CHAPTER 2
Danny crossed the building site in a yellow hard hat and a high-vis jacket that flapped in the wind. He aimed for Alf, the foreman, who was similarly dressed but holding a clipboard. Alf was a stout and balding man with a face like a boxer who never kept his guard up. Noticing Danny approaching, he looked over his shoulder at the black-suited, bony-faced, pale-skinned man standing nearby, who could have been mistaken for Death were he not wearing a safety helmet. The man tapped his watch and pointed at Danny. Alf sighed.
“Morning, Alf,” said Danny, shouting over the noise as cranes loaded with pallets pivoted slowly overhead while the shuddering arms of excavators scooped up huge wads of earth.
“You’re late, Dan.”
Danny frowned and checked his phone. “Not by my clock,” he said, showing the screen to Alf.
“By his,” said Alf, ignoring the phone and nodding towards the man in the suit.
“Who’s that?” said Danny.
“Viktor Orlov. New project manager.”
“Orlov?”
“Cossack,” said Alf. “Real ball-breaker. Already fired two people this morning. He’s coming down hard on everyone.”
Danny stared at the man in the suit. The man stared back with a frosty gaze.
“Anyway, get moving,” said Alf. “You’re on cement with Ivan. And, Danny?”
“Yes, Alf?”
“Don’t be late again.”
Danny grabbed a shovel and went to join Ivan, a Ukrainian man-mountain of muscle and broken English who could move more earth than an excavator and build things quicker than a Minecraft champion. Danny suspected that Ivan had killed at least one person in his lifetime, probably with his bare hands. This hunch was largely inspired by the gallery of crude prison tattoos that adorned his bulging forearms, which were covered with jagged words, ugly faces—there was even a completed noughts-and-crosses board on his left arm, near the elbow—and other random scribbles that Danny was too afraid to ask about.
The two had been friends since Danny saved Ivan’s life a couple of years ago. That, at least, was how Danny and everybody else on the building site remembered it, but Ivan refuted this version of events. Ivan had only been on the job for two weeks when a rogue piece of scaffolding came loose in a gale. The steel tube would have landed directly on his head had Danny, who happened to be working nearby, not barged the big man out of the way (almost dislocating his shoulder in the process). But while Danny was hailed a hero that day, Ivan, who had, in his own words, once been run over by a tank and survived, stubbornly maintained that a thirty-kilo pole to the head was unlikely to even cost him a sick day, let alone kill him, and that everybody was just being melodramatic “like the EastEnders.” The whole thing had become something of a running joke between them, although Danny was the only one who seemed to find it funny.
“Danylo,” said Ivan as he slapped a wad of cement into a wheelbarrow.
“All right, Ivan. Who’s the tool in the suit?” Danny cast a thumb over his shoulder.
“So,” said Ivan, “you have met Viktor.”
“Alf says he’s already fired two people this morning.”
“They send him from Moscow. They say we do not work fast enough.”
“And they think we’ll work faster if they fire us?” said Danny.
Ivan shrugged. “In Ukraine we have word for man like Viktor.”
“Oh yeah?” said Danny. “What?”
“Asshole,” said Ivan.
Danny laughed. “How was your holiday?” he asked, digging into the wet cement.
“Holiday?” said Ivan. “What holiday? I take Ivana to Odessa. I spend the week with her family. Her mother, she hate me. And her father. And her sister. Even the dog hate me.”
“I can see,” said Danny, pointing to a set of teeth marks on Ivan’s forearm.
“What?” said Ivan, following his finger. “Oh. No. That was her grandmother.”
“Right.”
Ivan removed a bundle of paper from his pocket and sheepishly handed it to Danny.
“Here,” he said.
Danny knew what it was before he’d even opened it. A week after the scaffolding incident, Ivan had invited Danny, his wife Liz, and Will over for dinner. They’d barely spoken since Danny had (or hadn’t, depending which camp you were in) stopped Ivan from getting skewered by a six-foot pole. Apart from that day, in fact, the two men had barely spoken at all, and Ivan gave no explanation for the invitation, although Danny had always taken it to be a subtle form of thank-you. They’d spent what turned out to be the first of many evenings around a dinner table together, eating, laughing, and drinking too much horilka (Liz drank more than anybody, and consequently suffered more than anybody) while Will and Yuri—Ivan and Ivana’s son—played Xbox and bonded over their mutual embarrassment at seeing their parents having fun. At some point in the night, Liz had fallen in love with Ivana’s collection of painted wooden eggs that she kept on the windowsill. Ever since then, whenever they went back to Ukraine, Ivan had returned with a wooden egg for Liz, something he’d continued to do despite the tragic change in circumstances.
“Thanks,” said Danny, turning the colorful ornament over in his hand. He knew how awkward these moments were for Ivan, who must have wondered more than once whether or not to abandon the tradition, but Danny was grateful that he hadn’t.
“How is Will?” said Ivan, keen to move the conversation along.
“He’s fine,” said Danny, slipping the egg into his jacket pocket. “I guess. I don’t know.”
“He still does not talk?”
“Nope. Not a word. Not even in his sleep.”
A man arrived with an empty wheelbarrow and waddled away with the full one.
“You know,” said Ivan, “maybe he is speaking.”
“Not to me, he isn’t.”
“No, I mean, being quiet can also be loud, you understand?”
“Not really, no,” said Danny.
“Look,” said Ivan, standing his shovel in the wet cement and leaning on the handle. “When Ivana she is angry with me, sometimes she yell and call me stupid asshole, but sometimes, when she is really angry, she say nothing for many days. She is quiet, like mouse, but I know she is still telling me something, you know?”
“Like what?” said Danny.
Ivan shrugged. “Like how she would like to put my head in oven.”
“You think Will’s trying to tell me to put my head in the oven?”
“No, but maybe you just do not hear what he is saying.”
“Well, if he’s trying to tell me something, I wish he’d just come out and say it,” said Danny. “It’s been over a year now. Whatever he wants to say to me, it can’t be any worse than the silence.”
CHAPTER 3
Girls pretended not to watch boys while gossiping in groups or playing with their phones, and boys pretended not to watch girls while secretly trying to impress them, mainly by playing keep-away and filming each other thumping unsuspecting classmates in their nonvital organs. Everybody was watching everybody, but nobody made eye contact. It was like one big staring competition, one where you could blink as much as you wanted to but shriveled up like a salted slug if someone caught you looking at them. Only one person had the confidence to hold the gaze of every pair of eyes in the schoolyard, and that day, like most days, Mark had Will in his sights.