She sat down at a table on the terrace of Cafe Rouge on Greenwich High Road. It was an ugly building. The ugliest for miles, her daughter had said. But she liked the view – left to the station, and right to the church – and she sat watching the people and the traffic until the waitress arrived. And she asked for a double espresso, and the waitress repeated her order, and turned about and vanished through the double doors. And the conversation could not have been shorter, but she was convinced that the waitress came from the south of Italy, and that this was her first job in London. It’s certain, she thought. And her memory fetched up an image of herself thirty-seven years before in Clerkenwell. Which was where she had first worked when she arrived from Naples. She remembered the tea, the rock cakes and the sandwiches – and the French lawyer. Eventually he had taken her away from the cafe, and she had lived with him, and had got pregnant, and they had married. And Hugo had been born the next year, and he was followed by Oscar and Angela. And Angela had left home at the same age as herself, but she had gone to university. Only later had she left England. She had mirrored her mother and moved to Naples. She has gone back, was how her mother described this in her own mind, and to other people – mostly to her husband. And he was apt to point out that she hadn’t gone back, because she had been born in Lewisham. But to his wife this was just a quibble, some piece of exact but futile reasoning which blinded him to what had happened. For her any Italian who lived in Britain, or America, and then returned to Naples was either a failure or a lunatic. And she was ever more convinced of her daughter’s lunacy. But Angela was bright, with a BSc and an MSc in Mathematics, and now she was studying for an MA in Italian Literature. But lunatic was still the word that came to mind as her mother read her letter for the fourth time. Her daughter’s interest in her roots had taken her to Naples, and there she worked as a maths teacher. And some of the children in her class had gangsters for fathers. They belonged to Camorra families. And Angela seemed to delight in spelling this out. And her letter described how she had lost her temper again with one of these boys, and slapped him hard. And being a true gangster’s son he had told his mother. And Mrs Gangster had come to the school and threatened Angela both with some unspecified reprisal, and also with the police – Mrs Gangster had threatened to report Angela for brutality. And this amused Angela – but not her mother. And Angela had defied the woman. She had met the husband, and he was a firm disciplinarian, who had praised authority – at least, in the school – and Angela thought that his wife was just a silly girl who would be put in her place. And so Angela intended to slap the son again whenever it seemed right. And Angela’s mother despaired. Her daughter wanted to live in truth, which meant honesty in all things – such as sparing her mother no sharp or troubling detail. And then the letter went on to describe Angela’s struggle to complete her thesis on Andrea Giovene’s novel, Sansevero. Which seemed to concern Angela more than her contacts with the Camorra. And her mother hated the book. Though her daughter described it as a Neapolitan cultural landmark, she had never before heard of the novel, nor its author. But it was 1,000 pages long. It contained five separate volumes. And her daughter had declared that she would remain in Naples at least until she had written her thesis. For this reason her mother hated Sansevero. And she feared that by the time Angela had earned her MA she would be too accustomed to the city to leave. And over her double espresso she tried to think of some answer – some way of persuading her daughter to leave Naples for London. And she wanted to write and tell her that house prices were falling, and that there was a huge demand for maths teachers in England. She had also continued to renew Angela’s season ticket for Charlton Athletic. There had been a time when all five of them had gone together on a Saturday afternoon to The Valley. And they had sung the club’s anthem – even at home they had sung about the mists rolling in from the Thames. And they had been a family together – in origin French and Italian, but now English. And her sons still lived close by – and like their father they were lawyers. But Angela’s departure was a deep crack in the family, or so she told her husband. Yet she had no words to mend this split. She didn’t know what to say to recall her daughter, and bind them together again. And she couldn’t even persuade her husband of the magnitude of the problem. And she watched a 177 bus go by. It was solid, red and British – and everything else around her seemed equally right and orderly. And she couldn’t evoke in a letter, or on the phone, what she felt and what she suffered. And the waitress brought the bill, and she asked in Italian where she was from – and she had been right. The waitress had come to London from Messina. And she asked the girl if she would ever go back. And the waitress replied in English, Not if I can possibly help it.  And in this there was some comfort.

I had heard the term “hillbilly” when I was growing up in Cleveland, and though I didn’t understand what it meant, my parents made sure I believed that our family was not.  We didn’t have dogs chained in our front yard.  We didn’t have stray cats searching for food on our porch.  We didn’t have roosters living in our garage.  We didn’t have fleas in our house, and we certainly didn’t have shit in our yard.  So even though Dad came home with oil under his fingernails and spent weekends under the hood of whatever used car he had in the driveway, they made sure I knew that our family was different.  Jackie’s dad was always drunk, Carol’s mom dressed like a tramp, the kids across the street rarely bathed, and all of their houses stunk like dogs.

We lived on 118^th Street in the heart of the Rust Belt, at a time when steel mills were still common in northern Ohio.  My parents told everyone it was supposed to be a starter home—somewhere they had planned to stay until my older brother started kindergarten.  I was born and added a few years to that equation, and when my sister came along their escape plan was pushed back even more.  Then Mom crushed her neck in a car accident when another driver ran a red light, and everything was put on hold.  Every year was the year we were “gonna move this summer,” and though I remember things like birthday parties with paper hats and inflatable pools, the things I remember most vividly about that street are the dogs.

“I just don’t think it’s safe to have kids here,” Grandma would say when she came over.  “Those dogs could jump the fence.”

“They’re fine,” my mom would say, “and I know how to raise my kids.”

I was never sure which dogs Grandma was talking about, but I knew they weren’t the kinds my cousins had for pets.  There were Pit Bulls across the street, a Doberman who had chased me onto our porch and barked viciously as I pinned myself between the screen and the deadbolted front door, banging violently for someone to open the other side.  My daily walks to the library, Leader Drugstore, and the playground were mapped with houses to avoid for fear of the dogs whose territory I would be invading.  There was a snarly Boxer, the appropriately named Kujo who even Dad wouldn’t cross, and countless mangy strays who prowled the park at the end of the street.

I was afraid of the dogs but didn’t consider the real fears I should have had about why they were there in the first place.  Those dogs were tools, not pets, and their job was to protect their owners.  They were patrolmen, bodyguards, and prize fighters.  And even with my hair in pigtails and my school books on my back, I was a threat.  Sometimes they would just chase me as I walked along the edge of their owner’s property, barking wildly and rattling the chain link fences with their menacing claws.  Other times, their gates would be carelessly left open.  I would turn around hoping they hadn’t seen me, scan the street for trees whose limbs I could climb, garbage cans I could use as weapons, and return home as fast as possible.  My heart would thump and all my thoughts would be reduced to a loop replaying in my mind: keep walking, keep walking, keep walking.  I was as small as they were big, and no matter how many times I’d walked past before, they treated me like an intruder who’d disregarded the warning “Beware of Dog.”

When I complained, Mom would tell me never to look a dog in the eye—that they could sense fear—and I should stand perfectly still and look straight ahead if I thought they were going to attack.  “You shouldn’t let fear control your life,” Mom would say when I told her I didn’t want to play outside.  I was conditioned to believe that fear was a weakness, and choosing not to show weaknesses was one of the only things in life a person could control.  So for every errand I needed to run, every book I wanted to read, and every swing I wanted to swing on, I pretended at least to show those dogs I was in control.  I walked past their fences pretending they were ghosts, that they didn’t exist and weren’t worth caring about.  Though I was terrified of our inevitable encounters, I trained myself to project a relaxed coolness in their presence, trying hard to keep my knees from exposing the crippling fear that ran through my body.  They were ghosts.  They weren’t worth caring about.  Keep walking.  Keep walking.  Keep walking.

It didn’t occur to me until I was older that in the same way I hid my fear from the dogs, my parents hid their fears from me.  Just as they had never been quiet about the ways they wanted me to believe our family was better off than we really were, they made no effort to conceal their elation when the summer we were gonna move finally happened.  They were right—we must have been better than the other people on 118th Street because we were leaving and they were not.  After six years of court dates, Mom’s accident settlement came through in the form of a down payment on a house in the suburbs.  There was no picket fence, but there were no chain link fences either.

“Tell people you lived in West Park,” Mom coached me as we wrapped dishes in newspaper and packed boxes with books and toys, “it sounds better than Cleveland.”  Though it was still in the city, West Park was a neighborhood of Cleveland whose upper borders rivaled the appearance of middle class suburbs.  So even though the lower end was like a different world and stopped just a block away at 117^th Street, we weren’t technically lying.  We spent most of July that year making cosmetic repairs in preparation for our August move.  When a crack that had been inching across the ceiling began dropping snowflakes of plaster on the rug below, we were warned not to slam doors.  “This house needs to look new for someone else,” my parents said.  “We just need to get till August.”

That same summer, a stray cat showed up in our yard with its tail missing.  “It must have been an accident,” Mom said when I asked what happened.  When more strays appeared with oozing, chopped-off stumps in place of phantom limbs and missing appendages, the accident excuse was quickly dropped.  It was clearly the handiwork of a violent neighbor, and even at eleven, my parents knew that I wouldn’t be fooled.  “I can’t wait to get out of here,” I heard Mom say to her sisters on the phone, Dad when he came home from work, and herself when no one was around.  And when she would catch me eavesdropping, she would give me a knowing shrug, ask me to pack a box, and remind me to tell people that we had lived in West Park.

I’m onto my third cup of coffee.  Penny still hasn’t decided what she’s going to have.

‘The Prawn Cocktail jacket potato filling,’ she says, licking her lips and biting her thumbnail, ‘will be at least four Weight Watcher’s points.’

I ate at home.  A tuna and sweetcorn baguette.  I’m still hungry now.  But I shouldn’t have two lunches.  It would be greedy.

I rip the top off another tubular packet of brown raw cane sugar.

