Our Lady of Everything

by Susan Finlay

  ‘No, I’m Lucy. I’m one of the nurses.’

  Iwona patted Margaret’s hand and gave Lucy one of her firmest looks, while Lucy looked at the flask and frowned.

  ‘And what’s this?’

  ‘Tea. Polish tea, with esencja,’ said Stanisław.

  ‘Eseni . . . ’

  ‘Esencja!’

  He threw out his arms in a grand, theatrical gesture and Lucy began to laugh. Then she wrote something on a clipboard at the end of Margaret’s bed, still laughing, and then he laughed also, winked and said, ‘And by the way you have nice smile.’

  Tzeentch

  KATARZYNA KWIATKOWSKA SHIVERED, ZIPPED UP her puffa jacket, and continued to wander through the Market Square in what appeared to be a duck down duvet. There were little stalls all around her, designed to look like little wooden cottages, each of which contained German-themed Christmas goods, some of which were a bit like Polish goods except that they were more expensive. She knew that it was partly because the city wanted to appear European, and partly because it was twinned with Karlsruhe (as well as Ghent, Ljubljana, Minsk and Harare – although none of these places appeared to have travelling markets, or indeed a culture that could be commodified quite so easily).

  She examined a series of wooden toys that struck her as having been designed more for the parents than their children, and wondered if she should buy one. Christmas was only a few weeks away but she still hadn’t begun her shopping, because she still didn’t know who to shop for. Should she still buy Eoin a present? And if she wasn’t still buying Eoin a present then would it be weird to still buy Margaret one? And did everyone at the Evening Post really want or need a card?

  She looked up at the digitally antiquated banner strung between two stalls. It said ‘Frohe Weihnachten’, which meant ‘Merry Christmas’ in German. In Polish people said ‘Wesołych Świąt’, and in Ireland ‘Merry Christmas’ – because no one who lived in Ireland really spoke Irish anymore. It occurred to her that she didn’t know what they said in Ghent, Ljubljana, Minsk and Harare, or even Basra for that matter. Or even if she cared. Except that of course she cared, because Eoin was out there, or somewhere thereabouts, and for better or worse she loved him . . .

  Katarzyna pulled up the hood on her puffa jacket, and continued to wander down through the Market Square dressed as the abominable snowman. She walked past a group of teenagers carrying placards, most of which depicted an enlarged version of her badge (‘Stop the War’, with two red bullet holes), although others held homemade versions that used old cardboard boxes – ‘Stop the War, End Racism’, ‘Bush and Blair: Number One Terrorists’ and even ‘Bring Our Boys Home’ – a sentiment that only a few days ago would have offered her some comfort, but which now felt vaguely threatening . . .

  She carried on walking very slowly, as if she didn’t want to get where she was going, which she didn’t, because she didn’t want to get anywhere any more. But still she carried on walking, slower and even slower up towards New College, and while she walked she said the following rhyme:

  Step on a crack

  Break your back

  Step on a line

  Break your spine

  She made her steps even smaller, as well as more deliberate, in exactly the same way that she remembered doing when she had walked to school, twisting her foot to one side and then the other in a weird and crooked way. The sky began to rumble and as she looked up to see what it was – a low-flying plane – she inadvertently stepped on a line. A shooting pain jabbed through her, and she shrieked with the suddenness of it . . .

  Katarzyna carried on walking up to the New College entrance, and then looked over her shoulder to check that no one else was watching. Students weren’t meant to be in on a Sunday but Jackson had lent her his pass, which she now swiped, and went into the empty reception. A vase of dirty water and dead flowers, most of which were roses, sat on the empty desk, and as she looked at them she thought of all the different Polish words that, one way or another, meant dead. There was ‘martwy’, for example, for dead, or inanimate; and then there was ‘zmarly’ for dead, or departed; and then there was ‘ślepy’ for dead, or blind or implicit – and then she thought that any one of them would suit her better than her own name, which simply meant ‘of flowers’ . . .

