by Fiona Mozley
She winks mischievously and potters into the kitchen.
After she has gone, Mona whispers to Precious, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to cause offense.”
“Absolutely none taken. She’s messing with you.”
Precious follows Tabitha into the kitchen to collect their tea.
Mona disappears beneath a black cape that she has brought with her. Precious hears some clinking and rustling and then Mona asks her to undress to her underwear and to sit on the bed. Precious does so. She removes the blazer she was wearing to make herself look respectable and sophisticated for the protest. Then she takes off her top and the neat skirt she selected. She is wearing a bra and knicker set in ivory silk and lace. The color suits her. She is confident in this getup.
Mona tells Precious to make herself comfortable, but Precious doesn’t need telling. She sits at the edge of the bed with her legs crossed and the toes of her left foot just about touching the floor. She stretches her arms out behind her and rests her palms on the bedspread, fingers outstretched and turned away from her. She tucks her tummy in a little, not because she is self-conscious at all, but she is having her photograph taken so clearly wants to look her best. She wears a broad smile.
“Say when,” she says.
“It’ll be a little while yet. I’ve got a bit more faffing to do.”
Mona seems to take a long time to get the camera sorted, and even after it appears as if it is sorted, she continues to fiddle with it for many minutes. As she turns knobs and tightens screws, she chats to Precious as she said she was going to. They talk about lots of different things. Precious tells her about her childhood, her family, her life in Nigeria. She tells her about moving to London, about her ex-husband, about how she felt when her granddaughter was born, about the first time she fell in love.
After a while, Precious herself becomes curious, and asks Mona a question. “Why do you do what you do?” she asks. “What do you get out of it?”
Mona looks her in the eye. Her expression is blank; she gives nothing away. “I seek fame and fortune through the beautiful rendition of other people’s pathetic lives.”
Precious falters. Her face falls. She panics. Mona takes the photograph.
The Devil’s Reward
After her meeting with Tobias Elton, Agatha tells Roster she’ll see him at home, then she walks to a nearby gallery.
There is an exhibition of religious art from the Spanish Golden Age she has been meaning to see. Paintings have been imported from all over the world.
She pays the small entrance fee and buys a program to read as she walks. There are lots of virgins. Virgins with child, Virgins in ascension. Virgins as no-longer virgins but mothers weeping over dead sons. Lots of Baptists. Baptists pointing at lambs; Baptists with conches; Baptists in itchy camel clothing; Baptists with no heads; Baptists with no bodies; Salome with her silver platter; Herodias looking on. Apostles, evangelists. Sinners damned. Bodies engulfed. The gaping mouth of hell. There’s a room at the end devoted to contemporary photography from Iberia and Latin America. The photographs are posed, and reflect the compositions of the earlier paintings. One photographer has gone into a woman’s prison and taken photographs of the inmates as the various incarnations of Maria. Maria the virgin; Maria the mother; Maria the demigod. The women in the photographs are tattooed. Some bear obvious scars of childbirth, violence, drug use, and these scars are emphasized.
Agatha considers this half of the exhibition to be bland, predictable. The themes illuminated by the photographs draw upon standard modes of leftist disaffection. The usual moaning. Perhaps these people think they’re being very clever, but as far as Agatha is concerned, the work is derivative. She returns to one of the earlier rooms to look again at an El Greco.
A nearby infant wails and won’t stop. Agatha tells the mother to take the infant outside, but the mother refuses and becomes angry. There’s a dispute, which Agatha wins by remaining calm while the mother becomes hysterical, drawing the attentions of the gallery attendant and subsequently the security team.
Agatha returns home to hear laughter rattling around in the basement. One of the voices belongs to Roster. The other is female, though just as familiar. Agatha descends and pushes open the door to Roster’s rooms. She doesn’t knock. She sees Roster sitting back on his grubby old armchair and her mother, Anastasia, lounging on his lap. Roster is wearing his usual black suit. Anastasia is wearing a fitted minidress. They both hold large glasses of brandy that tip dangerously as they cackle. Anastasia’s hand has found its way between the buttons of Roster’s shirt. His necktie is askew.
