The Whip Hand

by Nadine Browne

  ‘I tell you it’s as true as the grave! I saw her with my own eyes: standing on the street, no troubles, sticking out her flat chest and laughing. Hahahaha! Like a teenager.’

  The priest’s voice droned on, soft and deep, and Elena’s hand grabbed onto Mina. Mina jumped in surprise and looked at her mother. Elena’s mouth was stretched across her teeth in muted pain. Her eyes were pleading, brimming with tears. When she spoke it was a low moan, too deep for her small frame, and Mina looked up at the hollow above in search of the source.

  ‘Oh Lili … Poor Lili.’

  She whispered hotly against her daughter’s cheek.

  ‘Mina, forgive me, I let her die alone in that awful, awful place.’

  A few people had turned in their seats and were looking in their direction. Mina hushed her mother soothingly, but Elena went on, in English, calmly now.

  ‘She … left. She just left the house and I didn’t go after her, because I was angry. No, not angry … tired. I found her two days later in a home. They had plucked her off the street and she died in the heat. She couldn’t remember where she lived. She died.’

  Mina thought of Lili, alone in her final moments.

  Elena leaned back and was wiping her face. Mina moved closer to her.

  ‘Mami. I shagged Alice’s boyfriend. I have been fucking my best friend’s guy for over a year. Over a year. And I don’t really feel bad. Just annoyed that he still loves me. And I hate her for not hating me, for not screaming at me, for just being … sad.’

  Elena froze, hand poised with the tissue. Their eyes met, Elena’s wide with surprise, and they both gave a loud sigh.

  Then Mina felt her mouth twitch and she saw her mother shake her head and smile, and she had to look away.

  She looked up at the priest and tried to focus on the sermon, on the deep voice, on the faces of people she might have known. She tried to forget what she had just learned.

  There would be time to remember.

  Fig

  It was a quiet night. A light, warm, summer night.

  It was Sunday, around eleven thirty. Not that Clari had a view to a clock, but she knew it must be around eleven thirty, on a Sunday night, by Mark’s enthusiastic plodding on top of her.

  Mark was one of the three things Clari knew, beyond certainty, belonged to her. He had been her property – or, more generously, her boyfriend – for thirty-two weeks; yes, she counted the weeks. She knew the days and hours as well, but preferred not to think of these. Mark was loyal, kind and loving, and if it were not for his remarkable resemblance to a male of the human species, might very well have passed for a labrador puppy.

  Mark ended each conversation with ‘I love you’ and remembered the anniversary of their first meeting, first kiss, first shag, first holiday, and counting. Only a few months ago, when Clari had been enraged by something trivial but remarkably potent, and told him to please get the fuck out of her house, he had stopped mid-sentence with a soft look dawning on his face and said, ‘Babe, you know this is the first time you’ve thrown me out?’

  To which Clari responded, reasonably, by throwing a mug (decorated with kittens, and belonging to him, not her) at his head.

  The second thing Clari knew belonged to her was the two-up two-down, semi-detached, ten-minutes-from-the-tube property, bequeathed to her by a semi-unknown, much-appreciated auntie. The woman had apparently had no children of her own, and might also have been a small yet perfectly formed fruit-loop as she, in her will, had left her Tufnell Park property to ‘the oldest child of her youngest sister’s niece’.

  Clari had moved into the house some four years previous and had for the past six months rented out the ground floor to a woman named Katja.

  Katja was something of an enigma, wrapped in a mystery, wrapped in a tatty old shawl. She was Russian mostly, but on a couple of occasions had referred to a childhood in Hungary and a romantic misadventure in Milan. She might have been anything between thirty-five and fifty-five years old and, though not the least bit attractive, had a kind of hypnotic appeal with her ridiculously long hair and huge tits.

  And they were huge.

  They were the kind of tits a prepubescent boy comes across in an old ’60s porn mag and is immediately and irrevocably turned gay.

