Tales of Sin & Fury, Part 1

by Sonia Paige

  As Alex got off the bus, she pulled up her hood and then set off with long strides to her office building. She stepped into the lift, pulled the old-fashioned cage-like door across in front of her and pressed the button for the second floor.

  A smell of burning hit her as she went in the office. Dora, her wildly back-combed hair sticking out at all angles, was stuffing the contents of a wire wastepaper basket into a black plastic bag. ‘Thank Christ it’s you,’ she said, ‘I thought it was the others coming back from their meeting.’ Dora had the kind of face that looked permanently startled.

  ‘What’s going on?’ said Alex. ‘What’s burning?’ She screwed up her nose. Her features were as sharp as her mind, pretty but angular.

  ‘Nothing. It’s all out now,’ said Dora. ‘Just an accident.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I dropped my fag into the wastepaper basket and it wasn’t quite out. Nothing serious. I was in the loo when it started smouldering.’

  ‘I saw a fire engine coming up Kingsway,’ said Alex. ‘I might have known.’

  ‘Very funny. It was only in the bin.’ Dora took a paper handkerchief off her desk and went down on her knees in her leopard-skin trousers to wipe the residue of carbon from the inside of the basket. ‘Do you think he’ll realize?’

  ‘He will if you don’t get rid of the smell.’ Alex opened the window and cold cut into the warm air of the office. Snow flakes were drifting down outside, and some of them blew onto the window sill. ‘For fuck’s sake, Dora, setting fire to a publisher’s office! What’s the idea?’ Alex sat down at her desk and pressed her hand down on her wiry black hair, clutching her head. When she took it away the short curls bounced up again like heather. ‘Are you trying to get rid of the backlog of unsolicited manuscripts? Get out of proof-reading? Do us out of a job?… For Chrissake, get a grip!’

  Dora dropped the basket and sank into her chair. ‘You won’t tell the others, will you?’ She tried to wipe her hands clean on another paper handkerchief. ‘Anyway, you’re late. What happened to you?’

  ‘Doing a half day. The council came to fix a window in the flat. Fucking horrible weather. The Houses of Parliament are wrapped in obscurity. That figures. The monuments of the media are benefiting from a wintry whitewash. The legal world looks like Siberia. Then Christmas lights draped all over everything to make it look pretty.’ She pulled her coat collar tighter round her neck, and switched on her computer. ‘And since it’s Christmas, they’re hoping we won’t notice that they’re going to start a war in the Gulf. Kill a few people in the Middle East. That’s the Christmas spirit…’ She looked across the neat piles on her desk at Dora. ‘Christmas is madness,’ she said.

  Dora nodded across the chaotic and perilously stacked heaps of papers that covered her desk, nearly burying her electric typewriter. ‘Mass hysteria,’ she said, and shivered.

  ‘Capitalism running amok,’ spat out Alex.

  ‘Bah, Humbug!’ Dora threw her head back. Her dishevelled hair was hurled into a new disorder. ‘Scrooge had the right idea.’

  ‘Hang on,’ said Alex. ‘Poor old Scrooge has been misappropriated. In the service of consumerism. The whole point of The Christmas Carol is about the redistribution of wealth, the wealthy sharing with the poor. “Mankind should have been my business,” groans Marley’s ghost. Especially at the festive season.’ Alex spoke swiftly, as if the words were racing to keep up with her thoughts. ‘But how do they use that story? They use Scrooge as a taunt to make every poor sod on a low income feel they’re being mean if they’re not overspending on Christmas presents. To boost the profits of the big companies. Dickens wanted the rich to give to the poor, not take even more from the poor because it’s Christmas.’

  Dora was silenced. She stood up, delved into her handbag and applied some crimson lipstick. She touched up the jagged black lines drawn around her eyes. ‘So what are you doing at Christmas?’ she asked.

  ‘Having some good experiences, I hope,’ said Alex. ‘That are nothing to do with commodities. I don’t want my memories marketed.’ Her fingers flew around the keyboard. Then she stopped and looked up at Dora. ‘My younger sister and brother are visiting from Australia. We’ll have a meal and a Christmas cake. I always used to make one when they were little. Dad’ll like it. And I’m not going to buy one from the sodding supermarket.’ She pressed ‘Print’ and on the other side of the office a machine produced a sheet of paper.

