‘Na. Na na, lady. Don’t try to tell me you know what it’s like being Asian. You don’t know. See, that all makes sense to you, nice white person, sure. You know who want to hear a Pakistani boy being angry right now? Nobody, mate. Nobody want to hear it. Didya maybe notice that I was the only brown kid up there? It’s black music. You got to fit in, and do what everyone know. That’s how you get the fucking record deal, innit. You wanna know how to get people shouting “Taliban” at you? You be a Muslim kid with a big mouth. Aight? So na, you don’t get it. At all.’
‘This is exactly the stuff you should be doing. Exactly. Use it. Anger is an energy. I think the Sex Pistols said that.’
‘Sure. Yeah yeah. Skinheads, is it? More white people who ain’t going to have a bomb scare called on them if they just get on public transport. Them’s exactly who I should be listening to. Really helpful, that is. Listen, you mean well, just like all them teachers I had meant well, but you ain’t got a fucking clue, Clio. You’s maybe just too old or something. An you should just butt out where you don’t know what you talking about. You not even mentioned that I put your song in there for you, either. People gotta fucking rise up. Ripped it off LimeWire an everything as a surprise for you. Na, this is bullshit, man. Bullshit.’
‘You feel that way, you’d probably better run off back to your mum’s tonight, then. That song isn’t about a bunch of kids in a club coming up, by the way. It’s about real anger. Real anger bringing people together to make something change, not just moaning about the door policy at their local club. Go on. Scram. Off you go. I’ll get myself home.’
He kicked the side of the bus shelter as he left, felt it shudder beneath him.
‘Wow. Such maturity,’ she called after him.
‘Fuck you too,’ he screamed at the sky.
They didn’t talk for two weeks. Then he turned up at her flat early on a Sunday morning, having stayed up all night to make a new track. She answered the door wrapped in a towel, her hair falling down her back. He opened the towel and pushed her back on to the bed without saying a word. Afterwards, he pulled out the iPod again.
‘I’m not saying you was right, OK? Shouting your mouth off still fucking dangerous if you look like me. But I had a think about what you said, and I tried to do something that might make you believe in me a bit more. Just, also, making it funny. Know what I’m saying?’
The track he played her was the rough version of ‘Hearing Me (Rising Up)’, which was the first single he managed to get on Rinse FM.
XANTHE
Santorini, 2012
Xanthe’s fingers fumbled at the stone, easing it out of its sheath. The wind rushed her, throwing up her skirts and spraying a tangle of hair into her mouth. It tasted stale, grubby: she would need a proper wash soon. Something sharp on the rock face tore at her forefinger and she let the gust take her curses.
All this for a cigarette.
For the last couple of years she had always kept a packet hidden in this crevice, midway up the staircase hacked out of the cliff between the beach and the studio. Actual cigarettes, in a plastic-wrapped box, with a neat, machine-folded foil wrapper, the ugly Cyrillic health warnings. The pleasure of their order in the carton, their uniformity; when lit, the chemical sweetness of the first pull. That gorgeous toxicity. She inhaled, heard the crackling draw burn down, watched the glowing tip and then exhaled out into the huge blue Aegean in front of her.
It usually took her about a year to get through a packet, because the circumstances had to be right. Nikolas had to be safely away, for at least a couple of hours. There could be no guests staying in the apartments, in case they wandered down to the beach, saw her and brought it up in front of Nikolas; just casually asked for a light or something. Finally, she had to be angry enough with Nikolas to want to reject everything about his ethos and the way of life they’d built together, just for the length of time it took to smoke.
The wind was too sharp today to sit up on the steps. One-handed, she wrapped the cigs back up in their plastic carrier, placed them deep into the crevice, and wedged the rock in, tight enough that no hippy’s horned toenail could unlodge it, even at a run. Then she carried her lit cigarette with solemnity down to the beach. The tide was coming in with a ferocity she appreciated, battering at the rocks. Slap. Slap. She slipped her sandals off and stood on the sun-scorched black sand for as long as her skin could take it. She inhaled again, imagined weedkiller and asbestos filling up her lungs. Above her, on the cliffs, the sun hit the glass wall of the yoga studio, made white-hot patterns on her retinas.
