Hot Stew

by Fiona Mozley

  The bartender returns to his phone. He swipes right on all the pictures of women, 18 to 35, who have placed their profiles online for his perusal. He stopped following his employers’ instructions to keep the riffraff at bay several weeks ago, when he decided bar work wasn’t for him.

  They call the man Paul Daniels because he performs magic tricks for tips and the woman Debbie McGee because she is always by his side, but unlike their glamorous namesakes, they have neither expertise, talent, wealth, nor much of an audience.

  Paul Daniels is making his rounds of the tables and standing patrons. He inserts thin, purpled fingers into his pockets and pulls out a cup and three red sponge balls. They are lighter than their size should allow; a small-scale optical illusion. They stick to his fingers like marshmallows. He begins at the first table with the Three Cup Trick, even though in this he rarely succeeds. He knows how it should be done but loses concentration and forgets where he’s put the ball. The man in front of him correctly guesses its location, and flips the cup with a satisfied smile.

  “There you go, mate,” he says. He is wearing a baby-pink polo shirt with a logo embroidered on the chest. “Now pay up.” He holds out a hand.

  It is well known in the Aphra Behn that Paul Daniels is not allowed to lose. For all the occasions on which grubby playing cards slip from the frayed sleeves of his coat, or silk handkerchiefs reveal their secrets too soon, the loyal patrons of the Aphra Behn feign astonishment and hand over their pennies willingly.

  The man in the polo shirt insists on collecting his winnings. He is not a regular at the pub but a tourist. He intends to spend the evening watching women with silicone breast implants and the hair of Russian prisoners (severed, imported, bleached, glued to the new scalp) remove their clothes and dance for him while he slips crisp twenty-pound notes into their garters. He is a man who knows the price of everything. He likes to win and on this occasion he has won. He wants his 40p: 20p for his stake and 20p for his winnings.

  Paul Daniels is unwilling to part with his cash. He hesitates.

  “What’s your game?” the man asks the magician. “If you win you take the money and if you lose you take the money? That’s no way to run a business. Who’s going to play your cup game if it’s not properly competitive?”

  Paul Daniels’s hands tremble as he searches for copper coins. His ribcage convulses with incoherent apologies.

  The woman they call Debbie McGee remains calm. It’s a calmness derived from rehearsed apathy.

  Nobody in the Aphra Behn can remember anything ever provoking emotion from Debbie McGee. There was once a time when she took pleasure in many things: a compelling film, a well-taken photograph of family and friends, late-night karaoke, an Indian takeaway. There was once a time when she was saddened by other things: a break-up, news of hurricanes, the sight of her baby sister leaving the house for the last time. There was also a period of her life when nothing but heroin made her happy or sad. She was happy when she had it; she was sad when she didn’t. That time also passed. For the woman they call Debbie McGee, there is nothing left to feel.

  She remains silent throughout the exchange. Her eyes return to the man behind the bar. He has set aside his phone to follow the dispute.

  Some of the pub’s regulars shift on their bar stools. One of them is quietly celebrating his sixty-fourth birthday. Although Robert Kerr has been drinking beer with his friend, Lorenzo, he hasn’t told him it’s a special day. He is content with his daily routine and doesn’t want to disrupt it, and besides, Lorenzo is much younger than him, young enough to be his son, and he probably wouldn’t be interested in the birthday celebrations of his long-time neighbor and drinking companion.

  Robert turns to watch along with the rest of the pub. He had hoped it would be quickly resolved. With a deep sigh, Robert raises himself from the bar stool. The leather padding has settled to the shape of his buttocks after several hours of stasis. He takes the four or five steps to the scene of the altercation. “Do you know what you are, mate?” he asks. The tourist is nearly thirty years younger than him. He doesn’t reply. “You’re a cunt,” Robert tells him.

  Fights are now rare in this part of London. When Robert first came to the area they were common. In those days, assailants carried knuckle-dusters and switchblade knives.

  The tourist at the table stares up into the face of the older, burlier man. He notes the gold chain around the thick neck and the nose that’s been broken and clumsily repaired several times. He sees the scar on his forehead, which is large and perfectly square, the sort that cannot be caused by mishap.

