‘But seriously, do you want him back?’ I asked. ‘Because now’s the perfect moment. Ant won’t have him, apparently, and my dad’s already got a cat. I’m not sure Boris and Riley would get on, so . . .’
‘Dad!’ Ben protested. ‘You can’t just give Riley away. He’s my cat!’
‘Yeah, only Riley is actually Heather’s cat, champ,’ I explained. ‘You remember how he just started coming in our kitchen window, don’t you? Right back in the beginning?’
Ben shook his head.
‘OK, well, you were little. But he just started coming in through the window, and he was hungry, so we fed him. But he was Heather’s cat all along. He’d just got lost. That’s how he ended up at ours.’
‘Yeah, but now he’s mine,’ Ben said.
‘But if he’s Dandy, he has to come home,’ Lucy said.
My phone buzzed then, and as it was Joe-the-younger, and as it was also the third time he’d called, I made my excuses to Heather and stepped out into the conservatory to take it.
‘Joe!’ he said as soon as I picked up. ‘Thank Christ. I’ve been trying to call you for hours.’
‘Yeah, I can see that,’ I told him. ‘I was driving. What’s up?’
‘It’s Marius,’ he said. ‘He’s only fucked off.’
‘You what?’ I said.
Marius, Joe explained, had unexpectedly gone home to Romania. He’d been renting a small flat from the owner of a local pub, and it was the barman who’d given Joe the news.
At first, I found the story hard to believe. After all, I’d worked with Marius all day Friday, and he hadn’t said a word. I was even pretty certain he’d said, ‘See you Monday,’ on leaving the job at five, though perhaps that had been me. But Joe insisted it was true and when, on hanging up, I called Marius, his phone went straight to voicemail. As I’d paid him in full just before the weekend, it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility.
‘So is it true? Can we really have Dandy back?’ Heather asked, when I finally stepped back into the kitchen. ‘I’ve told Ben he can visit any time he wants, and he says that’s OK.’
‘He’ll probably just come back to ours anyway,’ Ben said. ‘The gardens all join up.’
‘Um?’ I said, still thinking about Marius and all the jobs we needed to finish. ‘Oh, yeah, if you’re willing, that would be great.’
‘Are you OK?’ Heather asked. ‘You look, I don’t know . . . strange.’
‘Yes, strange news,’ I said. ‘Kind of bad news, I suppose, if it’s true.’
‘Nothing serious, I hope?’ she said. ‘Everyone’s OK, aren’t they?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘One of my employees has gone AWOL.’ I moved across the room to squeeze Ben’s shoulder. ‘Can we go, champ?’ I asked him. ‘I need to go round to Marius’s place and see what’s up.’
Shocking as it was, it was true: Marius had done an overnight flit. His flat had been completely cleared out.
I went to the pub and spoke to the landlord. He said Marius had paid him till the end of the month, and that he’d already found a new tenant.
I phoned Marius about twenty times during the next few days, but my calls always went straight to voicemail. Later on, at the end of the month, that number would cease to work entirely.
As we were working on site, I didn’t call into the workshop until later in the week. I’d cleared out most of the tools anyway by then, so other than to pick up the mail, I had no real reason to go there. But on Thursday afternoon when I dropped in, a letter from Marius was waiting for me on the workbench.
Despite the fact that his written English was pretty approximative, he managed to make himself clear. In a nutshell, it seemed that his request to remain had been refused, and he hadn’t had the stomach to fight the decision. That refusal, in the form of a letter from immigration, which he’d enclosed, was the ‘small log that overturns the big cart’, he said. Which I can only assume is the Romanian equivalent of the straw that breaks the camel’s back. The letter informed him, pretty abruptly it has to be said, that he had twenty-eight days to leave the country. In his handwritten letter to me, he explained that he’d been thinking of going home since the Brexit vote, but had stayed on out of a sense of duty to me. But now you are go home, Marius go home too. Goodbye, my friend.
While I could understand the man’s anger completely – I was feeling pretty angry about how he’d been treated myself – I just wished he’d given me twenty-eight days’ notice. Because without him there was no way we could finish the jobs we had underway, and certainly not by the fourteenth of February.
If Marius’s departure threw a spanner in the works for me, things were even more complicated for Joe-the-younger. He’d signed contracts with two new clients to do their kitchens, it transpired, and had already ordered flat-pack units for the first.
‘You’ve gotta help me out, Joe,’ he pleaded. ‘Because otherwise, I’m screwed.’
And I’d worked with the guy for years. What else was I going to do?
Thirteen
Heather
It was the girls who first told me about Joe’s change of plans. It was a cold, grey, drizzly Sunday morning and we were waiting for Ant to arrive. He was due to take them out for the day, though Lord knows what he was intending to do with them in such dreadful weather.
Sarah was busy throwing those sticky jelly-men at the big conservatory window, leaving stains that would be a bugger to clean, when a neighbour’s long-haired cat nonchalantly crossed our lawn. This prompted her to ask when Dandy was coming home.
‘Soon,’ I told her, looking up from a magazine I was absent-mindedly leafing through. ‘In about a week or two, I expect. Why? Are you looking forward to giving him lots of cuddles?’
She nodded. ‘I want him to sleep on my
