The Leto Bundle

by Marina Warner

  After a pause, she said, ‘Phoebe was burned. It was a near-direct hit. She’s lucky to be alive. I haven’t weaned her – because . . .’

  ‘When was it?’ muttered Séverine Martin. ‘How old was she?’

  ‘She was three years old.’ Ella paused, stroked Phoebe’s head lightly. She wanted to say, it was a long time ago, we walked into the war, but we didn’t know that then. We were on our way to . . . freedom, so we thought. Tirzah!

  ‘And were there many of you?’

  ‘There was Phoebus, and Teal, and Phoebe, and me. Teal was hit; he was killed.’

  She could have added, It was a lovely day: sunny, with a light breeze and puffs and high cloud. Perfect flying weather, but I didn’t know those things then. We stood in the road, I remember. Looking out over Tirzah. It looked so beautiful, that first time we saw it. And then, something changed. Time bent, and we were tipped over into . . . now, today’s time, the present day.

  But instead, she continued, ‘There were soldiers who came. And press arrived, later. Phoebe was in the papers. Someone took her photograph when she was lying there on the road and sent it all over the world, they said.’

  ‘The little girl on the road? The massacre at Tirinčeva?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ella.

  There was a silence, and Séverine Martin looked at the mother with her big child at her breast with a kind of avidity that made Ella hold Phoebe tighter.

  ‘Let me try,’ Séverine Martin dragged herself towards her.

  ‘No!’ Ella pushed the woman’s head away. She fell back, against the wall.

  But then the doctor pulled herself closer again, slowly laid her body alongside Ella’s and her daughter’s. Her voice was thick, her tongue swollen. ‘Forgive me. It’s a comfort to feel – another human being.’

  Ella was too exhausted to fight her, and so let her lie there without pushing her away. She wondered if she could build a connection between what happened then, what was happening now and what might happen; her mind was working. But she made no gesture of reciprocity. Séverine’s hair against her shoulder smelled of sweat and disinfectant; her lips were thick and cracked, but the dull eyes were still feverishly open.

  ‘Then we saw the planes coming in, very low,’ the doctor’s body was growing heavier against her; Ella was talking under her breath. ‘We were standing on the road. I was holding my little boy on my hip, and I didn’t know where to turn. I just stood there, crying out to Phoebe. There were three planes, one after another. I had him safe, but Phoebe’d got separated from me – she’s always been headstrong! The first bomb landed in the road just ahead of us and we fell down in the blast. When I opened my eyes again, there was a terrible stench . . .

  ‘But we survived, it was a miracle we did. But Phoebe – Phoebe – it had flayed her.’

  She put her hand out and smoothed her daughter’s hair, following the three crowns where the hair grew in whorls softly with her fingers. ‘Can’t you do something – to help her?’

  ‘Let me,’ said Séverine, pushing her head to Ella’s breast.

  ‘No,’ said Ella.

  But then the doctor lifted her head and made her a promise: ‘If I make it through this, I’ll tell people that she’s the child – the child in that photograph of the massacre at Tirinčeva. We’ll make her a new skin.’ She struggled to get closer, ‘I swear it. We at FemMédecs will help her. A new skin, yes, so nobody would ever know what had happened to her.’

  She began to nuzzle, begging, ‘It’ll save me perhaps. Please.’

  ‘But I’m all dried up, how else could it be?’ Ella pushed at the heavy lolling head, shifted away from the hot, rough lips.

  ‘It’ll make it flow.’

  ‘Not when I’m parched.’

  ‘For her sake.’

  ‘You’re taking what’s hers.’

  ‘Let me. Please.’

  Ella hadn’t the strength to fight her, not with Phoebe stretched out listlessly, not with the others half waking around them. Not too much fuss was best, not too much commotion. She didn’t want to alert anyone. She calculated: the doctor might survive, and she might remember and maybe, maybe, they could call in her debt.

  It was a miracle that women, starved and broken by disease, could bear babies, that she, with her flap breasts, flat and shrivelled from lack of food and drink, could offer a drop of moisture to this young woman. But as the doctor’s dry, hot mouth sucked, Ella felt the faint, familiar tingle of her milk rising from somewhere under her heart.

