by Fiona Mozley
He feels sad, kind of hollow. He has lived in this neighborhood his whole life and has been coming to the Aphra Behn since he was first able to pass for eighteen. He steps inside. The worn, stone step is still the same. It still has its little sunken pocket in the middle that is just the right size to accommodate his foot.
Lorenzo doesn’t recognize either of the bar staff but they seem broadly in keeping with those here before. He is about to order a pint of something cold and generic when he notices the taps have changed and, accordingly, the beers too.
Lorenzo thinks of Glenda. She moved back home to her parents’ house a couple of months ago, just before Christmas. She seems happier. She has sent him photos of dinners her mum has cooked and loaves of bread her dad has baked. Glenda’s mum is a notoriously good cook and Glenda’s dad is a notoriously good baker. Lorenzo hopes she has put on a bit of weight. He will be seeing her tonight. She is visiting and staying with her friend Bastian in his new flat. Bastian’s girlfriend, Laura, will be there too. They are all going out for dinner at a fashionable restaurant Lorenzo has chosen.
Lorenzo’s phone vibrates. It is lying face down on the table so he turns it over. He has received a text from Eddie Kettering, only when Eddie Kettering put his number in Lorenzo’s phone, he entered it under the name Dikie Detergent, which is an anagram of Eddie Kettering. This is what has flashed up.
Lorenzo opens the message.
Hey. You back in London yet?
Lorenzo ignores him and turns his phone back over. He doesn’t want to see Eddie but he realizes that if he has a couple more pints, he’ll probably end up replying anyway and meeting up with him and possibly having sex. In the last couple of months of filming, Lorenzo and Eddie had a casual thing going that neither of them, Lorenzo least of all, had any desire to give a name to. They simply sometimes went to each other’s dressing rooms and had fast, fumbled sex. There was no discussion or analysis, which is how Lorenzo wanted it to remain. Eddie is hot, but Lorenzo finds him irritating and juvenile and has no wish to form an emotional attachment. Besides, Eddie is engaged to a stylish socialite called Miranda Billing. Lorenzo concedes that there might be some kind of moral issue here that he might have to think about at some point, but it isn’t a pressing matter and much more Eddie’s problem than his.
On a more positive note, Eddie had actually given Lorenzo some good ideas. On one occasion, they were hanging out on set and Lorenzo made an idle comment about being disillusioned with acting, largely because of the parts he found himself being put forward for. Eddie suggested that he start writing his own material—plays or screenplays.
Lorenzo has brought a notebook with him to the pub. He gets it out of his satchel along with a couple of pens and a pair of headphones. He puts the headphones on and plugs the cable into his phone, then scrolls through his music until he arrives at some slow, soothing electronica. Next, Lorenzo opens the notebook. It is more expensive that it needs to be, but Lorenzo appreciates quality paper: he appreciates quality in most things. Details matter. He clicks his ballpoint pen and puts it to the page. He will write a play. He wants it to be subtle, sophisticated, cerebral. He doesn’t want it to be gaudy or melodramatic. Big ideas, big themes, but told through small, everyday interactions.
He begins. He sips lager and sits back in his chair to think. He pays closer attention to the music coming through his headphones. He watches the new pub patrons, and wonders about their lives. He feels irritated by how much the Behn has changed, and resolves never to come here again, although he knows he probably will, that he’ll learn to put up with the changes and then he will forget about them, and forget how the pub used to be and forget about the people who used to come here. He practices his signature a couple of times, then writes out all the letters of the alphabet in upper and lower case. He draws a series of concentric circles. He sips his lager. He fiddles with his phone. He admires his elegant stationery.
Later in the afternoon, he gets up and puts his writing materials back in his satchel. He notices that his ballpoint pen has gone through the page and left a cobweb of scratched graffiti on the veneer tabletop. Feeling quietly satisfied by this result, and not at all guilty for defacing the new furniture, Lorenzo leaves, and wanders slowly back to his flat.
