‘Fuck.’
Silence settles on the flat, like dust. He found it, the flat, with Hans-Pieter’s help, about a month after arriving in the town. His landlord is a middle-aged man whose mother lived here until she died, and most of her stuff is still in place — vast dark wooden furniture looms in the two rooms. Down at floor level Murray lurks among the old lady’s pictures and knick-knacks, her pedal-operated sewing machine, her damp bedding. He had wanted it fully furnished. He uses her old steel knives and forks, her stained plates. There are even, on the walls, some framed photos of people in old-fashioned clothes, strangers with grave sepia faces.
The flat is still full of warm, stale air. The flapping grey scene outside its two grand windows seems disconnected from the tepid silence of the interior. It seems weird, histrionic. Rain comes at the windowpanes like handfuls of pebbles. Murray lights a cigarette. He smokes a local brand now — to that extent he has gone native. He sits in the hot shaft of the bathroom, surrounded by rust-furred piping, discoloured tile-work, a light bulb burning high overhead.
Afterwards, he dresses, and wrestles an umbrella the short distance to the Umorni Putnik.
Hans-Pieter is there, having breakfast at a table in the shadowy bar. A coffee, a buttered bread roll. He seems to be staring at a point about two feet in front of his eyes. Fucking space cadet, Murray thinks.
Without acknowledging his friend, he addresses himself to the bar, where Ester is on duty. Ester — she is out of his league.
She’s pals with Maria, though, so it’s probably worth keeping in with her: Murray smiles.
He feels the insufficiency of that smile himself, sees its insufficiency for a moment in the deep murky shadows of the mirror behind her. (The price list is written directly onto the mirror — his face peers out from among the numbers.)
‘Yes?’ Ester says.
‘Cappuccino,’ Murray’s face says, in English.
While she works the machine, he looks at a local newspaper. The words mean nothing to him, his eyes drop from picture to picture. Pictures of local politicians — mean-looking men with terrible haircuts trying to smile, as he has just tried to, and with, for the most part, a similar lack of plausibility.
When he has his cappuccino, he joins Hans-Pieter. ‘Morning,’ Murray says, mutters, taking a seat opposite his friend.
Hans-Pieter, his mouth full, just nods.
He seems to be force-feeding himself a bread roll.
Murray regards him with distaste for a few moments. ‘Where were you last night then?’ he asks finally.
Hans-Pieter is swallowing the bread in his mouth. He tries to speak prematurely and the words are indistinct.
Murray squints at him irritably. ‘What was that?’
‘Ammarias,’ Hans-Pieter says, swallowing.
‘What?’
Hans-Pieter swallows properly. ‘Maria’s. At Maria’s flat.’
‘What d’you mean?’
Hans-Pieter is unable to hold Murray’s stare. ‘You know — Maria?’
‘Maria,’ Murray says, struggling, it seems, to understand who they are talking about, ‘who works here?’
‘Yes.’
You were at her flat?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’ Murray asks, sincerely puzzled.
‘Well.’ Hans-Pieter laughs shyly. ‘You know…’
‘No, I don’t know.’
‘We’ve…We’ve got something going,’ Hans-Pieter says.
Murray, for a moment, looks totally nonplussed. ‘What — you?’
Hans-Pieter nods.
‘You and Maria?’
Hans-Pieter looks down. ‘Well, yes,’ he admits. He seems embarrassed. And it might be that he misunderstands Murray’s perspective. Maria is twenty years younger than Hans-Pieter, more or less. She is overweight and unattractive. Things that are, potentially, sources of embarrassment.
‘How did that happen?’ Murray says. He has turned quite pale.
Last Friday night, Hans-Pieter tells him, he was there in the Umorni Putnik until it shut, as he usually is, and it was pissing down outside, and she didn’t have an umbrella — she was waiting for it to stop, so he suggested she come up to his room and wait there, have a smoke, and she did, and they ended up spending the night together. Since then, he tells Murray, he has twice spent the night at her flat.
‘That’s it,’ Hans-Pieter says.
He starts on his second bread roll.
For some time Murray says nothing.
The little trees in the street outside shake and sway.
At the shadow-draped bar, Ester is talking to someone on her phone, laughing.
And I was at Beckie’s place, Murray thinks, trying to sleep. The Spider-Man duvet. And they were. At that same moment. Last Friday.
He is staring at Hans-Pieter with an expression of shocked loathing. ‘What the fuck does she see in you?’ he says.
—
What does she see in Hans-Pieter? The question keeps Murray awake that night. He sits there, in the tall mausoleum-like spaces of his flat, smoking in the darkness. What seems obvious to him is that if he had only made his own intentions plainer, sooner, he and not Hans-Pieter would have her. That thought torments him for a while. Not that he even particularly wants to have her in any physical sense. There was something limply sentimental, something vague, something almost like pity, about his feelings for Maria. And what she sees in Hans-Pieter is obvious enough — Hans-Pieter is just a lesser version of himself, a poor woman’s Murray. A foreigner from somewhere further west, with at least some money. Hans-Pieter even has a car — an old rust-perforated 1.2 litre Volkswagen Polo, leaking oil in a side street. In the context of the Umorni Putnik, that makes him a more or less plausible sugar daddy.
He’s welcome to her, Murray decides.
He’s welcome to the fat tart.
And the good thing is, this will give him more time to focus on his business interests. Which is what he should be doing anyway, not messing about with floozies. His business interests. Airport transfers. Minibus to Zagreb airport. Blago has the drivers lined up. He has the advertising lined up. The website is ready to go. He just needs the minibuses. He has enough for one, he says, but he needs four to make the business viable. So he offered Murray the opportunity to invest. They talked about it in Džoker, and then over lunch. Put in the money for the minibuses, get a fifty per cent stake, was Blago’s proposal. And sitting in an HSBC in Kingston upon Thames last Wednesday, Murray had finalised the loan, against the house in Cheam, and transferred the money to the account of Slavonski Zračne Luke d.o.o., the details of which — IBAN number and so forth — Blago had provided for him. Blago has shown him the minibuses he intends to buy — ex-police vehicles he found online, for sale in Osijek. Said he’d be going down there to get them just as soon as the money arrives. Murray said he wanted to come with him, to see the vehicles for himself. ‘I know a thing or two about that,’ he had told Blago. He had insisted on having a veto, if he didn’t think they were up to scratch.
He has tried Blago’s phone once or twice since he got back from the UK, to find out if the money has arrived.
No answer. That was typical Blago.
—
The most pressing issue, he finds, is the Hans-Pieter-shaped hole in his own days, which he now mostly drifts through alone. They used to meet every morning in the Umorni Putnik. These days, most of the time, Hans-Pieter isn’t there. Murray drinks his cappuccino, while pretending to look at the paper. He stays there for more than an hour, sometimes.
Occasionally Hans-Pieter does show up. One morning, when he does, Murrays says to him, ‘What you up to later then?’ Which is what he always used to say — and the answer would always be words to the effect of ‘not much’, and they would agree to meet at Džoker ‘later’, meaning some time fairly soon after lunch.