Big Sky

Eloping ‘So what now?’ he asked.‘A quick getaway,’ she said, shucking off her fancy shoes into the passenger footwell. ‘They were killing me,’ she said and gave him a rueful smile because they’d cost a fortune. He knew – he’d paid for them. She had already removed her bridal veil and tossed it on to the back seat, along with her bouquet, and now she began to struggle with the thicket of grips in her hair. The delicate silk of her wedding dress was already crushed, like moth wings. She glanced at him and said, ‘As you like to say – time to get the hell out of Dodge.’‘Okay, then. Let’s hit the highway,’ he said and started the engine.He noticed that she was cupping the bowl of her belly where she was incubating an as yet invisible baby. Another branch to add to the family tree. A twig. A bud. The past counted for nothing, he realized. Only the present had value.‘Wheels up, then,’ he said and put his foot down on the gas.On the way, they made a detour up to Rosedale Chimney Bank to stretch their legs and look at the sunset that was flooding the vast sky with a glorious palette of reds and yellows, orange and even violet. It demanded poetry, a thought he voiced out loud, and she said, ‘No, I don’t think so. It’s enough in itself.’ The getting of wisdom, he thought.There was another car parked up there, an older couple, admiring the view. ‘Magnificent, isn’t it?’ the man said. The woman smiled at them and congratulated the ‘happy couple’ on their wedding and Jackson said, ‘It’s not what it looks like.’*One Week Earlier*Anderson Price Associates  Katja scrutinized Nadja’s make-up. Nadja posed for her as if she were taking a selfie, cheeks sucked in like a corpse, mouth pouted extravagantly.   ‘Yeah. Good,’ Katja pronounced finally. She was the younger of the two sisters but was by far the bossier. They could be twins, people always said. There were two years and one and a half inches between them. Katja was the smaller and the prettier of the two, although they were both petite and shared the same shade of (not entirely natural) blonde hair, as well as their mother’s eyes – green irises encircled by grey.   ‘Hold still,’ Nadja said and brushed an eyelash off Katja’s cheek. Nadja had a degree in Hospitality Management and worked at the Radisson Blu, where she wore a pencil-skirted suit and two-inch heels and tidied her hair away in a tight bun while she dealt with complaining guests. People complained all the time. When she got home to her shoe-box apartment she shook her hair free and put on jeans and a big sweatshirt and walked around barefoot and no one complained because she lived on her own, which was the way she liked it.   Katja had a job in Housekeeping in the same hotel. Her English wasn’t as good as her older sister’s. She didn’t have any qualifications beyond school and even those were mediocre because she had spent her childhood and most of her teenage years ice-skating competitively, but in the end she just wasn’t good enough. It was a cruel, vicious world and she missed it every day. The ice rink had made her tough and she still had a skater’s figure, lithe and strong. It drove men a little crazy. For Nadja it had been dancing – ballet – but she had given it up when their mother couldn’t afford to pay for lessons for both of them. She had sacrificed her talent easily, or so it seemed to Katja.   Katja was twenty-one, living at home, and couldn’t wait to fly the stifling nest, even though she knew that a job in London would almost certainly be the same as the one she had here – making beds and cleaning toilets and pulling strangers’ soapy hair out of plugholes. But once she was there things would change, she knew they would.   The man was called Mr Price. Mark Price. He was a partner in a recruitment agency called Anderson Price Associates – APA – and had already interviewed Nadja over Skype. Nadja reported to Katja that he was attractive – tanned, a full head of attractively greying hair (‘like George Clooney’), a gold signet ring and a heavy Rolex on his wrist (‘like Roger Federer’). ‘He’d better look out, I might marry him,’ Katja said to her sister and they both laughed.   Nadja had emailed scans of her qualifications and references to Mark Price and now they were waiting in Nadja’s apartment for him to Skype from London again to ‘confirm all the details’ and ‘have a quick chat’ with Katja. Nadja had asked him if he could find work for her sister too and he said, ‘Why not?’ There was plenty of work in British hotels. ‘The problem is no one wants to work hard here,’ Mark Price said.   ‘I want to work hard there,’ Nadja said.   