Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars

by Miranda Emmerson

  Samira sat and brooded at the end of the dinner table. Ottmar disappeared to call the staff and arrange for evening opening. Ekin cooked silently in the little kitchen even though a wide hatch connected her to the women at the table. A swirling torrent of animosity flowed between the table and the kitchen counter. When Ottmar returned he filled the silence with his careful, neutral questioning.

  ‘Oh, lovely, Ekin is doing her cold salad. Are we having cacik, my love? Yes. Yes. I think we are. Samira, you must be very uncomfortable in those clothes. I can see your mama needs another couple of minutes. Why don’t you go and change into something cosy. So cold the weather is now. Go on, my darling, tights and a big jumper: yes. Wash your face, wash your hands. You’ll feel so much better. After lunch a lovely long bath, I think. We rang school and they know you have a bad headache today so no more questions asked. Go on, my darling.

  ‘Now, Anna, let’s get you a drink. We don’t have any coffee on the go but I can make you tea. Yes? Lovely. Ekin, I will make the tea. No, Anna, stay there. You are our guest. Knives and forks, yes? And serving spoons. Where are the mats again? I never eat here, Anna. Isn’t that awful? Only on a Sunday and then Ekin does a special dinner. You see, in a way, I blame myself. Never here. One parent, it doesn’t work so well as the children are getting older. Anna, you know … I’m not making excuses … But sometimes I think, how can it have been otherwise. We cannot afford to live if I don’t work eighty, ninety hours a week. The cafe would not bring in enough money and we cannot live on Ekin’s earnings alone.

  ‘I don’t know how your father was, Anna, but I sometimes think to have a successful family you have to sacrifice a happy family: at least at first. Maybe the girls can be happy later. Maybe we all can be happy later. Or maybe their husbands will not start from nothing and happiness will come earlier. As far as I can see, the successful family sacrifices happiness to work and the unsuccessful family sacrifices happiness to poverty. I think that I prefer success but some days I cannot tell the difference.’

  Samira came back in dressed in tights and a sweater and a very short skirt. She sat at the end of the table and stared out of the window at the houses beyond. ‘Why are you looking for her?’

  ‘What’s that, Sami?’ Ottmar asked.

  ‘Talking to Anna,’ Samira said without turning. ‘Why’s it your job to find Lanny, then? Police are looking for her, aren’t they?’

  ‘I don’t think they’re looking very hard.’

  ‘Too busy shaking down Soho for whores?’

  Anna ignored this. She was hoping they weren’t going to talk about last night. ‘I think Lanny got herself in trouble. I think she was in this country on her own and she found herself in trouble and she was trying to dig herself out of it.’

  ‘She had enough money,’ Samira said.

  ‘I don’t think it was that kind of trouble.’

  Ekin started to load the table with bowls and plates, then she took her place beside Samira and watched her daughter ignore her arrival.

  ‘Anna,’ Ekin said, ‘we normally say du’a. Do you mind? You can say grace if you wish when we are done?’

  ‘Oh no, I’m fine. Please just do as you would always do.’

  Ottmar and Ekin bowed their heads and spoke quietly, each using their own form of words; Samira sat and stared out of the window. Ottmar went to serve himself from the bowl of yoghurt but Ekin stilled his hand.

  ‘Please, Anna, say grace. We want to make you welcome.’

  Anna gave her a big, embarrassed smile. ‘I’d really rather not.’

  Ekin’s face fell, at a loss as to how to proceed, so Ottmar leaned across and in a stage whisper told her, ‘Anna doesn’t believe in God.’

  Samira’s eyes swivelled in Anna’s direction. Ekin looked bemused. ‘Really and truly?’

  ‘Afraid not. Not really raised in a faith. My parents had one, but then they gave it up. And my school had another one, but I didn’t really like my school. My father’s a scientist, you see, of a kind. My mother too. I’m just a bit … empirical for all of that. Respectful, obviously. Empirical but respectful.’

  Ekin looked at Anna and then at Samira who had moved to face the table. ‘My eldest daughter has run away from Allah also. I think the young today dislike all parents.’

