the boy I’d seen two days before. He was naked, lying on his back with one hand on his chest and the other holding his dick. Nothing, not the sound of our talk, nor the scrape and clang of the ladder, had interrupted his sleep.

  Around eleven with the job finished Laura made us both another cup of coffee. I said I wanted to fix the tiles next and, since people often kept a stack of spares, I’d take a look, if that was OK, otherwise we’d have to buy them. Laura’s son appeared, wearing only a towel about his waist, his eyes slitty with sleep. In silence he went to the sink and poured himself a glass of water. Laura stood up and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Good morning, darling.’ He put his glass in the sink and Laura picked it up and rinsed it. He opened a cupboard and looked inside and she asked if he was hungry. When he took down a packet of cereal, she fetched a bowl and a spoon and the milk from the fridge. I saw our conversation was over and stood up. Laura turned. ‘Thanks, Duro. Let me know about the tiles.’

  I stood on the slope at the back of the house and surveyed the roof. Typically steeply pitched, for the snow as I expect you know. From where I stood I had a decent view of the damage: worse than I thought, but not much more so. Heavy snow and frost take their toll and six months ago we were in the depths of winter. Lichen and moss had a hold. Fixing roofs is a year-round job, as I told Laura. An overgrown haw
thorn hedge bordered the courtyard on one side, on the other three: the house and outbuildings. A walnut tree had cast two decades of its offspring on the ground. The grass had grown and fallen for sixteen summers. An old sink, a rusted rat trap and a small wagon: flotsam pulled down into it. In one corner, the outline of several raised beds, where I found rocket, flowering yellow and black-striped blooms. Fennel, grown taller than I stood. Loops of raspberry canes. A parsley pot had overturned and its spilled contents grew in a puddle of bright green. I picked up the pot and placed it upon a windowsill. Against the wall of the house I found a pile of bricks but no tiles. The door of the second outbuilding was wedged shut and I gave it a kick. Again no tiles but a quantity of tools which I sorted through for anything that looked useful. I came out and stood in the sun.

  The blue house: I wonder if anyone but me called it that. To most people it was the Pavić house, the first Pavić house, because later they moved to a house in town. I circled it with a critical eye, ticked the jobs off on my fingers: gutters, roof, paintwork: the woodwork of the windows was in a poor state, the stonework needed whitewashing. The building was in reasonable structural shape. The dead tree of course, it needed to be taken down, and there was everything to be done inside, starting with the wall of the front room. I took a trowel to a windowsill where the wood was soft and splintered, I checked another and found it sound. I went back inside and said to Laura, ‘We’ll need to get some tiles, wood filler and paint, a blow torch.’

  She blinked. I added, ‘For the windows. The wood is rotten. A few more winters and you’ll have to replace them all.’ I turned and addressed myself to the boy, who was eating at the table. ‘Duro. Pleased to meet you.’ I put my hand out.

  Laura covered her mouth. ‘I’m so sorry. I forgot to introduce you.’

  The boy looked up and seeing my hand offered his own, though his grip lacked any kind of enthusiasm. ‘Hi,’ he said, withdrew his hand and dropped his gaze back to his bowl.