Hot Stew

by Fiona Mozley

  “Not much,” he says. He isn’t sure he wants to tell her where he’s working. She’s the kind of person who might be judgmental about him walking into a well-paid job at his dad’s company. “I’m thinking about going into the law. I’m doing an internship at the moment at a kind of property-law place.”

  Glenda smiles. “Cool,” she says. “Anyway, I’ve got to go. I really need the loo. Nice to bump into you.”

  Glenda begins to ascend the staircase. Bastian watches her climb. When she’s at the top he calls after her.

  “Hey! How’s Laura?”

  Glenda turns and smiles at him knowingly. It’s the first time she’s smiled since the beginning of the conversation. He notices, as he had not before, how sad her overall demeanor is, and has been for the whole time they’ve been talking.

  “Oh,” offers Glenda. “Laura’s doing really well. You should get back in touch.”

  Blank Slating

  The long and elegant index finger of Lorenzo Mendis carves shapes in the condensation lining his glass of cold lager. He draws ovals and triangles and oblongs and swirls. The moisture warms and collects at his fingertips then drips the length of the tall glass.

  Lorenzo is waiting for a friend. He spent most of the afternoon in the Aphra Behn with Robert but has now moved to an exclusive club down the road, and propped himself against the bar. He thought he saw her arrive, but the Glenda-shaped person who came in through the door has disappeared off somewhere. Glenda is often late, even more now than she used to be; her girlfriend split up with her a few months ago and she has quietly fallen apart.

  Glenda and Catherine shared a flat in Walthamstow, which Catherine, being a fair bit older, owned. Glenda had to move out quickly, and Lorenzo found a room for her above the Aphra Behn. The owners couldn’t advertise the room and get a real tenant with a real, legally binding tenancy agreement as they didn’t have the correct permits, and it didn’t meet the legal requirements. The building stood on this street when Samuel Pepys walked along it. Or, if not Samuel Pepys, then never-bored Samuel Johnson. The floors are warped from years of use, so dropped pencils roll from one side to the other. The door frames are tilted, and, rather than having been mended or propped up, the doors have been shaved and sanded to the new shape. The windows are single glazed and the wooden window frames are chipped and drafty. In winter, wind sneaks through. In summer, people stand on the pavements and drink and smoke, and there is a jagged torrent of noise until morning. Nobody would choose to live there, but the room is in central London and costs a quarter of what it would have cost were it safe, legal and habitable.

  Lorenzo met Glenda when she did a six-month internship at the talent agency he works for part-time. This is one of two part-time jobs he does to earn money between roles. His acting career once held so much promise, but the last few years have been lean. He was involved with theater at university, then secured a place at a prestigious drama school and was later given a short-term contract with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Then the auditions began to fizzle out. He was short on cash and started doing more supplementary work to pay his rent, but the work was tiring and required more of his time than he anticipated. He took the job of personal assistant to film star Yolanda Crimp. It was meant to be a temporary situation, but he’s been working for her ever since. He spends three afternoons a week at her house, organizing her affairs. He books appointments, arranges holidays, goes to the shops to pick up outfits for her to try on and dismiss. When the nanny calls in sick he plays with Yolanda’s children. He attends her parties and meets relevant people but none of them can see him as anything other than Yolanda’s PA. They hand him empty wine glasses and make cutting remarks under a guise of good humor.

  Lorenzo feels someone tapping his elbow, and turns to see his friend. He is pleased she has arrived but less pleased that she has put no effort into her appearance. When Glenda and Lorenzo worked together she was far from immaculate but had, at least, brushed her hair, ironed her clothes and polished her shoes. Now she does none of these things.

  “You look nice,” he says. He leans forward to kiss her on the cheek.

  “Sorry,” she replies. “I didn’t have time to organize myself properly this week. Again. So, I’m my usual scruffy self.”

  He didn’t mean for his insincerity to be detected.

