Fabulous

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  She hadn’t thought about naming the club. She added that to the list.

  Dee-Dee had drawings to show, all done with graphite lines as fine as hairs, on grey-mottled tracing paper. Minos pushed aside the hoof and leant forward to see.

  ‘I want it sophisticated,’ he said.

  ‘Have I ever,’ said Dee-Dee, ‘offered you a proposition that lacked that quality?’

  Minos smirked. Dee-Dee was his fixer. The little man’s cleverness was his to be proud of, even when it stung him. Paz leaned across to look, so that he could feel the warm dampness of her breath on his hands. After all these weeks, she could turn him on as simple as that. Not often he stuck with one that long.

  Dee-Dee talked, and she saw her booths, saw the glass walls that would sparkle with outdoor stars as the lights in the ceiling made stars inside to match them. She saw how the bar curved around the back wall. She saw the stairs leading down to the washrooms. She saw another flight of steps.

  ‘Where’s that go?’ she asked.

  ‘Tunnel to the labyrinth,’ said Minos. ‘You don’t think I’m walking in off the street?’ Minos didn’t like the open air. It upset his breathing for one thing. For another, there were often people looking for him, people he wasn’t keen to meet.

  Cattle-run. Cow-shed. Bull-ring. Beefeater. They liked the idea of calling up the past, and the whiff of meat. In the end, though, they kept it simple. The Cow.

  The red-haired man swam every evening in the tidal pool. Paz wasn’t there often. It was harder for her to stroll off alone down the beach now she had her bodyguard. But she would see him in the town. He was tall, with narrow hips, broad shoulders and a thick neck. He stepped on the balls of his feet, daintily, like a hoofed thing. The Danaans treated him with deference. Minos’s people left him alone. By day he worked in the kebab joint, turning the great lollipops of meat, and slicing fine slivers from them with a knife like a scimitar.

  She went in one day. She knew her minder was uneasy but he was never confident of the extent of his authority over her. Surely a girl could be allowed to choose her own lunch.

  She said yes to peppers but no to onions, and yes to the tahini and garlic sauce. He didn’t look too hard at her. He was exactly courteous. The flatbread was filled, but not overflowing. He wrapped the greaseproof paper around it as though it was a bouquet, fixing it with an ingenious pleat. One of his colleagues was an obstreperous buffoon, always niggling and teasing. She learnt from his banter that the redhead was called Toro. He said very quietly as he handed her the package, ‘The tide will be low tonight at eight forty-five.’

  It was unusual for her to be unready with something to say, but she just took the doner and nodded, and went off out and down to the waterfront to eat it with her legs dangling against the rough concrete of the harbour wall. Way beneath her the rusty wrecked trawler, on which some of Minos’s assets had once tried to escape, broke surface as the tide went out. Minos was out of town.

  Dee-Dee’s villa was symmetrical. It wasn’t that he didn’t like a late-Victorian terraced house, such as those that lined the promenade, their superfluity of volutes and pediments and fancy finials making them look, in their dilapidation, like a reef of bleached coral. On the contrary, he was fond of their over-ornamented facades. He liked the whimsical way their balconies’ little lead canopies turned up at the corners – some apprentice architect’s idea of chinoiserie derived, not from travel, but from looking at willow-pattern teacups. They did very well for others, but for himself he liked a house to be low, and double-fronted, so that when he stood in his hallway the spaces on his left-hand side exactly mirrored those to his right.

  He spent his mornings in the study, whose side-window let in the early sun, and his evenings in the sitting room, which was identical in every way except that the chintz curtains were toile de Jouy with milkmaids and cattle, while those in the study were garlanded with bays. There was a kitchen at the back but he seldom used it. When at home, he subsisted almost entirely on herbal infusions. He liked a steak as much as the next man, but that didn’t mean he wanted to be inhaling the odour of scorched flesh all night and all day.

