“That’s not good. That could drive you mad.”
“You might be right.”
He reached for her hand and squeezed it.
“This bar makes me want a cigarette,” he complained. “Even though it’s ten years since I smoked.”
The door crashed open and a man half fell into the bar, slurring something in Czech at the barman. He somehow made it to the counter without falling over, and the barman wordlessly poured him a measure of something pale amber in colour while Lydia watched with horrified curiosity.
“Maybe we should go now.” Milan sighed, rising to his feet, but the drunk turned and pointed to him, ranting unintelligibly.
Lydia watched as he swayed over, aggression written all over his red, thread-veined face. Then he stopped dead and widened his bug eyes even further.
“Kaspar,” he said.
Milan frowned at the man, clearly perplexed for a moment, then the clouds lifted from his face and he said, “Cervenka!”
They fell into a mutual back slap, the drunken man falling against Milan’s chest, then down on the chair beside him, launching into a great ramble in the middle of which Milan made occasional interjections. Lydia cursed her lack of understanding, desperate to hear the tales of old times that she might be missing out on.
Milan turned to explain. “Cervenka and I were at school together.”
“Really?” He looked older and much less healthy than Milan, but then again, a man as drunk as Cervenka seemed to be at four o’clock in the afternoon probably wasn’t an athlete.
“He says my mother still lives in this street. He is offering to take me to see her.”
“Oh, my God, are you going to go?”
“I’m not sure she’ll want Cervenka knocking down her door,” demurred Milan.
“But Milan—your mother.”
“You think I should go?”
“How can you not?”
Milan put his head in his hands. Cervenka rubbed a consoling hand on his friend’s back and leered at Lydia before saying something in Czech.
“Lydia,” Milan answered, with some more incomprehensible words.
How was he introducing her? As a friend? A lover? A colleague?
Cervenka held out a hand to Lydia, who took it and let him shake hers much too vigorously. He pointed to Milan and said something presumably intended to be jovial. She smiled in reply.
“Okay,” said Milan, rising fully to his feet this time. “Lydia.”
“You want me to come? I can wait here…”
“Oh no, no, you can’t,” said Milan, shaking his head firmly. “This isn’t a place for a young woman to be on her own. Come on.”
Taking Milan’s hand, she left the bar with him, following the voluble Cervenka into the street.
Outside, a car stood on bricks at a crazy angle diagonal to the pavement, which was sticky with gum and cigarette butts. They walked on through a canyon of huge, gloomy tenement blocks, the lower parts of the walls thick with tangled black graffiti, until Cervenka stopped at a metal entry door scratched all over with names and burns and paint splodges.
“Is this where you lived?” whispered Lydia, intimidated by the neighbourhood’s surroundings. There was n
owhere like this in Surrey.
“Yes,” said Milan tersely. He was nervous, she realised. The hand in hers was slick with sweat.