Waiting for Wednesday

you
baby-talking.’
    They laughed, then grew serious again. Sasha
took Frieda’s hand in hers. ‘You are my very dear friend,’ she said,
and her large eyes swam with tears.
    ‘You’re hormonal
already.’
    ‘No. Without you, I don’t know
what would have become of me.’
    ‘You’d have been
fine.’
    ‘I don’t think so. But, Frieda –
are you all right?’
    ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’
    ‘I worry about you. We all
worry.’
    ‘You don’t need to.’
    ‘Will you promise to tell me if
there’s anything wrong?’
    But Frieda changed the subject. She
couldn’t make that promise.



THIRTY-EIGHT
    Josef looked at the notebook Frieda handed
him.
    ‘And I’ve got some phone
numbers,’ said Frieda. ‘From the stickers on the side of the phone
box.’
    ‘So I phone the number,’ said
Josef.
    ‘I know it’s a big thing to ask.
But if I phoned, they’d get puzzled hearing a woman’s voice and I’d
have to explain things and it probably wouldn’t work.’
    ‘Frieda, you say that
already.’
    Frieda took a sip from her cup. The tea was
cold. ‘I suppose I feel guilty asking you to phone up a prostitute. In fact a
number of prostitutes. I’m grateful to you for doing it. You’ve already done
so much.’
    ‘Too much, maybe,’ said Josef,
with a smile. ‘So I call now?’ Frieda pushed her mobile across the table. He
took the phone. ‘We take the French teacher.’ He dialled the number and
Frieda couldn’t stop herself wondering whether he’d done this before. Over
the years, several of her patients had talked of using prostitutes, or fantasizing about
using prostitutes. At medical school, she had been at parties, once or twice, where a
stripper had turned up. Was that the same thing or something completely different?
‘Get over it,’ she remembered a red-faced medical student shouting at her.
‘Lighten up.’ Josef was writing something in the notebook. The instructions
sounded complicated. Finally he handed her the phone.
    ‘Spenzer Court.’
    ‘Spenser,’ said Frieda.
    ‘Yes. And it is by Carey
Road.’
    Frieda looked at the index of her
A –
Z
. ‘It’s a few streets away,’ she said. ‘We can
walk.’
    A gateway at the end of Carey Road led into
the council estate. The first block was called Wordsworth Court and they went along a
ground-floor level, consisting of lock-up garages and giant steel bins. Frieda stopped
for a moment. There were split bin bags strewn about, a supermarket trolley lying on its
side, a broken TV that had probably been thrown from an upper level. A woman in a full
veil was pushing a pram along the far side.
    ‘You know, I never understood places
like this,’ she said, ‘until, one time, I was in a hill town in Sicily and I
suddenly did. That was the idea about this sort of estate. It was going to be like the
little Italian town that the architect had spent his holiday in, full of squares where
children would play, and there would be markets and jugglers, and hidden passageways
where people could bump into each other and gossip and go for evening strolls. But it
didn’t quite work out.’
    ‘Is like Kiev,’ said Josef.
‘But these not so good when is twenty degrees cold.’
    They reached Spenser Court and walked up a
staircase to the third floor, picking their way through old food cartons. They went
along the balcony. Josef looked at the notebook and then at the flat in front of him.
The window next to the door was barred, but also broken and blocked from the inside with
plasterboard.
    ‘Is here,’ he said. ‘Is
difficult to be in mood for the sex.’
    ‘That’s the way it’s
always been. In London anyway.’
    ‘In Kiev also.’
    ‘We need to be calm with her,’
said Frieda. ‘Reassuring.’
    She pressed the doorbell. There was a sound
of movement from inside. Frieda glanced at Josef. Did he feel like shedid? A strange nausea and guilt about what was going on in the city where she lived?
Was she just being prim or naïve? She knew the ways of the world. Josef looked calmly
expectant. There was a fumbling sound, then the door opened a few inches and Frieda
caught a glimpse of a face behind the taut chain: young, very small, lipstick, bleached
hair. Frieda started to say something but the door slammed shut. She waited for the
chain to be unfastened, the door opened properly, but there was silence. She and Josef
looked at each other. Frieda pressed the doorbell again but there was no response. She
leaned down, pushed the letterbox open and