Hot Stew

by Fiona Mozley

  Bastian met Laura Blind at a late-afternoon cocktail event in the garden of one of the colleges that backed onto the river. He had seen her around, and knew they were in the same year, but they had never spoken to each other. They did different subjects and had very different sets of friends, with almost no overlap.

  The party had a carnival theme. There were people dressed as strongmen and mime artists, jugglers and magicians. A stand in one corner advertised a “Freak Show” which, for reasons of good taste, mainly consisted of plastic figurines and misshapen vegetables. In another corner, there was a hall of mirrors, and a little tent with a fortune teller inside. Bastian hadn’t been in, but apparently there was a woman dressed up as a soothsayer, who did tarot and palm readings, and had a crystal ball.

  Bastian saw Laura standing by the strawberry stand picking out the reddest and juiciest looking specimens then placing them into her cardboard bowl. He watched as she moved over to the jug of cream and poured it over the fruit as liberally as if she were pouring milk onto breakfast cereal.

  She didn’t appear to be with anybody but stood alone by the stand with her bowl and spoon and she ate without looking up. She took the bowl of cream, stained pink from the juice of the berries, with both hands, and brought it up to her mouth and drank from it until it was empty.

  Bastian approached and saw that some of this pink cream had lingered on her lips, highlighting their curve. He doesn’t know why he walked towards her. He didn’t know at the time. He doesn’t know now.

  Laura didn’t notice his approach until he was standing directly in front of her.

  “Nice strawberries,” said Bastian, unaware of what he was saying until the words had come out of his mouth.

  “What?”

  She must have thought he was a total prat.

  He thought it best to continue in the same vein. “They go very well with cream, don’t they?”

  More idiocy.

  “Um, yeah.”

  Laura began to look over Bastian’s shoulder to spot a friend or someone else to whom she could escape.

  Feeling the need to atone, he asked her if she wanted a glass of Prosecco. It was a shallow offer. All the drinks at the event were free. However, she said yes, and Bastian went off to get a bottle. He pulled one from a nearby bucket and opened it. He was glad of the task: it broke the awkwardness.

  Laura smiled uncertainly as she took a glass from him. It was a smile that said “thank you” but also “go away now.” But he didn’t go away. Instead, Bastian held out his right hand with his palm upturned. He looked at Laura very deliberately and said, “What’s my fortune?”

  Laura had just drawn a large gulp of Prosecco into her mouth and she was holding it there on her tongue to savour the sweetness and let the bubbles dissolve. After Bastian spoke she held the liquid there a little while longer and considered his words, looking repeatedly between his face and the palm of his hand.

  She swallowed and said: “Yours will be a life of adventure and intrigue, so long as you follow your love line rather than your fortune line.” He relaxed his arm.

  After that, there was talking and listening. They laughed a lot; Laura made Bastian laugh. They left the event together and headed to a pub and ordered a bottle of the cheapest, nastiest house wine, which they sipped from scratched glasses. Afterwards, they went back to Laura’s room. It was at the top of a dark, winding Victorian staircase, and had a slanted ceiling and a window looking out over the market. On the far side of the room, there was a single bed. Laura kicked off her shoes and headed towards it, leading Bastian by the hand. Then she turned and kissed him. Her lips were stained blood blue by the wine. He realized his must be the same color.

  They were only together for a month, but of that month they spent every day and every night in each other’s company until, one morning, the relationship ended abruptly. Bastian still can’t get his head around what happened. Soon afterwards, Bastian and Rebecca got back together. He and Rebecca made more sense, he decided. They had more in common. They had known each other for a long time. He promised Rebecca he wouldn’t contact Laura ever again, and it was a promise he kept.

  Back in the flat, Bastian goes to the narrow kitchen and pries open the freezer. Inside, there’s a bottle of vodka encrusted with frost. An upturned glass lies on the draining board. He rights it, pours in some of the gloopy liquid and takes a drink. He just about swallows the mouthful and feels it burn the length of his gullet, into his stomach. He fills the rest of the glass with water from the tap, then drains the glass in one go. He repeats both actions. By the time Rebecca returns, Bastian is drunk.

