Inglorious (6 page)

‘If I held up this,’ and he held up a hieroglyph of a figure holding a quill. ‘What would it mean?’

‘To write?’ said Rosa.

‘Good! Good! And this?’ And he held up a hieroglyph of a figure with its arms raised.

‘To praise?’ guessed Rosa.

‘Excellent. And this?’ And he held up a picture of a man tied to a stake.

‘Prisoner?’

‘Wonderful. And this one?’ And he held up a picture of a figure sitting in an arch.

‘I don’t know,’ said Rosa.

‘That’s a god wearing the sun’s disk and grasping a palm branch in each hand,’ he said. ‘But that one was difficult.’

Idly, Rosa wondered how long the game went on. And she discovered it went on for quite some time, as Pennington asked her to guess the meanings of another batch of hieroglyphs and to translate a line of them. ‘See how you do!’ he said.

Pen in hand, she went to it. She still wasn’t sure what he was paying. He had a fixed stare. He smiled a lot, but she couldn’t tell how deep the charm went. Unmarried, she assumed. Simple and terrible in his way, with his staring eyes, his shocking refusal to break eye contact. He dropped
this stare only when he was reading through her translation, laughing richly at her foolishness, then he lifted his eyes again and looked long and hard at her. Eventually he said, ‘Brilliant!’ He was laughing at her. ‘Complete nonsense! But they often are! How were you to know? How could you possibly do it? Impossible! You were bound to get it all wrong. And you did! But you tried, nonetheless, you tried. And that is very important.’

She thanked him while he snorted and told her not to worry, it was quite all right, he often – now that Egyptology had become so popular, something to do with Hollywood perhaps, and he said this with distaste – got applicants who were unsuitable. She apologised to Pennington for wasting his time. He nodded with a steely little smile. ‘Thanks so much, goodbye, dear, goodbye.’ Goodbye for ever, he meant, and Rosa thought,
Well, that’s that
. Once he had shut her out she went back out through the little gate. She side-stepped round a yellow digger, which was sitting on the kerb like an industrial scorpion. Pennington was nothing but a diversion. He was a wrong turn, if anything, and for a moment she wanted to go back and tell him. She had a few urgent questions to answer, and none of them, but none of them, had anything to do with Osiris. Except, it was Osiris who weighed you in the balance after death. It was Osiris who put a feather on one of the scales and your heart – or soul – on the other, and if your heart sank lower on the scales than the feather, then you were doomed. Well, we must all be doomed, she thought. Every last one of us! For who, in this day and age, can make any claim to having a heart lighter than a feather!

‘Mr Rivers is in a meeting,’ said the woman. Mandy had come back from the store cupboard with this news. ‘Really, are you sure?’ said Rosa. She tried to sound incredulous. Had Sharkbreath really not wanted to see her? ‘Can’t you try again?’ said Rosa.

‘He is too busy to see you,’ said Mandy. She said that with
an officious twang, rustling her papers.

‘But I really do need to see him,’ said Rosa. ‘I’ve been a good client, a client of many years. It’s true, my debt is quite bad. I’m not pretending there’s no debt. But I am actively seeking work. I am busy about it. And I just need some flexibility on my debt.’

Mandy bridled. She was definitely becoming sanctimonious. ‘If you’re in debt, then there’s nothing I can do about that. Mr Rivers can’t see you. I can’t help you any more,’ she said.

‘Perhaps you
can
help me,’ said Rosa, in a tone of ill-advised optimism. Mandy shrugged and looked as if she thought it was unlikely. When Rosa said a couple more things Mandy told her she had to talk to Rivers. Shaking her head brusquely, Mandy walked away.

Eager and ready, awaiting enlightenment, Rosa sat on the top deck of a bus as it rounded the corner and moved on to Kensington Park Road. There was still much to anticipate. Today she had an interview and she hoped she would get the job. She had to go back to Jess’s flat, pass the day writing applications, and prepare herself. She had to prime herself for her interview at 4 p.m. It seemed a real possibility, this job she was going to win. Her deviation would be corrected; she would climb out of her fiscal pit. After that, when that was settled, she would really get to grips with the basics, with the essential mysteries and underlying causes. She inhaled sharply as a woman elbowed her in the face. She heard Arabic behind her and German to her left.
Auch wenn wir nicht wollen: Gott
reisst
. Then she heard the tinny sound of an iPod, whispering a tune she couldn’t remember. The bus scraped past the parked cars and people. A scaffold and the sound of drills. The yellow-fronted self-service laundry, always for let. Shops with their windows full. Pale slabs. Enfeoffed, she thought. My kingdom for an epiphany. The sun ascending. The sky a lustrous pale blue. Soon it would be mid-morning. The morning
was half-finished, half-begun. And onward the day went, unstoppable, quite incessant in its vigour.