  As Séverine Martin’s whole body grew softer, Ella unwound the silk scarf with the silver thread that she had managed to hold on to through everything that had happened to her since Skipwith first gave it to her. She tore at it, and because it was now very worn, the threads gave. She stuffed a piece into the doctor’s pocket. ‘Take this. After this is over, I’ll come and find you. With my portion of the scarf. Then you will know it is me and remember that you’ve given your word you’ll help.’

  3

  An Encounter in Pontona

  The monkey swung off the carnival float and knuckle-leaped towards Gramercy till he had his long arms around her chest and was kissing her so the breath was squeezed out of her; she knew he was the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the late and unlamented government, even though, all fat and white, he wasn’t a bit like this stringy taut gibbon hanging round her neck. Then a mighty reek of urine overcame her. She struggled and twisted tighter in the quilt, which bore, on its underside, she saw, when she swam out of the monkey’s clutches and the cloud of piss, the stain of some previous occupant’s late night booster from the mini-bar. Even in the best hotels.

  Where was she? She struggled to remember. The band was two-thirds of the way through a six-week world tour, and she was as lost as a contact lens in a mixed leaf salad.

  She had an uncomfortable way of noticing other people’s traces: a toenail paring astray in a bathroom once, in a spick-and-span crisp white linen luxury resort no less; an old pair of some previous occupant’s knickers on the shower curtain rail where she’d hung them overnight to dry. Rather grey from wear, so Gramercy rolled out some toilet paper to pick them off and tossed them in the bin. But she hadn’t ever complained to management about these leavings; these were accompanying ghosts, and she’d written a song about them. In some part of herself, she felt close to their owners, they were, as the lyrics of her song put it, ‘Familiars in solitude,/strangers on the move/like me’.

  A short while before, an hour or so ago that felt like years, or, judging from her wrecked state, more like an interrupted instant of sweet sleep, she’d put herself away for the night in the huge pile of bedding, the wadded and padded heaps that provided comfort for the single traveller in five star hotels, offering the big body of mattress, pillows, quilt and valance in lieu of company. She’d never smelled anything like it, except when she failed to read correctly the costumed signs that, with increasingly perky ambiguity, designated Men’s and Women’s loos – breeched figures in top hats didn’t read male to her – and pushed open the door of a latrine. You always knew it was the men’s, even before you saw the monumental grinning orifices of the urinals; you knew it from the smell. So, here it was again, rearing up into her face in the small hours.

  But there was no shameful puddle under her: the reek went with the dream and, as the dream still gripped her, so it lingered.

  The wand of the telly lay on the bed. The porn channel was now dead: she’d been watching something in the dark to put herself to sleep; that was going to cost a bit, if she’d left it on for hours. Now that she was awake, the stench was beginning to fade and she could see, nothing was stirring in the room, no monkey, no pisser. Only the low hum of the electrics in the room disturbed its torpor.

  But she’d been plugged into the dream like a child who puts a finger in a live socket; she needed something to stop it shivering up and down her, like diabolical endorphins with their spermy tails wagging.

  It was probably due to dehydration,
a sugar low, after the concert. Pontona, that was it. They’d played some small towns with big stadiums; in this affluent and elegant city, a crossroads at the heart of the continent, the hall had been small with cool steel and smoked glass décor and cunning little halogen lights like hot stars, and no backstage tattiness either. Gramercy was beginning to recognise the EU’s Midas touch; certain countries were adept at extracting its juice. The hall was full – many more older men than usual had turned out to hear her. She seemed to attract the white-collar class, nostalgic for the lefty ideals they’d let go, unlike their equivalents in Albion, or so her roadie, TB, said. She’d made an emotional appeal on behalf of Tirzah, a ghost city after the siege, and only a few hundred miles away; she’d sung her ballad, ‘Incarnadine’, composed during the destruction.

  Gramercy unwound herself unsteadily from the heap of bedclothes, lowered herself from the bed, made towards the mini-bar by the crack of light from the curtains and opened it. The glow struck the room, a burst of radiation, huge and blue with yellow edges. Cans and bottles and packets gleaming and luridly presented were stacked inside the light, like ingots in an old bank robber movie; she pulled out a miniature vodka and by the fridge’s light fumbled for a glass, mixed it with orange juice, looked in the ice bucket, found it empty.