  Dora fished a packet of Silk Cut out of her handbag and lit up. ‘My Mum used to make Christmas cake,’ she said. ‘Until the year she put the cake decorations into the mixture. Instead of having sultanas and currants in it, there were reindeer and snow babies and plastic holly and Father Christmases all mixed in. Nobody was sure if it would be safe to eat.’

  ‘Sounds tempting,’ said Alex. ‘Speaking of which, do you fancy lunch? While the smoke clears? It’s freezing in here. The great world of publishing can do without us for an hour. You could have a holly and reindeer sandwich.’

  ‘OK,’ said Dora. ‘I wish I felt hungry…’ She shuddered and went to the window. She knocked her ash outside then pulled down the sash. She leant her nose against the glass. ‘The sleet knows where it’s going,’ she said. ‘It comes straight down or slants across in lines at an angle. But when it turns into snow like this, it gets confused. These little flakes are drifting every which way, turning back on themselves, making friends in clusters then going off on their own. Some of them don’t even seem to know if they’re meant to be going down or up. They’re just wandering around aimlessly, looking through the windows of the office buildings…’ She drew on her cigarette.

  Alex was working on her computer; she pressed the same key three times in rapid succession.

  ‘The air is very populated at this time of year,’ said Dora. ‘Heavenly choirs. People in red suits flying around bringing presents. Ghosts of Christmas past and future… And what with all these little flakes….’ She looked through the snow down at the street, full of slow-moving traffic. She looked across the road into the brightly-lit office window opposite, with staff moving around and desks in rows. ‘So many snowflakes,’ she said. ‘So many people.’

  Alex did not look up from her work.

  Tuesday 18th December 1.30 pm

  At the window of a fourth floor office in the Shellmex building, a middle-aged man in a grey suit stood watching the flurries as his secretary put some incoming mail on his large mahogany desk.

  ‘Have we heard back from the Minister about the report?’ he asked her.

  ‘Not yet, Mr. Goforth. Would you like me to chase it through his office?’

  ‘No, thank you, Iris. I’m afraid we’ll just have to sit tight and keep our fingers crossed. ’till we hear a yay or a nay. You’ve had your lunch, haven’t you?… I won’t be going out for mine.’

  Iris closed the door behind her and he sat down at the desk where a handwritten personal letter lay unfinished. So far it said:

  ‘To: Worthing Borough Treasurer

  ‘Ref: DL/4376

  ‘18th December 1990.’

  The phone on his desk rang and he picked up the receiver. ‘Hello?… Yes, darling, here too… I’ll try and get a report on the wireless……… So I’ll go ahead with the curtains?……… Yes……… I worry about Edwin……… I think it’s still cut off. Will he have the sense to keep warm?……… That’s all we can do……… Bye my love.’

  He took a bite from a Cornish pasty lying beside the phone in a paper bag, and re-applied himself to his letter:

  ‘Dear Sir,

  ‘Re: Edwin Maurice Frinton: Application for Exemption from Personal Community Charge Liability on grounds of severe mental impairment

  ‘Thank you for your letter of 10 December.’

  Although he wrote slowly and pressed hard, his squiggly handwriting was barely legible.

  ‘Edwin Frinton could not make a claim because he was incapable of doing so by reason of his mental illness of which you are aware.’
>
  He checked that the carbon paper underneath his top sheet was correctly aligned, and that his writing was coming out on the sheet below. He continued:

  ‘Mr. Frinton was incapable of transacting business and for that reason the Court of Protection has appointed me as his Receiver.’

  He took another bite of Cornish pasty and dusted crumbs off his suit. His secretary put her head round the door. ‘Would you like a cup of tea with your lunch, Mr. Goforth?’

  ‘Yes, please, Iris.’

  ‘The usual?’ she asked.

  He was writing, ‘It was thus through no fault of his that he did not make an earlier claim for exemption from Personal Community Charge Liability, and I would ask that you give his claim all due consideration (form enclosed).’

