Jak and Vasos were getting ready for work.
‘You stay here,’ Jak said. ‘You can clean up the apartment.’ I felt numb and the day passed incredibly slowly. I couldn’t eat or think about anything except my mum. Where would she be now? What would she be doing? How would she be feeling?
‘She’s coming back,’ I kept telling myself. ‘I’ll see her again very soon.’ Even though I knew it was true, it didn’t make me feel any better, and as the hours dragged by, I became increasingly anxious to talk to her. So when Jak got back from work that evening and told me he’d had a text from her and that I should call, I almost snatched the phone out of his hand.
‘I’ve been so worried about you,’ Mum said. ‘Just take care of yourself. I’ll be back as soon as possible, I promise.’
I felt much calmer after I had spoken to her. I knew I was really going to miss her, but it was stupid of me to have got into such a state about it all, particularly when I had Jak to look after me until she came back. And I really was all right, once I knew Mum wasn’t worried to death about me and that I would be able to text and speak to her on Jak’s phone every day.
For the next couple of weeks, our lives fell into an easy pattern. I would either go with Jak to work or stay at Vasos’s apartment during the day. Then, in the evening, after we’d had something to eat, we would go out for a coffee. I would often tell Jak how impressed I was by the extraordinarily rapid improvement in his English, and he’d respond by teaching me some more words in Albanian and telling me how proud he was of me when I repeated them back to him.
One evening, as we were sitting outside a café in a square in the centre of town, Jak’s phone rang. He listened before speaking rapidly in Albanian for a few seconds. Then he put the phone down on the table and sighed.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked him, touching the warm skin of his arm with my fingers. ‘Has something happened? Are you all right?’
‘I’ve just had some bad news,’ he said. ‘My mother is very ill.’ His eyes filled with tears.
‘Oh no, I’m so sorry.’ I gripped his arm tightly. ‘What’s wrong with her?’
‘It’s cancer.’ He spread out his hands with their palms turned upwards in a gesture of helplessness. ‘It’s in her throat. The doctor thought it was … How do you call it?’ He touched his neck. ‘Tiroide?’
‘Thyroid?’ I said.
He nodded miserably. ‘They did some tests and now they’ve told her today that it is cancer.’
‘Oh, Jak, that’s terrible! Can it be treated?’
The sound he made was like a burst of angry laughter. ‘Yes, it can be treated, for someone who can afford to have an operation. This isn’t England, you know. Just visiting a doctor here costs fifty euros. I can’t even imagine what the operation would cost.’ He rubbed his face with his hand and wiped away the tears that were falling openly now. ‘My parents don’t have any money. You know that. And it takes me a whole day to earn fifty euros, even though I work very hard.’ He sighed again and I tried to think of something comforting to say, but couldn’t. ‘Well, I’m just going to have to get a second job,’ he said at last. ‘I just hope I can earn enough money to pay for the treatment my mother needs before … before it’s too late. I don’t have any choice: you can’t just stand by and watch someone you love suffer and then die.’
I was crying too by that time. I had always had the sense that Jak’s mother didn’t really like me, but that didn’t affect the fact that I felt incredibly sorry for her, and for Jak too. I knew he was very fond of his mother, and I couldn’t even begin to imagine how I would feel if my mum was ever seriously ill. What I didn’t know until a long time later was that Jak could have won an Oscar for his performance that evening.
I think he had already decided we were going to move back in with his family. So that’s what we did a couple of days later. It wasn’t what I wanted to do, but I certainly wasn’t going to argue about it, given the circumstances. Sometimes, I would see him touch his mum’s throat as he was talking to her. Otherwise, neither she nor anyone else in the family gave any indication that she was ill.
I didn’t go to work with Jak anymore. I stayed in the house and helped his mum and sister do the heavy-duty housework that they taught me to do their way, with often unconcealed disdain for my lack of knowledge.
Jak’s parents slept in the only proper bed in the house, and every day the mattress had to be lifted off it, carried outside and beaten with a sort of carpet beater made out of cane and shaped like a tennis racquet. Then the mattress was left to air before being put back on the bed again, topside down. On most days, all the sheets and bed covers were hung out to air too, except on wash days, when they had to be taken out into the garden to be scrubbed and rubbed in freezing cold water in a metal tub until your knuckles were raw and bleeding.
However hard I worked, it seemed that I could never do anything the way some unwritten law stated that it must be done. One day, after I had struggled to lift something that was way beyond the limits of my strength, Jak’s mother clicked her tongue and said something to Jak, which he translated for me as, ‘English girls are very dirty.’ It seemed unfair, as well as irrelevant to the current task. What hurt me most of all was the fact that Jak’s tone of voice suggested he might agree with what his mother said.
Ever since I was a very small child, the thing I think I wanted more than almost anything else was for people to like me. So I particularly hated being around Jak’s dad, because he made no attempt at all to hide his impatient dislike of me. Whenever he walked into a room and found me there, he would glare at me, make angry clicking noises with his tongue and then say something unmistakably nasty in Albanian before walking out again. It might not have been because he was irritated with me personally, however. He wasn’t much nicer to his wife, who he continued to bully even now that she was ill.
At every mealtime, everyone would sit down at the table while Jak’s mum served the food and then stood up to eat hers. When it happened the first time, I jumped up and offered her my chair. She glared at me as though I had done something contemptible, and glanced anxiously at her husband, who muttered something angry, and Jak almost shouted at me, ‘What do you think you’re doing? She stands up.’ I seemed to have done something insulting in some way I didn’t understand and I felt really embarrassed. So I asked Jak later, ‘Why do you let your dad treat your mum like that? I don’t understand why a man would make a woman stand up to eat. That doesn’t happen in England. Everyone sits at the table together.’
‘It’s the Albanian culture,’ he snapped at me. ‘In Albania, wives love their husbands and husbands love their wives. Perhaps that’s something that doesn’t happen in England either. In Albania women do everything for their men. That’s what we call family.’ I realised I didn’t have enough normal family experience to be able to argue with him. But it seemed to me to be a very strange way to treat someone you loved.
As the days passed, I became more and more miserable, until eventually I told Jak I was unhappy living with his family and asked him if we could get a place of our own. It felt like proof of his love for me when he agreed, and a couple of days later we moved out. The one-room apartment Jak rented for us was tiny, although I think by that time I would have been happy living in a shed or a tent as long as it meant not having to put up with his family’s disapproval and the constant feeling that I wasn’t good enough in almost every way.
It was shortly after we moved into the apartment that I began to see the first glimpses of another side of Jak. Perhaps it was the side
