Oren

Oren repaired roofs with his uncle, argued with his uncle, and was not paid enough, which was everything he had to say about his work. He was a big, rawboned young man with grey roof dust in his dark hair that never quite washed out, and he shuffled cards from one hand to the other in a continuous ripple without looking at them, the way other people drum their fingers. He dealt the first hand of cards Zarina ever played, on the night she first came to the curtained room above a side street and called herself Sera.

He was not subtle and he was not curious, and both turned out to be gifts. He explained the rules once, at speed, and let her lose round after round until she worked the game out for herself. When she gave an evasive answer about who she was, he started on a story about a chandler’s roof held together by moss and good intentions, and never came back to it. Four nights later he looked up across the crowded room and said Sera, as though the name had always been there, and it went into her like a warm drink on a cold night.

He belonged to the curtained room and nowhere else: the low ceiling, the bad violin, the bread, the dog asleep under its chair. It was the small, honest freedom that Sera had at the beginning and did not recognise, and he was still sitting in it, complaining about his hand, on the night she came back from the Red House shaking and could not hear a word he said.

“You’re somewhere else tonight,” he told her once, gathering in the cards. “Get some sleep, Sera.” It was the most anyone at that table ever said to her about it.