  Lorenzo quickly finishes his pint and they both order cocktails. Lorenzo’s is tall and sleek, while Glenda’s comes in a squat tumbler stuffed with layers of ice and citrus. Lorenzo gets up from his bar stool and they find a table together at the back.

  “I thought I saw you go past the Behn on your way home from work,” Lorenzo says.

  “I live above the pub,” Glenda replies. “It would be difficult to avoid.”

  “Why didn’t you pop in and say hello? Did you see me in there?”

  “Yeah.” Glenda fiddles with a paper napkin. She tears off little pieces and piles them up like a cairn on top of a hill. “I saw your old man friend too.”

  “Robert?”

  “I don’t think he likes me.”

  “He’s just a little afraid of you.”

  “Because I’m a woman?”

  “Because you’re a particular kind of woman.”

  “Gay?”

  “No, he isn’t homophobic.”

  “Just a misogynist.”

  “Not a misogynist as such, just a bit scared of women.”

  “Isn’t that where misogyny comes from?”

  “Well, yeah, but, I don’t know. I’m not trying to justify it.” He isn’t trying to justify it, although he realizes that’s how it seems.

  “Sorry, I’m not trying to have a go. I just don’t get it. Well, I do get it. But I also don’t get it.”

  Lorenzo feels a bit awkward. He has got the impression previously that his friendship with Robert was a sticking point between him and Glenda, but they have never had a conversation about it.

  Glenda continues: “I can absolutely appreciate that he can have issues and still be a decent person in other respects, but a general, difficult-to-define, non-specific fear of women—that he may or may not have—just isn’t something I have the energy to put up with.”

  “I understand that.”

  “But hey, you go ahead with your outreach thing.”

  He is annoyed now. “Yes, he”s older and rough round the edges, but I also think he’s a good man. I’m not saying it’s okay he’s not comfortable around you, but he’s able to be friends with me, so deserves at least six out of ten on the Absolute Caveman to Enlightened Metrosexual scale.”

  Glenda starts to giggle.

  “What?” Lorenzo asks.

  “It’s just I haven’t heard the word metrosexual for years. It’s very noughties.”

  Lorenzo smiles, and relaxes. “Sorry,” he says. “I suppose I’m defensive about him because I do recognize what you’re saying, and I know we seem like odd drinking companions, but I’ve known him my whole life, and it is what it is.”

  “It is,” Glenda agrees. “And also …”

  She doesn’t finish the sentence but hovers on the last syllable and raises her eyebrows to indicate there’s something she’s holding back.

  “Don’t say it,” urges Lorenzo.

  “Daddy issues,” Glenda finishes.

  “Yep. Fine. You’ve got me there.”

  He playfully flicks at the pile of paper napkin pieces Glenda has arranged, and they flutter in her direction.

  It is true that Lorenzo has a bad relationship with his father, and the links between this and his tendency to form surprising friendships with older, straight, working-class men isn’t lost on him. He just doesn’t think it’s the only reason he’s friends with Robert.

  Glenda looks at Lorenzo sheepishly from behind her glasses. There are greasy fingerprints on the lenses, which Lorenzo notices for the second time. He has the urge to take them from her and polish the glass with his cotton shirt.

  “Sorry,” she says.

  “No, don�
��t be silly.”

  “I think we have both said ‘sorry’ to each other about five times now.”

  “Something like that.” He looks again at her dirty glasses. “Changing the subject, do you know what I saw on the Tube the other day?” He doesn’t wait for her to guess. “I was alone in a carriage on the Bakerloo Line going up to Yolanda’s, and the only other person there was this middle-aged woman sitting opposite me. She looked totally normal. Totally respectable. And do you know what she was doing? She was watching pornography on her phone. I saw it reflected in her glasses. Can you believe that?”

  “Oh my god.”

  “On the Tube. What the actual fuck?”

  “What kind of pornography was it?”

  “God knows. I looked away pretty rapidly. I just had enough time to see some naked arses, and that was about it.”

  “Maybe it was an arthouse film.”

  “It could have been, but that’s still a weird thing to watch on the Tube. She was only on between Oxford Circus and Marylebone.”