  Robert reaches into the pocket of his jeans and pulls out a fifty-pence piece. He drops it into the man’s gin and tonic. “With interest.” The greasy hexagon meets the acid of the lime and fizzes against the sides of the glass. The man makes no attempt to fish it out.

  Robert’s friend Lorenzo has been sitting with him all afternoon. They’re regular drinking companions. As Robert made his intervention, Lorenzo subtly lifted himself from his own bar stool—likewise customized to the curve of his arse—and slipped out the front door of the pub to the street, where the bouncer stands.

  The bouncer is a middle-aged woman called Sheila. She is around five feet tall. Her hair is bleached blonde over gray. Every morning she rubs wax onto the palms of her hands then runs her hands through her hair, creating little spikes and curls. Sheila’s employed to marshal patrons and gently reinforce the pub’s rules. She makes sure people leave the building to smoke and that they keep behind the white line that’s been drawn onto the pavement to demarcate the acceptable smoking-and-drinking area. She greets patrons who enter the pub and she calls taxis at the end of the night for customers who are too drunk to find their own way home. She also deals with disturbances, although these are a rarity these days or else the managers of the Behn would have employed a brawnier bouncer to do the work.

  Lorenzo beckons Sheila inside and points to Robert. The other man has still said nothing.

  Meanwhile, Paul Daniels looks about the premises, searching for a convenient escape.

  Debbie McGee is at the bar, finishing a row of drinks that have been left by a group of middle-aged women, now unsure of their choice of venue and keen to hurry on to a nearby theater and its production of Julius Caesar.

  Sheila faces a conundrum. She is fond of Lorenzo, and he has brought her inside to eject the tourist. She likes Robert too but he appears to be the aggressor. The man they call Paul Daniels is hopping around the pub despite the instructions she has given him to stay away. Sheila has no objection in principle to this desperate man and woman coming into the pub each day for a short amount of time to ply their trade, but she is also the sort of woman who takes her job seriously.

  Robert spots Sheila’s entrance and goes out onto the street, pushing the door open with a strong left arm then allowing it to swing shut behind him. It used to be second nature for him to come outside like this and smoke. He quit a few years ago, but he still feels the compulsion to interrupt his drinking to stand on the pavement and breathe the fresh air. And he wants to give that dickhead a chance to leave by the other exit.

  Paul Daniels also spares Sheila the awkwardness of an altercation. He scoops his belongings from the table and stashes them in his coat. As a parting gesture, he takes hold of the glass of gin and tonic and, as the man in the pink polo shirt watches, incredulous, he pours it down his ulcerated throat in a hollow gulp, coin and all. He hops towards the front door then rushes out. Debbie McGee notes without expression the departure of her beloved, and quietly follows.

  Robert Kerr has known the woman some people call Debbie McGee for many years. He knew her before she came to be called Debbie McGee, when she was known by her real name. He knew her before she met the man with whom she now walks the streets, before her bones dried and fractured and were set in casts by concerned nurses, before her skin withered, before she pierced it with blunted needles, before she slept curled up between strange men. Robert looks at her now an
d sees all the many changing seasons that have passed. He sees rain and wind. He sees months of creeping sickness. He sees moments of giddy health. He sees poverty and fortune. He sees terror and hunger and pain and hope. He sees time as she stands still.

  In the same pocket of his jeans from which he plucked the fifty-pence piece, Robert finds a twenty-pound note. He unpicks the folds with the care of a pastry chef for fine filo and holds it out. It flutters in the breeze like a handkerchief at a passing train.

  “Don’t spend it all on smack,” he says to her. “Get yourself some chips or something. And a decent place to sleep.”

  The woman they call Debbie McGee does not meet the old man’s eyes but focuses instead on the note. She takes it in her right hand and tucks it into the sleeve of her T-shirt, too tight even for her slight frame.

  Across the road, Paul Daniels weeps and swears and stamps. He throws up his arms and screams at the sky. Phlegm and spit fly from his mouth. He pays no attention to the location of his companion, nor does he look behind to see if she follows as he zigzags down the street, pushing pedestrians out of his way, causing black cabs to swerve and stop.

  Debbie McGee does follow. She keeps to the sides of the pavements where the tall buildings cast shade, and where chewing gum and half-eaten burgers, and the butts of cigarettes are thrown, and where dogs and drunks defecate and piss.

