Fabulous

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  Passify didn’t sit with the other girls. Minos was king of this town, as he frequently told her, and she was his consort, and the role imposed a certain decorum. Anyway. She didn’t particularly want to lie down, there with everybody else, not now she had a bedroom with a gigantic bed in it.

  The main beach wasn’t her favourite. There were little hopping things that lived in holes in the sand. The rotting seaweed trapped inside the harbour arm smelled rank. It bothered her to see Minos’s people – she knew them all – moving through the evening crowd. They looked like everybody else, but they were secretly inauthentic – not really as friendly as they seemed, nor as aimless, nor as carefree.

  She could see one leaning on the railing next to one of the Danaans. She knew how it would go. All right? Yeah. Been here long? Not so long, no. Got a job? No, no, no job. You in a doss, are you? Pardon? On the Broadstairs road, like one of those hostels? Yeah. Grim … Here’s something to cheer you up. And so it went on.

  The tide was going out and she could walk all the way she wanted to go on the wet sand, the ridges chilly against her bare soles. She passed beneath the pier, its undersides slimy. Minos had plans for it. He and Dee-Dee talked about it all the time. New amusements, fish-and-chips of course and those cut-outs you stick your head through for photos, and on the end a swank restaurant where honeymoon couples could eat lobster and look at the sea all around, like they were taking a cruise. There’d be a special place, he said, where people could scatter their loved ones’ ashes into the water – for a consideration. ‘Like walking the plank,’ he said. ‘You go down the pier, and you don’t ever come back.’ He was the handsomest man she’d ever kissed, but she didn’t kid herself he was kind.

  It was dusk by the time she reached the tidal pool. The sea had withdrawn, leaving it a blank rectangle, contained by concrete walls and laid, neat and sharp-edged, among the whorls and encrustations of rock and weed and sand. A man was swimming there alone. From a way off she could see his head, in a red rubber swimming cap, bobbing up and down as he made his way steadily from wall to wall. Swimming lengths. How dreary and dutiful, when the water he swam in had been so lately a part of the churning immensity of the sea. He stood – the water was shallow. He was naked but for his cap and he pulled that off and shook out thick hair almost as red. Paz stood still. He put his clothes on fast and went lightly up the long flight of cliff-steps.

  Paz hitched up her skirt and walked in. The lights were coming on. The water around her knees was black and mirror-smooth but, as she disturbed it, it flashed back up at her the lights to which her back was turned. Electric pink electric blue electric green. She waded up and down until the stars came out, singing softly to herself.

  Minos said, ‘Don’t be caught down the East End once it’s dark.’ She thought he was paranoid, but that was OK, she could go along with it. This time, though, she’d forgotten, or forgotten to care. As she passed the mouth of the gully that led inland, she saw something going on beneath a street-light. Something with an enormous head was lurching there. Going back and forth with arms – forelegs – swinging low. There were two people, standing back and laughing. She thought they wouldn’t see her but she remembered how luminous the sea was at night and she froze. The creature stumbled. She saw horns. Its great head seemed to drag it down. Its hind legs were tremulous. It collapsed to the ground and the men stopped their laughing and strolled out of the dark and began to kick it in the belly and the back.

  Passify waited for them to be well and truly gone. By the time she waded out through the seaweed at the water’s edge her thighs were numb and her toes spongy. She went up the cliff-steps two at a time and took a bus back to the tower where she lived with Minos. Top floor. He liked to be able to look down on the town from above, like a general mounted upon an eminence, surveying the field of victories to come.

  Dee-Dee took his breakfast every day in the café between Wonderland and the tower block. It had square plates. He liked the perversity of that. He ate square food. Toast with crusts trimmed off neatly. Sloppy things like scrambled eggs or beans, yes, but always rectified by the toast. The plates were matt black. That was pleasing too.

  Paz came in. Minos, at this hour, would be in the gym so she often joined his lieutenant, her face pale and damp-looking from newly applied make-up. She ate square food too. Plastic pots of yoghurt with viscid pureed fruit in triangular reservoirs in their corners.

