by Fiona Mozley
It was not eighteen months since his flock had taken the step to add the prefix to his already illustrious title. Paul Daniels had been the one to instigate this latest alteration. The addition had initially been delivered with more than a hint of sarcasm. “Arrrrch-bishop!” Paul Daniels had spat one morning when the ramblings of the old man had come between him and his first fix of the day. After that the epithet had slowly taken hold, and now it was ingrained. Now it was just his name, as if his own mother had bestowed it upon him.
The woman whose mother didn’t christen her Debbie McGee leans against the shoulder of her beloved and turns her head toward him so that her mouth is adjacent to his ear.
“The ground’s moving. It’s shaking. Truly it is. Maybe the Archbishop felt it too. Maybe that’s why he’s blessing the earth tonight.”
Paul Daniels is riffling through a pack of playing cards. It’s a defective pack, discarded and thrown into a dustbin from which Paul Daniels retrieved it. Their backs bear the logo of a Soho sex shop and their fronts, in small rectangles bordered by the specific number and suit of each card, bear a picture of a different naked woman being fucked by a different dog. A busty brunette is being mounted by a Weimaraner. A blonde receives the graces of a ferocious-looking pit bull. The Ace of Clubs presents another being humped by a pack of chihuahuas. Although there were a number of slightly defective packs of pornographic playing cards in the bin round the back of the sex shop, Paul Daniels laughed and snorted when he saw this particular set and stuffed it into one of his pockets.
“Shush,” he says, and he continues to shuffle. He’s testing his handiwork on a new trick. He divides the pack of cards into two with the thumbs and middle fingers of each hand, and uses the nail of his index fingers to press each half-pack into a crescent so the cards can be released and allowed to tumble back together.
“It was rumbling,” continues Debbie McGee. “I felt it right through my skin and bones. Like it was an earthquake or something.”
“No earthquakes in London. Never have been,” said Paul Daniels. “Isn’t that right, Archbishop?”
The Archbishop enjoys a direct question if it presupposes his superior intellect, and he generally pauses from his sermons to answer it.
“What you asking?” says the Archbishop.
“Earthquakes in London. There’ve never been any earthquakes in London, have there?”
The Archbishop narrows his eyes. “Earth quaking in London?” He struggles over each consonant. His gums are soft. “No earth quaking in London for a thousand years. A thousand years or more. The earth hasn’t quaked since the dragons last woke. Since the red and the white dragons came from the mouth of the river and swept up over the city. But now it quakes again. We can all feel it.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” asks Paul Daniels.
“Tremors, my boy. Tremors. The ground is alive once more. The earth is riddled with beasties.” He stretches back to gaze momentarily at the ceiling then rocks forward to consider the floor upon which he sits. His hips creak.
It cannot be said that the Archbishop doesn’t look his age because nobody knows his age. But he does not look any age, any age that is possible. He appears past the count of years, past any numerical measure. His spine is pronounced and it curves crooked. Vertebrae seem to protrude through his skin like the plates of a stegosaurus. The hairs that grow from his head and his chin haven’t thinned but are so old they look gnarled. The soft tissue beneath his eyes droops and tugs his lower lids to reveal a thick line of blood at the base of his eyeballs and when he walks he rolls on the balls of his feet like a strange bipedal spinning top.
Debbie McGee rarely looks at the Archbishop, so hideous is his image. But tonight she gazes at him intently as he riddles and reasons.
“Where did you feel them, my child?” The Archbishop addresses Debbie directly. This was not usual. “Where did you feel the tremors?”
Debbie McGee is a quiet person. She only rarely uses her voice, and sometimes when she opens her mouth and sets her tongue in motion to form words, her breath doesn’t come as it should, and no sound is made. This happens now.
“Speak up!”
“I felt it in the ground when I was sleeping through there.” She gestures to the other side of the large cellar. “And I thought I felt it earlier in the day, when we were out and about.”