Agatha is unsurprised by the tableau. “You don’t have to sit down here. You can sit in the upstairs rooms.”
“But I wanted to see my Reggie. Lovely Reggie.”
She means Roster. Anastasia always uses his first name.
“Take him upstairs as well. For goodness sake, why would you choose to sit down here?”
Agatha turns her back on the pair and goes to the stairs. As she ascends, Anastasia rushes up behind her.
“Are you happy to see me, my darling?” She says this in Russian. “Will you kiss me?”
Agatha turns and brushes her lips gracefully against her mother’s cheek. She continues up the stairs and into the main reception room at the front of the house. It has a view of the park. Her mother follows and so does Roster, who doesn’t sit with the women but instead stands by the door. He has buttoned up and tucked in his shirt, and straightened his tie.
“Come here and sit with me, Reggie, sweetie.”
“He won’t,” says Agatha.
“He won’t if you remain so cold to him. Why are you so cold to him? He’s family.”
“He just won’t. When he comes upstairs he’s working. It’s nothing to do with me. I just know that he won’t sit with us.”
“Come here, Reggie.”
“A man must have structure in his life. I am now at work.”
“Bollocks to that. Come and cuddle me. Come over here with that ox’s cock.” Anastasia turns to her daughter. “Did you know that our man here is hung like an ox? The devil blessed him with a big one as reward for all the sins he would commit.”
Anastasia laughs at her own joke.
Agatha does not look at Roster. She asks her mother why she has come to visit.
“What a welcome! Perhaps one day you will at least pretend to be happy to see me.”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t happy to see you. I just wondered what, in particular, prompted the visit.”
“Reggie phoned me. He tells me you’re having more trouble with those bitch sisters. And with a pack of whores that won’t budge.”
Agatha looks at her driver, who’s still standing stiffly by the door, like a gallery attendant.
“I talk to your mother on the phone every now and then,” he says, “and it happened to come up during our last conversation.”
“So I came immediately,” interrupts Anastasia. “You are too weak with these people, Agy. You let them get the better of you.”
“I do no such thing. I am dealing with both situations.”
When they sat down, Agatha chose the sofa opposite her mother. Now Anastasia gets up and squeezes herself into the small space between her daughter and the armrest, moving one of the cushions onto the floor to make room, sitting with her feet up and drawn into her body.
Agatha begins to shift over but Anastasia wraps her arms around her and puts her head on her shoulder.
“Do you have a boyfriend, Agy? Or a girlfriend? I wouldn’t mind. It would be a bit more difficult to have children, but only a little. It would just require additional planning.”
Agatha’s posture stiffens. She tells her mother she has no boyfriend, but that it would be a boyfriend if there were anyone.
Anastasia takes hold of a lock of her daughter’s long blonde hair and runs it through her fingers. “Is it wrong of me to want grandchildren? I know that not every woman wants to be a mother, but I know for certain that every mothe
r wants to be a grandmother. If you had had a child at the same age I was when I had you, I could almost be a great-grandmother.”
“You’re not even fifty yet,” Agatha points out.
Anastasia makes a little noise at the mention of her age. “If Roster had started as young as I did, he could have a whole clan by now. He would be like Genghis Khan, with his genes spread across a vast continent.”
“Maybe I did start as young as you,” says Roster quietly.
Agatha gets up and goes over to Fedor’s bed in the corner of the room. She picks up one of his toys and squeezes it to make it squeak. The hound’s soft footsteps can be heard on the stairs, and then his long nose seen pushing against the door. He trots over to Agatha and takes the toy from her hands, then shakes it.
“Darling, let’s go out,” says Anastasia.
“I’ve just got in,” replies Agatha.
“But you’ve not been out properly. You’ve been working or doing something boring. Let’s go into Soho. We’ll get some drinks, maybe some dinner, then go dancing. You might meet someone.”
“I don’t want to meet anyone in Soho.”
“We’ll dance, then. I haven’t danced in so long. It feels like years.”
“I’m sure you danced in Cannes.”
“A bit, maybe. But it isn’t the same. There isn’t anywhere to dance like in Soho.”
