Fabulous

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  As I said, there are things from which I have chosen to avert my eyes, though they are – in a very profound and distressing sense – my own. Promiscuous looking – idly curious, lubricious, or simply appreciative – I see it as a pernicious liberty to take.

  Diana called us in one by one. We were all intimidated by her, but we didn’t fully have her measure. We mistook her reserve for uptightness. She didn’t muck in, so we tended to ignore her, deferring instead to her chosen deputies, Acton among them. We hadn’t really understood how she’d run us. Now she showed her power.

  She handed us teeth. She stroked our fingers until the claws grew. She stiffened our jaws until they clenched like pliers. She lengthened our spines and hardened our skulls and made our eyes into laser guns and our noses into missiles. She growled at us until we growled back, maddened by our own subservience. She let it be known that we were her pack now, and there was to be no mercy for mavericks. She invoked Rokesmith and the likely consequences of his displeasure – should anything go wrong in that direction – for our end-of-year bonuses. I squirmed and whined. I’m not proud of the way I behaved that week, the tales I bore to Diana as though they were duck she’d shot down and I was her retriever, the confidences I betrayed, the mean little niggling ways in which I tried to tell her that it was her hand I wanted fondling my ears and rubbing my tummy when I’d pleased her, that it would be her voice I obeyed when it told me to go fetch.

  She said that Rokesmith had found a buyer for the penthouse. ‘Thanks to Eliza,’ she said. ‘Yes, she’s back in Sales. She’ll be heading up the team from next week.’ We got the picture.

  Acton didn’t come in on Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday, but Friday he was there again. ‘There’ll be one last party,’ said Diana. ‘In the penthouse. Before completion. Tomorrow in fact.’ When Rokesmith wanted something done, the lawyers got a move on.

  Diana wasn’t there herself. She didn’t work weekends. Saturdays, she was in Richmond Park with her other hounds. She didn’t need to be present in person. She’d trained and instructed and starved us, and she’d showed us the lure with Acton’s scent on it.

  It began with teasing. Acton was very smartly turned out. He wore one of those tight-buttoned shortish jackets that set off the amplitude of a man’s backside. All the better to sink your teeth into.

  We all knew that one of the kids had been found dead in the gasworks. Overdose. You could have seen it coming. No one’s fault but her own, but still … We made jokes about gas masks and gaslight and gas chambers. They weren’t funny jokes. They weren’t meant to be. Acton laughed anyway. He was full of bonhomie. He could always turn it on.

  He was onto the third caipirinha when he sensed the shift. He said something disparaging about a client, one we’d all had to deal with, one of those time-wasters whose idea of Saturday-morning fun is to go sightseeing around property way out of their price range. We didn’t laugh. It wasn’t that we liked the woman – she treated us all like she’d learnt at her mother’s knee that all estate agents are dishonest spivs whose vocabulary is risibly limited to words like ‘comprising’ and ‘utility room’. It wasn’t because we’d never jeered at her ourselves that we denied him his laugh. We kept quiet because we were all pointing, every sinew tight, each right-side forefoot lifted ready and each muzzle trained on the chosen prey.

  Acton put his drink down and his eyes swivelled a bit. He struggled on with his anecdote. He mentioned a shower attachment. He uttered the words en suite. It was as though it was a code word, a command like Attaboy or Rats. Beneath our summer-weight jackets our hackles rose. We crowded him. We barged and jostled. We made a half-circle with Acton as Piggy-in-the-Middle, hemmed in, with the glass panels behind him, and behind them nothing but the purple air.

  Mr Rokesmith seemed to rather relish the media coverage of Acton’s plummet, and of the party preceding it. An orgy, they called it, which was absurd. It’s not as though anyone’s clothes were off. ‘No harm done,’ said Rokesmith, ‘apart from the demise of your young friend. Sorry about that. Smart fellow.’

