Inglorious

by Joanna Kavenna

  Therefore, she waited patiently while the clerks talked to each other and then she asked if she could see the manager. Of course he was busy, this moneysmith, and they told her to come back later. Better still, she could ring in for an appointment, said a brusque woman with a face like a piano. ‘Just a minute or so?’ said Rosa. ‘I’d be very brief. Just a question or two really, simple questions, requiring simple answers.’ Can you give me more? More time to pay off my debt, or more debt? She knew the answer anyway. But the heel-clicking woman didn’t want to help her. She didn’t even want to talk to her. Perhaps she looked unkempt, or maybe it was her unstudied air of desperation. ‘I’m sorry, but Mr Rivers is very busy. We can do you an appointment for Thursday,’ she said, this zipper-mouthed woman. Do me? thought Rosa. Do me an appointment? Thursday was three days away. ‘Perhaps tomorrow?’ said Rosa. ‘Tomorrow morning, first thing?’

  ‘Why not leave your number,’ said the woman.

  ‘Mr Rivers has my number.’ That old Sharkbreath knew everything about her. He had been patient for a while, but now he was getting sterner by the hour. ‘I’m sure he would like to see me,’ she said. ‘Please could you at least ask?’

  Thus conjoined, Mandy clipped off. She vanished into another part of the bank and Rosa waited. She was too nervous to sit, so she stalked along the banks of machines and watched people taking money from them. We can do you an eviction on Tuesday, she thought. We can do you a spell in a reform centre for the fiscally incontinent on Wednesday. She edged around posters of perfect people with mortgages and TESSAs, smiling broadly because their mortgages made them so very happy. Whatever they might all say, she had really been trying to get a job. She knew money was an illusion, but she also knew that she needed food in her hardly illusory belly. It gave her something to aim for, and in recent weeks, she had tried a teeming array of things. Her terms were vague enough. She had to find a way to make money without being required to lie, to feign a certainty she didn’t possess. She thought that was broad enough. So she had tried to become a gardener. For a week she sat in the local library reading books about botany. The supply was patchy, but she learnt some definitions, tallied words with pictures. She pushed flyers through letterboxes and had a few calls. She went round to the house of a Mr Lewis, and they were getting on fine until she dug up a sunflower and he sent her away again. She had been applying for a variety of things, writing letters.

  Dear Sir, I would like a job. Actually that’s not true. Without wanting to trouble you with my ambivalence, a job is what I need. Sheer bloody debt has forced me back. I am quite free of many of the more fashionable varieties of hypocrisy, though I suffer from many unfashionable varieties of my own. I have many strengths, most of which I seem for the moment to have forgotten. However, I am a goal-oriented person and so on, und so weiter … Yours ever, Rosa Lane.

  Dear Madam, I am a person of inconstant aims and mild destitution. I find this combination of qualities excludes me from many jobs. But working together, I’m sure we can exploit my talents successfully. I still have a cream suit, a relic from a former life. I am unexceptional in every way, and eager to serve. You can find me in a borrowed room, in west London. Yours faithfully, Rosa Lane.

  More recently, she had written to landlords and restaurateurs.

  *

  Dear Sir/Madam, I would like to be considered for the post of barmaid. I have no experience at all, but I have an abiding interest in bars. I like a nice glass of beer, from time to time. Some of my most memorable moments have occurred in bars, some of my most desperate humiliations and fleeting patches of pure claritas. So far she had been dismissed by every barman she met. Kindly, politely, but dismissed all the same.

  A week ago – her finest hour – she had signed up for temping and gone along to a place where alcoholics rang to ask for help. She was put in reception and told to type letters. For the first day she was productive, working steadily through her in-tray, enjoying the flick of her fingers and her downright efficiency. She powered through a load of letters and cast them into her out-tray. By the next day, the novelty had worn off. Then she found the office air was stale and on the third day she was bothered by the conversations of the people to her left. It wasn’t fair, they were nice enough, friendly and clearly sane, but they did keep spilling out words. While she was typing up letters … Dear Sir, On July 21st we made an application for 20 purple box files with interior clips. These have as yet not arrived … they were pouring forth. Perhaps it was unkind to hate them by the end of the day. She knew it was. The following morning she realised they hated her. That hurt her feelings; she always preferred her hatred to be unreciprocated. They blanked her at lunch as she sat there with a plastic fork in her hand and a takeaway salad in a plastic box. Later she saw them queuing in the café, and it was hard not to feel sorry for them all, Rosa too, standing in their cheap clothes, waiting for a cup of coffee. When she got back to her desk her mood had darkened. She typed a few last letters … Dear Sir, On July 24th we ordered 504 brown envelopes and 10 million pencils and 30 trillion stamps and yet you have sent us 304 envelopes and only seven million pencils and only three trillion stamps please rectify this appalling oversight immediately before something terrible happens some unfathomable doom … and then she went home. The next morning she phoned to say she was ill. Her father called it lassitude. ‘You have to be able to get up in the morning,’ he said.

