by Unknown
‘That’s lovely.’
‘I’m on in a half hour – going to the kitchen to have a bite to eat. You wanna come?’
‘Yeah, why not? Food’s always comforting at a party.’
‘Those sisters upset you, Emily? Very rude.’
‘No. It’s fine.’
So Emily went down to the kitchen with Midori to have a bit of food. The kitchen was crowded this time, with people lining up to put food on their plates. Emily cheered up a bit, and then she saw that her cheesy potato bake hadn’t gone down well. It was rather grey and congealed and she overheard one of the other revellers being rather rude about it. She recognised him as one of the Australian lads who lived on her street.
‘What do you make of that, Jake?’ he said to his friend.
‘It’s proof of life on the moon,’ said Jake. ‘It is made of cheese, and grey rocks, and some scientist is gonna be sorry his wife has raided his lab, and brought a sample of his work to the party instead of the shepherd’s pie she was supposed to bring.’
‘Oh hey, shepherd’s pie? I wouldn’t mind some of that. Can you see any? Wahey, Chris! Great party.’
This last remark was addressed to a fair-haired English man who was eating a green apple. He nodded.
‘Midori,’ said Chris. ‘You’re all set up outside, whenever you’re ready. You OK for food?’ The pyramid of food teetering on Midori’s plate suggested that this was so. ‘You want a drink? You want a glass of punch?’ He ladled some punch into a paper cup and handed it over. ‘How about your friend?’
‘Emily,’ said Emily. ‘No, I don’t think so. Thank you.’
‘Chris is in charge,’ said Midori. ‘Party’s his idea.’
‘So you sent the invitation?’ said Emily.
Chris said, ‘Not personally.’
‘I didn’t expect you to be English. I thought everyone in this... collective... was Spanish or Polish or...’
‘Yeah. All except me.’
‘So you all chipped in to buy this place?’
‘We don’t go in for ownership. We’ve got a network around the world, to help us identify abandoned spaces. We identify, occupy, beautify – we fix it up and make one little corner of the world a prettier place. And then we move on. We’ve been on the road for a long time.’
‘And now you’ve come home,’ said Emily.
‘Home?’ said Chris. ‘Home is where the art is, Emily.’
He had an intense way of looking at her, as though he was assessing her worth – and had found her wanting. She didn’t like his slightly sardonic way of talking. She found she disliked him. But what was it she objected to? His intensity or his flippancy? Or just the way he looked at her. She hated to admit that there was nothing intellectual about her reaction – she was probably just out of sorts after overhearing Jake’s comments about the food she had made.
Emily wanted to get away from the kitchen but Chris was still here, hemming her in by the buffet. ‘Are you enjoying the party?’ he asked.
‘I am. I never know what’s going to happen next.’
‘It’s all great. Just don’t miss the knife throwing.’
‘Is that the sisters? Zizi and...?’
‘Zizi and Zsa-Zsa. They’re awesome.’
‘Yeah. They didn’t think much of Midori using their bathroom while they were trying to get ready.’
‘Did she? Where was that? Upstairs?’
‘I tried to get a look in case it was a performance, like Elise−’
Ah, poor Elise. I wonder if she’s got anyone to take her suitcase to that man yet.’
‘She asked me. Was I supposed to say yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘So which one is it who throws the knives? Is it Zizi or Zsa-Zsa?’
‘You’ll have to see it to find out,’ Chris said. He looked amused.
‘There’s no audience participation, is there? They both looked in such a mardy mood just now, I don’t think I’d want to take my chances.’
Chris smirked. The expression made his nose look very long and straight, and his mouth looked strangely sexy. Emily thought she had detected in Chris’s accent and demeanour a sense of entitlement that only comes from rich, well-educated people – the sort who can afford to go swanning off around the world with a troupe of performers in the name of art. If you were really so well brought-up, Emily thought, you might ask ‘do you mind if I smirk?’ before puffing your condescension all over me. But then she remembered her dog had just died, and probably that was making her thin-skinned and emotional, and she was at a party and she seemed to have forgotten how to enjoy herself, and she had better start.