  She didn’t go dancing after all, and is back earlier than expected. She lets herself in, and comes through to the sitting room. Bastian is lying on the sofa. He has replaced his earphones with a set of expensive headphones, which are plugged into an elaborate hi-fi system. A record is spinning on a turntable. Bastian’s eyes are shut.

  Rebecca nudges him. He starts, and then, seeing who it is, he pulls the headphones down to hang around his neck.

  “I’ve worked it out,” Rebecca says. She hasn’t put her bag down yet.

  “Worked what out?”

  “Who Glenda was. She was that lesbian who hung around with Laura Blind.”

  Bastian feels himself redden. He should never have brought it up.

  “Are you two back in touch?” she continues.

  Bastian pulls himself up, so he is sitting on the sofa with a straight back. “No,” he insists. “God, no. I haven’t spoken to her in two years.”

  Rebecca looks at him for a while longer, without saying anything.

  Bastian can hear the music coming out of the headphones around his neck. It sounds tinny, like cutlery scratching an empty plate.

  He takes a couple of deep breaths. So does Rebecca.

  “Because if you did get back in touch, that would be us over.”

  “Yeah, I know that.”

  Rebecca pulls at her lower lip. Her lipstick has rubbed off. She turns away from him, walks into their bedroom and shuts the door. He can hear her going into the en suite bathroom and turning on the shower.

  Bastian switches off the music and tidies away the headphones and cables. He is beginning to sober up. He is feeling like a complete dickhead. When he thinks about the time he spent with Laura, he is usually able to construct a network of explanations and excuses that align in his favor: Rebecca had made it clear she didn’t want to see him; Rebecca could have done something similar if she had wanted to (for all he knows, she did); there was never any certainty that he and Rebecca would get back together. And when they did get back together, Rebecca was so businesslike about it, he was never forced to consider her feelings.

  Sometimes it seems to Bastian that Rebecca views their relationship as a sound investment. They are from similarly wealthy backgrounds; they are likely to have similarly successful careers. They are both good-looking and intelligent.

  He knows she likes being in a relationship with him, but he doesn’t know if she likes spending time with him.

  He likes spending time with her. He likes seeing her holding forth in front of company, or making people laugh, even when she’s mean. He likes going out to restaurants with her and eating new and exciting food. He likes it when she tells him stories about her day at work, and he especially likes it when she tells him about the ceramics she has been working with. Bastian knows nothing about ceramics, or art more generally, or indeed East Asia, but it seems to be a subject Rebecca is genuinely enthusiastic about. It is her passion, something she actually likes, not just something she thinks she should like.

  Bastian stands outside the door of the en suite bathroom and knocks. She tells him to come in. Her voice sounds formal and distant through the door, as if she’s making a service announcement on a train.

  The bathroom is filled with steam. The clear glass shower screen is thick with condensation and Bastian can see the shapes of Rebecca but none of her details. She looks like a templat
e of herself. He moves towards the screen, reaches out, and places his palm on the glass.

  “I’m not going to have sex with you.”

  Bastian reels. “That’s not why I came in here.”

  “Well, I’m just letting you know.”

  “That’s not why I’m fucking here. For fuck’s sake. I just came in to see if you were okay. I wanted to, I don’t know, stand here and have a fucking chat with you.”

  “There’s no need to lose your temper.”

  “I’m not losing my temper,” he insists. He steadies himself, and takes a couple of deep breaths. “I’m sorry for losing my temper. It’s just, I hadn’t come in here to make a move on you, I just wanted to say hi.”

  “Hi,” she says.

  Bastian allows his hand to fall, painting the gesture in the condensation like a cockerel’s plume. He goes back to the living room. He assumes that Rebecca gets out of the shower and goes to bed. He wouldn’t know. He falls asleep on the sofa.