  ‘And I do,’ said his daughter, who was sitting in bed at the time with a cold compress on her head.

  ‘No one likes their job that much,’ said her father.

  ‘You liked yours. Mother liked hers,’ said Rosa.

  ‘Well, find something you like.’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ she said. She still hadn’t found a way to resolve it all. ‘It’s ridiculous. You think, would the knights on their grail quest, would they have been able to do it, find the grail and the rest, if the bank had been constantly telling them about their overdraft and how they weren’t getting any more money when they finished the hunt? Would Jesus have done so well, had he had Mr Sharkbreath ringing him up and asking him to discuss a debt repayment plan?’

  ‘Rosa,’ said her father. ‘Please don’t add a Messiah complex to your list of woes.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean.’

  ‘If you don’t like the office, then do something else.’

  ‘I mean, there’s so little time, and how are you meant to consider anything at all, when there’s this constant thing at your back – not even time’s winged chariot, I mean that’s there too, but the imperative – the imperative to earn money. And for that you have to adopt a mask. Dress up. Mark time. Squander days.’

  ‘It’s a basic,’ he said. ‘There’s no escaping it.’

  Successive nights like rolling waves convey them quickly who are bound for death, she quoted, whenever anyone would listen. ‘Melodrama,’ said Grace, when Rosa said this to Grace in July when she had been ignorant and they had still been friends. ‘Plain melodrama! Get a grip, Rosa! You’re acting like a child!’

  ‘But a child doesn’t know the horror! The horror!’ said Rosa.

  ‘Don’t try to quote your way out of it,’ said Grace. ‘Don’t drag literature into it. You’ve had a terrible time. But we have to work. We all have to work. You just have to grow up!’

  With her back against the wall (and on the wall was a poster saying ARE YOU MAKING THE MOST OF YOUR SAVINGS?) Rosa knew they were right. All of them: Grace, her father, the Grail Knights, the whole lot of them. (And now she thought TEMP might mean the Knights Templar, that seemed quite probable as she sat there with her hand on her heart and a feeling as if her blood was fizzing through her veins. A local branch. A modern version. Galloping towards truth.) They were joined together in a rousing chorus, the refrain something about getting on with it, not festering. Sharkbreath was in there too, telling her she couldn’t borrow any more. We all have to work, they were singing, moving crabwise along the stage. We all have to work! Life was short, a
nd indeterminate, the mysteries of the universe quite out of reach, but action was required. You had to play a part. Simply, you might as well join in! You couldn’t just fall off the horse at the first hedge! Your mother has died, but worse things would happen. Your father will die, your lover, your friends, everyone will die, you included! Still, whenever she saw something that suggested a return to the office she found she couldn’t tick it. So she had gone along to the local library and asked if they needed any help. There at least she could read, she thought. She could brush her hands over the soft spines of books, stack them on shelves and she could sit at a desk and direct people to the large-print novels. She was mobile and fairly bright, she explained. She knew a few jokes and she had once been a decent raconteur. She could definitely manage a stamping thing, she said, a book stamper, a stampe de livres, whatever it was called, and she knew how to talk about books. A woman with bright red lipstick had asked her for references. Rosa said she would supply some soon, and offered to show just how she could stack. She had read a lot of books, she said. Mostly modern classics, though she had recently begun a course of reading, from the Ancients to the present day. Meanwhile she had read a lot of Dickens and much of Dostoevsky. Some of Gogol. Most of the Eliots, George and T.S…. Ask me about a book, she said, any book, I’ll pretend I’ve read it. She was trying to look practical and efficient, like a woman with better things to do who happened to feel like working in a library. But the red-lipped woman turned Rosa down. Apparently she didn’t present the right qualifications. Then she applied for jobs as a farm worker. She had a soothing image of herself living it up on a Welsh farm, drinking cider in the evenings and falling in love with a boy called Glynn. But so far no one had written back to her.

