by Liza Cody
‘I remember stuff, okay? Especially insults. And you can’t have Electra till I see the river view.’
‘Well get your arse in gear. We’re going now. And do something about your head. You look totally random.’
Electra shook her head and gave me a look which said, ‘That about sums you up… Momster.’
Mister Sister held out a mirror while I righted my silk turban. My face looked worse but it felt better. I thought about the little mews house with the yellow front door. While I was there I wanted it to be mine. I even painted my nails the colour of unripe blackberries so that I’d deserve it more. But it could only be mine if I was Natalie Munrow, and then I would also have to pay her bills, pay council tax, learn how to use her terrifying technology, learn how to be a 21st century woman again, instead of being the creature that lives under a stone who expects nothing and from whom nothing is expected.
But Mister Sister offered me a rent-free flat and a dry bed. He is the worm that corrupts the hopeless apple. He said, ‘We could take a cab if you pay.’
So that was it: he’d been using his eyes, nose and ferrety little fingers and he thought I was Natalie Munrow. He didn’t know that if I was Natalie I’d be dead. Probably. Almost certainly. I should find out. I should have a drink and buy a newspaper.
‘Don’t start gargling yet, butt-bonce,’ he said with a charming scowl. ‘I need you walking on your own two kipper boxes and making sense.’ He adjusted his wimple, gave himself a flirtatious wink in the mirror and swept all his pretty dresses into a backpack along with his toiletries. ‘Remember,’ he said, ‘if anyone asks, we’re looking for sheltered housing for you and your dog. And we are taking a poxy taxi, okay? If I really was a fucking thief I’d have nicked your wallet as well as your phone.’
Not a thief? Self-assessment on the street isn’t close to realistic. Even I would never say that about myself.
‘But we buy proper food for Electra,’ I said. ‘Tuna makes her shit soup and you won’t want that in your river view flat. Also she needs a waterproof coat. This rain plays hell with her arthritis and she hates the cold. You can’t use her unless you treat her right.’
‘Who d’you think she is—the Princess Royal’s pampered Pekinese?’
‘Not much good at psychology, are you? People are generous if it looks like I care more for her than I do for myself. If she looks neglected they give me bugger-all and get straight on the blower to the cops or the RSPCA—listen, cos I’m telling you what you need to know.’
Electra was limping. Of the three of us she was the one who needed a taxi the most. Even so I would never have agreed if I’d known how far we were going. If I hadn’t been so woozy from all my hurts and all the pills I’d taken I’d have stayed where I was; or gone back to the West End where I know who I am. But I was woozy and she was limping. It was as much her fault as it was mine.
Crabbily, I decided that if Mister Sister kept on calling me Momster I would call him Smister. See how he likes that, I thought, as we rocked and lurched across London. Electra was breathing tuna breath in my face.
I warned him, didn’t I? But my life is splattered with the memory of guys who didn’t listen. And now so is the lift at South Dock High Rise. Poor Electra—not only was she suffering from painful joints but she’d also been given the wrong food and had a jolting taxi ride. On top of that she’d never been in a lift before. So first she freaked, then she got the shits and then she got the shakes.
There wasn’t much I could do about it because by that time I had the shakes pretty bad myself. I didn’t know where I was, and I hate tower blocks. Instead of a little house with a yellow door there was dripping rainwater, runny dog-do, a nun dry-heaving in the corner because of the smell. The lift slid to a queasy stop and the doors glided open. A man in a high-visibility jacket looked in.
‘Genius,’ he said to Smister. ‘You do know how to pick ’em.’
His yellow jacket was hurting my eyes. Cops wear jackets like that when they… I don’t know when they wear them. Oh yes, at night. It was night. I was going to the lock-up, no doubt about it. They’d take away my dog, my bottles, my pills. I’d have nothing between me and the rattling terrors except a thin plastic mattress.
I couldn’t persuade Electra to walk past the yellow man. We were trapped. In the shit.
My legs melted and I smashed my cracked ribs on the wheelie case as I went down.
They dragged me away down a burning brown carpet. I might’ve yelled. I can’t remember.
Chapter 11
Abiding In Babylon
Smister took away my pills and my shoes.