  Paz chose fennel tea. Nowadays her conversation classes were pretty much indistinguishable from the conversations she and Dee-Dee held elsewhere. His drawing of her seemed to be taking a massively long time, but she didn’t have to hold still for it. He liked to see her on the move. That was cool. She could do conversation class and work out at the same time. Any other man, and she’d have thought he just wanted to ogle her, but Dee-Dee wasn’t like that. You couldn’t imagine him naked. You couldn’t imagine him touching.

  She told him about the redhead. She told him how she thought of the man at night. Sometimes even when Minos was with her, on her, in her. For some reason she was sure that Dee-Dee wouldn’t repeat what she told him. He was Minos’s man but there’s a limit to what a despot can expect from his enabler. He and Passify were the favourites, the baskers in the unreliable warmth of Minos’s favour. They had a bond. Besides, Dee-Dee was an artist. He thought that she was his artefact, his made thing.

  ‘Where do you meet him?’ asked Dee-Dee, applying a charcoal shadow to his depiction of her hair.

  ‘By the tidal pool, mostly. I’m surprised Bruno hasn’t told you.’

  Bruno was the brother who tailed her.

  Dee-Dee was cross-hatching, his pencil as sharp as a bee’s sting.

  ‘He probably has told you, I suppose.’ She was swinging her whole torso up and down, arms spread, wide-winged. There was something liberating about knowing it was impossible to have secrets. It meant indiscretion wasn’t reckless, but inevitable.

  They weren’t assignations, their twilit meetings. Since that first day in the kebab house there’d been no need for either to make a move, to say anything. If she could make it, she was there. He was there always. She’d slip out of her dress and he’d lead her in. He’d swim beneath her while she lightly held his pale shoulders. She discovered what it was to be weightless, to let the water take her.

  Dee-Dee said, ‘I gather he’s quite a dancer. We’ll be needing some of those.’

  And so it came about that Toro was employed as a greeter in The Cow Club.

  Night after night Minos and his favoured associates would come up the steps leading from the labyrinth and sit at the central table. Passify would welcome them, a proper hostess, and slip in beside Minos on the cowhide banquette and put her hand on his thigh. Later she’d leave with him. Later still she’d be back, dancing with Toro, swaying, her wrists crossed behind his powerful neck, her body moving with his as it did in the water. A woman as young as she was doesn’t need much sleep. By the time Minos was heaving himself up to go to the gym she was back in the big bed beside him, and the redhead had dived off the pier end and let the current take him eastward, towards the new sun and his tribe’s territory.

  Paz wasn’t such a fool as to imagine Minos didn’t know. She thought perhaps he might not care. He wasn’t monogamous himself, after all. Lovers are often imprudent, and self-deluding.

  It all seemed to be working out fine, until one morning the following spring Minos put his hand on her bump and said, ‘Big. I wonder how many babies you’ve got in there, huh? And how many of them are mine?’ His smile was neither affectionate nor reassuring. He said, ‘I like my assets to multiply. But you’re out of here by tonight.’ He kept his voice even. He said ‘Scumbag’. He said ‘Whore’.

  The web of tunnels they called the labyrinth had several entrances. It was so constructed that each section could be separately shut down, transforming it into a sequence of traps. People had been living in those burrows since before there was ever a building above ground. They had kept their cattle in the larger caverns on the landward side. They had watched the sea from the passages that debouched into mid-air, halfway up the cliffs above the beach. They had stored dried meat, and hay, and treasure, in the chilly recesses
along the curving walls. There were springs there, where water bubbled up warm and stinking from deep underground, and there was rainwater seeping down from above ground, pooling in basins its flow had carved out from the rock, and running, in grooves it had taken centuries to cut, along the chalky floor.

  Whenever an invasion seemed imminent – the Romans, the Norsemen, the Normans, the Spanish, the Dutch, the French, the Germans – farmers would drive their beasts into the tunnels, and anxious men with weapons would explore the labyrinth looking for possibilities of ambush or undermining. Half a century before Passify came to town a gun had been installed in one of the seaward tunnels, its muzzle pointing out at the horizon through an aperture not much bigger than those in which the sand martins made their nests. It had never been fired. People said it was still loaded. The boatmen never much liked to see its glinting eye pressed to the peephole in the chalk cliff.