  Ice was what she needed, she realised with sudden fury, her skin was so hot she felt it might peel off her like a werewolf’s at the call of the moon. She swallowed some of the drink to take away the lingering whiff of piss from her nose and throat. Not nearly cold enough. Refreshments must be fresh. This was oily and almost warm, so she felt around the bedside table, and turned on the lamp and lurched towards the door. In the corridor, by the lift, a throbbing metal cabinet offered ice, she’d seen it on arrival, she remembered; the porter carrying her bags pointed it out to them, to her manager and her roadie and her lead guitarist. They’d all be sleeping now, more or less quietly. She might call one if the night went on like this. Talk to one of them, till she was bored enough to sleep. But she wouldn’t, not her, though she might tell them the next day that she’d thought of doing so and watch the effect of her reproach.

  She pressed the button and a lovely tumble of ice, shaped in soft ovals like soaps, clunked into the bucket. She took one and pressed it on her forehead, where she burned.

  With the relief came clarity, and then the jolt: she hadn’t brought her bedroom key. She was in her strap platforms from the concert the night before; she’d pushed her feet into them before she made for the ice machine. Anvils on the end of her bare legs, and wearing a nightie she’d bought from a mail order underwear catalogue when she’d imagined she could exercise some allure on Phil (it had circular stitched cups that made her breasts look bigger – why was he the only person in the world who didn’t crave her? Why wouldn’t he come with her on tour and keep her safe? Because he was, well, what was he? – remote, high-minded, holy), she couldn’t go downstairs to reception. The carpet in the hotel corridor was ornamented with crowned monograms. The crests pointed both ways: ‘In the unlikely event of an emergency, a path will light up in the gangway and guide you to the exits’, announced the air hostess in the plane after take off during the safety instructions. Light up, Gramercy begged the crests, light up. This is the event of an emergency. She looked one way and the other from the central axis of the lift shaft: Rooms 1510-1524 one way, Rooms 1525–1540 the other. Her eyes hurt, something was pushing them out from the back of her skull with hot hard fingers. Beyond the comfortable judder of the ice machine, the silence was terrible. It was like the ash that fell from Mount St Helen’s and muffled every living thing under its downy coverlet, it was like a fire blanket that stifles the leap of fire, it was like a sound system failure when the amplifiers just die and nothing, not a bang not a whimper, comes out of your instruments except a sudden high-pitched scream. Maybe she should scream, maybe hell was a hotel, maybe there weren’t fiery stakes and pools of ice and devils with grapnels, but just an empty corridor and nobody, only the leavings of the crowds that had passed through, paring their toenails, rubbing the stains unsuccessfully from their knickers, making cascades of piss, wanking in bed in front of the special, locked, charge-by-the-hour channel. Maybe she was dead, thought Gramercy Poule.

  Now she couldn’t remember the number of her room either.

  Still holding on to the ice bucket, which was condensing in delicious cooling drops where she clutched it to her stomach, she stumbled towards the telephone hanging on the wall between the two lifts. What time was it? It couldn’t be too late, or too early; it had been around 2.30 when they’d left her to sleep. Must be 5 a.m., must be someone on the desk. She picked up the receiver, dialled 0, heard the ringing. She’d ask for one of the gang – she’d ask for TB’s room.

  ‘Yes?’ came the hesitant reply. ‘Ah, jus’ a minute. I give you English menu.’ There was a bleep and a tape began, a dulcet-toned out-of-work actor doing his worst: ‘For an outside line dial 9. For Room Service dial 1 for Housekeeping dial 2 for Bellboys and Valet Parking dial 3 for Hairdressing and Beauty Salon dial 4 for Crèche and Babysitting Services dial 5. To reach a guest in the hotel dial 6 followed by the room number. Hold for the front desk . . . Thank you your call is held in a queue we are sorry to keep you waiting this is a busy time.’ The plangent strains of Albinoni’s bloody Adagio swam into Gramercy’s ear, a full semitone flat from the wear on the tape. She hung up, put her head down into the ice bucket and sloshed her hair in the melt at the bottom; she took two of the soaps and fitted them over her eyes, they were nicely socket-sized.

