Red Gloves, Volumes I & II

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘Well, I like to get to know people first.’ He gave a small smile.

  She laughed. It felt good to laugh again. She had to fight to stop it from turning into tears.

  The Fifth Day

  ‘I think it stinks in here,’ she said, lolling her head to one side and looking at the plastic sack of shit in the corner. ‘I mean, I can’t smell anything but it must stink, mustn’t it? Like when they open astronauts’ capsules. They say the smell is terrible.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘My hair needs washing.’

  ‘After two weeks, your hair starts cleaning itself.’ Galia was idly rearranging the papers in his case. According to his watch it was 4:45 p.m. but there was no sound of any activity from outside. They were still taking turns throughout the day to hammer on the door and yell for help, but their energy was fading. Mia looked unwell. Her skin was greasy and pale, and she seemed to be having trouble focusing her attention on anything for long. She stared from half-shut eyes, in a muffled limbo-land between sleep and wakefulness.

  ‘Do you think your mother is okay? Do you think your brother went to see her?’

  ‘I hope so, he’s kind of unreliable.’

  ‘Is that why he hasn’t tried to find you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Probably. He disappears every now and again with some girl he’s just met in a bar.’

  ‘But why hasn’t anyone else come for you?’

  ‘I don’t fucking know, Galia, okay?’ she shouted, her patience suddenly broken. ‘Because we live in a world where people don’t give a shit. Because my own mother doesn’t even recognise me. If I’m honest—if I’m really honest—there’s no-one out there who cares if I live or die. No-one.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, reaching out toward her.

  ‘Don’t touch me. Don’t fucking touch me.’

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘All right.’

  They sat in the respective corners of their cell and listened to the silence in the shaft. Then they heard it. The unmistakable sound of a woman in heels, walking across marble. And a man’s footsteps, heavier, wider, very close. They were talking. Their conversation faded and grew in a fluctuating wavelength. Galia pressed his ear to the door. Mia tried to get to her feet but had to be assisted.

  ‘Help! We’re here! We’re inside! Call someone! Please help us!’ They kicked against the door with their heels, then listened. The voices and the footsteps had stopped. Were they looking at the elevator, trying to hear who was trapped inside?

  They called and hammered and listened, but there was nothing more from beyond the steel walls. The silence was palpable and overpowering.

  ‘What’s wrong with people?’ she said, sliding slowly down the mirrored wall. ‘What the hell is wrong with these people?’

  The Sixth Day

  ‘My period should have started. That’ll be nice, won’t it? I have no tampons. Pity, they would have been something else we could have added to the pile in the corner.’ She nodded at the plastic bag of excrement.

  ‘Your period can stop in times of stress,’ he said. ‘I read that somewhere.’

  ‘Know a lot about women, do you?’ she asked belligerently. ‘When was the last time you went with a girl? Have you ever even had a girlfriend?’

  He looked down at the floor between his knees. ‘It’s none of your business.’

  ‘Really? Well, we’ve spent a lot of time together and you ask plenty of questions about me, but you never talk about yourself, beyond the fact that you resented your mother remarrying and moving to France. Do you even like girls?’

  ‘Of course I do.’ His voice was barely a whisper. ‘I love them.’

  ‘Well, I would have thought this was a perfect opportunity for you to get to know one really well, but all you do is stare at me. I’ve seen you watch me while I’m trying to sleep.’

  ‘I don’t have anything to say. Men don’t talk as much as women.’

  ‘So now you understand all women. I didn’t know you were such an expert.’

  ‘I know what you’re trying to do, Mia, you’re trying to goad me but it won’t work. I’m not angry.’

  ‘Really? Why not? You should be. If you’d taken the stairs, if the power hadn’t gone off, if the lift hadn’t broken down, if the building wasn’t being emptied, you’d be home right now having a wank in front of your computer.’

  ‘Why are you being like this, Mia? It won’t solve anything.’