Hanging Carcasses
She stands among hanging carcasses. Each pig has its own meat hook and is wrapped in plastic. The heads have been removed and taken to a different part of the kitchen, where they will be boiled and stripped and turned into sausages and terrines. Beneath the plastic, the pigs appear white, pallid. Their legs are splayed. The posture looks uncomfortable but then she remembers the pigs are dead. She is to chop them into sections, trim the skin and sinew. A few still have their heads attached. These animals are to be spit-roasted. It is one of Cheryl’s jobs to take the long, thin spit and thrust it the length of the animal.
Cheryl is stronger than she looks. Though small and wiry, she is able to carry objects that are up to four times as large as her. She lifts the pigs so easily that the burly men with whom she works feel a kind of strange jealousy, but also a deep-seated revulsion. Cheryl is hyper-productive. Her productivity alarms her colleagues.
“Stop,” her supervisor said to her one day. “You’ve butchered too many pigs. We don’t need this many.”
She got the job through her social worker. The restaurant is committed to “turning people’s lives around” so they give apprenticeships to people who’ve just got out of prison, got clean, or have otherwise been down and out. The restaurant sources its meat from the local, pop-up farm that has been set up in Soho Square. It’s currently full of pigs that are slaughtered and then brought to this restaurant for butchering.
That’s Cheryl’s job. She has begun an NVQ in butchery. She is learning to hack and carve and mince. She is learning about the qualities of different cuts, the texture, the cooking time, the price. She is learning how to saw through bone; how to cure. She enjoys using the cleaver best of all. She likes the weight of it in her right hand, and the way the weight shifts as she lifts it up to shoulder height then throws the steel onto the chopping block, right through whatever lies on top.
She and Richard Scarcroft are getting a flat together. The council are helping them. After everything that happened with her disappearance, she’s been pushed to the top of the waiting list.
Cheryl finishes with her allotted quota of pig carcasses and goes to another part of the kitchen to help peel potatoes. Strictly speaking, this isn’t part of her job, but her social worker is always going on about how good it is to learn new skills.
When Cheryl was underground, she read all about how important it was to have a diverse employment portfolio. Cheryl is a productive member of society now. She keeps telling Richard how to become a productive member of society too, and then he says something back about the capitalist-military machine, and about how they should move to the countryside and grow their own vegetables, and then Cheryl says something back about compound interest, and then the conversation is over.
Cheryl has regular appointments with her social worker, whose name is Miriam. Miriam asks Cheryl questions about her life, about what things were like for her growing up, and about her emotions. She also gives her practical advice, and showed her how to register for a doctor, and how to fill out online forms.
After she came back, the police kept asking her strange questions about where she’d been. They all seemed kind of angry that she had come back, as if it was really important to them all that she stayed missing. In fairness, they had lost many of their colleagues the night she returned, so their upset was understandable. Though Kevin (aka Paul Daniels) died too, and the Archbishop, so it’s not as if all the losses were on their side. Cheryl had to go and identify the bodies. It was horrible. They were both covered in bruises, and there were cuts everywhere. The Archbishop had had half his face smashed in and all of Kevin’s teeth had been knocked out.
One police officer, called Jackie, seemed nice enough, and came to
see her afterwards. She brought a box of items that had been found on Kevin’s person. “He had no next of kin,” Jackie explained, “but I thought a couple of these things might have, I don’t know, sentimental value for you, and there would be no harm in seeing if you wanted any of them.” From the box, Jackie pulled old packs of cards, handkerchiefs and magic wands. Cheryl shook her head at the sight of each item, until Jackie pulled out the crown, and Cheryl reached out and took it from her.
“This was mine anyway,” she said.
Jackie smiled. “I’d assumed it was part of his costume. For when he did his performances.”
“No,” Cheryl replied. “I found it in the ground.”
“Well, anyway, forensics reckoned it might be over fifty years old. You should see if it was worn by anyone famous. You know, Laurence Olivier or someone. There are so many theaters around here, you never know. That kind of memorabilia can be worth something.”