  It was Dee-Dee who had first noticed her. She was as grubby as the rest of the batch when they staggered out of the van, stiff and clumsy as new-born calves. He sent one of the brothers to bring her over to him and she said, ‘How much will you give me for it?’ Her English wasn’t bad at all. He shook his head and said, ‘It’s not like that this time.’

  He drove her back to his villa that night. It interested him how little she seemed to care about being separated from her companions. They’d be down in the tunnels by morning, growing pale under the grow-lights, those that weren’t chosen for an induction. He walked her up to the bathroom and he left her there until he realised she had fallen asleep in the bath and he went in through the concealed door, the one at the back of the wardrobe, and for a long time he looked at her, at the blueness of the veins in her breasts and her eyelids, and the fragility of her bones. He got the boys to carry her to the other bedroom and he let her stay there for a night and a day, before he fed her and dressed her and took her to Minos, as a cat brings a dead mouse and lays it on the owner’s doormat.

  Not that she was dead, far from it. Minos was appreciative.

  She said, ‘I saw something weird along by the tidal pool last night.’

  Dee-Dee had heard about that incident. Somebody had forgotten the demarcation lines, and needed reminding. He said, ‘You don’t want to be down that way on your own.’

  She said, ‘The Danaans. There’s quite a few of them with red hair, yeah?’

  Dee-Dee said, ‘Were you swimming?’

  ‘Come on. You know I can’t. I was just there. There was a man with like a giant furry turban on his head.’

  Dee-Dee arranged his knife and fork, parallel, at a precise forty-five-degree angle to the side of his plate.

  Paz had been with Minos nearly eleven weeks. She was used to being told there were things she didn’t need to bother herself with. She didn’t really expect any answers. She said, ‘And something sticking out of it. It was like he had horns.’

  Dee-Dee got up and went out the door and made a phone call while she watched him through the plate-glass window, pacing and gesticulating. He came back and sat down opposite her and said, ‘Minos and me – we’ve got to take care of you. We’ve got plans for you. Did he say? You’re going to be running the new club back of town.’

  It was what she’d always wanted, a place, glittery and bustling, where she could queen it. When she left the café she saw at once that Dee-Dee’s brother was following her – she wasn’t a fool. It was worth it, probably. Gain your heart’s desire: lose your freedom. That’s the story, always has been. She went back up to the flat. Minos frequently came out of the gym wanting what he called a ‘warm-down’ and he wouldn’t be pleased if she wasn’t there. Minos’s displeasure was often expressed in carnal and distressing ways, and Passify valued her teeth, her straight and dainty nose, her china-smooth complexion.

  Later, maybe, after her English lesson, she’d go back to the tidal pool. Surveillance didn’t really bother her. Secrets, privacy, they had no particular value. She’d already disappeared more than once. Being known, being noticed, that’s what kept you safe.

  People washed in and out of the town, and while they were there they were Minos’s. They arrived by various means and by diverse routes. It wouldn’t do to repeat oneself. One of the boats came ashore on the Ness in the south of the county, and an alarm was raised, and the nuclear power station there bellowed like a gigantic cow in labour while the security guards staggered over the shingle, the beams
of their flashlights criss-crossing while the cargo flattened themselves in declivities in the marsh until it was time to crawl to the road where the van was waiting.

  They all made it, that lot. Not everybody did. Night-time navigation wasn’t easy, what with the currents along that stretch of coast. The agents told them and told them they needed to go empty-handed but they wouldn’t sodding listen, would they. If you’ve got to swim for it, you need your hands free. Even the smallest backpack could drag you down.

