Chapter 16

Vinko’s place was much as Jay had expected. The decaying house, once-garish paint flaking from windows that were more filler than wood, was the end of a terrace reached via a small patch of willowherb, bindweed and scattered rubbish from an overflowing bin. As Vinko opened the door and they stepped over a collection of flyers, Jay saw a dark hallway lined with textured wallpaper held in place by layers of uneven paint. The smell, a combination of damp house, spicy frying, cigarette smoke and unemptied bins, was familiar to him. He’d known plenty of similar places – the pads of temporary acquaintances, squats shared or bagged for himself. Vinko’s room was on the second floor and he led the way towards the sort of creaky stairs it was always a relief to climb without a foot sinking through.

‘That you, Vin?’ a voice drifted to them on a tinny wave of bhangra music from the shared kitchen.

‘Yeah,’ he called from the first step. ‘I come talk soon.’

He took another step.

‘Hang on, we’ve got a message for ya.’

Vinko sighed and headed for the kitchen. Jay followed. The room was a mess of heaped dishes in the sink, all manner of packets and tins on every filthy surface – Jay knew from experience most would be almost empty – and a table piled with advertising leaflets, empty take-away cartons and overflowing ashtrays. The soles of his shoes clung stickily to the worn lino. Three men, two fairly smart Asian lads about Vinko’s age and a white guy with greying hair and a face that looked prematurely lined, were sitting round the table with mugs in front of them, recently-cleared dinner plates pushed to one side. They all looked past Vinko at Jay with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion.

‘Hi,’ said Vinko without introducing him. ‘What message is there?’

‘You had a visitor,’ said one of the younger lads. ‘That bloody fella again. Novak. Said he was waitin’ to hear from ya.’ Vinko shrugged. ‘Just bloody talk to him will ya, Vin? So you don’t want to know him – then phone him up an’ tell him. And while you’re at it you can tell him to piss off an’ stop botherin’ us, yeah?’

‘I did tell to him I’ll ring him,’ Vinko said irritably.

‘Whatever. So who’s your friend?’

‘Dan,’ Jay said, ‘Dan Freeman.’

‘He is…he plays music…’ Vinko glanced at Jay.

‘Busker,’ he said helpfully.

‘I know him longtime. He needs a place to stay. I say he can sleep on my room floor.’

‘Busker eh? You could give us some home entertainment,’ said the trio’s spokesman, making exaggerated dancing movements with his arms. ‘Sing for your supper.’

The three of them laughed, not entirely pleasantly. Jay grinned. ‘You never know your luck.’

The lad shrugged, looked at his housemates in turn. ‘He looks harmless enough, don’t he? You do what you like in your own room, Vin mate.’ He winked and the others chortled. ‘I’m not the landlord.’

‘I like that you will clean those.’ Vinko waved irritably towards the sink. ‘I’m wanting to cook food for my friend.’

Amidst general laughter, which Jay might have been tempted to join in under other circumstances, Vinko strode to the door.

‘Don’t worry, I’m not as fussy as he’d have you believe,’ Jay said with a wink over his shoulder as he followed him. ‘See you, lads.’

‘They are animals,’ Vinko muttered on the way upstairs. ‘I don’t want to live like that. You don’t think I am like that, please.’

His room bore out his words. The uncluttered floor had a threadbare but colourful cotton rug, the washbasin with its cracked tiled surround and the mirror above it were clean, curtains moved gently in the breeze from an open window. Vinko hung up his jacket behind the door and gestured for Jay to sit on the neatly made bed. He bent to pick up the kettle from a tray on the floor and Jay noticed the mugs beside it were clean and tidily arranged. As Vinko filled the kettle at the washbasin, he looked around at the walls. There was a framed photo of Marta and Ivan; it felt strange to see the image of his friend in this new context. There were also a couple of large posters, a fantasy cityscape and a Salvador Dalí, but it was the drawings that were the most striking. Lots of drawings – faces, buildings, strange hybrid animals, all in bold pencil strokes, depicted in varying degrees of abstraction. There was an open sketch pad on the table beneath the dormer window.