  Katja also hated cats, and Clari had come home one evening to find her tenant hissing, actually hissing, at their neighbour’s kitty, a bright orange tom named Dick. Clari had gaped incredulously at the woman, who had simply said, ‘He started it,’ and turned away.

  Dick vanished, mysteriously, a few weeks later and poor Mrs Velda, their old neighbour, put up posters all over the street. The posters showed an orange cartoon cat with huge eyes. Mrs Velda had chosen the cartoon cat because she did not have any photos of Dick, and was deeply disturbed by the onslaught of creative vandalism the posters elicited from her neighbours. In a few days every one of the cartoon kitties had been equipped with tits and cocks of infinite variety, comedy glasses, mohawks, bottles of booze, Hitler moustaches and one quite random doodle of a snake, which Clari suspected her tenant was responsible for.

  Clari didn’t mind weirdos as such, and Katja always paid her rent on time, by direct debit. What was, however, a bit worrying was the fact that, since the day Katja had moved in, she had played host to a ceaseless chain of visitors who knocked on her door at almost any time of the night and day. There were men and women, young and old, some looking furtive and distinctly artistic, others looking like lost bankers. There were the respectable ladies in their beige outfits and expensive perfume, which wafted up the stairs to Clari.

  There were also the earthier footballer’s-wife types, with platinum blonde locks, who clonked about in their sky-high platform heels making the very foundation rattle and forcing Clari to put a sign on the front door requesting: ‘Visitors to please remove shoes’.

  During the first week, Clari had thought these to be the weird woman’s weird friends. She tried to ignore the issue for a whole month, during which more sinister suspicions took root.

  Finally, no longer able to suppress her qualms, Clari knocked on Katja’s door, half-dying of curiosity and half-determined to kick her dubious arse out.

  The woman opened the door a few inches and stuck out her head, fixing a pair of dark eyes on her landlady.

  ‘You knock?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I did … may I come in?’

  ‘No, this is not good time.’

  Clari’s eyes narrowed as she fought the urge to tell the little bitch that, as it was her house, she would determine when was a good time.

  ‘Look, I would like to have a word with you.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘How do I put this … are you a whore?’

  At this, Katja let out a hail of laughter and stepped out from behind her door, her bazooms forcing Clari to take a step back.

  ‘I am not whore.’

  ‘Oh good. You’re just very popular?’

  ‘I run business, but it is not sex.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I am witch.’

  ‘Pardon … you are which what?’

  ‘No, no … I am a witch.’

  ‘Right. As in spells and stuff?’

  ‘Yes. Is that problem?’

  Clari considered, and then shrugged, ‘No, I don’t mind. I’ve got gypsy blood, you know, on my mother’s side. She used to read palms and all that stuff.’

  And Clari really didn’t mind. She even took pride in having a Russian witch living with her and mentioned this casually to people, to increase her quirky factor.

  But it was Sunday evening, Mark was happily pounding along, praising the Lord and clearly close to creating a wet spot on Clari’s newly washed sheets, when she reached a climax of sorts, a conclusion.

  She shoved him off, sat up in bed and watched his sweaty, pasty, confused form with a feeling of having stepped in dog shit.

  ‘What, baby? What’s the matter?’ he huffed, ‘Did I hurt you?’ he added reaching out and cares
sing Clari’s arm.

  She swatted him aside. ‘No … Look, we need to talk.’

  And she told him. She told him how every time she heard his voice it was like being doused with icy water, and that the only reason she let him fuck her every Sunday night was because there was nothing good on the telly, and that the moment the BBC or Channel 4 reconsidered their appalling Sunday line-up, he would have to contend himself with a quiet wank in the loo, and before that happened it would be better to just call it a day, wouldn’t it?

  He looked at her with his labrador eyes, his lip trembling, and asked, ‘Do you hate me?’

  And here Clari performed her greatest act of kindness, and said, ‘No, I don’t hate you, I’m just feeling a bit stifled. I’m sorry, Mark, you really are very … sweet,’ she patted his bare shoulder and smiled. ‘Do you think you could get your stuff out by next week?’

