by Fiona Mozley
Cynthia makes a fortune from her work; significantly more than any of the other women. There is a clear reason for this, which everyone apart from Young Scarlet understands and accepts. Cynthia has the largest arse in the United Kingdom. She even won a competition. There’s a trophy in a cabinet in the room in which she works. If a person has a particular thing about big arses, they will travel hundreds—sometimes thousands—of miles to visit her, and they will pay the necessary premium. This seems perfectly reasonable to everyone else, but Young Scarlet can’t get her head round it.
“She’s a fat bastard,” Scarlet said when she first discovered the discrepancy in their revenue. Tabitha seriously chastised her for the comment, and Young Scarlet half-heartedly apologized, but later expressed amazement that anyone would want to shag “that lard arse.”
Young Scarlet considers herself to be the most attractive woman in the brothel, although nobody else agrees. She is one of the youngest, and her looks most readily align with a prevailing type. She is around 5'4", she has a slim build but large breasts, she has long blonde hair and a face that can be described as cute rather than beautiful. She keeps herself looking neat and tidy, and she wears a lot of expensive makeup. Everything she sees in films and on TV and reads about online and in magazines has taught her that she is desirable. And she is. But it’s the kind of desirability that is common, while the desire that flourishes in this part of the city is varied. Those whose bodies command the highest prices are those whose bodies are more unusual. Within her own field, lard-arse Cynthia has a monopoly.
Cynthia sees Precious waving to her and she easily barges through the groups of people with her record-breaking hips. She hugs Precious, Candy and Hazel, and after Precious explains who is lurking beneath the Darth Vader mask, she hugs Darth Vader too.
As well as friends, there are unfamiliar faces. Looking at the crowd, Precious is struck by how big the city is, and how many people there are here who she doesn’t know.
The sun has gone and the day is overcast.
A group of people have brought drums. The drums are held at their waists by colorful holsters, and they are beating them with their hands, or large batons. The rhythm becomes more and more ferocious. Someone else has brought some kind of horn, which lets out a sporadic, single note. It is obnoxiously loud and comes at unexpected intervals. Tabitha is standing next to Precious and jumps every time the horn is blown, knocking against Precious and once standing on her toe.
Another group of protesters has brought circus paraphernalia. A man is juggling multi-colored clubs and another is tossing an object into the air with two sticks and a string. Someone else is walking around on stilts.
“Who invited the hippies?” asks Young Scarlet. “Isn’t it possible to go to a protest and also brush your hair?”
As a rule, Precious tries to be less judgemental about other people than Young Scarlet, so throws her colleague a disapproving look, while secretly agreeing. The overall tone of the crowd is now one of scruffiness, and in Precious’s view, one of their main objectives is to present themselves as respectable and responsible. So many of the people have come along expecting to have a good time, as if they’ve turned up for a carnival or music festival.
The sun keeps popping out from behind the clouds, and catching on Candy’s mirror. Whenever this happens she holds it aloft and sweeps the reflection across the crowd. The other members of the protest don’t seem to be entirely happy about this, especially when one of them gets the full sunbeam right in the eye. Candy, however, is having a great time. “I’m like the Eye of Sauron,” she says.
Precious has been standing for a while now, and the balls of her feet and her calf muscles are beginning to ache. She shifts her weight onto one side and another, then repeats the movement.
The gathering has little direction. There are some chants, but nobody is leading them. People are milling around in little groups. Then some people, who look as if they go to a lot of protests, begin to make announcements. Precious doesn’t recognize any of them, though someone says something about them being from an anti-gentrification movement or some political organization. Someone says something about the government. She worries that the real reason for the gathering is falling away from them, and she’s letting it fall.
Precious feels someone nudge her hard in the back and Cynthia leans in and whispers, “What are they talking about? It should be you up there.”
Precious shakes her head. She’s never spoken in front of a crowd.
Tabitha agrees with Cynthia that it should be Precious up on the steps with the loudspeaker, but Precious again refuses.
