by Tanith Lee
In itself going to Granny was worry enough. Granny, at that time, was in charge of Qirri. In Greece as a child Qirri had suffered from Granny’s guardianship. In England it was worse. Granny’s English-born husband too was a bully. Granny deferred to him, and put curses - horrible ones - on him when he was away (“with one of them tarties,” Granny would say). Granny’s name also had metamorphosed, from Eireni Narcissa to Jonquil. The grungy terrace where they lived, almost under the railway bridge that roared day and night like an indigestive lion, was a much nastier home than the village hovel where originally Qirri grew up. That too had had landscapes, trees, fresh fish from the sea, sunshine. Of course, there was money, lots of it mootedly. But nothing to show beyond a pittance until the girl (Qirri) was eighteen. The last time she saw her actual father, Yorgos, Eireni Narcissa Jonquil’s son, Qirri had been what? Fourteen, fifteen, or just sixteen - she never really recollected. She was not then as she would come to be. Overweight, her white skin spotty, particularly on her back and face, her dull brown hair cut short for ‘convenience’ and not washed as often as it might have been, this pre-imago Qirri lacked confidence, slouched, and spoke in the slum-London accent her slum-London environment had taught her. A year at a private drama school when she was nineteen would iron that crust away - save when she conjured the old voice up. Her Greek though was always fluent and beautiful. From the start, she liked her Greek voice.
The last memory then, when Yorgos put her in the cab, followed on the only time Qirri ever saw her mother. That was, met her mother, in the flesh. Claudia Martin was in her fifties. But she looked to Qirri absurdly pretty and elegant, and rich and graceful and - light… She looked as if it must be a lie she had ever produced such a creature as Qirri. And it rather seemed that Claudia must think this too. When Yorgos and Qirri arrived at the lunch party in the West End, everyone who noticed them seemed slightly fazed by their appearance. The handsome spivvy father, with his too sharp clothes, the unprepossessing fat daughter in her bulgy school skirt, and a top from Woolworths that Jonquil had thieved.
“Claudia,” Yorgos had fulsomely said to the blonde woman with the sea-blue eyes, dressed in the silvery white suit, “My sweetest Claudia! So long since I see you. And not a day older…”
“Several days, I’m afraid,” said Claudia flatly. Despite all her finesse and her acting talent, her face began setting like plaster of Paris. She wanted to escape, so much was very plain, but no one so far had come to rescue her.
From the conversation it came out that Yorgos had legitimately been invited to the party. He had worked on some movie or other some director or other here had valued. That old movie too had been where he met Claudia - though she was not part of the cast - and soon he had seduced and impregnated her with Qirri. But Claudia, who had not in the end aborted Qirri, instead gave birth to her in an unrevealed European nook, then handed her over to the father and his own mother. A classical name, and some money - both upfront and more importantly in trust for the child - were all Claudia left behind her when she rushed back to her English home and ‘perfectly’ married life.
As they stood before Claudia, Yorgos turned to Qirri as if afraid she might, spastic ox that she was (Granny’s English-Greek term) blurt all this and spoil his pitch. He suggested Qirri find herself a drink, a little champagne, why not.
So Qirri wandered away. The spacious reception room, in some opulent hotel, was full of elegant glamorous people. All drank, many smoked, there was the scent of cannabis among the Galoises. A few leered at her in amused mild dismay. What was this awful female thing doing here? She must have strayed in from some grosser place…
In the end, clutching a frosty can of Pepsi, that would subsequently splash her in the cab, Qirri gravitated hopelessly back towards her parents. Her parents. The scarcely known father, the mother known only by innuendo, slighting reference, hearsay, or the occasional old movie on TV.
“No, Yorgos, I don’t think she’s film material. Perhaps one day,” Claudia was saying, “when she’s older. More – organised…”
“I feared it’s so, Claudia. Hey, how come you and I, a fine feller like me and a beauty like you - how we make a kid so rubbish?” (How indeed had they made anything? Even love.)
At that moment Claudia had seen Qirri again, lurking there, peering at them. Listening. He had not. Claudia said, “Yorgos, you must excuse me. I really have to talk to some people over there.”