  He looked away, but said, ‘I’ll have my brother pick it up.’

  ‘You have a brother?’ Clari asked, and Mark dashed out of bed and into the bathroom, where he locked himself in for the rest of the night, forcing Clari to wee in a terracotta flowerpot on the balcony.

  ***

  The next morning Mark was gone.

  Clari went to work.

  Work: this was the third thing Clari knew to be her own.

  And work was close to Bow station, in an old warehouse, in the new, plush offices of Art Now magazine, where Clari was employed as a subeditor. She had worked for Art Now since its birth, three years ago – first as a receptionist, then as an administrator and finally as a sub.

  She had once tried to explain to a drunken stranger at a party how it felt to walk into the lively, bright office with all the young, beautiful, ambitious people and watch their collective talents congeal into the living thing that was Art Now. It felt like belonging to something, like being part of a club or something.

  ‘It’s basically a pretentious student rag? I mean, does anyone actually buy it, for money?’ asked the drunken idiot.

  Art Now was nothing like a student paper. It was cutting-edge journalism, dealing with art and life and all kinds of super important stuff. But yes, the magazine’s actual owner happened to be a student, a very rich student, whose father was a Lord something or other, and who often decorated the pages of other, lesser magazines, and who was, should the truth be told, already growing bored of this particular venture.

  And yes, there had been a few misses, a few professional lapses, like when the t had accidentally been omitted from the name of the magazine, on issue number eight, forever prompting idiots to go around crying, ‘Arrr Now, me matie!’

  Then there had been that one time when Des, their resident stud freelancer, had plagiarised a whole article on, ironically, copyright and the arts. Clari chose to believe that it had been an intentionally subversive act, a kind of postmodern attempt to draw attention to a very real and disturbing issue. She did, however, refrain from using the word postmodern, the drunken arsehole’s accusation still fresh on her mind.

  Des had simply explained away his little booboo with osmosis. There are no original ideas, he had said, every artist soaks up and regurgitates the work of others.

  And Des got away with it, like he got away with everything.

  Des had, and this was fact, shagged every woman in the office (excluding Clari) and two of the men. He was a kind of weedier version of Russell Brand, and he seemed to have an informed, usually highly amusing, opinion on every topic. He treated everyone like shit, which was an essential part of his appeal.

  Clari had never much fancied Des. But on this day, in the wake of her break-up, unexpectedly and irresistibly, she did.

  And when he stopped by her desk, leaned in and asked, as he often did, ‘So, you fancy it?’ Clari shrugged.

  That night Des took Clari out for a drink. He talked about himself for a straight hour and called Clari ‘Clair’.

  Finally, he said, ‘You know, I thought you had a boyfriend.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘We decided to go our separate ways.’

  ‘You dumped him, then. You seem like the kind of girl who dumps her boyfriends. Actually, you don’t seem like the kind of girl who has boyfriends.’

  Clari neither confirmed nor denied the accusation. She said nothing, which wasn’t a problem as he soon began talking about himself again. And she was just about to tune out, to write the whole night off as a waste of her time, when Des reached under the table, swiftly found his way under her skirt and inside her pants, and began fingering her, right there at the corner table of the King’s Arms.

  He whispered, ‘And who’s a wet little whore then?’ and then continued with his random chitchat while wrist-deep inside Clari.

  That night Des fucked Clair, there was no doubt about that. It started on the train on the way back to hers, and continued until the small hours of the morning. He had her begging him to keeping going and to stop and to keep going, he had her screaming and whimpering, he had her from the back, the side, the front, the top, performing acrobatic feats she had never thought herself capable of.

  When Clari woke up late the next morning Des had vanished and it was too late to go into work, so she called in sick and walked about her flat luxuriating in the freshly screwed feeling, making herself an elaborate lunch and drinking cup after cup of fresh coffee.

  She went downstairs to check the mail and bumped into Katja in the hallway. Katja gave Clari a wry smile.