  Ottmar started to serve people with great vigour and noise. Anna ate some bread and yoghurt and searched her mind for something to say. She pictured Aloysius standing by the desk in the station. She wondered if she would see him again. Their brief romance seemed a very long time ago, very slight and very fragile. She wished she had put her arms around him in the station. She wished she had comforted him in the street. She had watched him bleed onto the snow and said nothing. How much fear is too much? How much is common sense?

  Samira spoke. ‘So, you’re an atheist?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘I’m an atheist and a Marxist. My parents are members of the proletariat trying to be members of the bourgeoisie.’

  ‘I see,’ said Anna, bewildered as to how to follow this politely.

  ‘Our arrest last night was indicative of the fascist hold that the police – who are the army of the bourgeoisie – have over ordinary members of the proletariat.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t,’ said Ekin.

  ‘I’m not sure that I would describe the police as fascist,’ Anna ventured. ‘I think that might be to misunderstand the meaning of the word.’

  ‘Your friend had his head bashed into a police car because of the colour of his skin.’

  ‘Well, yes. But that isn’t in itself fascist. It’s more incredibly thuggish. And racist. And illegal. And unprofessional.’

  ‘Could we talk about something nicer?’ Ottmar begged.

  ‘No,’ said Samira, ‘it’s an example of the police believing they are above the law, much as they would in a martial force obeying the whims of a fascist dictator.’

  ‘But,’ said Anna, ‘Harold Wilson isn’t actually a fascist. In fact, he’s nothing like a fascist.’

  ‘He’s a product of the bourgeois system. He’s a grammar school boy who went to Oxford and now he pretends that just because he was born in Yorkshire he’s in the pub every night with his whippet and his pipe.’

  ‘Still not technically or actually a fascist.’

  ‘You know,’ said Samira, ‘if you identify a system as corrupt then your only honourable courses of action are to flee it or fight it.’

  ‘And which have you chosen?’ Ekin asked, her voice dripping with disdain.

  ‘First I have to remove myself from the system. I have to throw off expectations of how I will dress and who I will sleep with and what I will do to earn money.’

  ‘Good God!’ Ottmar said. Ekin shot his blasphemy a cold stare.

  ‘Of course, they think that means I’ll be becoming a prostitute. When in fact I will merely be throwing off the shackles of society’s expectations.’

  ‘But how are you going to live?’ Anna asked her.

  ‘Outside the system.’

  ‘Samira. Sweet one,’ Ottmar began. ‘To live outside the system you will need to go and live in a field and eat grass and drink the rain. You know, like a cow. It is not a human way to be. We are social creatures, my darling. Our systems are flawed but we made them. We were just trying to organise the world.’

  ‘So a black man can be beaten for offering to walk in handcuffs and a Turkish girl can be called a prostitute because she isn’t wearing tights and if you fail to keep your house you end up freezing to death on a park bench. Is that how we’re organising the world? After all the thousands of years and all that philosophy and religion and books and poetry, after the millions of elections and debates, that’s as good as we get? Wouldn’t you rather be a cow? I’d be a cow out of shame.’

  Anna stood, surprising herself as much as the others at the table. She fumbled with her napkin. ‘Sorry. Ekin, forgive me. It’s a lovely meal but my friend is hurt and I have to go to him. And I can’t—’

  �
�See!’ Ekin said to Samira. ‘See what you’ve done? You’ve upset our guest.’

  ‘It isn’t her,’ Anna said. ‘It’s all the rest of it. I can’t just sit here and not know what’s happening to him.’

  ‘Of course no one ever bothered asking me,’ Samira said as Anna turned to go.

  ‘Asking you what?’ Ekin demanded. ‘If Anna was allowed to leave the table?’

  ‘No one asked me if I knew Iolanthe,’ Samira said, dipping a piece of bread into her cacik and then glancing around her to gauge the response from the adults.

  Anna paused and studied Samira’s expression. ‘Did you know Lanny?’ she asked.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Knew her how, little one?’ her father asked.

  ‘I saw her at Roaring Twenties. I know her boyfriend. Delbert.’

  Anna retook her seat at the table. ‘Why didn’t you tell me, Samira? When you knew we were looking for her.’

