by Fiona Mozley
Eddie Kettering arrives late to the pub and doesn’t have time to get a drink before they head off. The barmaid glares at him as he sits down next to Lorenzo without buying anything, and when Lorenzo says goodbye to her on the way out she doesn’t look up.
Outside, Lorenzo raises his hood against the cold. It is the shortest day of the year and though early afternoon, the bare hedgerows and fence posts on the horizon are tempting gray night. On the walk, they chat about their Christmas plans, and Christmases they remember from childhood. When they arrive at the studio, they go to their separate dressing rooms. Lorenzo sits in front of a mirror while a makeup artist smears pastes across his cheeks and eyelids. Then he dresses in gaudy silk robes and goes out onto set where an assistant director is explaining the purpose of the scene.
“Basically this is the point at which our hero—that’s you, Eddie—starts to realize the battalion he’s been placed with is full of absolute bastards. They’re all in the brothel going at it and smashing up the joint, and our pimp—that’s you, Lorenzo—is stood there, like, with dollar signs in his eyes basically, and our hero is, like, Wait a second, this isn’t right. This is the turning point when he decides to go it alone. So, you know, important stuff.”
Lorenzo gets into position. Eddie Kettering gets into position. The soldiers get into position. The extras playing the prostitutes get into position. The scene begins.
Tuck Shop
Laura and Bastian sit together on the swing seat in the garden. The hinges are rusted and squeak when pressure is applied. The garden is overgrown. There are brown patches where the dog has urinated. Laura owns a plump Staffordshire bull terrier cross, called Flora, who has a prominent underbite. On the patio, there is moss, pieces of broken concrete. The plastic garden furniture seems to have rotted, causing Bastian to wonder whether a new strain of bacteria has developed in this garden that can devour hydrocarbons, which can be cultivated and nurtured and spread across the oceans to save the turtles, albatrosses, sea horses and prawns from discarded water bottles and microplastics.
“Did you feel this way two years ago?” asks Laura.
Bastian thinks about her question. “Yes,” he says. “But I wouldn’t have known to give it that name. I wouldn’t have known what name to give it.”
Laura nods slowly, reflectively.
Then Bastian asks, “How did you feel about that time?”
Laura looks at him and also thinks about the question.
“A lot of it is a blur,” she says. “My main thoughts and memories about the time we spent together are associated with how it finished. I guess I felt pretty bitter about it all.”
“Bitter?”
“Well, yeah. I’m over it now, but it hurt. It really hurt.”
“Why hurt?” Bastian turns to Laura and the swing seat clunks and screeches.
“Are you serious?” She can tell from his expression that he is. “You dumping me and just going back to your girlfriend. That hurt.”
“That’s not how it happened.”
“Yes it is.”
“No. I mean, I got back together with Rebecca but I didn’t dump you.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, are we still together? I didn’t realize.”
They sit in silence. Bastian’s fingers find a rip in the swing-seat cushion, and he begins to fret the synthetic lining. He never realized Laura wanted anything more. She had always seemed so confident, so in control of what she wanted and when. What he said was his true reflection on events, but it now seems his interpretation was skewed.
He had arrived at Laura’s house just after lunchtime. It was she who opened the door, which he’d been hoping for. He knew she lived with her mum and younger siblings and was dreading the process of introducing himself to them before he’d had a chance to see Laura and explain his arrival.
After a while, Laura says, “You know, Bastian, it is possible not to depend totally on the approval of other people but also to care. I wanted you. And when you went back to her it hurt.”
One of Laura’s little brothers comes out of the house with a football under his arm, which is so large compared to his skinny frame he looks like an ant carrying a bulky item of booty. The boy shuffles forward awkwardly.
“What is it?” Laura asks him.
“Ryan and me have got football practice.”
“Ryan and I,” Laura corrects.
“Ryan and I have got football practice, only Simon’s mum can’t come pick us up because they’re in Tenerife.”
“So what do you want me to do about it?”
“Will you take us in the car?”
The boy drops the football and takes hold of his T-shirt, pulling it away from his body and wringing it through his hands. He holds his weight on one foot and then the other. His eyes skip between his sister and Bastian and the ground and the sky.
Laura sighs dramatically. It’s a sigh that adults reserve for children.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this sooner?”
“Forgot.”
“When did Simon’s mum tell you they were going to be away?”
“Don’t know.”
“Oh, for goodness sake, Curtis.”
Laura gets up from the swing seat and it falls back and creaks loudly. Bastian plants his feet firmly on the ground to steady it.
“You coming?” Laura says to him.
Bastian would have been happy to go anywhere with Laura but tries not to seem overly enthusiastic. He gets up and follows Laura and Curtis back into the house and waits while the boys rush around collecting their things while Laura shouts instructions at them and looks at her watch pointedly and goes out to the car to start the engine and honk the horn aggressively.
Bastian enjoys seeing this side of her. He sits in the front seat with her and the boys sit in the back with their mess of shin pads and socks and water bottles and goalie gloves.
They drive to the sports ground and the lads go off to join their football training while Bastian and Laura stand together on the sidelines talking.