  The woman they call Debbie McGee keeps pace with her beloved. Robert Kerr watches her go.

  Familiar Streets

  Robert doesn’t return inside to finish his pint. It is a hot day and he and Lorenzo have been drinking cold lager, which will now be warm. He looks into the pub and sees his pal speaking animatedly with the bartender, presumably about what has just happened. Robert hopes he hasn’t embarrassed him. He did what needed doing but didn’t mean to cause a scene.

  Sheila begins to sweep the pavement with a coarse wooden-handled brush. Robert feels sure he must have annoyed her, but as she shuffles toward him she smiles. He thinks then, as he often does whenever he sees Sheila or any woman he considers good and kind and honest but for whom he feels no sexual desire, that he ought to marry her. But the moment passes, as it always does, and he thinks anyway she is probably in a relationship with the other lady bouncer at the lesbian bar around the corner.

  Robert walks south. He glances at his watch: six o’clock. He wonders if it is late enough to visit the other place at which he is considered a regular. It will be open, but it might be too early for that kind of thing. He slows, and looks in at some of the shops and restaurants along the route. He passes private members’ clubs with grand old doors leading to dark corners and deep armchairs. He passes restaurants and cafes and shops that sell oysters and noodles and sashimi and frozen yogurt. On the corner, a sex shop displays lurid butt plugs and leather thongs. In the window, the management have hung an A1-size poster of two men kissing. Their bodies are tanned and waxed and lightly oiled. They are both wearing tight fluorescent swimming trunks. One of the men is clean shaven but the other has a neatly groomed beard. This confuses Robert. He knows from Lorenzo that these sorts of men would generally be described as “Hunks,” owing to their height and tight muscles. However, the presence of the beard indicates the category “Bear,” to which Lorenzo enjoys informing Robert that he, Robert, would belong if he were a gay man. The man on the poster muddles these categories. Robert walks on past the sex shop pondering, from the information he’s been given, how Lorenzo might be defined. But Robert can’t remember. Lorenzo is just Lorenzo.

  Robert passes Des Sables and turns left. The shaded alley down which he slides brims with birds. Pigeons pluck the crumbs of Cornish pasties from between the slats of cast-iron grates and mutter to each other as they apportion scraps. A hen pigeon drags a gammy foot as she is pursued by two cocks. They hock flattering remarks but she remains uninterested and continues to hop. She tears her malnourished body into the air with lean but powerful wings and settles on a windowsill, squeezing easily behind the contra-avian spikes. The cock pigeons coo to one another as if disputing whether to pursue, then collectively decide to sate their hunger rather than their lust and return to the business of pecking. Further down the alley, there is a pigeon so white it is almost a dove. Its snowy wings are marred only by an irregular flight feather of dust and coral that hangs aslant as if aware of its own deviance. Beyond the pigeons, a flock of sparrows. Too few, too few. When Robert first came to London, nearly fifty years ago, sparrows smudged the skies and dotted every pavement. In those first decades, they were common, and he fed them from his bare, outstretched hands.

  Robert steps into the brothel. Old Scarlet sits behind the little desk. Karl leans against the wall, flicking through a glossy magazine. Both look up. Old Scarlet’s eyelids are painted with shimmering cyan that illuminates her brown eyes, tired from thirty years of late nights and dark rooms. Her lips are tinted the color of her namesake. She greets Robert warmly. Karl is even larger than him and has even less hair on his head. He wears nothing but black: a black shirt and a pair of black jeans tightened with a black leather belt. He notes Robert’s presence then returns to his literature. He hardly ever speaks.

  “How are we today?” Old Scarlet asks.

  Robert answers that he is well and asks how she is.

  “Oh, you know,” she says. “Sciatica. We’re not as young as we used to be.”

  “We’re not.”

  She opens the ledger. The only computer in the brothel is attached to the webcam upstairs. Old Scarlet runs the business with pencil and paper.

  “Tiffany and Giselle and Precious are free now, or we’ve got Young Scarlet in half an hour, or Crystal an hour after that. It’s Candy’s day off.”

  Robert raises his hands in indecision. “I’ll go with whoever will have me. To an old thug like me they’re all absolutely lovely.”

  “Precious, then. You and her get on well.”

