Hot Stew

by Fiona Mozley

  He pulls the boxers down and stands naked in front of her.

  His body is exactly as she hoped it would be.

  His stupid grin re-emerges.

  She realizes she finds it obnoxious and alluring, and alluring because it is obnoxious, and obnoxious because it is alluring.

  He steps over the rim of the bath and drops his foot into the water. There is no grace in his movement, but Agatha isn’t looking for grace.

  The lad washes himself. For the most part his method is practical, efficient, but on occasions he remembers why he’s been brought here and he affects a sensual air, leaning back or stretching or flexing muscles in a way he obviously thinks is seductive. Agatha would have found it embarrassing if he wasn’t so physically attractive, and if she wasn’t so truly turned on.

  He gets out of the bath and steps into a towel she holds out for him.

  Agatha leads him into her bedroom, which is connected to the bathroom by a short corridor with clothes rails on either side. She instructs him to climb onto the bed. He does. She takes hold of his wrists and draws them above his head, then proceeds to fasten them to the bedposts with a pair of leather belts.

  “Kinky,” he says, mundanely.

  She takes a handkerchief from the bedside table and stuffs it inside his mouth so he cannot speak. Then she takes another and uses it to blindfold him.

  “I won’t hurt you,” she says. “It is simply that I do not like to be touched, or spoken to or looked at. So, here is what is going to happen. I am going to go down on you. Then I am going to climb on top of you and fuck you, then I am going to leave. You won’t see me again. Roster will come in and untie you and show you out.”

  Agatha slowly undresses and folds her clothes onto a chair at the side of the room. She returns to the bed and places her left hand on his chest. She runs her hand down his body. It is fresh and new and beautiful.

  Coup d’état

  Soho is a word with no etymology. It sprang to life through declaration, like um … or oy!

  The Archbishop is the same.

  It is said he was born in a little hut in the woods, long before the trees were cleared for pasture, long before the pasture was cleared for houses, long before the houses were divided into flats. The Archbishop has stories of the first speculators who built tenements on the Lammas Land, where the poor folk hung laundry, and grazed their animals come August. It was said he started out as a gravedigger and was seen to hang around the churchyard. “There are bodies beneath the ground. There are bodies all around.” He points. “There. There. There.” He speaks of the plague as if he remembers it. He tells them how they thought animals spread disease so they slaughtered them. The bodies of dogs and cats were piled high; food for the rats they used to chase away. His topics of conversation change as quickly as his moods. “Lord Nelson was here the last night he ever spent on dry land. Came up to Soho to visit his coffin maker. I knew him personally, of course. I could have been with him on that ship.” The Archbishop tells people he went to the same parties as the real-life Casanova and that he remembered the square of land they now call Soho Square when it was trampled by hundreds of aristocrats, who drank and danced until the sun grew hot and the wine and beer and sweat grew stale. The Archbishop tells all who will listen that Casanova stole all his stories of seduction from him because he was too dignified to write them down. He was once a town crier, or so he says. He was once a roaming troubadour, or so he says. He posed for Joshua Reynolds. He posed for Francis Bacon. He gave Karl Marx all his best ideas and had long drinking sessions with him in his flat on Dean Street. He has been known to go out onto the street and flag down passers-by. He takes people on tours, from the Pillars of Hercules on Greek Street to the statue of Anteros in Piccadilly Circus. “He is the god of requited love,” the Archbishop tells all who will listen. “The brother of Eros. Eros creates a desire that is unfilled; Anteros gives us the antidote.”