‘These yours?’

Vinko nodded. ‘They hide…’ he waved a hand, ‘ugly walls.’

There were plenty of damp stains and cracks still showing, but they seemed not to matter beneath the magical papering-over. Jay reached out to press a curling corner back in place on its wad of blu-tack.

‘They’re amazing.’

‘Thank you. I told you I wanted to do something worthwhile with my life.’

He’d slipped back into his own language as if practising English no longer mattered in the privacy of his own space.

‘That one’s my home.’ He pointed at a drawing of an intricate stone folly of a building, with a shadowy figure that could have been partner, child or self-portrait, the whole perfectly placed within an intricate geometric border. There was a darkness to the beauty of the scene, something about the impossibility of telling whether it was day or night, that Jay found intriguing. ‘I’ll find it one day.’

‘I hope you do.’

Vinko made two coffees and sat on the room’s only wooden chair. He rolled and lit a cigarette and offered Jay the tobacco. He shook his head, took out his pipe instead and sat back comfortably across the bed as he filled it.

‘Why Dan Freeman?’ asked Vinko.

‘What?’ Jay looked at him in surprise. ‘Where did you hear that?’

‘That was what you told them you were called.’

‘Did I?’ He laughed to cover his unease. ‘Force of habit. I tell people my real name when I think they need to know. Sometimes that’s immediately, sometimes… never.’

‘You don’t have to worry about that crowd.’ Vinko smiled. ‘They live like pigs but they’re my friends.’

‘I could see that. It was more…that visitor they’ve been getting. And your nervous look as they mentioned him. Who is it?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ He picked up his mug and tried to sip the too-hot coffee. ‘Someone I met. A deal. I was drunk. Don’t want to get involved. It’s not important.’

Jay lit the pipe. ‘What kind of deal?’

‘Nothing. Selling things. I don’t earn much, I always need extra.’ He glared defensively at Jay as if it were his fault.

‘Shouldn’t you do as your friend says, phone him and tell him you’re not interested?’

Vinko flicked ash into the ashtray in an agitated gesture.

‘I have and I’ll tell him again.’ He picked up his mug and blew across it so he could drink. ‘If he doesn’t go away I can always disappear – find somewhere else. You help me, Šojka, you help me to be a proper person here – then I won’t have to do things like that.’

Jay stayed silent, feeling as guiltily helpless at this display of faith as he had at the first mention of Šojka the war hero. Vinko crushed his cigarette out and stood.

‘I have to go to the shop for food. Are you coming?’

‘Why don’t we eat out? I don’t want to spend all evening washing up to make space in that kitchen.’

‘You don’t have to – you’re my guest.’ The lad looked wounded.

‘Watching you wash up, then.’ Jay grinned. Vinko continued scowling. ‘That was meant to be a joke.’

He nodded with a wary smile.

Over a meal for which Vinko insisted on paying his share, and a number of drinks afterwards, Jay found himself telling the lad tales from his restless life, more than anything else to avoid the subject he knew the lad was burning to hear about. But when Vinko asked directly about Ivan, he felt he had to try. He deserved to hear about his father.

‘He was like the brother I never had. An older sister doesn’t count. We’d always moved around a lot and I’d never fitted in, never found close friends. The butt of people’s jokes, the outsider.’ He looked at Vinko guiltily. He’d have had it far worse. ‘I got so’s I could look after myself and kept my own company most of the time. Sounds daft but I never really realised I’d been lonely, never thought any of it bothered me till I met your dad. Ivan and I clicked from the start.’ So far, so straightforward. ‘He was fun to be with, we shared books, music… We were both into the sort of stuff you’d get laughed at for liking. And walking. We often took ourselves off, walking and camping together. We felt a deep connection to the countryside. Better, closer than anyone else. Of course – we were young.’ He reminded himself Vinko still was. ‘What I mean is, Ivan believed passionately in everything he did. And he was keen on politics, which is more than I was – I’ve always been too much of a dreamer – and I learned a lot from him. Most of all, he always felt a strong connection to his roots. Again very different from me. We’d always moved around. I didn’t have any. With Ivan I liked having somewhere special I could feel an attachment to, even if it was…kind of borrowed. At first. Not later. Definitely more than that later. So anyway, it suited my sense of adventure to go with him when he visited Croatia.’