  Another waste of time had been her interview with Pennington, the other day. She had really thought that job might be the one, a thing she could commit to, but Pennington had sorely disappointed her. The auguries were bad, and when she saw Pennington’s house she knew they were doomed, both of them. She was up in Kensal Green, at a forgotten line of houses far from the tube, and she looked at the snagged gate and the paint-peeling walls and the dirt-flecked windows and she stopped on the pavement, her hand poised above the gate. She was irresolute for a few minutes, perhaps it was longer, and then she found she was knocking on the door. She regretted it when she saw Pennington standing there, a man with a thatch of grey hair and a booming voice. He was smiling at her, rubbing his hands. His glasses, which were smeared with grime, had been mended with sellotape. He was looking for a proofreader, his advert had explained. ‘I have been working for twenty years on a definitive history,’ he said, as he led her through the hall to the living room of his small, shabby house. ‘I have various theories to prove. I need someone who can work with me on it. I can’t pay much. You’ll find it adequate, as long as your expenses aren’t great. Your main motive would be the experience. You would be dedicated to the research itself.’

  No good, then, thought Rosa. I am dedicated only to my debt. But Pennington was saying, ‘I am very fastidious. I like people to work hard. I strongly believe the book will make me very famous. Possibly rich, in which case I would pay you a bonus. Of course if you found me a bear or if I found you a slouch’ – and he fixed her sternly, all of a sudden – ‘we could of course agree to part. I have been through a couple of assistants already. Since I began, a dozen or so. Good ones are hard to come by. Do you know anything about Ancient Egypt?’

  ‘A little,’ she said. ‘I have spent a lot of time in the British Museum.’ He was staring at her, screwing his face into a thousand tucks and creases, mapping himself.

  ‘Well, we have all been to the British Museum,’ he said. ‘Anyone from your schoolboy to your young Turk’ – my young Turk? What was the man saying, she wondered briefly? – ‘has managed to go to the British Museum.’ He said this with disdain. He definitely had her down as one of them, a vulgar day-tripper, lagging on the steps with an ice cream.

  ‘If I held up this,’ and he held up a hieroglyph of a figure holding a quill. ‘What would it mean?’

  ‘To write?’ said Rosa.

  ‘Good! Good! And this?’ And he held up a hieroglyph of a figure with its arms raised.

  ‘To praise?’ guessed Rosa.

  ‘Excellent. And this?’ And he held up a picture of a man tied to a stake.

  ‘Prisoner?’

  ‘Wonderful. And this one?’ And he held up a picture of a figure sitting in an arch.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Rosa.

  ‘That’s a god wearing the sun’s disk and grasping a palm branch in each hand,’ he said. ‘But that one was difficult.’

  Idly, Rosa wondered how long the game went on. And she discovered it went on for quite some time, as Pennington asked her to guess the meanings of another batch of hieroglyphs and to translate a line of them. ‘See how you do!’ he said.

  Pen in hand, she went to it. She still wasn’t sure what he was paying. He had a fixed stare. He smiled a lot, but she couldn’t tell how deep the charm went. Unmarried, she assumed. Simple and terrible in his way, with his staring eyes, his shocking refusal to break eye contact. He dropped this stare only when he was reading through her translation, laughing richly at her foolishness, then he lifted his eyes again and looked long and hard at her. Eventually he said, ‘Brilliant!’ He was laughing at her. ‘Complete nonsense! But they often are! How were you to know? How could you possibly do it? Impossible! You were bound to get it all wrong. And you did! But you tried, nonetheless, you tried. And that is very important.’

  She thanked him while he snorted and told her not to worry, it was quite all right, he often – now that Egyptology had become so popular, something to do with Hollywood perhaps, and he said this with distaste – got applicants who were unsuitable. She apologised to Pennington for wasting his time. He nodded with a steely little smile. ‘Thanks so much, goodbye, dear, goodbye.’ Goodbye for ever, he meant, and Rosa thought, Well, that’s that. Once he had shut her out she went back out through the little gate. She side-stepped round a yellow digger, which was sitting on the kerb like an industrial scorpion. Pennington was nothing but a diversion. He was a wrong turn, if anything, and for a moment she wanted to go back and tell him. She had a few urgent questions to answer, and none of them, but none of them, had anything to do with Osiris. Except, it was Osiris who weighed you in the balance after death. It was Osiris who put a feather on one of the scales and your heart – or soul – on the other, and if your heart sank lower on the scales than the feather, then you were doomed. Well, we must all be doomed, she thought. Every last one of us! For who, in this day and age, can make any claim to having a heart lighter than a feather!