And this was when her father hustled Qirri out, frowning, yet grinning too his cigarette-stained, once-white teeth, determined to talk to Claudia alone. The doorman, aloof as a lizard, fetched the taxi to the kerb. “Go home to Granny, Kitty. And look, maybe - how about you diet a bit, yeah? Get one of them creams for your skin.” And then he kissed her on her forehead, which that day was unspotted, with the slightly dirty fringe combed back.
And that was the last time she saw him. He died the next spring, drowned somewhere off the mainland of Greece, perhaps in the ending stages of a fight.
She would realise eventually Yorgos had meant, had doubtless tried, to blackmail Claudia. She’s yours, get her a job, you owe her, why we gotta wait all these years for her money? All these people here - what are they to you? Get me back in the business. I need money. She needs it. What if I tell ’em all, all this fancy people, what we done, you and I? And your hubby. How he like it?
Had he said that, something like that? And what had Claudia replied? “They’d laugh at you. And my husband knows.” Did she say that? Or did she feel frightened?
In adulthood Qirri had wondered how Claudia had been so careless as to become pregnant by Yorgos. But Claudia had been in her thirties then. Her body, or only her contraception might have become unreliable. Or had she wanted it, another child - and then ceased to want any such thing?
Qirri had a dream a few nights after the party. She dreamed that Claudia was in her bedroom, the ten by nine foot box room where Qirri had been stacked, like a box, to sleep. Claudia said to Qirri: “How can you be mine? You’re hideous, a monster.” Qirri woke up and lay still. She was rigid, not with adolescent shame or misery, but with hate. She wished Claudia dead. And, for good measure, her father too.
Claudia, so the papers announced, died less than a month later. Yorgos, like an afterthought, the next year.
Qirri was too worn down perhaps to register any of this as a victory, whether due to her or not. But it influenced her. It must have done. Not that she believed she had developed psychic powers, the sort Granny thought she had when she started her curses. (If Qirri had been capable of that, Granny herself would have been long gone.) But it somehow established that Qirri alone was not to be life’s prey. Others too were prey to it, however powerful, or fair. And she had more time than they, the immortality of youth.
When she was seventeen her looks began, of themselves, to alter so much for the better, and in another year The Money entered her existence. The Money was in fact beyond belief. Nearly, by then, a million pounds sterling, padded by all the interest it had accrued. How rich she must have been, that pretty bitch of a mother. Unless, like Granny, she had been a clever thief.
Qirri also has a last memory of Laurence Adrian Lewis. In it he too is kissing her goodbye. As with her father, that time by the taxi, she had not thought, during the kiss, that it would mean goodbye at all. Rather she thought, in Laurence’s case, that it meant they would see each other again quite soon, after only a short delay. It was too, this, a very different kiss to her father’s.
Yes, she had intended to screw them all up, all Claudia’s cherished brats, the ones Claudia had kept. And sex, the beautiful new model of Qirri had found, was one of the most effective ways to do it. For by then Qirri knew a lot about sex, a lot about how to enjoy it and how to get hurt, and how to hurt worse in return. And she knew how to spend money, and use people that way as well. For example, buying Granny a nice flat, then using it, and using Granny like a servant, and Granny, the fucking deranged old crow, going along with it all, Granny’s wet b
lack flint eye always on Granny’s Main Chance.
Finding the Lewises was relatively simple. They were not unfamous, especially Laurence and Serena.
Qirri, now well-groomed, gorgeous, gentle, intelligent, charmingly eager to please, altered her name back to Granny’s Kitty, or to Kit, and got herself a job at the BBC. There she soon came into contact with Laurence. Even Reenie-Serena proved very reachable. Qirri had reckoned Serena might be the hardest of the three for Qirri to sink her claws into, but the stupid little cat was the easiest, (easier than Nick, who had seemed cautious). Christ, Serena must have been a closet Les for years, just too much a cretin to realise. Tracing Nick meanwhile, might have been difficult. But Laurence gave Qirri all the clues. Laurence had long before worked out Nick’s sideline as a gigolo, (odd, rather like her bastard of a father), and sneaked a peek at certain names in the secret book Nick kept for appointments. Hence the indirect employment of Sonia. Nick had, in his pale way, turned out attractive enough Qirri wondered briefly if he might be one of the ones who responded to her afterplay in that certain special manner. But he did not. By then she did not care. A fling with Nick would have been superfluous in any case.