Laura works for a charitable trust that funds food banks, homeless shelters and support services across the north, but she’s currently looking for a new job.
“Whatever you do,” she says, “don’t go and work for a charity. Believe me. In general, they treat their employees like shit.”
“I was thinking of doing some volunteering,” says Bastian. “I’ve recently been feeling this need to be a better person, but Glenda says volunteering denigrates the value of labor and that charities prop up capitalism.”
“Fuck Glenda. I mean, she’s probably right, as per usual, but do what you want.” Laura laughs.
“Are you set on staying up this way?” Bastian asks.
“I’ve not got much choice. Someone’s got to look after my mum and the kids. But also, I guess I feel a kind of weird commitment to the area. Most people who get Cambridge degrees—first class, by the way—fuck off to London afterwards. But, I don’t know, I like it up here.”
“No, I get that. I sometimes fantasize about moving to Cornwall,” says Bastian.
“Why Cornwall?”
“It’s my favorite place in the world, probably. I used to go there for the summer when I was a child, back when my mum and dad were still together. Mum used to spend all day painting the sea and the moors and lanes, and I had this, Enid Blyton-esque childhood.”
“Lots of tongue sandwiches and tinned peaches?”
Bastian raises an eyebrow.
“That was my main takeaway point from all the Enid Blyton I read as a child,” Laura explains. “The elaborate picnics. I didn’t really understand the concept of eating tongue, so I guess it stuck in my head.”
“I don’t think I ever ate tongue.”
The lads finish their stretching and begin a dribbling exercise. The coach is in his early fifties with a red face and a gravelly voice. He issues instructions with encouragement, and jokes and laughs with the boys. Though clearly past his prime, he runs around with them and
kicks the ball back to the lads when they overrun it. The football pitch is peppered with molehills like small explosions of feral interference. The white lines need repainting, and the nets between the goalposts hang loose.
“So Rebecca kicked you out, and you decided to get on the train and come and see me?”
When Laura phrases it like that, it sounds bad. Bastian tries to think of a way of explaining that he and Rebecca were unhappy together for a long time; that he regretted things ending with Laura almost from the moment it happened. He felt the need to explain to her that his biggest failing was being totally passive; of sleepwalking through his own life. He hadn’t ended things with Rebecca and come to find Laura sooner not because he lacked the desire, but because he lacked the ambition.
Laura waits for Bastian to respond but when he doesn’t, she speaks again. “To be totally honest with you, Bastian, it’s slim pickings up here. I haven’t had good sex since I moved back home and for whatever reason, despite myself, I just well fancy you. So, although I know in this situation I should be outraged and that I should feel, I don’t know, used or disposable or something. Despite that, I am absolutely going to have sex with you as soon as we can get a moment to ourselves. If this makes me weak or a bad feminist or whatever, never mind.”
After that, the atmosphere changes between them. Bastian becomes suddenly and inconveniently aroused, only there’s still another forty-five minutes of football training to watch, and even when they get back to Laura’s house it will be full of children and dogs.
But he’s thinking about her body. Her strength. The way she pushed back against him as they used to kiss. The way she gripped his arms with her hands; the way she stretched out her long legs when he was inside her, and linked them behind his back, and he felt her thighs against his hips. And the way, when she was on top of him, she rested her weight on his chest with a single hand, and rocked back and forth, and how his breathing came to work with and against her rocking. When Laura wanted something from him, she asked. When he wanted something from her, he asked, and he knew that she would give him a straight answer.
She doesn’t think there’s anything special about him. Bastian has been led to believe by any book he’s ever read and any film he’s ever seen that it is good for the person you love to think you’re totally one hundred percent remarkable. All fictional characters seem to very much enjoy being told that they’re wonderful and beautiful and intelligent and brave—the most wonderful and beautiful and intelligent and brave people that have ever existed in the history of the world. But Laura doesn’t seem to think Bastian is any of these things, except perhaps beautiful, and that’s okay. That’s exactly what he wants.
He’s average. He’s mediocre. He doesn’t think these things about himself because he lacks confidence or because he has low self-esteem. He thinks them because they’re true.
At school, Bastian and his friends were told that they would rule the world. That wasn’t even hyperbole. They were told that they would literally rule the world. The world of business; the world of politics; the world of culture; theater, film, television. At the time he just thought: fine. But that was before he realized what ruling the world would mean, before he had a chance to decide upon the kind of world he wanted, and the life he wanted within it.
Bastian’s eyes follow the line of the football as it’s kicked from boot to boot.
“Are you coming?” Laura calls from a few meters away. She’s turned and is walking towards the sports center. “Tuck shop, yeah?”
Bastian hasn’t heard anyone use the phrase “tuck shop” for years. Bastian jogs after Laura. She doesn’t lead him to a tuck shop. They go into an empty changing room at the end of a corridor. Laura pushes Bastian gently against the wall and kisses him, and as she kisses him she lifts her knee so that her foot strokes against his calf and she leans into him with her pelvis and he feels himself go hard, slowly then quickly.
