By the time Neil bought a bus ticket to Swindon the Christmas presents he was supposed to be delivering were already five months late. On the morning he was supposed to go he woke up on the couch. He’d been dreaming that he was eating the baling twine that used to sit in a pile in front of Nan and Pop’s barn. If dreams meant anything, this one foretold a hangover. So did the empty glasses and cartons of discount wine that covered the kitchen table and part of the floor. Someone, possibly Neil, had started cleaning up the night before and there were bottles filling the sink. Neil took out a few to get to the faucet; he could feel the dream-fibers still stuck to his tongue. He turned on the water and drank some out of his hands.
From the kitchen he could hear Veejay, his roommate, turning in his sleep and mumbling. Under the mumble was a beeping sound, because Neil hadn’t turned off his alarm. He stepped carefully between the glasses to get to their room. It smelled like feet. Veejay, who had been all over a girl from the film school the night before, was now, mercifully, sleeping alone, with only Neil to see the way his eyes didn’t close completely, leaving little white crescents in the gap between his eyelids. It was spooky, and if Neil weren’t feeling so like the undead himself, he might have gotten out his camera. For some reason Veejay denied that he slept with his eyes open, like he denied that he got a huge Indian accent when he was on the phone with his parents. Neil switched off the alarm.
Back in the kitchen he started putting the bottles in plastic bags, as quietly as possible. Nothing would wake Veejay up, and Alex’s door, like always, was closed, but the clink of the glass gave Neil a bruised feeling behind his eyes. No more parties at their flat, he thought, not for the first time. No more wine and cheese parties with the girls next door that started out with the girls bringing over bottles of something bubbly and ended up with Neil and Veejay running to Tesco for cartons of wine and everyone sitting around watching Arsenal play on TV. Neil was a lousy drinker. Starting now there would be no more pretending otherwise. He didn’t even like football, and he was tired of trying to remember to call it that in front of the girls, who thought Americans were boorish if they didn’t take a frenzied interest in a sport where the score was almost always tied at zero.
It was on mornings like this that he envied Alex, who never went out—not even when going out meant joining the party in the kitchen. Alex, their vampire roommate without any friends. Who knew what kind of dreams Alex had, but right then Neil would have given anything to be asleep with a clear head on the black sheets that Alex washed twice a week, a habit that caused their shitty British washing machine to inch its way out from under the counter and across the kitchen floor during the spin cycle. Sometimes he and Veejay placed bets on where the washer would end up, and there were pencil marks on the floor, recording its various journeys.
Neil wondered, dully, why he was awake, but it wasn’t until he was out on the street, wincing with each crash of broken glass as he pushed the bottles one by one through the rubber flaps of the big recycling container by the park, that he remembered the bus ticket. Which explained why he’d set his alarm for today, which was a Sunday, and was normally reserved for rehydrating and finishing the reading he should have done on Saturday. Swindon. Fuck, he thought. He’d have to call what’s-her-name again and go next week. This was the third time he’d canceled on her, and it was starting to get embarrassing, although it wasn’t like what’s-her-name ever volunteered to come to London. And why should she? The whole thing was ridiculous.
The exchange of presents must have been what’s-her-name’s mother’s idea. Neil’s father barely even remembered Christmas, he would never think of doing something like this. If he had wanted to send a present, he would have put it in the mail like a normal person. It wasn’t like her country didn’t have a postal service. No, this was some sinister plan by what’s-her-name’s mother. Probably the daughter was supposed to try to seduce Neil to get a green card. It was going to be embarrassing.
Neil pushed the last bottle into the recycling container. Swindon. His father almost never asked him to do things, but he had sent Neil a package back in November, saying that his friend’s daughter was also living in the UK, so he and his friend had decided to swap presents through them. It’ll be a way for you to meet someone new, Neil’s father had said. He always wanted to know if Neil was meeting new people, which was sort of funny, because Neil was pretty sure it was a hereditary awkwardness passed on to him through his father that kept him from meeting new people, and that, when he did, kept him from saying the interesting things that would make them want to be his friends.
From the shape of the gift, Neil could tell that it was one of the miniature handcrafted bow-and-arrow sets his father liked to buy from the Ute ladies, who sold them for surprisingly high prices outside the Conoco at Christmastime. The present had sat under Neil’s bed since then, and every time he planned to take the bus to Swindon—which it turned out was a long way from London—something came up or he forgot, and he had to call what’s-her-name (what was her name?) and make up some excuse. Okay, iss okay, she would say. You come next week okay?
