“Melinda, wait. Please don’t go. I love you.”
The miller moth elongated and swelled and inserted itself into her mouth. Its poisonous dust was making her choke. It pushed its way down through her body; she felt it circling her heart, winding among her intestines, nudging the inside of her vagina, but it didn’t come out.
“I know you’re afraid. I know somebody has hurt you. But I won’t hurt you. I love you.”
The monster was godlike; the god was monstrous. It had a single wet eye and a bifurcated heart. She would do anything she had to do to keep it away from her, anything to make it forever her own.
But not now. She wasn’t ready now.
“Mindy. I love you.”
“No no no!” She pulled away from his wet tongue, his hairy hands, his single eye. She sprang from the bed and ran, the monster who loved her stumbling after her.
She ran down the hall, painfully aware of her nakedness, of the hairy, wounded hole in the middle of her body that wanted to be filled, that wanted to be protected from the crawling, slimy vermin that filled the world. Even as she ran she frantically considered what she might use to plug it up.
She ran into the bathroom and slammed the door, locking it. Outside the monster panted, out of breath. “Mindy, Mindy . . . love . . .” And then it fell silent.
She crouched on the cool tile in the corner, her head pressed against cold porcelain. It was too late to vomit. Too late to escape. Under the edge of the door, black hair was spreading toward her.
Melinda tried to pull herself into the hole in the middle of her body, the hole in the middle of her life, the hole she had become. She knew she wouldn’t die there, although sometimes that’s what she wanted. She hoped she wouldn’t have to eat there, that nothing would have to enter her body ever again.
There she knew she could be the monster who never needed to love. She could be the god.
Safe. Safe at home.
CHRISTOPHER FOWLER
Mother of the City
CHRISTOPHER FOWLER lives and works in London, where he runs the Soho film promotion company The Creative Partnership. His first novel, Roofworld, became a bestseller and is currently being developed as a movie by Landmark Entertainment in America. His second novel, Rune, has also been optioned for filming, and he followed it with Red Bride and Darkest Day, which together comprise his “London Quartet”, set in an alternative city. His latest novel, Spanky, has been sold to Universal.
His short fiction is collected in City Jitters, City Jitters Two, The Bureau of Lost Souls, Sharper Knives, and Colder Blood. He is currently working on Satyr, a new novel about Satanists; Menz Insana, a series of adult graphic tales illustrated by John Bolton, and High Tension, an original screenplay.
About “Mother of the City”, the author explains: “I was researching my novel Spanky, which is set partly in London’s clubland, and I was out with three outrageous women familiar to the club scene. They knew how it worked and how to work it, and showed me the ‘inside track’ of clubs that you only get on if you’re (a) either a gorgeous girl or with one, and (b) familiar with the event organizers.
“By the end of the evening (with one of the girls now handcuffed to a psychotic doorman who had lost the key) I realized that there was part of the city even I was unfamiliar with; a side that was fast, potentially dangerous, and impossible to enter without exactly the right credentials. I used the evening as the core of the story, and perversely had the tale told by someone who hates the city. I believe the essence of the story is true, that your wellbeing is controlled by where you live, and that it is granted to you as a privilege, not a right . . .”
IF MY UNCLE Stanley hadn’t passed out pornographic polaroids of his second wife for the amusement of his football mates in the bar of the Skinner’s Arms, I might have moved to London. But he did and I didn’t, because his wife heard about it and threw him out on the street, and she offered the other half of her house to me.
My parents were in the throes of an ugly divorce and I was desperate to leave home. Aunt Sheila’s house was just a few roads away. She wasn’t asking much rent and she was good company, so I accepted her offer and never got around to moving further into town, and that’s why I’ll be dead by the time morning comes.
Fucking London, I hate it.
