A rusting green skip sat parallel to a length of wooden fencing, which looked twenty minutes’ effort away from being in the skip itself. This side of the fence was a row of garages, some with their doors rolled up, revealing workshop interiors, and overalled men tinkering with engines. From behind the thinly wooded area to Lech’s left came the sound of traffic, but here, in this low-key industrial estate, the cars were mostly sick or injured. This was where you’d come if you were rebuilding an American classic, or had recently flogged a car to death and were disposing of the body. A metal sign read powder coating fabrication shot blasting and it briefly amused him that, while he understood what each word meant, he had no clue what they signified.
Life was coding; was hidden messages. You knew what was going on or you didn’t.
Lech had parked on a grassy verge, and was walking through the estate called Northwick Park. A memory of mist hung in the air, and the ground was slick with leaves and the occasional fat black slug. Thrusting his hands into his pockets, he skidded briefly, then righted himself. A plane passed overhead, flying low; a two-seater, by the look. He didn’t know aeroplanes. His grandfathers, who’d both lived here, wouldn’t have recognised it either. But they’d have known what kept it in the air, and have held their breath at the memory of flight.
There were brick huts with corrugated roofs; some ivy-trailed, some barred up. Originally a hospital for American troops, the estate became a refuge for displaced Polish people in the war’s aftermath, and looking at it now in the bleak winter light, he couldn’t help wondering how it had felt: refugees turning up from concentration camps, from a broken Europe, to find this bleak estate; its squat huts their new homes. There’d been watch towers and barbed wire fences. It can’t have looked like freedom.
But freedom was measured, he supposed, by what you were leaving behind. Both his grandfathers had left Poland before the occupation; had served in the RAF, one a pilot, the other ground staff. They’d fought the war under foreign skies, but in time those skies had come to be their own. Maybe the skies hadn’t felt the same way. The war over, the men had chosen to stay and raise their families among fellow Poles, other ex-servicemen, until Northwick Park shut down in 1970. Both sets of grandparents, by this time in-laws, went to live on the south coast then, and family holidays for young Lech in the eighties had been seaside jaunts: ice cream and sandcastles. Poland was a name on the news, it was footage of unrest and cold-looking buildings, and he’d bridled against his ethnic heritage, hating the way it marked him as different, and had insisted on Alec, wouldn’t answer to Lech. His parents hadn’t fought him on the issue. Families from that end of Europe had learned to play the waiting game centuries ago. Give it time, give it time.
He had dark curly hair, and by five of an evening, looked like he’d gone two days without a shave. His genetic inheritance, he supposed. That, and a bone-bred pessimism: if you expected things to get worse, history would prove you right. And then, of course, there was the expectation of betrayal. Which was working out fine too.
A few short weeks back Lech had been an analyst on the Hub, Regent’s Park’s centre of activity, where the brightest and best were called to arms. He’d had all the usual training, but had never been out in the field. The nearest he’d come to an op was sitting in the back of the van while someone else kicked a door down. Afterwards, he’d be brought out to look at what had been found behind the door, or to offer a plausible reason as to why there was nothing behind the door after all, or occasionally to point at a different door and explain that that was the one he’d meant. This happened often enough that it had its own column in the budget. Analysis suited Lech; it gave him an excuse to brood. Not that he was sullen; he just liked to work things out, discover what was ticking. Plagued by insomnia, he’d pound the city streets, something he likened to taking London’s back off and exploring the workings. His fiancée, Sara, was used to waking in the dark to his absence, and would tell him, not entirely joking, that this would obviously cease once they were married. That was what life was: you worked, sometimes you couldn’t sleep, and your future was already being shaped. Until something crashed into it, and knocked everything out of true. A phrase that brought to mind Jackson Lamb.
