by Fiona Mozley
She discovered an underground complex. In the room adjacent to the pool there was a lounge with a kitchenette, a large, gently humming fridge, and rows of expensive champagne. In the cupboards, she found pretzels, crisps, nuts, jars of caviar, globe artichokes, stuffed jalapenos, green and black olives, foie gras. She ate and drank as much as she could. The food in the cupboards was non-perishable but had been there a while. She opened a sealed packet of crackers that crumbled in her hands as she took them out. She found a jar of dill pickles that had mold growing around the lid. Some of the frankfurters she bit into were hard.
In the first few weeks she was sick. She didn’t know whether it was the food or the withdrawal. She lay on the sofa wrapped in blankets and vomited until she could only retch. She sweated and shook and turned off all the lights she could find. She couldn’t stand the brightness. She couldn’t stand to catch her reflection in the mirror, or in the aluminium of the fridge or the glass of the oven door, or in the bright water of the swimming pool or the concave in the back of spoons, convex in the stainless-steel sink.
After the drugs left her system she slept, for what felt like days, weeks. She tucked herself up, wrapping herself in all the blankets she could find, then piling sheets from the linen cupboard on top. She cocooned herself.
She didn’t put her old clothes back on, but left them by the pool. She found a toweled dressing gown in the cupboard by the sauna and wore that along with a pair of slippers. She moped around the complex like this. If there had been anyone else there to see her they might have thought her a customer at an upmarket spa.
She worked out how to use the sauna, and sat in the warm cubicle and picked dead skin from the soles of her feet and scraped dirt from her pores before coming out, rinsing off, drying herself and coating her body with shea butter from a tub she found in a cupboard and initially mistook for food. She did this every day. She used tubs of the stuff. Her skin began to heal. She used to have cuts, sores, bruises, but these began to recede until all that could be seen was a smattering of scars.
She started to turn the lights back on, using the dimmer switch to illuminate and darken the rooms, admiring the fresh tone and texture of her skin in different gradients of light. She began to enjoy looking down at her own arms and legs and hands and feet and watching as the flesh and muscle beneath the skin began to return. This new flesh. She pressed her fingers into it and watched it recess then bounce up and back into place. Her skin didn’t do this before. Before, when she pinched, it stayed in position like whipped egg whites.
In one room, there was a small cinema with folding red theater chairs. She sat in the dark and watched moving images projected onto a screen. She watched for so long, the faces and stories swirled with her own memories and became indistinguishable one from the other. Was she Cheryl Lavery or Debbie McGee? Or Scarlett O’Hara or Vivien Leigh? In another room, there was a bowling alley. The lanes were pristine, and finely polished. There were no scuff marks or chips in the wood laminate. Many of the balls had not been taken out of the cardboard boxes in which they had arrived, so sat like ballast in the hull of a ship, as if to hold the building in place. She pulled balls from their boxes and threw them down the lanes at skittles. She practiced and practiced. She perfected her technique. She found locked doors and searched for the keys, and when she couldn’t find the keys she picked the locks with a bent paperclip. In one of the locked rooms, she found expensive fitness equipment, including dumbbells and rowing machines and yoga mats. She lifted the dumbbells and had a go on the rowing machine, and contorted her body into yoga postures she found outlined in a book. In another room, she found boxes of foreign currency and, behind the boxes, bars of gold bullion from floor to ceiling. She took these from their shelves, held them in her hands, gazed at them then replaced them carefully and closed the door. There was a library. She read novels, and travel books, and books about history, and self-help books. She learned how to motivate herself. She learned about being a productive member of society. She learned how to be happy.
She began to count everything. Measure everything. She counted the number of books she read, and how quickly she read them. She compared the number of pages, the number of words on each page, the number of letters in each word. She counted the films she watched, and everything within them. How many times does that character say “yes”? How many times does this character say “no”? She counted the number of lengths she swam and the speed with which she swam them. She counted what she ate, not just the packets, but the individual crisps, peanuts, noodles. She wrote all the numbers down in a little book and carried it with her wherever she went, as if this collection of numbers held something of value.
She has now been in the basement for six months. The supplies are running low. She has emptied the cupboards and the fridge and the storeroom filled with boxes she discovered in her fourth week. The boxes are mostly gone, and Cheryl is getting tired of caviar and stuffed olives. She has read all the books and out-of-date periodicals and she has watched all the films. She has swum 8,266 lengths of the pool. She has used up the soap and shampoo in the pool-side shower. She has tired of the jacuzzi.
The tropical plants in the pool room have little labels stuck into the soil, announcing their Latin names. She has learned all of these and has also given the plants pet names of her own. Besides her, the plants are the only living creatures in the basement, unless you count bacteria or the mold on blue cheese (which she doesn’t). She has paced, and picked her nose, and masturbated. She has slept in a bed with a duvet and pillows, and soft linen sheets. She is fit and healthy. Her diet in this bunker, though strange, has been more nutritious than ever in her life before. She has exercised extensively every day. She has massaged expensive moisturizer into her skin. It is no longer dry, brittle, cracked, bruised. It is soft and elastic and tanned from the UV lights.