She wouldn’t know what to say. When she thinks about how being forced out of Soho makes her feel, she is overcome. She wouldn’t know how to explain her feelings without getting it wrong and being misunderstood. It’s such a delicate situation, and so important to her; it isn’t something she wants to muddle up in front of a huge crowd.
In a way, it is funny that Precious has become so attached to the place. In Soho, there is dirt, pollution and so much that is vicious. There are people here who would sell their own mothers, or eat you alive. If society fell apart because of global warming, or nuclear war, this is the last place she would want to be. It wouldn’t take long for the food to disappear, and all the water to be drunk. Then people would start eating rats, then cats and dogs, then they would begin to feast on each other. Precious has heard human flesh tastes like pork.
But she also sees compassion, and different people rubbing along together. People come here to drink and take drugs and have a quick shag, and people come here to laugh, and hear music, and dance, and to eat sticky sweet cakes and dumplings, or snails cooked in garlic butter, and drink chocolatey coffee and red Bordeaux, and watch plays, and hear music.
And it’s home. She doesn’t totally know what a home is but she guesses it’s got something to do with friends and family and also something to do with being in a place that you feel has left its mark on you, for better or worse, and also being in a place that you’ve left your own mark upon, for better or worse. A place that remembers you’ve been there, that bears your imprint, like a squashy chair you’ve sat in a bunch of times.
When Precious thinks about it, she realizes that is what it means to her, and why she doesn’t want to leave. She is pushed onto the steps by Tabitha and Candy. Someone hands her a conical loudspeaker and shows her which button to press. She grips it in her right hand, curls her fingers around the handle, puts her forefinger against the trigger. When she pulls there is a click, and any words she chooses to speak will be shot through the air.
“Hello,” she says. Her words are loud, but they sound strange, as if she’s shouting into a cardboard box. It takes her a couple of seconds to realize she doesn’t need to raise her voice as the device will do the work for her. Tabitha and Candy and Young Scarlet and the others are looking up at her expectantly. Tabitha has taken off her Darth Vader helmet and is smiling up at Precious like an encouraging parent watching their child in a school play. Precious doesn’t know whether the sight of her friends makes her feel better or worse. Would she rather embarrass herself in front of a group of strangers or in front of people she knows? She isn’t sure.
“Thank you all for coming. It means a lot to us all. When we started fighting this battle we had no idea anyone would notice. We thought we were completely alone. And if today does anything, then it shows us that people—some people at least—care about us. And that, well, that’s always a nice thing. I haven’t got a speech planned, or anything, but I’d just like to ask a question. What will Soho be without people like us? Whatever it is we are. There will still be plays about us, and musicals. There are even operas about women like us over in Covent Garden, where all those fancy people sit with their champagne and their little binoculars. People will go to Piccadilly Circus or Leicester Square to see shows and films where people like us sing and dance, where people like us get naked and have sex or where we get murdered or die of tuber
culosis, or fall in love with some twat who wants to rescue us. But if these evictions go ahead, we won’t be here anymore, real people with real lives. And some people might think: big deal. Get them out. Clean up the neighborhood. But the thing is, where will we go? Look, it’s not easy to talk about this stuff without painting everything like it’s black and white. I’m not saying that it’s the perfect job, or the job we all dreamed of doing when we were little. But that’s life. Most of us end up a long way off from where we started out. But what we have going here is a good situation. Not everyone is as fortunate as us. If we get kicked out our work will be more dangerous, not less. And I’m just fed up with the hypocrisy. People have sex for loads of different reasons. And, well, we have sex for money.”
A cheer goes up. Candy is whooping. Cynthia has her hands raised above her head, and she’s clapping them together like she’s at a rock concert.