Nikolas and the van would be halfway to the airport by now, she guessed, creaking up hills, an awkward silence between them all, patchouli cloying the air as none of the windows worked. She hadn’t gone out to say goodbye, for the first time ever, but she’d checked from the window that Clio had actually got in the van and gone, and there she was, squashed in the back seat, staring pointedly the other way. Off to the ferry port with you. Sit on a hard plastic seat alongside a hundred stinking backpackers till your arse blisters, breathe in the horrible smells from the cheap cantina. Get seasick. Throw it all up over the side. Go on. Do you some good.
It wasn’t that Nikolas had a problem with smoking per se. They didn’t do it quite so often any more, but there was usually a bag of grass lurking around their residence space, a pouch of tobacco. It was the chemicals and the corporation that got him: a billboard advertising cigarettes would pitch him into a fury very much at odds with his character. Cigarettes were one of the only topics that he spoke quickly about, listing off the thousand poisons that were hidden in there, the callousness with which corporations developed murderous addictions. Weedkiller, asbestos.
The politics of smoking. From her early radical days, the most enthusiastic smokers Xanthe knew had been lefties, all of them so sure that their rollies, their pouches and their papers were another way of sticking it to corporate culture. The old creed of blindness, ignoring that no fewer tobacco plantation workers were exploited and lungs could still grow tumours even through you rolled your own. These cigarettes, slender things with their rolled-gold ring of sophistication, meant another life entirely to Xanthe. Meant boarding school, three bums shoved together out of a window; meant London members’ clubs and dark wood, cocktails, intoxication, bright, penetrating laughter and society pages. They meant everything she’d rejected at the age of twenty, steadily built herself into another person in an effort to get away from, and yet here she was, hiding them in a crevice in the cliff face for emergencies.
Once the cigarette was smoked down to the butt (the beef, they’d called it in the squat, passing the soggy ends of joints around), she would stub it out on a stone that she would then throw into the sea, to rinse away the sooty scar. Then she would cradle it in her palm and walk it along the beach, find a good spot to bury it. The final part of the ritual was to slowly strip down to her bikini, wrapping her various layers together and weighting them with stones on the beach, and inch into the sea. It was difficult under foot at first, with the violence of the waves and the pebbles slapping in riot, but once she’d made it to chest-height, she launched herself in, turned in a circle and lay on her back, cricking her neck slowly down, relaxing into it. She imagined the cold salt water licking away at the smell of the smoke, at the chemical residue on her skin. She lay back, spread her arms and legs like a cross, allowed the waves to take her hair. She squinted at the sky. This was the part where she unclenched, allowed her real life to ebb back in. All the choices that she had made – good, positive choices – to get her to this point, to this place, filling her slow, easy life with health and sunshine and love and peace –
– and Clio’s face, that twisted tiny half-smile tensing at the jaw, came back into her head and blocked out the sun.
‘Got it all right here, haven’t you? Mind you, you were never exactly struggling.’
They’d reconnected on Facebook, which was something Xanthe was ambivalent about anyway but kept up as her main
line to Dido. She was surprised, mostly because her crusty former pals were generally too suspicious of online surveillance to use it, and Clio had always erred on the side of paranoid, even in that company. The click had come through just after the hullabaloo surrounding the Carrington case had wound down – a little red notification from the past. Expecting another burst of hostility, she had braced. But nothing, for three years.
Xanthe had kept her distance from the case, but she still ordered the English-language newspapers in from the nearest tourist town and followed the online coverage. CLIO ACCUSES TOP COP OF UNDERCOVER SEX SHENANIGANS.
The headlines made it ridiculous, of course. They had wanted her to testify, but she and Nikolas had talked through this. It wasn’t that she was denying her past, more that she was at peace with it, and whatever other people had done during it.