One of the bottles hadn’t been entirely empty, and Neil’s hands were sticky with wine. He wiped them on his jeans. It would be nice not to have his father’s package under his bed anymore, reminding Neil of home every time he looked for his sneakers. It was wrapped in the same Santa Claus paper Nan and Pop had always used. Nan used to tuck a dollar bill, new from the bank, into the paper as an incentive not to tear it, and each Christmas Neil and his cousins dissected their gifts, slicing Scotch tape with their thumbnails and sliding out whatever was inside. Nan would scoop up the paper and smooth the creases out of Santa’s beard to use again next year—it became a family joke, since obviously she could have just saved those dollar bills and bought more wrapping paper. Neil had put his father’s present under his bed in the first place because it was depressing. When he turned the package over he could see that one edge of the Santa Claus paper was cut in a sawtooth pattern and there was a bit of yellowed tape where it had been attached to the cardboard cylinder, showing that his father had finally used up the last of the roll. Nan had died when Neil was about to start high school and now Pop was gone too, but somehow Neil hadn’t imagined that even the Santa Claus wrapping paper would come to an end.
The clock was just striking ten. If he hurried, he could probably make the bus. After he’d delivered the Christmas present he would call his father and tell him that Professor Piot had picked Neil to be one of his research assistants for the summer. Neil had found out two weeks earlier and it was a big deal—Professor Piot was practically famous. Plus he got to go to Paris for the summer. Neil had almost called his father with the news a couple of times already, but didn’t. Neither of them was very good on the phone, and the last time they’d talked, back in January, they’d had what was almost an argument and Neil had said some unnecessary things. He knew he should have called his father back and apologized, even if it wasn’t really his fault. But with the present still under his bed he’d put it off, knowing his dad was sure to ask whether he’d made it out to Swindon.
On the bus Neil’s hangover really got going. His stomach felt empty, but also like it wanted to be emptier; he took a few deep breaths. As they bounced along the little streets leading out of London he felt each dip and speed hump add to the disorder of his gut. He wished he’d bought a bag of the curry crisps Veejay swore by. He wished he were at home in bed. He caught sight of a homeless person asleep in a doorway and would have pawned whatever social privilege he’d been born into if it meant trading the jostling bus for the sidewalk, which moved only very slowly as the earth spun on its axis, the planets rotated around the sun, tectonic plates shifted and—
Neil’s stomach gave a small, terrible hiccup, its contents apparently seeking a more stable environment. He looked around. The door to the lavatory was taped shut, the bus windows weren’t the kind that opened. The seat beside him was empty, but across the aisle there was a woman and a little girl. The girl was sleeping the determined sleep of a child on a bus and the woman’s eyes were closed. Her hair was twisted on top of her head in an African cloth and the weight of it made her chin dip down onto her chest. Each time her chin touched down, her eyes opened. Nothing would spoil her bus ride like watching Neil throw up all over his seat.
Now the speed humps were gone and they were stuck in traffic. The bus lurched into an intersection and stopped. The light was green but no one moved. It turned red, then green again. Next to them a truck’s engine stalled and started up with a puff of bluish smoke. The light turned red, and the cloud of truck exhaust floated up and made it purple.
In his lecture on the Second Industrial Revolution, Professor Piot had brought blackened, half-eroded bricks to class to show the effects of air pollution in London at the turn of the century. Umbrellas are black even today, he told them, because they first came into fashion when that was the color of the rain, and in the late Victorian era silver tarnished so quickly that people stopped eating off it—although it could have been due to socioeconomic factors as well. As factory jobs became more plentiful and the price of labor rose it would have been more expensive to hire servants to polish all those cool heavy plates . . . They were moving again. Neil leaned against the cool glass of the window, imagining Victorians pressing their aching heads to gravy bowls. The bus picked up speed, the suburbs passed by behind a smudge on the glass. Letting his thoughts smudge with them, Neil fell asleep.
Professor Piot believed in what he called observed knowledge, and he was always telling his students about all the things one could learn about the past by noticing the details of the present. In France, for example, where Professor Piot was from, you could tell if a town had had monarchical or republican political leanings, say, a hundred and fifty years ago, by whether or not the trains stopped there. If the town had a train station, and you had to bet, you’d better bet it had been republican, because the towns in good standing with the new République were the ones that got the rail lines to the capital. And Professor Piot told them you could go to little towns and look at where the World War One monument had been placed in relation to the church to see how religious the people were by the time the war was over and the town’s young men were dead. There was actually a statistically significant relationship between the number of local boys who had died in battle and the distance between the church and the town’s memorial to the soldiers that were lost. The more dead soldiers, the less inclined the townspeople were to build a monument in the churchyard. They’d put it up in front of city hall instead. There were some villages, Professor Piot had told them, where the World War One monuments included broken crosses—broken on purpose, maybe even carved that way, to show that the people of such and such a little town knew what was up, up there.