Qirri had already found Laurence. She had known from the first time, at her Wimbledon flat.
Obviously he was handsome, if rather older than he looked on TV. But his body, stripped, was very sound, and his darkness (an erotic reference back to her childhood in Greece?) pleased her. They had drunk a generous amount, and in bed the act had been good. He was even a little rough with her, dominating, his face cruel. All this appealed.
But he had to leave early, it seemed, return to an insecure wife. And so Qirri took her chance at once.
As she had done in her letter to Nick, as she had done to uncountable men (and women) in other letters, telephone calls, texts and even emails, now and then face to face, she awarded Laurence a mocking and damning critique of his performance as a lover.
For some while no one, not even those verbally attacked in person - as Laurence now was - had become worse than distressed, or they only walked out on her. Laurence did not do any of that. He plunged straight forward, slapped her twice across the face, forehand and back, and slung her down on the floor. The rest of the sequence, though in its way not unfamiliar to Qirri, was one of the best and most vicious, the most exhilarating and arousing she had ever gone through. The blows culminated presently in what, by then, Laurence may or may not have realised, was a fully consenting rape.
When he would have left her she dragged him back, pleading and cajoling. An hour or so later, temporarily quenched, and Qirri completely delighted by her bruising, (the sight and soreness of it would re-arouse her when alone) they were in total understanding of the type of sex Qirri liked best. To his surprise, Laurence told her, he had enjoyed his side of it. Both silently knew he could not be so very surprised. He must have kept the need generally in check, suppressed it. But Qirri was for him, as he for her, the ideal bedfellow.
Qirri had no idea where her tastes had started. They had been there from the very first, even, in a dilute and incoherent form, long before she ever experienced sex with a partner. Whatever, and wherever, Laurence was for her, of all those who had assaulted her, the paradigm. Not only his fists, but his heart had been in it. He would, and did - as she did - want more.
The relationship became deliciously obsessive. He would sometimes call her, exalting her to orgasm by describing the violence he would do her when next they met. Though he still had other women, occasionally as a last resort even Angela, Laurence and Qirri were quickly mutually dependent. Either love or something masquerading as love, grew from the torrid compost of their brutal congress. They invented games - such as Laurence making sure he arrived in the Angela-watch, and Qirri jealously shrieking at him so he must beat her up to keep her ‘quiet’ - in fact the flats were beautifully soundproofed, especially at the Wimbledon venue; they could be very noisy and go unheard. There were other games where they met as ‘strangers’ in some bar or pub, got drunk and then ended up in some ill-locked park or derelict garage, the potential danger adding to the expected danger of these carefully choreographed rapes, enhancing unbearably the irresistible torrent of pleasure.
They began (inevitably?) during oases of calm, to plan an elopement together, a flight from England, from Laurence’s debts and Angela, and Qirri’s inquisitive grandmother. In curious adagios of deep tenderness, they wept in each other’s arms. Each had a storehouse of mental grudges and resentments, which they confessed, comforting each other. On the night she informed him she was his half-sister, the result of Claudia’s last adventure, Laurence beat her so severely that even Qirri was laid up for a day or two. When on her feet again, and during her last visit to Serena, it was this beating that had made Qirri throw up, made her look ill. When Laurence had grown scared at the effect of his assault, Qirri however had only laughed at him.
And of course, aside from their games, their fore-and-after-play, he did not give a fuck for the incest. He said he had wanted to fuck Serena once, when she was growing up. When Qirri also told him, post-coitus, she had fucked Serena, he burst out laughing, rolling around on the bed like a kid of fourteen.