Here’s a depressing thing to do. Grow up in the suburbs, watch your schoolfriends leave one by one for new lives in the city, then bump into them eleven years later in your local pub, on an evening when you’re feeling miserable and you’re wearing your oldest, most disgusting jumper. Listen to their tales of financial derring-do in the public sector. Admire their smart clothes and the photos of exotic love-partners they keep in their bulging wallets, photos beside which your Uncle Stan’s polaroids pale into prudery. Try to make your own life sound interesting when they ask what you’ve been doing all this time, even though you know that the real answer is nothing.
Don’t tell them the truth. Don’t say you’ve been marking time, you’re working in the neighbourhood advice bureau, you drive a rusting Fiat Pipsqueak and there’s a woman in Safeway’s you sometimes sleep with but you’ve no plans to marry. Because they’ll just look around at the pub’s dingy flock wallpaper and the drunk kids in tracksuits and say, How can you stay here, Douglas? Don’t you know what you’ve been missing in London all these years?
I know what I’ve been missing all right. And while I’m thinking about that, my old school chums, my pals-for-life, my mates, my blood-brothers will check their watches and drink up and shake my hand and leave me for the second time, unable to get away fast enough. And once again I stay behind.
You’ll have to take my word for it when I say I didn’t envy them. I really didn’t. I’d been to London plenty of times, and I loathed the place. The streets were crowded and filthy and ripe with menace, the people self-obsessed and unfriendly. People are unfriendly around here as well, only you never see them except on Sunday mornings, when some kind of car-washing decathlon is staged throughout the estate. The rest of the time they’re in their houses between the kettle and the TV set, keeping a side-long watch on the street through spotless net curtains. You could have a massive coronary in the middle of the road and the curtains would twitch all around you, but no one would come out. They’ll watch but they won’t help. They’ll say We thought we shouldn’t interfere.
Fuck, I’m bleeding again.
Seeing as I’m about to die, it’s important that you understand; where you live shapes your life. I’m told that the city makes you focus your ambitions. Suburbia drains them off. Move here and you’ll soon pack your dreams away, stick them in a box with the Christmas decorations meaning to return to them some day. You don’t, of course. And slowly you become invisible, like the neighbours, numb and relaxed. It’s a painless process. Eventually you perform all the functions of life without them meaning anything, and it’s quite nice, like floating lightly in warm water. At least, that’s what I used to think.
Around here the women have become unnaturally attached to the concept of shopping. They spend every weekend with their families scouring vast warehouses full of tat, looking for useless objects to acquire, shell-suited magpies feathering their nests with bright plastic objects. I shouldn’t complain. I’ve always preferred things to people. Gadgets, landscapes, buildings. Especially buildings. As a child, I found my first visit to the British Museum more memorable than anything I’d seen before, not that I’d seen anything. I loved those infinite halls of waxed tiles, each sepulchral room with its own uniformed attendant. Smooth panes of light and dense silence, the exact opposite of my home life. My parents always spoke to me loudly and simultaneously. They complained about everything and fought all the time. I loved them, of course; you do. But they let us down too often, my sister and I, and after a while we didn’t trust them any more.
I trusted the British Museum. Some of the exhibits frightened me; the glass box containing the leathery brown body of a cowering Pompeiian, the gilt-encased figu
res of vigilant guards protecting an Egyptian princess. Within its walls nothing ever changed, and I was safe and secure. I never had that feeling with my parents.
Once my father drove us up from Meadowfields (that’s the name of the estate; suitably meaningless, as there isn’t a meadow in sight and never was) to the West End, to see some crummy Christmas lights and to visit my mum’s hated relatives in Bayswater. When he told the story later, he managed to make it sound as if we had travelled to the steppes of Russia. He and my mother sat opposite my Uncle Ernie and Auntie Doreen on their red leather settee, teacups balanced on locked knees, reliving the high point of our trip, which was a near-collision with a banana lorry bound for Covent Garden. I’d been given a sticky mug of fluorescent orange squash and sent to a corner to be seen and not heard. I was nine years old, and I understood a lot more than they realized. My Uncle Ernie started talking about a woman who was strangled in the next street because she played the wireless too loudly, but my Auntie Doreen gave him a warning look and he quickly shut up.