  ‘Exactly, nothing I say or do is going to make any difference. If someone was going to come, they’d have been here by now. Something is wrong out there—I don’t know what, but it’s not normal. What’s going on outside is not just another working day, it’s something bad or weird or—I don’t know, it’s just not right. We can hear them, they must be able to hear us but they do nothing. Maybe the world came to an end. Maybe Martians took over. Maybe we’re already dead.’

  ‘Don’t talk like that,’ said Galia angrily. ‘You mustn’t say that.’

  ‘Why not? Face it, we might as well be. Nobody’s going to rescue us, we’re going to die in here, a pair of pathetic, pointless deaths. It’s over.’

  ‘You’re just being crazy because you’re upset. It’s dehydration. Our bodies are made up of two-thirds water. We need it for circulation and breathing, and to build energy. If you’re losing more water than you’re taking in, you dehydrate.’

  ‘But it’s cold in here. I’m not sweating.’

  ‘No, but the air’s dry. You only have to lose just two and a half percent of your body weight to lose a quarter of your power. I mean, for a hundred-and-seventy-five-pound man that’s only around two quarts of water. Then your blood gets thicker and loses volume, your heart has to work harder and your blood slows.’

  ‘What happens after that?’

  ‘Then you die.’

  ‘How long do you think we’ve got?’

  ‘I don’t know. We last had water the day before yesterday. You can survive without food for four to six weeks, but water…we’ve got maybe four, five days tops.’

  The Seventh Day

  A new fatalism had settled in the elevator. They tried the leak again, but found no more water, and besides, Galia was no longer able to lift Mia close to the ceiling. The floor was littered in debris from their cases; everything had been torn up and examined for the possibility of providing nutrition. The door was covered in scratches but they had not been able to move it even a quarter of an inch. Occasionally they heard a noise outside that might have been a person or a rat—it was hard to tell the sounds apart from each other.

  Mia could no longer think clearly. Her thoughts were a jumble of faded memories and half-formed notions. In her lucid moments she thought of her mother alone in her apartment without food, not remembering how to use her telephone, and of her brother out somewhere partying with some crazy girl, oblivious of his responsibilities. Then she would drift into the world of her imagination, remembering her childhood at the red-walled apartment in Kirovsk, her grandmother’s patient smile, the puppy that died of distemper at Christmas.

  When she awoke, Galia was cradling her head on his thigh and stroking her wet hair from her eyes. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘You have a fever. I found two headache pills in my jacket. Do you think you can swallow them without water?’

  ‘I don’t know…’

  He pressed the pain-relief tablets from their foil blister-pack and folded them into her hand. ‘Think of a knife cutting a fresh lemon in half, and imagine the juice running from it into your mouth.’

  She looked up at him and smiled. ‘It’s working. My mouth is wet.’ She ate the pills but could not swallow them, and crunched them instead.

  ‘Tell me about your family,’ he said gently. ‘Tell me about growing up. Tell me who you hope to fall in love with.’

  She spoke in a faint whisper, but her thoughts did not hold for long and soon she was asleep once more.

  The Eighth Day

  It was la
te afternoon when they heard the laughter, a woman screeching in what sounded like a helpless fit of hysterics. She had to be drunk. The noise was a burst of mundane life in their strange cocoon. Galia made a show of shouting but knew by now that there would be no response. In the last few days they had heard several others walking and talking, but there had been no reaction to their hammering. Mia briefly opened her eyes at the sound, but vapourised into fitful sleep once more. Her skin had turned a strange shade of yellow-grey, as if she was becoming bruised from within, and she looked even more translucent than usual, fading into her surroundings, sinking within the sweat-drenched folds of her reeking clothes.

  Galia stared at his thinning reflection in the opposite wall, noting how they looked like a couple long familiar with each other. It was a peaceful image to hold in his mind as he allowed himself to fall asleep.

