So there were Apollo and Aphrodite, and Artemis, who was rather more of a hands-on boss than Alice was used to, and Eros and Hermes, both of whom looked at her with a good deal more curiosity than she was comfortable with, and Ares, who always put her in a bad mood for some reason, and Hephaestus, who was so very ugly that she felt sick every time she saw him and this made her feel like the cruelest, most shallow person alive, and she always wanted to say nice things to him so that he wouldn’t realize what she was thinking, and she couldn’t, because he never spoke to her first, and Dionysus, who made her nervous because he was always drunk, and the other two women, Athena and Demeter, who ignored her so completely that it was almost like noticing her—all of these people who were so perplexing and whom she couldn’t talk about. She tried not to judge them; they were Greek, after all, and all families had their own ways. She was sure outsiders would find her family equally odd; her parents often ate cereal in the afternoons, and sometimes they would spend an entire day speaking only French, just to practice. And yet there was something about this family that filled her up, and, forbidden and unable as she was to find any way to let them out, they became like a wall inside her. And Neil was on the other side.
She looked at him over the table in the café just as he was looking back at her, and she thought she saw the beginning of suspicion in his eyes. And even as she opened her mouth to tell him all about the family—who cared about the rules—the words seemed to die on her tongue, and even as she resolved that on Monday she would hand in her notice, she knew that she would stay there for as long as they wanted her to.
14
“SO, WHAT DO you think?”
The corners of the estate agent’s mouth were both pointing upward, so Artemis assumed that he must be smiling, but she couldn’t understand what there was to smile about.
“Is this it?” she said.
“No, no, of course not.”
The corners of the estate agent’s mouth yanked upward again, and he straightened his tie. Artemis noticed a line of peachy beige foundation forming a circular stain around the collar of his shirt.
“There’s the bathroom as well. Which I already showed you.”
“Was that a room?” said Artemis.
When the estate agent had unlocked the grille that shielded the front door—to protect the occupant of the flat, wondered Artemis, or the other inhabitants of the listing, drafty block?—and forced open the door itself, gouging yet more out of the black crescent scoring the peeling, patterned “vintage” (according to the agent) linoleum, they had stumbled straight into an entrance hall that featured—was this normal for mortals?—a limescale-encrusted toilet and a moldy, dripping shower.
“Think of it more as an atrium,” suggested the estate agent.
Artemis pulled aside the faded floral curtain on the one cracked window. Down below in the car park, she watched as a group of schoolchildren kicked a smaller child who was lying curled up on the ground in front of them, shielding its head with its hands. She dropped the curtain.
“Does the flat have any outdoor space?”
“There’s the—ah—communal courtyard,” said the agent.
At the expression of interest on Artemis’s face, he indicated the window.
“Oh,” said Artemis.
She took another look behind the curtain. One of the children had detached itself from the group and was now filming the proceedings on its phone.
“What about pets?” said Artemis. “Could I have a dog?”
The agent glanced around the room. There was only a tiny strip of floor between the single bed, the three-legged chipped-veneer wardrobe, the stainless steel sink, and the almost-straight shelf that held up the microwave and the electric hot plate.
“Pets,” he confessed, “are forbidden in the lease. The damage they cause . . . It reduces the value of the property. Although,” he added, with optimism that belied the death in his eyes, “I’m sure you could have a goldfish without any objections. Or a budgie. So long as you kept it in its cage.”
“I’m really looking for somewhere I could keep a dog,” said Artemis. “A big dog. Somewhere with a garden it could run around in?”
The corners of the real estate agent’s mouth faltered.
“I, ah,” he said. “I fear that might be . . . on the amount of rent that you’re quoting me . . . unless you were able to find a small amount more . . . I would describe it as . . .”
“Difficult?” said Artemis.
“An impossibility.”
When she got home, Artemis couldn’t face the house, this place that seemed doomed to be her home, so she went straight out into the garden. Outside, she found Demeter, who, as goddess of the earth and fertility, naturally took care of the plants. In a wide-brimmed hat and gardening gloves, carrying a small trowel and fork, she was examining the bushes and flowers that filled the beds edging the unsatisfactory scrap of lawn.
Ignoring her, Artemis lay facedown on the grass and shut her eyes. It was too cold, really, to be outside, but right now this was all she could cope with. The hard points of the grass stems prickled her face like tiny needles. She breathed in. The earth smelled cold and metallic, the sun’s rays still too weak to sweeten it. The grass, though, smelled fresh and wet and bright. The ground held her body. It’s not so bad here, she tried to tell herself. It’s not so bad. From the house, though, she could hear the sound of raised voices, Aphrodite and Eros having an argument, as they seemed to do with increasing frequency of late. Aphrodite yelling, Eros growling defensively. And then, on cue, the sound of shattering crockery. Artemis tried, with little success, to blank it out, to pretend it had nothing to do with her, but she couldn’t. A wave of misery washed over her. It didn’t look as if she was going to be getting her own place any time soon. She was stuck with them all. Maybe she could pitch a tent and live out here.