Cops and nuns work together, you know. They say they’re into salvation but they steal your shoes so that you can’t run away from eternal damnation. Even if they don’t steal your shoes they steal your shoelaces. They don’t want you to hang yourself, you see; they want to do it for you. They try to throw your dog out.
The nun said, ‘She’s crazy about the dog.’
The cop said, ‘She’s crazy. She should be behind bars.’
Electra spoke up for me: ‘It isn’t craziness, it’s love. I’m the only thing left she can love since the Devil murdered her heart. He killed her mum and then she lost her baby.’
Now why would Electra accuse me of losing my baby? Why did she even tell the cop and the nun about it? She swore she’d never tell a soul.
There’s a little pink shell that sighs like the ocean and smells like oysters. If you make yourself small enough you can slide into it as if it’s a helter-skelter. Right at the end of the slide, at the very centre of the shell, nestling in a bed of shiny soft mother of pearl, is a tiny baby.
The baby said, ‘You didn’t lose me. I dumped you. Do you really think I wanted to be born in prison? What on earth made you chose Satan for my dad? Surely you could’ve done better than that.’
‘No,’ I cried. ‘No, no, no, I couldn’t. It was my last chance.’
An ogre in a white nighty appeared at a doorway and thundered, ‘Shut the fuck up—there’s people trying to sleep in here.’ He was obviously shouting at me. It’s what ogres do.
I didn’t hear what the nun or the cop said to the ogre because they shoved me into a small blue room and slammed the door.
In the morning I found the nun and the cop in bed together. No I didn’t. It was just Smister and a big guy with a buzz-cut. On the floor next to the bed was a yellow high-visibility jacket. The word ‘Security’ was written in white on the back. He wasn’t a cop at all.
My pills were there on a table plus an empty bottle of fine French wine. I’d been sleeping with thieves and fornicators. No I hadn’t—I don’t know where all that religious shite comes from. I just wish it wouldn’t. It doesn’t make me happy.
I collected as much of my stuff as I could find and took it to the living room.
Smister had told the truth about one thing: there was a fabulous view of rain on the river. The picture window in the living room was curtained by the downpour and the narrow balcony drummed with the sound of bouncing water. Electra wouldn’t go onto it and I couldn’t blame her. I let her out into the corridor to pee instead. I couldn’t leave the flat because I had no keys to get back in and I wasn’t well enough to leave for good.
Georgie, Joss and the cops couldn’t find me if I didn’t know where I was myself. I never go south of the river. Also I was just one aching bagful of hurt wrapped up in a bruised and sewn-together skin. I wasn’t fit for street life.
There was a grim little kitchen with milk in the fridge and cornflakes in the cupboard. There was no wine or dog food. I gave Electra a bowl of milky cornflakes and made a cup of tea for myself. The clock on the stove said it was six-fifteen. I took one co-codamol because I wanted a clearish head. Smister hadn’t left me many. It wouldn’t matter so much if he hadn’t drunk all the wine, but he was the greediest nun ever. He snuffled up intoxicants
like a giant anteater. He said he wasn’t a thief but I know for sure there were more twenty pound notes in the Louis Whos’is bag before he got his sticky fingers on it.
Back in the big bedroom I stood and listened to the two bodies breathe. They smelled of sex, wine and weed.
‘Hey,’ I said, in an ordinary voice. No one stirred.
‘Hey, fire!’ I yelled loud enough to make Electra jump. Neither Smister nor buzz-cut guy even twitched a muscle. So I ran my hand under their pillows and found more of Natalie’s money and pills. A great jangling clump of keys was still attached to Buzz-cut’s trousers by a dog chain. I took them and spent twenty minutes trying to find the key that opened the door of the flat.
We didn’t take the lift—Electra absolutely refused for one thing, and for another no one had cleaned up the dog poo from last night. Not that the stairs were much better, they too were decorated with pee, poo and gang tags; which didn’t say much for the residents of this tower block, my new neighbours.
