She glowed scarlet and green. With a twitch of her arm, blue skies poured across her radiant face. Ropes of gold shone between her fingers.
I grasped silks and scarves, enveloping her without care for creases. With every thread I added, she shimmered more brightly, growing iridescent under my hands.
‘Mamma,’ she choked.
I caught an artificial rose, but tossed it away as being too stiff, and reached for a skirt of shot silk, deep blue but containing the silver of stars. I wished to place her on this skirt and raise her, so she could flutter past the cornices as I laughed and chased her with a net. But I would only pretend. I would never catch her.
A clock downstairs began to chime.
In an instant, Missy was upright, her legs still bound in scarves. ‘Help me!’
I stripped her of colour, bundling armfuls of fripperies under the bed. As she plucked anxiously at her skirt, I hastily arranged the curtains so that the room was as shadowed as the rest of the house.
‘Papa will be angry,’ she muttered as she fled.
I could barely keep pace with her down the stairs. The clock had faded into silence. Would I be blamed for my inability to keep to time? Could I lose my position when I had only been led to the house scarcely twelve hours earlier?
Missy halted outside another door. I heard the clink of cutlery against a plate.
‘Papa will finish breakfast at half-past.’
Then she was in the room, greeting her father and closing the door in my face.
I found my way to the servants’ hall. Although I was gratified to be treated with respect by the housekeeper, who also revealed an admirable ability to cow the maids, I could barely remain civil as I conversed with her, for I kept twisting to look at the clock. Was Missy revealing to her father how utterly unsuitable I was? Was he looking reproachfully at her untidiness, and determining that I was clearly not fit to uphold the standard he expected of his daughter?
Ignoring the housekeeper’s amazement that I should leave my comfortable place before being summoned, I hurried upstairs and lurked outside the breakfast room. I heard clattering, and a man’s grave voice, but no hint of my name. Had they already made their decision?
Soon I would be sitting in the coach. When I reached London, I would totter along with my bag in my shrivelled hand, begging for a position. I would scrub chamber pots and teach infants how to rock their dolls. There would be no more rainbows, no outbursts of light, not a single girl who concealed a butterfly within wax and mourning garb.
I steeled myself to push through the door and jump higher than I ever had in my life. If only I had a net . . .
Then Missy cried: ‘May the bell be rung for Harriet! I wish to tell her all about Mamma. She will keep me tidy, Papa. Do not worry about me. Harriet will take care of me now.’
Strong Man
HELEN SIMPSON
GET MY KNEE fixed then get the fridge-freezer fixed, that was the plan. I’d set everything up for a couple of days off on the basis that the medics had suggested a week. Might as well make myself useful, I thought; for once be the one to wait in for the repairman. God knows Michael has had more than his fair share of it over the years – waiting in.
Don’t run on it for six weeks, don’t do this, don’t do that; then the nurse was making me practise going up and down stairs with a stick for a good half-hour before the op. Waste of time! I was fine. The bruising was fairly dramatic, mustard-coloured below the knee – English mustard too, not French – and purple-black above. But it really didn’t hurt that much.
The freezer man arrived right on time, which I wasn’t expecting, Michael having warned me there was a less than fifty-fifty chance of this happening in his experience. Plain black T-shirt and jeans, close-cropped hair, he was rather short and very strongly built. Martial arts? I thought to myself.
‘Water’s dripping into the top salad drawer from somewhere and freezing hard,’ I told him. ‘Then it melts and freezes again.’
I’d have gone away at this point and put in a few calls to work if it hadn’t been for Michael instructing me to stick with the process throughout. His reasoning was that it helped if you were able to explain to them what had gone wrong next time it happened, and the only way to understand what the problem was, was to go through the whole boring process with them in the first place and ask questions and try to understand it. He himself took notes, dated, before he forgot; he had a special file for them. Michael’s an academic, he likes writing things down. His last published article was ‘Islamic Historians in Eighth- and Ninth-Century Mesopotamia and their Approach to Historical Truth’. I haven’t read it yet but I know it’ll be brilliant, like all his work. Anyway I resigned myself to doing things his way this time, seeing it was once in a blue moon that I was the one hanging around.