  The incomers who lodged in the labyrinth now weren’t marauders. They hadn’t come to torch palisades and drive off livestock. They just wanted a place to live. The labyrinth was the holding centre where Minos’s crews deposited them, and where they were separated and searched and kept, pending decisions as to their future. Most moved on before the following night. Some troublesome cases took longer. Then there were the tunnels full of synthetic mist and artificial light, where the merchandise was farmed. And of course there was Minos’s office, directly under the tower block, where he sat with his scales.

  That’s where Toro was brought. They yanked at his bound arms, and headed him, and when it was night – obeying Minos’s orders – they led him, stumbling under the weight, down the pier to where weeping widows came with their gilded caskets and mass-produced plastic urns. Pay your last respects, they said, jeering. Ashes to ashes. Can you dive, swimmer? They circled around him, prodding and shoving until, in the double darkness inside the bull’s head, Toro was lost and amazed and then they shuffled him to the very edge of the planked floor and he fell and, strong as he was, he was dragged down headfirst to the murky bed.

  The labyrinth was Dee-Dee’s pride. Its ventilation, its multiple closable entrances and isolatable chambers, its complicated hydraulics, its electric lighting powered by heat from the earth’s core drawn up long slender shafts – all of these were the products of his ingenuity. He had overhauled it and put it into commission for Minos and it befitted the man. Dark, oppressive, intimidating. Personally, Dee-Dee preferred something more rococo.

  He had never told Minos about the offshoot of the warren, the grotto that he had found beneath his own villa, and that he had sealed off. A round central chamber with an ivy-wreathed oculus that let in air and dappled light, an encircling gallery. Its walls were encrusted with seashells, not scattered as the sea might have cast them millennia ago, but arranged in complex prissy patterns. There were thousands of shells, perhaps millions. When Dee-Dee first showed it to Passify, months back, she clapped her hands and danced her pleasure in it. Squares and triangles, ovals and spirals, faces with big dark eyes made of mussel shells, bunches of grapes wrought of sea-snails, cornucopias full of flowers each of whose petals was a flawless small powder-pink half-clam.

  ‘Who did it?’ she’d asked. ‘It must have taken ages and ages.’

  ‘Romans, they think,’ said Dee-Dee.

  Its secrecy delighted him. He kept a tallboy pushed up against the entrance door. When Passify came to him sobbing he led her down there. There was a bed with oyster satin cushions, there was a basin made of a giant clamshell. There was no risk of anyone hearing her scream, as she might need to. Fortunately he had made a study of obstetrics. He was confident of being able to do the necessary. He always kept his knives sharp. He liked to keep his mind well-honed too, but he did occasionally allow himself a little mental holiday, wafted to dream destinations by an opiate, so his lacquered bathroom cabinet contained the wherewithal to dull the pains of parturition.

  By morning there were two babies, a boy with hair the colour of a Hereford bullock, and a sleek dark stocky little girl.

  They were found of course. It only took a couple of weeks. Minos came himself, for once, barging into the hallway, sweeping knick-knacks (Georgian brass compass, tortoiseshell ink-stand) off the console table with his beefy elbows. He’d never visited Dee-Dee at home before. The curtains made him laugh. He waved the ‘brothers’ – his brothers now, not Dee-Dee’s – into the little vestibule and while they heaved the furniture about he kept his back turned to his erstwhile right-hand man. Paz came blinking up the steps.

  ‘Got your figure back good and quick,’ said Minos. She didn’t answer.

  A brother brought up the two babies, holding them expertly, one in each crooked arm.

  ‘That’s mine,’ said Minos, and grabbed hold of the girl, lifting her with his big hands under her armpits. Passify flinched as though it was her own body he had snatched at.

  ‘The other one’s yours if you want it,’ he said. ‘Then you’re getting out, the pair of you. You too Dedalus.’

  The girl-baby’s face was red as she squinted at her father, so loud and overbearing. Her hands waved in the air like tiny star-fish. Passify reached for her.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Mine. Fair’s fair. One each.’

