One of Us by Iain Rowan Read Free Book Online Page B

examining her. Her cheek bore the mark of a fading bruise, but there was not anything that I could do for that. She told me that her name was Maja, and that she was from Slovenia.
    “How did you end up here?” I asked.
    The man sitting reading a newspaper and pretending not to watch my examination coughed. Maja glanced at him, and did not say anything more, she just drummed away on the bed frame, like she was tapping out a distress signal in morse code.
    When I was finished I told her that she did not have a venereal disease that I could see, she had a very bad case of thrush, and what she should do about it. But I also told her that this did not mean that she did not have any diseases that I could not see.
    “Have you been to a clinic?” I asked her.
    She shook her head. “Not allowed. This is why I see you.”
    I shook my head. This was madness. “Tell Corgan,” I told the man. “Tell him she needs to see a proper doctor. She can go to a clinic, it will be anonymous, she won’t get reported to anyone if you need to keep this all so secret. Tell him.”
    He laughed. “I’m not going to tell Corgan anything. I’d wash your hands now love, if I were you.”
    “Why?” I said to him. “I haven’t touched you.”
    ~
    I carried on with my job at the burger restaurant. It was safe, it was familiar, and if Corgan took my papers away again it would not matter, because Peter had not been interested in seeing any in the first place. It was not easy being back at work with Sean. We did what polite people do, and so did not talk about what had happened at all. We talked less than we had before, and when we did it was only about things that did not matter, that could not matter, and that could not lead on to a conversation about anything that mattered. It was being in a lift with a stranger, over and over again.
    He did little things for me, without saying anything about them. When it was my break, I would go to make a coffee, and there would be one there on the side already cooling for me. I would be on cleaning rota, and I would go to scrape the grill down but I would find that it had already been done. When I thanked him, Sean would just look embarrassed, and look away, and mutter that it was not a problem. This was Sean’s way of saying sorry to me, and I was touched that he did it. But I was still hurt that he had run from me when I needed him most, and he still looked like a school boy who had been caught looking at his father’s dirty magazines, and we still did not talk about what lay between us like a wall.
    And then the next morning I came out of the hostel, and Paul was there, waiting in his blue car with his sunglasses on. They were nice, and would have suited someone else.
    “Job for you,” he said. He did not look very happy.
    “No time. I have to go to the shops,” I said.
    “Go after,” he said. “Don’t make it hard, I’ve got to take you.”
    “You are just following orders,” I said, but he did not get it.
    “Aren’t we all, love,” he said. At least I think he did not get it. I scowled at him, and got into the back of the car. That was the morning that I met Elena, and everything changed.
    It was the first time I had been taken back to the house where I had treated the man who had been shot. I walked in past the table full of mail. I wondered whether anyone ever collected it, if it was the same collection of junk mail, free newspapers and pizza menus that it had been when I first came to this house. Maybe the invisible people of this house did collect their post, but it was replaced again the next day by more. Maybe there were no other people in this house. Just whoever Corgan brought here, and me. I also wondered whether other people were brought here by Corgan too, not to be healed, but to be hurt.
    I climbed the stairs to the room on the third floor. The scarred door was open a little, so I pushed it further, and walked in.
    She was standing with her back to me, smoking a cigarette and