Suddenly Artemis heard screaming from much closer by. Her eyes were open and she was on her feet in a split second. She looked around to see who was being hurt and whether she should defend them or join in. It was Demeter. She was standing at the back of the garden, where a high yellow brick wall divided it from the neighboring plot. She had her back to Artemis and, after her scream, had broken into racking, dry sobs, her shoulders heaving like the spasms of a vomiting cat. Artemis ran over.
“What happened? What’s going on? Are you—”
Artemis couldn’t finish—ill, hurt—the suggestions were terrifying, impossible.
“It’s dead,” choked Demeter, turning. “It’s all dead.”
She held out her hands—she had removed the gardening gloves, and Artemis was shocked to see the deep gnarls in her aging skin. She was holding the dry, crumbling remains of a climbing plant.
“The clematis.” Artemis recognized it.
“I couldn’t keep it alive. I couldn’t save it.”
“But . . .”
“This is what I do. I nurture. If I can’t do that . . .”
“Maybe that mortal on the other side of the wall poured weed killer on it. He’s always hated us.”
“My hair’s going white,” said Demeter.
“Come inside,” said Artemis. “It’ll be all right. Come inside.”
She took the dead clematis from Demeter’s hands and dropped it on the ground, then put her arm around her shoulders and steered her back into the house.
“I’m dying,” sobbed Demeter. “I’m dying.”
To her surprise, Artemis felt a little bit jealous.
15
IT WASN’T HARD for Neil to find the house. Alice had told him where she was working when she had first got the job—it was only later on that she had become so secretive. Walking up the road toward it, he didn’t have to check the house numbers to know immediately which one it was. Alice had mentioned to him how dilapidated it had become, but it was worse than he had imagined. It was literally falling down—without urgent attention, he doubted it would last more than another few years. He was shocked and upset that
anyone would let such a wonderful building get into such a state of disrepair. He had experienced a similar feeling only last week, looking at a recent photograph of Brigitte Bardot. So he was feeling quite indignant as he marched up the cracked, uneven steps, lifted the heavy, gleaming door knocker—it was Alice’s job to polish it, no doubt—and rapped it hard, its sonorous reverberations echoing through the house. Frankly, he was surprised that the lintel of the door didn’t collapse from the force of it.
After a few seconds, he heard footsteps approaching and then the door creaked open halfway. He opened his mouth to introduce himself, possibly even to offer his services as an engineer, but the link between his brain and his tongue seemed to have been severed as cleanly as if someone had taken a knife to it. On the threshold before him stood the most beautiful woman, not only that he had ever seen, but that he would ever have been able to imagine. Once, years ago, he had come home from school in tears because Marissa MacKendrick had refused to kiss him, saying—and he remembered this precisely, indeed relived it often—that she would not touch an ugly, spotty, skinny-arsed spoddy minger like him if the survival of the species depended on it. His mother had taken him in her arms—and he must have been devastated, because he had let her—and told him that not only was little Miss MacKendrick a stuck-up cow and so were her parents, but that nobody was perfect, that Marissa probably secretly hated her feet or her ears or her belly, and that one day, when gravity had taken its toll and her husband had left her for someone prettier and younger, she would realize that beauty was only skin deep and that she should never have spoken to him that way. It had been scant comfort at the time, and he had suspected even then that his mother was wrong or lying, and now here was the proof, standing in the doorway in front of him: this woman was perfect, there was no way that she hated anything about herself, except, perhaps, the view in front of her eyes right now, and in fact beauty was not “only skin deep,” sometimes it was everything, absolutely everything.
“Fuck off,” said the apparition with bruising inevitability.
“I,” said Neil. “Hello. I. Um. Hello. Is Alice? Um.”
“Alice?” said the apparition. Her face was perfectly hewn stone.
“I’m a friend of Alice’s,” Neil managed to say. “Your cleaner.”
The woman looked at him appraisingly, as if trying to calculate his exact weight.
“What kind of friend?” she said.
“A close friend,” said Neil. “She’s my best friend.”
“Are you in love with her?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Are you in love with her?”
There was something about this creature that made Neil give the reply that he had never given anyone, least of all himself.
“Yes,” he said.
It was as if he had cast some kind of magic spell. Like clouds lifting after a storm and revealing the blessed face of the sun, she broke into a smile, the smile to end all smiles, and Neil’s face creased into an imitative grin, making him, he knew, look like an unspeakable idiot, but there was nothing to be done. Seemingly undisgusted by his imbecility, the beauty opened the door fully, in a gesture of magnanimous welcome.
“Come in, come in! I’m Aphrodite. It’s such a pleasure to meet you! Any friend of darling Alice’s is a friend of mine.”
Neil stepped over the threshold into the house. He tried to imagine Alice and this Aphrodite being friends, and failed. Aphrodite, he had to admit, was the more beautiful. But Alice had more class.