  Crying did no good. Pleading got her nowhere. She had no leverage, no counter-offer to make. But how could she leave her little girl, whose scalp smelled of cotton and irises, who’d fall asleep clinging to her finger?

  Minos didn’t want to use force. That would be messy. Paz was, after all, the mother of his child. He offered money, enough to get shot of her. More than enough. But still, there she was, stubborn cow. At last he said, it was almost a joke, but as soon as he’d said it the idea delighted him. ‘Right you are then. If that’s what you want. Double or quits.’

  He was already getting the coin out of his pocket. He handed it to the brother. ‘Heads or tails?’ he said. Passify shut her eyes. It’s the only chance, she thought. Dee-Dee was shaking his head and trying to do something, but what could he possibly do? The gag wrenched his mouth crooked and someone had him in an armlock.

  Passify said ‘Tails’. The brother tossed. Heads it was.

  And so that was it. She wasn’t leaving without her babies. Minos didn’t much care. He took little Arianna to live with him in the tower and he let Paz come every day to take care of her, so long as she got out of the way when he came in at night with one of the newer girls, or two actually, one to keep the baby quiet while he and the other were in the giant bed, making its leather headboard pound the wall like an angry beast.

  Paz would put her copper-headed boy into the buggy, then, and go down in the lift and back to the villa. Dee-Dee had gone Lord knows where. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ he’d said. ‘I can fly.’ He was a weirdo, but he’d been kind to her. He let her live in the villa ‘as caretaker’ he said. He wouldn’t be back, not likely. She made beds for them in the grotto, the only place the boy felt safe.

  When the summer came, she took him down to the tidal pool. Soon he was bold enough to want to swim, and she would launch out into the grey water, the seaweed caressing her belly (not so taut now – no one would ever again want to sketch her as she danced) while he clung to her pale shoulders and butted her with the two little bumps on his forehead. She was glad of what she found in Dee-Dee’s well-stocked bathroom cabinet. It helped with the forgetting.

  There came a time when she needed more of it. She, who had been queen, joined Minos’s sales-team. When the holiday-makers arrived, she’d be there on the promenade, striking up conversations, ‘spreading happiness’, as though she had a superfluity of the stuff to give away.

  JOSEPH

  He loved her from the moment she sidled out of the garden door. She was wearing some kind of hairband with glass beads attached, and a swimming costume in two shades of blue – azure above the waist, indigo below. Not that she actually had a waist. At that age the torso is as smoothly unitary a
s a plum. Her hair was wet. She was barefoot and took little mincing side-to-side steps on the hot paving. She was the most feminine creature he had ever seen, more so even than his grandmother’s cat.

  She took no notice of him until her father told her to say hello to her Uncle Joseph (he wasn’t really her uncle, they were more remotely related) and she held out her hand with no coquetry, as she might have extended it to a door handle – using it to do what needed to be done. Her eyes were at the level of his lowest rib. Her fingers were fat and soft, a little damp, tapering like tiny carrots. He touched them and she said, ‘How do you do?’ and looked past him towards where her baby brother was on all fours, licking pebbles, and then she looked up at him, fleetingly, and her eyes were pale grey, and from that moment Joseph was hers for life, for ever and ever amen.

  He didn’t say anything. He went back to London and carried on with the window-cleaning. He lived in a hostel for his compatriots, on the Harrow Road. In the evening, when the others were watching football in the canteen, he walked for miles, learning the city, looking for the perfect place to bring her home to. There was a short street going nowhere, just linking two others, with an apple tree growing from a gap in the pavement. The tree was older, he could tell, than the pavement, older than the gabled brick houses. In April the blossom covered it sumptuously. In September it scattered apples across the tarmac, each with one brilliant scarlet cheek.

  In the sixth year after he’d found it he was picking up the apples, as he liked to do, when a man about his age came by. Joseph had seen him before. The man went for a run, every night and every morning, wearing special clothes for running in and carrying a special plastic bottle. He said, ‘I’ve never tried eating them – what are they like?’