They weren’t stupid, they knew about trafficking, about people who tricked girls into thinking they were going to good jobs, proper jobs, who then ended up drugged, trapped in some filthy hole of a room having sex with one man after another, unable to get home again because their passports had been confiscated and they had to ‘earn’ them back. APA wasn’t like that. They had a professional web- site, all above board. They recruited all over the world for hotels, nursing homes, restaurants, cleaning companies, they even had an office in Brussels, as well as one in Luxembourg. They were ‘affiliated’ and recognized and had all kinds of testimonials from people.   From what you could see of it on Skype, their office in London looked very smart. It was busy – you could hear the constant murmur of staff in the background, talking to each other, tapping keyboards, answering the ringing phones. And Mark Price himself was serious and businesslike. He talked about ‘human resources’ and ‘support’ and ‘employer responsibility’. He could help to arrange accommodation, visas, English tuition, ongoing training.   He already had something in mind for Nadja, ‘one of the very top hotels’, but she could decide when she arrived. There were plenty of opportunities ‘for a bright girl’ like her. ‘And my sister,’ she had reminded him.   ‘And your sister, yes, of course,’ he’d laughed.   He would even pay their airfares. Most agencies expected you to pay them money up front for finding you a job. He would send an e-ticket, he said, they would fly to Newcastle. Katja had looked it up on the map. It was miles from London. ‘Three hours on the train,’ Mark Price said, it was ‘easy’. And cheaper for him this way – he was paying for their tickets, after all. A representative of Anderson Price Associates would meet them at the airport and take them to an Airbnb in Newcastle for the night as the Gdansk flight came in late in the day. Next morning someone would escort them to the station and put them on a train. Someone else would pick them up at King’s Cross and drive them to a hotel for a few nights until they got settled. ‘It’s a well-oiled machine,’ he said.   Nadja could probably have got a transfer to another Radisson but she was ambitious and wanted to work in a luxury hotel, somewhere everyone had heard of – the Dorchester, the Lanesborough, the Mandarin Oriental. ‘Oh, yes,’ Mark Price had said, ‘we have contracts with all those places.’ Katja wasn’t bothered, she just wanted to be in London. Nadja was the more serious of the two, Katja the carefree one. Like the song said, girls just wanted to have fun.   And so now they were sitting in front of Nadja’s open laptop waiting for Mark Price to call.   Mark Price was on time, to the second. ‘Okay,’ Nadja said to Katja. ‘Here we go. Ready?’   ***   The tiny delay in transmission seemed to be making it harder for her to translate what he was saying. Her English wasn’t as proficient as her sister had claimed. She laughed a lot to compensate, tossing her hair and looming nearer the screen as if she could persuade him by filling it with her face. She was pretty, though. They were both pretty, but this one was prettier.   ‘Okay, Katja,’ he said. ‘Time’s getting on.’ He tapped his watch to illustrate because he could see the blankness behind her smile. ‘Is your sister still there?’ Nadja’s face appeared on the screen, squashed against Katja’s, and they both grinned at him. They looked as if they were in a Photo-Me booth.   ‘Nadja,’ he said, ‘I’ll have my secretary email you the tickets first thing in the morning, okay? And I’ll see you both soon. Looking forward to meeting you. Have a good evening.’   He turned the screen off and the girls disappeared. He stood up and stretched. Behind him on the wall was the smart ‘APA’ logo for Anderson Price Associates. He had a desk and a chair. There was a print of something modern but classy on the wall. Part of it was in view in the camera on the laptop – he had checked carefully. On the other side you could see an orchid. The orchid looked real, but it was a fake. The office was a fake. Anderson Price Associates was a fake, Mark Price was a fake. Only his Rolex was real.   He wasn’t in an office in London, he was in a mobile home in a field on the East Coast. His ‘other office’, as he thought of it. It was only half a mile inland and sometimes the screaming gulls threatened to spoil the illusion that he was in London.   He turned off the recording of Office Ambience Sounds, switched off the lights, locked up the mobile home and climbed into his Land Rover Discovery. Time to go home. He could almost taste the Talisker that his wife would have waiting for him.