“Where?” The Archbishop is insistent. She’s not used to him paying her any attention.
“I, um, felt it over by the cranes. I felt it in the soles of my feet when we were standing there on the pavement.”
The old man turns his attention to Paul Daniels. “Did you feel it too?”
“Nah. I didn’t feel nothing. And I wouldn’t listen to this mad cow, neither.” He’s referring to his lover. “She’s bat-shit crazy, this one.”
“You do not believe.”
“No, I do not believe! I’m not having any of it.”
The Archbishop believes, and others in the group follow his lead. He pulls himself into an upright position, and others get up too. Soon afterwards, they set off to find the epicenter of the mysterious vibrations. The Archbishop leads his flock around his archdiocese and as they walk he tells stories of the past.
“It’s named for the sound the men and the animals made when there was hunting afoot,” the Archbishop states. “A so and a ho from man and beast. A so ho, a so ho. That’s what they shrieked when they got on their horses and chased deer through the forest. Before there were bricks and windows and sewers, there were grasses and roots and trees and deer. Deer deer deer that brought the men out of the city on horses with a so and a ho.”
Paul Daniels initiates his own line of conversation. He pulls on the arm of Debbie McGee’s jumper and whispers into her ear. “We need new tricks,” he says. “That business at the pub this afternoon can’t happen again. These days any old sod with a mobile phone can go on the internet and discover our secrets. I’ve heard there are actually magicians out there who video themselves doing tricks, and then they put them up on the internet and then they explain how they performed the trick! Can you believe it? They give away our secrets! Whatever happened to the Magic Circle? Whatever happened to our code of honor? How can an honest performer make a living if his punters can all look up the routine on the YouTube? No, no. It can’t happen again, my lovely. We need new tricks.”
Debbie McGee makes no response.
“We need to carve out a patch for ourselves, like them in Covent Garden do. They set up an arena with a little rope on the ground and everyone gathers round and they’ve got themselves a captive audience for their whole routine. I’ve seen people put tenners in their pot at the end. Do you hear me? Ten-pound notes! We’ll set up in Soho Square or something and we’ll perform a full routine. We’ll do proper tricks. None of these cards and cups shit for me anymore. I’ll get one of them boxes you can fit a person into. And I’ll put you in it, my lovely. And then. And then, I’ll make you disappear. Bam.”
The woman they call Debbie McGee makes no sign she’s heard anything her companion has been saying.
“What the fuck are you on about now?” says someone from behind. Richard Scarcroft is an army veteran. He joined the Archbishop’s flock reluctantly after falling out with the managers of the local shelter and finding himself in need of somewhere else to sleep. He doesn’t hold with the Archbishop’s nonsense, and still less with the nonsense propelled by this shady man everyone keeps referring to as Paul Daniels.
“Do you know how much skill that kind of thing requires?” says Richard. “I’ve seen the tricks you do, and they’re shite. Absolute shite. As if you could pull off anything on that scale. Not to mention the equipment you’d need. How on earth would you afford all that? With the pennies you make from your cards and cups? What a load of shite.”
“Who asked you? Shut your face.”
Richard Scarcroft turns away. It’s not important enough for him to start an argument. He’s said his piece.
The g
roup follows the Archbishop around a corner and comes to a building site. It’s quiet now, after hours, but for security reasons it’s illuminated from above by powerful floodlights. Long, sharp shadows are cast by heavy machinery. Winches and pulleys hang from cranes and sway in the breeze. There’s a criss-cross of girders and scaffolding; sheets of tarpaulin flap and smack their tethers. Debbie McGee notices the shadows and thinks that if this were the only bit of the scene you could see, like if your vision couldn’t take in light, only shade, you could just about make out a forest in this tangle. She keeps this thought to herself.
A King Among Dogs
Agatha lies in bed waiting for Fedor to come back from his walk. Her best ideas come to her when she’s just settled down for the night. It used to be one of the few times of day she could relax and be herself, by herself. Now she’s alone much of the time, but the habit of spending this window in quiet reflection has stayed with her.
