by Fiona Mozley
The police scoop them up as soon as they appear. The lot of them are funneled into the back of a windowless van. She sees them, thin and pasty, hunched over, dejected. The doors of the van are shut behind them, and then the vehicle begins to drive away.
They never did find that Cheryl Lavery, she reflects.
Tabitha comes to join Precious at the edge of the roof. She has carried the handheld megaphone from the street protest up to the roof with her. She hands it to Precious.
“Call for help,” insists Tabitha. “Say something.”
“It’s three in the morning, hun. We’ll wake the neighbors.”
“That’s the idea.”
“Who is going to help us?” She points. “The police are down there.”
Tabitha snatches the megaphone. “I’ll do it, then.” She switches on the device and begins to shout through it, calling out for help, denouncing the police, screaming out injustices past, present and future. The batteries give in after about forty-five seconds and the grainy, electronically enhanced voice fades to a hoarse, human rasp, battling the billowing wind.
Precious begins to laugh. Tabitha looks at her friend. Her face is cross at first then she smiles, then she laughs too. The women laugh together.
“God knows what I thought was going to happen,” says Tabitha. She throws her head back and laughs again. Precious draws her in for a cuddle, then notices something. “Look,” she says. “There are some people staring at us from that hotel window.” A light has flicked on in the building across the street, and a man and a woman are peering out nervously from behind a thick set of curtains. The woman has a phone pressed against her face.
“She’s calling the police, look. From where she is she can’t see the police down on the ground. She must think we’re up to no good.”
“Do you think she’s calling the police so they come and help us or so they come and arrest us?”
“Hard to say.”
There is now also a crowd of people gathering on the street. Some are pointing upwards. Some are shrieking and shouting things Precious and Tabitha can’t hear.
“They think we’re going to jump,” Tabitha observes. “Are we going to jump?”
“No we are not,” Precious replies, incredulous. “I don’t feel suicidal at this moment in time. Do you?”
“Not one bit. I have an unquenchable lust for life.”
“Well then.”
“It’s just I thought this was going to be a much more effective and dramatic last stand than it has in fact been.”
Last Night Stand: Part II
A few streets away, Robert Kerr has been unable to sleep. He is slumped on his couch in pants and an old T-shirt, a brown beer bottle in one hand, the TV remote in the other. He is watching a football match broadcast live from Chile. Small figures run around on a sandy pitch, their movements narrated in a language he can’t understand.
Roster and Anastasia will surely kick him out of the flat, but he doesn’t know when. They’ll be stopping his money too. He has no pension, no other source of income, and he has nowhere else to go. He told Anastasia to fuck herself, and he’s glad he did. He always liked her, but he wasn’t in a million years going to do what she wanted him to do just because he used to carry a flame for her.
They won’t pay him any more, though. Anastasia made that clear, and Roster made that clear too, months ago. People like that expect you to be loyal forever. But Robert has other loyalties. He isn’t in that world anymore, and he doesn’t want to be.
He would go and ask Lorenzo for advice, but he’s still away somewhere working on a film. And Robert isn’t sure Lorenzo is that fond of him anymore. He regrets the confession he made.
He sits up. He’ll phone the lad in the morning or send him a text. He’s not going to let that friendship slip away from him, as everything else has slipped away. He will make it right.
Maybe he will move out to the suburbs like Lorenzo’s parents. They are somewhere by the sea. He might move back to Scotland. He won’t know anyone anymore, but at least he’ll be able to get to the Ibrox. But how will he live? He hasn’t done an honest day’s work in decades. And he’s retirement age as it is. Perhaps he will be able to draw a state pension. These are all concerns now.
He turns off the telly. He can’t follow the action. The flat is quiet now, unusually so. He can’t hear any of the regular hubbub that continues in this neighborhood all day and night, and he finds it unsettling. Robert is afraid of silence like other people are afraid of the dark, and has spent his life avoiding it, moving in large crowds, living in the busiest parts of busy cities. When silence falls he goes out to find a racket—the clinking of glasses or the hum of traffic. When the world is quiet, he is alone in his own head, and that’s a place as dark as any night.