  The Archbishop sits in his cellar, where he always sits, where he has always sat. Over the centuries the buildings around have been torn down and rebuilt, but this one has endured. The cellars are original, dug into the earth with bare rock for floor, bricks and timbers propping up the walls. He is a hoarder. He has filled his space with artifacts. He has kept every pair of shoes he has ever owned. They are laid out next to each other in chronological order, the toes and heels scuffed, the laces snapped, the soles worn away. He has collected items dropped on the street: single gloves, umbrellas, tasteful, minimalist business cards, sunglasses, receipts, maps, bottle tops, curious coins, foreign banknotes. He has brought them back to his cellar and arranged them like precious artifacts in a museum, displayed on shelves and tabletops with little labels relating their provenance. He has a nail from the nail bomb that was let off in the Admiral Duncan pub on 30 April 1999. He has snail shells, discarded by the restaurant above. He has boxes of dead media. There are vinyl records, CDs, old 78s, film negatives in small, medium and large formats, plate-glass prints. And he has books, collected from the bookshops and newsagents that have shut their doors. They are stacked in boxes in no logical order: poetry abuts porn.

  Some of his disciples are around him. Paul Daniels comes in.

  The man they call Paul Daniels is fuming. His rage has been building for months. He has always been an emotional man, with whirling, tumultuous thoughts. His schemes and ideas in these last months have gathered a kind of physical presence he can almost touch. It is as if, with Debbie McGee gone, his thoughts and feelings have taken on her weight; the place she used to occupy. Only they are louder and more aggressive than his woman ever was. They tug and pull at him and obscure his senses.

  Paul Daniels stands in front of the Archbishop and lifts a long index finger in his direction.

  “I have come to claim my crown.”

  The Archbishop gets up to face his challenger. He shakes his garments. He draws himself up to his full height. Usually frail, he now looks strong. “The crown is on my head. And that is where it will stay.”

  “It’s mine,” Paul Daniels protests. “I found it. I pulled it from the earth. It yielded to me.”

  “I am the lord of this manor. I am the ocean to which all rivers lead. If gold is found, I shall have it.”

  “You’re a thief. You would have nothing if it wasn’t for us.”

  There are murmurs of accord from the gathered crowd, but when the Archbishop spins around as if to confront those whose voices he heard, they lower their eyes.

  The man they call Paul Daniels speaks again. “You’ve had your time. We want change.” It is unclear whether he speaks for anyone else in the room, but Paul Daniels, at least, lunges forward and pushes the old man to the ground. The Archbishop puts one hand out to break his fall and the other up to his head to hold onto the crown. He hits the earth. A crunch of brittle bones breaking rings out through the cellar. A shelf is knocked, and decades of tat come tumbling down.

  Paul Daniels reaches down for the crown, but the Archbishop is not yet defeated. He kicks out with both legs and brings his adversary to the ground with him. They grapple. Hands are pressed to throats; fingers are pressed into eyes. The man they call Paul Daniels uses his teeth. The man they call the Archbishop makes the most of his long, sharp fingernails. Blood is drawn. Paul Daniels is above his adversary, bearing down. He pulls the crown from the prelate’s head but sacrifices his position to do so. The Archbishop grabs at the magician’s throat and squeezes. Then Paul Daniels pulls back, spluttering, but rolling on the floor. The Archbishop has the advantage.

  At first, the crowd stands to watch the men wrestle. Then they begin to drift away. The Archbishop and Paul Daniels are left to the room, and the crown, and the battle which shows no signs of concluding.

  Last Night Stand

  Precious will never get used to the long nights. When she moved to London, it wasn’t the damp that shocked her, or the cold. She was expecting those things. Those are the things everyone warns you about on this island. It was the dark. When she use
d to visit with her family as a girl, it was always in summer. When she moved here, she arrived in May, when everything was bright and fresh. But then the light left. She couldn’t believe it when November came. She didn’t initially notice there was less daytime, and then she saw that she was going to work in the dark and coming home in the dark too. And then December came and it was even worse.

  Precious is standing by the window, looking out onto the street. It is dark. It is the shortest day. It is the longest night. The streetlights are glowing. Some of the bulbs are the old yellow type that have shone against the Soho night for decades, once novel, now dated. Others have been replaced with bright white LEDs. Precious dislikes the new color. It makes visible that which should, at night, remain invisible. It illuminates the city’s wrinkles, like an aging starlet betrayed by an unexpected camera flash. The pavement shines. Puddles reflect the light, each droplet a tiny star.