When she was at school she was never alone, but had often been lonely. Her school was like that. There was a constant clamor of people, routine and activity, but unless you were the kind of person who slipped naturally into friendship, there was little charity.
Agatha did not require much attention. Her classmates were bland and she preferred her own company. Hers was the kind of school where all the pupils had titles and connections and country houses. They lorded it over her, even though in just a few years, come her twenty-first birthday, she would be able to buy and sell them all ten times over. Possibly they knew this.
When they went out riding they would enquire whether Agatha would be coming along too. Asking was not a kindness. They knew she would decline, once again, because she had no horse and could not ride. They came to ask her in their jodhpurs and riding boots, clutching helmets and crops, and after she had said no she heard them running along the corridors towards the stable, sniggering. When they came back following the afternoon hack they feigned astonishment that Agatha had not been out too. Then she found their dirty riding clothes crumpled up with her clean school uniform and she spent the night scrubbing and ironing it. They knew she only had two sets: one to wear and one to wash.
She told them she was only poor temporarily, because her father died before she was born and his money was in trust somewhere for her and she couldn’t access it until her twenty-first birthday. But when you are thirteen, your twenty-first birthday is far off, and the only salient fact was that she, Agatha, looked poor and dressed like she was poor and acted as if she was poor, and what was more, she literally had no money.
Everything Agatha and her mother had during these first twenty-one years came from Anastasia’s boyfriends. They gave her clothes and jewelry and other expensive trinkets and Anastasia retained what she needed to look the part of a trophy girlfriend and sold the rest to pay for her daughter’s boarding school fees.
“You must receive the best education that it is possible to receive,” her mother said to her. “You must live now the life you will later live,” Anastasia insisted. “There will be people always who will question your right to own all that you will own. But you must not let them question it. You must make them see how much you are worth.”
Anastasia grew up in poor circumstances in a small village between Moscow and St. Petersburg. She never mentions its name, nor talks about her early life much at all. Agatha knows that her mother’s childhood was difficult, that her mother’s mother was drunk and her mother’s father was violent, and that there were lots of siblings, and that Anastasia was the eldest and was expected to look after them. In 1990, when she was fourteen, she ran away to the capital.
In Moscow, Anastasia found a city caught between fat beginnings and slim endings; an empire decaying and regenerating all at once. The wall in far-off Berlin had crumbled, its rubble repurposed as paperweights and ornaments on bourgeois mantelpieces. All those subservient countries between Russia and the West had sidled away, and while the satellites and space stations continued to orbit the Earth, nobody much cared. There was no food in the shops and whole families had to live off a bag of flour and little else for weeks.
Anastasia attached herself to a gang led by a former tank commander in the Red Army. He and his men had seized various military assets as the state fractured, and they were in the process of moving their profits from Moscow to London. Anastasia went with them. She was passed around, but they treated her well enough otherwise. Better than her father had. They clothed her and fed her and some of them chatted to her and made her laugh.
Anastasia met Agatha’s father in Soho in the early 1990s, in a nightclub he owned. He was seventy-three. She was sixteen. His name was Donald Howard. His associates called him Donnie. She called him Donski.
Agatha turns onto her side then onto her back then onto her side. The sheets are soft and slip against her skin. She begins to fall away into sleep but is then awake. This is a common pattern. She’s not sure what manner of insomnia it is. It is not that she cannot fall asleep, but that she cannot stay asleep. She flicks on and off like a faulty generator.
