Read One of Us for Free Online

will have to do some things.”
    Sean looked up at me.
    “No, not bad things,” I said. “Medical work.”
    “Well, that’s OK then, isn’t it?” Sean said. “If you’re not doing bad things. You were trained to be a doctor, Anna, it’s the fucking crazy system here that makes you waste that talent and work in a shitheap like this, instead of doing what you’re good at. So using that training, that’s a good thing, yeah?”
    “Yes. But this good thing, I am doing it for bad people.”
    “Uh—OK. Right.” He sat back in his chair. “What do you mean, bad people? It’s cool, you can tell me.”
    So I told him.
    When I had finished, Sean sat back in his chair, picking away at the polystyrene of his cup with his fingers, dropping little flakes of it across the plastic of the table like snow. This was very Sean, part of his shy side, that had him stumbling over words when he was talking to people he did not know very well, the stoop of his shoulders as if he did not want to stand out for being tall, the way that he found it hard to meet the eye of the person he was talking to, instead studying their shoes, the lapels of their coat, or whatever he had picked up and was twisting round and round in his hands. He did this all the time. Pens, cups, the plastic stirrers that we used in the restaurant. Anything that was around. He would pick it up, turn it over and over in his hands as he spoke, spinning it round, walking a pen end over end through his fingers and back again, or pull it to pieces, leave them scattered over the table like confetti.
    “You should smoke,” I had told him once. “It would give you something to do with your hands.”
    “Christ no,” he had replied. “I’d be on about sixty a day.”
    Now he shredded the cup, and did not look at me. “Jesus,” he said. “Jesus, Anna.” His eye twitched, as if he had something stuck in it.
    “I should not have told you?”
    “It’s not that, of course you should, you know you can talk to me.” It sounded from his voice though that he wished I had not.
    “You do not approve,” I said. “You think I am a bad person.”
    “Fuck no, no, Anna, no. Not that, not at all. It’s just, Jesus, I’m scared for you, is all. These people you’re working for, bullet wounds? Jesus. This is serious stuff Anna, what the hell have you got yourself into? And they know you work here?”
    He was jumping from thought to thought, and it was difficult for me to keep up. “I don’t know—I don’t think—”
    “‘Course they do, they know you work here, that guy, what was he called, Daniel? Daniel. He came here, didn’t he. Jesus, I met him, he saw me when he came here. He’s one of them.”
    “Not the same as them, not Daniel, he is just like a little boy who tags behind the big children.”
    “Oh no, of course,” Sean said, rolling his eyes. “He’s just Mr Fixer. He’s not bad, he’s only a little boy who knows bad people. Christ, Anna, you don’t have a clue what you’re getting into, I’m sorry but you know, you’re in a strange place, new country, you’re too naïve.”
    “There were bad people where I came from too, Sean,” I said. I tried not to let the anger appear in my voice. This was not what I had wanted. I had wanted Sean to listen, to be sympathetic, to give me good advice, to be the friend I thought that he was. Something about Sean had always reminded me of my brother. When I was a girl, Aleksey always protected me, stuck up for me when my father was angry, warned the boys who wanted to take me out that if they were bad for me he would kick them from one end of the town to the other. I remember playing with friends in an abandoned house once, shrieking with joy and fear about whether a rat might run over our feet. We crawled through a narrow passage full of brick dust where the roof had fallen down so far you could not stand, and a rat did run over me, although it was my hand and not my foot. I screamed and tried to stand up.