As Neil slept, the drone of the bus motor gave way to the nasal patter of Professor Piot’s voice. Neil hoped it was an indication of his future greatness as an academic rather than of extreme nerdiness that during restless sleep his dreams tended to center on the history department, and that Professor Piot’s voice in particular seemed to stick in his head, maybe because he had two classes with him that semester. Neil had even started thinking his own thoughts in Professor Piot’s accent, which was definitely weird, and during their meetings—Professor Piot was also Neil’s faculty advisor—he had to concentrate very hard to make sure he didn’t accidentally gargle his r’s.
Neil felt something move against his foot. He opened his eyes. The little girl across the aisle had crawled under her mother’s legs and was reaching for Neil’s father’s present. “It’s okay,” Neil said, as her mother hauled her back into her seat. “I’d let her open it, just—it’s not really mine.”
He settled his head against a new, cooler spot on the window. They were well out of London now. Something bright and yellow was blooming in the fields in all directions. The color rose and fell over little hills, like someone had taken a highlighter to the entire landscape.
Professor Piot would be able to learn something from the view out the bus window. Neil looked at the unbroken expanse of yellow flowers, but all he could think of was that there weren’t sprinkler systems in England. The Colorado prairie might have seemed endless to the pioneers, but every patch of green back home now had a dotted line running through it, wheels and pipes and bursts of high-powered water making frets in the landscape. When Neil was a kid he and his cousins used to run through Pop’s sprinklers on summer afternoons, and the water felt like the smack of a two-by-four when it hit them across the back. But in England there was rain, and Neil wondered if British farmers led a fundamentally sweeter existence, not always fixing broken irrigation pumps and wondering who upstream was taking more than their share. The yellow of the fields was so bright it hurt his eyes, so Neil looked out through his eyelashes for the rest of the trip, thinking about Nan and Pop’s ranch and wondering how his dad was doing now that he was running it all on his own.
The girls in the flat next door thought it was cute that Neil’s father was a farmer—actually his dad had been an English teacher, but Neil left that part out. During halftime the night before Neil had told the girls about the first time Neil’s dad brought Neil’s mom home to meet the family, which happened to be on a day Pop was castrating bull calves. Nan had served Rocky Mountain oysters for supper—the marriage was obviously doomed from the start—and Amanda thought the idea of breaded testicles was so funny that she sort of fell against Neil’s shoulder while she was laughing and stayed there through the penalty kicks. Neil made a mental note to ask his father if anything interesting had been happening at the ranch in the months since they’d talked. It was too bad the cows had been sold after Pop died; it would have been great to have some stories about calving chains or coyote problems to tell the girls.
Now that he was finally delivering the Christmas present, Neil was honestly looking forward to talking to his father, and he figured that with the time difference it would work out perfectly to give him a call when he got back to London that night. He’d tell his dad about Professor Piot’s class trip to East Sussex, where they’d tramped through privately owned meadows looking for the famous and possibly nonexistent ditch where the English made their last stand during the Battle of Hastings. He would save the news about getting picked to go to Paris for last, knowing that when his father was proud of him for something he tended to choke up and get awkward and would probably end up hanging up before Neil was actually done talking. Unlike Neil’s mother, who didn’t see why Neil wouldn’t want to spend one last summer at home, working at the movie theater and saving money for school, Neil’s father would understand that it was a big deal to be the only underclassman on Professor Piot’s research team.
The bus station in Swindon wasn’t much of a station, just a place for buses to turn around and a covered waiting area. The bus stopped and Neil peeled his face off the window. His cheek felt flattened and cold from the glass, like a refrigerator cookie stuck to wax paper. His mouth had the briny, nutty taste of terrible breath. He searched for a piece of gum in his jacket pockets and forgot his father’s package under the seat, then had to fight the getting-off crowd to go back and get it. In the bottom of his pocket he found a restaurant mint, long since unwrapped and fuzzy from his jacket lining. At first it stuck to his tongue, then began to dissolve slowly, turning one half of his mouth sticky and cool. Neil’s headache had concentrated itself into a single jab down his spine and his stomach felt gritty and hollow. He needed a Coke and a cheeseburger and a nap and a toothbrush. With his father’s present under his arm—the real-feather fletch of an arrow now sticking almost completely out of a hole in Santa’s chin—Neil was the last person to get off the bus.