  Katarzyna walked down the steps and into the Media Hub. She took off her puffa jacket and attempted to turn it into a giant, marshmallow cushion with which to soften one of the uncomfortable chairs. Then she looked at the equipment, which seemed even smaller and more dead and blind than it usually did, before turning on all of the computers. She got out one of the video cameras and linked it up to one of the monitors, thinking as she did so that Meg and Dave were her only friends now, but that even they would hate her if they knew, if they didn’t know already, because then they would know too that she was responsible. Because if she had loved harder, and loved better, she could have stopped this terrible thing from happening. Except she hadn’t. And now all she could do was sit in the Media Hub, numb from her inferior loving, and wait for the instructions, the orders, that the people she hoped might still be her friends had promised or threatened to send her after she had replied, without thinking, to an email from Dave with the subject header ‘favour’ . . .

  Katarzyna checked her phone and saw that she was half an hour early. Then she sat down on her coat that was now a cushion and typed ‘www.hotmail.com’ into the navigation bar, followed by her username, password and so on, and fifty-seven unread emails flashed onto the screen. She could see that some of them were from journalists, with subject headers that referred to justice, and torture, and British troops in Basra, but that most of them were from people she had never heard of, with subject headers that called her awful things, each and every one of which she was sure that she deserved. She wondered how they’d found her email, and then concluded that it must be from Facebook, which was something called a ‘social networking site’, which Jackson, eager that she too should have access to media, had suggested she join; and then she wondered how many people had seen the video on the Internet; and how long before the Internet would turn into the real news and everybody, not just kids and geeks, would read it, because it was printed in the proper papers . . . Feeling numb and inferior, cold and loveless, she scrolled down the sidebar, ticking the box beside each one, and then she pressed ‘delete’.

  Katarzyna watched as all of the fifty-seven unread emails disappeared, and then she clicked ‘refresh’, and then ‘refresh’, and then ‘refresh’ – but nothing. And then she clicked ‘new’, and an empty box appeared. She cracked her knuckles, and tapped the keys – all of which added up to the following:

  Dear Eoin,

  I don’t care what you’ve done, I love you.

  Kathy x

  She stared at it for what seemed like a long, long time and then thought about the way in which the layout of her email looked a little bit like the layout of a poem. Then she pressed ‘delete’ again, keeping her finger on the button until one by one all of the letters disappeared. Then she stared at the blank screen. Then she clicked ‘cancel’. Then a little box popped up asking her whether she wanted to ‘save draft’ or ‘delete’. She clicked ‘delete’. Then another little box popped up, reminding her that she was about to throw away what had once looked a little bit like a poem but was now an empty space. She clicked ‘continue’. And then she wondered if the Internet was trying to tell her something, namely that she needed to send a message from Katarzyznastan to Basra because one of them was under siege . . .

  Khorne

  MEGHANA BUDANNAVAR WALKED UP TO the entrance of the Evening Post Classifieds office, and then looked over her shoulder to check that no one else was watching. The office was always shut on a Sunday, but she had managed to get hold of Judy’s pass, which she now swiped. She waited until the door made the bleeping noise that meant the swipe had been successful, and then she went inside. She removed her coat, which, she had now decided, had looked much better on he
r in the shop, and went into the kitchen where a box of soft, white Indian sweets was going mouldy by the kettle.

  Meghana put the sweets in the bin and made herself a cup of tea, with sugar but no lemon, because lemon would have been seen as the wrong sort of foreign, which meant that it would have seemed middle class and therefore snooty and so was not provided by The Post. Then, while she waited for the kettle to boil, she thought about how, in spite of her books and her hair and her clothes that never seemed to do much for her, someone who had once been authoritative and distant, as opposed to unthreatening and merely familiar, obviously still saw her as attractive, as well as what this meant:

  Dr David Goldstein holds a somewhat ambiguous appeal to those of the opposite sex, simultaneously possessing great knowledge and authority, and working as the Games Workshop Manager. His ethnic origin is White or Jewish; his nationality is British; his gender is male; his age range is 25–34; and his religion or belief is No Religion or Other (magician). My study explores Dr Goldstein’s impact as a supposedly unassuming (but subtly domineering) presence in the romantic landscape of my own, somewhat limited, imagination. Through a field study approach I will develop new methods for interpreting the key symbols and rituals that constitute Dr Goldstein’s life, each one of which will not so much avoid as challenge pre-existing frameworks . . .