‘Forget bloody Weight Watchers,’ I say, then close my mouth around the hole in the top of the sugar packet and tip my head back, the granules hitting my palate and epiglottis and sticking there, beginning to slowly dissolve.  I don’t swallow, talk or move as they disintegrate.

‘You’ll ruin your teeth,’ says Penny, without looking up from her menu.   I take a swig of coffee to wash down the remaining sugar.

‘It never touched my teeth,’ I say.  ‘Have you decided yet?’  This is infuriating.  She always does this.  It’s bad enough at posh restaurants, where there’s actually a choice.  But we’re only at Tesco’s.

‘It’s difficult,’ she says.  ‘I’m discerning.’

It’s true.  She is pretty discerning.  My Penny knows how to choose the best of everything.  The best clothes, the best sofa covers, the best tinned tuna (the new drain-less kind that contains no water, so that it’s tasty tuna without the mess and hassle).  Her furniture is from Ilva.  She also has excellent taste in women, if I do say so myself.

The Formica table top is tacky, in both senses of the word.  I’ve been running my fingertips across it, pretending to play the piano, and now the pads of my fingers are sticky.  I wipe them on my jeans.  I forgot napkins.

I look over at the illuminated chiller cabinet that stretches along the wall to our right.  The array of cakes.  Huge slabs of dense chocolate sponge.  Triple-chocolate muffins, dark chocolate with milk and white chocolate chips.  Modest squares of carrot cake with tiny sugar carrots nestled in the butter icing.

‘Have a cake,’ I suggest to Penny.

‘Sometimes,’ she says, her dark eyes glittering with a coating of anger, ‘I think you’re just taking the piss.’

I’ve said the wrong thing again.  This is a frequent problem.  I seem unable to predict what will make Penny happy, and what will make her sad.  What will make her angry, and what will make her cry.  What will make her blush, and what will make her kiss me.  It’s like negotiating a minefield in a blindfold.

It’s taking its toll on me.

Penny is skinny.  Bordering on seriously underweight.  It makes her eyes look huge and round.  Her mouth stands out – a wide slash of thin lips that she slathers with cocoa-coloured lipstick.   I am an acceptable weight.  I have curves where I should have, and perhaps a few where I shouldn’t.  It’s not that I eat ridiculous amounts.  But I’m not averse to necking the odd packet of sugar, just for the heck of it. Penny shows me up.  Sometimes I want to hold her down and force feed her.

She stands up, carefully propping up her menu in the stand on the end of the table.

‘I’m having the chicken in a basket,’ she says, then negotiates her way through the tables to grab a tray.  I watch her join the queue and place the tray on the metal sliders that bear the sign,

‘DO NOT SIT CHILDREN ON THIS SURFACE.’

Every few seconds she shuffles closer to the till.  She looks longingly at the cakes as she passes them.  Then she looks longingly back at the ‘DO NOT SIT CHILDREN ON THIS SURFACE’ sign.  That’s slightly disconcerting to me.

I wait impatiently, curling up my nose at the damp-cloth smell of the place.  No matter how many times they wipe these surfaces down, they must never be clean.  I’d hate to work here.

When Penny returns, she sets a little red plastic flag down on the table.  The flag is ‘flying’ from a thin stainless-steel pole six-inches high, and bears the number ‘29.’

‘It’s coming,’ she says.

I know she won’t eat it, when it arrives.  She might peel the batter off one or two pieces and eat the chicken inside.  But she’ll leave the rest.  How she can live like that, I don’t know.

I tear the top off another sugar packet.

‘You are not going to eat that,’ says Penny.  ‘It’s disgusting.’

I defiantly close my lips around the end of the tube and tip my head back.

Penny shoots her hand out and knocks the sugar packet away from my mouth.  Granules spray across the table and floor.  She leaves her hand hovering in the air between us, and for a moment I think she is going to slap me.   I leave my mouth open to signify shock.

After a second or so, she drops her hand, and I close my mouth.  I use the sides of my hands to shepherd wayward raw cane sugar granules into a neat pile in front of me.  Raw.  Cane.  Together with the recent threat of Penny’s hand, it makes me think of spanking.

Sometimes I feel like a child to Penny’s mother.  A naughty pupil to her sexy teacher.  Though she’s actually thirteen months younger than me.  I crunch a sugar granule between my front teeth.

‘I might get a cake,’ I say.

I try to push my chair back, then remember it is attached to the floor.  All of the chairs here are attached to the floor.  What a stupid state of affairs.

My thighs begin to ache with wanting to get away.  I’m well and truly stuck.  My fingertips welded to the tacky tabletop, the legs of my chair screwed firmly to the ground.  My backside is heavy as lead.  Too much sweet stuff.  I can’t lift it an inch.  I decide to forget the cake.

The waitress brings Penny’s chicken.

‘Here you go,’ she says, setting the plate down on the table top, along with a knife and fork neatly wrapped in a plain white napkin.

Penny stares at the plate in mute astonishment.  Then she finds her voice.

‘What’s that?’ she asks.

The waitress sniffs and swallows.

‘It’s your chicken.’

The plate is thick and heavy, rimmed by a wide band of silver.  Penny pushes it away from her a little, then jerks her hand back.  It must be hot.

‘Where’s the basket?’ she asks.

The waitress looks at her blankly.  Then she looks at me.  I remain silent.

‘The basket?’ asks the waitress.  There is sweat along her upper lip, shining and silvery as the edge of the plate.  Like a line left by a slug.

‘On the menu,’ says Penny, ‘It said “Chicken in a Basket.”  I ask you – where’s the basket?’

‘Surely it tastes the same whether it’s in or out of a basket?’ says the waitress.  I can tell she means it diplomatically, but it comes out as a mite unpleasant.

‘That’s not the point.’  Penny purses her lips.  ‘It’s the principle of it.’

‘But…’ says the waitress, wiping her upper lip with a forefinger, ‘The chicken’s there.’

I make eyes at the waitress.  Trying to communicate to her on some level that this is not the correct argument.  But what do I know?  I’m blindfolded in a minefield myself.

‘I’ve ordered the “Chicken in a Basket,” says Penny.  She points to her meal.  ‘This is what I would term “Chicken on a Plate.”’

The waitress looks nonplussed.

‘What I’m saying, is that this is false advertising.’  She pierces the waitress with a steely gaze.  ‘When I order a meal in a basket,’ she raises her chin, ‘I expect it to be in a basket.’

The waitress snatches up the plate from the table.  From her sharp intake of breath, I know that she’s forgotten the plate is hot.  But she stoically refuses to release it.

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she says in a pained voice, and stalks away.

I look at Penny.  The colour is high in her cheeks.  She’s flushed with defiance and her hands are trembling with the energy of righteous complaint.  She’s never looked more beautiful.

Gazing at her with all the devotion I can muster, I say,

‘You’re amazing.’  And for once, I know I’ve said the right thing.

The waitress is back in no time.  She’s carrying something.

‘There we are, Madam,’ she says.  ‘Is this satisfactory?’

She holds it out so that Penny and I can see.  It’s chicken and salad in a large wicker paper bin.

‘Most satisfactory,’ says Penny.  ‘Thank you.’

The waitress deposits the wicker bin on the table, and disappears to somewhere out of sight and mind.

The bin is too tall to eat from when set on the table, so Penny pulls it down into her lap.  She stares down at the chicken nestled at the bottom, then uncaps the vinegar and sprinkles a liberal amount of it over the meal.  I hope it doesn’t leak through the holes.  She pauses, screws up her nose and gently picks out a screwed-up, vinegar-soaked waitress’s order slip from beneath the lettuce.

‘You’re going to eat all of that,’ I say, tugging at the point of the napkin wrapped around the cutlery until the knife and fork clatter out onto the table top.

She takes up the fork, spears a piece of chicken and pops it into her mouth, batter and all.  I tear off the top of another sugar packet and neck it.  Out of the corner of my eye, I see the baby in the highchair at the next table looking at me curiously.  I turn and grin at him, sugar granules glittering in my teeth.

_______________________

Read another story by Anna Towers here.

Grace Andreacchi

He was the most beautiful old man I have ever seen. They say the face of vice is ugly, but he was the living proof that it need not always be so. I cannot tell you his precise age – he must have been three hundred years old at the time we met, but one’s first impression was of a man not much over sixty. There was a vigour in his cold eye, a statuesque immobility about his person that belied his real age. On closer acquaintance one became aware of the thin, porcelain skin, the bloodless condition of the lips and hands, tinged with the pale violet blue of northern skies. He was still very upright, with a good figure, a little above the middle height, broad in the chest and narrow at the hips under a grey jerkin; his white hair was long and abundant, tied with a black ribbon. The eyebrows, too, were black, startlingly so given the dreadful whiteness of his complexion – they spread like the antennae of some fine-lined black insect, lightly coated with the pale pink dust of scented face powder. The voice, when he spoke, scarcely rose above a whisper; one sat closer, inclined one’s head in an effort to catch that which sounded as if from far away, as the echoes of thunder that roll upon the mountains, tremendous in themselves but dim to us who are far down upon the plain. In this distant thunder one heard, nonetheless, a nameless sweetness, an ineffable charm that spoke volumes of poetry – in the ordinary pleasantries one seemed to hear other words sounding like musical ghosts behind those actually spoken, words such as ‘moonlight’, ‘love’, ‘embrace’ and so on.