He needs noise.
He gets out of bed and finds items of clothing in his wardrobe, then puts on a pair of sturdy boots, wraps himself in a thick coat, and goes down to the street. Only a few places will be open at this time of night, but he’ll find somewhere.
Then he hears the voice. There is a voice shouting out over the rooftops. It is far away, but it seems to carry eerily, as if the person is speaking directly to him. He begins to walk towards it, taking alleys and backstreets. As he walks, he begins to hear other voices. There are men shouting. There are women screaming. He begins to run, but not away from the panic. He runs towards it.
Last Night Stand: Part III
There is a wall behind Tabitha and, without looking, she puts her hand back to lean against it. She screams. She tries to pull her hand away but it is stuck. She screams again.
Precious rushes forward.
Tabitha screws up her face in a grimace and lets out a deep breath through her teeth. She turns and looks down at her hand, lets out a brief “oh god” and then looks away and shuts her eyes.
Precious now sees what her friend has done. The low walls of the roof are covered with spikes, to keep away birds and burglars. As she leaned back, Tabitha skewered her hand on one of these spikes. It has pierced her hand through the center of the palm and has come out through the other side.
“Oh my god,” says Precious. And then she realizes that panicking won’t be of any help to anyone. “Don’t worry, love,” she says, in the calmest, most reassuring voice she can muster. “It’ll be okay. I’ll get help.”
“Don’t leave me here. Just get it out of me. Just get it out, and I’ll come down with you.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea. It might make it worse.”
“Just get it out of me!”
“Okay, okay.” Precious relents. She steps forward and takes a closer look. There isn’t as much blood as she expected, but she realizes that more will come once the hand is freed. She pulls the cord from her dressing gown out of its loops, to use as a bandage. The fabric isn’t thick but it is long and she will be able to wrap it around Tabitha’s hand several times.
There isn’t enough light to see the wound clearly. Precious asks Tabitha if she is able to hold her phone torch with her other hand, so that Precious can investigate further. Tabitha holds up the phone and switches on the light and a beam of white descends to Tabitha’s hand and the sharp metal spike cutting through it. Tabitha’s skin looks pale, even paler than usual, partly because of her injury, partly because of the bright white light from the LED. The blood that has emerged looks as if it is already beginning to clot. It is turning the color of the rust on the metal spike and it is even taking on its texture, like a cuttlefish flushing the color of the seabed.
Precious places her fingers beneath her friend’s hand, and pushes upwards, gently at first then harder until Tabitha’s hand is free.
Tabitha inhales sharply but she does not scream again.
As predicted, the blood begins to flow in earnest. Precious recalls some of her medical training and wraps the belt of her dressing gown tightly around Tabitha’s hand, securing it with a knot. She instructs Tabitha to keep her hand raised, to le
ssen the flow of blood. The older woman does this at first but soon finds that she is too tired to hold her hand up. Precious carefully takes hold of Tabitha’s wrist and raises it up herself. The pair stand on top of the building with their arms raised in this manner, as if celebrating a sporting victory.
“Fuck this building,” says Tabitha. “Fuck this place.”
The friends look at each other, and without saying a word, there is an understanding. There is no way out. Whatever they thought they were going to do when Tabitha barricaded the door of their flat and they came up to the roof, it is impossible now. Tabitha needs medical attention. The only way to get it quickly is to submit themselves to the police.
They stand for a few minutes huddling together against the wind, drawing their night clothes closer to their bodies. Tabitha bemoans her lack of cigarettes, and for once Precious agrees that at this precise moment there would be nothing better.
“Don’t be annoyed right now,” says Tabitha. “But I’ve got a confession. I did actually hide some up here. They’re under that plant pot.” She nods in the direction of a large terra-cotta planter.
“I could kiss you.” Precious helps her friend onto the garden bench and lifts the pot to reveal a half-full packet of tobacco, some papers, filters and a plastic lighter. She joins Tabitha on the bench and begins to roll two cigarettes.