  The ones who got to Minos’s town were put to use, and they were grateful for it. They’d better be. They didn’t have a lot of choice. It wasn’t cheap bringing them over, as Dee-Dee was frequently obliged to remind them. They had debts to repay. The young women worked in the nail parlours, and they worked (different sort of work) in the parlours’ backrooms as well. The men worked down in the tunnels, and weekends they ‘spread happiness’, as Dee-Dee put it. Week in week out, they were Minos’s warriors, fighting with the Danaans for control of the town. When someone crossed a line they’d put the head on him, the manky great bull’s head that used to hang in the pub.

  The water-meadows inland nourished tremendous cattle. The publican had had the head off his granddad, whose prize bull’s it had been. The great brute had once thought with that head and eaten with it and lowered it and swung it and terrified anyone who came near. Now it was hollowed inside. It was heavy. A man could breathe with the head on, but he couldn’t lift it off without help and he couldn’t eat or drink. Minos found it amusing to watch someone who’d been headed staggering and failing. Passify was right – he wasn’t a kind man.

  It was Dee-Dee who gave Paz her lessons in English conversation. ‘What do you want to talk about?’ he’d say, and she’d blather on while he sat drawing her, looking at her very intently but as though she was not actually a human being but an architectural element. His drawings were minutely detailed. He was a finicking man. She was not fooled by his apparent abstraction. She knew he wanted to know everything about her, and she let him have it because no one that she could remember had ever been so interested in her before.

  They talked about the club.

  ‘Where I worked in Rotterdam there were mirrors in the floor even,’ she said. The journey to this place could be long and tortuous.

  ‘That,’ said Dee-Dee, ‘is crass. We’re aiming for elegance here. We’re talking sophisticated.’

  ‘I like a mirrored ceiling, though,’ she said, ‘that makes you feel high before you’ve started. And there’s all the twinkling and flashing coming at you double.’

  Dee-Dee made a note. ‘I’ve never seen you dance,’ he said.

  ‘I’d dance for you,’ she said.

  ‘Keep talking,’ he said. So she told him about how she’d dance with her little brothers, holding them up to her face and kissing their fat cheeks, and how they laughed until they got hiccups. She told him how her mother would call out to her to be careful, not to make them throw up, to stay away from the well. ‘Never would she say, “I’m glad they love you. I’m glad you give them a good time.” Always “Watch out for this. Careful of that.” She didn’t like me very much.’

  ‘Is that why you left home?’ asked Dee-Dee, holding up his pencil and squinting at her.

  Paz scratched at her hair as she did when she was annoyed. ‘What do you think,’ she said. ‘You think I’ve come all this way just because my mum was cold to me?’

  She wondered where her family had ended up after the Minoan agents took her.

  Dee-Dee said, ‘You’ve been down the labyrinth?’

  She had.

  The proposal that the Minoans made was carefully judged. They didn’t lie. People in the part of the world where they trawled for fresh flesh weren’t going to believe in offers of uncontested immigration and free housing and a decent job. None of that was going to happen, and most of them knew it. They had friends, uncles, people who’d gone before. They weren’t fools. They were, on the other hand, desperate. ‘We’ll get you in,’ said Minos’s agents. ‘But we’re not magicians. Work permit, refugee status, benefits – no. Once you’re in you can work on that stuff – not our department. But we can use you. Your choice. No obligation. We can use you, and if we do, we take care of you. A place to sleep, some of your own people to work with. And we have an arrangement in place. You won’t be bothered by immigration enforcement. Nice to know, don’t you think?’

  Dee-Dee looked them all over, the young women that got through. They didn’t need to look like Helen of Troy, but a certain standard had to be maintained. He got the ones he trusted to take the new recruits in hand. Haircuts, heels, dietary advice. Most of them had been living off some kind of porridge for years, and it showed. He planned the menus in the dormitory. He wouldn’t have wanted to eat like that, personally, but he saw to it that it was nutritious. He got them dancing in the backrooms. He observed the way vanity and exercise put a shine on them.

