The group all gasped and cheered, and he bowed and accepted the cheers as if the whole pub were applauding. Bette set down her cleaning stuff and went to the table.
“What can I get you?”
He stopped then, at her tone. He looked up at her with his icy blue eyes, suddenly serious if not wholly sober.
“I should like another cognac, but let’s have something festive for my young friends. Fancy things. Cocktails maybe? Can you make them something special?”
Bette nodded and collected their empties. As she walked to the bar, she saw the man who had been in so many times. He sat on a high stool at a ledge, on his own. He was watching her. His drink was half full, but he didn’t touch it.
Bette shivered, and looked away, down at the glasses she carried.
She noticed that two of the glasses were unlike like the others. Two of the wine glasses had something grainy at the bottom, chalky and white, a fine sediment. She checked the others, but they were clear. No trace on the sides, just the smears of their fingers. The two glasses with the white powder in had visible smears of lipstick at the top. One bronze, the other more of a peach colour.
Bette paused and turned to look back at the table, the two girls were laughing, their eyes very twinkly. Michael R Langford was smiling first at one and then the other, one of the young men was on his way to the toilet, the other seemed to be nodding off at the table.
She put the empties down, and looked at the bottles on the back of the bar. What was in those glasses? Maybe the girls had put something in there themselves? Something procured from Jay during a smoke break?
She knew it wasn’t. She knew from the way Michael R Langford had been looking at them.
Bette took a deep breath, and frowned.
She put sugar around the top of four fancy glasses and added ginger ale and cranberry juice with an ounce of fresh orange. She then mimed adding vodka from the empty Smirnoff optic and put them on a tray with four of the ‘BOOK NOW FOR YOUR WORK’S CHRISTMAS PARTY!’ leaflets, the Hare chasing and leaping across the top of each of them.
Bette reached down a brandy balloon. She lifted the cognac bottle and made a great show of trying to get the stopper out, using her apron for grip. Then she took it and the bottle into the back room, where she unstopped the bottle with ease and poured a generous measure.
Reaching into her bra, Bette took out the CHINAHERBAL packet, and opened it. The powder was very fine.
She thought about the two glasses with lipstick on, with the white powder in the bottom. She frowned.
She had two friends who had been date raped, one in Magaluf, and one a couple of months ago right here, in the city, on a normal night out. Neither of them went out now. One of them, she knew, was on antidepressants.
Bette took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
She took a teaspoon from the draining board, filled it with the brown powder, and tipped it into the brandy glass. Was that more than a gram? She thought so. Quite a lot more. Either way, It was gone before she began to stir it in. She added another. Sniffing the glass, all she could smell was the cognac.
She was putting the packet back into her bra when Jay walked in. She jumped and pulled her T-shirt down, sweat prickling her forehead.
“I was trying to get the Remy open. I had to use a cloth.” She felt herself go pale.
Jay looked at her clammy face, her hands which shook as she shut the cognac, and then at her breasts. He was thinking.
She moved to pass him, but he stopped her with his arm, and leaned in close.
“I know what you’re up to in here”
Bette swallowed. Her throat suddenly dry.
“You do?”
He looked down at her breasts meaningfully and grinned.
“Don’t worry. It’ll be our little secret.”
Bette frowned.
“Uh… okay.”
Jay winked at her.
“Do it in the bog. It’s more discreet, and if you’re after… anything else, then just shout.”
Bette breathed out.
“Um, yeah. Will do.”
He was turning to go when she had a thought.
“Jay, this is a weird question, but how much is a gram, what does a gram look like? Sorry… I’m not explaining myself well am I?”
He grinned and reached into his top pocket. He pulled out a small plastic baggie, about a third full.
“That. Anything less is a rip off.”
A couple wanted serving, but Jay said they’d missed last orders. Bette brought the cognac to the tray, and then the tray to the booth. How long had she taken? Maybe eight minutes? Ten?
Michael R Langford looked up, beaming and red faced now. In his absolute element. “Ah, there she is! Nancy to my Sykes!”
She placed the four cocktails down on the table, both the young men had left. The two girls accepted theirs and drank them thirstily. He paid cash this time, and told her to keep the change. As she walked back to the bar, she heard him speaking to the girls. He urged them to drink the lads’ drinks too. After all, he had paid for them! It would be a waste, would it not?
Bette put the money in the till, and the tip in her glass. She went back to her cleaning stuff and began to wipe the tables. As she made her way around the room, she glanced at the booth. Michael R Langford downed his cognac in one, with a theatrical wince at the strength of it, and the three of them then struggled comedically to get out of the booth. Eventually, they were all standing, and he flung an arm around each of them.
“Hold me, girls! Hold me! For I am but an old man! Take pity won’t you, on this decrepit fool!” They laughed, and helped him weave his way to the door. She saw him make a show of waving for a cab, and then they were gone, the three of them, into the night.
The only person left was the staring man. He still hadn’t finished his pint. As she approached him to tell him to drink up, he shot away into the gents. When she finished putting all the chairs up, he was still in the gents.