  She dialled I.

  ‘Hi,’ a cheeky voice replied. ‘What would you like to eat now?’

  ‘Help me, please help me. I’ve locked myself out of my room.’

  ‘. . . ’

  ‘I’m in the corridor upstairs and I can’t remember which room it was.’

  ‘. . . ’

  ‘Please, please help me.’

  ‘Reception help you, Madame. I can no bring you nothing without a room number.’

  Gramercy wailed her name. To no effect. Only useless people knew her, adored her. Then, after a pause, the only kitchen staff up at that hour asked, ‘Which floor you on?’

  Gramercy saw the number written opposite the lifts: ‘Fifteen.’

  ‘The penthouse floor? I call maid. You stay there.’

  From down the corridor, in the stifling inertia of the top floor, Gramercy heard a phone ring.

  She discarded the bucket, tottered towards the sound.

  The door of the laundry store was ajar. When the telephone rang Ella was in there, half-awake, lying on one of the slatted shelves. She slithered out of the narrow gap without disturbing Phoebe, who was lying on the inside of their makeshift bed, towards the wall, so, when Ella pulled open the door, Gramercy saw them disengaging; she could almost feel the heat of their bodies in such trusting nestling intimacy from where she stood in the corridor. The cupboard was about five feet wide, so curled up together, the woman and the girl just fitted on the shelf. This closet was cramped quarters, with a mop and pail and two or three brushes standing up against the shelves. They had piled up most of the linen from the shelf they occupied on the one above and lay together on the towels they’d kept for bedding, like a bitch and her whelp in a basket. The girl was sleeping with her head flung back and one arm crooked above it: her skin was so thin it looked like old carbon paper. Even though they were sleeping together, it never crossed Gramercy’s mind that they might be friends, or lovers: she knew them instantly for mother and child, for their fleshly intimacy conveyed the tenderness of the familial: it came to her all of a sudden how she used to snuff the scent from her mother’s things on her dressing table, matching the aroma of this box of powder to the smell of Bobby Grace’s cheeks, of this hair spray to the vapour that moved with her towards the door when, her hair newly backcombed, she was going out for the evening. Gramercy would have liked to have climbed on to the shelf with them, to crawl between them and be tran
sfused, to press herself against their doubled soft squirming flesh until her lifeblood beat to theirs.

  Ella stood up in her pink uniform and stockinged feet, searching for her shoes with her toes as she looked at Gramercy with an expression in which fearfulness, shame, obligingness and defiance all flickered. She picked up the receiver, deftly looping her hair through a tie with her free hand to lie on the nape of her neck in a coil.

  There was an exchange or two between them, and Gramercy saw her draw a passkey from her pocket like a nurse consulting her upside down watch while taking your pulse.

  Ella bent over her sleeping daughter’s shoulder with an almost absentminded gesture, whispered something in her hair, placed her pillow against her body, and closed the door of the cupboard.

  ‘You come,’ she said, beckoning Gramercy to follow her.

  ‘And . . . ?’ Gramercy pointed to the closed door. She wanted to ask if the girl could be left shut up in a linen cupboard on her own.

  Ella shook her head, clearly dismissing her enquiry, and set off down the corridor.

  She remembers me, she knows my room, Gramercy realised with a rush of relief. I saw her yesterday when I was dressing for the concert she came and turned down the bed and put a chocolate kiss with a sleep well message from the hotel management on my pillow and I thought, yuck, but now, I see they know about solitude, the chocolate kiss is a substitute it releases something in the blood that’s like love she has love she can stroke and caress that daughter of hers absent-mindedly she doesn’t have to ask or wait for an answer that’s the love between mother and child it doesn’t negotiate a peace every time.

  Inside Room 1518, Ella untwisted the bedclothes and plumped the wrung duvet. Gramercy was fumbling for her bag – for her wallet – she fished out a note – £20 – too much? Perhaps. She looked for a tenner. She didn’t have one. She lifted her head to give the woman the £20 note, and Ella took it, nodded, smiled and tugged at the strap of Gramercy’s nightdress and flicked her fingers upwards, indicating she should take it off.