Most people headed toward the city bus stop. A couple of cabs stood by but no one took them. Neil looked around for someone who could be the daughter of a mail-order girlfriend of his father’s—he was pretty sure that was the situation. But aside from a lot of blue eye shadow or something, he didn’t know exactly what such a person would look like, and anyway, it was hardly fair. He could only imagine what the friend’s daughter would be expecting of him. So Neil looked around again for a normal female person. A youngish woman sat at the city bus stop, but she was talking on her phone with a serious British accent. A bus came and she got on. Nobody got off. Neil crossed the street to the ticket-buying area. There was a girl smoking a cigarette outside. Neil smiled but she didn’t. She ground out her cigarette and didn’t seem to notice as he passed. Neil went inside the ticket office. A guy with no shoes was asleep across the chairs, despite the armrests. Behind the ticket window a woman ate a vending machine sandwich, avoiding the crusts.
Neil went back outside. He checked his phone, but no one had called. Maybe she forgot. In a few minutes he would call Veejay and probably wake him up and get him to dig through the stuff on Neil’s dresser to find the notebook where he’d written her number, which he had forgotten to put into his phone and which was going to be embarrassing, because Neil was pretty sure he’d written a couple of incriminating lines of poetry in that notebook about Amanda. Neil was no poet, but Amanda had a way of tracing her fingertips along the edges of her clothing while you talked to her. It was literary, or so Neil had thought the night before, when he was supposed to be watching Arsenal but was really watching her, and when he was likely to have already been slightly drunk. Maybe it was better to leave Veejay sleeping, his notebook safely buried under pizza boxes, and just go home.
Another city bus came and went. Neil stood with the now only mostly wrapped souvenir bow and arrow under his arm. He was suddenly sick with the thought of the stupid things he’d said to Amanda last night, combined with the thought of her fingers brushing along the edges of the shirt she’d been wearing. His breath mint was almost totally gone, and he felt his hangover gathering strength for a last assault before burying itself in the patient recesses of his liver.
“Ni-yell?” It was the girl with the cigarette, who had apparently decided to notice him.
“Oh hi,” he said. “I didn’t know it was you.”
“I am waiting for you on the other side,” she said.
“Yeah, I know,” Neil said. “I guess you didn’t see me.” She seemed distracted, like something interesting was going on behind him. Maybe she’d expected someone better looking.
“We should walk?”
“Okay,” Neil said, and they started up the street. “Cool town.”
“London is more cool,” she said.
She was about Neil’s age, or maybe a little older. She didn’t seem to have on eye make-up of any color, and Neil felt like a jerk for expecting her to look like a hooker or something, though she did have an accent like the hot robot in Warcraft Reloaded. Jesus, what was her name? Had she said? He couldn’t remember.
“How’s your mom?” Neil asked.
“She’s good,” she said.
“She went back home?” Neil asked.
“Yeah. She’s having one restaurant now in Vilnius,” she said.
“Oh, wow. What kind of restaurant?” Henry IV had spent a lot of money trying to invade Vilnius before he turned his attention to deposing Richard II, but Neil couldn’t remember what modern country it was in. Belarus?
“Pizza,” she said. They crossed through a mostly deserted shopping center, then a little park. A fountain dribbled over mossy tiles. It made Neil have to pee. He wished he could remember where Vilnius was. Being a European History major, it was pretty bad that he didn’t know.
“Pizza is new big thing in Lithuania,” she said. Lithuania, Neil thought. Lithuania, Lithuania, Lithuania.
“Oh, yeah, I bet,” Neil said.
“And your dad?” she asked.
“Oh, yeah, he’s good,” Neil said. “You know.” Which was a stupid thing to say, she didn’t know his father, and if her mom had told her anything it was just that he’d been all alone in a big house since Pop died. They walked quietly for a little while, and Neil looked hard at the patchy flowerbeds, trying to think of something to say.
“So, what do you do?” Neil asked, just as she was starting to say something too. Their words got jumbled up in the air and they had to start again. “You first,” Neil said.
“No, it’s okay,” she said. “I am only asking it is okay to go to my house?”
“Sure,” Neil said. He really had to pee.
“So, what do you do?” he asked again.
“I work at one club,” she said. “Like giving drinks and things. It’s okay job, but, you know. And you?”
“I’m in school,” Neil said.
“At university?”