“We don’t,” Aphrodite said in a stage whisper as she led him down the front hall, “usually let strangers into the house. We like to keep our privacy. But you’re hardly a stranger, are you? You’re more like family. Let me find Alice for you. She’s probably with Apollo somewhere.”
Neil followed Aphrodite up the stairs, trying to keep his eyes away from her bottom, bouncing ahead of him like two hard-boiled eggs dancing a tango. He was beginning to think that this impromptu visit was not such a good idea.
Up until the moment that he had got here, his reasoning had seemed infallible. There was something wrong with Alice. That much was obvious—it was particularly obvious to him when he was trying to work, trying to watch TV, trying to read, trying to sleep, trying to have a conversation with anyone other than Alice, or trying to have a conversation with Alice. And it had started when she began working in this house. He had no idea what the matter was but he knew that there was a matter, and he had come here to find it. What the matter might actually be—or worse, who—and how on earth he was going to do anything about it were questions that were only just entering his head right now as he trailed Aphrodite’s perfect buttocks up the stairs.
“Do you know,” said Aphrodite, tossing her silky hair as she looked alluringly over her shoulder at him, “I think they must be in Apollo’s bedroom. I’m sure they won’t mind us disturbing them there.”
“No,” said Neil. “I mean, yes. Let’s disturb them.”
“It’s just over . . . ,” said Aphrodite as they reached the landing, but she was interrupted by the ringing of her phone. “Oh, I’m sorry, I need to get that. There,” she finished, pointing at a door, ajar to their right. “Hello, big boy,” she breathed into the phone. “I’m so wet. What do you want to do to me?”
Neil nearly swallowed his tongue. Aphrodite gave him a wink and a little wave, then turned her back.
“That sounds really sexy,” she resumed, into the phone.
With some effort, Neil turned away from her and walked toward the door that Aphrodite had indicated. From the other side of it, he could clearly hear two voices laughing—a male voice and Alice. This made him feel queasy, but he forced himself to believe that at least she sounded happy and that was all that mattered. But then he heard her say, “That’s enough, please,” and the male voice say, “Come on, just one more,” and suddenly she didn’t sound that happy and he remembered why he had come. He pushed open the door to the room and strode inside as manfully as he could.
The first thing he saw was Alice, standing at the window in a housecoat, a duster in her hand. When he saw her, he couldn’t believe that only a moment ago he had been (he had to admit it) drooling (but only slightly) over Aphrodite. Alice was still laughing, he was relieved to see, but he could also see anxiety in her eyes and he knew that her protests were not feigned. The individual to whom those protests were directed was Apollo, wearing not a toga but jeans and a T-shirt, who was sickeningly more handsome than he remembered, and who appeared to be taking photographs of Alice using his phone. Alice, Neil knew, absolutely hated having her photograph taken.
“Leave her alone,” said Neil as loudly as he dared.
“Neil, what are you doing here?” said Alice.
“Yes, ‘Neil,’ what are you doing here?” drawled Apollo.
Neil really didn’t like the way Apollo said Neil.
“What are you doing taking her photograph?” said Neil.
“It’s okay, Neil,” said Alice. “I said he could.”
“She said I could,” said Apollo.
Alice had never let Neil take her photograph.
“Neil, it’s really nice to see you, but . . .” Alice tailed off. “I’m not really supposed to have friends round.”
“No, she’s not allowed any ‘friends’ round,” said Apollo.
“You didn’t tell me that,” said Neil. “I just came by . . .” He couldn’t actually think of a reason. “Would you stop repeating everything that she says?” he said to Apollo instead.
“Well, it’s very nice to see you,” said Alice. “It’s very sweet of you to have come. Why don’t you wait around a bit? I’m nearly finished here and then maybe we can go and have a cup of tea.”
“You heard her,” said Apollo. “It’s nice to see you. Now get lost.”
“He’s just joking,” said Alice.
Apollo smiled at Neil in a way that didn’t seem all that jokey.
“It’s really nice that you two have met at last,”
said Alice. “Apollo, Neil is really interested in your TV program. That’s why we came to see it in the first place.”
“Is that right?” said Apollo.
“Yes,” said Neil. “Or at least I was interested in it before I saw it.”
“I was interested in humans till I saw you.”
“Actually,” said Alice, “maybe we should leave straightaway. I was early this morning so I’m sure Artemis won’t mind.”
“Oh no,” said Apollo, “please don’t rush off. You’ve only just got here, ‘Neil.’ Stick around for a bit. I’d love for you to meet my brother. I’ll just go and get him. Why don’t you take a seat?”
Apollo left the room and shut the door behind him. Neil refused to sit.
“We should go,” he said. “Don’t you think it’s a bit odd that he wants me to meet his brother?”
“I think it’s just his way of being friendly,” said Alice. “He is a little bit, um, unconventional, but he’s really very kind underneath it all. Anyway, we can’t go now when we said we’d stay. Let’s wait till he gets back, then we can leave.”
“Okay,” said Neil, “but as soon as he gets back I’m going.”
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