  The Ninth Day

  The lassitude of their becalmed world deepened like a mantle of snow or dust, thick and museum-silent, so viscous that it was virtually unbreathable. Galia reached out and pressed his fingertips against the mirrored wall, wondering if he might somehow be able to pass through it now, for it felt as if some fundamental metaphysical change was occurring, in the same way that the atoms of corpses eventually mingled with the wood of their coffins.

  He found a few crumbs of something—possibly brick-dust, hopefully the remains of a wholemeal biscuit—in the inside pocket of his jacket, and gently forced them between Mia’s lips, trying to make her eat them, but they remained on the tip of her dry tongue.

  At some time in the course of that endless, neon-lit evening, Mia’s fever broke and she appeared a little healthier. The sweat dried on her brow, and she was able to sit up. She was too dry to speak, and Galia knew she needed water or she would die in the next few hours.

  Slowly and painfully he rose and wedged himself in a corner of the lift, reaching up inch by inch until he could reach his fingertips through the panel. He retracted them in wonder. They were cold and wet.

  ‘Mia, the water’s back. I think I can get us some. But I’ll need to stand on you to reach it.’

  ‘I can’t—everything hurts. Please, Galia, no.’

  Ignoring her, he pushed a foot onto her back, jumped up and reached the plastic cup through the panel until she cried and sharply rolled away from him, causing him to fall with the cup, spilling the precious droplets. ‘You idiot,’ he rasped, ‘I can get you some water, you can last longer.’

  ‘What’s the point?’ she croaked back. ‘No-one is coming. Why should I bother to try lasting for a few more hours?’

  ‘Because it’s not over yet,’ he answered. ‘It doesn’t end like this.’

  The Tenth Day

  They lay together like old lovers. Galia pulled himself up and stared back at the smeared mirror. Mia was curled over him with her arm around his waist. They looked posed, as if they were having a portrait painted. He listened to her soft shallow breath, and then at the distant thumping on a floor somewhere above them. With infinite patience and care he arranged her hair back over her ears and forehead, and adjusted the coat that was her bed, so that she looked like any normal girl asleep in her partner’s arms. Even though her eyes were sunken and her lips were the colour of paper, she was beautiful. After a few minutes her eyes slowly opened and she saw him. She managed a faint smile.

  ‘Hello, you.’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘You’re always there.’

  ‘Yes, always here.’

  ‘I was dreaming of fruit—fresh fruit and chocolate. The chocolate was so real I could smell it. And there was a great lake of fresh water.’

  ‘That sounds like a nice dream.’

  ‘Maybe we always dream about things as they should be, you know—in an ideal world.’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve had too many nightmares in my life.’

  ‘Your life wasn’t good? Is that why you don’t talk about it?’

  ‘My life has been as bad as some very bad dreams. But that’s what nightmares are for. They prepare you for the world.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be.’

  ‘I’m sorry you won’t get a chance to put it right. To enjoy the good part.’

  ‘You think every life has a good part?’

  ‘It must do. Otherwise why else are we here?’ She snuggled into his bony waist, enjoying this oasis of lucidity. ‘There must be a part which makes you feel this is why you’re alive.’

  ‘I hope you’re right. I would like to feel for a moment that everything was perfect.’

  ‘We’re all selfish, I know that. We want grat—’ She stopped to cough. He tried to calm her but she wanted to talk. ‘Gratification. Pleasure. That’s human nature. It doesn’t make us bad. But we must give as much pleasure as we want to receive. Don’t you think that?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I do.’

  ‘Good.’ She was happy that the matter seemed settled. There was no point now in talking of escape or rescue or survival. They had reached a calm plateau where a purity of thought passed easily between them. ‘I only wish—’

  ‘You should try to rest,’ he said, noting that her last coughing fit had produced specks of blood from her lungs.

  ‘I feel okay. My throat hurts less when I talk. That doesn’t make sense, does it?’

  ‘Nothing makes sense in this world anymore, Mia. Maybe it never did.’

