In the end, it was Barry who paid the rent that was due on her flat, and he said she could stay with him in Swindon if she promised to teach him Lithuanian. It seemed like the kind of situation Magdalena would have tried to keep Lina from getting into. But she couldn’t stay in the flat in London anymore and she couldn’t face the thought of going home to Vilnius where their apartment was empty because her mother was in America, and where everyone had pale skin filled with words she had no hope of not understanding.
At least on Barry’s skin most of the words were unfamiliar. What she did understand, she didn’t like, but those things had happened in such faraway places that it was easy to imagine they didn’t belong to Barry at all. Even when he told her that he was also a foreigner, born in a city that was now called Harare, which, when Magdalena found it on a map, was not so far from the places mentioned on his face and arms, she let herself believe that he’d somehow gotten wrapped in other people’s crimes. So she packed Lina’s old suitcase, which was the better of the two, and took the bus from London to Swindon, with Lina’s ashes still in their plastic bag inside the shoebox.
A month passed after the day in the bathroom when Magdalena told Barry about the words. Now it was June, and she was leaving Swindon the same way she’d come, on the bus back to London with the shoebox in her lap. The bus windows were open and Magdalena could hear the music from an ice cream van outside. She wished she’d made Barry give her enough money for the trip home to Vilnius before she read him anything. She wished that at least she’d had time to buy something to eat. As it was, there had been a scene and Barry had thrown every bit of Magdalena’s clothing out onto the street. Veronika had called the police, the new girl had been screaming, and Magdalena had run all the way to the bus station in the center of town with Lina’s old suitcase wobbling like a sick dog behind her.
The bus rolled through the outskirts of Swindon. Magdalena knew she should call her mother to tell her she was coming, but she had hardly any credit left on her phone. She looked through her purse again, just in case there was a top-up card in there that hadn’t been used. If she called her mother, then her mother could call Ruta Valentukien?, to let her know that Magdalena was finally bringing Lina home. But Ruta had been in and out of hospitals and rest homes, and now she could be anywhere. Magdalena might have called one of their old school friends, but so much time had gone by, she wasn’t even sure who knew about Lina and who didn’t. It was one thing to tell people in the rush of disbelief right after it happened, the way she’d called her mother during the long night of making tea for the policeman, hardly hearing her mother’s voice on the other end of the line as they both said again and again, Lina is dead, using the words like shovels to hollow out a place for the empty space to live. The sound of the words dug a little grave for Lina in each of their minds that first night, when the world itself had not yet made room for the lack of her.
The bus was going faster now. The blur outside her window changed from brown and gray to green. Magdalena put her glasses on and watched the countryside.
She hadn’t planned on calling Neil, but as the bus got closer to London, Magdalena realized she didn’t have much of a choice. There would be no taking Lina home at all if she couldn’t come up with the money for the ticket. She’d thought of asking one of the girls she’d worked with in London, but she knew that those kinds of friendships didn’t go much past sharing a cab or a cigarette. This is what men are for, Lina would have said, with a dozen possible sources of the price of a ticket to Vilnius programmed into her phone. If there had been time, Magdalena might have asked her old boss at the bar in Swindon, or even Ivan, but now it was too late. She had thirty-eight pence left on her phone—enough for one call to someone who, when her credit ran out, would be sure to call her back. Someone who would be too polite to ask why she was leaving Swindon with her suitcase half-full. She dialed Neil’s number, but he didn’t pick up.
When she got to London, Magdalena stood in Victoria Station, reading the outbound timetable and thinking about the meat pies fogging the glass of the pastry stand next to the ticket counter. She counted the money she had left from the catering work she’d done after she lost her job at the bar, calculating how many meat pies it would buy, because it was not enough to get her even one quarter of the way to Vilnius.
The tops of the meat pies were beaded with grease, their crusts gone limp under the hot lights of the pastry counter. Magdalena settled on beef and onion. She was taking out her wallet when her phone rang. It was Neil. He’d gotten her message about stopping in London on her way home to Vilnius, he said, but he wasn’t there anymore. There was something artificial in his voice.
“Well, it’s okay,” Magdalena said. “It’s no problem really, you are busy.” She would sleep in the station, buy another top-up card, call her mother and ask her to wire the money.
“No, it’s not that, it’s just that I’m in Paris right now,” Neil said, sounding more normal.
“Oh, you are in Paris?” she said.
“Yep, till August,” Neil said. Something about a professor.
She wondered if it was possible that her name had been written under his eye as a kind of receipt. If he’d gotten a haircut since she’d seen him last she might see that her name came at the end of a sentence: lends bus fare to Vilnius to Magdalena Bikauskait?. She’d seen plenty of people covered with little things like that. She was still holding the timetable. London to Paris: the cheapest bus left late that night. She had just enough for the ticket, counting her change.
“I’m really sorry,” Neil was saying. “It would have been fun to get a coffee and all.”
Magdalena shook her head at the girl behind the pastry counter, who had come up to ask what she wanted.
“Actually this is perfect,” she said. “I am changing my bus in Paris.”
She looked at the timetable and told Neil the time the bus would arrive. Then she bought her ticket. The man behind the window said something under his breath as she dug in her purse for the last of her coins. She tried not to look at him as he gave her the ticket, but she couldn’t help seeing that debts were wrapped tight around his wrists.
“To Paris Gare du Nord, departing tonight, eleven o’clock,” he said.
Magdalena looked around the station until she found a bench that was fairly clean. She had hours to wait, and she was too hungry to spend them awake. She put the ticket and her passport and the papers from the inquest inside her blouse. She rested her head on the shoebox, closed her eyes, and listened to the sounds of her stomach until she fell asleep.
{NEIL}