  Archaeology

  The group spreads out across the building site like a dropped handful of sand. Each finds a dark corner with its own heap of detritus. “You never know what you might find,” the Archbishop reminds them, frequently. They look for discarded metals, power tools, wood that can be salvaged and repurposed, anything to turn a profit.

  Paul Daniels finds a stack of wooden crates and begins to sort through them. Somebody else makes his way towards the skip, piled high with discarded timber, building rubble, wooden planks with rusted nails stuck through them, broken drill bits, snapped broom handles, chipped bricks, valuable masonry discarded because of minor imperfections.

  The woman they call Debbie McGee wanders among her friends. She has not forgotten the tremors. She walks among the rubble, taking care to step gently, allowing the soles of her feet to move over the ground and feel any vibrations that the earth might throw up. She moves like a metal detectorist over an ancient battlefield, working as methodically as her patchy short-term memory will allow, treating the building site as a grid, walking in the straightest lines she can, turning at right angles.

  She walks to the furthest corner of the building site. She steps with her left foot then her right. When she tries to step again with her left foot, she trips. She hits the dirt, putting hands out in front of her body to break her fall, grazing her left elbow.

  Winded, she tries to pull her foot loose but she is snagged. She twists her body around to see what has caught her. Reaching out, she grabs what appears to be a thick, metal hoop. It is cold to the touch and covered with clods of mud. It is half-wedged in the ground. It must have been exposed when the builders removed the topsoil. Once she has freed her foot, she stands and takes hold of the thick metal hoop with both hands. She pulls and pulls and jiggles the hoop and slowly the earth relinquishes its tight grip on the object. She stumbles backwards, clutching the treasure.

  The commotion attracts attention. A couple of the others start trotting towards her. After they see the object she is holding, they beckon others over too. The arrivals peer at the shiny hoop. They are amazed.

  Some of them reach out to touch it. Debbie McGee moves the object towards a beam of light shining from high up on a crane, and the object begins to sparkle through the layers of dirt. There is a glint of gold, and other colors too, translucent and opaque, flickering, catching the light then falling back into shadow.

  The man they call the Archbishop and the man they call Paul Daniels are the last to arrive, but they do so with the most audacity. Paul Daniels pushes through the crowd, shoving others aside. He sees his woman at the center of the circle. He looks first at her face, captivated by something she is holding. He sees that she is gazing at the thing with more wonder and awe than she has ever expressed in his direction, and he reaches out and snatches the metal hoop easily from her hands.

  Debbie McGee does not resist. As soon as the treasure has been removed from her grip, she recoils, drawing her arms into her body like a flower retracting its petals when the sun disappears. She steps back. She herself is no longer illuminated by the bright white light from the crane. She slinks back into the collective, engulfed by the little crowd of vagabonds, absolved of any protagonism.

  The group turns towards Paul Daniels, who is now at their center, holding the object. He does not fill this role for long. Soon the Archbishop arrives, and plucks the metal hoop from the hands of the man they call Paul Daniels, and focus resolves instead on him.

  “Bring water!”

  The Archbishop snaps this instruction at nobody in particular, and one of his lackeys runs off and returns with a bucket of water that had been standing by the cement mixer.

  The Archbishop dips the object into the bucket and cups water with his hand to douse it, as if baptizing an infant.

  The crust of dirt slowly dissolves and when the Archbishop pulls the hoop from the water he reveals a golden crown, set with bright gems: blue, red, green, yellow.

  “Oh,” they say. “Ah,” they say.

  He raises it with both hands, holding it up to examine the stones. The harsh floodlights reflect and refract. The jewels dazzle; their colors true. The Archbishop lifts the crown higher still, then slowly, with liturgical solemnity, lowers it onto his head.

  The Death of Debbie McGee

  Robert gets up from his bar stool, falters, steadies himself, then pushes through the heavy wooden door and stumbles onto the pavement. He left the company of Precious several hours ago feeling worse rather than better. He hoped spending money on sex would stop him spending money on drink. Sex is better for his health if not his bank balance, and usually it improves his mood.

