by Fiona Mozley
Rebecca is a highly measured person. Bastian is frequently astonished by her levels of self-control. She keeps a rigid routine; Bastian has never known her to be late. She eats healthily and exercises regularly, and is tidy in her appearance and domestic habits. She thinks before she speaks. Her sneezes are a minor aberration; a stray note in an otherwise perfect symphony.
It took Rebecca a long time to allow Bastian to see this part of her routine. They met at Cambridge, during the first week of their first term, and were in a relationship by Christmas. For three years, before they graduated and moved into this flat, Bastian saw neither her un-made-up face nor her un-straightened hair. She brought her makeup box when staying over in his room and, in the morning, she locked herself in the bathroom and emerged as a pristine facsimile of herself from the day before. When they moved in together, she relaxed her regimen but only slightly. She began to come out of the bathroom with wet hair wrapped in a towel, wearing no makeup. Now, she stands in front of him while getting ready.
There is still a lot Rebecca doesn’t let Bastian see, but he finds evidence in the flat. He sees her tweezers lying on a shelf in the bathroom cabinet, and her razor on the side of the bath with spikes of dark hair tucked between the blades. He has opened the lidded basket she placed by the toilet for paraphernalia to deal with her periods. He smells traces of her too. He sometimes smells the odor of menstruation, and the singed keratin of her straightened hair.
Rebecca has moved on to her hair. She feeds strips of her dark brown locks between the hot tongs and irons out any kinks or inconsistencies. Next, she stands back from the mirror and considers her reflection. She flicks a couple of stray hairs into place.
Bastian rises and pats out the creases in his jacket. He swings it around his shoulders and slips his arms into the sleeves. He moves toward the mirror and checks his own appearance. He looks more or less how he wishes to look or, at least, he has come to terms with how he looks.
His face is on the feminine side, perhaps. He thinks he is reasonably good-looking, but he isn’t one of those men who has a large, square jaw and an assured brow.
The suit fits him well. He turns to the right then to the left as he did when he first tried it on. It is nipped in at the shoulders and at the waist. He was told the cut would show off his slender upper body.
Bastian places a gentle hand on Rebecca’s waist then leans in to kiss her cheek.
“You’ll smudge me.” She moves away.
Bastian backs off, frustrated rather than hurt, and moves to the sideboard. He collects his keys and wallet and puts them in a trouser pocket.
They take a black cab to Soho as the wait for an Uber is too long. The driver is from the East End and speaks to Bastian briefly about West Ham football club, before realising his passenger has no idea what he’s talking about. Then he tells them a story about a restaurant he went to where he ate a seaweed soufflé. “Seaweed! A soufflé made out of seaweed!” Then he turns on the radio.
As they cross the Thames, the sun is low over the Palace of Westminster. It carves wobbling halos around the gothic turrets, each a flaming torch. Bastian reaches for his phone to take a photo. The cab slows for the line of traffic caught on the bridge. He sees a bevy of swans in the shadows by the north bank, the largest he has ever seen in the city. There must be at least thirty, bobbing on the water, perhaps a whole extended family of cygnets who never left their parents and grew up, found partners and raised cygnets of their own.
Bastian nudges his girlfriend. She leans over him to look out through the glass and her eyes follow the direction of his pointing finger to the river. She recoils.
“Oh god, Bastian, you know I have a phobia of birds.”
“Sorry.” Bastian turns back to look out at the family group. They bob contentedly on the current.
Rebecca doesn’t have a phobia of birds, she just dislikes them: the way they move when walking or flying; the sounds they make and the parts of the city they inhabit. She considers them to be unclean. She uses the word “phobia” because it lends more gravity to her distaste.
The cab pulls off the bridge and follows a series of back streets, a route known only to the drivers of black cabs and cycle couriers. They pass grand Georgian terraces that have been converted into flats and offices. They filter through tight streets lined with shops and restaurants. They feel affluence and poverty beneath the wheels of the car as they roll over smooth tarmac and pristine paving stones, then stretches of road that are potholed and warped. These paths take them through the few blocks of council flats that still linger like boorish relations at the end of a party.
“In the Middle Ages, swans signified sex,” Bastian says, not to anyone in particular. “Pictures of swans hung above the doorways of secret brothels.”
Rebecca looks at him. “Wasn’t everything a symbol of sex in the Middle Ages?”
Bastian keeps his gaze fixed to doors and bricks and signs and pedestrians that flash past the window of the cab.
“No,” he says simply. “Not everything.”
The cab stops just outside a club. Bastian takes out his wallet and gives the driver two twenty-pound notes and waves away the change. He doesn’t like to carry coins. They make his wallet bulge, which ruins the line of his jacket pocket. And tipping generously gives Bastian a pleasant feeling of his own largesse. Wealth, after all, is meant to trickle down.
Hot Bath
Precious allows Robert Kerr to kiss her goodbye. She is fond of the man, in a way, and sees no harm in indulging him.
“Until we meet again,” he says, in an affectation of a 1950s music-hall comedian. He laughs at his joke. Precious laughs too. She is good at her job. She sits on the bed, pulls the loose silk robe over her thighs and breasts and allows her patron to kiss her again before he lets himself out.