The man refused coffee when I offered but asked for a glass of water instead. All a bit of a novelty for me, this. I couldn’t quite place his accent: east European, but not Polish.
He opened the door to the freezer compartment and our eating habits were laid bare. Sliced bread, because you can toast it from frozen; litre cartons of skimmed milk so we didn’t ever run out; several tubs of ice cream (Cookie Dough for Georgia, Mango and Passion Fruit for Verity, Raspberry Sorbet for weight-conscious Clio). Not much else except frozen peas and a bottle of vodka. Not much actual food. Oh well, everyone seemed healthy enough. The vodka was officially Georgia’s now she was eighteen, for pre-drinking with her friends; better here where we could keep an eye on how fast it goes down, we’d reasoned, than hidden in her bedroom.
‘So where are you from?’ I asked, setting the glass of water down beside him.
He looked up from the fridge drawer for a moment. He had very dark eyes, like a watchful bird.
‘Russia,’ he said.
Snow and ice, I thought.
‘Where in Russia?’
‘Nearest city Moscow,’ he said; then, with fleeting mockery, ‘Three hundred kilometres.’
‘So you’re from the country?’
He nodded.
‘I’ve been to Moscow,’ I said, but he’d turned back to the freezer.
That time I thought we might get into emerging markets, invest in commodities, get a piece of the action, I couldn’t believe how long it took to get there. Not the flight but the actual drive from the airport into Moscow. The roads were atrocious, it took almost three hours in the cab for what should have been a forty-five-minute journey. The crawl through the gridlocked suburbs was teeth-grindingly slow. Then when I visited Mr Petrossian in his office there were a couple of security guys with sub-machine guns in reception. The secretaries and support staff, all female of course, were trussed up in pencil skirts, tottering round on stilettos. It was like a surly version of the Fifties. Embarrassing.
The man was lying spreadeagled on the floor now, shining a little torch into the gap beneath the freezer from which he’d neatly wrenched the grille. Seen from this angle it was obvious he worked out. I found myself wondering what sport he played and at what level.
I was going to go ballistic if I couldn’t play tennis for six weeks. But of course that’s what had done the damage in the first place – cartilage, wear and tear, fragments of cartilage which had broken off and were floating round in the synovial fluid. We’ll just have a root around, clear out the gunge, said the surgeon. He’d already done half a dozen that afternoon by the time he got to me, the nurse told me afterwards; a light general anaesthetic, just enough to put me under the surface for twenty minutes, then in at a nick beside the kneecap with his keyhole gizmo. I was all done by eight; I hadn’t needed to drag Michael out after all but had gone down in the lift and straight to the cab rank outside.
The cabbie asked me whether I had any children as we set off over the bridge and I said, as I always do when I’m asked this question, yes, three lovely daughters. If I say ‘stepdaughters’
I find I get quizzed about whether I want my ‘own’ children – and by complete strangers too. I adore the girls, and that’s been enough for me. Broody? Phases of it, in passing, like lust, and dealt with in the same way. Listen to your brain as well as the other stuff. Now, at fifty, I think I’m probably safe as well as fully occupied with running the business. It was shortlisted for the Dynamo Prize for Entrepreneurial Initiative last year.
Michael was so sad when I met him. It was sad, being left a widower with three small children. Then after a while he wasn’t sad any more! He thinks I’m wonderful. He even loves my wonky nose, he says it’s Roman; cartilage problems there too, that’s next on the list. He thinks I’m beautiful though. He can’t believe his luck, even now, twelve years on, bless him. Neither can I. The recipe for a happy marriage!
