Hot Stew

by Fiona Mozley

  When the pie is hot through, she takes it over to the kitchen table and begins to eat. Then she hears the floorboards creaking upstairs, the hinges of a door, the flush of a toilet and the turning of a tap on then off. She hears Valerie descend the narrow flight of stairs, then sees her in the doorway in an old burgundy dressing gown that reaches all the way to her ankles. She is wearing thick socks and navy-blue slippers, worn white with age.

  “Oh,” notes the old woman. “It’s you.”

  “We drove up this morning,” Agatha replies. “We were at the races. And afterwards I was occupied.”

  “You’ll sleep here tonight?”

  Agatha nods, her mouth full of pie.

  “You helped yourself, I see. There’s sponge for afters if you want it.”

  “Thank you, but this will do fine.”

  “Is Reg with you?”

  “He had to go out somewhere, but he should be back soon.”

  Valerie shuffles into the room and idly dusts crumbs off the kitchen surfaces into the palm of her hand, then deposits them in a bin. She leans back against a counter, puts her hands in the low pockets of her dressing gown and watches as Agatha eats.

  “You know,” says Agatha to her eldest sister, “I might come and live here all the year round. I only have to be in the city for business and I can do much of it remotely.”

  Valerie makes a noise at the back of her throat which Agatha takes as agreement.

  She goes on, “I could take a more active role in managing the estate. I wouldn’t be taking over from you. You could teach me. If I’m being honest, I have no idea how to run a place like this but I’d like to learn. I think I’d find it fulfilling. We could do it together.”

  “It’s a big old house,” says Valerie. “And you’d be in it all alone. I can’t imagine Reggie up here all year round. He’s a townie through and through. If they cut him open, he’d bleed Thames water.”

  Then the door opens, and Roster walks through it. She didn’t hear the car on the gravel outside, so is startled when he enters without knocking.

  “Radio,” he says. His voice is urgent.

  There is an analogue radio in the corner of Valerie’s kitchen. Agatha goes over to it, but has a hard time working it. She knows most stations she would need are FM but she doesn’t know much beyond that, like what frequencies she needs to tune to. She finds the power switch, flicks it and is met with the crackle of white noise. There are dials on the top, so she swivels them. The white noise fades in and out, shifts pitch, shifts speed. It sounds old-fashioned to her. It is a sound from the past, now a memory; the stuff of junk shops, vintage stores and museums. And what a noise it is. There is nothing like it in the world. It is like the sea on a shingle beach, or the wind on autumn leaves, or a fire cutting through coal, but not like any of those sounds at all.

  Agatha is still fiddling with the radio.

  “I’ll do it,” Roster insists, stepping around her. Valerie goes to wash up Agatha’s plate in the sink.

  As Roster turns the dial, Radio 4 tunes in and out. They catch loose words.

  …

  …

  “London …”

  …

  “Total collapse …”

  …

  Agatha looks at her phone. Nobody has been in touch. The policeman said he would text her to let her know everything had gone according to plan. She looks for the little bars at the top of the screen and sees none. No service. Of course, she would have no service here.

  Roster is still fiddling with the old radio, trying to dial in a better signal. The voice of the newsreader is unclear. More snatches of words, incoherent phrases.

  He turns to her. “I heard more in the car,” he says. “There’s been some sort of disaster in central London. A building has completely collapsed. They don’t know how many people are trapped beneath.”

  “What has that got to do with us?” Valerie asks.

  “Valerie, don’t be difficult. You know very well that all your father’s property is in central London.”

  “And you think it is one of ours?”

  “It is in the West End. And I caught something about a police raid.”

  Agatha looks up at Roster.

  “It might not be—” he says.

  “Yes it is,” Agatha interrupts, curtly. “What else could it be?”

  Roster concedes the point and begins to move quickly out of Valerie’s kitchen. He tells Agatha that he is going back to the big house to collect the rest of her things, then he leaves.