Tabitha enters from a door behind the bed. She carries a stack of fresh towels. She sets these down by a copper bath at one side of the room, turns the hot tap, and water gushes into the bath. The copper hums as it is struck, a softening musical note as the water pools and rises. The steam has a metallic scent, but as lavender oil is added this becomes the dominant aroma.
Tabitha has called herself Tabitha since she was in the trade.
As well as the women who work with their bodies, the building contains other personnel. Each woman has a maid, who is older and previously worked in the trade herself. The maids help with the women’s day-to-day life. They cook and clean and increase the safety of the work: they can hear from the next room if something is going badly wrong. When necessary, they phone downstairs for assistance from one of the security guards, like Karl. Many of these are ex-military, and are paid from a mutual fund. They come when they are called and, when required, they pull men out of the beds of women and throw them onto the street and make sure they never return. The mutual fund also pays Old Scarlet’s wages. Like the maids, she was once a sex worker herself. She sits at the front desk and manages the girls’ appointments.
Now Tabitha is a maid, and she takes good care of her charge. She tests the temperature of the water, then turns the cold tap until it is on full.
“No!” Precious insists. “Hot! I want it hot! Hot, hot, hot! None of your cold tap today!”
“It’ll scald you!”
“Nonsense,” Precious replies. She rises from the bed and lets her dressing gown slip to the floor. She lifts one leg up to the edge of the bath, points her toes like a small child pretending to be a ballerina, and holds them there with practiced poise. She looks at Tabitha and narrows her eyes. Tabitha holds her gaze and mirrors the expression. Then Precious plunges the pointed toes along with the foot and leg into the steaming water.
Precious doesn’t flinch. Tabitha recoils and shields her eyes, as if it is her own skin being boiled. Precious cackles and reaches out to pull the older woman towards the spectacle. She throws back her head and howls. It is not the meek, flirtatious laugh she performs for clients. This is a roar. She shifts her weight onto her bathing
leg then drops her whole body into the lavender water.
“You’re horrible, you are,” Tabitha observes.
“Charming.”
Tabitha smiles despite herself and takes the smile with her into the kitchen. She comes back with two flutes of sparkling white wine.
“Prosecco?”
“Don’t mind if I do,” says Precious, taking the glass. Condensation has settled on its surface, pooling to droplets where it meets her warm fingers.
Tabitha returns to the kitchen to prepare dinner. She stoops as she walks. Her legs are bowed and her hips well worn.
Precious lies back in the bath with her wine-bearing hand quivering on a loose wrist over the rim. She relaxes all muscles she is conscious of and allows her body to bob on top of the cushion of compacted water. She aches. It has been a long day and hers is not an easy job.
Her legs come up through the surface of the water and jut over the end of the roll-top tub. Water pools and trickles to the floor, tapping on the mahogany-effect laminate.
Precious washes herself with a simple bar of soap, not the bottles of expensive bath and shower creams that sit in her cupboard. There is a nostalgia to the new block, wrapped in paper. She stands and strokes the bar across her skin: around the back of her neck, between her legs. She divests herself of grime, the thin film of soot that has accrued from the fumes of exhaust from the city outside; the fingerprints of five men; the semen and saliva and sweat of the same men, and the grease from her own pores. The soap eases these substances from her body into the steaming water. She lifts her body from the tub and reaches for one of the fresh towels. It feels cold and crisp. She rubs it over herself and gouges the remaining dirt and dead cells from her skin, then puts on another, more comfortable dressing gown.
Tabitha emerges from the kitchen carrying two plates of steak and kidney pudding.
“Have you made that meat and gravy spongy thing again?” Precious asks.
Tabitha lays the plates on the coffee table and returns to the kitchen for the peas and oven chips.
They eat together. Precious squashes her steak and kidney pudding with the back of her fork then mixes her peas into the concoction before scooping it into her mouth. Tabitha says her table manners are disgusting. They drink more of the wine and discuss the possibility of new furnishings in the flat. Tabitha pulls out a general knowledge crossword from the middle of her newspaper. Some of the letters have been filled in pencil.
“Greek god of wine,” says Tabitha. “Eight letters.”
“Dionysus.”
“How’re you spelling that?”
Precious spells it out.
“Nah, it’s got to have an “m” in it. Third letter’s an ‘m.’ ”
“Then you’ve got the other answer wrong,” Precious replies. She pulls the paper towards her and traces the list of clues with her forefinger. “There you go,” she says. “Fifteen down isn’t McCorory, it’s Ohuruogu.” Precious picks up the pencil, rubs out the mistake and makes the alteration. Her friend snatches back the paper, with a look of reluctant gratitude.
They continue with the crossword until supper is finished. Tabitha takes the plates back into the kitchen. From the other room, she says, “We got another letter from Howard Holdings.”
Tabitha said it so casually that Precious has not heard. She repeats, more loudly, “We got another letter from Howard Holdings.”