She is ready. She goes through the pool room, says goodbye to her botanical friends, gently brushes her hands against petals and leaves. She lifts herself out through the grate by which she entered and begins to march back through the tunnels. In the last six months, the only thing she has failed to count accurately are the days. When she descended, it was midsummer, the solstice, the longest day, the shortest night. The day she chooses to ascend, it is midwinter: the shortest day, the longest night. She descended as the earth’s tilt took the northern hemisphere away from the sun. She ascends as the light begins to return.
Oxbridge Escorts
Glenda and Bastian sit opposite each other on the train. Both look out the window. Glenda follows the scene outside as it rushes from behind. Bastian watches as it rushes from ahead. They speak very little. The soft skin around Glenda’s eyes is pink. Elsewhere, she is pale—even paler than when he found her the night before. Every now and then Bastian offers a smile. Sometimes she returns it. At other times, she just sits and watches her friend.
“Thank you, Bastian,” says Glenda. “I don’t want to get too sincere on you, but you’re a good mate for doing what you did.” She turns away from him towards the window again. They streak past fields and copses and outbuildings and beaten-up farm equipment.
There is no need for him to respond. He leans his head against the glass, creating a smudge with the natural grease of his hair. Then he rummages in his bag for a book.
It is still early. The train is full of business types heading to meetings in northern cities. They sit with teas and coffees and complex spreadsheets.
The night before, Bastian worked late, into the small hours. He has been put in charge of communications at Howards Holdings, and has been inundated with freedom-of-information requests and enquiries from news platforms. He had to put together a statement to send out in the morning.
He got a taxi home. When he arrived, he noticed from the street that the lights were on. It was 2 a.m. He entered the building, took the lift up to the fourth floor and let himself in.
Bastian placed his keys in the bowl by the front door. He dropped his messenger bag ben
eath the coat hooks and slipped off his shoes. He walked from the hall into the living room in his socks. Rebecca was sitting on their sofa with her arms and legs crossed.
“Where the fuck have you been?”
“I’ve been at work. Didn’t you get my text?”
“You expect me to believe that you were at work?”
This sounded to Bastian like a line from a soap opera and he couldn’t help but smile, although he did so while his head was turned away from Rebecca.
“Why wouldn’t you believe that?” he asked.
“Your little friend came round here this evening. Hammering on our door in the middle of the night.”
“Which little friend?”
“You’ve got more than one, have you?”
“Rebecca, I’m sorry, but I haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about.”
“The hell you don’t.”
Bastian chose not to respond to this. He was too tired and it was all too confusing. He went into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water from the tap. He came back in and said to her, “I’ve obviously done something that’s upset you but I genuinely don’t know what it is.”
“Your friend Glenda.”
“Glenda came here?”
“Blind drunk. Stumbling all over the place. Crying and wailing. Cuts all over her hands. Hammering on the door. I mean, what the fuck?”
“Oh my god, is she okay?”
“How should I know? I didn’t let her in. She was in an awful state. She was asking for you. I should’ve known you were carrying on with that Laura again. You’ve been so shifty lately.”
“Where did she go?”
“My god, the way she was carrying on. What a mess.”
“Yes, but where is she now?”
“That’s what you’re worried about? God, do I mean so little to you that you’re not even going to try to salvage this relationship?”
“Rebecca, I don’t know what you think I’ve been doing, but to be honest that discussion can wait. Glenda’s vulnerable—she’s had a rough time lately and has been really struggling. And frankly, I can’t believe you didn’t let her in.”
“Why should I? I’m not about to let random drunk people into the flat.”
“But she’s not a random drunk person, is she? She was at our college. You may never have spoken to her but you know who she is.”
Bastian took his phone from his bag and called Glenda but her phone went straight to voicemail. He put his shoes back on and went out into the night in search of her, all the while Rebecca shouting and screaming that it was over, that if he went out that front door he could forget coming back in.
“I’m fucking my personal trainer,” she had yelled as a parting shot.
“Dave? Your friend’s husband?”
“That’s right. We’ve been fucking for months.”
Then she had slammed the door after him.
Bastian walked the streets around his flat, searched at the bus stops near the Tube station. He clambered over the fence of the park—now shut—and searched on the benches and by the pond. He walked all the way to the banks of the River Thames. Swans hid their heads beneath their wings. The water lapped the shore.
All the time, he thought: how can she care so little? Glenda’s a person who obviously needed her help; our help. And she turned her away.
Bastian found Glenda on the bridge between Embankment Tube station and the Royal Festival Hall, looking out over the Thames. She wasn’t wearing a coat and she was shivering. There were tears in her eyes.