They hear men shouting downstairs. It is almost comic. The voices are deep, artificially deep, as if the situation has elicited the deepest frequencies in the human range. There is stamping and bashing, as if all the men are chasing each other around the building, up the stairs, down the stairs, through doors, in and out of rooms and cupboards, as if in a vast pantomime, an animated cartoon.
“You know something, Precious. I think this last year, while we’ve been having all this grief with the landlords, I’m not sure I ever actually thought we’d have to leave. I just thought it would all sort itself out somehow, and we would end up getting to stay on, and everything would go back to normal.”
“That’s funny,” replies Precious. “I thought the exact opposite. I never for a minute thought we had any hope.”
“Why did you fight so hard, then?”
Precious shrugs her shoulders and pulls her lower lip back and forth between her teeth. “I suppose I didn’t want us to go without a fight. I thought it was important to stick up for ourselves, whatever the outcome. And I’m glad we did, even though I’m not sure it’s made any real difference in the grand scheme of things. But it’s made a difference to me—a difference to all of us who were involved. And it was worth it for that.”
They will leave their home together and they will not come back. It is inevitable. It was always inevitable.
Precious hears someone calling her name. She hears it again, but the person, whoever they are, isn’t calling from the side of the street where the crowd have gathered and where the police are shovelling their friends and customers into the backs of vans and police cars. She hears the voice from the other side, from the alley behind the building, where the restaurants keep their bins; the entrance that she and Tabitha use when coming up to their flat.
“Hang on a second.” Precious lifts herself up off the bench and goes over to see who is calling. Down on the ground she sees a large man. His face is turned up towards her, but it is dark on that side, and although the moon is bright, a cloud has just cut across it, and she can’t make out who it is at all. The man calls again and she recognizes the voice. She had never heard a Glaswegian accent before she met Robert.
“Robert! What on earth are you doing?”
“I’m coming up!”
“For god’s sake. How? You going to King-Kong it up the side of the building?”
“Yes,” he shouts. “Yes I am. I’m coming to get you.”
Precious can hear the ruckus within more clearly. There is shouting and banging. She can make out the sounds of someone being arrested. The police officer is reading them their rights, and the arrestee is shouting obscenities. She can’t quite hear enough of the voice to recognize it. It might be Candy. Then again it might be Hazel.
“Go back home, Robert. You’ll hurt yourself.”
“I’m not going home without you. I’m going to get you out of here. I’ll fight them all off if I have to.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, you’ll do your back in.”
Despite their protestations, Robert begins to climb. First he raises himself up onto the bins, and then reaches for a drainpipe. It is a proper old metal drainpipe. Robert is a heavy man, but the drainpipe is securely attached to the wall, and it holds his weight. He grips with both hands, and puts his feet on the ridges, then climbs like a great silverback up the trunk of a tree.
When he nears the top, Precious reaches out a hand for him and he takes it, and she helps him up onto the roof. He stops for a moment to look around, panting heavily.
“Nice garden you’ve got up here,” he says.
“Yeah, it’s not bad, is it?”
Robert spots Tabitha and nods in her direction, and she smiles back, weakly. Spotting the paleness of her face, he says, “You all right, love?”
“Not really,” she says. She shows him her hand, and the blood that has dripped down her arm, having now dried hard. Precious explains what happened, then says, “We’ll have to go back down.”
“Bugger that,” says Robert.
“We have to. We need to get her hand seen to. We’re just up here having a last sit and cig and then we’ll go down.”
“No. You can’t. They’ll get you both on some bullshit pimping charges.”
“We’ll fight it, obviously. But what’s the alternative?”
“Come down the back way,” he suggests. “Down the way I’ve just come. Then leg it.”
“With this hand?”
“Well, I’ll help. Or else I’ll create a diversion. I’ll go down there and draw out as many of them coppers as I can, and you can slip past me. I’ll take on the whole bloody Met if I have to.”
“They’d kill you, you crazy fool.”