  Meghana took a sip of tea and thought about how much of a relief it was to think about someone in the third person other than herself. It made her feel less mad which, as she wasn’t daring or poetic or romantic enough to be mad in a daring or poetic or romantic way, was probably no bad thing. She looked out of the kitchen window at the canal, which in some places had frozen so that an upturned shopping trolley was now part suspended in the ice, and then into the mirror above the kitchen sink. As she moved closer to it she saw that she had one grey hair. She separated it out from all the others, pulled hard at it, and said, ‘Ouch!’

  Meghana checked the time on her phone and saw that there were still twenty minutes to go, and then she went and turned on one of the computers. She thought about how she had spent the last five years studying the science of humans and their works, and how she was now studying Dave the same way that Dave had been studying her. She thought that, after she had helped him to complete his experiment, which she still couldn’t quite believe that she had agreed to be involved in, she would write it up, but with him, not it, as the subject. Then she would send it to him, explaining how it was now his turn to be her field study – except that actually she wouldn’t, because deep down she didn’t want to do anything that weird.

  Meghana typed ‘GoTeamBudannavar.blogspot.com’ into the navigation bar, and a picture of her cousin’s new baby appeared, with her cousin hovering in a contented blur behind him. Meghana looked at the picture and thought about how, these days, her own body seemed so separate from her – an assortment of oddments that, no matter what she did to them, or how she covered them, still never felt quite as they should. She typed ‘Congratulations to Kajri! He’s gorgeous. Already looks like another engineer to me! With love, Meghu x’ into the comments box. And then she opened up the wide blue yonder, typed in her email, her password and all of the other usual things, and began to compose the following:

  Dear Dave,

  While I am happy to take part in your ‘magikal’ experiment, please be aware that I am in the process of writing up my thesis. I realise that you may not have a problem with your current living and working arrangements, but I want to use my time productively.

  Remember: this is a one off, so don’t get any ideas!

  Meg

  She stared at it for a long time and then pressed ‘delete’, keeping her finger on the button until one by one all of the letters disappeared. Then she stared at the empty screen. And she began again:

  Dear Dave,

  While I am happy to take part in your ‘magikal’ experiment on this one occasion, I really think that you could (and should) be doing something more productive with your time.

  Come on – you can do better than this!

  Meg

  She checked the time on her phone and saw that there were still ten minutes to go, then pressed ‘delete’ again. And she began again:

  Dear Dave,

  My parents are having a puja at their house next month for my cousin’s baby. It’s in Leicester obviously, but we can get cheap tickets if we book in advance.

  Hoping to cross cultural identities sometime soon,

  Meg X

  All of which translated as something that was neither daring, nor poetic, nor romantic, but which might just about still do.

  Meghana stared at the last email for a long time and then pressed ‘delete’, keeping her finger on the button until one by one all of the letters disappeared. Then she stared at the empty screen. Then she clicked ‘cancel’. Then a little box popped up asking her whether she wanted to ‘save draft’ or ‘delete’. She clicked ‘delete’. Then another little box popped up, reminding her that she was about to throw away the empty screen without sending it. She clicked ‘continue’, and then she checked her phone and saw that, finally, it was time. She stood up, and with her shoulders hunched and her head lowered, took a deep breath and muttered the words: ‘My ethnic origin is Asian, Black, White, Mixed, Other (Please Specify).’

  The Warp

  DR DAVID GOLDSTEIN CHECKED THE time on the till and saw that he still had ten more minutes to go. It had been dark outside for some time now, and the protesters who passed by the windows, with their placards glinting in the Christmas lights, gave the Games Workshop a strange, almost apocalyptic feeling, further heightened by the fact that David, who had still not lost his craving for nicotine, had now completely run out of gum.

