Deboree-deb n’ deboree-de-bree-deb
Deboree-deb, n’deboree-de..
Oh Deborah…
‘Your dad named you for this song, right?’
‘He was mad about T.Rex. The only Indian in his street growing up trying to work a perm.’
‘I can’t imagine what that looked like.’
‘Photographic evidence is slim, but my mother said it never took. All he was left with was the smell.’
‘And he waited all those years to name his baby girl after his favourite track.’
‘Yup,’ she said, setting down the food and pouring red wine.
‘Guess it could have been worse.’
‘Have you ever listened to the lyrics beyond the actual name?’ she asked stepping closer to hand him a glass.
They stood there for a moment while the song played on revealing its nonsense.
Oh Deborah, always looked like a zebra
Your sunken face is like a galleon
Clawed with mysteries of the Spanish Main…
‘You take my point?’ she asked.
But Tudor wasn’t listening to the song. He was looking at her, thinking how striking she looked, remembering how things had been, and wondering quite what he was doing in her flat, drinking wine, when he should have been home with Emily. A stab of rusty guilt, left over from their affair, twisted in his conscience. Would he never be able to think of her without feeling guilty one way or another?
‘Come on, sit down. Carbonara waits for no man. Or at least, it does, but it gets claggy in the process.’
He smiled, taking the chair opposite her. ‘That’s a good northern word.’
‘There is something of my mum in me too,’ she said. ‘But you didn’t come here for my food or to discuss my family, lovely as they are.’ She reached out to a shelf beside her chair and extracted a slim, brown file from between the books. She handed it to him. ‘I give you, the Begovich clan. Or at least, their history. Seems old man Begovich… I think his first name was Andre, was that right? Yes, there,’ she pointed as he opened the file and pulled out the documents. ‘Andre Begovich, came to the UK sometime in the eighties, just after President Tito died and Yugoslavia opened its borders to the world.’
‘Lucky world.’
‘Indeed. Anyhow, he settled here and established a business - import/export.’
‘Ah,’ Tudor acknowledged the well-known term for dealing-in-anything.
‘Yes, ah. Usual system, on the surface, artefacts and antiques and generally traditional Slavic goods, pickled peppers,Slivovica,that sort of thing, but beneath it all, duty free fags, booze under the radar paying no tax. Small fry really, but a good business.’
‘So, why the file?’
‘Well,’ she paused to eat a forkful of pasta and then continued, stabbing the air with her fork to punctuate her words. ‘Mr Begovich got ambitious. Moved on to bigger things.’
‘Drugs.’
‘Not that we ever discovered, no.’
‘Guns?’
She shook her head, ‘That would have been too hard core for him, I think.’