She looked over at the bar, but Jay must’ve been in the office, putting the cash in the safe. She took the man’s glass to the bar and left it there. She counted out the pints in the wastage bucket, changed the empty optics, and got the last load out of the glass washer. She put the drip trays in to wash and cleaned the ice machine. She looked over at the door to the gents. It was still closed. She would have to ask Jay to go and get him.
She thought about his expression when he watched the other man kissing her.
She thought about his face as he stared down at her breasts.
She thought about him waiting for her to finish her shift.
She looked at the undrunk half pint on the bar.
She pressed her bruises. They still hurt.
When Jay came down from the office, she had her jacket on. She was counting her tips on the end of the bar, enough for a taxi home, maybe even chips.
“Good night?” he asked, nodding down at the change.
“Yeah, not bad.” She put it into her pocket. “Actually, Jay, there’s a guy in the gents, I don’t fancy going in myself to get him out. He’s not pissed, he nursed his pint all night.” She nodded at the glass on the bar.
“Yeah, no worries. Old josser! He’s probably asleep. There’s always one!”
Jay put on his coat and took the keys off the hook, turning the lights off behind the bar.
“You go, I’ll take him his pint. See if that tempts him out.”
Bette smiled. “Thanks. I will. And thanks, you know, for the other thing.”
Jay was heading to the gents. “No worries,” he called back over his shoulder.
Bette stepped out into the night.
It had stopped raining now, but the wind whistled around her neck and ears and whispered that it knew what she had done.
Bette saw a bus climbing the hill toward her, and ran to her stop to get on. She could be home in half an hour, she might get chips on the way.
Sitting down, she put her hands in her jacket pockets. She co
uld feel the red packet in her bra. Dog’s Bane, Tiger’s Bane, Old Woman’s Hood, Monkshood. Good for what ails you, good for the stresses of work, for restoring your Yang, for digestive complaints, for chills, for nausea.
As the bus went under the railway bridge, Bette thought she could see a figure, slumped in the shadows. Was it? Or just a trick of the light? Too late, too late. The bus thundered on.
Bette took a deep breath. She let it out slowly, and then she smiled.
(‘What is it?’
‘It’s a beetle.’
‘Jesus Christ, keep it the fuck away from me. Where’s it from?’
‘It was hatched or whatever. I don’t know. It’s a beetle.’
‘I mean where did you get it? It’s the size of my hand!’
‘—’
‘Oh my god it’s moving! It’s alive! Look at its shell!’
‘—’
‘Why won’t you say anything? Look at it!’
‘I’ve seen it.’
‘But what is that on it? Did you do that? How?’
‘—’
‘They’re moving.’
The oil-film sheen of the chitin is no colour to which she can give a name. Rainbowed and dark, split along a seam so fine that when the insect shuts its wing-case firmly, bringing two halves of a picture together, the line disappears. Like ghosts on a faulty television, figures move on the brittle back.
‘That’s me! Your fucking beetle’s showing me me!’
‘—’
‘Make it stop! What’s it doing?’
‘Do you mean what are you doing? On the shell? Well, just look.’
‘I am looking! I never did that!’
‘You haven’t done it yet.’)
This Place of Thorns
Marina Warner
An open thoroughfare once connected the cities of Syria to the countries that lay to the south; striking out across the desert from oasis to oasis, passing through Jericho and beyond. The road has seen the passage of many people and many goods, including precious myrrh, which Balthasar brought with him—he was the black king—as he followed the star. Myrrh, so rich, so fragrant, seeps from hard-bitten, barbed and scraggy thorn bushes, which need only stony barren soil; when you cut into the bark, it oozes a resin which is dull, sticky, and sickly yellow; but when sniffed, this flow is delicious and can be rubbed and warmed, suspended in oils or dried and burned to give out the sweetest scent, light and fresh as dew, gentle as a baby’s skin, pure as fresh water, a perfume of rejuvenation and beauty, promising conquest over the ravages of time and the body’s organic decay: a scent of paradise, myrrh! It’s a cruel plant, and yet it’s the true balm; its long, sharp needles repel all grazing animals with tender mouthparts, except for the very toughest billy goats. But its sap is a sweet remedy and solace; prepared as an unguent it can seal wounds and, inhaled in fumigations, it will clear sore lungs and heavy heads; it freshens stale linen and stuffy rooms; it transforms decaying flesh—ordinary mortal flesh; and it will preserve a mortal body for eternity.
It was the female Pharaoh Hatshepsut who, a millennium before the star drew the three kings down that westward desert road to search for the prophesied saviour, pioneered the idea of transplanting the myrrh-bearing trees from Gilead and Jericho, and set about shipping them westwards to Egypt. She foresaw the riches the sweet-smelling gluey stuff would reap for her treasury and so, in the equally parched soil on the outskirts of Heliopolis, she made “the garden where the true balsam grows”. You can see it marked on old maps of Cairo and is still there to this day, a little neglected but a sanctuary still: legend has it that Mariam—the Virgin Mary—her husband Joseph, and the baby stopped there on their flight from the massacre ordered by Herod.
It was a time of new massacres that brought Nour and her grandmother Zubayda to follow the same road that unfurls across the desert winding towards the Red Sea, where they were hoping to embark so they could sail north and make their way further… to another world and another time.