  Of course, he is right. They will have to go back now, and drive through the night, but in this moment, Agatha doesn’t want to move. She is tired. She is tired of it all: the constant movement, the constant struggle. She wants for things to be easy, for once. She wants to be left alone.

  Agatha feels the tears coming before she notices them. She raises a hand and wipes them away, then looks down and sees a smear of black mascara. She lowers her head so her eyes can’t be seen, but the tears instead fall to the kitchen table. A couple drop onto the wood and soak in. She catches more with the sleeve of her woolen jumper.

  Valerie asks Agatha a question, but Agatha is unable to answer. If she had answered, her voice would have faltered. Valerie turns around to ask again, then sees the tears, then returns to the washing up. “That’s no use to anyone,” she says quietly.

  A Vision

  Richard Scarcroft is sitting alone in Soho Square. He left the Archbishop’s group a couple of weeks ago, which he is now regretting. The weather is getting colder, and it has become difficult to find night-time shelter, or a cozy space to sit during the day. He is wishing he had found the patience to put up with that lot for just a little while longer, at least until after Christmas.

  Richard has parked himself on a bench to be up off the cold ground and he has wrapped himself in a blanket and a thin sleeping bag. A couple of disassembled cardboard boxes provide further insulation, and the winter coat he got from the army is at least thick and warm, and his leather boots keep out the damp. He is no longer clean-shaven but has grown a thick beard. It ages him. When he catches sight of himself in shop windows he hardly recognizes himself. He looks at least ten years older, maybe more. He looks like his father, or his father’s father. There are wiry gray hairs among the smooth brown ones. He wonders whether it is the street that has done this to him or if it is just the natural aging process. He cradles a paper cup containing hot tea. A cycle courier popped up from behind him earlier and handed it to him with a smile and a couple of words of greeting, and he then got back onto his fixed-gear bike and rode away, gliding as smoothly as a swan in flight, along the paths that intersect Soho Square, out through the open iron gate, towards Oxford Street and out of sight.

  Richard holds the cup of tea close to his chest and declines his head so the steam rises and condenses onto his face. He breathes it in like a summer’s day, and feels the heat warm the inside of his nose and then all the way to the back of his throat. He takes a sip too soon. The boiled liquid burns the tip of his tongue but he doesn’t care. He will take the burn with him throughout the cold night. He will feel it, numb like a stubbed toe, and taste it, bitter and sweet like cold iron, and be reminded of that cup of tea. It is proof.

  The interaction with the cycle courier has also left a mark, like a warm thumbprint in cold clay. An act of kindness, a smile, a nod, some eye contact, the recognition of Richard as a fellow human being.

  Richard hears the screaming but is reluctant to give up his bench and walk towards it. Something tells him it will be trouble. Whenever in his life he has heard a man shout and a woman scream, it has meant something bad is happening. It’s not that Richard doesn’t care; he just has so little of himself left to give.

  Then the rumbling begins. He hears the building collapse—an all-too-familiar sound—but he hears no bomb. Though surely there was a bomb. There must have been a bomb.

  This time, he does go. An explosion requires military experience. He has not
forgotten.

  The gates of the square have been locked, but he scales them easily, and runs to the beginning of the cloud of brown dust, which hangs in the air, illuminated by the streetlights, eerily suspended, as if entirely free from the constraints of time and gravity. He cannot look past it, through it, to see what has actually happened. People are emerging, coughing, spluttering. The first person is a woman in her underwear: a black, lacy bra and knicker set. Her face and hair are covered in a thick layer of the dust, making her look like a petrified Pompeiian. Her hands are bound in front of her in handcuffs. She is running barefoot down the street, and she keeps looking over her shoulder, as if worried she is being followed. Then there is a man. He is entirely naked, and also covered in the dust. Richard thinks he recognizes him from somewhere—maybe from the telly. Then there are other people: most fully clothed, some of them look like the usual drunk party people you would see spilling from clubs at this time of night. They are wearing expensive suits and dresses, now ruined. Many of the women are struggling to run in high heels. Some take them off. Some of them fall over, then pick themselves up and keep running.