  This evening, it didn’t make him feel better, and he still had enough spare change to continue drinking. He didn’t want to go back to the Behn and explain his absence to Lorenzo, so he went to a different pub and sat alone at the bar, hunched, and ordered a double measure of blended whiskey.

  Robert Kerr has fucked for fifty years. He first fucked when he was fourteen. Back in Glasgow, Rangers lost to Celtic catastrophically. A die-hard fan, he got in with a group of supporters who took their love of the club to its murky extremities. Club and country. God Save Rangers; God Save the Queen.

  After the game, Robert left the Ibrox with this crowd and found a pub off the Paisley Road. By rights, he was too young to drink and smoke with these hard men but he was big for his age and eager to keep up. They found some girls around the corner and brought them into the back rooms.

  One of the girls marked out Robert for herself. She had wide hips, large, white breasts and hair the color of Irn-Bru. She sat on his lap and allowed him to caress the inside of her bare thigh with his fingertips then reach up beneath her dress. An older man saw the beginnings of the assignation. ‘You taking that hen upstairs?’

  Robert did. The rooms above the pub were still drenched in wartime ruin. There were blackout blinds but no curtains; holes in the walls where cast-iron light fittings had been removed. The sheets on the bed hadn’t been changed between occupants.

  It was in this setting that Robert Kerr first kissed a woman’s lips, first kissed a woman’s nipples, first felt a hand that was not his own grip his dick, first felt a mouth and tongue there. Though young, he knew instinctively what to do. He took the lead.

  He fell in love as assuredly as any fourteen-year-old boy in his position would. For him, the red-headed woman who might have been more than twice his age, was the most beautiful thing to have ever walked the banks of the Clyde. At the end of their encounter, he paid the going rate.

  That evening, Robert fucked Precious for fifty minutes. He worked up a sweat. Precious wriggled beneath him. She is good at her job but not so good that she could feign interest for almost an hour without letting up. She did her best, Robert could tell, not to look actively bored, but the manufactured excitement and engagement of the first twenty minutes dissipated. Robert felt a stab of guilt. Guilt for taking so long, guilt for being so old and ugly and for inflicting his body upon this beau
tiful woman, guilt for going out whoring at all.

  After Robert left the walk-up, he was followed by the bouncer, Karl. Robert got to the end of the street and turned a corner, then felt a hand on his shoulder.

  “What do you want?” Robert asked.

  “To let you know that place is finished,” Karl replied.

  “Finished how?”

  “The landlords have been trying to chuck them out for months. They’re fighting it but they’ve got no chance of winning. They’ll be out soon enough. I’ve already got another job lined up. There’s a bunch of guys down in Surrey who’ve got a place going. All Russian or Eastern European or something and they need blokes like me. And, well, obviously they’re looking for customers.”

  Karl reached into the inside pocket of his black leather jacket. He pulled out what looked like a business card, only it had nothing printed on it. He then took out a pencil and wrote a mobile phone number. “If you’re looking for a new place when this one packs up, give me a call.”

  Robert took the card and watched Karl as he walked back to his sentry duty.

  Surrey. Robert knows of those kinds of places: unlikely looking detached houses on the outskirts of insignificant towns. Boarded up windows. Girls drugged and thrown on beds. Johns handing their cash over to men like Karl. Idiots like Robert picked up by black cars with tinted windows, dropped off again when it was done. It isn’t for him. Maybe it is inevitable, as Karl said it was, but Robert can’t stand those places. He’s seen a few, to his shame, but only for work.

  Bugger Karl for lining a job up with those Eastern Europeans while he’s still working for the girls. The girls are paying him good money to look after them. People have no sense of loyalty anymore.

  Robert veers across the pavement and trips onto the road, steadying himself with a hand on the tarmac. Revelers edge around him. A group of young women on the other side of the street turn away. He tries hard to keep a straight course. He manages perhaps twenty steps before stopping to rest.