My mind was wandering all over the place. This was not like me; I was usually so focused. It must be some floaty post-anaesthetic thing, I thought. Or maybe it was the unaccustomed feeling of having to do something that didn’t interest me. I made an effort.
‘What do you think the matter is then?’ I asked, as the man sprang back noiselessly from a one-handed press-up. Impressive!
‘First I check condenser coils,’ he said, selecting one from among his twenty or so screwdrivers.
‘OK,’ I said, then added, ‘So do you miss Russia? The Russian countryside? Not much country near London.’
‘Good country near London,’ he said, turning to look at me.
‘Really? Where’s that, then?’
‘Brentwood.’
‘Brentwood?’
‘Very good country,’ he repeated.
A smile flashed across his face before he could suppress it.
‘Very good paintballing in Brentwood,’ he added.
That figured. I could just see him dodging from tree to tree with his paintball gun.
The one time I’d been inveigled into paintballing, while I was still at Renfrew’s, it had been as part of some corporate team-bonding exercise. There were unflattering padded overalls to climb into, and a claustrophobic 360-degree helmet; also an uncomfortable neck guard to stop you getting shot in the throat. Paintball guns fire at surprisingly high velocity.
The objective had been to steal the other team’s flag in a raid and bring it back to camp. At one point I’d been in possession of the flag. Returning to base, zigzagging to avoid the bullets as we’d been taught, gave me a weirdly nasty jacked-up feeling. I was running and I could see sudden blooms of colour bursting on the obstacles and trees in my sight line, turquoise and lime green and fluorescent yellow; every colour of the rainbow, except red of course. I got the flag back to our camp, we won the game, but I was still glad when it was over.
‘It hurts,’ I said. ‘Paintballing.’
‘Some people shoot close range,’ he said, fiddling with his phone now. ‘Not good.’
He showed me the phone screen and there was an anonymous torso sporting several big indigo bruises like starbursts.
‘Ouch,’ I said, handing the phone back quickly. It felt like looking at porn. I didn’t ask who it was; I didn’t want to know.
Clio had brought back a paintballing invitation from school that term and I hadn’t been sorry when it turned out a clash of dates meant she couldn’t go.
Being a stepmother has been good in all sorts of ways. You’re close, you love them but there isn’t quite the same cauldron of emotion. No, you can afford to get on with your work like anyone else.
I do earn more than Michael of course. Considerably more. My business has gone from strength to strength in the last decade, while the terms of his university employment, his tenure and so on, have become increasingly insecure and ill-paid. He hasn’t got as far up the academic greasy pole as he might have, either, though he doesn’t seem to mind. Maybe he’ll write a surprise bestseller once he’s retired, I tell him.
You’re not supposed to say so but I’m very careful about employing women. This means in practical terms that I won’t take on a woman who earns less than her partner. I need to be a hundred per cent sure it’s true of everyone on my payroll that their job comes first in the pecking order at home. No women with alpha-male husbands! I simply can’t afford them.
Back to the freezer and apparently it wasn’t the condenser coils after all.
‘Next thing I test evaporator fan mechanism,’ he said, rooting round in his tool-box again.
‘OK,’ I said, and started to make myself a coffee. ‘Another glass of water?’
He gave a quick nod.
Yes, funny the way that Russian trip worked out. Mr Petrossian himself had been as clever and persuasive as when I’d met him at the trade fair in London, but there in Moscow he couldn’t show me anything useful on paper about his business. He had to keep all the facts and figures in his head, he explained, as it wasn’t a good idea to write things down. In the end we weren’t able to strike a deal and I’m not particularly sorry, looking back. Russia hasn’t woken up yet. It’s still only good for raw materials; it isn’t actually making anything worth buying. No thanks, I thought, I’ll stick with fibre optics.
Georgia locks horns with me about wicked capitalism now and then; she’s doing politics, history, maths and economics A-levels, clever girl, so it’s good to hear the arguments. Liberal capitalism in the UK and the States has produced shocking inequality, she rages; regulation is toothless and it’s getting worse not better. Correct, I say. Germany is the way to go, she says, corporate capitalism, more equality and a workforce which moves in tandem with management rather than automatically against it. And of course that sounds very attractive.