I had come to him on a most delicate mission – an elderly aunt, a sister of my grandmother, lay dying in a Venetian convent. Once the name of Caterina Mazzarò had been renowned from Vienna to London, and south to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. For over thirty years she had played the part of prima donna assoluta in the great opera houses of Europe. The King of Bavaria had proposed marriage to her; the young Duke of Devonshire had sent ten thousand roses to the theatre at Covent Garden to mark her reappearance there after an absence of three years; it was said that the old Empress of Austria, when she lay confined to bed by her last illness, had wept because she could not go to hear la Mazzarò, and that the diva had heard of it and had left the theatre precipitately just as the audience were taking their places, to appear at the bedside of the dying sovereign and sing whatever it might please Her to command. When my aunt’s voice began to die she sold her jewels and went into the convent. The Holy Sisters of the Child Jesus were not held to a very strict observance of the monastic ideal; I had visited her on numerous occasions throughout my childhood. From my earliest years she had shown a certain partiality for me, and in the end she sent for me and entrusted me with a letter which I was to deliver to the legendary Don Juan Tenorio of Seville. I was twenty years old and had just completed my studies in Germany. You may imagine how my vanity was flattered to be distinguished in such a manner by my marvellous aunt. My sorrow at her coming death, in which, at any rate, I did not readily believe, for no man at twenty believes in the reality of death, life is too much with him, blowing about his head like a noisy gale, so that he fails to hear the imminent silence of death (that will only be heard when the first fury of the gale has somewhat abated; later it grows to such proportions as to drown all sounds and furies in its own white silence) – my sorrow, I say, such as it existed, was mitigated by the thought of a journey to Spain, a country I had never seen, and of an encounter with the man whom my aunt’s distinction and death had thrust upon me.

I took the route over land, for I had some business of my own to attend to in Austria. At Paris I received word of my aunt’s death. I pushed on towards Spain with renewed purpose, harbouring, I think, some unspoken fear that any additional delay might bring upon me a visit from the dead. Thus I managed to cross the Pyrenees with the tramontana, just as autumn swept down upon the countryside like a wave of gold and the great white sleep of summer gave an audible sigh and rendered up its spirit.

In Seville I made inquiries of the Governor and determined that the Cavalier Don Juan Tenorio had retired to his country estate which lay another half day’s journey outside the town. I rode across deserted countryside, through a grey mist of olive groves whose leaves drank gratefully of the light, silvery rain. The castle stood alone, a smudge of gold on a hillside. It was larger than I had expected, and much of it lay in ruins. One tower had fallen completely, its bleached bones open to the sky, but three others still held their heads high. On every side the olive trees had gathered like ballet girls in serried ranks, their fingertips poised above their lacy skirts.

We sat in an upper room, before a good fire, but it did not seem to warm him, he had always the same bloodless white face. He gave me to drink of a strong wine, nearly black, such as they make in that country, and I could see it take its course down his translucent throat, whence it vanished into the aperture of his lace collar. There was a simplicity about his manner that put me at once at my ease, although I had arrived trembling with excitement and an odd kind of fear. I explained my mission; I placed the letter, which I had carried all the journey from Venice next my heart, on the little marble table between us. My explanation he received in silence; the letter he took up and examined without opening, then replaced it on the table. It was written on ivory-coloured paper, and sealed with dark red wax; the blob of wax had the appearance of a fallen petal that had happened to affix itself to the letter. My aunt had always been possessed of this singular artistry in little things. The arms of the Order of the Child Jesus were clearly visible in the wax: a bear upon a field of stars, a reminder of St. Ursula Bonifacio, the founder of the Order.

‘Does she expect an answer?’ he said.

His eyes were very dark, without any light in them at all, as if cut from some black, heavy stuff such as velvet or lead.

‘No, indeed. I’m afraid – she is already dead.’

‘When?’ I gave him the date and circumstances of my aunt’s death as well as I was able. He listened closely, his eyes on my face, then there was a settling, not quite a sigh, about his whole person, and a little smile teased at the corners of his bloodless lips. ‘So… Caterina Mazzarò is no more,’ he mused. ‘She thought of me in the end, did she? Oh – witch, witch, charming little witch!’ With a quick movement of his hand he tossed the letter, which I had been at such pains to guard, into the fire. Without thinking what I was about, I sprang to my feet and attempted to draw it out, to the accompaniment of his ribald laughter. Too late! It was quite burnt.

‘But don’t you want to know what it says?’ I asked desperately. I certainly did.

‘I know quite well what it says. She asks me to forgive her.’

‘For… breaking your heart?’ I hazarded, breathlessly. I felt I was on the verge of a great romance, that I was about to hear a tale that would point the way to love in all its disreputable glory. Again he laughed.

‘You are her nephew?’ he said.

‘Great-nephew.’

‘No matter. You have just the same simplicity of soul – un coeur simple. Listen to me, young devil. People will tell you it is men such as I who lead others to perdition. Completely untrue! It is the simple souls like that witch, your aunt, who are responsible for most of the trouble in this world, and ten parts out of ten of damnation in the next. Let them once get hold of an idea and they never let it go. You suppose I was in love with your aunt? What nonsense! I don’t fall in love with beautiful witches like that – I take them whole, like bonbons – so!’ He lifted an invisible dainty to his lips and appeared to swallow it in one bite, followed by a loud smack as he kissed the air. ‘Did you never wonder what Caterina, of all people, was doing in the convent – this coeur simple, this prima donna assoluta? Why did she not retire to her palazzo to collect emeralds and handsome young men?’ I had often wondered, but hadn’t the faintest idea. The black feelers of his eyebrows rose upon their white field in a comical dance of inquiry. ‘Sister Caterina,’ he said, giving the first word more derisive emphasis than I would have believed possible. ‘Where is she now, the good sister, the holy sister? God is not so easily fooled as all that,’ he said.

‘But what had she done?’ I said, uneasy in my mind. I was beginning to be sorry I had ever come on this pointless journey. The letter had been destroyed unread, my adored aunt held up to ridicule – I was afraid to hear more but unable to resist the temptation to ask.

‘What had she done?’ he echoed. ‘With her jealous tricks, her evil spite – she drove away the only creature worthy of love I have ever known.

‘I had been in Venice some time, pursuing a life of pleasure. I was no longer in the first energetic flush of youth; on the contrary, while I retained a sufficiency of good looks and physical power to attract women, in secret I was often tired, and nearly always bored, even to the point of contemplating my own end with a certain morbid satisfaction. I had reached the age when a man discovers his inability to prolong the pleasures of the senses, not so much by virtue of the body’s weary reluctance, as by a deadly satiety in the soul. There is a sameness, a numbing idea of endless repetition that, once the greedy appetite of youth is past, gives rise to a terrible nausea. One turns, then, to ever more diverse pleasures in the effort to experience once more that fierce desire, and the delight in its achievement, that alone give moral fervour to life. I turned to women ever younger, to children, girls or boys, it was the same – moments of agonized pleasure, close to madness, in the fear and anguish of these children, quickly replaced by the old satiety. I had recourse to the violent pleasures of the homo-erotic, but these I found to be ultimately uninteresting, for in another man one finds, as in a mirror, all that one hates most in one’s self, and out of this hatred arises a homicidal lust – and this too palls.

‘Caterina was my mistress at the time. I was attracted to her by her art and intelligence, her culture as well as her beauty. Among the hundreds of singers, musici, actresses, acrobats, charlatans and clowns who found employment in Venice, she was in the front rank. She was young then, perhaps twenty-six or seven, with a pale white skin and a long, strong throat like a column of marble. She had been the mistress of two dukes and a cardinal when I took her away from all of them. Also her lady’s maid, a pretty little thing from the Abruzzi, the two downstairs maids, the little girl who brought us butter and eggs from the country, a fine young laundress as strong as a horse, and of course the baker’s wife as well. No harem is complete without la Fornarina. I suppose it is the flour that keeps their skin so very white. You are wondering how I kept them all happy. Ah, but that would be telling…

Caterina’s taste was legendary. It was she who began the vogue for bathing in red wine, which she would then invite her numerous admirers to drink. She set the style in everything from the acciaccatura she tossed with a little roll of the head, delightful to see, to mode of dress – she was the first to appear in public with her breasts swathed in nothing but black point de Venise. She served pearls among the oysters at her suppers, and raw meat to those whose manners she found too rough. She kept a little dwarf, a black Spaniard as talented as he was ugly, who accompanied her on the mandolin. In the evenings she sang after supper for a crowd of young men. She would tease and torment the dwarf, box his ears and pull his thick hair until the tears streamed from his eyes, declaring the while to the company that she was certain he was less than a human creature, and had no real feelings such as our own. Then, in compensation, she would take the dwarf on her lap and allow him to fondle those lace-encrusted breasts, even to lavish kisses upon her, pressing his thick, ugly lips to her throat and face, for she delighted in contrasts – it was one of the marks of her genius. Before an audience, be it at the theatre or in the salon, she knew the value of ugliness and knew how to make use of it to point out her own beauty. I have said that she was intelligent, and it was in this taste for contrasts that her intelligence most showed itself. She had an imagination for juxtaposition that continued to surprise me – and, you see, I was very much in need of surprise. I did not realise how far that imagination would take her, although I should have done, the signs were perfectly clear.

‘For already her star was no longer the brightest in the firmament. There was a new soprano in Venice that winter, a young castrato who went by the name of Farinelli. He was not yet the great figure he was to become, but it was immediately apparent that he would soon eclipse every other singer in both virtuosity and pathetic power. I had seen him on the stage several times: he was a slender, good-looking boy, very fair, with dark, expressive eyes. His stage manner was not good – he stood as still as a statue while he sang, but once he began there was no resisting the beauty of that voice. He might have sung upside down and in his nightclothes and it would not have made the slightest difference. He was said to be simple and unaffected, of an upright and virtuous character. He was of good family, and his unnatural condition was said to be owing to a childhood accident. Perhaps in this case for once it was true. Most lies eventually turn out to be true. That he was modest was later borne out by his remarkable career at the court of Spain. He left Venice suddenly, before his engagement had run its course. It was whispered that someone had tried to poison him.