  Some men across the street are unloading a drum kit from the back of a white van and carrying it to a bar at the end of the road. One of the men stacks a couple of cymbals precariously on top of the kick drum and lifts them all into the air. She watches as the cymbals begin to slide and hears the jarring scrape of the brass against the rim of the drum. The man spots them falling and reaches out to catch one, dropping the kick drum onto his foot. He manages to halt the cymbal’s descent, but the other, the larger of the two, hits the pavement with a sharp edge, rolls off the curb with a clatter, and along the road in a decreasing spiral, the ringing sound becoming higher and higher in pitch.

  Later, when she remembers her last night in Soho, this is the image she will recall.

  Men in uniforms arrive in the middle of the night. Precious isn’t working. She finished a couple of hours ago and is watching a true-crime series on Netflix. She’s engrossed by the real-life events, the ordinary people caught up in the debacle, the slow unfolding of the mystery, the injustices at the heart of the case. She ordered a food delivery and it has just arrived. The skinny lad stands outside her door in cycling shorts and a light-blue waterproof jacket. He’s rummaging in his bag for her vegetable biryani. She is already on her phone, giving his service a five-star review, deciding how much to tip. It is important to support people like him, she thinks. It must be a difficult life. She would tip a waiter in a restaurant at least ten percent of the total bill, if not closer to fifteen, so why not this boy. He rushes around the city in the middle of the night to scratch a living, and he is younger than her sons.

  When she first hears the banging, it sounds very far away. It is a noisy neighborhood and anyone who lives in Soho must quickly learn to organize sounds into layers of importance and proximity. The sound is that of metal banging against wood and is most likely someone throwing beer barrels into a cellar, or empty crates out into the street. Precious is not even fully aware of the commotion. It is something her brain easily blocks out. Then there is shouting. Again, this could be anything at all: drunks being kicked out of a club; someone getting into a fight in the next street.

  The boy pulls out a plastic bag containing her food and holds it out to her. Precious puts her phone back into her pocket, smiles at the boy, and takes hold of the bag.

  “Fuck these fucking fuckers,” says Tabitha between her teeth. She rushes over to the door and slams it in the lad’s face. As it swings shut, Precious catches a last glimpse of his puzzled expression, hand still stretched out in front of him. He has no idea what is going on. Precious doesn’t know either.

  “It’s a fucking raid, the fucking bastards,” Tabitha explains. She begins to dash around the bedroom, gathering items that might serve them well in any number of given circumstances, then changing her mind about what those circumstances might be and dropping the items onto the floor. “They are not getting their hands on you. They are not getting their hands on you. My god, if there’s one thing I hate on this earth it’s the fucking pigs.” Tabitha takes hold of the bedpost and tries to drag it. The bed is too heavy so she abandons the attempt and rushes over to the wardrobe, which is closer to the door. She shoves it with all the strength she can muster and it tumbles to the floor, blocking the entrance. Then she takes other items of furniture and begins to pile them on top of the wardrobe. She takes the drawers out of the bedside table then picks it up and places it on top, then adds the drawers themselves with their heavy contents. She has apparently forgotten about her bad shoulder. As she rearranges the room, Tabitha herself is transformed. As she builds the barricade, the years appear to fall off her. All of the energy she has ever possessed in her long life comes rushing back, from the past into the present, as if a collection of younger selves has gathered and come to the aid of their senior version.

  Then Precious begins to hear the noise for what it is. The banging is coming from the bottom of the building, way down at street level. There is a slow, repetitive thud, again and again, and then there is the sound of ripping and splintering, as a way is forced through the thick wooden door.

  Now the shouting comes from within the building itself, and she hears dogs beginning to bark. Two, maybe three. Big dogs with deep barks mean strong jaws, long teeth.