  After this, Lorenzo asks Glenda about her work. She is now employed by a major firm of estate agents. Lorenzo is fond of houses: their interiors and exteriors, the domestic routines they contain, their place in the economy, and their potential to make or break fortunes. He does not think that it is the right job for Glenda in the long-term, however. She is too sensitive for a sales role, or any kind of highly pressured business environment. She is too much of an introvert, and going out of her way to talk to strangers and persuade them to buy or sell expensive property couldn’t really be more antithetical to her character. But Lorenzo understands she needs the money. Glenda wants to be a theater director (which, if Lorenzo is being honest, is also a bit unrealistic), and to pursue this, she needs to have enough money saved either to do a course or unpaid internship.

  Last week, Glenda’s company started work on a new project. They are collaborating with a development firm that owns a significant amount of property in central London, much of which is not currently Achieving its Full Potential, which Glenda and Lorenzo agreed sounded like something they would have both received in their end-of-year school reports. The flats and retail spaces which the firm—Howard Holdings—owns are currently occupied and let, but at a far lower rate than they could be. The strategy was to increase the yield either through renegotiating contracts with existing tenants or by “blank-slating” them. “Blank-slating,” Glenda informed Lorenzo, was the term her employers had adopted to describe evicting people from their homes or businesses, gutting the buildings and employing a fashionable architect to redesign them from the inside-out. Once this had been achieved, the estate agency for which Glenda works stepped in to do the flogging.

  Glenda is charged with this operation. She wears a uniform made up of a black pencil skirt, a white fitted shirt and a little rayon scarf in the colors of the company tied at her neck like an air stewardess. She sits behind a little desk next to the large, inviting windows at the front of the shop, where dreams of extravagance and domestic bliss are displayed on glossy placards.

  “It’s going okay,” Glenda says, when Lorenzo asks. “I mean, I’m obviously completely incompetent, but the project itself seems to be progressing. And progress is a good thing, right? We’re looking to blank-slate some properties in Soho at the moment, actually. The architect’s already done the sketches.” She shows Lorenzo a picture on her phone.

  They finish their drinks and Lorenzo buys another round. He pays for everything when they go out, being older and, when they met, her senior colleague. When he returns to the table, she asks him if he’s got any auditions coming up. Glenda is relatively new to the world of theater and has not learned that, for an actor, this is quite an annoying question.

  “Ah, no,” replies Lorenzo reluctantly. He lowers his head and grasps the two little paper cocktail straws between his lips and pulls some of the liquid into his mouth.

  “Have you spoken to Joanne about it?” Joanne is the managing director of the talent agency for which Lorenzo works part-time and is also Lorenzo’s agent. “Have you been in contact with Tamzin Chapworth? What has Yolanda said?”

  “Oh, um, no, and nothing much.”

  Glenda fixes Lorenzo with a patronizing look that, in Lorenzo’s view, is not appropriate for a younger and less experienced person to fix on an older and more experienced person.

  “I did speak to Joanne about making more of an effort with TV work,” Lorenzo offers.

  “That’s good. I don’t know why you were so reluctant before.”

  Glenda means well but doesn’t understand his situation as well as she thinks she does. His reasons for being ambivalent about TV work are complex. A few years ago, he was on an episode of a popular spy drama. He played a Radical Islamist. On another occasion, he was on a long-running police procedural and played a Radical Islamist. Lorenzo’s dad came from Sri Lanka and his mum came from Italy, and both were Catholics, but casting directors overlooked these subtleties. It wouldn’t have felt much better to be cast in these roles repeatedly had his heritage been Pakistani Muslim, but somehow the obliviousness of TV executives to who he was and the particularities of his background were especially galling.

  “Joanne did suggest a TV thing to me last week, actually, but I told her I wasn’t interested.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “The show sounded awful. Like, really awful. Not my kind of thing at all.”

  She asks him how he knows this without having yet been to the audition.

  “I just know.” Lorenzo hopes this will be the end of the interrogation.

  “You’re so principled,” she says.