Nour was eleven years old, and her grandmother, Zubayda, was about fifty, but the long war had taken its toll on her; they were the only survivors they knew of from their large household and the whole apartment block in which they lived; the men were all long gone away to fight or disappeared into the torture basements of the regime—and they had endured together the long siege of their town and its systematic bombing and destruction. The latest onslaught of government forces swept them up along with a few straggling fugitives, old and very young only, and finally drove them out of their city. After many days’ march south—a drifting, erratic progress at night when they could escape the sun’s fist—they reached a meagre encampment. It had grown up against the double fence of high razor wire defending a border which had not been there before. Of necessity, they came to a halt and there they found others, who had reached it before them, called it the Place of Thorns, because thorns were the only thing that grew. The only other living things were lizards with frilled jowls like prehistoric dragons, some species of small, shiny metallic snakes, and precision-tooled birds of prey, which planed above on the look-out for the reptiles. There, Nour and Zubayda joined more women and children, living in shallow caves in the rocky sand, which they had tried to hollow more deeply using sticks of the thorn bushes. The new, heavily fortified border rose above them, glinting, spiked. Were it not so ferocious and menacing, it might have been tinsel, so gaily did its brand-new coils sparkle in the unremitting sunshine. This new border unspooled to the horizon on both sides, cutting a wide, empty swathe over the undulating, dry body of the desert, a scar twelve metres wide, running from the port in the north to the rose-red cliffs of sand in the high desert of Upper Egypt in the south. It prevented all access to the Gulf of Suez, and any attempt to cross.
They could not move on, nor could they retreat and turn north or south. They were checked to a standstill, like so many hundreds of others who had found themselves up against the new armoured border. It had carved out a place of no-one, a Terra Nullius which nobody could enter, or traverse, not unless they had serious matériel—hydraulic cutters, heavy caterpillar tanks, ironclad jeeps, bomber planes, or drones—to flatten it from the air.
The scar marked a place of unwelcome, where no man or woman or child lives or can claim ownership, a neutral place, unattributed, unmastered, an interzone between two armies facing each other, a cleft between. Untended, unattended, terrain vague, as the French call such wastelands. We see these spaces on the map, sometimes narrow, sometimes wider, a gap between two lines inscribed onto desert, meadow, mountains, streets, buildings: occasionally a gap that is not quite an alley has been left between two houses which have not been terraced but remain detached; this gap then acquires this dishevelled, orphan look. Sometimes such a border will slice right through the middle of a house or apartment block, bisecting it, as was threatened when the two mothers fought over a baby and asked Solomon to judge their claims. A place that was once a home can be left stranded on two sides of a border with a gap, a nothing, in-between. Passages and holes, leaving a tailor’s offcuts of territory, which, if you patched and pieced these plots one next to the other for a coat of many colours, would hang loose on a colossus, and provide enough land for a planetary moon where all those who have nowhere to stay and call their own could make a home. Or would that be an exile, to be in orbit elsewhere far from this world?
In the past, before Schengen, I remember how we used to walk through these nowheres; at Ventimiglia between France and Italy, for example, and it used to be a strange and exciting feeling, as one left one border post behind with its national guards and stepped into the perimeter that did not belong to anyone and met the different country’s policemen or soldiers and took stock of the way they handled themselves (did they twitch for their pistols, did they lounge about smoking? Why did they take so long to scrutinise the photo in one’s passport? Once I was with a friend who was ordered to shave off his beard to match his passport picture, but it was still touch and go). Wh
at about the cut of their uniforms (the bulk of their boots, the white of their spats, the swirl of their cock feathers)? And since those holiday times, we have seen so many undone by war and plague and famine, so many making their way across bridges, across frontiers, moving from one place where others belong, to another place where different others belong.
The unbelonging on the move in the spaces of nowhere.
Terra nullius—the land of nobody—began as a place to be shunned: the waste ground under the walls of a fortress, the fosse where the shameful dead lay exposed to carrion birds and animals (Antigone wanted to stop this happening to her brother Polynices). It was a place of execution, a killing field. It still is: the makeshift camp in the place of thorns where the fleeing huddled down into the sand to hide from aeroplanes flying low and drones hovering over the strip watching for attempts to cross it; they were hiding in the earth like animals, shrinking from rumours of armies on the move using the territory between the fences as a fast patrol road.
There was a time when it could seem amusing that antiquarian collectors in the United States paid good money for varieties of historic barbed wire, used in the staking out of property in the West, parcelling out the prairies to the new landowners, each one identifiable from his design of barb and hook, just as his herds were known to belong to him from the brand burned into their hide. But these curiosities of a particular connoisseurship now feel ominous when bales of silver razor wire unfurl for miles and miles to demarcate frontiers of the rich world, keeping out the poor, leaving between the high, thorny fences a wild forbidden territory. In no man’s land you mustn’t be seen or the official armies of one side or the other, or random snipers working for traffickers, or vigilantes working for their own purposes, will pick you off. You can tunnel your way through. Burrows are one place where you might survive. On the surface concealment is necessary.
The Outcast Hours Page 27
