Harper cast her unmade-up hazel eyes over Gael. ‘If he looks like you, is he single?’
‘If you don’t count his two kids.’
‘Are you single?’
‘And I plan to stay that way. Does this walk-in wardrobe have a lock?’
Harper knocked back her coffee and pulled a tequila-shot face. ‘Come on.’ She swung round on the stool, her feet dangling above its footrest. ‘I’ll show you.’
‘Now?’ Gael asked.
‘It’s now or now. Stein time, baby. If you hate it, make like Nancy Reagan and Just Say No. I still win cuz I get to tell my therapist I took someone home with me. That’d be a big step for me. Like … lunar.’
Gael was running through all the ventures she could put the saved rent funds towards; as if her decision would come down to expediency and not that she found it difficult to (want to) tune out of Harper’s singular frequency.
‘I hope you ride side-saddle,’ Harper said, accusingly.
Gael followed her out of the café to her rust-caked, basket-case bike. ‘I most certainly don’t.’ Still, she hopped on the pannier rack. Boycotted the zeroes of her code. Observed the marzipan-hued tan of Harper’s nape as they rode; held the tender of her midriff. Harper was oblivious to the coup that had been getting Gael to ride side-saddle.
Over the months that followed, Gael was clear that they’d be flatmates only; that she wasn’t in the market for friends; that she didn’t want to get to know Harper because she found people disappointing and would rather be spared the daily tally of Harper’s shortcomings. But Harper vetoed that scenario, saying part of her OCD was the compulsion to speak her mind frankly and indelicately, regardless of consequence – she found it practically impossible to bend her behaviour gently around others and that was why her life has been how it’s been. ‘How’s that? you ask.’ Gael hadn’t, but was given the information nonetheless. Harper managed her behavioural issues by burying her head in books. Through her first undergraduate degree in literature and creative writing (at twenty, her thesis had been a memoir called Chronicles from My Porn-Flyer School Route), she’d gotten a clerk job at the Las Vegas Library. Alphabetizing was eighth-of-an-orgasm-satisfying and there were no patrons to brashly shush. ‘Vegas isn’t famous for its library.’ In books – particularly history-drenched European fiction – she found the perfect antidote to her only-childhood of sprinkler weather, window glare and doughnut glazing. Her commune-nostalgic mom and low-double-digit-IQ dad feared that the only career for bookworms was teaching and, knowing Harper’s way with people, they tried to encourage her in other directions. She took them up on it. London for a degree in architecture. She was halfway through a scholarship-funded master of arts at the time, but they agreed. And so she came.
Though they’ve lived together for seven months now, the flat has been basically unfurnished. Harper drops her backpack and her jaw upon arrival and gusts around the newly IKEA’d living room, opening and closing all the doors and drawers, which takes quite a while and serves to calm her down from raging to merely riled.
‘It’s like giving someone a sheet of bubblewrap that’s popped already.’
Gael wipes her brow with her slippery forearm and says that some people would consider it a favour and why wasn’t she home to collect the delivery anyway.
‘No one was supposed to be home. They were supposed to think it was their bad and come back in the morning. I got the Gravity’s Rainbow audiobook so I could spend the weekend building this stuff … I wanted to build it, Gael. None of the NHS shrinks know how to friggin medicate. Wait, why is there a hole in the wall? Put some clothes on so I can think straight. Good Lord, why can’t you keep the apartment neat as your bikini line? What is that, a Venezuelan? That is the flag of one patriotic country.’ She clocks Gael’s interview outfit on the carpet and hears the familiar silence following a roulette spin. ‘Shit, I’m sorry. How’d it go?’
Gael pulls the plastic sachets from her bra and drops them to the carpet. ‘I got a woman.’
Harper raises her hands in the air and plonks them onto her head. ‘That blows.’
‘Played by the rules.’
‘Sure she did.’
‘Roadblocker fuck.’
‘Forget it, Gael. Get dressed. Take a shower first though. Something stinks. Whatta ya bet the cat dumped a bunch of rat guts in our drainpipes? Wait. Did she not go for the Russian business thing? I swear-to-god, if it weren’t for Kipling, I’d never believe this country was ever an empire. Don’t even tell me. Let’s take a walk around the block. Those goddamn wind chimes kept me up all night. I’m gonna find em, cut em down, make em into earrings, gift-wrap em and mail em to the owner so they know how friggin ding-a-ling my world’s been.’