  The sale went ahead. Contracts had been exchanged, after all. People who want to live on that stretch of river like to be reminded of the East End of their imagination, of opium dens and mutilated prostitutes and Ronnie Kray saying, ‘Have a word with the gentleman outside, would you, Reg?’ If you want Kensington, you know where to find it. But Wapping, well, it’s got a bit of a frisson, hasn’t it? Even if rowdiness at an estate agents’ office party doesn’t quite cut it in the glamour-of-evil stakes.

  Diana assured the police we were all exemplary beings – docile, obedient, team-spirited. We weren’t charged with anything. We were good boys. We got our bonuses.

  She still calls us her pack. We are still let out for exercise at lunchtime. We run together along the Embankment. Our muscles work fluidly beneath our elastic skins. We keep our heads low and our weight well forward. The little gizmos slung around our necks allow her to find us swiftly should we stray.

  Our eyes switch sideways to check each other’s proximity – we don’t like to be isolated. We know the hindermost and the leader are both easy prey. Acton was our leader once. Look what happened to him.

  PSYCHE

  There was once a young woman whom no one wanted to touch. It’s not that she was ugly. No. The problem was that she was too beautiful by far.

  Her skin was as smooth and matt as crêpe de Chine. You wouldn’t want to stroke her cheek for fear of rumpling it. Her hair was as lustrous as falling water and as black as squid ink. If you ran your fingers through it – or so the young men thought as they watched her walking to the library – you’d be afraid they’d come away coated in darkness or cut as by a million tiny wires.

  She walked always with her shoulders back. Her hips swayed around the invisible plumb line which dropped from the crown of her head. Her centre of gravity was high, but securely poised. You couldn’t really picture yourself tumbling onto a mattress, giggling, with a girl like that.

  You couldn’t see yourself kissing her, either, or blowing raspberries on her naked belly, or sucking her toes.

  She was called Psyche.

  Her parents were proud of her, but not as pleased as they supposed they ought to be. Their friends said, ‘You know what they’re like. I never know how many I’m cooking for.’ They said, ‘I haven’t seen him for days, hardly. He’s always in his room with that creepy friend of his. I’ve no idea what they do up there.’ They said, ‘She’s dyslexic.’ ‘He’s dyspraxic.’ ‘She’s anorexic.’ ‘We’ve tried counselling.’ They said, ‘I think they should do their own washing, don’t you? But you know. Sometimes, the smell …’ They said, ‘You’ve got to let them do it their own way, haven’t you?’

  Psyche’s parents kept quiet. They really had nothing to complain about. Sometimes, at night, though, one of them would say, ‘Do you think Psyche’s all right? I mean, really?’ and the other would look out of the window, or pick a towel up off the floor, or neatly square off a pile of books, and then say, ‘Well, we’ve no reason to suppose that she isn’t, have we?’

  They hadn’t. No reason at all. There was nothing wrong with Psyche. She was no trouble. It was just a bit funny the way that she had no friends.

  The boys of the town were offended. They didn’t like a young woman to be so negligent of them. They swaggered about, these boys, their hair falling forward over their eyes, their tight trousers puckering around their ankles. Their boots were scuffed. Silver studs gleamed in their nostrils and gold hoops in their ears. They looked like desperadoes, but they were very easily upset.

  The war memorial was their place. In the mornings they’d stand around it. They turned their collars up and smoked. Or they sat on the steps and ate bacon sandwiches, holding them carefully with both hands so that the brown sauce wouldn’t run out. They’d talk chorically, each one addressing all the others, each one adding a detail to the story they were telling t
hemselves, mumbling, catching no one’s eye, with occasional barks of laughter. Then they’d scatter, to do whatever they each did by day, and when it was nearly dark they’d be back, waiting for the story to progress, waiting for the night’s episode to unfold.

  Psyche saw them when she came out of the library. She said hello, pleasantly, to the ones she’d known at school, and walked on by.

  The other young women passed in pairs or gaggles. They went noisily away up the side streets to shop for lip-balm or tights, or they settled in flocks around the tin tables outside the bar. They sat on each other’s laps when the chairs were all taken, and shared each other’s drinks – three, four, five straws converging in tall glasses full of ice-cubes and sliced fruit. They looked at the boys. The boys kept talking, and fiddled with their cigarette lighters. After a while one – the one whose leather jacket looked old and soft, its blackness whitened by scars – walked over to two girls coming back into the square with carrier bags, and he put his arm across the tall one’s shoulders, and her friend took her carrier bags without being asked, and the tall girl and the boy went away towards the river. That was the beginning of the night.