  ‘I only wish I could have experienced more. Gone travelling. I’ve never been to a really good beach, a tropical beach, you know? Like the ones in the brochures. I’ve never been to the kind of parties you see in films. Never had champagne. Never been to China or India or the West. Never got out of a car at a nightclub and walked to the front of the queue, all the photographers trying to take my picture. Not that I’d want to do that, it’s just the idea that’s nice.’

  ‘What were you going to do when you left this job? Get married, have children?’

  ‘No. I was thinking of leaving to teach in an African village. I knew a girl at school who did that. A job you’d look forward to each day, with children and sunlight, lots of sunlight.’

  ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s not been easy for me to overcome unhappiness. All I can ever do is make it go away for a few months at a time.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It’s one minute past midnight. Another day just started.’

  The Eleventh Day

  ‘You’ve been keeping track.’

  ‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘Can I ask you again?’

  ‘Go on, then.’ She held his gaze in the mirror and nodded permission.

  ‘Why didn’t you find a boyfriend?’

  ‘Because I never met anyone who deserved me.’

  ‘Do you think you could ever have—fallen in love with me?’

  She thought for a while, and it seemed that she had drifted back into sleep, but her eyes slowly opened once more. ‘I think I’m in love with you now,’ she said.

  And there it was, the simplicity of the admission, without irony, kindness or dishonesty, stripped of any other meaning, a calm and perfect statement of love that appeared like a boat on a flat, still sea. The boat held hope.

  ‘And I am in love with you.’ His eyes held hers. ‘I have always loved you.’ There was nothing else either of them needed to say anymore. He watched her unchanging face as she fell asleep with his image imprinted upon her retinas, and remained quite still as her breath became shallower until it was imperceptible, and the minutes turned to hours, and her coma deepened, and the day ticked silently away, slowing to ever tinier proportions of the clock, and he knew she had finally passed across the threshold of death. He checked his watch: 7:45 p.m. The building was empty once again.

  He set her body gently on the floor and tucked the collar of her coat around her neck, wanting her to be comfortable and beautiful now more than ever. He had difficulty rising to his feet.

  He dug into his toolcase and found the red plast
ic rectangle, and carefully reinserted it into the hole in the lift’s control panel. Then he pressed the ground floor button.

  He heard the machinery and cables moving above him. The elevator started up and descended to the ground floor. He cleared the detritus from the lift and picked up the chocolate bar wrappers that had fallen from his pocket.

  When the doors opened, he removed the taped signs that said ‘Elevator Maintenance in Operation for Two Weeks’ and put them in his case.

  He was tired and thirsty, but it had been a moving and truly wonderful experience. He had experienced the most perfect form of love. Flooded with an overwhelming sense of satisfaction, he made his way towards the exit and the outside world.

  Piano Man

  I knew I was right to hate jazz, but New Orleans gave me a reason to fear it. For years I figured it was black-sweater-and-goatee music that appealed to aged hipsters, but in the Big Easy that image is only part of the story. There are plenty of jazz-funksters and rapmasters around that town now, but you can still find bars where the music hasn’t changed in eighty years. The real trouble is that old jazz can be twisted into easy listening and piped into elevators like soap bubbles that burble through the overheated air at a volume just loud enough to cloud your thoughts. A reworking of Weather Report’s ‘Birdland’ was playing in the lobby of the Marriott hotel when I arrived, and a horrible, plinky electro-version of Miles Davis’s ‘So What’ issued from the speakers as I handed my key in to the concierge.

  Every city trades on its image, but in parts of New Orleans it works because they’ve still got the old range of religions. The Vieux Carré was romantic in a rundown way, although it was smaller than Soho and really just a few old streets of shops and bars geared around fleecing tourists, housed behind wrought-iron balustrades. And though it traded on its old movie image, the French Quarter was still kind of cool. But after I’d done it there was the rest of the place to deal with, about the most scarred-up ugly-ass concrete city I’ve ever seen in my life, and post-Katrina you can still see tidemarks on some buildings, warnings of what could happen again if the levees break in some other place.