  Old Scarlet makes a mark in the ledger and instructs Robert to take a seat in the showroom. “I’ll tell Precious you’re coming. Help yourself to a drink.”

  Robert wraps his knuckles on the wooden desk by way of thanks and turns from Old Scarlet and Karl. He takes the swing door to the left of the admissions desk and steadies it shut before proceeding. A long and familiar hallway stretches before him. The walls are coated with a red fabric like velvet but with longer strands, like the coat of a shaggy dog. It gives the walls the texture of something organic, something that has grown from the plaster. Robert stretches out both hands, as he always does when he walks through this familiar passage. He allows his hands to glide across the fabric. He enjoys the soft tickle. The carpet is likewise red and it is padded with a kind of satin towelling. Robert’s shoes sink into it. The lighting is dim and rose-pink. Long tendrils of silken cord, this the deepest red of any of the fabrics, have been stitched into the padded ceiling and hang to approximately the height of Robert’s waist. The silk tendrils are the red of bull’s blood. They are the red of sow’s blood. They hang as if dripping.

  Robert walks through the web of cloth. It strokes and caresses his face and he carves a path through it as if parting a sea. The light from the pink bulbs shines on the red fabric of the walls and the floor and against the crimson tendrils. The hall is steeped in a spectrum of red, and the red is alive with movement.

  Robert is color blind. For Robert, red is green and green is red and there’s nothing in between. When he takes this short walk between the foyer and the waiting area, he does not think of the heat and clamor of the busy street behind nor of the pleasures beyond. He finds himself in a forest that he knows of old, in a wood so thick and fecund he can see no more than an arm’s length ahead and an arm’s length behind. He feels the fabrics as foliate, like the tender needles of young firs. He seeks a path through the branches to the room beyond, and when he comes to it he blinks, though the light here is hardly dialed brighter.

  The far wall presents a familiar brass drinks trolley, with glass and crystal decanters holding br
own and gold and burgundy liquids. He pours himself a whiskey and waits. After a minute or so Old Scarlet comes rushing in from the reception.

  “I forgot to ask,” she says. “What can I tell her you’re after?”

  “Full service,” replies Robert. “It’s my birthday.”

  The Trickle Down

  In another part of the city, Bastian Elton watches his girlfriend preen. There are parts of her routine he’s permitted to see and parts he isn’t. She goes inside the bathroom to wax, to shave and to pluck, but stands in front of the living room mirror to apply her makeup. Rebecca keeps her catalogue of accoutrements in a metal box with compartments that fold in and out like the doors of an airplane. It is highly technical. There are boxes within boxes, and pastes and gels and brushes. She selects a white tube and squeezes a precise amount of clear gel onto her forefinger. She uses the fingertips on both hands to rub it over her face, then pulls out a small plastic tub, unscrews it, and balances the lid on the mantelpiece. The tub contains a fine powder resembling ground skin.

  Bastian is sitting on the sofa with his legs slightly apart. His hands are between them, holding the jacket of a suit that has just been delivered. The clothes Bastian used to buy came from expensive high street shops, but when his grandfather discovered this, he set up an account for Bastian at a tailor’s shop on Savile Row and took him for a fitting.

  Bastian continues to watch Rebecca. She touches the dust with a long brush with bristles that fan out like the tail of a peacock then bounces it across her face until the powder becomes invisible. Next, she attends to her eyes. She clicks open a disk containing powders of varying hues, divided into sections. She applies some of the beige powder then two shades of brown. She puts the items back into the box then pulls out a pencil and a long thin tube that Bastian recognizes as mascara. She traces the tip of the pencil around her eyes to create a dark rim then sets about touching the tip of the black mascara brush against her eyelashes while she stares into the mirror with her lips parted. She finishes this process and sneezes. Bastian has previously noticed her sneezing after touching her eyelashes with the mascara brush. It makes him smile. It reminds him of the family cat he had when he was growing up: a fluffy pedigree named Purrsia. Purrsia used to sneeze when she was excited. She would stop, stand still, steady herself, and shut her eyes. When the sneeze came, she would hardly make a sound. Rebecca’s sneezes are also strangely silent. She scrunches up her face and draws her shoulders up to her ears to brace herself against the minor, internal explosion. She looks very cute when she does this.