  Psyche was at home. She had supper with her parents and her sister and her sister’s fiancé. They ate fish pie with broccoli. Then she went up to her room. She sat in the rocking chair that her mother had sat in to nurse her when she was a baby and, because she had been reading all day and needed to use another part of her mind, she put on her headphones so as not to disturb anyone and listened to a couple of Bach partitas while she did some petit point.

  A boy called Crispin said, ‘That girl who comes out of the library every time? The one with the black hair? Where does she go off to?’

  The boy he’d asked said, ‘Fuck her. Who cares? Who’s bothered? Who needs her?’

  Crispin said, ‘I just wondered, is all.’ He went home early that night. It felt a bit boring in the square.

  When Psyche’s sister got married the boys all got together in a corner of the marquee and made a plan. They were uncomfortable in their hired or borrowed suits but each one of them secretly thought he looked pretty sharp. None of them wanted to get married, not for a long while, but there’s something about a wedding. Not just the booze. The bride in all that lace and filmy stuff, the groom looking solemn, the kissing. It’s just weird, one of them said. All these aunts and uncles and the teacher from primary school and Psyche’s sister’s boss and her husband who was in the police force – they’d all come to celebrate two people getting it on. It was so blatant, so embarrassing. The air quavered and pulsed with eroticism. Even the little bridesmaids were flushed and jumpy. It put the boys on edge.

  Psyche wasn’t a bridesmaid. She’d said thank you, what an honour, but if her sister didn’t mind she’d rather be in the pew with the rest of the family, and that way she could make sure Granny was all right, and wouldn’t it be sweet if the bridal procession was all made up of their pretty little cousins. Secretly, her sister was relieved. She’d been thinking pearl-grey for Psyche, but she knew that even if you wrapped her up in fog she would still dominate the picture.

  Crispin had a cousin who was an embarrassment to him. Mackeson, he was called. He didn’t talk much. From a distance Mackeson looked superb – tall, broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped, a sculpted totem of virility. When you came close though, you could smell his breath and see how his irises slid around in their yellow whites. When he was younger he used to wait under the holly bush by the jink in the road near the old chapel and if a woman came by on her own he’d jump out and grab her breasts and twist them. He stopped doing that after he was beaten up by Iris the baker’s girl’s brothers. Now he worked in the garage. Most of the young women of the town knew to stay away from him. Sometimes, at night, people in the house where he had a basement room would hear his muttering punctuated by a hoarse, retching groan.

  Mackeson was at the wedding, his thick hair slicked down, in a decent grey suit. His biceps distorted the shape of the sleeves so that they rode up and looked too short for him. His hands, which were large and pale, were frightening to see. Because he was a bit older, too old to have been at school with her, and because she never listened to gossip, Psyche didn’t know about him. She saw that he was standing alone and when he stared at her she went up to him kindly and asked him was he a friend of the groom’s? That’s when the boys made their plan.

  They wouldn’t have to tell Mackeson what he was to do. Rape came naturally to him. They just needed to provide an opportunity.

  Afterwards they all felt ashamed of themselves. They weren’t bad boys, and not one of them had ever forced himself on a girl. Not really. Sometimes you couldn’t be sure whether they wanted it or not. But not really. Not forced as such. It was all a kind of joke. The thing was that Psyche was so serious about everything. For fuck’s sake, couldn’t she see it was a joke?

  Crispin wasn’t told about the plan. That was crucial.

  One day, in the week following the wedding, Crispin wasn’t at the war memorial, not in the evening when everyone else was there. He’d been in the square earlier, at lunchtime. He worked weekends at the hospital, so he got Thursdays off. He sat on the steps by himself from eleven thirty until three. There were some kids around, bare-kneed boys who should surely have been in school. They were kicking about under the plane-trees. People having lunch in the café looked at Crispin curiously but there was nothing remarkable to see apart from the cleanness of his white shirt and the quickness of his hands as they flickered over his travelling chess set. He waited, and he sang to himself. At three he thought she’s not coming out, and he went into the library, and there was Psyche, wearing glasses, and although he’d known perfectly well he’d see her there he was shocked by the joy her presence brought him.