Yes, Germany is a more equal society, I say to Georgia, but in order to be that way it’s also a more traditional and less diverse society. Swings and roundabouts. Did you know they have a special word for mothers who work over there? Rabenmutter, or raven-mothers. That’s how conservative they are! And so we go, to and fro. We’re making history as we go along of course and that’s the truth of it; we live in time.
‘So what’s that wire for?’ I asked the man as he took another piece of kit out of his toolbox.
‘I push it through drain tube,’ he said, feeding it into a small hole in the wall joining fridge to freezer. ‘See. Maybe blockage. Small pieces of food.’
‘Like my knee!’ I said, and told him about the keyhole business.
‘Many footballers have this operation,’ he said, frowning into the fridge. ‘Cartilage problem.’
My brothers stayed put in Middlesbrough and they don’t speak to me these days. Earning more than them has done nothing for family relations. All part of the increasingly bitter civil war that’s been pitting families against each other up and down the country for some time now: north against south, brother against sister, London against the rest. I moved to London at the right time, I was lucky. This year I’ve got twenty-eight people on my books.
The man had been here for the best part of an hour now and I started to get a sinking feeling that this was all a waste of time, he’d say he needed to order a spare part or that we’d be better off buying a new fridge-freezer despite the fact this one was only three years old. When I voiced my doubt, though, he assured me he would be able to mend it. Great, I thought.
Even so it was taking a while.
I asked him what he thought of the current Russian president.
‘Strong man,’ he said, with a nod of approval, adjusting a dial behind the vodka bottle.
Strong man? I thought. What, another one?
Hadn’t they had enough?
A blast from the past: ‘What did you say? What did you say?’ Beat. Then – ‘You asked for it!’
Which was what happened if you challenged anything; and, after a while, if you said anything at all. I got up. I got out. I got away. The classic thing is to go for another bully in the future. You don’t have to, though.
‘Russia needs strong man,’ he said, going over to the sink to wash his hands.
I looked at his broad shoulders and the way his body tapered at the hips, the elegant triangle of his torso, and this brought to mind the contrasting hunched back view of the cab driver who’d driven me home from hospital the night before. He’d wanted to tell me about his children; he’d had a tale of machismo to tell all right.
He had a grown-up daughter who’d become a hedge-fund manager, he said, and she had just come out of a bad relationship.
‘Yeah, he was in insurance, the boyfriend. He was all right the first year then he got jealous, obsessive jealous if you know what I mean. He started raising his hand to her.’
‘Nasty,’ I said.
‘My son went round, they had words, then my son he raised his hand to him and gave him a bloody good hiding. Lucky it wasn’t me, I’d have sent him through the window.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘My son, he got beaten up in Tottenham fifteen years ago. Yeah, Tottenham, funny that’ – this said with deep sarcasm – ‘Then after that, after getting beaten up he went to the gym, he trained in something with a funny name. Like karate but not karate. Anyway, now he can look after himself. And him and his sister, they’ve always been close.’
Sometimes it’s hard to know what to say. The last time I heard that expression was when the man I was sitting next to at the Dynamo gala dinner told me, ‘I have never raised my hand to my wife. To be honest, I’ve never felt the need to.’ I think he was expecting me to congratulate him. Well done, sir!
The truth is. The truth is, no one would believe you back then. ‘A bit heavy- handed’ was how it was described if you had to visit A&E. Nothing happened when you told a teacher. The police had a good laugh. ‘Making a fuss about nothing,’ was what they used to say; or, if it showed, ‘Making a fuss.’
He was still tinkering with the freezer controls. I started to tidy the kitchen, put some mugs in the dishwasher, straightened the pile of books and papers on the dresser.
Best British Short Stories 2015 Page 11