Then Precious sees the men. They are wearing dark uniforms, stab vests, black lace-up boots. She looks down a thin alley connecting this street to the next, and she sees them jogging in a line, parallel to the crowd. They are clutching shields and batons. Precious panics and spins around to see if there are any more coming. She sees a van pull up in the distance. The doors slide open and more masked men jump out and begin to rush in their direction. Precious turns again and sees another group of masked men at the other end of the street. They are already nearing the crowd and are walking slowly towards the assembly of protesters. The drumming stops. Its rhythm is replaced with that of steel-capped boots on hard tarmac, tapping against the ground like a set of chattering teeth.
“It’s a kettle!”
Precious doesn’t know what a kettle is in this context. She looks around desperately. Other people, apparently, do know what a kettle is, and it doesn’t seem good. She sees people beginning to run away. It doesn’t occur to Precious to run away. She loses sight of Tabitha and tries to find her, but the crowd has become a tangle of frightened faces, and she can’t for the moment see anyone she knows.
The police close in around them, and form a blockade. They are trapped. Nobody is allowed in or out. Minutes pass, maybe twenty, maybe more. Precious begins to tire. The police will keep them here until they are told by their superiors to release them. Everyone around her becomes fractious. Even the police officers become fractious. She can feel the anger behind their shields and masks.
Precious can feel an elbow digging into her lower back. Her face is pressed against a policeman’s shield. The clear acrylic is heavily scratched, from years of use. Her left cheek and eye are squashed against it, and through the hazy glass she can see the riot police, standing shoulder to shoulder, with shields and batons, and more behind to hold the line.
She remembers her sons standing on the other side of a plate-glass door, between the kitchen and hall in her old flat. They used to press their faces against it while she was cooking, squashing their lips and cheeks into the glass to make her laugh.
Someone is standing on her foot. She tries to shift it.
She can hear Candy squaring up to another policeman. She does her best to twist her body in the direction of the sound.
The man Candy is shouting at is exceptionally large. In his boots, he is nearly a foot taller than she is. He is wearing a helmet, so Precious can’t see his face clearly, and his hands are covered by thick, dark gloves.
Candy tells him he’s a bastard. She tells him he should be ashamed of himself. Then she changes tack. “I piss on men like you every day,” she says. “I piss on men professionally. I piss on their faces. I piss on their cocks.”
His response is shrouded by the balaclava and his heavy helmet with its visor. He doesn’t look down at Candy, but up over the crowd.
Candy continues to shout. “I’ve pissed on police officers. I’ve pissed on judges. I’ve pissed on politicians.” She is getting angrier and angrier. The policeman ignores her, but his colleagues are now watching. One policewoman looks furious. Another scared.
Then Candy stops shouting. Her face becomes calm. She looks like she is trying to reach something on the ground, but the weight of people around is forcing her to remain standing. She lowers herself slightly, so she is just out of sight, and then she comes back up. Precious tries to push back against the person standing behind her so she can get a better look, but she doesn’t need to see. She can soon feel it underfoot. Urine.
The large policeman is now looking down at her and she is smiling up at him. And then he jumps. He has felt what she is doing. He moves like a spooked bull in a cattle chute. He is pinned to his position by the crowd of protesters in front and the line of police to the back, but his movement is involuntary, and explosive. He swings his arms wildly. People around him are knocked to the ground. Candy is knocked down, and Precious too. Precious manages to crawl away, but she watches as Hazel and some of the others are wrestled to the ground by police officers, then dragged kicking and screaming and shouting into the backs of police vans and driven away.
Then the rain comes. Clouds were building all afternoon, but now they fall, as if clouds are what happens when the world begins to daydream, and rain comes when it is revived. At first the water falls as thick drops, slowly then suddenly very quickly, then as ice. The hail shatters against tarmac and concrete and brick, casting shards into the gutters and drains.
The Past
Robert often sees a ghost. The ghost walks at night with a ghostly dog. He isn’t as tall as he used to be, his bones having fallen into one another with age like kindling licked by flame, but Robert still recognizes the outline: his gait, his long nose, the way he looks over his shoulder after he changes direction. The dog is new, but suits him, tall and thin like a greyhound, but with long, white silky fur. It trots at his heel. They come from Mayfair, cross Regent Street, then walk the backstreets of Soho. Robert thinks about calling out to the man, or going over and tapping him on the shoulder, but he doesn’t.
