Sonia stood there in her coat. She needed her handbag but it was downstairs. She wanted a cigarette. She went to the window and looked down. There was a little garden, flowers, a tree. There was a knock at the door and the man came in with her suitcase. He put it down beside the bed and went away again. She stood in her coat and waited.
‘How is it?’ Kurt said on the phone. ‘What’s it like? How is the house?’
‘Big,’ she said.
‘Did you give them their gifts?’
Kurt helped her choose the gifts. The only place to buy things was the general store, where they sold newspapers and cigarettes and food that could stand on the shelves for a year without rotting. They chose key rings for the children, one each, and for the parents a jar of some pickle Kurt said was the right thing to offer no matter what it tasted like, because it was a speciality of the region.
‘Of course I did,’ she said.
‘And the children? How are they?’
She hadn’t really paid much attention to the children. She felt like a child herself. During dinner she couldn’t eat or speak. They sat around the table, the father and the mother, the two children and her. They felt, the two girls, a little like rivals; dimly she saw them across the table, two beings competing with her for the evening’s resources, almost for consciousness itself. Something was happening to her, to her, yet everyone seemed to think something was happening to them too. The woman kept petting the younger girl and putting her on her lap. When they had finished eating the woman got up to clear the plates. Sonia hesitated and then she got up too and began carrying things to the sink. The woman seemed pleased. Oh thank you, she said.
‘They’re OK,’ she said to Kurt. She told him she had helped with the dishes.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘That’s good. Remember you’re there to help. You’ll get used to being there. It’s difficult at first. Everything will seem strange. You’ll feel homesick.’
She did not say, did not say that what sickened her was, in fact, the thought of home. The paralysing terror she felt was the opposite of homesickness. It came from her sense that there might be nothing else for her, that she had come out into the world and met its strangeness and indifference like a fist in her face.
‘It will all seem better tomorrow,’ Kurt said. ‘I’ll call you again in the evening on my break, same time.’
Kurt was working for the summer in a chicken factory. He worked nights because the pay was better. On his part of the line they took out the chicken’s insides, sealed them in a little plastic bag to preserve them, and put them back in the chicken again. Like education, Sonia said. She lay on her bed, darkness at the window, the metal phone hot against her ear. She had failed her English certificate and couldn’t complete her college course without it: it was Kurt’s suggestion, to defer her place and come here. You can live for free, he said. You live with a family, you help them around the house, and you come back speaking English. She didn’t say: if I spoke English I wouldn’t come back at all.
‘All right,’ she said. She didn’t ask him anything about himself. She had two pills in her purse she was going to take in a minute, to make her sleep. ‘Bye.’
The house is big. There are rooms with no one in them, full of paintings and old furniture like a museum. She looks through the doorways but doesn’t go in. She goes downstairs and straight out to the garden, to smoke.
Later she leaves the house and walks around the town. The woman has taken the children to school. She says one day Sonia can take them, but for now she’ll do it herself. Sonia understands better when the woman speaks than the man. Yet the woman talks about things that don’t exist. There’s something that comes from her, something other than words. It’s as if she isn’t contained in her own skin. She spills out and Sonia can see the spillage. She can see what is meant as well as hear it. The woman talks about the future and the past but what she wants right now isn’t obvious. So Sonia goes out and walks around.
In the town centre there are so many shops they make a kind of noise. There’s a feeling of crisis, almost of panic here: the plate-glass doors stand open, loud music plays, the pavements are swarming with people. The shops are huge inside, like caves, and she stands at their mouths, being shoved by passersby. She watches the customers moving around the aisles, rifling and discarding with the unselfconsciousness of looters. There are long queues at the tills. She doesn’t know whether what she is seeing is poverty or luxury.
She goes to look at the sea. The beach is quieter. There are people walking their dogs. The water is grey and fretted by wind. She sits on the shingle, smoking. A man approaches her, a young skinny man in black trousers and a black T-shirt with a picture of a wolf on it. He asks her for a cigarette. They talk for a while. She is surprised that when she says English words they work and he understands. He sits quite close to her on the shingle and stares into her face while she talks. He seems to be interested in her: the feeling is uncomfortable, like a needle probing at a vein. His face is pale; his eyes are green, with long black lashes. She tells him a bit about her family, her home town. Then he mentions that he comes from Lithuania and immediately she wants to get up and leave. She thought he was English, but now she knows his interest is the interest of a lost boy, someone alone who saw her aloneness as if it had been written across her face.
On the way home she passes a little shop hidden in a side street whose window is all decorated with strange pictures, brooding flowers with black outlines, roses shedding drops of blood, daggers with snakes twined around their blades. It is a tattoo parlour. She stands for a long time looking at the window. Then she goes back to the house.
Sonia, the woman says, I really need you. Sonia understands that part of the sentence: the words are the words of the American song they play in the bars at home. The rest is harder to make sense of. The woman wants her to go shopping. She writes a list. She draws a map, with a big cross on it for the supermarket. She gives her money, large notes with a thread of silver running through them.
Sonia spends a long time in the supermarket. The supermarket is nice: she feels happy there. She looks at the food. She wanders the aisles, caressing things. At home she does the shopping for her mother. The supermarket is a long way from her mother’s house and she has to bring the bags back on the bus. She carries the bags into the kitchen, where her mother and her mother’s boyfriend are usually sitting smoking and drinking coffee. They don’t thank her; they barely even look at her.
But the woman thanks her. She seems overjoyed. Well done, she says. Well done. Did you get lost? She taps the watch on her wrist, shows the time to Sonia. Sonia has been away for three hours. I was worried, the woman says. I was worried you’d got lost.
She goes to her room and lies on the bed. She bought a package of brownies at the supermarket and she eats them lying there. There are so many that she can eat them without worrying the pleasure will come to an end, but all at once it does and the package is empty. It starts to get dark. She doesn’t turn on the lights. She feels sleepy. She lies there, drifting, in her clothes. When the knock at the door comes she is startled; she must have fallen asleep. The woman calls her name through the door. Sonia gets up, her head thick. Yes? she says through the door. The English word comes so strangely from her mouth. The woman asks her if she can come downstairs. I need you, she says.