  ‘You didn’t ask. You just turned up in the club and ordered me home like a child.’

  ‘But can you tell me now? About Lanny?’

  ‘You could try asking me nicely.’

  ‘Samira!’ Ekin banged the table.

  ‘I am asking you nicely, Samira. What happened to Iolanthe?’

  Samira put down her bread and pushed away her plate. Then she fixed Anna with a direct stare.

  ‘You go somewhere often enough you get to know the faces. The sound system guys, the barmen, the musicians, the girls who turn up to dance. I saw Iolanthe for the first time about three, four weeks ago. She turned up one night, maybe with a guy, I don’t know. When I saw her she was on her own. People recognised her, I think, but there are musicians in there all the time so seeing someone from a magazine is no big deal. I saw her dancing, drinking, sometimes she’d be talking to someone. More than once I’d see her watching Del because he works the sound system there sometimes. Lots of the girls like him. I don’t know if he goes with them. A couple of times I saw her go up to the speakers, to the deck and she was flirting with him, laughing, leaning over.’

  ‘What about Del? Did he like her?’

  ‘He liked the attention all right. He’s very pretty, Del; knows it too. He’ll flirt with anyone but mainly he just gets on with the music and stuff. He likes to look good in front of the older guys. Duke Vin, people like that. That’s who he respects. I saw her one night standing up at the sound system with him. Another time, I saw them kissing at one of the tables. One night I’m in the women’s toilets and I see her crying. Lanny, right. She’s sitting on one of the toilets, bent double and she’s just rocking. At first I think maybe she’s laughing but then it sounds more like she’s choking. She puts her hands round her tummy and she just howls. Like she’s in pain. I hear the girls talking about her in the queue. Del’s dumped her. Told her to find someone her own age.’

  ‘Nice guy …’

  ‘I know. So the next night she’s back and she’s on the dance floor every minute and she’s touching anything that moves. Dancing with the guys in front of him, black, white, whatever. Dancing with the girls, too. Messing about, showing herself off. Trying to make him jealous. Honestly, she kind of struck me like she was a child, you know. Like the girls at school. I expected her to have a bit more …’

  ‘Decorum?’ Anna asked.

  ‘Self-respect. She wasn’t trash. She was someone. She was more than those men she was draped all over.’ Samira paused. ‘This society is so fucked up.’

  ‘Language!’ Ekin roared.

  Samira’s eyelids barely flickered. ‘You think she got in trouble with Del?’

  ‘Not if he only knew her this past month.’

  ‘You think she got herself knocked up, though?’

  Anna said nothing but she held Samira’s gaze. ‘Maybe she wants to be lost,’ Samira said.

  ‘Maybe she does,’ Anna agreed.

  ‘But you can’t know that,’ Ottmar said.

  Anna looked at him and smiled briefly. ‘That’s the thing of it. She could be in the worst kinds of trouble and no one’s coming to get her. One policeman, sifting through papers in his office and all the while she’s out there somewhere. It doesn’t matter if she’s all right. It doesn’t matter if this is a waste of time. You can’t leave someone in trouble all alone. She might do anything. And then it’s all our fault.’

  ‘She might do anything.’ What a genteel way of putting it, Anna thought. How careful we’re all being. Not ever speaking the worst of it. Keeping our distance, staying safe.

  Is that what I did to Lanny? Did I keep my distance? Did I keep her at arm’s length? Because I do that. I signal my distance from people. I draw back. I cut them out. I walked away from Aloysius … I left him, alone and bloody. Why couldn’t Lanny tell me the truth?

  ‘Pregnancy is the loneliest place on earth,’ Anna said – surprising even herself – and Ottmar laughed because to him this seemed the most ridiculous of ideas.

  ‘What makes you say that then, Anna?’ Ekin asked.

  Anna shook her head and blushed a little. ‘Nothing.’ She felt tears start to prick in her eyes so she stood. ‘Forgive me. I really have to go now.’ She paused for a moment and found Samira’s gaze. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘For trusting me with that.’

  Anna made her way back to the flat. In answer to last night’s missive, Kelly had left a note lying on the coffee table.