‘It was during the Carnival, at a masked ball given by the Princess of Santa Croce, the same who was the mistress of Cardinal Mazzini. Caterina went as a beggar boy, in a pair of blue silken breeches she smeared with dirt from the hearth; her white calves were bare, and on her feet were blue silk slippers ripped open at the toes and adorned with diamond buckles. Her chemise was trimmed in rich Valenciennes lace, slashed into tatters that fluttered most becomingly about her arms and breast. Her face was artfully smudged with dirt under the eyes and upon one soft white cheek. She carried a plate of ruby-coloured glass for alms, which she took care to crack first. In this state of sumptuous misery she went among the guests, begging alms and bowing low whenever she received anything. Soon the plate was full of gold and silver coins, trinkets, and strass diamonds. I myself was in a domino, for I am never effective in any role but my own. As usual, I was bored – the music seemed to me a horrible din, I felt no inclination for dancing; despite the dainty offerings I found I was neither hungry nor thirsty. The déguisements, aside from Caterina’s coup de theâtre, were mostly obvious and uninteresting. I stepped out onto the balcony for a breath of air.

‘The great canal lay glistening in the moonlight, lurid where lit by the torches of passing gondolas. Behind the tall, thin windows of the palaces, the lights of the carnival were burning. I could hear the drunken voices of revellers going by in the dark, the water lapping incessantly at the quay, the grey chumble of rats under the pilings, the brittle tinkle-tankle of a clavichord within the house. The night air was damp, thick, like a soft, wet cloth laid over the face – it smelled of wood smoke and the cold, dead smell that rises from the bottom of the sea.

‘While I stood thus in solitary contemplation, a gondola of luxurious appurtenances drew up just below. I saw a footman in red livery and gold lace step out, then give his hand to a lady. She was dressed all in white – white dress, white fur mantle, and a white mask trimmed with ostrich feathers. Her form was tall and very slender, and she moved with a pale languor that, appearing out of the moonlight and water as she did, suggested a nymph or spirit. I felt an odd frisson, an unaccustomed excitement took hold of me. In a moment she had vanished inside the house. I went in to join the revelry, determined to find her out.

‘We danced the minuet together. She was an exceedingly fine dancer, moving with a lithe grace and agility that were modified by a majestic carriage. She must be some great lady of the stage, I thought, and I racked my brains in an effort to determine who she might be, but among the many actresses, singers, ballerinas, and cocottes of Venice I knew of none so tall, straight, and slender, with so white a skin and such long-fingered, tapering hands. For a while I entertained the suspicion that she might be en travesti, but I soon had to abandon this as an impossibility. I have much experience in such things, and she had not the feel of a man – I don’t know how else to put it. When one takes the hand of a woman there is an instantaneous movement of the spirit, felt as a sudden quickening in the flesh. Never had I felt it so strongly – at once I was on tiptoe with desire. Yet she had not the scent of a woman about her. She was colder, somehow, her hands were chill despite the hellish heat of the ballroom; she hadn’t the warm feline stink that rises from the cracks and crevices of female flesh. Still less did she smell like a man. Her odour was glacial and serene, like the white lilies that bloom at Eastertide and are called after Our Lady, madonna lilies. Her voice, too, could never have belonged to boy or man. It was rich and sweet, with a pure, ringing tone such that I understood at once how a blind man too may fall in love. I was certain she must be some famous singer, but all the musicians in the city were intimately known to me. A visitor, then.

‘Soon I had her alone on that same balcony above the glittering canal. I lavished kisses upon her hands, as cool to my burning lips as a white sorbet. I took her in my arms and kissed her mouth; she was curiously acquiescent, bereft of the usual feminine tricks, the delicate writhings and raillery that constitute a woman’s strength. She received my ardent kiss with – curiosity is the only word for it. As for me, this mouth, which has feasted on every delicacy in the catalogue of saints and sinners, which has gorged itself on rosy lips as on stuffed partridges; this same mouth, which remembers still a mother’s kiss, a drink of pure water, the holy Eucharist; which has defiled itself with blood, excrement, tears and which I had thought completely versed in all the possibilities appertaining to a small, nerve-ridden cavity by means of which we speak, sing, pray, spit, suck, whistle, lie, abjure, swear, betray, wheedle, coax, shout, lick, bite, or even kiss – this organ was merely astonished.

‘It was something new, this. I was eager, very eager, her mouth opened easily, perhaps, as I have said, too easily, to my command, for a woman will always put up a fight, if only for the pleasure of surrender. My tongue was arid, thirsty – and I was surprised by a deep-sounding resonance there. I once had occasion to examine a violin from the hand of the great Stradivarius, and, as I took the shining creature in my hands and let my fingers play over the light and dark surfaces of the wood, I experienced that same sensation – of a limitless beauty sounding somewhere just out of reach.

“So that’s how you do it!” she said to herself. And then to me, “You are Don Juan Tenorio of Seville, are you not?”

“At your service, Signorina. But I’m afraid you have the advantage of me there. Won’t you please remove your mask? Your voice is so lovely – and it seems somehow familiar to me. I’m sure if I were to just get a glimpse of you…”

“Not tonight,” she said. “It’s quite impossible.”

“But when am I to see you again?”

“Do you really wish to see me again?”

“Desperately.”

“Then be at the Café Florian every morning at six.”

“Every morning?”

“I won’t be there the first morning, nor yet the second, but perhaps on the third or fourth if the weather is fine.”

“Come with me now,” I said, pressing her close, lavishing kisses on her beautiful throat.

“What you wish is quite impossible,’ she said, with an air of perfect tranquillity. Armed for the habitual struggle, I was unprepared for this, and before I knew what was happening she slipped from my grasp and vanished into the crowd.

‘I was there the next morning well before the appointed hour. There was no one but an old priest, probably a spy for the Inquisition, and a very young man who sat reading a newspaper. It was still dark – the stars were glittering over the domes of San Marco. Slowly the rosy light of day crept from its bed in the sea ever higher into the sky. The last of the night’s revellers went by in the piazza, their voices and footsteps swallowed up by the great crescendo of morning light. I waited thus for an hour and then returned home in an evil temper. This scene was repeated in all its particulars on the second day. On the third day I had no sooner taken my seat than the young man with the newspaper approached me and, inclining his head respectfully, addressed me in a high, clear voice which I recognized instantly as that of my companion at the ball.

“I see I shall have to introduce myself after all,’ he said. ‘I am Farinelli.”

___________

Grace Andreacchi is the author of the novels SCARABOCCHIO and POETRY AND FEAR .

As I wake up and begin, through the burn of the headache and morning light blindness, to weigh up the evidence, it would seem that as far as sticking one’s cock into complete strangers goes this has been something of a relative success. I feel certain that contraception was used. A sufficient quantity of alcohol was consumed as to significantly delay but not prevent orgasm. You did not orgasm, I recall, but you seemed to enjoy yourself before you fell asleep and you did not vomit on me, which must be counted as a bonus. Having experienced such a mishap on one unhappy occasion, I have, it is true, come to think of all vomitless fucks as relative successes – there is nothing quite like having the putrid contents of a girl’s stomach deposited on your chest to take your mind off the gentle bouncing of her breasts.

You seem, over the course of the last few hours, to have mercilessly claimed every last inch of your duvet for yourself. Entombed now in a kind of cocoon of bedding from which only an elbow and an unpleasant smell protrude, you appear to have ingeniously created for yourself a single small aperture to facilitate breathing. Peering tentatively into it, I note that, as well as being something of a snorer, you are also rather prolific in the unconscious production of saliva. Your matted hair covers what’s discernible of your face so I cannot be entirely sure, but you are not, I think, wholly unattractive.

Your room is a warm, welcoming colour, but gives few clues as to who you are: either you are something of a minimalist or you have only recently moved in. Bed, sink, wardrobe, mirror, numerous large cardboard boxes, piles of clothing and stereo with small stack of CDs. No photos, no ornaments, no art, no books. No books. I refuse to believe that I have put my penis inside somebody who does not read books – I prefer, instead, to think that at least one of the boxes is full of loved novels, pages browned and spines broken.

Pile of clothing one of two: located adjacent to the full-length mirror, pile number one of two appears to be formed of garments that you removed from the wardrobe, tried, and systematically rejected (in some cases rather wisely). Pile of clothing two of two: located in close proximity to the bed, pile of clothing two of two is variously formed of the clothes that you finally settled on and those that I found myself in, and was formed in a somewhat less methodical fashion. On the floor next to pile of clothing two, your keys, attached to a memory-stick keyring. What do you store on this – the holiday photos that you keep meaning to show to friends, a powerpoint presentation that you grope for in your handbag, the novel that you have been working on that dangles from your steering column as you turn left at the lights?

Stack of CDs (one of one): for all I know you might have an impressively extensive collection (who knows how many of the boxes are filled with piano sonatas and obscure world music), but the selection that is currently on display is, it must be said, a little heavy on recent, middle-of-the-road pop-rock shit. But the case that is open on top of the stereo is Miles. Miles fucking Davis. It makes me smile to think of you putting on your makeup while listening to Miles far too loudly, annoying your new neighbours. I almost want to wake you up just to congratulate you, but waking you might, I think, be unwise, if not perhaps impossible.

I met a man some months ago, a drunk friend of a drunk friend, who claimed to have awoken in the beds of at least twenty women and to have placed a fifty pound note on the pillow next to each of them before leaving them there sleeping. He said he carried a fifty around with him wherever he went, in case of success in the pursuit of coitus. He even opened his wallet to show me – true to his word, he removed a folded up fifty from a small compartment separate from the rest of his cash, a compartment in which I think I also glimpsed the serrated edge of a condom packet. When I laughed and asked him why, he looked at me stonily over his drink and said, because women need to be reminded that they are whores. I believe him to be something of a misogynist.