‘Bourgeois bitch, intcha,’ Gaz spat at her, over Skype. ‘Always looking out for your own interests, you was.’ A long swim in the sea, her body suspended in the water, just a tiny floating thing in the mass of the blue, got rid of that one.
Xanthe had built up an armour of anger in her twenties, filled up the chinks in it with other people’s ideologies. The squat, the Utopia they’d naively thought they were building there, the demonstrations and the building of the movement, all that idiotic hope; that was the first of many solutions she thought she’d found that turned to rot. With a baby girl to protect, she had run, again and again, from the negative elements in her life: her former friends and lovers, even Dido’s father. Especially him. She began listening to what other women had to say; burned harder and hotter with anger than she’d thought possible. She worked in women’s shelters and shaved her head, tried half-heartedly to be a lesbian, kept Dido in dungarees and pudding-bowl haircuts until she cried that other children were bullying her, and felt no more peace for any of it.
Eight years ago, still looking for something, she had taken Dido on a pilgrimage. They had flown to Athens with their clothes tangled together in one long rucksack, Xanthe clutching Dido’s thin white limbs to her in the line of tall, tanned twenty-somethings queuing at the ferry port. Dido, who had never been out of London, seemed to shrink at first in the face of so much strangeness, retreating into Xanthe’s hips like she hadn’t done since she was a toddler. Xanthe had thought of herself at that age, the leggy boarding-school brat already well accustomed to flying solo, with a built-in understanding of her place in the world, flicking her fingers at the stewardesses in business class. Much better to be this scared little mouse, gripping her mother’s hand tight.
If it had been a true pilgrimage, Xanthe would have simply toured Dido round the glossy Athens apartment buildings they’d shuttled between as children. But she wasn’t interested in reconnecting with her parents or the life they’d given her. This was about Greece itself, and what it meant. Dido’s skin tanned gradually, in days puttering in rock pools or on the decks of ferries, chasing tiny lizards over stone; Xanthe bought a kohl pencil in a Kos chemist, long heavy earrings and a flowing white dress from a shop targeting hippy backpackers. She lined her eyes and held her head higher. They curled up together under white sheets in budget rooms with shared toilets, the too-sweet smell of sewage rising in the heat of the night. They took a joint decision to renounce vegetarianism, just for the time they were there, and ate calamari, octopus and lamb in tavernas, swooning at each other over the richness of the tastes. Dido picked up a basic vocabulary: yes and no, please and thank you, enough to make elderly waiters clutch their hearts and beam.
In Santorini, in a white village carved out of a cliff face, they walked into the cool of a basement bookshop, where the air was thick with incense, to avoid the crush of tourists ploughing to the most westerly point for the legendary sunset. There was an English section, and Dido gravitated towards it; specifically to the word ‘sexy’ that had been painted on the side of a shelf. Xanthe found herself thumbing through contemporary Greek poetry, still struggling to translate back in her head as she was so out of practice. She had never had much time for poetry: she’d always been too hard for it, in one way or another. But now, here, she felt something uncurling in herself. It was related to the quality of the sunlight, maybe, or the expanse of sea and sky they stared into every day. It had to do with not being in a city, and with speaking Greek again. The poet was a woman, Katerina Elogiat, her eyes brown and liquid in the picture on the jacket. She wrote tiny scraps of things, only a few words, about light on the sea, about the need to stop, be still and breathe. With the tears still in her eyes, Xanthe took it to the till, even though they were on a tight budget for the rest of the trip. The man behind the counter had a beautiful, serene face: he looked older than he was because his long hair was white under the scarf, but his tanned skin had very few wrinkles, and his beard was black.