“Please let me do this for you,” says Robert, seriously. “What am I for, if not for this?”
Precious considers, then looks over the side of the building at the drainpipe. “There might be a way down for us, if you help, Robert, and if, together, we carry Tabitha. Are you up for it, Tabitha?”
“You know me, Precious, love. I’ll do anything.” She winks at Robert.
Robert blushes.
Precious takes Tabitha by one arm, and Robert raises the other. Precious is unsure whether any of this will work, but perhaps if Robert goes first, there will be a way to lower Tabitha down.
“Stop,” says Tabitha.
Precious thinks she must be accidentally hurting her. “I’m sorry, love. But we really should hurry.”
“No,” says Tabitha. “We need to stop.”
Robert already has one foot over the side of the building, ready to take the first step down. “What is it?” he asks.
“Can you feel it?”
“Feel what?” Precious is beginning to think the loss of blood is affecting her friend’s perceptions.
“The tremors,” says Tabitha quietly.
Precious stands very still. So does Robert, though he has less idea what is going on. He is still hunched over, holding his chest, panting heavily. Then Precious feels them too. She feels a trembling in the soles of her feet, through the thin fabric of her slippers. The trembling is subtle, but it gets fiercer. She feels her legs begin to shake. There is a low rumbling, deep within the earth. The pitch is so low, she can hardly hear it. It is something she feels rather than hears. She feels it in her ribs. It creates a funny, hollow feeling in her lungs and it jars with the rhythm of her heartbeat.
Precious looks over at Robert, who has felt nothing. He is looking between her and Tabitha as if the pair of them are speaking in tongues. Tabitha is beginning to move back, towards the intersection between their neighbors’ roof and their own. Tabitha uses
her good hand to grip the wall, taking care to avoid the contra-avian spikes. She and Precious climb up onto the other roof, and continue to move back, beckoning for Robert to follow.
“Come this way, Robert,” Precious urges. Robert is utterly baffled. He stays where he is. He is clutching at his chest. He still hasn’t properly caught his breath from climbing up.
Then the shaking begins in earnest. Tiles fall from the roof. There is a creak as seventeenth-century timbers bend and snap; the trunks of magnificent oak trees that grew in vast forests, that were harvested and bent to the shape of the city—oak trees the like of which don’t exist anymore, haven’t been seen for centuries. The timbers warp, then break in two. Precious and Tabitha are now on the neighbouring roof. They hold on tightly to a chimney stack and watch as the old building falls away from them, and crumbles. Robert slips out of sight.
Gravy
The pie has a buttery crust that flakes when she digs. The meat is smooth and cut easily with the side of a fork. The best part is the gravy. Agatha has stood by the stove and watched Valerie make it many times. She roasts the meat on the bone, places it on a plate to rest, then puts the roasting tin, still hot, onto the gas hob. She scrapes at the fats with a wooden spoon, loosening the parts that have formed a dark crust. She sprinkles on flour and blends it together with the residue. She adds hot water, stirring all the time. She stirs and stirs and simmers, and the gravy thickens slowly then all at once.
Agatha feels relaxed. Her mind is quiet, focused on the room, the company, the taste and texture of the meal. It isn’t a sensation she is used to but it is one she likes. She decides this is how she ought always to function. She will reject anything cerebral. She will always put sensory experience before any other consideration. She will allow her mind to follow her eyes, her ears, her tongue, her nose, her fingertips. Her senses will inform all her decisions.
Roster presumably drove the boy home. Agatha left him in the bedroom and came down to the gatehouse. Valerie will have gone up for the night, but she never locks the door, and keeps a bed made up for Agatha, knowing her youngest sister sometimes likes to sleep down here with her rather than up at the big house on her own. Agatha has always had a room here with Valerie. She uses it less and less these days, feeling the need to sleep in the house she owns, as she should, but she has come down tonight out of a desire to leave the boy alone, and because she was hungry, and suspected Valerie might have something delicious lying around. She found the pie on the hob and has heated a slice.