And then a tall, dark-haired man edged in next to her at the buffet table and took charge of things, as though he had heard her silent command to get the party started. ‘Joe,’ said Chris, nodding in acknowledgement. Was there a hint of antagonism in the way he said Joe’s name?
‘OK, man,’ Joe said. He was strong-looking, as though he worked outdoors, and he spoke with a slight accent. He turned away from Chris, and as he turned away – he was half a head taller than Emily, so she had to tilt up to get a good look at his handsome face – she saw something she hadn’t been expecting to see in response to Chris’s antagonism. Not bitterness or aggression or anger or indifference. No, for a moment she thought Joe looked sad.
‘You got to eat something,’ Joe said, noticing Emily’s empty plate. He put a huge spoonful of her cheesy potato bake on her plate, and then he put an equally good portion of it on his. ‘It’s good,’ he said, as if she needed persuading. ‘We make it like this at home in Hungary. You have the meat, and you have the potatoes. I don’t understand this layers of things,’ he indicated the dish of lasagne, and the dish of cottage pie, ‘like they want to hide the meat in there because it’s shy.’
He looked towards Midori but her plate was full. She stood and scoffed her food right there in the kitchen in a ladylike but extremely efficient manner, plate to her chin, fork to mouth, fork to mouth, fork to mouth. With her crazy white gear and her repetitive movements, she could have been a next-generation robot demonstrating hoovering techniques.
‘Ah. Better,’ she said when she was almost done. She put her plate down and used both hands to snap the heads off two prawns that remained on it, then sucked the meat out of the prehistoric little bodies like a very genteel predator.
‘You want some punch?’ Joe said to Midori. He put a paper cup down on the table next to her.
‘Got some.’ She took an individually-wrapped, alcohol-soaked hand wipe from the pink plastic bag that was slung over her shoulder, the cartoon cats depicted on it bouncing at her hip, and she ripped open the packaging and carefully wiped all eight fingers and two thumbs on her hands like a proud mama. She swigged the cup of punch down in two draughts, and then she went out into the garden where her DJ booth had been set up.
Joe loaded up his plate with meatballs and salad, and every time he took something for himself, he first offered a serving of it to Emily. He took two paper napkins and two plastic forks from the table. He said, ‘You want to go outside and eat?’
Emily did. She had formed rather a good first impression of Joe, with his strong, muscular arms and his air of slight sadness. Added to that, he had been nice about the food she had brought.
Emily and Joe went and sat together on two plastic chairs in the enormous garden. It was much bigger than any of the other gardens Emily had glimpsed from her street. It was much bigger than her garden, which she tended lovingly in spite of the difficulties of maintaining a lush green lawn that arose from allowing an elderly Golden Retriever to piddle on the grass a couple of times a day.
The party house had once been a very grand house, and the size of the garden where Emily and Joe were now sitting was testament to that. There was a small orchard off to the west of the garden, with apple, cherry and pear trees in it. Nearer the house were neglected flower beds with overgrown shrubs and bushes, and midway between house and orchard, on what had on
ce probably been a very fine lawn, there was a towering bonfire that had not yet been lit. It was stacked with sawn-up pieces of wood, branches and kindling. Emily surmised that it had been built by a man because in her experience men were good at making fires (goodness knows, she was self-sufficient, but building a decent fire in the grate in the decorative but functional tiled fireplace in her flat, was the one thing she never quite managed to do to her own satisfaction.)
Close to the house was Midori in her DJ booth, a temporary structure decorated with fairy lights and bearing a hand-painted sign with ‘DJ Hana-bi’ on it. Closer still was a barbecue with a man in a chef’s hat, an apron and checked trousers. He was carving roast pork from a pig on a spit, and serving it to a very long line of hungry customers. Emily wondered if there was any difference, ethically, between eating a dog and eating a pig. If so, then whether or not it was acceptable to eat a two year old child was another question that ought to be considered as part of the mix: Emily had read that dogs were supposed to be just as intelligent as toddlers, and she had read that pigs were cleverer still.
Emily didn’t think she ought to share with Joe her thoughts about pigs, dogs and toddlers. She didn’t want to allude to her assumption that he must be good at lighting fires as he was a man. She didn’t want to sit there and imagine him chopping up pieces of wood with an axe in his hands. She didn’t want to sound as though she was being suggestive, or simpering at him.