  Richard tries to flag someone down to find out what is going on. He spots a woman who is fully naked, her hands also bound. She is running at full pelt towards him.

  “Are you okay?” he shouts in her direction. He doesn’t expect her to stop. She seems totally unfazed by her nakedness.

  To his surprise, she does stop and speaks to him. He asks her what has happened.

  “Earthquake, or something. I’ve no idea. Some massive hole just appeared in the ground, and the building went right in. I just ran. I don’t think there was any of us lot still in there, but maybe some police. Fuck knows.” Then she runs off.

  Richard continues. The dust is beginning to settle. As he closes in on the scene, he sees police standing around. Nobody seems to be doing anything at all helpful. Everyone and everything is covered in the dust. The old brothel is in ruins. It was one of the old Soho buildings that was always a bit crooked. Now Richard can see doors, and bedposts, and timber beams poking up out of the wreckage. Beyond the wreckage, there is a gaping hole.

  Then he sees her, walking up through the dust, illuminated from behind. He recognizes her instantly although is startled by the sight. Her face has been on posters across the capital and she has been at the center of his thoughts too. He never really spoke to her much, never really knew her, never really knew if she was in any sense knowable. The face he saw on the posters—fresh, happy, identifiable—was different from the face he knew in real life—gaunt, frail, invisible. The face he sees now, just there emerging from the dust, is similar to the idealized version from the publicity campaign. She looks renewed. Her skin is bright and shining. Her hair has been washed and brushed, she is standing straight and tall, as if she has grown into her own representation.

  Spring

  Spectral Dust

  Lorenzo stands on his tiptoes. There is a gap in the hoardings above his eye level and if he straightens his back and raises himself up onto the balls of his feet, he can see through to the crater. He catches sight of some ancient-looking timbers sticking up from the churned ground like the ribs of a beached whale, black now from years of smog, and a small yellow digger propped up on its chains at the edge of the recess, the teeth of its bucket set into the soil. The air still feels thick with dust, three months later. Lorenzo doesn’t know if it’s really there, or if it’s just that he can feel it because of all the stories he’s heard. Apparently, the fug took weeks to settle. When the building fell, a cloud surged high into the air and hung defiantly, as if it had phantasmal agency, lingering as a grim warning; a specter of the building that had stood on that spot for centuries.

  Like everyone else, he first saw the images of the collapse the morning after it happened. Camera crews from all the major news channels set themselves up on the street outside the exclusion zone and streamed live footage of the rescue efforts. Lorenzo watched on his phone from his rented cottage near the film studio as fire crews and paramedics rushed around in protective clothing, their faces obscured by the breathing apparatus it was necessary for them to wear. The news channels sent their main anchors to the scene and they delivered the rest of the day’s news while on location, panning back to the Soho street when there were pressing updates.

  Lorenzo’s mum phoned him from her new house in Essex as soon as she heard the news on the radio. Lorenzo wasn’t able to get away—the producers had a long list of shots they needed to get done before cast and crew departed for Christmas—so his mum said she’d pop to town and check on the flat. The flat wasn’t particularly close to the site of the sinkhole, but it made sense that one of them went to check on the place, just in case. Maria also had lots of friends still in the area and was anxious to make sure they weren’t hurt.

  Lorenzo and Maria continued to exchange texts while she was on the train to Liverpool Street, and she kept sending him links to the video clips from the scene and other updates, even though he had access to exactly the same online media sources as she did. She texted him again when she arrived at her old flat:

  Flat fine. Bit messy. X

  Lorenzo received this while waiting at the side of the set between takes, and he put his phone away in irritation. The flat was fine. It was perfectly clean. He had left in a bit of a hurry and hadn’t sorted out the sitting room as well as he maybe should have, but it wasn’t as if he’d left dirty dishes in the kitchen before making the journey north. The next time he checked his phone, he saw that his mum had sent another text:

  It looks like a warzone.