Ahead she saw the blue bridge hanging over the road, cars filing across it. It was a slung construction of steel and on its curved belly were signs and shapes, cryptic clues, left there by the taggers.
TEMP.
She had a fine view of a high-rise block, faded turquoise trim on the windows. On a balcony she saw two eagles, painted in gilt. Then there was the pebble-dashed side of another bank. Another bank, she thought, with bars on the doors. But there was no point trying to get symbolic about the fact that she had ripped through her overdraft and failed to supply a payment plan. The glass shivered as the bus turned abruptly and everyone swayed, rubbing shoulders in a friendly way. For all of this, despite the deep sense of community, the Blitz spirit of the upper deck, Rosa found she had her head in her hands. Suddenly she wanted to get out, she was racked with a sense of unease, and when the bus came to a halt under the Westway she ran down the steps. At the side of the road, she wondered if she should wait for another bus or walk home. Indecision stopped her for a second, then she walked up the hill and along the street thinking that here was another Georgian terrace and here a window with the curtains gusting in the breeze. She picked her way past the station where an old man was chanting a mantra, begging for change. A man with a grey face was selling papers, his hands in fingerless gloves. He mouthed an ‘A’ at Rosa, and then she heard the rest: ‘ARSENAL WIN CUP’ he was saying, and then his voice faded again. Pressing her feet carefully on the pavement she walked up the hill, passing the stalls selling falafels, the late night shops, the all-night chemist. She noticed the taggers had scrawled new words along the walls. EASY I, she read. THAT and what? she thought. She couldn’t read it.

She reached the funeral parlour on the corner with the growl of the Westway at her back. The houses were yellow and blue and some of their lintels were crumbling. The traffic lined up in queues, and she heard the low moan of brakes. But really,
she added, we’re nearly in the suburbs. She stared intently at the rooms she passed, seeing an African woman with her hair scraped into a bun, spreading out sheets on a bed, and a Middle Eastern man tying back the curtains of a bedsit – she could see the bed behind him and beyond that the shabby frame of an ancient cooker. He caught her staring and she looked away.

Everything was named for outmoded pastoralism – Oxford Gardens, St Michael’s Gardens, Ladbroke Grove. There was a sign pointing left, saying EQUAL PEOPLE. So that’s where they live, she thought, moving past. The houses on this road were Victorian, with pillars and grand windows. They were haughty in the cold sunlight. There was a mural on the side of one row, an image of stairs ascending to a celestial place. Even here they were bugging her with thoughts of eternity. Meanwhile she nodded at the blue plaque which said ‘Phiz lived here’, nailed to a house with yellowing curtains, a neon light by the door. Now she could see the Trellick Tower with washing on the balconies like semaphore flags. A pair of men who were covered in paint and a kid with a hood slung over his eyes. There was a blue sign saying offices to let, and a man saying ‘Fuck shit’ to the open air, and the number 52 was shuddering past. Beyond the prophet on the corner was the roundabout where everything looked ruined, patched in pinks and blues. There was the cheap call centre, the takeaway with its plastic pictures of faded food in the windows, a set of banished office blocks, and on a low wall running up to the red steel bridge she saw
TEMP
again, and a billboard saying HERE COME THE TEARS. Her mouth filled with fumes; the air was thick with the smell of petrol. Rosa always turned the corner wheezing, vowing to get out of the city. Her street had a few Victorian houses, stranded amid rubble and nothing, as if the row had been bombed and never rebuilt. On the other side of the street was a high-rise block. There was a hoarding further away, decorated with leftover scraps of former posters. One day they had pasted a sign up saying ARMAGEDDON.
It was a huge hint from God. The back windows of Jess’s flat had a view of the receding parallels of train tracks, coated with moss, and a red steel bridge. To the west was a gas tower like an abandoned shrine and a burial mound of rubble.

Her mouth was dry and she could smell her own breath. Somehow the door came closer and closer until she could see the peeling paint and the small bare garden and then she dropped her keys. She scrabbled in the earth thinking it is today and I am the mother god. When the door opened she felt faint for a moment and stumbled in the hall. At the door to the flat she paused and wondered if she heard a movement within. That made her heart thump madly in her breast. She had avoided Jess for days, but it was never certain when she would be at home. She was holding the handle, but she couldn’t twist it. Then she heard a noise and the door swung open.