‘Did you build that bonfire?’ she asked Joe.
‘I helped,’ he said.
She pressed on, trying to find a bonfire-related question that didn’t involve a mention of chopping, smoking, lighting fires... she came up with: ‘I hope you checked for hedgehogs this morning, if it’s been there overnight. You know they crawl in there and sleep, if it looks cosy?’
‘Hedgehogs, horses, people. We checked it, don’t worry. When they light it, there’s gonna be a big parade. They’re gonna put a effigy on the fire and burn it. You’re gonna stay and see it?’
‘Oh, yes. And the knife throwing. I want to see that, too.’
‘Yeah? Why?’
‘I heard it was good. Zizi and...’
‘Zizi and Zsa-Zsa. Crazy girls. Yeah, it’s one hell of an act.’
‘What do you do here... Joe?’
‘Joszef. You can call me Joe.’
‘Do you have an act, Joe?’
‘No, Emily. It’s Emily, right?’ She was eating a meatball but she bobbed her chin up and down, acknowledging that he was right. He said, ‘I don’t put on a mask. I make some of the props. The art works – did you see the metal horse upstairs? I made that. I used to be a blacksmith in my home town. So now I do this.’
‘Where’s home?’
‘Hungary. What about you, Emily? You from here?’
‘Yeah, I’m... I’m one of the neighbours. One of the guests. I live in this street. I’m not from London, though. But this is a city of immigrants, isn’t it? Nearly everyone’s moved here from somewhere, including me. Though I only moved from the countryside – no need for a passport.’
‘You OK, Emily?’
‘Do I look miserable? My dog just died.’
‘Oh, that’s a shame.’
‘Well, everyone who has a dog, it dies eventually. I just need to get over it.’
‘That’s OK – it just happened... didn’t it?’
‘Yes. And I’ve been moping about the house the last few days, and I realised I’d been operating for years as one half of a human/dog duo. I need to get used to life without the furrier half. The separation is so real, I can feel it. If you had a diagram of the human body here now, I could point to the place where the wound would run from just beneath my armpit to just above my thigh – as if there was some kind of physical manifestation of the separation from Jessie.’
‘I don’t have a diagram of the human body, Emily.’
‘I don’t have any outward scar.’
‘Oh, OK. I wondered if you were going to ask me whether I wanted to see it.’
Emily thought, Are you flirting with me, Joe? She blushed. She looked at his neck where his shirt was open – the only naked part of him that she could see. He had a gold chain around his neck and some dark hairs on the region below the collarbone where his neck officially became his chest. She wondered if he had any scars that he would like her to see.
Joe said, ‘I got to get some props ready for the girls.’
‘The knife-throwing girls?’
‘Uh huh.’ He grinned. He gripped her bicep as if they were two men who’d just shared a pint, and he said, ‘You take care of yourself, Emily.’
He walked off towards the house, leaving behind his plate and plastic cutlery. You’re not perfect then, thought Emily. She picked up his plate and hers, so she could tidy up, and she looked at the grease on her hands and under her fingernails. She would have been grateful for one of those individually-wrapped alcohol-soaked hand towels just then, and thinking of it made her look towards Midori, which is how she happened to be watching her friend just when it happened: There were three or four explosions from a neighbouring garden as firework rockets went off, and Emily jumped and thought about gunshots – and then Midori went down. The Japanese girl dropped, as if someone had taken hold of the edges of her and was trying to shake her down like a duvet, and hadn’t held on tightly enough to the corners. It didn’t look as though it was something she was in control of personally. It didn’t look as though she was ducking or dancing or reaching for a record from the case at her feet. It looked as though she had been shot.
Oh my God! thought Emily. She’s down! And her next thought was that she sounded ridiculous. And then she started running towards the DJ booth, hoping that Midori was only looking for something and would pop up again in a minute and carry on. The music continued, of course, because Midori’s job involved changing the records, not cranking a machine to keep them spinning round. Emily got to the booth and Midori was on the floor, apparently unconscious. There was no blood, and she was breathing. The two Aussies, Jake and the other one, whatever his name was – the rude one – had seen what had happened and reached Midori at about the same time.
