4 A Third-Floor Apartment Without an Elevator #2
“Look, Mark, I’m sorry if you’ve come up with a whole story, but that’s not my handwriting. Someone, who even knows . . . Someone must have needed paper, maybe found my business card on the ground in London and used it to write that down . . .”
“Do you speak French?”
“No.”
“Me neither. I went to a work friend, some guy from Calais, who does the north route. I asked him what was written here, and he said: ‘Call me.’”
“Yes, yes. ‘Appelle-moi.’ I saw that. But I surely couldn’t have written that.” She had just told the first truth in a while. “I don’t get what my card was doing in the book.”
“Have you ever been to London?” The question sounded like one from a beginner’s English language textbook. Have you ever been to London?
“Yeah, yeah . . .” In that moment, she thought as both Paulina and Gina, if she had ever gone to London.
“Yes, twice . . . I was sent to Canterbury for two summers to study English, and on the weekends, we’d go on trips to London.
But . . .” Paulina returned the card to Mark’s mutilated hand.
“Where exactly did you say you found it?”
“In a book. You know farther up at Charing Cross? There’s a huge bookstore, maybe you’ve been.”
There was a silence.
“I went there. Between shifts sometimes I have some time to wander. I bought a book, and a couple of days later, while I was flipping through, all of a sudden it fell out . . .”
Mark Granger looked for clues that could explain his finding. As lonely as he was, he wanted that “Appelle-moi” to be a sign. He needed it to contain an element of mystery or sweetness or poetry that he had imagined for months. However, that Paulina, brazenly young, answered him in prose.
“Look, all that sounds strange to me. Did you say that you have a car nearby?”
“Yeah, about two corners from here.”
“How does this sound, Mark? I propose that you help me carry all this stuff. Take me to my new apartment and we’ll get a beer.”
It took him ten minutes to come back to pick her up.
His sense of direction was fine-tuned. Mark was Welsh, but his car was English, a brand and a drab color that only the British bought.
They don’t export them, because no one else likes them.
It’s like their gravies, Gina thought. But the trunk was plenty big, and aside from the minimal baggage that Mark had brought for his fifteen-day stay in a two-star hotel in Salou, Gina, now Paulina, was able to fit all her stuff.
Just as she was about to sit in the passenger’s seat, she bumped into the steering wheel.
“You’ll have to let me borrow your car to practice, although driving on the right side is hard enough . . .”
“There’s a trick to it. For my colleagues who are just starting out, us professionals say that changing sides is like fucking. The more you think about what you’re doing, the worse you are.”
“And without a finger is it more difficult?”
“Fucking?”
“Changing gears . . .”
“You noticed?” Mark held up his five fingers. The four he had.
“Does it hurt?”
“No. It starts to throb when it gets cold. But it doesn’t stop me from doing my job. I’m a . . .” He said it without emphasis. Without humility or pride. “I’m a bus driver.”
“A bus driver?”
“For the red ones in London, the double-deckers. I’m sure the first time you went to London you climbed to the upper deck and took a picture.”
“Of course. And I’m sure it was yours.”
“Why not? I’ve been driving for a while.”
He took his four-fingered hand off the wheel, and held it in front of Paulina’s face. “Do you want to know the story?”
“You fell asleep right as a train was about to pass?”
“No, no.” He laughed. “It’s not hereditary. If we ever see each other again one day, I’ll tell you.”
Paulina didn’t respond. And neither did Gina.
She had seen more romantic ways of trying to ask for a date.
An amputated finger, what a strategy for getting a date.
She decided not to respond and focused on giving directions, “the first turn on the right, straight down the avenue until you reach the plaza, and we’ll be right there.
It’s a narrow street. I’m not sure you’ll find parking right in front. This is called Sants.”
“Is the Barca stadium nearby?”
“You’re also a soccer fan? It’s not far.”
“Pfft. Mark Hughes is Welsh. A beast of a man.”
“We’re here. Stop, it’s here. Let’s unload, and if someone comes around, they can wait.”
“But . . .”
In the blink of an eye, Mark went from acting as a chauffeur to the porter. He took the two heaviest suitcases from Paulina’s hands, and he lugged them up to the third-floor apartment without an elevator.
“What do you have in here that’s so heavy?”
“It’s just a dead woman’s clothes.”
The staircase, with white, chipped paint, smelled like cat and humidity.
The steps, uneven, made for uncertain footing.
Or they caused you to slip or they were too tall or too narrow, but not a single one was identical.
Time and use had turned them into traitors, the kind who fail you when you least expect it.
No one was at the apartment. They had left the key for her under the mat.
Once inside, there wasn’t a surprise party or welcome balloons.
Just cigarette butts. A blend of black and white cigarette filters that had filled all the ashtrays in the kitchen/living room/dining room for the last couple of weeks.
The apartment was a hovel where she’d have to coexist and share—because that’s what she had decided on a whim—with a guy and two girls from Reus who studied art history in Barcelona.
Judging by the stench they left behind, they hardly aired out the apartment, and they smoked like chimneys.
“Mark, I promised you a beer, and you earned it.”
Paulina left the six boxes at the entrance.
Without turning off the light, she slammed the door shut and left the key back in the Reus students’ hiding place.
She let Mark walk ahead, she hit the stairwell switch with her butt, and distrusting each step, she descended down with the intention of interrogating the Welsh driver who, without even knowing it, was searching for her mother.