“Yeah. It’s like an exchange program with my school in America. They let you spend a year studying in London if you want to.” Studying in London. Jesus. She probably thought his dad was really rich. “See, usually you have to be a junior, but I’m trying to finish in three years to, you know, save money”—which was true enough, though with all his AP credits he was practically forced to graduate early—“so they’re letting me do it a year ahead of time. See, they have this program here, for what I’m studying—it’s actually better to learn about it here, because it’s European History, and this is Europe. I mean, I thought this was Europe until I got here and heard all the British people talk about Europeans like they were an alien race or something.” That was something the American kids in the history department joked about, and obviously she didn’t care, it might even be offensive, since she was a European. Her gaze kept flicking up past his shoulder, like she was trying not to look at him. He wondered if he had something on his face.
Her purse began to ring, and she dug around for her phone, which gave Neil a chance to do an all-over exploration of his face with his fingertips. He smoothed his eyebrows and wiped the sides of his mouth and the corners of his eyes. Since he hadn’t eaten anything, he could hardly have food stuck in his teeth. When he was done she was still on the phone, saying, “Yeah, it is plugged in by the wall? You are sure?” and he had a chance to really look at her for the first time. She had a very round face and hair that was intentionally cut at different lengths so that it wisped out at the slightest bit of wind, and she had on high-heeled boots like no one ever wore back home. American women in high heels always looked apologetic, like they knew they were crushing the dreams of their suffragist grandmothers or giving themselves varicose veins, and women in London wore heels with such grim awareness of how good they looked that Neil no longer found them attractive. But on what’s-her-name the boots had the effect that only Eastern European women could pull off. She didn’t look comfortable, exactly, but she walked like it was no big deal—and that in itself did something nice to her hips.
She finished the phone call, saying something in another language and then, “No, I am not talking to you when you’re calling me this . . . yeah, I know this, yeah okay good-bye.” She threw the phone back into her bag, which was large with a lot of buckles and fringe.
“Everything okay?” Neil asked, though it wasn’t his business.
“Well, everything is shit,” she said. She had one grayish tooth, like Neil had had when he was a kid and the roots of one of his baby teeth died after he got hit in the face with a swing.
They had turned onto a residential street—rows of houses with pale curtains across the windows and gardens in the back filled with hollyhocks and pieces of tricycles. She didn’t say anything more, but Neil felt like he couldn’t just leave it at that.
“What happened?” he asked.
She was still looking past his head in a way that made Neil want to give his face another once-over, thinking there must be something nasty on his cheek. Suddenly she leaned in, looking right at him with strange intensity. Either he had something on his face or she was going to kiss him. Neil thought he might pass out. But instead she smiled, like something there had pleased her.
“It’s nothing,” she said.
They stopped in front of a largish house. Neatly clipped hedges made it look businesslike, like a dentist’s office. She stood on the sidewalk, digging for her keys. “Wow, this is your place?” Neil said. It even had a garage.
“It’s my friend’s,” she said.
They went around to the back door and left their shoes in the hallway. Without her heels she was the same height as Neil. She put on some slippers and Neil followed her down the hall, clenching his toes to hide a hole in his sock.
The house was warm. It had a carpety smell and the soft floors seemed to absorb any sound. “My friend, he’s a little bit crazy today, so, you know, sometimes he says some stupid things.”
“Was that him on the phone?” Neil asked.
“Yeah, he’s always calling like this. He has some small problems with his computer, I don’t know what.”
“We can go someplace else,” Neil said.
“No, no, it’s okay. I think I must show him how to make it working again.” She led Neil through a living room into a sort of study. At first Neil didn’t see anybody, just lots of cardboard boxes, some of them open and filled with plastic spools of photo negatives. Books with titles in various languages stood on a bookcase with World War Two army helmets acting as bookends. There was a large photograph of a naked girl on the wall. Something about it made Neil feel that it was only polite to look away. Which was when he saw a man sitting in the blue glow of the computer monitor, watching him.
“She’s beautiful, yeah?” the man said, and Neil thought for an awful second that he was talking about what’s-her-name. “Picked her up at an auction in Leeds. Fucking five hundred quid, but she’s worth it, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Neil said, looking at the photograph in what he hoped was a mature and thoughtful way. “Oh yeah, wow,” he said. “I’m Neil.”
“Barry,” the man said. He wasn’t British; he sounded Australian. His chair was the rolling office type and he scooted it on well-worn furrows in the carpet toward Neil to shake his hand. “Magdute said something about you coming. American, eh?”
“Yep,” Neil said. “I’m studying in London.” Magdute, he thought to himself, trying to print it into his brain. Mag-doo-tay.
“London’s a great town,” Barry said.
“Oh yeah,” Neil said. “Yeah, definitely.”
Magdute shifted behind him.
“You made it working?” she asked.
“Hardly. Get me out of this blue screen, okay?” Barry said, and added something in another language. The sound of it was so different from Barry’s Australian accent that it took Neil a moment to realize that the words, whatever they were, were coming from him.