He convinced her to go with him and they went to sit in the McDonald’s on the Strand which is open twenty-four hours a day. Bastian bought Glenda a cup of hot tea and a Big Mac, and he bought for himself a Filet-O-Fish meal with Fanta because he’d never had a McDonald’s before and he didn’t know what to order, and thought the name sounded funny.
Glenda had returned home the previous evening to discover that she had been evicted from her room.
“It was all dodgy anyway,” she said, “and I knew it would all come to an end sooner or later. I just didn’t think it would be so abrupt.”
“Isn’t it illegal to just kick you out like that?”
“Well, it was illegal that I was there in the first place, so I guess there’s not much I can do.”
“There must be. It wasn’t you who was breaking the law; it was them. Do you have any lawyer friends?”
“Must do.”
“If not, my dad’s one.”
“You don’t have to ask your dad for help, it’s okay.”
“It’s not okay. You don’t look okay. I mean, are you literally homeless now?”
“No, don’t worry. I’ve got a job and a safety net. I’m lucky. I’ll never be homeless. I’ll just move in with my aunt in Barkingside or back up north to my parents. It’s not like it’s working out here anyway.”
“Maybe it’s a good idea to get out of London for a bit,” he said. “You could go and stay with your mum and dad. You don’t like your job anyway.”
Glenda shrugged then agreed, then thanked him.
They sit on the train together. Bastian recognized some of the landmarks on their way out of the city: a football stadium, a university, a block of flats where he’d once been to a New Year’s Eve party. Now they are in the countryside, and the landscape is new. There are low hills, and gnarly copses, and empty fields. The train bisects them, splitting the scene into neat sections that fill the window frames. When they pass beneath a bridge, or slice through a short tunnel, there is a flicker of darkness followed by a flash of bright color.
After a while, Glenda starts talking.
“The thing is though, I can see how ridiculous it all is. It’s like I have these constant multiple out of body experiences. I’m me, feeling all these things, and then I’m also outside myself looking in, aware of how lucky I am in the grand scheme of things or whatever. And then beyond that there’s the realization that everything actually is pointless, and that if I fundamentally don’t enjoy my life there really is no point in living. And then of course, there’s the thing that actually keeps me alive: the awareness of how much pain I would cause to my family and friends by ending my own life. So I’m just stuck here, I guess. Stuck here feeling shit but unable to do anything about it. Like, I’ve never completed a single project I’ve started and that includes suicide.”
All this is said very quietly so as not to alarm the other passengers.
“What would it take for you to begin enjoying your life? I mean, I know that’s a really difficult question, but—”
“It’s not a difficult question. It’s a really easy question with some really easy answers. I’d like to find a person to love who loves me in return. I’d like to find somewhere to live with her. Nothing fancy, but it would be lovely if it had a little garden. And yeah, in terms of a job, I just want to have a job that pays a modest amount and lets me bumble around and achieve some tasks and then go home and be with the person I love; whoever that person is. I don’t need loads of money and success; I don’t need lovely clothes and luxurious holidays. I don’t want to run fucking marathons for charity. I just want simple things. They just seem so unbelievably out of reach. They seem so far from achievable it’s like I can’t even see the path towards them.”
“Is there a chance of you meeting someone?”
Glenda gives him a look that’s something like a grimace.
“Is that really such an awful suggestion?” he asks.
“No, it’s just. Look, do you really want to chat about this stuff? I feel like such an oversharing twat.”
“Yes, I actually want to chat about this stuff.”
As soon as Bastian says this, however, he wonders if he might come to regret the statement.
“I feel like I should re-establish my personhood or whatever before I try to meet someone new. I hope it can happen eventually, but the thought of intimacy with another human being isn’t really something I can contemplate right now.”<
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The train trundles along. The conductor comes around and checks tickets. Glenda continues, “It would probably be easier if I put myself in lots of dangerous situations and just died from a natural disaster. Like, maybe I should take up mountaineering, which would greatly increase my chance of dying in an avalanche. That would be a glamorous way to go. Nobody would be like—Oh, that Glenda’s died of an overdose what a loser, they’d be like, Oh, that Glenda died in a mountaineering accident. And other people would be like, Oh, how ghastly.”
“I guess the fact you’re imagining being celebrated in death means you don’t really want to die.”
Glenda makes a face. “Good one,” she says.
Bastian returns to looking out the window.
“Is your relationship with Rebecca over, then?” she asks him.
“I think so.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine. Really, it’s been over for a while.”
Bastian escorts Glenda all the way to her parents’ house.
“You’re so kind for doing this,” she says.
“To be honest, you probably owe me some sort of blood debt now.”
Glenda can’t bring herself to laugh. Maybe deep down she believes that she does. She says, “You’re coming in, yeah?”
He shakes his head. “I’m off to Wakefield.”
Glenda pulls out her phone, touches the screen with her thumb a few times, then sends him a message with an attachment of the address and the phone number he needs.