  ‘Good morning,’ said Clari, feeling her ears go red.

  ‘Morning. I think you were popular too, last night, yes?’

  Clari ignored this and went back upstairs, where she had a bath and noticed that most of Mark’s belongings had been removed and that only two boxes, bearing his name, remained cowering in a corner of the hall.

  By the early evening Clari began feeling restless.

  She stood holding her phone for a few minutes before dialling Des’s number.

  ‘Yes?’ he answered.

  Clari put on her most seductive voice. ‘So … do you fancy it?’ she purred.

  ‘Erh … no, not really,’ Des said.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Hey look, let’s be adult, right? You’re a lot of fun and everything, but our time is up.’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Our time, babe. See you around.’

  And he hung up.

  ***

  Over the next few days Clari launched a full dirty war against Des. She paid an old friend, who worked at a club and was thus up until the small hours, to call Des every hour, for the whole night, and just breathe. She edited his copy creatively, including a whole extra paragraph on the benefits of recreational drugs and how best to score them. Though she was disappointed to find that not only were people not outraged, they actually congratulated him on a brilliant piece.

  But at home, alone, she decided that she didn’t want things to get nasty with Des, they had to work together after all, and so she called him and left a friendly little message on his phone, saying that she thought he was alright and that she hoped they might be mates.

  When he didn’t call her back, Clari called him again and left a less kind message, and by the seventh message the tone had definitely deteriorated from friendly to threatening.

  She read her horoscope. It said, ‘Do not set your expectations too high.’ She didn’t much like this, and so she read all the other horoscopes until she found one she did like (‘What you long for can be yours with a little perseverance’).

  She took this as a sign to call Des again.

  A few hours later and Clari was standing outside Katja’s door, hand poised, about to knock, but holding back.

  ‘This is crazy,’ she said to herself, but before she could say anything else, the door opened and Katja stood before her, wearing all black, her eyes sparkling wickedly.

  ‘Knock, knock?’ said the woman, helpfully.

  Clari lowered her hand.

  ‘I
was wondering …’ she started.

  ‘I will help,’ Katja interrupted, turned and sashayed back into her flat, trailing beads and shawls and long oily hair. Clari followed and found herself stepping into a kind of New Age brothel, all red velvet furnishings, candles, heavy curtains, and, on a purple velvet chaise longue, a bright orange furry cushion.

  Clari stared at it.

  ‘Oh my god … is that Dick? Is that Mrs Velda’s cat?’

  Katja patted the cushion fondly and smiled.

  ‘I make everything myself,’ she said proudly, ‘curtains, candles, tablecloth, everything. With my own hands.’

  Clari nodded, her eyes fixed on poor Dick, the former tom, and now the cushion cover.

  ‘And now … business,’ Katja said. She sat down at a table in the middle of the room, and Clari took the seat opposite.

  ‘Give me hands,’ Katja said, and Clari did as she was told, thinking that perhaps the time had come to read fortunes. But instead the Russian grabbed her hands hard just below the wrist and held them while looking straight into Clari’s eyes.

  ‘What you want?’

  Clari sighed. ‘Des.’

  ‘This man doesn’t want you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You want to make him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There was a silence, a heavy, awkward silence. Clari tried to pull her hands away, but could not.

  ‘Okay, I’ll help you. Three hundred pounds off next month rent.’

  ‘Three hundred? Are you crazy? I’ll give you a hundred off.’

  ‘Three hundred.’

  ‘What if it doesn’t work, then? Two hundred.’

  ‘Three hundred, and if it doesn’t work it wasn’t meant to be.’

  ‘Well that’s bloody convenient. Fine, three hundred. But I want Dick too. The cushion,’ Clari pointed.

  An hour later Clari was back in her own flat.

  She stood in the hall holding one ripe fig in her hand and glaring at it. It was simple, Katja had said, this spell had been used by women in the Middle East for thousands of years. Since the days of old this little piece of volatile magic had brought back wayward husbands and won the love of heroes.