I am not going to leave money on your pillow, nor will I leave you some enigmatic clue as to who I might be. I will leave as I arrived, willfully anonymous. Rest assured, I will not even piss in your sink.

I don’t remember your name and I don’t remember your face. If I saw you in a club next week I probably wouldn’t recognize you – maybe I’d fuck you again and not even realize until I woke up in this room. Or maybe I’ll meet you again in a year, or in ten years, at a concert or in a bookshop or wherever it is that people meet when they don’t just want to fuck each other. In another city, or even another country. You might be beautiful, and I might fall in love with you. Maybe there would be just the quietist pang of recognition that would make me think that I had somehow known you forever. We would marry, and we would buy a house. After agreeing on a genderless but warm, welcoming colour, we would take a lazy Sunday to slowly, carefully paint the walls of our first child’s bedroom, all the while listening to Miles far too loudly and so annoying the new neighbours. I would continue to paint as you put your brush down onto newspaper and crouch there for a moment, smiling red-faced at me as you hold your swollen belly with your hand.

Waking next to you each morning, I will gently kiss the nape of your neck and tell you that I love you, savouring the smell of your skin as you sleep. We will never know that I came here and fucked you, fucked you coldly and calmly, with something close to contempt. We will never know that I rose from next to you and dressed; that I left you here snoring and farting, stinking of vodka and sweat. That I walked out of your room, down your stairs and slipped out through your front door into the world, simply wanting to breathe.

He turned the steering wheel hard to the right, changing lanes without having signaled. The driver of the car behind him, whom he had just cut off, blared his horn, then tail-gated him, bitterly, before moving left. The other man drove parallel for awhile, giving him the finger, before hitting the gas and whizzing away.

Get a life, Bill Chubbuck thought. Then, forgetting the other man immediately, he thought: I hate that expression. I wonder who made it up: probably some poor dumb bastard like me. Now, through no fault of his own, it’s become part of the language, polluting it, one more cancer degrading the English tongue until it destroys it completely. And you’ve got men like me and whoever invented that goddamn “Get a Life” to thank for it.

Bill had had a few drinks after spending a long Saturday at work. There he had been harangued, then pressured, and at last mildly praised. He had done his job for too long not to know that this mild praise—faint praise, that’s what the expression was—meant that he had done marvelously well, saved his job, that of his superiors, and even those of all above them. But giving him more than faint praise might mean he would want something in return—a raise or a promotion or even a better job—and that could not be. “Damned with faint praise,” he thought and liked the expression, sensing that it was invented at a time when people were still creative and not yoked, lashed like galley slaves, as all were now, no matter what age, race, or sex, to some kind of corporation.

The expression made sense: if you were damned with faint praise, well, you weren’t condescended to, exactly, but, anyway, it was worse than getting no praise at all, right? So even if the expression didn’t quite apply to him today—he had been under-praised, intentionally—he still approved of its clarity and wit, qualities which he associated with this earlier, freer age in America, and he knew that the separate parts of the sentence did in fact apply: “faint praise,” as he had already mentioned to himself, and, frankly, “damned.”

Bill cut right, again without signaling, but this time there was no need, no one was behind him. He was entering a narrow, two-lane highway that grew more dark and deserted as it moved more north from New York City. It was six o’clock, the sun had already set, and there wasn’t even the occasional weekday commuter to impede his speed, which was just about to reach seventy-five.

Bill wasn’t seventy-five, he was forty-two, but he thought he looked seventy-five, as he glanced in the rearview and saw the crow’s feet beneath his eyes, wrinkles which made other men look distinguished and only made him look ill and exhausted. “Crow’s feet”—he approved of the expression; its origin might even have been archaic: it was descriptive, precise, and unsparing, and he felt like cruelly sparing himself nothing today, on a day when he had succeeded, a day when other men might have felt exhilarated.

But these other men, he thought, his speed now at eighty, weren’t working for two corporations which were, in turn, working for two other corporations. Olly Olly Advertising, his employer, had recently been bought by—“merged with”—September, October, & Terwilliger Advertising, and was now handling the account of Cedar Ribbon Investments, which had recently been bought by—“folded into”—High Landing Financial Enterprises, which had been born during the depression as Pennywise, Inc.

Bill had survived the inevitable Olly Olly firings that came with the “merger”—
firings all employees had of course been assured would not happen—because he was a gifted copywriter, the best they had, though not one apparently deserving of the praise that might give him ideas of his own worth and so ambition to be elsewhere. (And where else could he go now, anyway? September October? Olly Olly was September October now—it was Olly-September, that was the new name!)

Even when he was given the Cedar account, it was bestowed on him with the veiled threat—“veiled”: cliché, he hated it!—that he had to deliver, because, remember, they weren’t just Cedar any more, they were Cedar-High Landing now, they were thirty-five per cent of the U.S. investment business now, wrapped up in one, demanding, ever- unsatisfied client. So don’t blow it, he was told, instead of, Do your best! We know you can nail it! You’re the best guy we’ve got!

A raccoon raced across the road, a few feet from being crushed by Bill’s car, just missing joining the ever-growing collection of roadkill (deer, coyote, woodchuck) that smeared the shoulder—there was no shoulder, the side of the road. “Roadkill,” “shoulder”—these expressions were…all right, Bill thought, there was nothing wrong with them. And in this strange, sudden calm moment in his over-excited mind, his foot eased off the accelerator as he neared ninety.

He passed a billboard on the darkened road. Annoyed by the presence of an ad in what should by all rights have been a wilderness, he tried to avoid it, looked only at the logo of the billboard company at the bottom, Modern Sign. Then, helplessly, tempted, he glanced back up.

It was an ad for a local bar, with a sleazy joke—“Get a Margarita. And she’ll go down easy”—next to a picture of a pliant, Spanish-seeming woman suggestively sucking on a straw. It was a double-entendre about getting a Latina girl drunk and getting oral sex—right out in the open where kids could see it, was there no decency anywhere, what the hell was happening?!

Bill’s foot slowly started to push down again. The ad was probably done by some small upstate agency. There was no money for a New York firm at Coco’s or whatever the hell the bar was called—it wasn’t part of any chain—maybe an employee had come up with it—maybe there had been a contest, and the bartender won!

Still, Coco’s played by the same rules as Olly-September did now, as everyone did: cut through the clutter, grab the attention and, whatever you do, don’t get caught advertising! People are too sophisticated to be sold to, so blur the lines between other kinds of expression and an ad: sneak the ad into (in the case of Coco’s) a dirty joke or a beautiful image or a heartfelt notion. Further pollute the language with ads hidden like terrorist cells inside words that make you laugh or cry or consider an idea; then just put the product logo at the bottom, subtly and insidiously. Nothing was safe from it—everything was imperiled!

Bill took a turn now at a treacherously high speed. Cedar—sorry, Cedar-High Landing—hadn’t wanted an ad, they had wanted (and here someone in the office, Bill didn’t remember who, he had blocked it out, had actually touched his heart before saying) “truth.” Not “you can trust our investment counselors” or “please invest your money with us,” but feel something when you think of Cedar-High Landing, believe. Your money isn’t a commodity, it’s an emotion; we don’t want your wallets, put those wallets away, we want your tears, your hopes, your souls.

Make it “profound,” Bill was told—and implicitly threatened instead of encouraged, because they were all scared, everyone at Olly-September was scared of Cedar-High Landing, one corporation was scared of displeasing another, as if they were robots with insecurity installed. Make it—and here the growing meaninglessness of all words made Bill blink, dizzily, as his car flew up the empty highway as if acting on its own volition—“real.”

And what had been Bill’s response? Revulsion? Indignation? Even a small, appropriate amount of anger? No, he had obeyed, because not only was he good (oh, don’t ruin that word, too, he thought, he wasn’t good, he was glib: glibness was both his gift and his downfall, it allowed him to make a living and buy a house ninety miles north of New York City and it had ruined his serious writing career and it had driven his wife away, for he excelled at a facile, talented imitation of truth, the kind of thing that ruins novels and ends marriages but makes one an—albeit underpraised—star in advertising) not only was he good (glib) but he was scared. His superiors always succeeded in scaring him, even though he knew better: he always feared for his future even as he knew they were faking; he was the best, he had nothing—or as close to nothing as anyone working for two (no, four) corporations could have—to fear.

He was scared because he wanted their approval because he was weak and so he obeyed and so he was glib and so he did brilliantly, even as he hated himself for being scared and weak and glib and doing brilliantly and thereby saving a job that wasn’t in jeopardy in the first place and then feeling—for a fleeting, disgraceful moment, before he got in his car to go home—proud of how he’d done!

The world on his right, off the road, was pitch-black now—“pitch”: cliché!—and he knew this was where it all fell away, where the highway began to climb a mountain; he could feel his ears pop. For a second, deafened—before he mimed a yawn and cleared his head—Bill heard only the scream of his own thoughts, which were the words of the campaign that he had written.

They had wanted truth, profundity, reality, and he had given them those things. On a white background, the ad said, “You only get out of it what you put into it.” Then, in a different, lighter, ghostly type-face, three words, “Save,” “Your,” and “Life,” floated, as if at once disconnected and connected to each other, at once self-sufficient and dependent on each other for meaning. Finally, in the lower corner, centered, minding its own business, merely playing host to these words but not, of course, benefiting from them (if letters could say, “Who, me?” that was how he conceived it), the logo for Cedar-High Landing was placed: CHL.

Bill was a clever boots, all right! It had a little bit of mystery and, above all, meaning. The ad was a truism both for living and investing: “Save Your Life” referred both to putting your money where it would grow and remaining existent, pulling yourself back from the brink. Remember, it said—he, Bill, said, for he was responsible—without your contribution nothing can occur, whether you’re living in the world or putting your money in a high-yield IRA or secure government bond or whatever the hell Cedar-High Landing (CHL) was offering.