‘That was why you went? Adventure?’

The critical tone of his voice made Jay look away. He picked up his glass and drank.

‘The first visit, perhaps. A holiday, to stay with your great-aunt, Zora. I loved it there and wanted to go back. But the second time was more than mere curiosity. It was the year we finished school, 1990. We’d seen the wave of change across Eastern Europe, the demos, the air of revolution, the fall of the Berlin wall. I guess you heard something about it, from your mum?’ Vinko nodded. ‘We’d watched it all happening on TV and, well, if something similar was going to happen in Yugoslavia, we wanted to be there, to be part of something big. So we both planned a gap year, and…’ He paused; if Vinko was unfamiliar with the concept of a gap year he didn’t show it. ‘Even as young, idealistic lads, we knew it wasn’t as simple as an enthusiastic crowd waving šahovnica flags and having a great big party on Zagreb’s Jelačić Square. But we had no idea it would get as bad as it did. No one did. Though…in the end there was no question of us not getting involved.’

‘You adopted our country?’

So like Ivan – “our country” when, as far as Jay knew, Vinko had never even had the chance to set foot there.

‘You could say that.’

He swallowed. It was getting harder.

‘Could? You mean you didn’t really?’

‘No, no. I did. Zora, she…she said there’d be chaos, and yes, there was talk of civil war – some said it was inevitable, others that it couldn’t possibly happen. She suggested we waited before going. But we were determined and she didn’t try for long to dissuade us. She even made special arrangements for us. She’d moved permanently to her old family home by then, in Dalmatia. She’d got herself a transfer from Zagreb to the university in Zadar because, well, things were getting uncertain, and if she was going to be stuck anywhere she wanted to be there, at what she thought of as her home, rather than anywhere else. She told us the train would be hopeless – we’d have to go through Knin and that would be…difficult, even then. By road, too. There were roadblocks in parts of Dalmatia; that was how it started. So she arranged for us to come by boat from Trieste. Imagine that. Talk about adventure!

‘That should have been it; we should have known, but we talked each other up. Even then, at first Ivan and I were disappointed; we thought it (whatever “it” was) would all be happening in Zagreb. But as it turned out, we were in the thick of things. The Krajina, the area the Serbs were claiming as an independent region, was only a few miles east of us. There was trouble; even then people who’d lived side by side, been friends for years, began to suspect and even hate one another.

‘People, Croats, were forced from their homes in the Krajina region and Serb families were driven out of Zadar. Zora used to get mad at us: “Look, people are leaving and you two idiots decide to come.” But we knew she was pleased we were there and, well, deep down I guess we thought it’d be no more than a bit of unrest before…before things settled down. At first the worst of the trouble – we watched it every night on the news – was happening far away, in the east, Vukovar. It didn’t involve us. We were just there because we couldn’t leave Zora alone in that house, in that volatile region. Weren’t we? That was all. But of course we got involved.’

The flood of words dried up and the noise of the crowded pub swirled in to fill the silence. The air around him felt increasingly bright and strange and he closed his eyes to ward it off. He wondered how he’d got this far.

‘What happened then?’

‘The war happened,’ he muttered.

‘But what—’

‘Enough!’ He looked up and for a moment saw Ivan sitting across from him, all reproach and contempt. He rubbed his eyes and it was a young lad dying to hear about his father. ‘I’m sorry. Another time, all right?’

His voice didn’t come out as conciliatory as he’d intended. Vinko stood abruptly.

‘I go outside for smoking.’