“Sleazy, you mean.”
“Well, maybe. Is that so bad?”
“I suppose it depends on your perspective.”
“I want to feel someone grinding against me in the dark.”
“That’s where we differ. You wish to be molested by a total stranger. I can’t think of anything worse.”
Anastasia slumps back on the sofa, pouting. Agatha is struck by how childlike her mother looks in this posture. Anastasia spends her summers in the sun, and her skin is bronzed and, despite the application of expensive creams, beginning to sag and wrinkle. But her aspect is young. She has the mannerisms of a teenager. She sighs and pouts and shrugs and sulks, and she laughs at juvenile jokes and makes crass remarks.
Agatha is conscious that she may have been a little unkind. “Perhaps we could go out for dinner,” she says. Her mother sits up. Her face brightens. “I’ll need to have a shower and change my clothes. Let’s leave in an hour.”
Anastasia becomes very excited by the prospect of getting ready for a night out with her daughter, and starts talking about hair and makeup. Agatha smiles and plays along, and after her shower she allows Anastasia to blow-dry and straighten her long hair, and she even allows her mother to do her eyeliner and mascara. She doesn’t take on board any of Anastasia’s clothing suggestions, but her mother is so happy to be allowed the physical contact with her only daughter that she doesn’t argue too much.
She and Anastasia decide to walk into Soho. Anastasia tells her daughter that a short walk before entering a bar does more for a woman’s face than a thousand pounds’ worth of cosmetic treatments; and that if she wears high heels, it’ll do even more for her arse. Anastasia is full of this kind of advice.
As they walk, Agatha asks her mother how she has been since she saw her in the summer. “How is Mohammed?” she asks.
“He’s depressed.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” replies Agatha, startled. Mohammed seemed well last time she saw him.
“It’s because I split up with him. I broke his heart and now he is depressed.”
“I’m sorry to hear that too.”
“He became so boring. I had to end it. He wanted to put me up in an apartment and come and visit me and have little family dinners with me like I was his wife. I told him not to. I’m not your wife, I said to him. I said, I don’t want to be your wife, stop trying to treat me like a wife. And then he said he was sorry and that he was in love with me or something and then he said he wanted to spend all his time with me and that he wouldn’t be able to get divorced from his actual wife, because of his children and his job, but he already saw me as the most important person in his life. And I told him, that’s not what this is. Meet me in a hotel, yes. Take me out for dinner, yes. Buy me diamonds, handbags, a car, yes please. But don’t expect me to sit in a little house baking stupid cakes and waiting for your flight to get in. No thanks.”
“I liked Mohammed.”
“Well, he didn’t like you. He thought you treated me with a very little amount of respect. He had no idea why I put up with it.”
“Okay,” says Agatha. There isn’t much more she can add to that.
They are walking down a street Agatha doesn’t recognize. She doesn’t come this way much. Her mother takes hold of her arm, perhaps in reconciliation after her unnecessary barbs, and they find their steps falling into time. They are the same height, and their legs and feet are the same length and size, although Anastasia’s heels are much higher so she has to stoop to hold her daughter’s arm.
The streets are crowded and the bars and pubs are overflowing. Men in suits stand on the pavement with pints of beer, jostling for space by the window so they can place their glasses or elbows on the sill. A big man takes a step back without looking around, and both Anastasia and Agatha are pushed into the road. Anastasia swears at him but the street is busy and the hubbub from the bar is loud so he doesn’t notice.
They come to the French restaurant, Des Sables. Agatha hadn’t realized this is where they were heading. She hadn’t paid attention as her mum had led her through Soho.
“Not here,” she says.
“I love this place. Your father used to bring me here when we were first dating. He knew how to treat a girl. I never had eaten food like this. Snails. And garlic. He used to order all the most delicious foods for me and all the most expensive wines. I thought I was getting fat, but it turned out I was pregnant.” She raises a hand to Agatha’s cheek tenderly.
Agatha rarely hears her mother speak affectionately about her father. Conversations about him, in whatever context, tend to center on his money. On another occasion, she might want to coax more out of Anastasia, but she is too flustered by the sight of the restaurant. “But it’s on the way out. We’ve already given them notice.”
