Chapter Two #2
snorted. He spread his hands. “Are you kidding?” he asked. “Did you
ever see a border agent’s dad come along and haul him off by the
scruff?”
Sasha
smiled. To Laurie it was like an undiscovered type of sunlight; he
took a helpless step toward it.
“All right. I’m sorry. Street people get suspicious. I thought
perhaps you were their latest secret weapon.”
They
continued along the riverside promenade. Sasha had not replaced his
arm around Laurie’s shoulders. They made a conspicuous enough pair
as it was—the skinny down-and-out and his elegant, glossy-haired
companion, two sides of the same coin if you knew how to look.
Laurie said, not much caring for the answer—he could have walked
like this at Sasha’s side forever, as if in a dream, on and on
downriver until the Thames spread wide into the sea—“Where are we
going, then?”
“I’m going to take you to lunch,” Sasha told him serenely. When
Laurie’s eyebrows went up, he reached into one of the parka’s deep
inner pockets and produced a twenty-pound note. “I couldn’t use
this. The police check the shelters, and I’m not supposed to be
here.”
They
stopped outside an elegant little café on the Embankment. Heading
automatically for the door, Laurie noticed Sasha had remained
behind him, rooted to the spot. Laurie saw fear in his eyes.
“What’s the matter? Don’t you want to go in?”
“Love to. If you want the embarrassment of having them ask me
to leave, or calling the police to make sure I do.”
“Sasha, for God’s sake. You can go anywhere you want when
you’re—”
“When I’m with you?”
Laurie
looked away. “I…didn’t mean that.”
“No. I know you didn’t. Street people aren’t welcome anywhere
but the street, that’s all, and nine times out of ten, not there.
Here.” Smiling, letting him off the hook, Sasha held out the
twenty. “Go and get us something. I’ll wait for you on the fountain
steps in the gardens.”
Laurie
emerged a few minutes later with long beef-and-mustard sandwiches
and two extra-large coffees clutched to his chest. It occurred to
him belatedly, sitting down at Sasha’s side the whispering shadow
of the fountain, that he should have asked him what he wanted, but
Sasha only shook his head when he expressed the concern.
He took
the sandwich carefully from Laurie’s hands, shot him a quick,
half-apologetic glance. “Wait a moment, please.”
Laurie
watched, half in amusement, half in sympathy, while he demolished
his meal. Wherever he came from, he hadn’t left his manners behind
him there. The process was not messy, but it was thorough, and
Laurie guessed it was an urgent priority, certainly over small
talk. Once he had finished, Laurie offered Sasha the remaining half
of his own sandwich, which he accepted with a shamefaced
grin.
“I was worried you might be vegetarian or”—Laurie cast about
for his limited knowledge of dietary restrictions—“or Muslim
or…”
“Nn-nn.” Heaving a deep breath, Sasha patted his mouth with the
paper napkin. “As it happens, neither. But if I had been…well, I
wouldn’t be anymore. Not down here. Thank you. Now we can
talk.”
Laurie’s
throat promptly went dry. The brown eyes on his were without
expectation, but so steady and calm that they unsettled him. “How
stupid,” he said, faintly. “Now you put it like that, I don’t know
where to start.”
Sasha
reached for the coffee, wrapping both hands around it. They were
strong-looking hands, though wasted and chapped with cold,
expressive even in their grasp on the polystyrene cup. “Well, you
can start by telling me how you found me. Nothing personal, but
it’s not good news for me that you did. It would help if I
knew.”
“Don’t worry. It was mostly luck. I turned right instead of
left outside of the Tube station, and I asked an old guy on the
plaza, that’s all.”
“By the statue?” Laurie nodded. “Gyorgy told you where I
was?”
“Not exactly. He just did this.” Laurie reproduced the old
man’s vague directing gesture. “Don’t be angry with
him.”
“I’m not. I’m just surprised. He’s one of us.” Sasha smiled at
Laurie over the rim of the coffee cup. “He must have liked your
face. All right. I’m glad he did. I’m glad your luck brought you
here. But you have to promise me you’ll never do it
again.”
Laurie
tensed. He fought not to betray a sharp sting of disappointment.
Stupidly, he had not considered that his arrival might bring more
evil than good to Sasha. That this might be a last time, not a
beginning. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make trouble for
you.”
“No, stupid. Trouble for you. The likes of Len will eat you
alive. It’s no place for gaje.”
“Gaje?” Laurie echoed. “Is that what I am?”
“Just one of you, so gajo. Oh, everyone’s got their own
name for them—the people who live on the topside. Gaje’s a Roma
word—in Romania, anyway. You’d call us gypsies.”