Packing
Agatha packs her things into a matching set of suitcases. Roster is already waiting by the car, which is parked on the street. Fedor is sitting up on his haunches on the back seat with his long head hanging out the open window. He watches as she comes down the steps with her largest suitcase and runs back up for the second and the third while Roster lifts them into the boot. The sun is bright. There is morning dew on everything that is cold: the iron railings outside Agatha’s house, the windowpanes, the chrome hubcaps of the large, expensive cars parked all along the street. There are a few people around—a postman across the road; a man hoisted into the air by an elaborate apparatus to clean the top floor windows of the house a couple of doors along. He spills soapy water from his bucket onto the ground below and the suds forge slow streams across the pavement into the gutter then along the downward tilt to the sewer grate. Once the suitcases are in the boot, Roster shuts it then walks around the car to open one of the rear doors. Agatha slips in beside Fedor. The dog places his head in her lap.
Most of the morning newspapers led with the story. Agatha was given a small amount of forewarning. A couple of investigative journalists asked her to comment, which she declined to do. She tried to phone Michael Warbeck, who has resigned his position in the police and publicly announced his candidacy for mayor. She was told he was unavailable. She tried a second time and was met with the same response. She was too proud to make a third attempt. Her relationship with Warbeck had been strained since the fiasco at the brothel, for which he unfairly blamed her. She, in turn, quite rightly blames him for his poor handling of the raid. The whole escapade was badly planned from the beginning, in her view. And now, because of these headlines, he is refusing to speak to her at all, despite the generous donations she has made to his campaign fund, both in cash and in kind.
Agatha suspects Roster thinks she is overreacting. She tells him so when he climbs into the driver’s seat.
“I have no such thoughts. It’s not my business to have thoughts of that kind.”
“I know it’s not your business but I also happen to know you have them anyway.”
“I do not. I drive you where you need to go, and I don’t do anything more than that. If you want to go to the docks, I’ll take you to the docks.”
He would also come with her on the yacht, she knew. He had his own cabin, between the skipper’s and the rest of the crew, and he had personal items on board at all times, just as she did.
She will give evidence at the public inquiry into the collapse of the building, as has been requested of her. And then she will get out. She will not only leave this decrepit, stewing city, she will leave the country.
Since the collapse, the press has taken an interest in all aspects of her life and business, in a way that is utterly invasive. She is not a public figure, has never sought to be one, and does not deserve the treatment she has received. Reporters have looked into her holdings and her finances; anything they’ve been able to get their hands on, legitimately or illegitimately, and they have printed stories about her wealth, about her father, about the properties she owns. Anyone with half a brain should realize the incident was an act of god; a sinkhole is an aberration, an uncontrollable geological phenomenon. It can’t be her job, as a landlord, to monitor subterranean rumblings. And if anyone could be blamed, it is surely the police, who ran into a seventeenth-century building with battering rams, full body armor and steel-capped boots, with no thought for the integrity of the place. Yet, because a number of those men were killed, nobody feels able to put any of the blame on them, so Agatha has become the villain. Her name has somehow become synonymous with all that is wrong with the city. She has received rape threats from perfect strangers.
Now, the press has unearthed information about illegal immigrants in one of her clubs, and many of the morning papers have led with the story, even though, by rights, the discovery of squatters should be a non-event.
“How the bloody hell was I supposed to know? Am I expected to monitor everything that goes on in those buildings? It’s a witch hunt.”
Roster agrees that it is extremely unfair.
Those people had nothing to do with her. All those clubs operated independently. One of the managers had obviously tried to save a bit of money and get in some workers without proper papers.
“Do you think Tobias knew?”
“I have no idea, but that man has always acted in his own interests. If he did know, and he thought there was something he could get out of the telling, then he would have done it.”
“It would explain why he’s ditched us, the ungrateful piece of shit. He probably wanted to save his own neck. I wouldn’t be surprised to discover he’s in it with Warbeck.”