  ‘The usual, Mr. Goforth?’

  He looked up and stared at his secretary blankly.

  ‘Tea? The usual?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, yes, thank you, Iris.’ He finished his letter:

  ‘I look forward to hearing from you on this matter at your earliest convenience.

  ‘Yours faithfully,

  ‘(Raymond Goforth, Receiver of Edwin Frinton)’

  He read the letter through, nudged his spectacles further up his nose, and signed his name in the gap with a flourish. He was half-way through re-reading it when Iris came in carrying a stack of folders and a cup of strong tea with two sugars.

  Tuesday 18th December 1.30 pm

  In Tottenham Court Road, Freddie was standing with his hands in the pockets of his faded red windcheater looking at an electric guitar in a shop window. He had no hat, and the wet snow settled in his matted shoulder-length locks like drops of dew in a spider’s web. The pavement was crowded with Christmas shoppers and office workers on their lunch break. A smart man in a black serge coat jostled into Freddie from behind, accidentally spiking his head with one of the points of his umbrella.

  ‘Ouch!’ yelled Freddie, clutching his hair. Turning to look down the pavement, he identified an umbrella with a Union Jack design as the culprit and yelled after it: ‘Have you got a licence for that thing?’

  The man stopped, turned slowly and eyed Freddie as if wondering whether it was worth retaliating. He decided not. ‘Get lost, why don’t you?’ he said in a patronizing tone of voice, and turned on his heel.

  Tuesday 18th December 1.30 pm

  A few blocks away in Gordon Square, on the sixth floor of the archaeological institute, snow was settling on the balcony of the Common Room while behind closed doors inside Morton was having a discussion over coffee and a tuna sandwich.

  ‘In Rajasthan,’ he was saying, ‘one of the visual forms of traditional storytelling uses a thing called a par. It’s a large painted scroll about 16 feet long. It illustrates the elements of the story, but not in a sequential way. For me this resonates with the Homeric epics.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said the lecturer Lefteris who was sitting at the same coffee table. ‘How did we get to Rajasthan?’

  ‘You think,’ said Sang next to him, ‘that Homer is connected to Rajasthan?’ He blinked twice.

  ‘No, no, no,’ said Morton. ‘Not at all. I’m just using it as an analogy. Not suggesting any literal connections. The scroll is like a map with the same characters reappearing. It’s used in the ritual performance of a long poem linked to the worship of a local hero Pabuji. He’s had a cult since the 16th century. It’s mostly observed by Rebari shepherds and rural Rajputs. The recital is performed by bhopas, folk priests, who travel through the villages with the scroll.’

  A male student sitting at the table smothered a yawn.

  ‘So what are you saying with this?’ Lefteris flung his hands down in the Greek gesture of questioning.

  ‘The par, the scroll, resonates with possibilities opened up by fictional narratives over recent decades in our culture. Both text and films.’ Morton’s green eyes widened with excitement. ‘We aren’t any longer trapped in the monolithic plot of a “grand narrative”. Artists now can develop the decentred, the non-chronological, the multi-focused, the multi-layered. John Berger has compared the process of writing a novel to standing on a hilltop describing the story you see happening in the valley below. Susan Sontag has described it rather as the accumulation of a series of moments: rain on a window; someone breathing out; the ring of a telephone.’

  The Greek drained his coffee. ‘And when it comes to a series of moments – oh, and what moments! – Homer’s your man – or perhaps woman… ?’ He smiled, and the scar on his left cheek crinkled up.

  ‘Right!’ said Morton, ‘Everyone knew the stories in Homer’s poems. When they were being performed orally they could be told in any order. Sequential narrative could dissolve in the large picture. In a similar way the par embodies synchronicity: on the scroll all the adventures are happening at once. Time is simultaneous. And the folk priest highlights the religious or spiritual element in the act of storytelling: like religion, fiction can take us outside ourselves. The more tedious or difficult life is, the stronger the need to escape into another world.’

  ‘You know,’ Lefteris ran his hand through his tousled grey hair, looking out through the glass doors onto the balcony, ‘there is another world outside at this moment. It is being transformed while we are speaking. I propose that if we step outside, our various opinions will melt away and we will get a new perspective.’ He stood up to his full height and went to open the doors.

