couldn’t help me at all. She was now making me tea, so I could hardly leave, but I had no idea what to say to her. “So do you work?” I asked, a rather unsubtle variation on the standard cocktail party query, “So what do you do?”
“Yes. Cleaning … sometime supermarket shelves, but night work, horrible. Sometime I work for magazines.”
I immediately thought of porn mags. My prejudices, based on her wardrobe choices, were too stubbornly entrenched to be shifted without some effort. Though to be a little bit fair to myself, I had started to worry about her being in the sex trade rather than simply being judgmental. She was astute enough to sense I had reservations about her “magazine work.”
“The free ones,” she continued. “I put them in the letter boxes. The house that have ‘No Junk Mail’ I put in too. I can’t read English.”
I smiled at her. She seemed pleased by the first genuine smile I’d given her.
“All the doors in the rich places not want free papers. But we not go to the poor places. Funny, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” I searched for another opening conversational gambit. “So where did you meet Tess?”
“Oh. I not tell you?”
Of course she had, but I’d forgotten, which isn’t surprising when you remember how little interest I took in her.
“The clinic. My baby ill too,” she said.
“Your baby has cystic fibrosis?”
“Cystic fibrosis, yes. But now …” She touched her stomach. “Better now. A miracle.” She made a sign of the cross, a gesture as natural to her as pushing her hair away from her face. “Tess called it the Mummies with Disasters Clinic. First time I met her she made me laugh. She asked me to flat.” Her words caught in her throat. She turned away from me. I couldn’t see her face but I knew she was trying not to cry. I reached out my hand to put on her shoulder but just couldn’t do it. I find being tactile toward a person I don’t know as hard as touching a spider if you’re arachnophobic. You may find it funny, but it really isn’t. It’s almost a handicap.
Kasia finished making the tea and put it all on a tray. I noticed how proper she was, with cups and saucers, a small pitcher for milk, a strainer for the tea leaves, the cheap teapot warmed first.
As we went through to the sitting room, I saw a picture on the opposite wall that hadn’t been visible to me before. It was a charcoal drawing of Kasia’s face. It was beautiful. And it made me see that Kasia was beautiful too. I knew you’d done it.
“Tess’s?” I asked.
“Yes.”
Our eyes met and for a moment something was communicated between us that didn’t need language and therefore there was no barrier. If I had to translate that “something” into words, it would be that you and she were clearly close enough for you to want to draw her, that you saw beauty in people that others didn’t see. But it wasn’t as verbose as that, no language clunked between us; it was a more subtle thing. The sound of a door slamming startled me.
I turned to see a man coming into the room. Large and muscular, about twenty years old, he looked absurdly big in the tiny flat. He was wearing laborers’ overalls, no T-shirt underneath, his muscular arms tattooed like sleeves. His hair was matted with plaster dust. His voice was surprisingly quiet for such a large man, but it had the timbre of threat. “Kash? Why the fuck haven’t you bolted the door? I told you—” He stopped as he saw me. “Health visitor?”
“No,” I replied.
He ignored me, directing his question to Kasia. “So who the fuck is this then?”
Kasia was nervous and embarrassed. “Mitch …”
He sat down, stating his claim to the room and by implication my lack of one.
Kasia was nervous of him, the same expression I’d seen that day outside your flat when he’d blared the horn. “This is Beatrice.”
“And what does ‘Beatrice’ want with us?” he asked, mocking.
I suddenly felt conscious of my designer jeans and gray cashmere sweater, de rigueur weekend wardrobe in New York but hardly the kind of outfit to blend in on a Monday morning in Trafalgar Crescent.
“Mitch doing nights. Very hard,” said Kasia, “He gets very …” She struggled to find the word, but you need to have a mother tongue phrase book in your brain to find a euphemism for Mitch’s behavior. “Out of sorts” was the one that sprang to my mind most quickly; I almost wanted to write it down for her.
“You don’t need to fucking apologize for me.”
“My sister, Tess, was a friend of Kasia’s,” I said, but my voice had become Mum’s; anxiety always accentuates my upper-class accent.
He looked angrily at Kasia. “The one you were always running off to?” I didn’t know whether Kasia’s English was good enough for her to understand he was bullying her. I wondered if he was a physical bully too.
Kasia’s voice was quiet. “Tess my friend.”
It was something I hadn’t heard since primary school, standing up for someone simply by saying
Mitch was sprawled in an armchair; I had to step over his legs to get to the door. Kasia came with me. “Thank you for the clothes. Very kind.”
Mitch looked at her. “What clothes?”