Laurie couldn’t help it; a thrill went through him. Childish
of him, he knew, but the word conjured for him stories his mother
had read to him of a people whose lives were so free, so different
to his own narrow existence that he could scarcely believe in them.
Frightening figures too, or they became so after his father had
chased a group of them off their grounds in Suffolk. Horse thieves,
child snatchers, ghosts who silently unlatched windows and doors to
rob the cradle. He felt a blush rise, as if Sasha could read these
paranoid gaje thoughts. “Gypsies…” He thought for a moment, then
remembered an article he’d read in the Guardian—because it certainly wasn’t
the kind of political awareness he’d ever been taught at Eton—and
said, “But the right word’s Romany, isn’t it?”
Sasha
turned to him. The chatter of the people on the esplanade, the
paths that wound through the winter-bare park, seemed to fade out
to Laurie, replaced by the thump of his own heart. He watched,
motionless, while Sasha put out a hand and, just for an instant,
touched his face. His palm was warm from the coffee cup, soft as
suede. He said, “You’re…very sweet, aren’t you?”
Laurie
frowned. He wanted to protest that he was not. He might not live on
the streets or earn his keep giving blowjobs under bridges—might
not carry a knife, but he wasn’t naive. Not a child.
But Sasha lowered his hand, smiling gently.
“Romany’s a good
word,” he went on, only when he said it, the emphasis fell on the
second syllable, not the first, and the y transitioned into a soft,
foreign i sound that made Laurie shiver. “That’s what I am.
Now…what about you, my visiting prince? What are you doing down
here among the Romani?”
“I…” Laurie paused. The compulsion, the repeated inner tug that
had drawn him here, would sound poor in plain words. But he didn’t
want to dress it up, much less lie to Sasha, so he said, shrugging,
“I just wanted to see you again. I couldn’t forget your
face.”
Too
much, surely. He braced, waiting for Sasha to betray disgust or get
up and walk away. But although Sasha’s expression became serious,
all Laurie could detect there was a kind of concentrated,
deep-seated pleasure. “Thank you,” he said. “And…you came a long
way off your beaten track to find me, didn’t you? A long way from
the beautiful car and—your father, was it, who dragged you off?
Does he do that often?”
“Oh, only when I’m talking to people wrapped in blankets on the
Strand.”
“And do you do that often?”
“No. You’re my first. I…never even looked twice
before.”
“Don’t be ashamed. Why would you? It’s two different worlds,
Laurie, and I think you live up on a mountaintop, even in yours.
Last night I was afraid I had
disgraced some kind of royalty.”
“Oh, not even a minor aristocrat, until he dies. He’s only a
baronet because his great-grandfather made enough money to buy
himself a coat of arms and half a county.” Laurie pulled himself
up. He wasn’t about to lessen the gap between this new friend and
himself by trying to do away with his family or their wealth—by
trying to make himself ordinary. “It’s my ma who’s the real blue
blood. I think her lot owned the Languedoc while his were still
working out which end of a woolly mammoth was which.”
Sasha
broke into brief laughter. “French?”
“Oh, very. And you? Romanian?”
“Yes, by birth. Although my own mother…” Sasha trailed off, his
attention refocusing on a point beyond Laurie’s shoulder. “Well.
She was English, but nevertheless…I am an illegal immigrant, and
when that policeman making his way down the promenade sees me here
with you, he’ll assume I’m soliciting you for money or you’re
soliciting me for sex. And he won’t like either, so…”
Sasha
began to get to his feet. Halfway there, he stopped and looked down
at Laurie in astonishment. “Laurie, what…what’s the
matter?”
Laurie drew a breath and resurfaced. He could feel, in the
muscles of his face and brow, the expression that had been there a
second before. He’d never seen it himself—had never been looking in
a mirror at the right time—but had gathered from friends and from
seeing his mother very occasionally do the same thing, that his
response to disgust or outrage was not a grimace but a stern and
absolute blank. A mask of aristocratic thunder. He never meant it
or at least never meant that dawning aspect of his nature to
show—the latent imperiousness he had from his mother’s blood and
his father’s conduct. There isn’t a
policeman in this city who would dare question
me, that haughty bastard would say,
let alone make such a vile
implication.
“Sorry,” he said to Sasha, who had gone pale beneath his patina
of city dirt and looked ready to run for it. “All right. Let’s
go.”
“Not you. Just me.” He grabbed up the sandwich papers and his
pack and broke out suddenly. “Look, you saw me under the bridge
back there! You know what I do.”
Laurie
did. All that bewildered him, when he thought about it, was his own
faint shiver of excitement at the thought. He should simply have
been horrified, shouldn’t he, that a boy his own age should be