The traffic is heavy. It is the time of day when the backstreets are lined with delivery vans, parked with two wheels up on the pavement. People in overalls carry boxes into restaurants. They run across the road with their hands full and pop out from behind vans.
“They think they can run out into the street without looking and expect other people to fall over themselves to accommodate them,” Agatha says to Roster. “One of these days, someone is going to plow right into them. It’s the road, for god’s sake. Roads are for cars.”
Roster honks his horn, then honks it again, then holds his hand down on the center of the steering wheel, and the horn rings out in a long, sonorous semibreve.
Her sisters have threatened to turn up to the inquiry today and accost her in person. It’s the last thing she needs, especially if the press is there to see it. One of them—Chelsea—gave information about her to a magazine, and Agatha imagines they would all relish the opportunity to stand outside the inquiry making incendiary remarks about her to the cameras and waiting journalists. She pictures them: three sirens, waiting for her as she draws up in her car. She wonders if she will recognize them, whether they will look like her, or like Valerie, or like the painting of the father that still hangs outside her bedroom. When she was a child she thought of her sisters as very ugly—her mother told her they’d had cosmetic surgery back when the procedures were crude. Anastasia described them as “vacuumed-packed gargoyles.” But perhaps this was all a fabrication. When Valerie speaks about them, they lose their hideous aspect and become unexceptional, almost normal. This frightens Agatha even more: the thought that, when she sees them, she might not know them. They could fall into step beside her, brush against her in the crowd, their eyes meeting her own, and there would be no recognition. Either way, she will try her best to avoid them—go in quickly, give her evidence, leave. She will be on her yacht by evening, then sailing into international waters.
A Choir of Sighs
Precious holds the baby, one hand beneath the child’s bottom and another beneath her head. She is three days old and her parents can’t decide what to call her. Precious tells them not to rush, the name will come to them in time. “It’s better to get it right than to do it immediately,” she says. “She’ll have that name her whole life.” The baby is met with a choir of sighs each time she opens her eyes
or flexes the joints in her tiny hands. Currently, she is asleep. She has a soft round head, a little nose, scrunched-up eyes and a serious mouth that twitches as she sleeps, as if she is skeptical about the content of her dreams. Her thin film of dark hair looks like it is held in place by static electricity.
Precious places the baby in the washing basket among folded bedsheets, fresh from the line, smelling of sunshine. She begins to unbutton her blouse.
Nicky and Marcus have a number of colorful wraps that they are using to wear the baby, and it works best if skin is next to skin.
Precious didn’t do this with either of her boys though she had older cousins and extended family members who wore their babies in this way. Nicky tried to show her how to fix the wrap, but Precious stopped her gently, saying, “I know how to do it. I watched women wrapping babies like that for years.” It was only saying this that she realized she did truly remember. It was as if the image had been tucked away when she left her family behind, and now it comes back, as she takes off her top and bra and puts her baby granddaughter against her chest, wrapping the bright fabric around the pair of them like she’s grafting a cutting to a tree.
The baby searches for a nipple, her mouth opening and closing like a cod. “There’s nothing for you there,” Precious croons, “but I’ve got something else until your mummy comes out of the bath.”
She sticks out her little finger and the baby begins to chew, surprising Precious, as babies always do, with the strength of her jaws and the little tongue she keeps between them.
With the child settled around her finger, Precious is unable to continue folding the dry laundry into the basket. She leaves the last couple of pillowcases to swing in the breeze and instead potters from one side of the patio to the other, inspecting the plants. Most are in a bad way. She leans over and pulls out weeds with her free hand, snapping the stalks that have died. Precious has encouraged Marcus and Nicky to begin from scratch—to pull everything up, empty out the pots, and buy new bulbs and seedlings from the garden center, but they haven’t taken her advice. She might surprise them and remodel the patio herself. It could be more than this: a little square of life, rather than just a place to hang the washing, and store the rusty gas barbecue they never use.