Gael holds her hand out to stymie Harper’s talk. She runs through several scenarios in silence, as if angled in a game of snooker, figuring a way to get at the object ball by cueing the black. There’s no reason not to take her time, except for patience.
‘What?’ Harper says, wary of Gael’s design.
‘Put on something posh,’ Gael says.
They’ve never gone out at night together. Harper’s stunned. ‘Posh like, equestrian?’
‘Put on the classiest clothes that you own.’ Gael heads for the shower and revises the demand over running water. ‘Nothing on the colour spectrum, unless it’s mulberry silk or vicuña wool or obviously designer. Think, if Eton let in girls.’
Harper shimmies in pleasure and bother, as if one or the other can be shaken off. Dressing up and leaving the house on a Friday night is something that friends do. Gael had warned her against hoping to become anything more than one another’s convenience. She’d been warned against placing her hope anywhere in Gael’s vicinity. The only bond between them would be the five hundred pounds for the closet room, but even that Harper had deemed unnecessary – her dad would use five hundred pounds for a hankie.
‘I got a Roberto Cavalli blouse with huge pearl buttons?’ Harper offers. ‘In London, pearls are posh, right? In Nevada they’re … unsanitary.’ As if to suppress a hernia, she places her hand over her gut as Gael emerges from behind the shower curtain, saying, ‘I’ll dress you.’
Harper’s skin is tanned, but her eyes have the deeper mauve-brown colour of an old bruise, which offsets her healthy countenance. She has a creased neck, like linen that’s been worn all day, which Gael constantly finds herself wanting to stretch out. Her toffee-coloured hair is shoulder-blade-length, layered and tied in a ponytail so high it fountains down on her face, and a grown-out fringe falls all around her temples. Though she’s short, she likes to rest her elbow on Gael’s shoulder when they’re waiting for the kettle to boil in the morning. She knows not to talk pre-coffee. They have their own, separate cafetières. Gael’s always up early and Harper eventually emerges to find Gael with her arms crossed before the kettle, staring at the clouds out the window, envious of their pace and impulse.
‘You’re an anomaly,’ Harper says, assessing Gael’s appearance. ‘Most Irish people are radishes. Pink on the outside, white underneath. Speck of mud on their cheeks. Kinda oval. Adorably bucolic. If you’re Irish-American, you’re a conch. Same pink-white thing going on, only with more rolls, and shiny, like you been glossed. But you, you’re just white. Whiter than a French flag–’
‘We have to switch to the Jubilee line,’ Gael interrupts. She hasn’t heard a word. She is busy reconfiguring her immediate future; since the moment she’d finished weaving a magic carpet, the higher-ups had brandished a staple gun. Her finances feel newly like her feet – cinched. The government’s Student Loans Company covers her tuition but, instead of taking their fixed-rate five-thousand-pound-a-year ‘maintenance loan’ (and supplementing it with bar work), Gael had found a private provider of a larger ‘prodigy loan’ that didn’t require university sign-off but for which she’d had to pay an ‘origination fee’ and whose variable interest rate was tied to the London Inter-bank Offered Rate. Had she consulted Jarleth in 2009,
he might have directed her otherwise. Then again, statistics attest that one is generally richer in the future. After rent and utilities, Gael has seventy-eight pounds a week in spending money. What she earns through project-based online enterprises, she reinvests into her education (Sangeeta and suchlike; prodigious robes like the one she wears now).
Harper groans and fishes two weighted poker chips from her bag. A black and a blue. She flips them over and back between her fingers. It sounds like the start of a hail shower. She doesn’t play poker because – although it’s largely a skills-game (the house wins all luck-games in the end) – it requires careful control of one’s opinions and tells; a mastery of interaction unavailable to Harper. Chess, by contrast, is an all-skills game. No conduct control required. Harper can play chess (though she was kicked out of the college club for not having the basic requisite Cold War subtlety) but Gael won’t compete with her because she can’t stand being locked into an inevitable sequence of losses. Why play a game in which you only have a few precious moves at the start to determine your fate? There’s no improvising, after a point. Just death by inches.