This was Nikolas, and he took the book from her and smiled, without ever asking why she was crying. Two nights later they were eating fava beans on an old wooden table set up under a grapevine outside his tiny house. Fava beans, Nikolas explained to them in his slow, gentle voice, had to be cooked with love, because it took many hours of stirring to get them to the right consistency. That night he taught Dido how to play Greek tunes Xanthe had never heard on a small wooden flute, and they drew mandalas in the sand on the beach near his house after dark. They stayed on the island for the rest of their vacation, Dido and Xanthe curled into Nikolas’s bedroom while he slept under sheets on the floor next door, or out under the stars. On the last night, Xanthe crept out there to join him. They held hands and told their lives: hers as a revolutionary and an activist (she never mentioned her upbringing any more), his as a recovered addict. He had discovered meditation, he said, and it had saved him. Xanthe thought, finally, hopefully, that she knew how he felt. She initiated the sex, stared deep into his eyes in the dark.
He drove them to the ferry the next morning in his crappy old car that smelled of patchouli, and solemnly presented Dido with the flute. She beamed and hugged him, and Xanthe realized that Dido had never had a man in her life.
‘I think I need to come back,’ she muttered, into his ear, as she reached up to embrace his wiry strength. ‘Yes, you do,’ he said.
Dido and Xanthe, back in London, were shells. Xanthe went to work and Dido went to school, because that was what they had to do. It rained. Neither of them really made conversation except with each other. Xanthe did not email Nikolas, because there was nothing to be done. She felt calmer; she wasn’t as angry, not any more. One wet Sunday, Dido came into the living room and curled up in a ball at Xanthe’s feet on the sofa that doubled as her bed.
‘Mum, we’re sad here. We weren’t sad in Greece. Why don’t we go back?’
‘I’d love to, baba, but we have no money left for another holiday. We won’t be able to afford something like that for at least three years. And you have school.’
‘I could go to school in Greece, though. I could go to school on the island.’
Slowly it came out that Dido was hating her new secondary school, just as much as she’d hated primary. In fits and sobs, she confessed that she’d made no friends, and that some of the bigger boys had started calling her ‘Dildo’. Xanthe cursed again her own stupid 23-year-old self for thinking the name was romantic.
The meeting with her father had been brief. A table in his name at the Café Royal; he’d asked her to come to his office, and she’d said no, you can buy me lunch.
‘I want what’s owed to me as your daughter. I haven’t asked you for anything for fifteen years; I won’t ask you for anything again. I want to go home; I want to make a life for your grandchild there, and leave this miserable country behind. Nothing good has happened since you brought us here.’
The old bastard had been surprisingly compliant, agreeable even. She had anticipated more of a fight. He motioned to the waiter to top up their wine, and then wrote her a cheque, which he held in front of her.
‘One condition. We want to meet this grandchild.’
> She flinched but, having suspected something like this, she already had her answer.
‘Mum can meet her. Not you. You know why.’
He looked away from her as he passed the cheque over. ‘Very well,’ he said. It was the closest he’d ever got to an acknowledgement.
They left just before Christmas, flying all the way this time, shedding layers of thick winter clothes in airport toilets as they did. Xanthe read Katerina Elogiat on the plane, smelled the incense on each page. She walked back into the bookshop and he didn’t look up; she pressed herself close to a bookcase, pretended to browse. When she turned around he was smiling at her. He touched his finger to his forehead, to what she would learn to call his third eye.
‘I knew,’ he said.
The money paid for rent on an apartment, an old car, and a tutor to help Dido with her Greek. Eventually, it also paid for the deposit on the studio on the clifftop, and for a local handyman to come and help them remove the main wall overlooking the sea, replacing it with windows; for them to buy the derelict building carved into the rock and refurbish it into six small apartments, and for a professional company in Athens to create their website. They lived on the last of it until the end of the first season, by which time word had spread and they were running eight yoga retreats a year.
The name had given her pause, when the email came through with the booking, grabbing the last place at the last minute for the beginners’ week. It actually took her a second to place it. It couldn’t be a coincidence, could it? No, of course, Clio would know that she ran this retreat. They’d used a picture of her and Nikolas, smiling, on the welcome page of the website. But why just book? Why no friendly little message on Facebook, no personal email? Well, Xanthe wasn’t going to be the first one to start things up. She counted down the four weeks until Clio’s arrival with steadily building dread.
Scabby Queen Page 12