Jay took out his own tobacco and slowly began to fill his pipe, watching Vinko disappear into the pub’s Saturday night crowd. Best give them both a few moments’ breathing space. Perhaps now would be his opportunity to walk away. He shifted in his seat as if to rise, but sat back, shaking his head at his own cowardice. He let his mind wander for a while. Realising he was beginning to think through a haze of alcohol, he tried to count back how many they’d had, coming to the conclusion this was the fourth. Which meant it was probably the fifth. Too many, whichever way he counted. He attempted to convince himself his head was perfectly clear and his legs were steady as he picked up their half-empty glasses and elbowed his way towards the door.

Outside the air was fresh, but though he breathed deeply, greedily, he found the orange light of the city street and occasional swish of passing cars oppressive. A crowd of drunken lads approached; their incoherent shouts to a similar gang across the road made him tense up. They passed without even noticing him. There was no sign of Vinko. Jay was surprised at the strength of the momentary concern he felt for him. He saw a covered passageway set aside for smokers and went over to look up it. A slight figure was sitting alone by an upturned-barrel table at the far end and he wove his way between noisy groups of people towards him, relieved. As he approached Vinko was tucking something away in his pocket. He looked up guiltily as he registered Jay’s presence. Jay glanced back over his shoulder, trying to remember whether he’d seen anyone Vinko could have been meeting.

‘I…I usually see my mates on a Saturday night.’ Vinko glanced down at his pocket. ‘I was just texting to tell them I won’t be there.’ Jay nodded, relieved it had only been a phone he’d seen. ‘So they don’t hang around waiting for no reason, you know?’

‘There’s no need to spoil your Saturday night on my account. Go and join them if you want. I can sort myself out.’

Vinko shook his head and rolled a cigarette. There were no spare seats; Jay passed him his drink and took a draught of his own before leaning against the wall and lighting his pipe. When Vinko finally looked up, his expression was hostile.

‘You blame him, don’t you?’

‘Blame who?’

‘My dad.’

‘I never said—’

‘You don’t have to say. You hate the fact that you had anything to do with that war and you blame my dad that you were there.’

‘For fuck’s sake, Vinko!’ His voice echoed round the alleyway and he expected the other drinkers to fall silent, though in fact not a single person turned to look. ‘If I blame anyone, it’s myself.’

‘So why won’t you tell me more?’

‘It’s not a question of blaming anyone.’

‘There’s always blame.’

Jay stared hard at a crack in the render over Vinko’s shoulder. He imagined the wall as a cliff face, the crack his escape route.

‘How did my dad die?’

The accusation had faded; it was as simple as it was possible for such a question to be.

‘I wasn’t there by then. He was shot in action during Operation Storm.’

‘You weren’t there.’ Vinko was glaring, angry again. ‘Why weren’t you there?’

He inhaled deeply. ‘I got injured,’ he said slowly. ‘I came back here before the war ended.’

True. Except for the missing parts.

‘What happened?’

‘What I said.’

‘But—’

‘Please stop going on about it!’ His voice was harsh, as defence turned to anger. Like it usually did. He wasn’t being fair to Vinko but he didn’t feel fair. Life wasn’t fair. ‘I’ll tell you when I’m ready. If I’m ever ready. Can’t you understand? It’s in the past. Our lives – mine and yours – have moved on. Understood?’

‘You—’

‘Understood?’

Vinko glowered at him.

‘I want to be your friend. Help you. Now. Nothing to do with then. Stop going on about the past, stop… Stop seeing me as anything other than a…a concerned mate, or I’m out. On the road. Off into the sunset. Leave you to as many shady deals as you want to get involved in!’

‘I told you I don’t!’

‘I’m sorry, I…I shouldn’t have said that.’

Vinko stared at his hands, one curled round his glass, the other drumming in front of him on the table. ‘I’m sorry, too.’

Jay suppressed an impulse to move over and put a fatherly arm round his shoulders. Vinko stubbed out his cigarette and drained his pint. Jay realised his own was empty.

‘Want another?’

‘Yes.’ He glanced down the alley towards the street. ‘No, it’s late. We ought to go back.’

Jay had no idea of the time, but it didn’t feel late. Not for a Saturday night.

‘You sure?’

‘Did you mean it when you said you’d help me?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then perhaps it’s better to talk at home, Šojka.’