It seems as if everyone on the Underground is entitled to stare at Gael, from the black thrust of her hair to the shadow cast by her tapered chin, down. As if it’s their right to engulf a person, as if the person has waived the privacy of their skirt, yielded their direction to a greater body – the public – by coming out Dressed Like That. She thinks of Guthrie. How people leer as they like at his seizures. The only windfall of his life is that he wasn’t born female. A man sitting opposite gapes into the cleavage of Gael’s toes in her stilettoes. She’s wearing the interview shoes. No bandages. No stockings. No ointment or relief. When she put the shoes back on, the pain reminded her of a wasp sting: the sharp difference in positions of attack and defence. Gael slips her feet out of the shoes and watches the man’s reaction to her sores. He remains po-faced, sluglike, but she can hear a newly heavy breathing through his nose. Finally, he looks up. Gael leans forward a fraction and, very slowly, very quietly – so that even Harper, who’s standing beside where Gael is seated on the busy Tube, doesn’t hear – says, ‘Disgusting. Isn’t it.’ Something at the other end of the carriage urgently requires the man’s attention.
Harper, however, isn’t so used to the stares. She’s standing and gripping a pole, which means ogling is solicited. Especially under artificial light. It would be a waste to miss out on those detectible, delectable seams; the soft bulges surrounding them. Harper is much curvier than Gael, so the body-hugging, long-sleeved mottled grey dress makes a louder-than-intended statement. A chiffon scarf is built into the neckline and hangs as a loosely tied bow over her bust. To shake off some of the eyes, she wrestles on a Vera Wang charcoal coat. She’s used to wearing designer clothes, but of the harem pants and boxy polka-dotted shirt variety. It’s not her looks that usually get her noticed. It’s the other thing.
‘Everybody stay calm. Uh-huh, I’m a train wreck, but you don’t need to freak out unless you’re inside of me. The damage is contained to the dress.’ A few people do the socially responsible thing and avert their gaze. Others snicker. She turns to Gael. ‘I feel like my mom’s Pilates coach Sandy from Palm Beach. Only, Sandy gets gratuities. In the States, people say what they want and they’re not shy about it. They own it. Here, they just, like, squint at it sourly. It’s lame. Anyway, I judge you for owning this dress. And for not wearing stockings. It’s sub-sixty. Your nipples are like candy corn. Are we getting off here? I sure as hell know that guy is.’
Yeah, Gael absently affirms. But then she thinks to caution Harper. After all, she doesn’t know the thickness of this wise-guy armour; which arms it can resist. Prepare for more of it, she says. The slavering. Prowling. The pant of expectation. Only worse. Animals are allowed into these casinos. They are the ungelded defenders of Finance. This is the Isle of Dogs.
II
‘‘You seem all here so hideously rich.’’ Harper cranes her neck at the glass skyscrapers. ‘Henry James. The Ivory Tower.’ The gloom across her eyes might be homesickness or, just as easily, pity. ‘Difference is,’ she says, ‘in Vegas, the shiny buildings invite you in. They’re welcoming.’
Gael looks up at One Canada Square, clad in stainless steel and paned in glass dense enough to bear an abnormal loading of wind – to insulate its people from rainy days and thermal expansion both. The pyramid roof flashes to let aircraft know it’s there, lest anyone forget. Its ranking as the tallest building in England will soon be bested by The Shard, being erected to the west, but that’s half owned by the State of Qatar, so who’s counting. Citigroup. HSBC. Bank of America. Barclays. Clifford Chance. Fitch Ratings. J.P. Morgan. Moody’s. Skadden. State Street. Thomson Reuters. All the menfolk, none of them gents.
‘Wall Street would be a fairer comparison than the Strip,’ Gael says, ‘but I get what you’re saying. You guys own all of this anyway. Canary Wharf. For now. One of Morgan Stanley’s groupies. But the US lost its wallet and is resorting to selling its body. So it’s only a matter of picking the sultan with the deepest wellbore.’
‘Touché!’ Harper says. ‘Can we leave now?’
‘Not yet.’