  Lorenzo assumed this was from the scene itself. When he got a minute to himself, he gave her a call. She told him there was dust across the whole district, and the closer you got to the old walk-up, the harder it was to breathe. It was all over the pavement, on lampposts, windowsills, on top of postboxes, benches, vans, cars and in the air. A huge cloud of brown-gray dust just hung there, as if it was solid. It didn’t fall to the ground as quickly as she expected.

  Lorenzo went straight to his parents’ house in Essex for Christmas. He changed trains in London on Christmas Eve, getting off at King’s Cross, taking the Circle Line to Liverpool Street, and then getting the train on to Clacton-on-Sea. It would have been easy enough to stop off in Soho, but he didn’t. At the time, he told himself it was because the rail network, and London itself, was so busy, and if he missed any of his connections he might not be able to get to his parents’ house for Christmas at all, which would have been upsetting. He thinks now that it was because he wasn’t ready to see it. He hadn’t had the news about Robert then, but he feared the worst without being able to articulate why. He always suspected Robert spent time at the walk-ups, and it seemed more than likely after what he’d told Lorenzo about his past.

  Lorenzo returned to London a couple of days ago. The last week of filming was frantic. Everyone on set was stressed, tired, overworked, and even people who were otherwise perfectly friendly went around shouting at each other. The show wrapped a month late. Lorenzo had intended to go on holiday afterwards, and had booked flights to Majorca, but was forced to cancel them once the necessity of staying on at the studio became apparent.

  The first couple of days being back in London, Lorenzo mooched around his flat. Everything looked and felt and smelt different. His mum had obviously forgotten to shut one of the windows before she left and a pigeon had wandered in and laid a single egg in his underpants drawer. He found it when he went around vacuuming the carpets and dusting the surfaces. At first it seemed so surreal he couldn’t quite make out what it was. It sat there, the size of a walnut and the color of full-fat milk, so simple and perfect. For a second it looked to him like a brand-new creation, as if he’d made a miraculous discovery: a divine teardrop, frozen solid on descent. After the surprise passed, he saw it for what it was and had to laugh, at the thought of his own confusion, at the thought of the pigeon herself waddling in here, full of egg, gently squattin
g over his socks and boxer shorts, laying then leaving. He wondered if the pigeon had tried to incubate her creation at all or whether it was just a hit and run.

  This evening marks the first time he has returned to the Aphra Behn since being back. It has changed. The Behn used to be a traditional pub. The color palette was brown and burgundy, and the walls were covered in wood paneling that matched the bar and the furniture: oak polished with a dark walnut tinted varnish. The walls were decorated with old prints and ornate mirrors advertising defunct breweries. The area directly around the bar had wooden floorboards, likewise tinted and polished, but further back, where there were low tables and chairs there had been a fitted carpet, happily threadbare enough to obscure what had been a particularly vile pattern.

  Now, there are exposed brick walls and the place is decorated with slogans, inscribed on framed posters, around the borders of the new menus, on metal plates hung on the wall above the bar. There are motivational slogans, weird puns, fake antique advertising posters to replace the real antique advertising posters. The TV in the top corner above the bar has doubled in size and next to it is a list of live sports events that will be showing over the next few weeks.

  It isn’t Lorenzo’s kind of place anymore. He stops outside and looks in through the window. There’s no sign of Sheila. She would usually be here, guarding the door, leaning against the cracked paint of the exterior walls. The cracked paint of the exterior walls is no longer cracked, or rather it is no longer there. It has been covered with a new color. It used to be a postbox red. It is now somewhere between gray and navy. It is stylish and joyless; elegant in a deliberately masculine sort of way.