  *

  ‘Mr Rivers is in a meeting,’ said the woman. Mandy had come back from the store cupboard with this news. ‘Really, are you sure?’ said Rosa. She tried to sound incredulous. Had Sharkbreath really not wanted to see her? ‘Can’t you try again?’ said Rosa.

  ‘He is too busy to see you,’ said Mandy. She said that with an officious twang, rustling her papers.

  ‘But I really do need to see him,’ said Rosa. ‘I’ve been a good client, a client of many years. It’s true, my debt is quite bad. I’m not pretending there’s no debt. But I am actively seeking work. I am busy about it. And I just need some flexibility on my debt.’

  Mandy bridled. She was definitely becoming sanctimonious. ‘If you’re in debt, then there’s nothing I can do about that. Mr Rivers can’t see you. I can’t help you any more,’ she said.

  ‘Perhaps you can help me,’ said Rosa, in a tone of ill-advised optimism. Mandy shrugged and looked as if she thought it was unlikely. When Rosa said a couple more things Mandy told her she had to talk to Rivers. Shaking her head brusquely, Mandy walked away.

  *

  Eager and ready, awaiting enlightenment, Rosa sat on the top deck of a bus as it rounded the corner and moved on to Kensington Park Road. There was still much to anticipate. Today she had an interview and
she hoped she would get the job. She had to go back to Jess’s flat, pass the day writing applications, and prepare herself. She had to prime herself for her interview at 4 p.m. It seemed a real possibility, this job she was going to win. Her deviation would be corrected; she would climb out of her fiscal pit. After that, when that was settled, she would really get to grips with the basics, with the essential mysteries and underlying causes. She inhaled sharply as a woman elbowed her in the face. She heard Arabic behind her and German to her left. Auch wenn wir nicht wollen: Gott reisst. Then she heard the tinny sound of an iPod, whispering a tune she couldn’t remember. The bus scraped past the parked cars and people. A scaffold and the sound of drills. The yellow-fronted self-service laundry, always for let. Shops with their windows full. Pale slabs. Enfeoffed, she thought. My kingdom for an epiphany. The sun ascending. The sky a lustrous pale blue. Soon it would be mid-morning. The morning was half-finished, half-begun. And onward the day went, unstoppable, quite incessant in its vigour.

  Ahead she saw the blue bridge hanging over the road, cars filing across it. It was a slung construction of steel and on its curved belly were signs and shapes, cryptic clues, left there by the taggers. TEMP. She had a fine view of a high-rise block, faded turquoise trim on the windows. On a balcony she saw two eagles, painted in gilt. Then there was the pebble-dashed side of another bank. Another bank, she thought, with bars on the doors. But there was no point trying to get symbolic about the fact that she had ripped through her overdraft and failed to supply a payment plan. The glass shivered as the bus turned abruptly and everyone swayed, rubbing shoulders in a friendly way. For all of this, despite the deep sense of community, the Blitz spirit of the upper deck, Rosa found she had her head in her hands. Suddenly she wanted to get out, she was racked with a sense of unease, and when the bus came to a halt under the Westway she ran down the steps. At the side of the road, she wondered if she should wait for another bus or walk home. Indecision stopped her for a second, then she walked up the hill and along the street thinking that here was another Georgian terrace and here a window with the curtains gusting in the breeze. She picked her way past the station where an old man was chanting a mantra, begging for change. A man with a grey face was selling papers, his hands in fingerless gloves. He mouthed an ‘A’ at Rosa, and then she heard the rest: ‘ARSENAL WIN CUP’ he was saying, and then his voice faded again. Pressing her feet carefully on the pavement she walked up the hill, passing the stalls selling falafels, the late night shops, the all-night chemist. She noticed the taggers had scrawled new words along the walls. EASY I, she read. THAT and what? she thought. She couldn’t read it.