‘Jay. We’ll get on a whole lot better if you start using my proper name.’

He grinned and was relieved when Vinko smiled back, much of his anger and disappointment dissipated.

On the way Vinko called at a mini-market to buy tobacco. As he came out, hunched against the drizzle, Jay looked at the bulge in his pocket.

‘What’s that?’

‘Whisky. Only a half-bottle. I thought—’

‘Half bottle or not, how can you afford that, on top of fags and all we’ve just spent? You told me what you earned hardly covered rent and food.’

‘You told me not to ask questions.’

He began to walk away. Jay stopped him.

‘Not while you’re with me, you don’t,’ he said. ‘You want your life to be worth something, remember? Value yourself.’

He handed him a ten-pound note and sent him back in, watching through the window to make sure he paid this time.

They filled the neat, strangely homely room with smoke and the whisky bottle fuelled their plans. Any doubts Jay still had were dispelled as he rose from arranging a makeshift bed of blanket and cushions on the floor and saw Vinko watching him.

‘I’m sorry, Jay. For earlier. I’m glad you’re here.’

Vinko put a tentative hand on his shoulder then clung to him as if he were Ivan himself come back to life.

He lay staring at the orange glow penetrating the thin curtains that billowed against the open window. The waves of light made the pictures on the walls appear even more surreal. He tried to shut out Vinko’s stifled sobs. Twice he had asked if he was all right.

‘I am OK. Thank you, Jay. I sleep now.’

He wondered what caused Vinko’s tears. Was it the reminder of the father he’d never known? Eventually the lad fell silent, the deepening and slowing of his breathing revealing that he had found sleep at last. Jay felt guilty at not telling him more. But he’d never been able to talk about it. Never. He hadn’t even been able to say much to Polly. His heart tightened as he thought of her. He wished he was back at Stoneleigh and could talk to her now. No – perhaps it was a good thing he missed that bus; perhaps he needed time away. It wouldn’t do to get too involved. And he never talked to anyone; not in that way. There was never anyone to talk to. Which was good – with two people in as many weeks now he’d proved he wasn’t up to the job of talking. A man of action, then. He wasn’t too good at that either. There he was, about to leave Polly’s barn unfinished – only for a couple of days, and he’d do his best to let her know, but even so – and who knew how far he’d get with sorting Vinko out. But he was determined to try.

Vinko had almost pleaded with him to set off on their planned trip first thing the next morning, and despite Jay’s protests that now wasn’t a particularly good time for him, something – guilt, or a sense of responsibility – had made him agree. He tried not to ask himself why, but the question crept in regardless. Of course it wasn’t purely altruism. If at all. Helping Vinko was about his own freedom. He’d thought he was free after giving Zora’s inheritance back, but now he knew he had not been. His peace of mind, his life, couldn’t be bought back that cheaply. Perhaps he still wouldn’t be free after seeing Vinko right. But he had to hope, or he might as well give up now. The alcohol blurred his thoughts and he turned over and tried to sleep.

A beeping announced the appearance of a glow in a corner of the room. He knew he shouldn’t, but fighting off guilt was something he’d got good at. He only stared at the screen of Vinko’s phone for a second before checking the inbox. There were two new texts waiting, both from sender MN. Knowing he’d be found out, already preparing his excuses – ‘I’m new to this mobile business, thought it was mine’ – he looked.

What’s your problem? Get in touch said the latest arrival in Croatian.

The previous one was also unopened but received earlier in the evening, at around the time he’d found Vinko outside the pub.

Good work. Where is he now?

Glad he’d interrupted him, Jay hoped they’d be able to talk about whatever it was Vinko seemed to have got mixed up in. It could wait until morning – the peaceful breathing from the narrow bed was not something to be disturbed. The phone revealed nothing else; as far as he could discover with his limited knowledge, the other folders – Outbox, Sent – were empty. Vinko was obviously a good housekeeper. He wished he knew how to mark the incoming messages unread. Vinko would probably be annoyed, and justifiably so; disturbing their fragile peace with an argument first thing in the morning was not something he relished. He quickly deleted the messages into oblivion, put the phone back in its corner and went back to his attempt to lull himself to sleep to the steady waves of the lad’s peaceful breathing.