“Yeah, okay,” Magdute said. She clicked on a couple of things on Barry’s computer.
“So you’re studying—” Barry tipped his head back to look at Neil. “Economics?”
“History, actually,” Neil said.
“Ah-hah!” Barry said. “Bit of a history buff myself. What’s your area?”
“I haven’t totally decided,” Neil said. “I have a professor who’s an expert on medieval France, and, I mean, I think that’s pretty interesting.”
“Mm,” Barry said. “I go in for the more recent events myself. See those casings there?” Barry pointed to a glass jar of what looked like bullets sitting like a paperweight on his desk. “Dug those myself out of the Ponary forest, just outside Magdute’s hometown. A hundred thousand executed from 1941 to ’44. Give or take.”
“Okay, Barry, don’t start with this now, okay?” Magdute said. She dug the router out from under some papers and unplugged it.
“You get east of Berlin and they’re fucking allergic to history,” Barry said. “Lits are the worst. Couple of skeletons in that closet, ja Liebchen?”
“You have Explorer like from 2002,” she said, not looking up. “I am getting you new, okay?” She plugged the router back in and got Barry’s computer downloading, then turned to Neil and said, “So you will wait please? I am going to get you those things.” She went out and Neil tried to think of something to say. He could still see the naked photograph out of the corner of his eye. It was making him uncomfortable, but when he turned his head he saw there were others. He didn’t want Magdute to come back and see him looking at them, so he focused on a dusty case filled with old army canteens and a gas mask that stared back at him with black apocalyptic eyes. It gave him the creeps, but he was running out of places to look.
Barry jiggled the mouse, then shouted something in the direction Magdute had gone. Neil knew he ought to know what language it was. He took a guess.
“Gosh you can speak Russian?” he asked.
“Lithuanian,” Barry said. “Roots in ancient Livonian. Don’t let her hear you call it Russian—too long under the Soviet boot, yeah?”
“Oh, right,” Neil said. Some history major he was. “So, did you live there or something?” He was glad to have a reason to stop looking at the walls.
Barry laughed. “God no. It’s a hobby of mine, languages.” Magdute came back in with a shopping bag and a chair for Neil. “Magdute helps me,” he said.
She said something in Lithuanian to him, and then to Neil, “He does the endings no good.”
“Poorly,” Barry said to her. “I make my declensions poorly.” He turned to Neil and said, “Estonian is easier.”
“You know Estonian?” Neil said.
“And six or eight others. Bulgarian, Latvian, Polish—a hobby. I’ve been trying to learn Ukrainian, but I can’t find a girl, and the tapes are shit, you can’t do it with the tapes.” He said something else to Magdute. She rolled her eyes and left again, and there was the sound of banging from another room. Barry shouted something that made Neil jump. It was incongruous, the switch to those strange-sounding words from Barry’s big-voweled accent.
“Always banging into things, that one,” Barry said. “Blind as a bat.”
Magdute came back in with lemonade. She said something to Barry and he said something back. It was a language that sounded like sticks rubbing together, occasionally making a spark. As she bent to give him a glass of lemonade Barry brushed his hand over her cheek, like there was an eyelash there.
Neil wanted to leave. He tried to drink his lemonade quickly, but it only made him remember that he needed the bathroom. He wondered how soon he could ask for it without seeming rude.
“You must be really good at languages,” Neil said.
“The girls help. You’ve got to use the words, you know. You’ve got to speak. A new language, a new girl, sometimes the other way around. Take Lithuanian. Filthy language, but I just had to have little Magdute here.”
Barry chuckled. Neil wasn’t sure, but he might have chuckled too. His hangover was making him sweat.
“For Polish I have Zosia, for Bulgarian there’s Desislava, Veronika for Czech, but for Ukrainian, nobody. Little Galya lied to me, didn’t she?”
“She was Russian,” Magdute said.
“Stupid cunt,” Barry said. “But what can you do? Some of these girls’ll put on a real show for a place like this, eh? Rent-free. And I have such a hard time saying no.” Another wink. “You know, that Baltic charm. Ees veery nice, yah?” he said, in perfect imitation of Magdute’s accent. Neil’s mouth tasted vinegary. He was sweating a lot. “Am I right?” Barry asked.
“Oh yeah,” Neil said. He wasn’t exactly sure what they were talking about.
“Just no Russians. I have a rule against Russians. Germans too. Goddamn Bolsheviks and Nazis, yeah?”
Neil really needed some gum. His mouth tasted like something had died in there. He finished his lemonade.
“I have to go to work,” Magdute said.
