Free The Walk Home by Rachel Seiffert Page B

was standing room only on the lower deck, so she carried him up the stairs, while the driver lurched into the rush hour along the Canniesburn Road. The windows up top were misted, and Lindsey couldn’t see out, but she was happy enough, sitting with her boy warm in her lap, thinking over the strange afternoon she’d had. About Eric and his pictures, and the break he’d made with home; all his box files on his shelves, and what he might have drawn the next time she went round.

8
    The boy and Marek were a team now. As the first week wore on, Jozef got used to putting them together, mostly on the top floor; they put up the woodwork in the main room, where Stevie slept.
    Tomas didn’t like it much: the boy dossing up there, or him working with Marek either, and he let Jozef know most mornings. He came and found him, shaking his grey head, after the day’s tasks were divided:
    “That boy shouldn’t be staying here. You look at him, he’s seventeen, at most. I say he’s lied to us about his age.”
    Tomas didn’t want the young ones working together.
    “They’ll slow us down.”
    He couldn’t have this job running over: he’d been saving to spend all of August at home, seeing his grandkids, and his word counted for something with Jozef. Born the same year as his father, Tomas was of that world-changing generation, and also just very good at his craft. He’d taught Marek how to tile on the last job, at Jozef’s request, and to plumb in a bathroom, andhe’d taught him well, too. But Jozef suspected that was half the trouble: Marek was wasted now doing his finishing, all the boring bits Tomas didn’t want to do himself. So when Tomas said:
    “You’ll watch them, yes?”
    Jozef nodded, but found himself irked too.
    He didn’t need to be told. He’d become a clock-watcher here in Glasgow, much as it annoyed him. The plasterer he’d sacked had started a second job alongside, which he’d done at weekends, so this was fine by Jozef. Except when the man went to buy render, he took to dropping off materials at the other place, adding an hour to every trip. And then he started skimming supplies from Jozef’s orders. As though Jozef was too foreign, or too much of a pushover to see he was being robbed.
    Wary of a repeat, Jozef had been keeping an eye on progress in the top flat, and he’d seen how Stevie and Marek got on well, but they got on with the work too, fitting all the skirting boards and architraves. The boy re-hung the doors, swift but careful with the chisel, just as Jozef had learned to be, years ago now, when he was first apprenticed. The boy had been taught by Romek, no doubt, and it had not gone unnoticed by the other men, how this new one kept his tools, neat as any Gdańsk carpenter. He didn’t brag like one, though: Marek was always talking, talking on the job, and Stevie shot back occasional one-liners, bettering his jokes, but mostly he just set the pace, not wasting time on words. The boy kept the windows wide, and his radio on loud, and even on days when Jozef came up straight after breakfast, he’d be well into a task, his bedroll already folded neat in the corner, ancient trainers out on the windowsill. Jozef had searched but found no mess, or belongings scattered, no trace he was taking advantage. But not muchclue as to who this boy was either, so he had only one way to defend him to Tomas.
    “He works hard. Just like a Pole.”
    “We all do. I still don’t like it.”
    Jozef didn’t share Tomas’s doubts, but as the second week started, they had him watchful of the boy just the same. Noticing he ate lunch with the men now: bread rolls that he stuffed with crisps, and whole packets of biscuits at a sitting, and that he ate much the same thing in the evenings. Jozef had lived on toast and biscuits in the months after Ewa went back to Poland; on whatever he could get at the service station, driving home late from jobs. He’d drunk too much as well, until Romek and Tomas stepped in. The