I put my bag down and sat down next to her. ‘You’ve come on a little trip because of me, right?’ she said and moved closer. ‘Not that far,’ I said. I picked up my glass; it smelled like cheap and nasty ‘Goldbrand’, tasted like it too.
‘Bet you’re glad you’re here now, right?’ She moved away from me again towards the armrest, kicked off her shoes and stretched out her legs, touching my knees with her feet. I reached for my glass and pushed it to and fro on the table. There was an ashtray there as well, and I pulled out my cigarettes. I felt the roll of money in my inside pocket. ‘Be a sweetie and give us one.’ I lit my cigarette and handed her the packet. She fingered one out and put the packet down on her leg. I wanted to give her a light, but she took the cigarette out of my mouth and lit hers on it. I stood up and reached into my inside pocket. ‘Listen …’
‘Hey, don’t go running off.’ She jumped up so quickly that her cigarette and my cigarette and the packet as well fell on the carpet, but she took no notice and pressed right up to me and put her arms around me. She was really strong, even though she was so short. I wanted to push her away, throw the money on the table and disappear, find a place to hide and wait for Monday, but she held tight; she must have got her strength from the Boxer.
‘Don’t do that,’ I said, but she was still hanging on to me and rubbing her face against my neck, it must have been her nose, no, she can’t have got that from the Boxer, but maybe he’d had the best nose in town, before he nearly made it to the Olympics. She fumbled with my flies and said, ‘You’ve got to give me something, you know …’
I felt the roll of money in my inside pocket, but I knew that wasn’t what she meant, and now I knew that neither the Boxer nor the herring boys had told her I was coming either. I grabbed her by the shoulders but let her go again straight away, because I felt her skin and bones. I picked up my half-empty glass and lobbed it at the sideboard, so hard that splinters of glass and drops of liquor sprayed back at us. She took a couple of slow steps away from me and looked at me with her big Japanese comic eyes. I stumbled backwards and sat down on the sofa. I picked up her glass and drank it dry. Suddenly there was a man in the middle of the room. ‘Trouble,’ he said and came over to me. He walked fairly slowly, and I could have got him in the face with the glass, but I put it down on the table. I got up. I saw him pulling back to punch, but I didn’t move. He had a good right hook and I was on the floor. I turned on my side and looked between the table legs. She was crouching in front of the sideboard, her chin on her knees, and I looked her straight in the face. I got up. Straight away, the guy gave me two or three hard ones, and I went down again and looked under the table at the Boxer’s daughter, still crouched in front of the sideboard, not moving. I felt blood on my face. I saw the guy’s legs right next to me, I could have grabbed them, pulled him over and mashed him up, but I got up again and looked at him. He didn’t hit me straight away, and I looked over his shoulder at the wall. The guy rammed his knee in my belly, I gasped for breath and crouched down.
‘Stay down, fucker.’ He punched like a professional and talked like one too. I lifted my head slightly and saw her leaning forwards and moving both hands to and fro over the carpet, as if she was playing with something. I got up slowly and closed my eyes. He got me pretty bad, and I felt my nose break.
‘Hey son,’ said the Boxer, ‘you’re nearly as pretty as me.’
‘Walked into a door,’ I said, ‘in town. The usual, you know.’
‘Did she see you like that? You didn’t scare her?’
‘No no, Boxer, I went to hers first, it was all all right. She’s fine. She was pleased, the money and that, really pleased.’
‘Wasn’t much, but she’s still a trainee, in a real hotel. She doesn’t get much there, has to watch her money.’
‘I know.’
I stood on the bridge and looked down at the river. In the fields on either side were the remains of the morning mist. I heard the cars behind me, quite a lot of traffic, start of the week. A long way off, I saw a tugboat on the wide river. It didn’t seem to be moving. Maybe it was going over to the Czechs, maybe in my direction and then on to the sea in Hamburg. I lit up my last filter cigarette and threw the empty packet in the river. My nose started bleeding again, and I pulled a tissue out of my inside pocket. It smelled of fish, just like the money. I’d put it in her letterbox on the ground floor. Really wasn’t much, just over a ton, but it must have been the Boxer’s last reserves from his golden days, when he nearly made it to the Olympics. I looked down at the river again. A couple of ice chunks disappeared under the bridge. One got caught up on a red marker buoy, then broke free and floated on again. I pressed the tissue to my nose, threw my fag-end in the river and went home.
IN THE AISLES
Before I became a shelf-stacker and spent my evenings and nights in the aisles of the cash-and-carry market, filling shelves, fetching pallets from high on the storage shelves with the forklift, now and then helping one of the last customers of the evening and getting to know all kinds of food, I’d been working on building sites for a couple of years.
I hadn’t given up of my own accord but I wouldn’t have kept it up all that long, even if the boss hadn’t fired me. I was a builder’s mate, lugging sacks of cement and plasterboard, gutting flats — that meant I knocked the plaster off the walls, tore out fireplaces and chimneys with a big sledgehammer we used to call ‘Rover’, until I was covered in soot and dirt and spent hours getting the soot and dust out of my nose at home. The firm didn’t even pay well and the boss was a bastard. The guy came from Bavaria; I’ve met people from Bavaria who were actually OK though.
I can’t remember exactly when all the fuss with the boss started, but I do know we were demolishing an old roof that day. We found a big pigeon’s graveyard, two pigeons still alive and perfectly still in among all the bones, piles of feathers and pigeon shit and decomposing and mummified corpses, and we could only tell by their eyes and their heads, moving slightly every now and then, that they were waiting. We fetched the Portuguese guys and they killed them with a blow of a spade. Then we tipped lime over the pigeon graveyard and shovelled it all into buckets and tipped them down the rubbish chute fastened to the scaffolding outside.
And after that we didn’t feel much like hard work any more; the pigeons had got to us. We took the tiles off another section of the roof, not exactly motivated, removed the roof battens with wrecking bars, and then we took a lunch break.
We usually had our lunch break at eleven thirty, and when the bells of the church just round the corner rang at twelve we went back to work.
But when the bells rang that day we were still sitting with the Portuguese guys. They were drinking red wine out of cartons, passing them around. The Portuguese guys spoke very bad German and earned even less than we did and lived in tiny basement flats in one of the buildings owned by the boss. They drank red wine at work because they knew the boss wouldn’t fire them — they worked too well for too little money. They did bricklaying and plastering, and sometimes they were builder’s mates like us, lugging sacks of cement, gutting flats until they were covered in soot and dust.