He enjoys the loss of control, of the response his body has to her touch. His mind can just shut down now, and for this he’s grateful. There’s no point in having a mind anyway, or in personhood at all. As she kisses him and reaches down to unbuckle his jeans, he leans back against the wall, dissolves into it. I am nothing, he realizes. I am nobody.
Anastasia
Following their argument at the motorway service station, mother and daughter part company. Anastasia finds Roster waiting by the car. She tells him she’ll be making her own way back to London. He doesn’t object. He has known her for a long time and knows there is no point arguing.
Anastasia makes her way towards the lorry park to find a likely looking driver. She knows what to look out for—how to find a target, and how to work him. She has played this game before.
It doesn’t take long. He looks lonely and eager. He is heading to London and says she can join him. She climbs up into the passenger seat, checking as she does that the interior door handles are still intact and that none of the locks have been tampered with. While he goes off to pay for his diesel, she looks behind and beneath the seats for anything suspicious: rope, cable ties, weapons. All she finds are a packet of tissues and a half-eaten box of Cadbury’s Milk Tray. The driver doesn’t come across as a psychopathic murderer but you can never be too careful.
The journey south involves a lot of listening. Anastasia has traveled on many long journeys and has listened to lots of talking men. The driver speaks about the roads and the state of the haulage industry. Anastasia is in fact deeply interested in all aspects of business and industry. She is fascinated by the making of things and the ways in which those things get from one place to another and are then transformed from one thing to another thing. That said, she doesn’t let the lorry driver know that she finds his conversation interesting. She knows from experience that it can be dangerous to bolster a strange man’s sense of self-worth. Almost as dangerous as undercutting it.
Also, he keeps forgetting her name. “Anna, is it?”
“Anastasia,” she corrects him.
Anastasia isn’t her real name. She adopted it when she came to London. Nobody could pronounce her real name, but “Anastasia” was the kind of name these people thought she should have so she gave them what they wanted. Her old name was ugly when pronounced by the English; she did everything she could to forget it.
The journey back to London goes more quickly. Perhaps it’s because Anastasia is agitated. She passes the same pylons, the same motorway bridges, the same road signs, albeit reversed. They drive through a thick cloud of fog that has descended since the morning. The fog gets stickier as the city gets closer, as if attracted by its mass.
Anastasia would do anything for her daughter. It is an inescapable, uncomfortable fact. She supposes it is a connection that was established at birth, only Anastasia can barely remember her daughter’s birth. She reads about birthing choices that women make these days, in glossy magazines. When she was pregnant she had never heard of birthing choices. She had never realized there were any choices she could make. She was seventeen years old, in a foreign country, under the protection of a man who was old enough to be her grandfather. When she felt the contractions, she was rushed to the nearest hospital. The rest of the process must have been vivid at the time, but it is now a series of facts; not a story but an itemized list. The labor lasted eight hours. Eventually the doctors performed an emergency C-section. Agatha weighed 5lbs 9oz.
Anastasia was left with neither sensory nor visual memories of the events, and they exist for her now as if they happened to someone else. When she thinks about it, it is like looking at the scene through a steamed-up window, slowly wiping away lines with an index finger.
Anastasia presses her index finger against the steamed-up window of the lorry. As she looks out, she begins to form a plan. Who from the old crowd does she still know in London? Which of the men she came over with from Russia still lives there? She thinks about Vlad. When she first met him he was fresh from the KGB, only not the section that dealt with intelligence a
nd espionage, the section that dealt with enforcement. He’d seen the inside of soundproofed torture facilities and knew how to use the equipment there. And there is Mikhail, his heavy. Both are now respectable businessmen and live in Belgravia. They deal in imports and exports and stocks and shares. They are unlikely to want anything to do with this, for the same reason that her daughter wants nothing to do with this.
She had met other hard men through Donski. He came from a criminal background and had always kept a foot on that side of the fence, even after he’d become old and bought property. As the driver speaks, she makes a list in her head of some of the old crowd, judging who she is most likely to be able to find and who will be willing to do the job that needs to be done.
It doesn’t take her long to make a decision about whom to approach.
Anastasia is dropped off on the busy Euston Road and walks through Bloomsbury to Soho.
It is nearly Christmas, and the city is full. There are only a few days until the high street closes, so shopping has become frenzied. There is no time for browsing, only purchasing, and the pace of pedestrians has quickened. The lights have been up for weeks and flash with festive messages that only make sense when it’s dark. In the dark, they shine brightly and cover the street in beads of color. During the day, they look awkward, out of place, the tangle of wires resembling bare hedgerows against a cold white sky.
In London, Robert Kerr lies back on his sofa with a can of beer listening to BBC Radio 3. It is incredible how his tastes have changed over the decades. He can’t think of any reason for it. When he was a lad he listened to rock and roll. When he joined the gangs he listened to punk. Now he listens to Brahms, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Thomas Tallis, Ralph Vaughan Williams.
This is what people always said would happen but he hadn’t believed them. This is what adults tell teenagers.
“Just give it a few years,” they say. “You won’t be able to stand that rubbish.”
That part isn’t true. He still enjoys all the music he used to enjoy, just not as much as he did.