This was what he had written and he knew from the minute he wrote it that it would succeed, that it would be exactly the new kind of non-ad they desired, that it would fulfill every shallow, underhanded need four corporations had to insinuate themselves completely into people’s lives, to co-opt and befoul their language in the process, to replace their art, their philosophy, even their religion. Bill had been their handmaiden, their henchman in this, and for it he was both rewarded (with a hearty handshake and the implied promise that he would not be fired—for now—though the look of sweaty sweet relief on his frightened superior’s face was transparent) and damned.

At the highest point of the highway, his headlights the only illumination, he started his descent in the direction of the exit that would lead to his home. Then his eyelids began to droop. The drinks fogging his mind, Bill turned his wheel toward the flimsy guard rail that would be insufficiently strong to keep him from bursting through and crashing to his death down miles of mountain onto the black earth below.

*

Suddenly, he opened his eyes and turned the wheel the other way. Right before it hit the rail, he brought the car back from the edge, back onto the deserted road. Shaking, sweat streaming from his face, pits and back, he managed to keep the vehicle steady and stay in lane. Soon his breath slowed, his heart rate eased; he even hit the brights to see his way ahead. Then, fearful of falling asleep again, he turned on the radio to keep him alert through the rest of the ride.

It had been nuts to drink so much after work—he had never done it before. But then Tony Hooker had never been laid off before, left high and dry by a liquor store that was being replaced by a chain store, Drugall’s. If a man couldn’t get a little tight then, well, when could he? Still, look what had happened—or almost happened. Had he even wished it to happen? That was crazy, wasn’t it?

It was worse than crazy—cowardly. What would Connie and the kids have done without him? Still, strange to say, he wasn’t slowly being revived now by thoughts of them. It was something else that was sobering him up.

As he climbed the highway—the fastest, most familiar, and at night most death-defying way home—Tony passed the same old billboard he always did. Only this time, it wasn’t that hot Spanish chick from Coco’s who had been there for so many months. (He doubted any girl who looked like that would ever go to that crappy dump, and he’d long since grown tired of that dumb joke once his boy, Baylor, 12, had explained it to him.)

No, tonight, there was a new sign.

The sign was white, which got his attention right away. Pure white, as white as—well, as the driven snow, what else, he was no wordsmith! And it said, “You only get out of it what you put into it.” Then he saw the words “Save Your Life.” They weren’t put together, they were set apart; he had to be clever to connect them, and he had been.

It was no ad. It was a message, it had meaning, one that he understood. It was all up to him, this life, and without his effort, there would be nothing. Though Tony knew someone must have written those words, they seemed to just—exist—without having been invented by anyone, to have been formed naturally, like a rock face or a river, and he saw something in them the way people see meaning in those shapes in nature and never forget.

Die? Those words made him want to live! As he got closer to home, now driving at a normal speed, Tony felt empowered by them, as if the future—no matter what he had hopelessly thought an hour before—was not out of his control.

He was strong, he was himself; he felt it physically now as his big hands gripped
the wheel: it was what the sign made him feel. He couldn’t blame his store now; blame was for weaklings. He was sure they had their reasons, and they had to make money—if he was at their level, maybe he would have done the same thing. If? He would be at their level one day—he was going to be past it, goddamit! That was what the sign made him feel, too.

Tony took the exit that led him home. He remembered one more thing from the billboard, right at the bottom: the logo CHL. He knew it represented the people responsible for those words. As he pulled into his driveway, with a deep sense of gratitude and relief, he vowed that, the first chance he got, he would find out what it meant, who they were, and what else they might be able to do for him.

LAURENCE KLAVAN wrote the novels, “The Cutting Room” and “The Shooting Script” (Ballantine) and the libretto to “Bed and Sofa” (Vineyard Theater, NY). His graphic novels, “City of Spies” and “The Fielding Course,” co-written with Susan Kim, will soon be published by First Second Books at Macmillan. His books can be ordered on www.laurenceklavan.com.

Copyright: Wellcome Collection

Fredric Skargren

Dear Mnumba,

It seems as if I am writing you a letter, my dear friend. We have always been honest to each other. Thus, to make sure that there is no misunderstanding between the two of us, perhaps I should confess immediately that this is the case. I am writing you a letter! I am writing to you from a wooden cottage on the border between Italy and Switzerland, just by Lake Como and Lake Maggiore. The first draft of this letter was made in handwriting just by the previously mentioned lake, whereas the text you are reading now was compiled on a computer, on the stony surface of my desk. At this moment it is snowing outside. The snowflakes are as big as the stars and the sky is white. Do not worry dear Mnumba; the cottage is warm which the snowflakes would confirm if they could live to tell.

Before we venture further into details, let me briefly provide you with some general remarks concerning my habitus. In terms of time, I have a long way to go before I have gathered sufficient specimens to analyse back at the laboratory. My funding will unfortunately only allow me to stay here for two more months and there is little leeway for buying any more office equipment or specimen gathering paraphernalia. In addition, I am afraid that my cottage basement is not big enough to harbour the amount of specimens required by the research board. I will have to start storing the samples on the wooden floor in my living space which currently looks as follows: one big room, with a bunk-bed, a desk made of rocks from the local mountain and a shelf made of trees from the rainforest. There are two windows in my room, and they are facing each other on opposite sides, and there is a door which allows one to enter and exit the cottage.

O Mnumba, the days feel protracted; and I am often restless – but I am certainly not lonely! I feel comfortable in knowing that the specimens are well preserved in the basement. I have only to wander outside for a while in the snow, at the foot of the mountains – in order to relinquish my feelings of restlessness and replenish my desires to be lonely. Because, my dear Mnumba, I am not alone in the cottage. I have arranged with the people residing in the near by village to visit me once a week for a transaction of basic foodstuffs, whiskey, animal protein and moleskins. They send me a different person each time. Sometimes they send a male sometimes a female, sometimes a teenager, other times it is an elderly person, less frequently they are polite, more often than seldom they speak and they always come alone.

I have always maintained that I have a touch of genius; nothing will demonstrate this fact better than if I tell you of my decision, at the tender age of seventeen, to taste of the whole range of human experience.

I duly fell in love with an intensity that is, I suspect, unrivalled in recent years with a beautiful, solemn, grey-eyed girl who cared nothing for me. In this way I also managed to experience heartbreak in one efficient affair. Afterwards, I contrived to experience the other side and set about wooing two girls simultaneously. I was perfectly indifferent to both although they were pretty in their way – one had a rather charming beauty spot over small full lips. When I revealed their existence to each other, one of them took to her bed. I heard later that she had swallowed half a bottle of sleeping pills. Why not the whole bottle? I wondered. She failed, of course, in her endeavour to kill herself. In fact, sometimes I doubt that she ever wanted to kill herself at all; they were weak stuff those things and I’m not sure whether even a whole bottle would have killed her. In any case, failure in all shapes, whether intended or not, must be abhorred.

I am twenty-five now and have done well in fulfilling my mission. I have in a happy accident experienced a near-death encounter; begot a child; travelled all over the world; sampled every drug; tried every sexual position known to man; gone into the church; gone out of the church; starved and despaired.

It is with reluctance (I wish to emphasise this, with reluctance) that I came to realise that I would have failed in my quest if I did not commit murder. And it could not be some mundane stab-in-a-drunken-fight murder – that is beneath me – but a meticulously planned, exquisitely executed execution. The person I kill must be one that gave me no financial benefit, that I did not wish dead in any way. You must understand that I am no common criminal: I wished none of the usual vulgar benefit in such actions. It is merely to complete my education. I am a student. Or a connossieur. A connossieur of life, if you like.

Perhaps you think me mad? In a technical sense, perhaps I am. But what are technicalities? Merely the rules that the inferior majority wish to impose on a superior minority. You who are happy to sit dozing, as the train of your mortality trundles along the banal tracks you have laid for yourself…you are mad! You have chosen to exist entirely on porridge despite the fact that, within your reach, there lie platters of saltily sharp caviars, slow-roasted lambs that almost melt in the mouth, succulent oysters, chocolate fondants and ripe luscious peaches… you are mad to waste a life glistening with possibilities through your criminal mediocrity!

———

I felt that this rather important addition to my collection of experiences ought to have its proper setting so I duly travelled to my favourite city, Firenze. I have always felt that God made a grave error in not planting me in Renaissance-era Italy: it is a place and an age which most closely aligns to my temperament. The Medicis – ah, they knew how to live! They experienced much of the myriad shades of life and we remember them now and salute them as the great men they were.

I spent a happy week sipping espressos in a charming little piazza, researching methods in books I borrowed from the excellent science library at the university. I found myself studying each person that passed before me for their potential. Finally, after much debate with myself, I selected a young Englishwoman who occasionally sat near me in the cafe. A woman would have that extra frisson of excitement, and this one was particularly lovely with her heavy-lidded sleepy expression and the sensual mouth, a little too big for her face. Her head was, in turn, too large for a slender and beautiful neck. She was stupid, I could tell, with a vacant, myopic stare. She would be easy to coax home; not only was she obviously both naive and lascivious but our shared nationality in a foreign city would quickly create an immediate understanding, a sympathy. Though even if she were a glacial virgin, it would pose no problem to me: I possess – as you may well have assumed – a charm both delicate and urgent that complements my refined beauty.

‘Excuse me mademoiselle…’ (I find that these stupid kinds are always impressed by any facile touch of sophistication.)

She looked up with a wide smile.

—–

‘…and I said to her “No! I can’t believe it!” and she said “It’s true!” and I looked and yes there she was that girl wearing the same dress as I was how embarrassing is that my hair, my dress, I mean it’s creepy isn’t it it’s just, just like creepy.’