She left the room, and Neil looked at his watch—which actually wasn’t there, he’d forgotten to put it on that morning—and said, “I’d better be going too.”
“Right-oh,” Barry said. Then, with Magdute out of the room, he scooted his chair toward Neil again and said, “Listen here. Wouldn’t you like to stay a bit? For a historian—I’ve got a few things that might be of interest.”
“I can’t,” Neil said. “The bus, it’s at three, I think, three fifteen . . .” Barry was nodding.
“But there’s another bus you know. Tomorrow.”
“Yeah, but I’ve got to get back.” A warm drop of sweat broke free of Neil’s armpit and rolled down his side. It hesitated for a moment on his ribs, then gathered momentum and rolled purposefully down into his underwear.
“I’ve got a bit of footage from the Kriegsberichter film crews—official cameramen for the Waffen SS. Himmler at the horseraces, a burlesque show in Minsk—that one hardly for official purposes. Real collector’s items.”
“Wow, I’m sure,” Neil said.
“Spend the night,” Barry suggested. “We can set up the projector.”
“Gosh, thanks,” Neil said. “But I’ve got a paper to write.” Which was possible, even likely, but at that moment he couldn’t remember whether or not it was true.
“I’m only joking,” Barry said, thumping Neil on the arm and leaning back in his chair. “Only ladies welcome here, yeah?”
Neil could feel his thoughts banging along behind what was actually happening, like a kid pulling a tin can on a string.
“Can I use your bathroom?” Neil asked.
“Left and left again,” Barry said, pointing toward the hallway.
The house was strangely noiseless. Neil’s socks left footprints in the thick carpet, but his steps didn’t make a sound. In the silence, Neil could almost hear his breathing reverberate against his bladder, stretched tight like a drum.
Neil flushed, then stood at the sink, letting the cold water run over his hands. Finally he had a chance to look at himself in the mirror. Nothing out of the ordinary about his face, although it was hard to tell; the mirror was more like a plate of tinted glass than a real mirror, as if it hadn’t been intended for actual use. Like the rest of the house, the bathroom had an impersonal feeling. It was clean enough, but clean in a way that left a film over everything. Soaps shaped like sea horses sat unwetted in a dish and there was a little silver padlock on the medicine cabinet. Only an eye pencil without a cap that had been left beside the sink gave any sign that the bathroom had been used.
Neil splashed some water on his face and cupped his hands to drink. The water had the same plasticky taste as the water in London and it left his tongue feeling chalky. He needed some mouthwash or a dab of toothpaste, anything to cut the taste in his mouth, a sign of what was surely inexcusable breath. He looked closely at the padlock on the medicine cabinet and saw that it wasn’t entirely closed. He opened the cabinet.
It could have been a TV commercial, Neil thought. The medicine cabinet was empty, except for a tin of Altoids sitting like the Holy Grail on the middle shelf. Curiously Strong Peppermints when you need them most. The box had obviously been there for a long time, it was stuck to the shelf. But Altoids don’t go bad, and when the lid wouldn’t open Neil worked his fingernails under the lip, which was a little rusty. It always bothered Neil when people groped around in Altoids tins and ended up touching every one of them. He got the lid open and looked inside. There were no little white candies. Just a bundle of black wire cinched with a red elastic hair band. Neil nudged the wire with his fingernail. One end led out through a little hole drilled in the back of the Altoids tin and disappeared through another hole cut into the wall. The other end of the wire attached to what Neil thought at first was the cap of a black magic marker, wedged sideways into the box. Another little hole had been cut out of the front of the tin, and when Neil leaned in to look at it he saw the glass eye of a tiny camera lens staring back at him. It was pointed in the direction of the shower, and Neil noticed that what he’d thought was a mirror on the outside of the medicine cabinet was actually translucent from the inside. There was a bit of paper stuck to the underside of the shelf.
naerata
uśmiechnij się
pasmaidiet
šypsokis
smile
it said.
There was one more thing Neil saw before he slipped his shoes back on without even tying them and hurried after Magdute out onto the street. Back in London, when he tried to make Veejay understand why a house full of Eastern European girls with cameras in the walls was not cool, it was creepy, and Veejay looked at him with his I-don’t-get-it eyebrow raised, it was the thing Neil couldn’t quite explain, the image that would stay with him forever, labeled “The House in Swindon” in the archives of his mind.