  ‘Excuse me but have you got any more Lizardmen?’ said a boy with very thick glasses.

  David shook his head. ‘We’re all out I’m afraid. But we’ve still got Elves, and Dwarves, you know everything else, we’ve got in. Even the Skaven.’

  ‘But I really wanted Lizardmen.’

  The boy looked pleadingly at David, and indeed his determination was so strong that the memory of the one remaining box located somewhere near the empty beer bottles pushed its way into David’s mind, and then refused to leave it.

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ he said before darting off into the back room and returning a few seconds later with the last box. ‘Okay so that’s sixteen pounds then please.’

  The boy got out his wallet and began to go through it, becoming more and more agitated as he did so.

  ‘But I only have fifteen pounds!’

  ‘I’m sorry but the recommended retail price is still sixteen pounds. Although all of the Elves are on sale. You could get two boxes for that, you—’

  ‘But I don’t want Elves! I want Lizardmen!’

  The boy’s eyes, which were magnified by his glasses, were now not only pleading but also helpless. David looked into them and then at the time on the till, which now showed that there were only five more minutes left to go. He took a deep breath and said, ‘Okay. Fifteen pounds. But don’t tell anyone okay?’

  ‘Okay!’

  David rang his purchase through the till, slipping in a pound coin that had become coated with the fluff and bits of sweets inside his pocket as he did so. Then he handed over the Lizardmen and followed the boy to the door, locking it behind him and turning off all of the lights in the display. He checked the time and saw that it was now half past five precisely. He took out his laptop and turned it on, and then went and stood in the middle of the room, lowered his head and hunched his shoulders, took another deep breath and muttered, ‘My ethnic origin is Asian, Black, White, Mixed, Other (Please Specify)’, while trying to visualise a red arc of light around his head.

  Then he muttered, ‘My national identity is English, Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish, British, Other (Please Specify)’, while trying to visualise a yellow arc of light around his throat.

  Then he muttered, ‘My gender is Male, Female, Othe
r (Please Specify), Prefer not to Say’, while trying to visualise a pink arc of light around his heart and lungs.

  Then he muttered, ‘My age range is 16–24, 25–34, 35–44, 45–54, 55–64, 65+’, while trying to visualise a green arc of light around his stomach.

  Then he muttered, ‘My religion or belief is No Religion, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Other (Please Specify), Prefer not to Say’, while trying to visualise a purple arc of light around his genitals and anus.

  Then he repeated each statement, and each attempt at visualisation, which was harder than he had anticipated, working up from his genitals and anus and back towards his head. When he finished he took another deep breath and drew two arcs with his left hand, one that he visualised as orange, and one that he visualised as blue. Afterwards he made a forty-five-degree turn to the left, repeating the statements and the visualisations and the drawings in the air, and then another turn and then another until he was back where he started. And then he began again. Then he stood up straight, raised his head, pointed into the darkness of the window display and shouted, ‘Look! A rainbow!’

  In the background the telephone started to ring, but David ignored it. It switched to answer machine and a warbling voice inquired as to the availability of Dark Elves but not High Elves; but instead of going over and making a note of the details he began to shout out ‘zero’ and then ‘one’, over and over again in what seemed like a random order. Then the answer machine switched itself off. And then he went back over to his laptop where the little green light on his Gmail account was flashing.

  David clicked on the Gmail window, where one unread message, with no subject header, had just appeared. He clicked on it, and a clipart drawing of cupid with a zero superimposed above his head opened out across the screen, accompanied by the message that it had been sent by Swopments. Then he clicked on another window, which showed a film of Kathy in the New College Media Hub. She was surrounded by computer screens and TV monitors, each of which showed him standing in the Games Workshop. Both he and Kathy looked into the image of each other, and then they both started chanting: ‘A variety of things, a selection of items, an assortment of bags, jars and boxes.’