  Hope he was worth it!!!! K

  Of course Kelly had not considered any of the worrying options when Anna had failed to return home. She simply assumed that Anna had finally given in to her natural impulses.

  Anna stripped her clothes off and went into the bathroom to wash herself. There was no hot water for a bath at this time of day, so she scraped the muck and the sweat off with her fingernails, the painful ripples against her skin making her feel more alive. Then she put on her only pair of trousers, two sweaters and tied her hair up. So what should she do now? The number of Aloysius’s boarding house … could she remember it? Mrs McDonald seemed like a lady who’d have an opinion about most things.

  ‘Hello? Directory enquiries. What name, please?’

  ‘McDonald. Amesbury Avenue. SW2.’

  ‘Thank you, caller. Shall I put you through?’

  The phone buzzed and then rang.

  ‘Amesbury Avenue. Mrs McDonald speaking.’

  ‘Mrs McDonald! It’s Anna. From last night. I don’t suppose you know anything about Aloysius, do you?’

  ‘He called me half an hour ago; said they were releasing him. What did you let happen to my boy?’

  ‘I didn’t let anything happen. We were arrested for no good reason and then they assaulted him while I was handcuffed in the back of a police car.’

  ‘He didn’t say anything about being assaulted.’

  ‘They bashed his head against the top of the car. And his glasses are broken. And his face is a mess.’ Quite without warning Anna started to cry. ‘I told the policeman who interviewed me. I told him who Aloysius was. I’m sorry for crying. I haven’t slept all night. I think it’s just tiredness.’

  ‘Now look. Aloysius told me he was going round to see you after he was let out because he wanted to ask you something more about this missing girl. Anna, promise me you will send him home. He’s in no state to do anything else today. If they’ve hurt him he needs to be getting better in bed. Not wandering the streets looking like another crushed-up black man with a target on his head.’

  ‘Of course. Of course I’ll send him home. You have my word.’

  ‘And don’t you worry about crying. If your body’s doing it that’s because it needs to be done. Have a cry. Have a drink. Have another cry. Then eat something or you’ll feel like crap. I’m going to go and wait for my boy.’

  ‘Wait! Mrs McDonald. Is Aloysius really your boy? I mean, sorry if I’m meant to know this, but are you related?’

  ‘We all need some kind of family, even if there’s no blood in it. Now you send him home and everyone can get a bit of sleep.’r />
  Anna made herself some toast and sat on the sofa with the flat door open, waiting for the doorbell to ring. ‘Released’ sounded good. It sounded better than bailed. Maybe Hayes had done something after all. Half an hour passed and no one rang or knocked. She pulled on socks, shoes and her coat and went out into the cold.

  Aloysius was standing on Neal Street, his arms crossed, his head sunk in thought. Much of the snow had turned to slush under the feet of the market boys but here and there icy hills and peaks still marked the pavements. Anna crossed to him but he didn’t stir. She fished a pair of black wool gloves out of her pocket and touched them to the back of one of his hands. He looked up and she saw his large, scared, bloodshot eyes gazing at her through the cracked glass.

  ‘I dried them out on the radiator while I was being interviewed,’ she said. ‘I should have left them at the desk for you. I didn’t think.’

  Aloysius took the gloves but didn’t speak.

  ‘I rang Mrs McDonald. She said you were coming over here. She wants you to go home.’

  Aloysius nodded, though without really seeming to understand.

  ‘I think you might be in shock.’

  Aloysius opened his mouth to speak but no sound emerged. Anna had once seen a picture of a statue of the Czar being toppled during the Russian Revolution. Aloysius looked like a man who was in the process of being pulled down and broken into pieces. She had an urge to kiss him, despite his battered, bloody face, to let him know that she had not meant to push him away. Instead she put a hand out and stroked his arm.

  When Aloysius’s voice came it creaked with thirst. ‘I’d like the chance to help you find Iolanthe. I … I need something good to happen now.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Anna.

  ‘Do you know where you’re looking today?’ he asked her.

  ‘I don’t. I mean, Sergeant Hayes told me a lot of things about Iolanthe this morning but I don’t really know that they help me to figure out where she is.’