He works now. Two jobs. Five days a week. Night porter in a cheap hotel. He reads all night. He’s got new glasses. They make him feel like someone else.
He starts his shift at eleven at night, finishes at seven in the morning, sleeps till three in the afternoon then heads off to work a miserable shift in a pub kitchen washing pots. He finishes there and goes straight to the hotel. He’s never had energy like this before. He likes the tiredness. It gives him something to do. He’s still got no money. The council tax, the electric, the phone bill.
There are women everywhere. Now he knows how to talk to them. Maybe he’s getting older. He seems to know what they are telling him before they’ve even spoken.
He understands her more with every passing day. He sees her much more clearly now she’s gone. Sometimes, when he’s with women, he feels like he’s becoming her. It happens when he least expects it; he’ll take his clothes off and move towards a woman taking her clothes off, and suddenly he’ll feel so much like Becky that he’ll forget how his body moves and he’ll have to relearn what it is to kiss.
Pico greets harry like an old friend. Grips her arms above the elbow gently and pulls her in to kiss both cheeks. He indicates that she should sit beside him. The restaurant is grand, everything brilliant white. A huge domed glass ceiling, mirrors line the walls. The waiters wear waistcoats and smart shoes. Harry sits down beside Pico and gazes around. She wonders what the other people in the restaurant think their relationship might be.
Pico orders for them both. He tips his face towards the waiter and speaks his demands without please or thank you, like a man too used to service. He orders seafood and salad and expensive white wine. Harry sits silently, not smiling. Watching the edge of the waiter’s collar. The perfect slick of his parting. Pico stretches his arms around the back of the banquette they are sharing. Time passes like it’s wounded, dragging itself across the restaurant.
Pico begins to speak quietly in Harry’s ear. ‘I know what happened, so don’t worry for saying it, OK? It’s easy now.’ His breath is warm and smells clean, like cardamom and liquorice. ‘I’m out now, so we start from scratch.’ His accent is round and ripe as fruit. ‘No worry no more.’ Harry swallows, hot and shy. Her throat feels like it is crawling with insects. ‘The man. Joey?’ Pico’s J’s are Y’s. ‘Joey. He try rob you, no? I heard.’ He watches the side of her face carefully. Breathes gently for a long moment, like an optician leaning in with a blazing torch, before he pulls his arm away and reaches across the table for bread, olive oil and the glass bottle of balsamic vinegar, sculpted like an upturned teardrop. His white shirt, his thin moustache. His cufflinks gold-rimmed St George’s flags.
‘Believe or don’t believe, it’s you to choose. But. ’ He widens his eyes, traces his moustache to its end, smiles kindly at Harry. ‘I was going ask you take over, while I was inside.’ He clears his throat, the olive oil held in still hands. Harry feels a wave of heat and sickness passing through her head. A plate of cracked oysters arrives on a tray of ice and they shudder in their shells like her stomach. ‘But now, we see, there is debt.’ Pico surveys the room, leans back into the padded seat and watches the blazing white world of spotless china and napkins and rich women discussing their business while subservient waiters bring them plates of red meat.
Harry looks at her knees and gathers her thoughts before looking up at the opposite wall and speaking in a panicked churn of sound, her voice too high in her chest. ‘I don’t want to owe you anything, Pico. I don’t want to be in your debt.’
A silence stalks the table like a hungry wolf. Pico frowns. Carefully pools yellow olive oil and black balsamic vinegar in a small white plate, making a yin-yang which he admires and grinds pepper into. He wipes soft bread across the pool and folds it, dripping, into his neat mouth. He chews, swallows and wipes the corners of his lips.
‘OK,’ he tells her. ‘Now. Here.’ He taps the table with his thumb and forefinger. ‘You have to pay your debts in life, Harry,’ he says sadly. ‘You work for me now, is what I say. I’m looking for a person who can help me, more direct. It’s hard to trust when there’s, you know, this. the money like this. It make people lose their centre. This money.’ He sighs deeply. Harry watches the serrated edge of the knife on her napkin, the uneaten oysters, cold and snotty. ‘You come back, you work for me.’
Her heart is broken and she can’t move and she wishes Becky was here to tell her what to do. Her body begins to shake. Pico can feel it. He is surprised.
‘Your man tried to set me up, Pico,’ she says, her tone a snarl. ‘I trusted you and our arrangements, but that’s what happened.’ Her voice gets louder, the room swims. She speaks towards his ears. ‘That money I took was my recompense, for the danger you put me in. If I hadn’t been prepared to fight, he could have killed me.’ She spits the words out, her body shaking. ‘This money is my life insurance. I don’t want to work for anyone. I want out. I want out of this.’ Her voice is heavy now and thick and beaded with growls. She’s been chain-smoking for weeks and her throat hurts and she’s too scared to drink the posh water. She looks at him with dark ferocious eyes and Pico lets out a good-natured chortle. He leans his head down to rest on Harry’s shoulder. He taps her arm, friendly as a man with his pet. He stays leaning there and the moment is paused in a strained still image. Harry is as awkward as always. Pico is chortling and patting her arm. He sits up, smiling heartily, to lean a pale kiss onto the top of her head and ruffle her hair.
‘A good one,’ he tells her. ‘A good one such as you.’ He giggles a little. ‘People die for less. But you no scared of me that way.’ He breathes deeply and raises his glass to his lips, sips thoughtfully. ‘So what we gonna do then, Harriety?’ he asks softly. Placing his glass back down on the spotless tablecloth and reaching across her for an oyster.
‘Just let me go, Pico. I’ll give you half the money back. But let this be the end of it. I want to come home. I want to draw a line under all this.’ She blinks slowly. Waits.
‘Home?’ He leans towards her.
‘Yeah.’ She reaches for a glass, pours the cold clear water into her mouth. Holds it at the point of swallowing, lets it soothe her burning throat.
‘You come home, you work for me,’ Pico says, smiling. ‘You stay out here, fine. But you get back to London, you work for me.’
Harry shifts in her chair, massages her jaw. ‘No,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to work for you, Pico.’
Pico’s attitude changes. Something hardens in his eyes, some switch is flicked in his circuitry and he seems to take up twice the space he had a moment earlier.
‘I understand you say it was a set-up and this Joey has been punish, you can trust. He pays the debt for you, he pays.’ Pico cracks the knuckles in his thumbs and little fingers. ‘But you refuse me? When I offer the work? When I say you come work for me? In friendship I offer this, and you say no?’ His voice is quiet and monotonous. Harry is chilled. ‘You think I’m not a serious man?’
Harry waits it out. Knows better than to speak before she absolutely has to. Pico waits too. The wolfish silence comes again. Hunting. A waiter appears but Pico waves him away with a flick of his hand. The gesture feels so rude to Harry that it makes her stomach ache. Pico sips wine. Eats a forkful of chopped bright leaves. Chews like a farm animal, which seems strange to Harry, given his delicate disposition.
Harry holds on to the table leg. Becky in her brain. Her heart an empty boot since the morning that she left. She has nothing to protect; it makes her stronger than she’s been. Without Becky, what’s the money worth? Without London, what’s the dream? She shrugs. ‘You can do what you like to me, Pico.’ She levels her gaze. ‘I’m finished with this work.’ She stares at the side of his face until her eyes are sore. ‘No more,’ she tells him. Burning up.