Fedor still hasn’t come upstairs, though it is likely he and Roster have returned from their night-time walk. She rises from the bed and tucks the sheets behind her. She slips a wool blanket around her shoulders, walks across the bedroom and pulls open the heavy doors. Across the wide landing from her bedroom there’s a gaudy life-size portrait of her father. She never met the man but here he is, illuminated from below by the dim nightlights. The portrait once hung in the entrance hall, looking down at anybody who entered. After staring at it every time she came into the house for years, she decided to assert her presence in the building and remove anything she didn’t want. That included most reminders of her father. Instead of following her instructions, Roster has evidently simply decided to move the picture upstairs.
It is indicative of something, Agatha supposes, that the painting survived at all. Her elder sisters were grown up by the time of her conception. After they heard of the death of their father and the fact that his entire estate was left to an unborn child of a new Russian mistress, they did what they could to loot the movables, coming into the house and lifting everything that wasn’t nailed down. But not this portrait. Nobody wanted it. It hung in the entrance hall looking down at the women and their husbands as they squabbled over its subject’s possessions, pored over the jewels, the crockery, the wine cellar, and after they dragged the white baby-grand piano through the front door on its side, peeling off the lacquer on the stone steps. Not one of them glanced up to look at the man to whom they owed their wealth, diminished as it admittedly was by his last will and testament. This proud man with grizzled sideburns and a forehead like a marble plinth. This gilded patriarch with the frame of a gladiator and the brow of an emperor.
Agatha descends. Roster lives on the lower-ground floor, next to the kitchen. He has a couple of rooms which have refused any of the technological or aesthetic developments of the last four decades. When Agatha renovated the house, he insisted on no alteration to his small portion of it. He cooks his own drab meals not in the glossy kitchen, which Agatha’s chef uses, but on his own gas stove. His utensils are Bakelite. His electricity is tungsten. His carpets and curtains and wallpaper are stained with cigarette smoke and spilt whiskey and tea.
She is constantly telling Roster to clean his flat. She enjoys telling him about people she knows who have entirely redeveloped the basements of their townhouses. It has become fashionable for wealthy Londoners to dig deep into the ground and build an underground warren of swimming pools, games rooms and home cinemas. Some have built panic rooms or underground bunkers in case of emergency. It was not unheard of for very wealthy individuals such as her to be the target of kidnapping, armed robbery or extortion. And when London rioted a few years ago, a crowd of looters actually ran down her street wearing black balaclavas, whirling golf clubs and cricket bats.
Agatha knocks. She hears the old man rise from his wing-back armchair. She hears Fedor scuffle and slip on the lino
leum floor then leap to the door and sniff its base. Roster pulls it by the handle and Agatha sees him in the smoky gloom. Fedor lifts himself onto his hind legs and places his forepaws on Agatha’s chest.
“You were only supposed to take him out,” she says. “You’re not supposed to keep him down here with you in this dirt.”
“He’s a dog. Dirt is his domain.”
“Nonsense. He is a pedigree borzoi. His ancestors slept on the beds of Russian Tsars. His ancestors were kings among dogs.”
Roster looks down at Agatha. His cool gray eyes are dulled by the light. “And yours were thieves and whores.”
The Stews of Southwark
Tabitha places a copper penny on the bedside table. She and Precious stand and look at it. Tabitha holds her hands above it. Her eyes and mouth are wide in anticipation. Precious frowns.
“What am I supposed to be looking at?”
“It did it before,” says Tabitha.
Precious leans towards the penny, as if heightened concentration will alter its state.
“It was vibrating,” Tabitha insists. “It moved across the table.”
“Well, it’s not moving now.”
They wait for a few seconds. Precious feels like an idiot. Then the penny does begin to shake. It jingles across the surface of the table like a bell being rung, then settles, still and silent.
“What do you think it means?”
“Probably nothing.”
“Why is it doing that?”
“Maybe you have magical powers.”
“Do you think it’s an earthquake?”
Precious concedes London does experience small earthquakes. She picks up the penny and puts it into her purse, then goes to the sofa to sit down.
They are waiting for the rest of the girls to arrive. Precious and Tabitha’s flat is the best place to meet as it’s the biggest, and has access to the roof garden.