He opens his eyes again as he senses a familiar presence. The boy is sitting on the end of Vinko’s bed looking down at him.

‘You’ve found me here too, have you?’

The boy says nothing, merely turns his head to look at Ivan’s son. Vinko turns over noisily in his sleep.

‘Leave his dreams alone,’ Jay says under his breath. ‘He had nothing to do with any of it, you hear?’

The boy turns his attention back to Jay.

The truck driver stops and leaves him to walk the last couple of miles to the place he has come to think of as home. He wonders if he will ever feel that as well as thinking it, and is shocked by the realisation that he doesn’t already. The truck rattles away down the damaged road and it feels good to be free of the merciless jolting. The engine noise fades and he becomes momentarily aware of the sporadic sound of distant shelling in the hills behind them, before shutting it out like an ordinary town dweller ignores the constant hum of traffic. It is hard to imagine there is anything left worth attacking and he wonders when they will come this way, hungrily looking for more. Zora is confident the house is safe now, and the extended family of refugees seem to share her optimism – they have stayed, after all – but he is not too sure he does.

He no longer thinks too hard. Since his injury and fevered weeks of recovery he has felt different. Though the wound was not directly life-threatening, the infection was serious and left him feeling as if he did die and someone else is now acting through him, as unreal as the stories Zora would tell him and he would then continue in his head to while away the agonising hours of his lucid periods. His feelings and reactions, including the sense of comradeship and family, are more intense, but he is sometimes conscious of being on the outside, aware of himself experiencing them.

He hears a heavy vehicle approaching and instinctively ducks into the scrubby undergrowth before it comes into view. His gun has been an added burden in the heat, but he feels safer with it. The armoured truck turns out to be one of theirs, but is past by the time the adrenalin rush of fear subsides. He hears others approaching and waits, concealed, for them to pass. Nothing is certain here. Even walking down a road. There were no road blocks in this area last time he was here, but it has been a while. His senses send feelers out around every bend. It is a relief of sorts to turn up the stony track and know that anyone who passes is likely to be friendly.

One more hillock to go and he is relieved not to see a pall of smoke. Relieved, too, as he crests the rise in the land and does not see an empty, blackened shell. The fields of a working farm are a rare sight in a place where most have done the sensible thing and fled for safety. Or stayed and been killed.

The newly reopened wound in his side nags, the hastily-rebound bandage chafing. His weakness, which eventually got the better of him so he could no longer hide the pain, means he has been allowed some time to rest and recuperate here before it is back, back to the constant fear of being hurt, seeing others being hurt. The fear of his own actions inflicting that on someone else. He never voices that last one, doubting it is a fear the others share or would understand. It stays inside, eating at him like the infection in his side had. He’s getting over that, isn’t he?

Zora isn’t expecting him. Her surprise makes the homecoming even sweeter. She embraces him and her touch makes his dusty, war-weary world seem momentarily brighter. He leans his head on her shoulder, wondering if he will ever be able to leave again.

She dispels his guilt with a kiss and a few words.

‘You did well. I’ve heard things are going well. Don’t be ashamed you’ve had to come back. They weren’t sure you should go at all, you know.’ For all he feels different now, her smile can still melt him. ‘But you showed them.’

She means ‘us’ – he knows she’d shared the opinion. He went back before he should, not only because he couldn’t watch Ivan leaving another time without him. He’d gone to prove himself. To her, as they both know. He smiles, telling her even Lek might be beginning to respect him – he’s allowed him back now after all. But none of it is making him feel as good as it should. Not even when she says he must be fearless.

He shakes his head. ‘No. You don’t stop feeling fear. You just get used to it.’

Despite the absence of Lek and the others, he is surprised when she invites him to her that night. He can’t refuse. He shouldn’t be there but it’s where he wants to be.

Fear isn’t the only thing you get used to.