‘I want so bad to be out with you.’ Harper looks in dismay at the demographic. She’s never been to this part of London and there’s a reason for that. Gael has only ever run past and she has always picked up her pace to a veritable sprint. Shaped by a loop in the Thames and a loophole in the public consciousness, the wharf makes for a turning point. Running always seemed an apt mode of movement through the region. She’d often imagined coming here on purpose and not in running shoes, as she would have for the MBA’s internship and she’d have said, ‘There’s been some mix-up. I’m interviewing for the Business Line Specialist position,’ once she was in the chair, and there was a whole script that would have followed. It would have been like using one’s queen early – right at the outset – and skipping over the laborious middle, the tedious pawn movements which are only a means to an end. She looks around, as if for a lever.
For an age, this was one of the world’s busiest docks. Sugar, coffee, bananas, elephants, huge hogsheads of commercial cargo would arrive from the Canary Islands, heralding Britain’s prosperity – in an age when worth wasn’t yet wed to perception.
‘It used to be all warehouses,’ Gael tells Harper. ‘The workers wore pocketless clothes to stop them hiding fistfuls of sugar. There were heists in the night. So they built warehouses to store everything, half a mile wide.’ She sweeps her arm out in front of them. ‘It must have seemed so solid, half a mile’s worth of brick. So secure and permanent. Till it was poleaxed in the Blitz. Sugar bricks, mortars make ash, evidently. And look what rose from it. A phoenix on steroids.’
‘If you said all this to the MBA lady, it explains why you didn’t make the cut.’
Someone drops a champagne flute into the water from a yacht that’s moored in the quay and all the guests on the deck make a fuss until some bright spark shouts, ‘It was plonk!’ and every Thomas, Richard and Harrie repeats it in hysteric concentric circles and someone thinks to write it down for posterity. ‘Priceless.’
‘Uncle Avery had a catamaran,’ Harper says. ‘Before he went under. Now Dad’s got a catamaran. And a new condo in Malibu, cuz you can’t set sail on a mirage. He wants to do a big Schiada spree this summer but he’s gotta learn to drive the thing. You should come.’
‘Yes,’ Gael says with energy, remembering. ‘Just keep talking like that. Perfect.’ Steering Harper towards a swanky bar on the ground floor of the Bank of America building, she adds, ‘You’re perfect.’
A bloom of colour appears on Harper’s neck, which makes the creases stand out, and she says ‘Thanks,’ with no attitude whatsoever. Gael can almost hear the click of the drawer Harper has opened in her mind to store that in – You’re perfect – a drawer she will open and shut and open and shut and open. ‘It’s all I ever wanted to be,’ she says, recovering.
Gael
wonders if she has spoiled her prop at the last moment. She halts. Toughen him up, went Jarleth’s instruction. No one’s going to shake his hand if they think they’ll break it. ‘Go straight up to the counter and open a tab on your dad’s card. I’ll have a Mayfair martini, extra olives. I haven’t eaten since breakfast. Get yourself a bourbon. Do not pay. Meet you at the bar.’
‘Wait – you’re not coming with me?’
‘In a minute.’ Gael audits the buildings up ahead. ‘I’ll come in the private entrance.’
‘Are you tryna get another interview?’
Gael starts walking off. ‘No. I don’t want that anymore.’
Harper cracks all the knuckles of all of her fingers in a leftward and upward motion. She calls out: ‘You’re always saying how women change their minds.’
Gael turns back. ‘And you’re here with me. Don’t change yours. Just … use acronyms.’
Harper nurses her knuckles now by pressing them against her ribs. ‘Like OCD?’
‘Like CDO.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You don’t need to know.’
‘But I wanna.’
‘Don’t forget the olives,’ Gael says, and grimaces, the pain in her feet catching up with her each time she comes to a standstill.
‘Well, that’s rude.’ Harper uses her loud voice. ‘Dress me up like a doll. Duct-tape my mouth. Wanna punch me in the intellect while you’re at it?’
Gael is facing the ticker tape alighting and bending around the corner of the Thomson Reuters building, with its cryptic script of letters, arrows and numbers that Jarleth had once taught her to regard like a grown-up alphabet. All alphas. The fluctuating price of securities. The ticker tape spells out: ‘The right information in the right hands leads to amazing things.’
‘I’m the one that picked you for a fake tutor,’ Harper says. ‘What’s CDO? Teach me to speak BS, Irish.’
Orchid & the Wasp Page 12