The rain skipped and jumped off Buzz-cut’s high-viz plastic coat and after a couple of minutes Electra was soaked to the bone. Even so she seemed glad to be outdoors. Me too. It’s amazing, if I’d been sleeping out in the night’s rain I would’ve been moaning my head off for a dry place to live. But stick me in a flat, eight floors up in a tower block, and I feel like I’m in chokey. I wouldn’t say living rough’s a lifestyle choice because I only chose it when I’d run out of other choices, but it does become normal quite quickly.
About half a mile away from the tower block a mangy line of shops cowered sadly in the rain. This is why I hate London south of the river: it looks derelict even when it isn’t. But there was a mini-mart that sold wine and dog food.
As I stood in front of a shelf stacked with cheap wine I couldn’t remember when I’d last had a drink. I tried to think but my brain kept slamming doors. When did Joss kick me in the head? How long was I in hospital? I held my head in my hands. It was still wrapped in Natalie’s silk scarves which seemed to be stuck to my scalp with dried blood. Maybe while I still had the pills I wouldn’t need the wine. But wine is predictable. It tiptoes up behind you, wraps you in a soft woolly cardigan and cuddles you. It doesn’t just stick its fist out and wallop you on the head like the pills do.
I grabbed three two-litre bottles of red and stuck them in my basket along with dog food for Electra and went to the till.
There were three hard girls in hoodies lolling at the counter. One of them sniggered at me and said, ‘Security? My arse!’
Taller and broader than her by far was the woman who checked out my purchases. She said, ‘They found you then.’ She had stark white hair floating like lambs wool round her head, but her eyes, brows and lashes were coal black. A pair of gold-rimmed half glasses gave her a teacherly look. ‘You don’t look like you should be out of bed yet,’ she added sternly.
‘I’m alright,’ I said. I couldn’t remember if I knew her—if I’d seen her on the street or in hospital.
‘You don’t look alright.’ She sounded so certain that I tried to find a reflection of myself in the cigarette cabinet behind her. ‘You don’t hardly look no different from them photos they printed in the Standard.’
‘What photos?’ I couldn’t help myself—my fingers, holding out the money, started shaking. Two of my fingernails were painted the colour of unripe blackberries. They were flaking and looked ridiculous.
‘Them photos they took in hospital. “Death shock, brutal beating.” Didn’t no one show you?’
Another hard girl seemed to wake up out of her iPod coma. ‘What she gwan do? Stick it in album, innit?’
‘Nobody told me,’ I said, trying to keep my voice level.
‘Din’t want to upset you I s’pect,’ the older woman said. ‘But you went missing, right?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I went to my… my daughter’s convent. She’s a nun, see. They looked after me there. That hospital was filthy.’
‘They breed their own sickness, for true.’ She gave me the concrete stare. ‘So now you work for fat King Belshazzar, take the gold of corruption, huh?’
‘Huh?’
‘And that wine, it’s for communion table? At £1.25 a litre—I don’t think so.’ The hoodie girl reached out and flicked my highly visible yellow sleeve with a fingernail that looked like an opal dagger. ‘There ain’t no security thuggies at no convent, you axe me, and there ain’t no convent neither, you lying old cow, you.’
‘I-I-I… ’ Their aggression and powers of observation nailed me to the sticky floor. ‘I borrowed the jacket,’ I stammered, ‘from my, my brother-in-law. I’m staying with my sister now. It was raining. What photos? No one said I was in the papers. Have you still got one?’
‘Not while you abides in Babylon with the servants of the fat Corruptor.’
I still didn’t understand what she was raving about.
‘We ain’t giving no handouts, innit.’
‘I can pay.’
‘Go look in the back, Shawshawna.’
‘Recycling, Nan, innit?’
‘But you did forget, Shawshawna. Go look in the back.’
I waited, wondering what it would be like to have the personal power to make even hard girls in hoodies obey me. And while I waited I shook. Apart from one co-codamol I was sourly, bitterly sober. Teaspoonsful of milky cornflakes erupted from my belly and hit the back of my throat making me swallow nervously and too often. I was crushed by Nan’s slab-like stare. Electra scratched at the door with her long middle toenail. She looked soaked and almost as nervous as me.