  “Is that a compliment or a criticism, I can’t tell.”

  “In general it’s a compliment, I’ve heard.” Her demeanor becomes more serious. “Really though, I admire you for it. I think it’s very noble. But it’s frustrating seeing all sorts of talentless people on the telly while you sit here with me drinking. I mean, I love that I get to spend time with you in person rather than watching you on a screen, but also there’re lots of great things getting made that I think you should be a part of.”

  “This isn’t going to be one of them, believe me.”

  “But it might lead to further work. It’ll help you make connections.”

  “That’s possible. It would be painful, but possible.”

  She keeps on at him until he promises to attend the audition. The prospect makes him feel queasy. He used to think the constant rejection associated with his chosen career would get easier as he got older. He’s now thirty-three and it’s harder than ever.

  The Archbishop

  Debbie McGee wakes. She creeps from the secluded corner of the damp cellar to the wider room, where her companions sit in an unstructured semicircle; a parody of a mutual-help group. They sit with their backs against the stone walls or slumped forward with heads on knees. They sit on repurposed palettes, rancid mattresses or on the hard floor. Syringes lie around in degrees of decay, rust on their needles and filthy fingerprints on their pistons. Clear acetate bags that were once suppositories can be seen discarded and shit-stained beneath sheets of newspaper and chip-shop wrapping. Silver spoons with scorched bellies glitter in the dust.

  “Blessed be the ground,” says the man they call the Archbishop. “Blessed be the ground beneath our feet. Blessed be the soil that scuffs our skin. Blessed be the earth that holds our fathers’ bones and feeds the worms and bees.”

  “Bees don’t eat earth!” snaps the man they call Paul Daniels.

  “Blessed be the rocks that hold our cities in place. Blessed be the stones that aid the rocks. Blessed be the iron ore. Blessed be the tin. Blessed be the—”

  “What about the magma?” asks Paul Daniels. “There’s magma beneath the rocks and stones, right in the center of the earth. What about blessing the magma?”

  “Blessed be the rivers that cut through the earth. Blessed be the underground lakes and seas. Blessed be the fossils. The ammonites.
The Devil’s Toenails. Blessed be the sleeping dragons that wait beneath this land.”

  The man they call the Archbishop continues in this vein as Debbie McGee crawls across the room and takes her place by her partner. As the Archbishop cants, Paul Daniels continues to mutter about bees and magma, then finds new faults with the Archbishop’s taxonomies and offers his adjustments and interpretations as they arise.

  The Archbishop blesses further elements and compounds, below the ground and above it. He spits as he speaks. He rocks and closes his eyes and turns his head to the ceiling.

  For the first twenty-five years he roamed the streets of Soho, they called him Vicar. His fervent brand of spiritual ejaculation held nothing of the established Church of England but he dressed in black and spoke like the master of a public school. He preached to untold generations of forlorn vagrants. His flock came and went. They entered the city and found succor in its fetid core. Some came for sex. Some came for drugs. Some came for pints and packets of crisps. Some came for jobs. The fortunates came in the evening and left before the dawn. The unfortunates stayed for longer. He preached to them all. But it was the men and women who loitered and lingered, and who were more touched by the sex and the drugs and the liquor and the desperation for vocation, whose attention he drew. He collected these vagabonds. They came to squat with him in his underground palace like dozens had before them. Most who stayed were addicted to something, or half mad, like him. Many remained for years, some for decades, but none stayed as long as him. “You’ll outlive us all, Vicar,” they said.

  After a quarter century of service to his delinquent parishioners he was promoted in their vernacular to the episcopate. His elevation came after his hair and beard, once a living sponge of golden curls, had turned grizzled white. They altered his title to “Bishop” as befitted a man of his age. Nobody could remember whose idea it was.

  The Archbishop had welcomed the change. He was nothing if not vain. He had ridden the wave of adulation and preached more vehemently still. He had donned purple like others of his kind. He had reveled in his false position even more assuredly than before and lauded his status over the residents of his squat.