She had been going on like this for at least an hour. No-one can claim I do not suffer for my art.

‘Have some more wine.’ I smiled. ‘This is a good vintage. It has a fine bouquet.’

‘You are funny!’ She thrust out her glass and giggled. I was displeased with this comment and slammed the bottle down.

‘Wha-’ she faltered.

‘Oh I’m sorry, slipped my hand…’

‘Oh!’ she laughed again (she was always laughing, it was most irritating), ‘I thought for a moment you were angry.’

‘How could I be angry at someone as lovely as you?’

Inevitably, she laughed again.

‘Excuse me. Do please help yourself.’

I passed her the bottle and went into the corridor. I took off my tie. It is a beautiful tie, a silk paisley affair. I had decided for strangulation. (‘Strangulation’ is such an evocative word is it not? It’s that combination of the initial hiss, the quick pull of ‘gyu’ and the long luxurious ‘ation’.) Besides, with such a lovely neck, it seemed a shame to do anything else.

As I wrapped both ends of the tie round my hand twice, tightly, tightly, I imagined the flash of stupid shock and the panic as it rose and the eventual complete vacancy of her already vacant eyes, the cry that would escape her wide mouth and the tenderness of my touch as I brushed down the lids with my fingertips and then the kiss I would plant on the still warm lips…

I looked at her through the darkness of the corridor. She sat in a consciously appealing manner, her breasts thrust out, her waist dipped in, her hips and bottom far back on the chair, the sexual shape of S. Suddenly, with a slight raise of her eyebrows, she fished out a small compact mirror from her bag and stared anxiously at her face. With her fingers she made some slight, quick, imperceptible adjustments and then dropped the mirror back into her bag. She smiled, slowly, happily thinking of me.

So what if I did not murder her? If I took her to bed, fulfilled the imagined joy and treated her well like the gentleman I am; a delicious simple breakfast and then I would walk her home or call a cab and pay for the fare…

The tightness of the tie on my hands slackened, my arms lowered.

Ah! Now this, this was mercy. I have looked at her, the lovely idiot and felt pity, granted her mercy. In a sense I have saved her life. I smiled too, the intelligent echo to her smile. There was no need for murder tonight. Mercy. My merciful smile. A new experience. The sensation! It crystallised into beauty. I, the genius of living.

I draped the tie on my broad shoulders and sauntered in.

1.

Starving people on TV: a sight so familiar it verges on cliché. These appeals are becoming ever more frequent, global weather conditions having recently taken a turn for the worst. Stick men – skeletal beings moving through a parched landscape. Children with pregnant bellies, visible ribs.

The narrator announces that the problem is one of distribution. I’m not sure if I should believe him. Is it possible in an era in which a message can traverse the earth at the click of a mouse, in which I can choose between three types of mango at my local supermarket, that these obstacles should prove insurmountable? Is our failure to feed the starving millions truly, as the narrator claims, a logistical one? Or is it a failure of will?

The bodies on my TV screen are lean to the point of invisibility – spindly pencil-sketches slowly being erased. The world seems unmoved by their looming disappearance. The stick men sit with their heads in their hands, or lie motionless as though practising for the inevitable. The world keeps turning. Soon they will fall off the end of it, like mediaeval sailors. The stick men sit with their heads in their hands. The world keeps turning.

A telephone number ticker-tapes across the bottom of the screen. The number is a hotline for donations. Pen and paper in front of me. I don’t bother to write it down.

2.

That night I dream I see heaven. It’s not the first time this has happened to me. The heaven of my dreams is an island fortress: a vast, white citadel way out in the middle of the sea. For some reason in my dream, heaven has closed its gates, but people still keep trying to reach it. Their desperation for another life, a second chance, drives them to undertake voyages of near-unimaginable peril.

To start with, the mainlanders’ boats are barely seaworthy, and an increasing paucity of natural resources (most available materials having already been turned into schooners, galleons, sampans, etc.) means that the vessels in which they set to sea grow more and more primitive. Before long, they are using plastic kayaks, rubber dinghies, floating tyres: anything, really, that they can get their hands on. Anything that might lend their emaciated carcasses a gram or two of buoyancy.

The journey is long and arduous. Many of the boatpeople perish en route. The remains of these ill-fated persons are invariably consumed by their shipmates, malnutrition being the trump card in any moral debate. The deceased, run most arguments, are martyrs: they have sacrificed their own lives so that others may find salvation. Some of the more barbarous maritime subtribes are not so fastidious in their reasoning. Sustenance has been presented to them as though on a silver platter: there is really no need to equivocate.

As they approach the island stronghold (an ivory city, a gleaming metropolis), many of the boatpeople are forced to shield their eyes. The light that exudes from the fortress, reflected off its snowy walls, is for the majority too bright to bear. But for those lucky souls, squinting against the glare, whose vision is powerful enough to penetrate this heavenly radiance, a wondrous sight awaits: St. Peter himself, a towering figure perched aloft upon the battlements.

His beard is long and white. He cuts a majestic profile: solemn, regal, garbed in flowing robes. There is something terrible about his visage. He wears upon his face an expression unreadable by mortal beings. But the angelic hordes that throng the parapets know what is coming.

By now, the waves below are thick with boats. At the foot of heaven’s walls has collected a floating favela, a seaborne shantytown. The boatpeople, who from this Olympian height resemble ants in a bathtub, are in constant danger of being drowned or dashed against the ramparts. When a certain number of supplicants has collected, the fearsome saint raises his hand as though in greeting. The signal has been given; the angels’ machine-gun fire rips great gouges in the salty water.

3.

Rajesh hates poor people. He hates them with all his strength. No, I mean it. Pretty much every ounce of intellectual muscle in Rajesh’s body is devoted to his antipathy towards the less fortunate. He hates everything about them: their clothes, their accents, the smell of their cleaning products. Mostly he hates their poverty.

“Why?” one might ask. “What have the poor ever done to him?” The answer, of course, is “nothing.” Nothing at all. But it’s not really a matter of anything these benighted creatures might have done or failed to do. Rajesh has no interest in poor people’s actions. It’s their existence he can’t tolerate.

Rajesh is thirty-nine years old, teetotal, and almost excruciatingly mild-mannered until you get him onto the subject of pauperism. Then, his gentle computer-programmer’s features are transformed. He becomes animated, and his eyes light up with a revulsion that seems almost gleeful. Rajesh wears wire-framed spectacles with little circular lenses, and this sometimes leads people to mistake him for a pacifist. But when he gets into one of his moods, the effect is more Himmler than Gandhi.

Personally I can’t share in Rajesh’s odium. I have nothing in particular against poor people, as long as they don’t try to steal my wallet or rob my house. Nor do I have any real problem with the redistribution of wealth – though obviously I’d prefer it if my own wealth remained stationary. But Rajesh is different. His philosophy is callous, unyielding. Social Darwinism is for him an ersatz religion. Furthermore, he practises his faith with the zealous fury of the recent convert, frequently berating others for their inability to see the light.

We’re walking through the city centre on our way to the nearest branch of a popular global café-chain. It is two in the afternoon; we are on our lunch break. Rajesh and I work for different companies, but we perform the same function. Our job titles are identical, and our lunch breaks are often synchronized. On this particular lunch break, the sun is shining. It is a beautiful Spring day.

A beggar comes up to us – a wretched specimen. Bad skin, patchy beard, piteous expression. He approaches with outstretched hand, looking for all the world like a feudal serf about to prostrate himself before his lord. Without really thinking about it, I fumble around in my pocket for change, and then press a tarnished twenty-pence piece into the beggar’s grubby palm. As we walk away, Rajesh says:

“Why did you do that?”
I feign puzzlement. “Why did I do what?”
“You know it only encourages them.”
“What do you mean?”

Rajesh sighs deeply. I can feel a sermon coming on.

“The reason people beg for money,” he says, “is that they’re confident others will give it to them. When you give money to a beggar, you’re essentially validating a parasitic mode of existence – a way of life that is not only valueless but actually detrimental to society as a whole.”

We are approaching the café. The company logo, bold and instantly recognisable, can be seen from the far end of the street.

“I don’t follow,” I say.

Again, Rajesh sighs. His usual strategy in arguments is to become professorial, assuming the role of a teacher disappointed by his pupil’s persistent inability to understand. I find Rajesh’s affected weariness unconvincing. A faint gleam in his eye betrays him. I know how much he loves explaining his theories.

“Mendicants,” says Rajesh, “pose by their very existence a whole host of complex moral conundra, the simplest solution to which is to make a small donation. This enables the donor to feel good about himself, to cleanse his individual conscience whilst ignoring the wider processes at work.”
“Processes such as…?”
“Evolution. Survival of the fittest. Progress, in other words.”
“Right…”

We enter the café. Inside, a queue of thirty or so people stand waiting to get to the counter. Actually, it isn’t really a ‘queue’ in the traditional sense, but more of a swarm – a shifting mass, formless and amoebic. Rajesh and I attach ourselves to the periphery of the throng. There is a lapse in the conversation as the two of us scan the menu-boards: a pointless reflex, since we come here pretty much every day, and always order the same thing. Suddenly, Rajesh says:

“Give me your money.”
“What?”
“Give me your money.”

Reluctantly, I hand over a crumpled ten-pound note.

“What are you going to do?” I ask.

“You’ll see,” says Rajesh. “Double crappuccino, right?”
“That’s right. And hold the soya.”

The crowd is growing more and more agitated. It is chiefly composed of white-collar worker drones, many of whom will shortly have to return to the corporate hive. The servers are doing the best they can, but there are simply too many people to take care of. The workers are impatient for their midday caffeine fix. It is hot and stuffy inside the café – difficult to breathe. A peasants’ revolt is imminent.

Rajesh takes a deep breath. “Cover me,” he says. “I’m going in.”

4.