Robert moved from Glasgow to London in his twenties. During an Old Firm fight he bottled the son of someone important and was advised to disappear. He traveled to London with a small piece of paper in his pocket, with the address of someone who could help him get work scrawled in pen, and a name Robert couldn’t make out. He followed directions from Euston Station into Soho and knocked on a door at street level, then was led upstairs to an office. When Roster was a young man he was exceptionally handsome. Even Robert remembers being impressed. Reginald Roster was five, maybe ten years older than Robert, and he looked after him, in a sense. Roster was the boss’s driver, but also much more. The boss had all his most important conversations in the back of his car, and Roster heard them. He sorted everything out for him, and he gathered men like Robert to help him do it.
Robert sits alone in a holding cell. He was brought in for a chat, then he got rough and was put in the cell to cool off. He has a phone call. When he used to get in trouble, back in the day, he would call Roster, and Roster would come with the lawyer. It must be thirty years, but that phone number is still as clear to him as ever. Robert has no idea if it is still in use. He isn’t sure where it was connected to, at the time; either to a line in the Soho office, or maybe to a line at the Mayfair townhouse.
Robert thinks about calling Lorenzo, but he’s already regretting everything he told him. Lorenzo left the pub without saying goodbye, and Robert sat there for a bit drinking until it was clear he wasn’t coming back. The lad had looked at him like he was some kind of monster. Perhaps he is some kind of monster. Only, that’s not how he feels. He feels like a person with memories of a bad past and hope for a better future.
Robert saw Lorenzo grow up. He remembers him going off to school in the mornings then coming back in the afternoons and sitting out on the balcony doing his homework on hot summer days. He always worked so hard. Robert thought the lad would be a doctor or lawyer or businessman. When he got the place to study at Cambridge, his mum and aunt organized a party and Robert chipped in with a case of champagne (which he stole from
a strip club he did security for). It seemed right to mark the news with something fancy. “You’ll have to get used to this sort of thing,” he told Lorenzo. “You’ll have to stop drinking lager and start drinking champagne, and you’ll have to learn what all the little knives and forks are for. When you come back at Christmas we won’t recognize you.” Robert meant it as a joke, but the lad looked upset. He peered down at his drink then up at Robert. “Sorry,” Lorenzo said. This wasn’t what Robert had intended. He put down his own drink and placed a hand on each of the boy’s shoulders.
“Never apologize for having an education,” he said. “Never apologize for being clever and working hard and doing well. I’m proud of you.”
It was a surprise when Lorenzo announced he was going to be an actor. His family were anxious about his prospects. His dad was especially loud about it, though Robert suspected Jimi wasn’t so much anxious as ashamed. It was clear by that point Lorenzo wasn’t going to be the type of man Jimi wanted him to be.
Lorenzo’s dad was hardly around when he was a boy, and the lad was raised by his mum and aunts, who all worked at an Italian restaurant. Jimi was in the merchant navy. He was from Sri Lanka and met Maria when he was docked in the Medway and had come up the Thames to enjoy the city. In Robert’s opinion, Jimi was a pure cunt. He was away for much of the year, which would have been fine if he sent his wages home to his family as he should have. Instead, he spent them in foreign ports. He was a looker and a charmer, and Robert wouldn’t have been surprised if the man had other families in other cities. It was a dishonest way to carry on. Robert knows all about lust, but he doesn’t lie and cheat. Though perhaps that’s because he’s never had anyone to lie to; anyone to cheat on.
He is led out of his cell, down the corridor to the phone. His fingers find the old number. He hears the dial tone, and then the sound of ringing at the other end of the line. After seven or eight rings, he feels sure nobody will answer, but reckons he might as well stay on the line while he figures out who else to call. Then someone does answer. He hears the man’s voice, familiar but distant. He explains who he is and what has happened. Roster says very little. Robert doesn’t know if the man has remembered him.