‘But Shan, why you making a face like that!’ she says, taking the spray from the shelf and squirting small circles of foam over the bar counter between them. ‘You look at it – is made of plastic! Is just a toy! He get it because he complete his reading, after two weeks of reading one book, is a reward for him. Come on!’
Ava takes her cloth and wipes down the wooden surface with an enviable vigour. He is still waking up, really.
‘Sunny!’ She sings with a coaxing tone to her voice, as if to lure him back into good humour. It is the song from the sixties, the one by Stevie Wonder. She sings it as though it is written all for him, a private joke of some sort, this pet name. ‘Sunny!’She makes a face at him, tips her head to one side and makes herself cross-eyed to suggest she is losing her mind.
Shan laughs. He is fascinated with the defiant bulge of muscles in her small arms, he can see them as she leans over to complete the job, her whole physicality is streaked with the force of these tight lines of feminine power. She is a woman who defies categorization in terms of age: long grey hair in waves down her shoulders, pinned back at the front with grips, youthful angular face with lightly tanned skin, a few lines barely framing the eyes and mouth, her black apron tied meticulously around narrow hips. Conscientious, small and strong. A woman who tells him that she saves up the scraps of money that she doesn’t send back to her family in Valencia (her sister needs it mostly, for her kids, has a delinquent drunken husband she needs to kick out of her home) for her own, very odd idea of luxury: a monthly visit to a climbing wall in some big mall complex in west London.
He says her name to himself. Ava Amada. She has a brusque, no-nonsense manner about her that suggests an incontrovertible history: some kind of extracted wisdom that makes it pointless to argue. There is something relaxing about her particular brand of conviction, he thinks, as he mops up some olive oil with the remainder of his bruschetta, sucks on the pieces of tomato, attempts to assess the experience with the blunt narcissism of a customer. They’ve been trying out the recipe at the restaurant with less garlic, have added tiny weathered particles of capsicum, which Shan knows to be a mistake, knows it definitively now that he can feel them on his tongue. But he is new, he knows the deal, keep your thoughts to yourself.
She returns to the bar and begins polishing glasses.
‘Do you need help?’ she asks, moving her towel over a glass so that the squeak repeats itself again and again, in a satisfying rhythm. Her eyes have mischief in them. Green now, grey before, a gentle change with the light. At her neck there is a crystal, a tiny rose-coloured dagger of stone, hanging from a black leather necklet.
‘I mean, is that why you are here early today?’ says Ava. ‘Did you come to see Tuli for help?’
‘No,’ says Shan, disguising his annoyance with a cough. ‘I’m OK.’
She laughs and a quick glint of silver is visible in her mouth, like bullion.
‘What did he do, to help you, in fact?’ asks Shan, turning the question back on her. ‘We never discussed that.’
His tone is sharper than he intended, but Ava does not find the question to be an insult.
‘What didn’t he do?’ she says, crouching down with a piece of cloth to polish the tiling display on the floor, large glossy hexagons in terracotta and jade, flanked by a mosaic border. ‘You can say I have a big debt for how he has helped me but he does not mind that I cannot repay him. But I will be a friend to him always.’
How old is Ava? he thinks, as he watches her eyes refract the light back to him: olivine fragments of a meteorite, set forward like that in her tanned skin. Thirty-five? His own age. Forty? Forty-five? Even fifty, it is possible, with that long soft waterfall of grey hair, rippling with curl. It is impossible to say but he watches her pert behind, snug and righteous in stonewashed jeans, tied up like a present and topped off with the black bow of the apron strings, as it leaves the room and disappears through the door to the kitchen.
Ten minutes later, he is in the kitchen alone, slicing chicken, stacking the neutral oblongs of flesh on a crumpled cellophane skin, when he hears raised voices in the main space. He frowns. There is something of an aggravated quality to the discussion, and one of the voices belongs to Ava.
‘Calm down, Elene!’ she is saying, as he comes through the door to stand near them at the countertop and till. ‘Just calm it now, Elene!’
Elene is hysterical, her face is wet with tears behind her spectacles and she keeps pulling at the fringe of her chunky dark hair. She is the Georgian waitress who works in the Polish café three doors away, and often comes over for a coffee or bite to eat with Ava. She usually has an air of girlish good humour about her, chuckles away and whispers surreptitiously during their meets as though she has escaped from school lessons rather than an adult job, for a coveted break. Today, however, she is panicked and it has the unnerving effect of making her seem older, less naive than usual.
‘But she’s there right now,’ she says, urging Ava to listen by grabbing her arms, gulping her breath as she speaks. ‘Woman police, she’s there now, right now, telling Krystian to sign a paper and he won’t sign it, he keeps saying, “The man in kitchen is just washing his hands. He is my friend.” Keeps on saying this. “He is my friend. Washing his hands.” And the lady police is speaking in her walkie-talkie all the time. What is going to happen, Ava? If he signs it he will have to pay thousands and thousands fine, people are saying? And what about Tendai? There’s a big van outside, he’s sitting in there with the hoops and silver chain on his hands? On the back seat? Lots of people from the street standing and watching, Ava, you don’t know – there’s another police at the driving seat too, a man, asking the crowd questions out his window of the car, pointing at the Chinese shop, I mean he is even pointing here to Vesuvio—’
‘OK,’ says Ava, taking Elene’s elbow and walking her to the door. ‘Thank you. Is good you came here. Now go back, Elene.’
Elene nods and starts crying again. Ava firmly manoeuvres her out the front, turns the girl’s body so that she faces left and puts both hands on her back with a gentle nod and murmur of consolation, masking the fact that she is literally pushing her down the street. She shuts the door, pulls down the blinds and comes back to Shan.
‘Go,’ Ava says to him, gesturing towards the back door of the kitchen. She comes up close to him. In the sudden darkness of the room, her voice is a terrifying, scouring rasp of a whisper. ‘Go now, Shan.’
Outside, there are people shouting: thick voices pummelling against horns. A door is slammed, and then they hear a car alarm singing up and down, see-sawing madly through his head.
Ava keeps her voice deep but raises the volume, as if to shake him into action.
‘Just GO! This is the direction, Shan. Is all set up by Tuli. Anybody comes, then is you, Rajan and Guna – you three must to leave from the back before they get past us to the kitchen. Me and Nia – we keep them talking. The other cooks, legal ones, stay – they got their documents upstairs.’ She points again, thrusting her hand to urge him out.
And then, the shouting seems louder. He thinks he can hear expletives. FUCK YOU. FUCK OFF. But he can’t be sure if it is in his head, he can’t separate the noise out into words. Can Ava hear it?