Before picture, Keiko told herself. She stepped into the room. One of the others-the female one (Grete?)-hit the save button twice, plucked out an ear bud and turned to Keiko.
“Okay,” she said. “Here’s the deal. I’ve been working on my thesis for five years”-she turned back to her keyboard and hit the save button again-“I’m nearly finished and I can’t have any disruption. I asked Lynne-the secretary-not to put anyone in here, but there’s no space anywhere else.” She put her ear bud back in, hit the save button yet again, and started typing.
“You’re talking,” said the other student, without turning. His voice was a flat drone. “It’s happening already. She’s here and you’re talking to her.” He turned up the volume on his own ear buds and put his head down.
Keiko stood in the doorway for a moment listening to the midget tsk-tsk of the two iPods, then stepped back into the hallway and let the door close quietly behind her.
Those people with the sherry, she told herself, are literature scholars, not psychologists. Work like mine demands solitude and sobriety. She found the secretary’s office, knocked, and went in. A woman was standing with her coat on reading pieces of paper and throwing them into her waste basket.
“Lynne?” she began. “I’m Keiko Nish-”
“I know who you are,” said the woman.
“I have something to ask you. A big favour.”
“I’ve been to the dentist today, and I’m leaving early,” the secretary replied.
“I hope you’ll say no if it’s too much to ask,” said Keiko. Lynne raised her eyebrows and waited. “I wondered if I might have a change of office.” The eyebrows moved even higher. “When one becomes available. I realise it may be some time.” The woman’s stare had become fixed. “But I would be most grateful if you would put me on the list.”
“Well, we’ll have to see, won’t we?” the secretary said. “There isn’t a list as such. I just allocate rooms first come, first serve. They’re pretty much all the same.”
“Oh yes, yes of course,” said Keiko. “But perhaps there’s a room where all the students are just starting?”
“Yes, well, the thing is that the home students”-she paused-“all arrived on time, last month, at the start of the semester. It’s only ever international students”-careful articulation there-“who keep us waiting and then roll up with a list of demands.”
Keiko took a moment to process this. “Ah yes, I see,” she said. “We have to arrange our visas and funding.”
“Precisely. You need permission to take up a place, and you cast about for money wherever you can.”
“And the overseas fees are so very expensive.”
“But still they keep coming. Floods of them, every year. A deluge.”
She couldn’t face the bus stop, so she hailed a taxi with a surly driver who asked to see cash before he’d start on so long a trip and kept an eye on the meter, ready to stop and pitch her out when it rolled round past twenty pounds, which was what she’d shown him. But he kept the other eye on her, in the rearview mirror, and saw her tip her head back and press her fingers along her lashes, heard her gulp and sniff but refuse to let go. So when the meter hit twenty, he just switched it off and kept driving, all way to the empty street with the shut shops and dark windows. And he waited until he saw a light come inside her flat before he drove away.
Strange place, he thought, looking all around him, up and down the streets, and a phrase of his mother’s came back to him. Not a soul astir, she used to say. He looked at the closed-down petrol station sitting out on its own and shook a sudden knot out of his shoulders. He wasn’t sorry to get to the open road and the sixty-mile limit to put his foot down.
nine
Keiko didn’t notice the quiet, except to be glad that she got inside without anyone seeing her.
Inside the old petrol station on the corner, Willie Byers was glad of it too. He was sick of them all, with their hints and their nagging. They didn’t even have to open their mouths these days; he could see it in their eyes, could easily imagine what they said about him.
He had bought the garage as a going concern, right there by the main road and ten miles from the nearest chain with its discounts. And Painchton folk didn’t hold with new cars every three years, so there was good trade in keeping their old ones going. And Mr. Byers could surely live cheap, with his quiet ways and no wife to his name. Could have taken on a lad right away-people made mental notes to mention that to him whenever he should come to his first Traders’ meeting. He never did come though, just as he never bought so much as a newspaper or a packet of cigarettes at Glendinning’s or in the Spar, although he stopped in at both of them to read the headlines.
At first, Iain and Margaret Ballantyne assumed he had plumped for the Bridge, and Alec and Sandra Dessing guessed he’d taken to the Covenanters’ and it was six months before it dawned on the four of them that the new mechanic didn’t drink anywhere. Not so much as a single glass of beer after bending over an engine all afternoon on the hottest day of summer.
And so with nothing to build fellow-feeling, the judgement began. It was a work of willpower, said Kenny Imperiolo, to make a garage fail. Even a handless mechanic could have lived off the passing trade from the petrol pumps if he’d only kept the place tidy and put in the hours. But Byers took half-days here and weekends there and shut for Easter, and when he was tinkering away with his body repairs, he rested doors and wings and bumpers up against the outside walls to spray them and left stencil-ghosts all around so that tourists would slow down, but then shake their heads and look on the map for the next place to fill up.
Eventually, judgements made, the Traders turned on him in a pack with the full might of the town behind them. He complied with the order that his “premises should be predominantly uniform in colour.” Technically. He spent one Sunday slathering on pink industrial paint with a nine-inch brush, all over the walls, right over the doors and window frames, up over the roof, unprimed and on top of the dirt. He worked on until his paint ran out and then burnt the tins on a bonfire the next morning, the women right up that side of the main street whipping in their Monday wash to get it away from the smoke and fumes.
And still none of them had seen it coming.
They were looking right at it now, though. As Keiko dried her tears and Byers enjoyed the quiet, up in the Covenanters’ sat the same people around the same horseshoe-shaped table, which looked shabbier in the daylight, clothless, covered in folders and coffee cups, phones and elbows. Byers was the business of the day
Mr. McKendrick ran his hands through his hair.
“I’ll talk to him,” he said. “Again. There’s no reason whatsoever for him to be hanging on to that site.” Fancy was waving at him. She had arrived late and unexpected. “Miss Clarke?”
“Don’t we already own the site?” she said. “Aren’t we only trying to buy the buildings?”
“Is that a point of information or a question to the chair?” asked a sharp little woman sitting to Mr. McKendrick’s left, scribbling minutes.
Fancy sighed. “Sorry, Miss Anderson, it’s a point of information. Mr. Chairman, can I remind the meeting that the Traders own the land and only need to buy out the buildings and the business.”
“Thank you, Miss Clarke,” said Mr. McKendrick, blandly. “I stand corrected.”
“Business!” said Mrs. McLuskie, jaunty today in a golfing sweater and check trousers and without her provost’s chain. “What business? He’s running it into the ground, the lazy beggar.”