  Precious stands, transfixed. She doesn’t know what to do. She feels suddenly incompetent, something she’s never felt in her life before. It’s as if all she has in this world are the clothes she’s wearing and the plastic bag containing the box of biryani she’s holding in her hands. Everything she’s able to reach out and touch feels suddenly very close. Anything she can’t reach out and touch feels very far away. The rest of the world, outside these walls, is remote. She hears the shouting from downstairs. Shouting and screaming.

  Precious runs to the window and looks out.

  The men behind the masks aren’t men. They are a natural disaster: a hurricane, a flood. There’s no reasoning with them. They cannot operate any of their human faculties. They are robots, cyborgs, automata. Tabitha once told Precious a story about her past, when she was still living in Leeds. The police picked a bunch of prostitutes up off the street then took them back to the cells and raped them. Precious knows not all policemen are the same. But, in those masks, they all look the same.

  Tabitha is pulling at her arm; pulling at her jumper. Tabitha knows what to do. Tabitha’s seen it all. She’s been there, done that.

  “Come on, Precious, come on. I won’t lose you. I won’t fucking lose you.”

  Tabitha is crying. Precious has never seen Tabitha cry.

  “I’m not going to prison and neither are you. Come the fuck on.”

  Tabitha takes hold of Precious and steers her towards the fire escape. They step out onto it together and at Tabitha’s insistence they begin to climb. Both women are in their dressing gowns. Precious owns two dressing gowns. One is made of silk. It is black with red trim and reaches to the middle of her thigh. She wears this when entertaining clients. The other is made of a purple fleecy material and reaches below her knees. She wears this one when she is with Tabitha or alone. Thankfully, this evening she is wearing the purple dressing gown. As Precious follows Tabitha up the steps to the roof she begins to shiver. She pulls the dressing gown tighter around her body. Her feet are bare save for some flimsy slippers that cover her toes but leave her heels exposed. The cold wind wraps her ankles.

  From the building they have left, Precious can hear banging and shouting and furniture being thrown.

  They get to the top of the fire escape and step out onto the flat roof. Up high, the wind is even stronger and colder. It blows through their dressing gowns and pajamas. Precious takes small comfort in the garden. She is standing with her rose plant, her herbs, the evergreens, but comes to the sad realization that this is quite possibly the last time she will see any of them. She hopes they won’t be destroyed. It wouldn’t matter to anyone else; they are only plants. But she put them there herself, and she has cared for them for years. She can see a slug on the rose right now, the cheeky bastard. It seems to be feasting on the leaf mulch she placed at the base, but it will soon m
ake its way up the woody stem and begin feasting on the plant itself.

  Precious moves towards the edge of the roof and looks down. She can see people being dragged out of the building. Some of the girls were working. She can see naked bodies being thrown onto the street. Girls in underwear, shivering as they are shoved into police vans. Men too, cowering in the cold beneath the stark lamplight.

  She can see the dogs now, as well as hear them. Huge German Shepherds and Dobermans, up on their hind legs, pulling on their leads furiously, jaws gnashing.

  She has known dogs. That sort only have love for their handlers and they will perform whatever task is asked of them. Right now they are being held back, but they are pulling with all their strength to be free, and if any of those police officers let go of the rope, they would be on their victims, tearing them apart.

  “Why did they bring the dogs?” Precious mutters.

  It was a vaguely rhetorical question but Tabitha responds anyway. “They’ll be searching for drugs, or firearms.”

  Precious looks down again. Some of the Archbishop’s disciples have begun to come out of the cellar. She doesn’t know if the police even went down there or whether the vagrants just came crawling out on hearing the commotion, like worms at the sound of stamping feet. They hear the thumping, think it might be something good, then come up to the surface to see, only to get stamped on or run over or pulled from the earth by hungry blackbirds and fed to a nest of squawking chicks.