On the way home, as if to verify his words, we saw two Arab men having a fight at the entrance to Notting Hill tube station. Being impressionable and imaginative, from this moment on I assumed that London was entirely populated by murderers.
A psychiatrist would say that’s why I never left Meadowfields. In fact I longed to leave my parents’ little house, where each room was filled with swirling floral wallpaper and the sound of Radio One filtered through the kitchen wall all day. All I had to do was get up and go, but I didn’t. Inaction was easier. When I moved to Aunt Sheila’s I finally saw how far my lead would reach; three roads away. I suppose I was scared of the city, and I felt protected in the suburbs. I’ve always settled for the safest option.
Look, I’ve taken a long time getting to the point and you’ve been very patient, so let me explain what happened last night. I just want you to understand me a little, so you won’t think I’m crazy when I explain the insane fix I’m in. It’s hard to think clearly. I must put everything in order.
It began with a woman I met two months ago.
Her name is Michelle Davies and she works for an advertising agency in Soho. She’s tall and slim, with deep-set brown eyes and masses of glossy dark hair the colour of a freshly creosoted fence. She always wears crimson lipstick, black jeans and a black furry coat. She looks like a page ripped from Vanity Fair. She’s not like the women around here.
I met her when I was helping with a community project that’s tied to a national children’s charity, and the charity planned to mention our project in its local press ads, and Michelle was the account executive appointed to help me with the wording.
The first time we met I was nearly an hour late for our appointment because I got lost on the Underground. Michelle was sitting at the end of a conference table, long legs crossed to one side, writing pages of notes, and never once caught my eye when she spoke. The second time, a week later, she seemed to notice me and was much friendlier. At the end of the meeting she caught my arm at the door and asked me to buy her a drink in the bar next to the agency, and utterly astonished, I agreed.
I’ll spare you a description of the media types sandwiched between the blue slate walls of the brasserie. The tables were littered with Time Outs and transparencies, and everyone was talking loudly about their next production and how they all hated each other.
Listen, I have no illusions about myself. I’m twenty-eight, I don’t dress fashionably and I’m already losing my hair. London doesn’t suit me. I don’t understand it, and I don’t fit in. Michelle was seven years younger, and every inch of her matched the life that surrounded us. As we shared a bottle of wine she told me about her father, a successful artist, her mother, a writer of romances, and her ex-boyfriend, some kind of experimental musician. I had no idea why I had been picked to hear these revelations. Her parents were divorced, but still lived near each other in apartments just off the Marylebone Road. She had grown up in a flat in Wigmore Street, and still lived in Praed Street. Her whole family had been raised in the centre of the city, generation upon generation. She was probably one of the last true Londoners. She was rooted right down into the place, and even though I hated being here, I had to admit it made her very urbane and glamorous, sophisticated far beyond her years. As she drained her glass she wondered if I would like to have dinner with her tonight. Did I have to get up early in the morning?
I know what you’re thinking – isn’t this all a bit sudden? What could she see in me? Would the evening have some kind of humiliating resolution? Did she simply prefer plain men? Well, drinks turned to dinner and dinner turned to bed, and everything turned out to be great. I went back to her apartment and we spent the whole night gently making love, something I hadn’t done since I was nineteen, and later she told me that she was attracted to me because I was clearly an honest man. She said all women are looking for honest men.
In the morning, we braved the rain-doused streets to visit a breakfast bar with steamy windows and tall chrome stools, and she ate honey-filled croissants and told me how much she loved the city, how private and protective it was, how she could never live anywhere else and didn’t I feel the same way? – and I had to tell her the truth. I said I fucking hated the place.
Yes, that was dumb. But it was honest. She was cooler after that. Not much, but I noticed a definite change in her attitude. I tried to explain but I think I made everything worse. Finally she smiled and finished her coffee and slipped from her stool. She left with barely another word, her broad black coat swinging back and forth as she ran away through the drizzle. Kicking myself, I paid the bill and took the first of three trains home. At the station, a taxi nearly ran me down and a tramp became abusive when I wouldn’t give him money.