‘What happened?’ Jake asked Emily.
Emily said, ‘I don’t know. I was watching and she just went down. She hasn’t been shot?’
‘What d’you reckon, Rob?’ Jake said to his friend, and Rob said, ‘She’s fainted, mate. Maybe it was something she ate – a dodgy prawn?’
Rob took hold of Midori under the armpits and hauled her out of the DJ booth, then he shifted her up into his arms, so her chest was on his chest, and carried her with her head on his shoulder towards the house. And meanwhile Jake stepped into Midori’s place, selected the next record to be played, and lined it up and mixed it in seamlessly. The music continued, and nobody who hadn’t witnessed it would have known that anything had happened at all. From the nonchalant way Jake and Rob behaved, it seemed this must be a fairly regular occurrence in the outback or wherever they had grown up, something they had been drilled in, the way children on fault lines are told what to do if there is an earthquake, except that their particular fault line required that they should step in at a moment’s notice to DJ at artistic parties, or carry around unconscious Japanese women in white PVC hotpants.
Emily followed Rob as he carried Midori towards a side entrance to the house, just along from the kitchen. Presumably this entrance had once been a servants’ entrance. It was poorly lit and out of sight from the party, bordered by a herb garden, and what had presumably once been a vegetable patch, though it was now overgrown with weeds.
As they stepped through the mud in the dark, Emily looked over at the brightly lit front door that led directly to the grand hall. Rob must have caught her look: ‘Don’t want to make a fuss, eh?’ he said to Emily, by way of explanation. And it was true that if he had carried Midori through the grand hall in front of all their neighbours, there would have been an awful fuss. But he tried the side door and it wouldn’t
open, so then Emily tried it too. As Emily was rattling the handle, without any luck, Midori stirred a little on Rob’s chest, and vomited. But because Rob was pretty quick about setting her down and lying her in the recovery position, and because the vomit had come out in an arc, none of it went on any of them, it just puddled into the grass.
‘She’s pretty crook, eh?’ said Rob.
‘Should I get a doctor?’ said Emily.
‘What about Dr. Muriel?’
Dr. Muriel was a capable woman but she was a doctor of ethics and had no medical training, so far as Emily knew. She might have been the person to ask about whether it was any better to eat a pig than a dog or a toddler, but even if she’d been available to answer the question, this probably wasn’t quite the right time to ask.
‘Midori?’ said Emily. And then again, ‘Midori!’ She said to Rob, ‘I wonder if I should take her to hospital.’
Just then Midori opened her eyes and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and said, ‘Aw. Sorry about that, Rob.’
‘Can you stand up?’ Rob asked her. Midori stood, a little shakily. Rob said,‘This was gonna be your big night.’
‘I know.’
‘Come on, I’ll get you a glass of water and then I’ll walk you home.’
‘Do you want me to come?’ said Emily.
‘No, you’re all right,’ said Rob.
‘It’s OK, Emily,’ Midori said. ‘You stay at the party. I’m gonna go lie down.’
‘What could have made you so ill?’
‘Punch,’ said Midori.
‘You only had two swigs of it.’
‘Well I’m glad I stayed away from it,’ said Rob, ‘because it must be lethal. Mate, it’s really done you in.’
He took his scarf off and put it around Midori’s neck. He took his jacket off and put Midori’s arms into the sleeves as though she was a child who needed help getting ready for school – right arm first, that’s it. Then the left. Midori was shivering. Rob put his arm around her shoulder and steered her towards home.
Emily wandered a little further up around the side of the house, away from the front door. It was quiet here – or at least, though she could hear the music, there was no-one else around – and she was trying to decide whether or not she should go home or stay at the party. She felt she ought to stay and try to enjoy herself now that she didn’t have to go home for Jessie. Dear old Jessie – what would she want Emily to do? Emily heard, then, the sound of a dog whimpering. Now, Emily was an imaginative person but she wasn’t suggestible and she didn’t believe in ghosts. She knew it wasn’t Jessie trying to communicate with her from the afterlife. What was it, then? She decided to investigate.