  ‘I think you have a point, Lefteri,’ said Morton, and followed him out.

  The others watched from inside as the two men leant on the balcony railings where they could see the whole of Gordon Square becoming a white theatre for the performance of silence. Snow landed on their foreheads, hair, eyebrows, ears, cheeks and mouths. The Greek tilted his face up as if he was receiving a blessing. Standing smaller and thinner beside him, Morton gazed at the multiplicity of the snowflakes and tried to see through the gaps between the molecules to reach the essence of things.

  Tuesday 18th December 1.30 pm

  ‘And now it’s bleeding snowing,’ says Debs from the window.

  The rest of us are lying on our beds and the snow is barely visible through the steamed-up glass.

  ‘And I couldn’t get my mum on the fucking phone and it’s her birthday,’ Debs carries on.

  ‘Shut it,’ says Mandy. ‘We all got problems. Some just make more of a song and dance about it.’

  ‘Ooh, what’s got into her?’ Debs asks me, flouncing back to her bed.

  I shrug. ‘Ghosts from the past?’

  ‘They never ask you why you take the stuff in the first place,’ says Debs.

  Beverly extracts a half-smoked cigarette from her bag.

  ‘How come you always got a fag?’ asks Debs.

  ‘I got a friend in Block D.’ Beverly puts it in her mouth but doesn’t light it. I think she is savouring the anticipation.

  ‘I just remembered something,’ says Debs. She fishes two dog ends out of her pocket, ‘Found them by the phone.’ I can make out white flakes of snow sticking to the outside of the windows as Debs uses her nails to dissect the dog ends, take out a few shreds of tobacco and start to roll up.

  Mandy makes a low sound halfway between a grunt and a growl.

  I climb off my bed and sit down on the floor. The pale blue pen is still working. The web I draw comes out large and erratic. I can’t seem to get the lines straight.

  By the time I finish it, Debs’ miniscule roll-up has smoked through and she’s staring at Beverly.

  ‘All right for some,’ says Debs in a too-loud voice.

  Beverly finally decides to light up. She flicks her lighter four times and finally gets a flame.

  ‘I said all right for some,’ Debs wrinkles up the bridge of her nose.

  Beverly puts the flame to the half cigarette in her mouth.

  Debs keeps on staring at her. ‘Your friend in Block D got plenty of fags, eh?’

  Beverly inhales.

  ‘You lot always do stuff for one
another, init.’

  ‘Leave off, lady,’ says Beverly and returns her stare.

  Debs is pissing me off even more than usual. I say, ‘You like picking on people, don’t you?’

  She turns towards me, ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Do you get a kick out of it?’

  Debs lurches off her bed and comes over, ‘Who rattled your cage?’

  She’s got an ugly face on her and she’s leaning over me as I sit on the floor. I don’t usually raise my voice, but this bloody woman is getting to me: ‘Why don’t you shut up?’

  Debs takes a step forward: ‘You telling me to shut up?’

  This is when I lose it. There’s that Bob Marley song about the bucket going to the well every day, and one day the bottom drops out. Well, the bottom falls out on me. I’ve had enough of being bullied. All of a sudden I find I’m yelling ‘Fuck off!’ again and again but I’m not making the sound, it’s making itself, it’s kind of pouring out of me and I feel as if I am just one big open mouth making a roar of sound.

  Debs steps back.

  Then Mandy sits up and joins in, shouting at Debs, ‘What you picking a fight for, you silly cow?’

  I find I’ve stopped yelling but I’m still shaking and my body is tingling all over. Debs turns away from me and heads for the door like she’s going to walk through it. ‘Can’t stand it in here, that’s what!’ she shouts back. She shakes the handle. She slams her foot into the door twice. ‘Bastards!’

  ‘No-one here happy,’ says Beverly.

  ‘Yeah, but some got cigarettes.’ screams Debs. She pulls a face and walks to the window. ‘And on top of it all, fucking snow…’ she directs her bitterness out through the glass as if it could shrivel all the snow in London.