Waiting for Wednesday

peered through. Something was blocking her
view.
    ‘We just want to talk,’ she
said. There was no response. She handed her phone to Josef. ‘Try calling her. Say
who you are.’
    He looked puzzled.
    ‘Who I am really?’
    ‘Say you’re the man who made the
appointment.’
    He called and waited.
    ‘Leave message?’ he said.
    ‘No, don’t bother. She probably
thought we were from Immigration or the police or someone who meant trouble.’
    ‘Is you.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Is you. She see woman, she think we
do something to her.’
    Frieda leaned on the balcony railing and
looked down. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘This was a stupid plan.
I’m so sorry I dragged you out here for nothing.’
    ‘No. It’s not nothing. I keep
your phone. You give me the map. I walk you back to café, you sit have nice tea and a
cake. I will come back in one hour.’
    ‘I can’t ask you to do that,
Josef. It’s not right. And it’s not safe.’
    Josef smiled at that. ‘Not safe? With
you not protecting me?’
    ‘It feels wrong.’
    ‘We go now.’
    When they got back on to Carey Road, Frieda
took some banknotes from her purse and gave them to him. ‘You should ask them if
they know a girl called Lily Dawes. Lila. That’s what she mainly called herself, I
think. I wish I had a picture to show them but I don’t know how to get one. Give
them twenty pounds anyway, and another twenty if they tell you anything. Does that seem
enough? I don’t know about these things.’
    ‘Is OK, I think.’
    ‘And be careful.’
    ‘Always.’
    Frieda left him there. After a few moments
she glanced back and saw him talking on the phone. She went back into the café and
ordered another cup of tea but didn’t touch it. What she really wanted was just to
rest her head on her hands and sleep. She felt she should read, or think about
something. She took the sketch pad out of her bag and spent twenty minutes making a
sketch of the great plane trees in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. She couldn’t get
them right and told herself that she would go back there soon and do it from life. She
put the pad away and looked around the café. There was a couple sitting at a table by
the door. She met the eye of the man, who gave her a hostile look, so from then on she
just stared in front of her. When she felt a touch on her shoulder she started as if she
had been asleep but she was sure she couldn’t have been. It was Josef.
    ‘Is it an hour already?’ she
said.
    He looked down at the phone before handing
it to her. ‘An hour and a half,’ he said.
    ‘What happened? Did you find anything
out?’
    ‘Not here,’ said Josef.
‘We go to pub. You buy me drink.’
    They could see a pub as soon as they were
back on the pavement and they walked to it in silence. Inside there was noise from a
games machine, with several teenage boys clustered around it.
    ‘What do you want?’ said
Frieda.
    ‘Vodka. Big vodka. And
cigarettes.’
    Frieda bought a double vodka, a packet of
cigarettes, a box of matches, and a glass of tap water for herself. Josef looked at his
drink disapprovingly.
    ‘Is warm like the bathwater,’ he
said. ‘But
budmo
.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘It means we shall live
always.’
    ‘We won’t, you know.’
    ‘I believe you will,’ he said
sternly, and drank his vodka in a single gulp.
    ‘Can I get you another?’ she
said.
    ‘Now we go for the
cigarette.’
    They stepped outside. Josef lit one and
inhaled deeply. Frieda thought of long-ago days outside the school gates at lunchtime.
He offered the packet to her and she shook her head. ‘So?’ she said.
    His expression was sad, as he answered:
‘I talk to four women. There is one from Africa, I think maybe from Somalia. She
speak English like me but much, much worse. I understand little. Man there also. He want
more than twenty for her. Much more. Angry man.’
    ‘Oh, my God, Josef. What
happened?’
    ‘Is normal. I explain.’
    ‘He could have had a gun.’
    ‘Gun would be problem. But no gun. I
explain to him and I go. But no use. And then I see a girl from Russia and thenone girl I don’t know where from. Romania, maybe. The last
girl, the girl I just see, she say a few words and I have a strong feeling and I talk to
her in Ukrainian. She have big shock.’ He gave a smile but there was harshness in
his eyes.
    ‘Josef, I’m so sorry.’
    He stubbed out his cigarette on the pub wall
and lit another. ‘Ah. It’s not so big a thing. You expect me to say,
“Oh, it’s little