Laurence informed Qirri during that particular night, of Claudia’s two long absences in the late ’70’s. Laurence had been about fourteen, Nick a baby, a “squalling tiny red pig” of one? - two? She had been doing theatre - was it in Sweden? Then she came back, sulky and nervy. And then abruptly she left again. What had their father thought of this? Oh, he took very slight interest by then in her work. He had not even attended her London First Nights for years; she was seldom any more the lead. And Joss had his business empire to canoodle with. Christ knew what Dad did himself, away from home. But Claudia, obviously, had done two things during that era. She had got pregnant with, and then given birth to, Qirri. And none of the family, (“Fucking morons. Me as well, but I knew nothing then”) guessed a thing. Even that sullen month Claudia had later spent in bed, weeping, or else drugged senseless, had only been the aftermath to forcing Qirri into the world, and then leaving her as negligently as a laptop on a train.
Laurence and Qirri. Qirri and Laurence. The two of them against the stupid hating world.
Laurence helped her hunt and bring Nick down. Laurence, by then, seemed to know everything.
Armed with so many facts, even before she met Nick she showed Laurence the critical letter she had already written, evaluating Nick’s professional abilities, and due to be sent him after they had been to bed. “I might call him up then too. Late at night is often best. But I’ll let the letter do most of it - it’s good, don’t you think?” She would send it via the BBC, through another girl Qirri still kept up with there in case she might still be useful; just like Sonia Daforian. Laurence agreed the letter was good. He liked it. “Little prick,” said Laurence. “Nick the Prick.”
“Oh,” said Qirri, “I’m sure his prick’s really great. Bigger than yours, not that it would be difficult…”
Laurence bought Qirri a gold wedding ring. He told her over the phone from Coreley. He said he had found something there too, one night on his own, prowling the dig, and well clear of the security cameras. It could be worth a fortune, Roman ivory, probably legionary in origin, and from the coast of Africa.
But on his return to London, when he drove over to Jonquil’s flat where Qirri had arranged that time to meet him, he did not bring the ivory. Instead he told Qirri he had lied, knowing how mercenary she was, and handed her an ivory-coloured square she thought was plastic. They had the designer argument in the hall (fairly quietly, the walls here were not so reliable soundwise, and once the door was shut). There wasn’t much time, he meant to get home before it grew too late. The beating was not the finest she had had from him, but they still enjoyed it, and the harsh sex, thrusting against Jonquil’s wall.
It would be their last session for a short while. He had told her they had better abstain, even from calls or texts, in case. Angela
seemed extra suspicious and stroppy. He did not want her interfering - he and Qirri would be going away so soon, nothing must spoil their plan. An interim too would give him the chance to clear up the last details, obtain his last available funds. And she could finish her own last scheme with bloody Nick. “You’d better not like it.” Sex was over for now, she answered, “There’s only you, now. Ever and always.” Then he put the golden ring on her thumb. “It’s too big for your finger. It’s still a wedding band.” The savagery of their union always, involuntarily, freed them to indulge romance.
They kissed, crazed lovers, writhing behind the narrow stained glass panel of the door. And then he went out into the night. Out into the night which, as she did not then know, contained plotting Mr Pond and murderous Angela, and the assassin known only as The Man, and the walk up the hill above Richmond Park, to the place of death under the indifferent moon.
Qirri heard of Laurence’s death on the radio. She instantly went out and got very drunk. She wanted to kill people on the street, but never herself. She wanted to kill Laurence, for dying.
By the time her equilibrium had righted itself, Qirri, the beautiful survivor, had located the ultimate Lewis, Joss. His being in Greece incentivised, as they said, her option to go to him.
She did not try to seduce Joss. She only told him that she was Claudia’s daughter, and had wanted to meet Joss who, if her fate had been kinder, might have been Qirri’s father, rather than the disgusting crook who had been.
Joss had, over the years, by negotiating clandestine, conceivably Masonic financial routes, regained much of his wealth and its holdings, next creating new ones. He seemed charmed by Qirri. He said he had never known of her existence, but evidently her claim was genuine, she was so very like - indeed identical to - his former wife.