I said, ‘I need some first aid stuff—clean dressings and antiseptic. Is there a chemist anywhere near?’ My voice trembled. I was pitiful and I hated myself but I carried on, trying to make Nan believe I was a real person. ‘And a pet shop? My dog lost her waterproof coat.’
‘Oh, you got a dog then? I was wondering why you buy cheap wine and dog food. Hungry and thirsty, I thought.’
I looked down at my Louis Whos’is handbag. Why wasn’t it saving me from insults? I had money. I wasn’t begging. ‘Are you always this rude to customers?’
‘Only ones who work for Babylon,’ she said, ‘and lie to me and don’t clean their teeth.’
‘Pardon me?’
‘I sell toothpaste, you know. And toothbrush. But no, you guzzle up alcohol by preference.’
That was too much. ‘They split my lips and gums and broke my teeth,’ I said. ‘You can scrub your gnashers with a rusty fork and it’ll hurt you less than it hurts me.’
‘I sell mouthwash too,’ she said, implacable. ‘You ain’t got no excuse to forget your dental hygiene.’ To demonstrate she flashed me her white picket fence of enamel. I gave up and followed her pointing finger to a few bottles of green mouthwash.
Shawshawna came back with a damp, creased copy of the Standard. It was open at page four. ‘Glamour shot or what,’ she said and the other two hard girls joined her staring alternately at the picture and at me. Nan shooed them away. She folded the damp paper neatly and held it out to me.
‘Ten pounds,’ she said with no shame in her eyes whatsoever. ‘You soldier in the forces of corruption at South Dock High Rise. You profit from greed and coercion. I ain’t giving you nothing for free. Someone got to pay for what they doing over there.’
‘I haven’t done anything over there. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Then why I going out of business? Where all my old customers gone?’ She glared at me over the top of her half-glasses.
‘I don’t know,’ I said faintly.
‘Then you ignorant, but you ain’t innocent.’ She waved the Standard in front of my nose. ‘Ten pounds or bugger off.’
‘You tell it, Nan,’ Shawshawna said, and the other hard girls growled in agreement.
‘You come in here wearing the uniform of the Corruptor and ask for my
charity.’ Nan was almost singing in her rich contralto.
I was defeated and I knew it. I’d known it since I first set eyes on her with all her certainty and respectability. The street has taught me how to wheedle when I want something from the strong; not to do battle with the righteous. I should never have stolen Buzz-cut’s highly visible waterproof. I crept away, ten pounds poorer, with a wet newspaper in my plastic bag full of mouthwash, wine and dog food. Electra crept away behind me. We both had our tails between our legs.
Chapter 12
In Which I Try To Review The Situation
Electra ate proper dog food at last and I dried her off with a tea towel and the hairdryer I found in Smister’s bag. She lay down and went to sleep in my wheelie case, snuggled up in Natalie’s towelling bathrobe. She’d had a traumatic outing, poor thing.
I sat on the bunk bed with a bottle and the turkey baster and wondered how I’d let myself be bullied by Nan and her feral granddaughter. It was the handbag, I decided. Far from protecting me, the sight of it had set me up as a mark. It was a badge of prosperity and I was foolish to cling to it. But it was a lovely bag even banged about and soaked with rain water.
The other clue nestled on page four of the Standard: a picture of me, unconscious, bandaged, bruised, swollen, lumpy and drooling because of a tube in my mouth—a portrait of the archetypal victim. They said I was Natalie Munrow who worked for a firm of corporate investment sharks called Goodall and Jett. I was thirty-eight years old, divorced, and living in a trendy area of South Kensington. The other victim had not yet been identified. The neighbours were shocked out of their socks. An Australian au-pair claimed to have seen three or four suspicious characters in the mews earlier in the afternoon.
You’d think that someone would’ve noticed the difference between high-flying Natalie and bottom-crawling me. But as I say, it was the portrait of an archetypal victim. A woman beaten beyond all recognition is, after all, beyond recognition. The paper didn’t say so but I had to assume that the other victim had been beaten too. She, Natalie, must have been unrecognisable too. The only reason anyone mistook me for her was because of the bag. I asked the ambulance lady for my bags and bedroll, but my mouth was too broken and she brought me Natalie’s bag instead.