As Neil left the bathroom, a door in the hallway closed quickly—he hadn’t even noticed it was open. But before it closed he saw a girl with blonde hair wearing a going-out dress. Her makeup was smudged and she was carrying her shoes—Neil had the sense that she’d been tiptoeing. The girl turned quickly, her eyes flicked up and two fingers pressed against her lips, as if keeping them shut. For an instant they stared at each other. And as they did, an unwelcome flash of a memory came into Neil’s head: someone he’d known when he was a kid, her eyes red from crying, glancing up, startled, looking at Neil with the same sudden panic in her eyes. Some complicated psychological process was responsible for bringing her face to mind at just that moment, and Neil intended not to think too much about it. But he knew it meant one thing for sure: He was not going to call his father when he got back to London. He was not going to say that he’d finally delivered the Christmas present, or that he’d been chosen to go to Paris for the summer—which meant that the entire day had been a waste. But with that particular memory in his head, Neil knew there was no way he was going to be able to tell his dad about Barry and Magdute and the other girls all living in that house.
Magdute walked him to the bus station. They were quiet and Neil imagined the things he might say, how he might take charge of the situation and calmly, carefully tell her what he’d seen, downplaying things a little bit so she wouldn’t freak out. But each time he made up his mind to tell her about the camera, he wasn’t sure exactly how to start, or, when he’d decided on a way to begin, what had seemed simple became suddenly much more complex and nothing came out. So they kept walking and Neil said nothing, feeling the moment passing him by when, for a second or two, he had the chance to really be someone and life could tip like a seesaw toward—well, who knew what? That was the point. A life as a person with guts, the kind of person who, at the right historical moment, would be raising a peasant army or hurling paving stones at the Bastille, the kind of person Neil never quite managed to be.
“Barry’s really into that World War Two stuff, huh?” Neil said, because he had to start somewhere.
“Oh yeah,” Magdute said. “He’s totally obsession for this. He is going over all country for buying cigarette lighters of German army and such.”
“That’s weird,” Neil said.
“Yeah, totally,” Magdute said. The heels of her boots tick-tocked against the sidewalk, reminding Neil that time was running out. He took a breath.
“That’s a really beautiful church,” Neil said. Why was he talking about churches? Anyway, it was a lie. The church had the studied boringness of the interwar style.
Magdute looked up and squinted her eyes. The church was made of yellow bricks, squat and intent in its ugliness. God, he was such a moron. I think you’re being spied on in the shower, Neil said inside his head.
“Yes?” Magdute said. “I am not so much looking at this church before.”
They were a few blocks from the station, and Neil could see the bus was waiting. Magdute was standing, looking at the church sort of vacantly, like she was thinking of something else.
“There’s my bus,” Neil said. “I’d better run.” Magdute looked up the street.
“No, I think it will come only at three o’clock,” she said.
“Oh,” Neil said. It looked like his bus, but he didn’t argue. They walked slowly up the street.
“You know, I have really liked churches when I was young,” Magdute said. “I am thinking about becoming some kind of nun, how about that?” She laughed. “But now we are all fuckshit heathens, yes?”
“I guess so,” Neil said.
“This is what Barry says. This land is full of fuckshit heathens still praying on rocks and things. And when he says this I was looking all over for rocks and crazy English praying on them, but I’m not finding it so much.”
Speaking of Barry, Neil said in his head.
“Well, there’s Stonehenge,” Neil said. The line to get on the bus was getting shorter. He was starting to be certain that the little sign in the windshield had LONDON written on it. “I really think that’s my bus.”
“Is here?” Magdute said.
“Yeah, it’s right there,” Neil said. “Shoot, I’m really sorry, I have to run.” The door to the bus was closing. “It was really nice to meet you,” he said.
“Okay, good-bye,” Magdute said, and Neil waved over his shoulder as he sprinted up the street. The driver opened the door, and Neil dug in his pockets for his ticket. Coins and gum wrappers fell out.
“Hey,” the driver said. “You with her?” He nodded out the window. Magdute was waving her arms. She started up the street toward the bus, then hesitated, looking confused. She turned and went the other direction, but she was still waving and calling his name, like she hadn’t seen where he’d gone.
“Hang on just a second,” Neil said to the driver. He got off the bus and ran toward Magdute, who had an odd look on her face, like a kid lost at a shopping mall, hollering “Niii-yell!”
“Yeah?” he said. Her head turned toward him and the lost look disappeared.
“You are forgetting the present!” she said. Sure enough, Neil’s father’s package was still under his arm. He’d been holding onto it so tightly that there was a little imprint of an arrowhead on his wrist.
Magdute took a paper bag out of her purse and gave it to him, and Neil handed her the package. The bus driver honked the horn.
“Gosh, thanks,” Neil said. “Merry Christmas.”
“Okay, bye,” Magdute said.
Neil waved to her as the bus pulled away, but she didn’t seem to see.