When she regained her focus, she saw Jess had a steely gaze and a resolute air. She was by the table, a Marlboro Light in one hand. Jess was dressed in pristine cream, she had a first-rate brain, and she commanded a decent salary that she had used to buy a flat in no-man’s-land. Jess was a guardian, tending her own personal shrine to normality. She was standing straight-backed, making herself as tall as she could. She stood with her cigarette in one hand, the other hand in her pocket, eyeing Rosa calmly. Then she tossed back her glossy hair; Jess was defined completely by her brown mane. Rosa had never seen her naked face; it was always half-concealed by hair. Jess lined herself up with the window, and cast a reluctant glance towards her.
By God, you are a redoubtable foe, and I concede
before the contest
, thought Rosa. She had nothing in her armoury at all, nothing to say, and no way to defend herself. Besides, her head hurt. She knocked something off the table, a bottle of something, and it rolled away, under the sofa.
Something to sort out later
.

‘Rosa, now we’ve coincided, let’s go and have brunch,’ said
Jess in a flinty tone. ‘I’ve been working from home this morning. Now I have to go into work. Let’s grab a bite to eat while I’m on my way. We need to talk about a couple of things. Have you got time now?’

That was clearly ironic, and Rosa rose with a sense of foreboding, staggering under it, or under the weight of something else she couldn’t identify. ‘Of course. Just have to wash my face,’ she said, her throat tight. Jess nodded, as if she understood Rosa’s reluctance, commended it as a fair assessment of the situation. ‘I have to drop off some dry cleaning. I’ll meet you at Café 204 in twenty minutes,’ she said tersely, and stalked out of the door.

In the bathroom Rosa put her head under the tap and washed her face. She rubbed the condensation from the mirror and looked at herself – mostly unchanged – wry smile, deliberately cultivated at fourteen, thin face, pale cheeks, dark eyes, nothing unattractive about her, older of course, but her family aged well, their cheekbones grew more chiselled and their jaws kept their lines, and their fat turned to scrag. Recently she had noticed deep lines across her brow, a sceptical puckering of the skin. A vein had burst on her cheek, but there was nothing else that singled her out. She looked well enough. Slightly anaemic, but she had always looked bloodless. The bags under her eyes were swarter by the day, but that was to be expected. Anyway, swart was just her colour.
‘Amor fati,’
she said to the mirror, the steamed up smear in front of her. ‘There’s no happy ending anyway.’ Through the narrow window of the bathroom she saw the feathery texture of the sky. Later the sun might shine on the city, brightening the grey fronts of the Georgian houses and the dusty terraces. There would be a smell of the approach of winter and dried out petrol and she would walk in Kensington Gardens and watch sunlight skimming on the surface of the water and people playing football in the grass. If she went to the interview and did well, she thought, then she would take a book to a quiet corner of the park and read for a while.

Now she turned off the taps. The pipes made a low groan. She took a towel from the rack and smelt it. She used it sparingly on her skin. Because Jess had already gone out, she drew the curtains and dressed quickly in the living room, looking round at the familiar objects, silhouettes in the half-light. In the corner she saw the diodes of a stereo, glinting like rubies. She could see Jess’s coat hanging on the half-open door like a timid man too nervous to approach. Then, prepared to beg, she walked out onto the street.

She caught up with Jess at a café on Portobello Road, a place where they sold designer clothes and food at the same time. The waiters passed their time sniffing down the menus, styling themselves on Satan and his minions. In the designer kitchens of Beelzebub they were dishing up much-adorned plates. Everyone in there was well clad, loaded with the latest styles. Even the brunch was as elegant as anything. Rosa didn’t care about the contrasts. It was only when she had eaten half her salmon and eggs that she understood she was there to receive advice. Jess was a small, precise person, who always thought before she spoke. She had been generous for months. Now Rosa’s whole
Weltanschauung
, to give it a name it hardly merited, was wearing thin. They ate toast and failed to talk seriously until a second round of coffees came. Then Jess – who was a kindly person and really quite hated to kick people in the teeth – said, ‘Rosa, I brought you here to suggest that you take a break. Why not go away for a while? A change of scene. How about it?’ She was twirling a napkin round her neat little fingers.