On my way out of London I tried to understand what she loved so much about the litter-strewn streets, but the city’s charms remained elusive. To me the place looked like a half-demolished fairground.
I couldn’t get Michelle out of my mind.
Everything about her was attractive and exciting. It wasn’t just that she had chosen me when she could have had any man she wanted. I called her at the agency and we talked about work. After the next meeting we went to dinner, and I stayed over again. We saw each other on three more occasions. She was always easygoing, relaxed. I was in knots. Each time she talked about the city she loved so much, I managed to keep my fat mouth shut. Then, on our last meeting, I did something really stupid.
I have a stubborn streak a mile wide and I know it, but knowing your faults doesn’t make it any easier to control them. Each time we’d met, I had come up to town and we’d gone somewhere, for dinner, for drinks – it was fine, but Michelle often brought her friends from the agency along, and I would have preferred to see her alone. They sat on either side of her watching me like bodyguards, ready to pounce at the first sign of an improper advance.
On this particular evening we were drinking in a small club in Beak Street with her usual crowd. She began talking about some new bar, and I asked her if she ever got tired of living right here, in the middle of so much noise and violence. In reply, she told me London was the safest place in the world. I pointed out that it was now considered to be the most crime-riddled city in Europe. She just stared at me blankly for a moment and turned to talk to someone else.
Her attitude pissed me off. She was living in a dream-state, ignoring anything bad or even remotely realistic in life. I wouldn’t let the subject go and tackled her again. She quoted Samuel Johnson, her friends nodded in agreement, I threw in some crime statistics and moments later we were having a heated, pointless row. What impressed me was the way in which she took everything to heart, as if by insulting London I was causing her personal injury. Finally she called me smug and small-minded and stormed out of the club.
One of her friends, an absurd young man with a pony-tail, pushed me down in my seat as I rose to leave. “You shouldn’t have argued with her,” he said, shaking his head in admonishment. “She
loves this city, and she won’t hear anyone criticizing it.”
“You can’t go on treating her like a child for ever,” I complained. “Someone has to tell her the truth.”
“That’s what her last boyfriend did.”
“And what happened to him?”
“He got knocked off his bike by a bus.” Pony-Tail shrugged. “He’s never going to walk again.” He stared out of the window at the teeming night streets. “This city. You’re either its friend, or you’re an enemy.”
After waiting for hours outside her darkened apartment, I returned home to Meadowfields in low spirits. I felt as though I had failed some kind of test. A few days later, Michelle reluctantly agreed to see me for dinner. This time there would be just the two of us. We arranged to meet in Dell’Ugo in Frith Street at nine the next Friday evening.
I didn’t get there until ten-thirty.
It wasn’t my fault. I allowed plenty of time for my rail connections, but one train wasn’t running and the passengers were off-loaded on to buses that took the most circuitous route imaginable. By the time I reached the restaurant she had gone. The maître d’ told me she had waited for forty minutes.
After that Michelle refused to take my calls, either at the agency or at her flat. I must have spoken to her answering machine a hundred times.
A week passed, the worst week of my life. At work, everything went wrong. The money for the charity ads fell through and the campaign was cancelled, so I had no reason to visit the agency again. Then Aunt Sheila asked me to help her sell the house, because she had decided to move to Spain. I would have to find a new place to live. And all the time, Michelle’s face was before me. I felt like following her ex-boyfriend under a bus.
It was Friday night, around seven. I was standing in the front garden, breathing cool evening air scented with burning leaves and looking out at the lights of the estate, fifty-eight miles from the city and the woman. That’s when it happened. Personal epiphany, collapse of inner belief system, whatever you want to call it. I suddenly saw how cocooned I’d been here in Legoland. I’d never had a chance to understand a woman like Michelle. She unnerved me, so I was backing away from the one thing I really wanted, which was to be with her. Now I could see that she was a lifeline, one final chance for me to escape. OK, it may have been obvious to you but it came as a complete revelation to me.
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