“Where is it?” Precious replies, immediately this time. She gets up from the table and begins to cast around the flat, lifting towels and strewn clothes. “What are those bastards up to now?”
“It’s in the drawer beneath the keys.”
Precious goes over to the cabinet and finds the letter, returned to its envelope, mixed in with other post. “When did you open it?”
“This morning. I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d get angry. Like this.”
“Damn right.”
Precious pulls the letter from the envelope and unfolds it. As she does, Tabitha relates its contents, “It’s basically exactly what you predicted.”
“They’re trying to tip us over the edge.”
“Probably.”
“They want us out.”
“Maybe. Could be they’re just trying to squeeze out more money.”
“No way,” says Precious. “I’ve dealt with people like this before. And I’ve been watching it happen all over the neighborhood.”
Precious reads the letter a couple of times, then she tightens the strings of her dressing gown and lets herself out the flat, leaving the door open behind her. She walks along the corridor. Some of the doors have signs to indicate that their occupants are busy with a client, others don’t. She knocks on a couple of the doors and stands back to allow their owners time to answer.
A door is pulled open and a face peers out. Seeing Precious, the woman pulls the door wider, and steps into the threshold and leans against the frame. She is wearing a full pink tracksuit, which tells Precious she is taking a day off. Her long hair is dyed a reddish purple and tied in a tight ponytail. “I thought I’d be seeing you this evening,” says Candy.
“Read the letter?”
“Yep.”
“What do you think?”
“You were right and I was wrong. They won’t stop until we’re out. Did I tell you I spoke to some of the girls from Brewer Street and they’re actually facing proper evictions now. Sorry, not evictions. Tenancy terminations. Contract non-renewal, or whatever.”
Precious crosses her arms. She is still holding the letter in her right hand and it crumples in the crook of her left elbow. “I can’t even,” she says. This is what she says when she is too angry to construct a proper sentence.
“I know, love,” Candy replies.
“It’s not even the money. It’s not really even the prospect of moving, though obviously I don’t want to. It’s just the fact that these bastards think they can treat us like this. It’s the lack of respect.”
“I know, love,” says Candy again.
“Look, have the other girls got letters too?”
“I assume so.” Candy walks across the hall and hammers on another door. Shouting comes from within, first a man’s voice then a woman’s. There are footsteps and the door opens a crack, steadied by the safety chain.
“What is it?” whispers Young Scarlet between her teeth.
“What the fuck?” shouts the man from within. “I hope this’ll be coming off my bill.”
Young Scarlet turns back to her client and puts on a voice that is sweet and pliable, a voice she reserves for men. “Just a minute.” She turns back to Precious and Candy and her voice returns to its normal pitch. “This better be good.”
“Did you get this letter?” Candy asks. She indicates towards the letter in Precious’s hand.
“Does it look like I’m in here reading?” Young Scarlet replies.
“It’s from the landlords,” says Precious.
“Oh fuck. Is it curtains?”
“Not yet. Just a rent increase, only it’s not a small one this time.”
“For fuck’s sake. If I wanted to lose eighty percent of my income each month I’d still have a fucking pimp.”
The man’s voice comes from within. “I’m in here losing eighty percent of my erection.”
Candy cannot help but laugh.
“Don’t laugh at that,” says Young Scarlet, “he’s funny but he’s a total twat. Listen, I’ll just finish him up quickly and come and find you. Get the other girls, yeah?”
“My place as soon as you’re free. I’ll get Tabitha to boil the kettle.”
“Bugger tea. Tell her to open a bottle or two. And none of that rubbish from the corner shop. We all know what you two have got hidden away from your France trip.”
Après nous
“It would be easier for everyone if they left of their own volition.”
“Clearly, but Roster tells me the ratio of rent to custom is too good, even with the increases we’re enacting. The level of foo
tfall, the Soho address, the circumstances of their lease. These things are all too advantageous to expect a voluntary departure. But if we raise the rent enough—as much as we’re allowed to—and make life inconvenient for them in other respects, when we ask them to leave they won’t make as much fuss as they otherwise might. They will just move somewhere new—to a part of London more in keeping with their profession.”
Agatha Howard holds the phone flush against her ear. The voice of her longtime lawyer, Tobias Elton, is an irritation. She has told him her intentions on so many occasions she is almost reciting from a script.
“It does seem like an awful lot of bother,” says the lawyer.
Agatha tries to stifle her irritation. “It will be difficult work for all of us but the benefits will be substantial. We need to get them out, Tobias.”
Tobias waits on the line. Agatha can tell he’s thinking of another question. He finds it difficult to construct thoughts and turn them into sentences, but Agatha doesn’t want this to become a protracted conversation. After years of enlisting his legal services, she knows it’s best to keep the conversations frequent and brief.
“We’ll talk again tomorrow,” she says curtly. “Goodbye.” She has spoken with him too many times to bother waiting for a response. She places her phone on the large, walnut desk and slides her hand to the furry head resting between her legs. She takes one of the silken ears and threads it between her fingers, rubbing the soft tip with her thumb. He is a pedigree borzoi: the size and shape of a greyhound, with long white fur and a pointed face.