Waiting for Wednesday

long, hot bath and then she would go up to her little study
in the garret room and do a drawing: concentrate, yet think of nothing. Shethought of the graveyard, the desolate coastline. She pulled her
sweater over her head. She started to undo the buttons of her shirt but then she
stopped. She had heard something. She wasn’t sure whether the noise was inside or
a much louder noise outside and far away. She stayed completely still. She didn’t
even breathe. She heard the noise again, a small scraping sound. It was inside the house
and close by, on the same floor. She could feel its vibration. She thought of the front
door downstairs, with its bolt and chain. She tried to time it in her head, the
scrambling downstairs, the fumbling with the chain. No, she couldn’t make it work.
She thought of the mobile phone in her pocket. Even if she could whisper a message into
it, what good would that do? It would take ten minutes, fifteen minutes, to get here,
and then there was the locked, bolted door.
    Frieda felt her pulse race. She made herself
breathe slowly, one breath after another. She counted slowly to ten. She looked around
the room for a hiding place but it was no good. She had made too much noise as she came
in. She picked up a hairbrush from her dressing-table. It was hopelessly flimsy. She
felt in the pocket of her jacket and found a pen. She held it tightly in her fist. At
least it was sharp. It seemed like the worst thing in the world, but she edged out of
her bedroom on to the landing. It would take just a few seconds. If she could get down
the stairs without them creaking, then …
    There was another scraping sound, louder
now, and something else, a sort of whistle. It came from across the landing, in the
bathroom. The whistling continued. Frieda listened for a few seconds, then stepped
closer and pushed at the door of the bathroom so that it swung open. At first she had a
sudden sensation of being in the wrong room or the wrong house. Nothing was where it was
supposed to be. There was exposed plaster and pipes and a huge space. The room seemed
larger than she’d remembered. And in the corner a figure was bent over, pulling at
something to get it loose.
    ‘Josef,’ she said weakly.
‘What’s going on?’
    Josef was her friend – a builder from the
Ukraine who had entered her life in an unlikely way, falling through her ceiling when
she was with a patient. But he had not taken no for an answer, and had a fanatical
devotion to her. Now he started, then smiled a bit warily. ‘Frieda,’ he
said. ‘I did not hear.’
    ‘What are you doing here? How did you get
in?’
    ‘I have the key you give
me.’
    ‘But that key was for feeding the cat
when I was away, not for this.’ She gestured. ‘And what is this?’
    Josef stood up. He was holding a huge
wrench.
    ‘Frieda. You have been not well. I
look at you and see you being sad and in pain and it is difficult.’ Frieda started
to speak but Josef interrupted her. ‘No, no, wait. It is difficult to help but I
know about you. I know that when you are sad you lie in your very hot bath for
hours.’
    ‘Well, not for
hours
,’
said Frieda. ‘But where is my bath? I was just about to get into it.’
    ‘Your bath is gone away,’ said
Josef. ‘While you were with your friend, Sasha, me and my friend, Stefan, we take
your bath away and we take it to the dump. It was a bad plastic bath, and it was small,
not good for lying in.’
    ‘It was very good for lying in,’
said Frieda.
    ‘No,’ said Josef, firmly.
‘It is gone. I have great luck. I work on a house in Islington. He spends much,
much money. He cut everything out of the house and throw it in four skips and then put
new things in. He is throwing out many beautiful things but the most beautiful thing is
a big iron bath. I see the bath and I think of you. It is perfect.’
    Frieda looked more carefully at the
bathroom. Where the bath had once stood, the wall and floor were now exposed. There were
cracked tiles, bare floorboards, a gaping pipe. Josef himself was covered in dust, his
dark hair speckled with it. ‘Josef, you should have asked me.’
    Josef spread his arms helplessly. ‘If
I had asked you, you would have said no.’
    ‘Which is why you should have asked
me.’
    Josef made a gesture, palm upwards.
‘Frieda, you protect all other people and sometimes you get hurt from that. Whatyou must do is let other people help you.’ He looked at
Frieda more closely. ‘Why are you holding your