Five minutes later, we are seated at a window-table in a couple of cushy leather armchairs that I managed to colonise whilst Rajesh was muscling his way towards the front of the queue. I take a cautious first sip of my coffee. It is as good as always: full-bodied, rich and aromatic, and served at exactly the right temperature.

“So,” says Rajesh, “where were we?”

A curious image haunts me: Rajesh’s skinny, shirt-clad back disappearing into a pulsing mass of pinstriped flesh. Plunging through that crowd of people, he looked like a plucky sherpa struggling against the flow of a swollen Nepalese river. He emerged several minutes later, glasses askew, clutching a chunky foam-topped mug in each hand. A broad grin dominated his face. He looked dazed yet triumphant.

“Survival of the fittest,”I say.

“Ah, yes,” says Rajesh, who after his momentary stint as a man of action is slipping back into a more familiar didactic role. “The survival of the fittest. Of course.”

Rajesh clears his throat. Ah-hem.

“Darwin’s theory,” he says, “which over the course of the last century or so has become accepted as fact by everyone but a small cabal of political regressives and religious nutjobs, holds that the evolution of a species – any species – proceeds via natural selection. In layman’s terms, this means that Nature in her infinite wisdom selects the hardiest and most hard-working specimens for reproduction, whilst consigning the weaker elements to the genetic wastepaper basket.”

“Yes,” I say: “evolution. So?”
“So when you interfere with this process, i.e. by donating money to help the weaker elements survive, you are interfering with the evolution of the species.”
“Yes, but – ”
“Ergo, the charity-giver is a traitor to the human race.”
“Right,” I say. “I see.”
Sometimes I think we’re all just so totally insignificant. Like bees. A bee on its own is nothing. No matter how hard it works, its labour produces very little that is worthwhile. A single bee: what real damage can it do? Its tail can leave a nasty sting, I’ll grant you. But the swelling, though painful, goes down in a matter of hours. The bee loses its life – and for what? Most of the time, the stinger doesn’t even leave a scar.

“You don’t look entirely convinced,” says Rajesh.

“That’s because I’m not,” I say.

The bee is not an individual, but part of a collective. Its life is meaningless outside of the hive. Likewise, I often get the feeling that our lives are, in the grand scheme of things, pretty inconsequential. The worker drone spends his whole life contributing to the hive, but his individual contribution is negligible. No matter what he does, he can’t see past the walls of his hexagonal workspace – his small, six-walled cell.

Rajesh is part of a vast corporation, with office in Paris, Tokyo, New York, Singapore. In Mumbai, hundreds of people whose skin-tone is similar to his sit in cubicles that match identically the one Rajesh uses in London. Sometimes they speak to each other via telephone. Each finds it hard to understand the other’s accent, and there is usually plenty of interference on the line. In this global age of communication, the human voices crosses continents in seconds, but distance can be distorting – and besides, how can you be sure that the person on the other end is listening? Really listening, I mean?

And the biggest riddles always seem to remain unsolved. Maybe its in their nature. Take the riddle we started out with: “Why does Rajesh hate poor people?” Are we any closer to solving it? I don’t think so.

It could be something in his upbringing. There’s a reasonable possibility that Rajesh’s parents (grandparents?) were poor when they came to this country – though they probably came on a plane or a ship rather than a floating tyre. Unfortunately, I can’t confirm this, because Rajesh has never told me much about his family. Our conversations tend to remain in the realm of the abstract, as this is where we technophiles feel most comfortable. All I know of my friend’s personal life is that he has a wife, Rita (which may or may not be an Indian name), who so far has borne him a son, Ravi (“sun”), and a daughter, Sita (“princess”). However, I like to imagine that Rajesh’s rather warped perspective on social issues is a way of distancing himself from his humble origins. For some reason, this makes me feel better about myself.

The simplest explanation I can think of is that Rajesh hates poor people because he’s afraid he might become one. As a formula, it’s far from perfect, but it’s the best I can come up with. Admittedly, the explanation doesn’t make sense in mathematical terms, for Rajesh is one of the most highly paid people I know – and deservedly so, I might add. No, the numbers don’t add up, but there’s a residual truthfulness there. At least, there is if we accept that the truth doesn’t always have to make sense in literal terms.

5.

This is all mere speculation, of course – speculation being the only course of action left open to me. Rajesh is no longer with us. He died over a decade ago, taking to the grave the solution to his personal riddle. I, too, am not long for this world.

The world, by the way, has taken a turn for the worst in recent years. Or rather several turns one after another. Each coming hard on the heels of the last, multiplying the damage exponentially. Once a planet gets on a downward slope – well, there’s precious little that can be done to save it. Our only hope now is for some kind of outside intervention: the benevolence of a hitherto unknown alien race. Charity, in other words. I’m not exactly holding my breath.

But I soon will be. The waters are rising, and some people have already started building life-rafts – often with materials stolen from their next door neighbour’s garden. I don’t think I’m going to bother. Drowning will be a release. I gather it’s rather peaceful, actually, as suicide methods go. In my dreams, the angels strap new ammo-belts to their machine-guns.

I think that I might die tomorrow.

It never seemed to matter when the black ones died. As it stopped breathing bubbles it bloated to the surface like a globule in a lava lamp, and bulged there as its scales already began to peel, a single wet dark eye tadpole-like reflecting the ceiling of its tank, black plastic grating, and the other staring down, staring right down at her as it floated on the membrane between the world’s one eye fixed on each. She wondered what it had been thinking as it died and whether it knew Mummy only wanted it to absorb their bad luck, and if it did know, whether it minded. It didn’t have a name – the black ones died so often she got bored of thinking up new names for them all the time. Sometimes she didn’t even notice when they died – it looked a bit poorly in the morning, but by the time she had come home from school it would be happy again, kicking its tail happily like a fish in water.

The other fish, the orange ones, seemed to live for ever, she couldn’t remember any of them dying. She wondered whether they made friends with the black fish of the family and whether they missed them when they were gone, but they never looked sad. They were always playing in Disneyland with plastic statues of the little mermaid and multi-coloured neon gravel and glow-in-the dark plants that look like candy floss and coral that was cave-sized for the little bodies playing hide and seek. Besides, Mummy said they only had a memory of six seconds, so they probably wouldn’t remember that there had been any other black fish but the one there was, and when it died, while Mummy was at the shop buying a new one they probably just thought it was asleep in the cave. So they wouldn’t remember the sea either, and even if they did they wouldn’t miss it because now they lived in Disneyland and who would rather live in the sea when you could live in Disneyland for ever? Mummy said they didn’t come from the sea, they came from the pet shop and the pet shop got them from a pet shop pet shop, but this made them seem even more immortal and even more confusing when they died, though it made the orange fish living so long more understandable. Poor black fish, there must be a lot of bad luck aimed at us all the time for them to keep dying.

She gave the other five orange fish names, and would introduce them to her friends, pretending to point them out confidently, although actually they all looked the same. Mummy had chosen them specially to all be the same size and have the same eyes and colour, because they were part of a set and had to match, although she sometimes felt sorry for the black fish because maybe this made it feel even more left out.

They ate a lot of black fish too, it was always black, or pink, or sometimes white covered in orange breadcrumbs, but never orange orange fish. She never liked eating black fish because it felt like they were eating other people’s bad luck. The good luck fish never died. These fish were much bigger than the ones in their home tank, it must have taken a lot of bad luck to kill them. She asked Mummy where they came from and she said the supermarket and that the supermarket got them from fish farms where fish all live together like sheep do, but the pet shop was next door to the supermarket and fish all live together there. She didn’t mind eating white fish and chips because she knew that the crunchy golden skin wasn’t part of the fish, but black fish always tasted bitter and she couldn’t understand why it was all right to eat them. She only saw big fish like that in zoos and zoos belonged to everyone, so she was scared these big black fish were dead because they had absorbed the bad luck of everyone in the zoo that day, and that’s a lot of people.

She didn’t know what happened to the black fish when they died, they just disappeared. Her mother thought them unworthy of any special treatment, just rotting pieces of flesh and threw them over the garden fence, over the boundaries of their home rather than spreading their energy by flushing it down the toilet and dispersing it through the whole house via the waterworks. That would never do. The memory of the water would take up the bad luck, the particles it dyed them with as it passed through and this would spread through the whole house, it would flow into the radiators and warm into the metal, rise with the heat into the air and be breathed in again and absorbed by us as we absorb the heat and bad luck would creep into the tissues of our pink bodies and it would be as if the black fish had never died at all.

And although six months seems forever to a six year old, goldfish are not immortal, except for not being human. One day an orange fish did die, it sailed to the top of the tank like a balloon and stayed there, because both her parents were away, gone to visit Nana in hospital, and the baby sitter wasn’t paid enough to administer last rites for pets, so she watched it inflating and hovering like a hot air balloon shining orange sun up at her out of the sky of the tank as she peered down and felt dizzy like she was lying in the garden staring up at the sky or watching the shadows over the ground. And the black fish looked just as happy as it always had swimming among the other four as if they were old friends, and the other orange fish didn’t look sad at all and never once looked up at the second sun. But she was sad, and watched it for what felt like all day until the lightbulb was the same colour as the fish and Father came home and did not say how Nana was or where Mummy was only that it was for the best. She told him that the fish was floating and without thinking he took the lid off the tank and scooped it up in a tea cup and poured it into the toilet bowl, pressing the handle as automatically as if switching on the kettle. No one had fed the fish that day because Mummy hadn’t been home and they were Mummy’s pets not hers and Daddy threw a handful of confetti into the tank instead of food so they didn’t touch it.

Fish cannot smile for they have gashes in their faces not mouths, where the pouches of their bodies have been slit open like slots for coins. They cannot blink but always hold the same expression, as black and orange kiss and devour their new-laid eggs.