the lies I have to tell Steve, making excuses so I can stay all night, and now this.’
Janusz felt the anger bolt out of him like an unleashed dog.
‘I have a job to do, money to earn! You are not my wife to tell me whom I can and cannot see!’ His voice boomed around the flat.
‘You are right – it’s none of my business,’ she said, her voice tight. ‘How can I complain if you have other girlfriends? I am just some dziwka you are sleeping with who other men pay to see naked.’
He clutched his head, mute before this irrational torrent.
‘And no, I’m not your wife,’ she went on. ‘I’m someone else’s – and I shouldn’t be here.’
Softening his voice with an effort of will, he said, ‘Listen, Kasia. You are still young, you could leave Steve, start life over again,’ but he knew it was hopeless – this was old ground, the argument well worn.
She pulled on her coat. ‘You know I can’t, Janek,’ sounding weary now.
He caught her arm as she opened the flat door.
‘Don’t go off this way, kotku,’ he said.
She smiled a sad smile at this big man calling her a little cat, touched her fingers to his lips, and left.
Thirty seconds later, the main door to the street boomed like a distant firing squad.
Janusz paced the flat, cursing; running the last hour’s dramat through his head on a continuous loop. Half an hour later he still couldn’t make any sense of it: what right did she have to be jealous when she was the one sleeping with another man? The fact that man was her husband didn’t make it any easier. No! Being able to picture that rat-faced Cockney screwing her made it a thousand times worse.
With an effort of will, he pushed Kasia to the back of his mind, threw himself onto the sofa and drank a glass of red wine in a single draught. He took the snap of Weronika, the one of her in the fur coat, out of his wallet. Something about this girl, her innocent beauty, and yes, okay, the way she reminded him of Iza, had got under his skin, made him preoccupied with finding her. Naprawde, it was even worse than that, he realised with an embarrassed grimace: he wanted to rescue her.
He went to turn off the oven, and after a moment’s hesitation, scraped the roast potatoes into the bin: once cooled you could never recapture their crust.
Leaving the block’s front door between the stone columns that flanked the entrance, Janusz noticed that a new ‘For Sale’ sign had sprouted overhead. Oskar said that if he sold up and bought a place further out he could pocket a couple of hundred grand, easy. But why would he want to live in some benighted suburb like Enfield?
When he left Highbury Mansions, it would be wearing an oak overcoat, as his father used to say – God rest his soul.
As usual, he took the shortest route to the tube, straight across the southern section of the darkened Fields, feeling the dew from the grass creeping into his shoes. Halfway across, without breaking his stride, he glanced backwards – there had been a spate of muggings here recently. All clear. But as his gaze swung forward again, he discovered that a big, heavyset man, almost as tall as him, had materialised on the pavement at the edge of the Fields, twenty-five, thirty metres ahead. He must have just stepped out of a parked car, but if so, why hadn’t Janusz heard the distinctive clunk of a car door? He kept his gaze locked on the bulky figure, clad in an expensive-looking parka jacket, strolling through the pools of orange thrown by the street lights, until finally, the guy disappeared out of sight behind the Leisure Centre.
Janusz couldn’t fathom what it was about the man that had caught his attention – he certainly didn’t look like a mugger. All he could say was there was something about him that looked indefinably out of place.
FlashKlub, the place that Justyna had named for their rendezvous, was located in a basement under a semi-derelict fifties factory building in an area called Maryland on Stratford’s eastern fringe. The name might suggest rural romance, but the area was depressed and scruffy – no Olympic effect visible here. Lining up with a queue of youngsters chattering away in Polish he felt middle-aged, out of place, but the young bouncer showed no surprise, greeting him with a polite ‘Dobry wieczor, panu.’ He did make an apologetic gesture at his cigar, though. Janusz ground it out on the pavement before heading down the rickety stairs toward the klub with all the enthusiasm of a man going to get his teeth drilled.
Justyna was sitting on a stool at the bar, fiddling with the straw in her drink. She was even more attractive than he remembered: glossy dark hair grazing her shoulders, eyes the colour of conac. She seemed relieved to see him – no doubt she’d been pestered non-stop by guys trying their luck. He ordered a Tyskie and another apple juice for her – she shook her head when he suggested a shot of bisongrass wodka to liven it up. Maybe she didn’t want to let her tongue run away with her, he thought.
A huge screen on one wall playing pop promos dominated the basement. The current one had been shot in some semi-derelict Soviet housing estate and starred two skinny crew-cut boys. Dressed like gangsters from an American ghetto, they bobbed and grimaced through a Polski hip hop number, their faces deadpan. Maybe he was just a narrow-minded old fart, but it set Janusz’s teeth on edge. The mindless beat and nihilistic lyrics struck him as an affront to the musical beauty of the language.
‘You don’t like it?’ she asked with a half-smile at his tortured expression.
‘No. Do you?’ he said, raising an eyebrow.
She shrugged. ‘Sure. I like all kinds of music.’
‘When I was your age, studying physics in Krakow,’ he said, ‘there was a craze in the cellar bars, for traditional music, folk, I suppose you’d call it.’
Her expression was attentive, but detached. She had one of those faces that you felt compelled to keep scanning because her emotions were so hard to read.
He paused, remembering those nights, the frenetic violins, the thrilling sounds infused with the wildness of Gypsy music, often a haunting woman’s voice in the mix, and felt the tug of nostalgia in his chest. He took a swallow of beer to cover his expression. ‘The thing was, the dumbass … excuse me … stupid Kommies thought traditional music was wholesome, harmless stuff – but of course, all those old partisan songs about carrying your heart around in a knapsack were dynamite.
‘The music had us stomping and cheering, climbing onto tables to sing along. After closing, all hyped up and full of wodka, me and my mates would dodge the police patrols and paint Solidarnosc graffiti all over town.’
‘Did you ever get caught?’ she asked. From the mild curiosity in her tone, she might have been asking about something that happened in the nineteenth century rather than two-and-a-half decades ago.
He hesitated. ‘Just once. There were three of us – my mates had hung me by my legs over the side of a railway bridge so I could paint some slogan or other. “THE TV LIES”, I think it was. When the milicja arrived, the lads just about managed to drag me back up, but by the time I was on solid ground they’d legged it and I got nicked.’
‘What happened to you?’
He looked away. ‘Nothing much, spent a night in the cell, got a few slaps, got sent