  He went up and sat sideways on the edge of her desk, and fiddled with a stapler, while the chief librarian looked quizzically at him.

  ‘I was waiting outside,’ he said. ‘I thought we might have gone for a walk on your break.’ Psyche made a little shooing movement with her hands and he stood up properly and faced her.

  The chief librarian said, ‘Psyche didn’t take a break today. We’re re-shelving Biography D to F and we thought if we stopped we’d get confused.’ He was a kind man and he worried about Psyche’s dedication to her work almost as much as he welcomed and exploited it. He said, ‘I brought in flapjack so we wouldn’t starve. But even so …’ He said, ‘Why don’t you take that walk now, Psyche? You’re owed a couple of hours off, after all.’

  The summer was nearly over and the light flew horizontally, lighting up the undersides of the pigeons swooping over the square. Mauve, rose-pink and cloudy greys. When Crispin looked at Psyche the low sun was in his eyes and there were rainbows in his lashes and all he saw of her was a kind of glory. When Psyche looked at him she saw curls and curves. She saw skin pale and blue-shaded as mother-of-pearl, and a mouth as red and sensitive as a sea-anemone. She smelt Knight’s Castile soap, the kind her father used, a smell that that was neither feminine nor medicinal, that was simply the scent of cleanliness. She knew he was besotted with her. The signs were familiar. Sometimes her suitors annoyed her. Sometimes she was afraid of them. But this time she felt only a wistful tenderness. He looked so young!

  What Crispin didn’t know was that he was bait. The schoolboys who’d been mooching around in the square were lookouts. They had been posted there by their big brothers. They took it in turns to drop into the barber’s shop where one of the big brothers worked, to report developments. He’s still just sitting there – what a loser. Still there. Still there. He’s eating an apple. He’s playing a board game all by himself. Still there. He’s gone into the library – about fucking time. He’s come out with that girl, the long-haired one. They’re buying chips. They’re going towards the river. They’re leaning against the wall. They’re still just standing there. He’s hopping around and doing all the talking and she’s just l
ooking at him. No. They’re off. They’re going towards the bridge. They’re under the bridge.

  Under the bridge, the footpath dwindled to a slimy ledge with only a rusted iron railing to save one from slipping. It was noisy there, the river compressed into a narrow channel and its roar echoing off the black brick vaults. Psyche thought it was marvellous that the bridge-builders had been as careful of the grandeur of this underspace as they were of the handsome stone parapet above. Psyche appreciated scrupulous workmanship. She responded to symmetry. She sometimes thought of training as an engineer. She scarcely noticed the schoolboy whistling a signal behind them. It was at least six seconds after Crispin had spotted them, with dread, that she noticed the three people who had appeared, as though from nowhere, on the narrow walkway ahead.

  Crispin pushed gallantly ahead to protect her. He couldn’t tell for certain, because of the darkness down there, and the balaclavas, who they were, but he could make a pretty good guess. When he smelt the breath of the one who tripped him and slid him into the water, he knew it was Mackeson. As the river tumbled him away he saw the other two yank Psyche off her feet and then hoick her up, one taking her legs and the other her arms, and carry her at a run into the side-tunnel that led along secret passageways to – what? Nobody knew, because when they were little the local children were too scared to explore, and by the time they were bigger they no longer cared.

  Psyche wasn’t calm exactly, but she was surprised to find that the mind can keep coming up with ideas and observations even in situations of bewilderment and peril. She had seen Crispin borne away, so there was no point shouting for him. Suspended as she was she couldn’t do anything to save herself. She could speak though, so she asked the obvious questions – what are you doing where are you taking me who are you anyway why – not so much because she expected answers as because speech is orderly and rational and might help to counter the violence that had broken over her tidy life.