  Once they were ready for work they were brought to meet Minos for an induction. The girls very seldom complained, though one or two of the younger ones, each time, needed a slap. That’s how Paz had met Minos, being inducted, she and half a dozen others that night. She often thought, what if she hadn’t been picked for him. What if she’d ended up with one of the brothers. She wouldn’t have been protected like she had been ever since. She’d have gone the way, likely, of the girls who tried to make it to the city, walking up the railway tracks. There’d been an almighty hullaballoo when one of them was found. She’d been headed. The local woman who reported it kept saying, ‘I couldn’t believe it. I thought I was hallucinating.’ It was her dog who’d found the girl, sprawled on the embankment, the heavy hairy head dragging her neck into an unsustainable bend.

  ‘She made a tragic mistake,’ said Dee-Dee to the other girls. ‘Don’t go doing the same, will you. If you’re not happy, you need to tell your Uncle Dee-Dee about it. I’m here for you.’ The girls didn’t say anything. One of them was kid sister to the one who’d gone. Her face was blotched mauve. After the month-end party in the tunnels she walked out to sea, wading nearly a mile through the shallow beige water until at last her feet drifted away from beneath her. The current threw her back on the beach at Ramsgate. ‘Silly cow,’ said the heftiest of Dee-Dee’s brothers.

  Back when the town was a fashionable resort, when, at tea-time, in the terraces along the front, professional men and their families would listen to the wireless as they ate jam sandwiches at tables set in the bay windows, and when, at dusk, the brass band would play medleys of patriotic songs, back then, at least once a week, a procession of sacrificial victims would enter the town in the still of dawn. The grazing on the water-meadows inland was lush. Raising beef made sense.

  The young cattle all looked pretty much the same. Neat pointed hooves, silky pelts, long pale eyelashes, ears so pinky-clean and soft-looking you’d want to stroke them against your cheek. Before they were weaned they were skittish and playful. Their mothers, no – it’s hard work being a cow. Eating enough to sustain your bulk is a full-time occupation. The painfully angled haunches testified to the impossibility of the task they were called upon daily to perform. There was no cladding that knobbly skeleton with fat on a diet of grass alone. But while the dams doggedly ate, their milk-fed young had time to caper, to jump with all four feet together when startled by seagulls, to race in packs, bucking and skittering, from one end of the meadow to the other, male and female together.

  Once they were grown, though, their destinies divided. The heifers were let be. They would grow old, or old enough to calve a few times at least, but the bullocks’ bodies, rounded and taut with muscle, had been nurtured for another purpose. When the call-up came they went willingly, unsuspecting.

  The drovers used lorries mostly, but of a summer’s night they’d sometimes still take the steers along the green roads through the marshes, slapping at the midges, chirruping and growling at stragglers as they c
oaxed the herd towards the yellow glare of the town, while a barn owl, unperturbed by the small noises they made, sailed back and forth across the thistley ground, serenely intent on killing.

  It was important to get the animals into the yards at the back of the town, and get the business over with, before people were stirring. No one likes thinking too much about that which has to be done before a fellow can sit down to carve a nice bit of topside for his family, with cabbage and horseradish and Yorkshire pud.

  ‘Slaughterhouse,’ said Minos. ‘Are you joking me?’

  ‘I’m not proposing you should call the club that,’ said Dee-Dee. ‘I’m just informing you of the building’s previous function.’

  Paz was with them. She had made a list, but she didn’t expect answers to that many of her questions. Back home she’d helped her mother manage a taverna. Her mother’s memory was perfect, because she’d had to rely on it all her life, but Passify could write down the orders and add up the bills. The foreign customers seemed to like that. A list gave one clarity, and a sense of control.

  Décor – purple and silver? Wait-staff uniforms same.

  Booths – essential

  Products for the toilets. Room-fragrance.

  Music – DJs – got to pace the night

  Lighting *****

  Backrooms clean – plenty of tissues

  Happy hour

  The stars beside the word ‘lighting’ (she knew that was key) were tiny and neat. When she was first given a pencil she’d spent hours drawing stars on discarded brown paper bags. She could do stars five different ways. Not a particularly useful skill, but she’d acquired it.