“Even more reason to make the most of it.”
“Mum, they know who I am.”
“Why do you care? They wouldn’t dare say anything. They need all the business they can get.”
“I don’t care, particularly. I just think we can do better elsewhere. Leave places like this behind.”
Anastasia concedes. They head elsewhere and debate the merits of different European cuisines before settling on an Italian restaurant that serves tasty but generic Tuscan fare to an exclusive clientele.
The Shortest Day | The Longest Night
Debbie McGee Redux
Debbie McGee is not dead. On the day she felt the tremors she walked into the building site at the center of Soho. She found the mouth of a vast hole, like a crater gouged by a mortar at the Somme. She found a ladder and steps. Through the dark, she felt her way. Her hands gripped the cool metal rail, and her feet found the rungs. She took her time. If she slipped, she steadied herself, waited, then continued. She climbed down, deep into the earth. She found tunnels, and walked along them, back and forth, up and down.
The tunnels led in every direction. There were tall tunnels that were big enough for trains to pass through. There were smaller tunnels, corridors that a person could walk along. There were tunnels that were narrower still, that she would have to stoop to pass through, or crawl along on her hands and knees. There were tiny chambers, capillary-like, that spooled out from the main arteries, for rats, moles, and other small mammals. And there were the seams big enough only for insects. Debbie McGee found tunnels that were fresh and new and lined with concrete; others that were old and worn out, held in place by rotting timbers and chipped bricks; walls of bare earth or cut from the bedrock. She felt the roots of trees, some alive, some dead. There were grubs and worms and other things she did not have names for. She walke
d for what felt like days. She drank the water that dripped. She did not eat. She lost herself in the darkness, feeling her way, seeing nothing.
And then, far off, she saw a light, and walked toward it. The light became larger and brighter. Its shape changed from ill-defined blur to a rectangle with horizontal lines. She reached with her arms into the light and moved as if to push against it. Her outstretched hands pressed a cool metal grate. She felt it shift in its holster, felt it give way, slip, disappear into the room with the light. She heard it clatter against a hard surface and the sound of the clatter ringing through the hole in the wall and bouncing around the dark tunnel, giving texture to the space. She placed her hands on the edge of the grate, pulled her featherweight body up and slipped through the hole. She blinked. She saw an expanse of rippling turquoise. A fevered Hollywood dream, a Kodachrome test-strip. It was a swimming pool, lit from below, lit from above. The swimming pool was lined with tiles in shades of blue. The walls from floor to ceiling were a photograph of a beach front, white sand, gently breaking waves, sun. The sides of the swimming pool were lined with tropical plants. Palms with leaves the size of parasols, long thin tendrils in a static, green explosion, and flowers as large as a baby’s cradle. Pinks, yellows, lilacs, reds. There were UV lamps, the like of which she had seen in marijuana factories. The plants, too, were fed hydroponically. It was an underground ecosystem, a subterranean oasis, a chlorine and halogen haven, a garden with walls on six sides. She walked around the pool three times, reaching out to stroke the plants, bending and crouching to smell the flowers. She stood on the edge of the clear water. She peeled off her sooty and ragged clothes, folded them and placed them in a neat pile. She stood naked and stretched her arms into the air. She could hear the calls of birds and the scratches of insects, parrots chattering, cicadas rubbing their legs together. Were there loudspeakers hidden among the plants? Did they broadcast the recorded sounds of the rainforest? Or was it that she saw the water and the plants, and smelled the flowers and the leaves, and felt the UV rays on her skin and had imagined these sounds to fit the scene? She crouched, then lowered herself into the water. She pushed out and began a breaststroke, remembering her childhood swimming lessons, paid for by a man she couldn’t quite recall: armbands and earplugs and swimming caps and Lucozade and KitKat afterwards. She took deep breaths, filled her lungs with the ersatz tropical air and dipped her head beneath the surface. She held open her eyes despite the sting of chlorine. The water swept through her loose hair and teased out strands of soot and oil. She surfaced, renewed.