Carnaval

Chapter 1

The pub was refilling faster than his glass—it rained outside; it had rained for the first two weeks of March now, and London’s workers and non-workers tipped into and out of offices, into and out of buses and taxis and tubes and pubs and bars and shops, where they wrung themselves out over each other and fogged up every interior with the condensation of their banter and the steam from their wet clothes. Only die-hard smokers hung about under awnings like laundry someone had forgotten to bring in. Sam spotted Mike trying to elbow past those clogging the doorway and pointed to the stairs behind the bar. Upstairs, quiet but for the rustling of quiz papers and a barman taking orders for drinks, the two lads tapped their feet under their table to warm up and scanned their mobile phones before the order came to turn them off.

‘So, your day was?’ said Mike.

‘Wow. Well. I might have a job’

‘The journo one you interviewed for?’

‘Nope.’

‘OK. What do you reckon to our chances tonight, man? Did you study the Modern Art topics? If I’ve got to do Sport. Like, short straw, or what?’ It was a reasonable complaint. Mike wasn’t overweight, but he looked like he sat around a lot and ate a good deal from the supermarket aisles that Sam never ventured down. Which wasn’t reasonable as Mike could afford to go down the aisles Sam preferred.

‘Still, we already agreed. Division of labour and all that. Not losing every week cos of Sport and Modern Art. Covered the backsides of every other topic. Fifty quid pot plus free drinks at stake. Depending on...’

‘So...the interview? Man, lookie over there. There’s that lovely beautician or whatever.’

‘No way is she a beautician. She knows what Existentialism is. Maybe she’s a sex worker. Ok, I got a job. Sixteen hours a week. As a cleaner for some stuffy cow. Called Honoré. Apparently.’

‘You’re shitting me.’

‘About the job? Or her name?’

In the half hour before the quiz, Sam elaborated upon his ‘totally far out morning’. He described Honoré. That she was all money, a cold mannequin with a sort of stoop. With no tattoo. And an immobile face – he had the chutzpah to ask her about this and even then, it didn’t move. Her house—the expansiveness, the generosity of its proportions, though not, he suspected, of its inhabitants, whom he was yet to meet. He meandered through this in the same way he had roamed about the dwelling—in the end, she’d said, ‘Oh go and see for yourself but don’t touch anything and don’t go in the bedrooms. They have brass brooches on the doors.’ He sensed money everywhere. He smelt it in the floors and the walls and the extravagant bouquets that roosted on every console table. He heard it through the speakers hard-wired into kitchen and dining room and study and bathrooms. He felt the coldness of it rise from marble surfaces, its false promise of warmth from mahogany balusters, and hearths big enough to house a reptile farm. He tasted it in the sting of the scented candles and expensive perfumes in the exotic air. But best of all, he saw it. Not in Honoré, no, not there – of her, there’d be more later—but she didn’t talk like money ought to talk anyway. He stopped a while in the library. ‘A British Library in the making. Scuffed leather chairs and double-glazed cabinets. This I checked. Why? Afraid the books might get cold? Reckon Hemingway’d mind being cold in print?’ He dawdled again in one of the bathrooms. He felt the taps. He stared in a wall-to-ceiling mirror. ‘I kinda twizzled about a bit, checked my tattoo—Mike sighed here, maybe enviously— ‘thought about washing the back of that beautician over there.’ He whispered at this point. Mike nodded, dark eyes wide. Finally, coming back down the staircase from the first floor muttering to himself about sixteen hours, and how clean it already all was, and wondering if anyone lived there as it was all a bit of a sarcophagus really, he spotted a painting in the big stairwell. ‘The big one, not the one to the second floor, cos that was a bit darker. Stingier,’ he explained. The painting haunted this stairwell. It was, in his young and studied opinion, a fake, or a copy, as surely the real thing was hanging in New York or San Francisco or Paris, ‘on loan, one of those paintings that you can’t ever get up close and personal with because it’s bunting-ed about with little ropes and palisading.’

‘Ok. Whistle’s going. Hold up with all that descriptive shit. Let it be a painting we get asked about tonight. Man... she’s paying you... to clean’? Like, no other services? We’re in a ghost story? You’re serious, right? This is one of your Stephen King numbers?’ said Mike with a mix of envy and fear in his voice. Mike earned enough but money frightened him. He stashed it in eight different bank accounts to spread his risk in the event of a bank failure. He’d never quite recovered from the shock of 2008 when he thought the credit balance he’d bothered to cultivate as an undergraduate had evaporated. Neither did he ever know how much was in each account; such was the limit of his understanding of a subject that terrified him. Every time an overdraft alert pinged away in his back pocket, his fear was justified. So, he went to a Fortnum’s or Waitrose, bought expensive food, and drank a few tots of something very fine.

Chapter 2

These nights were a ritual in thirds: the quiz, the drive home and the whisky. After the quiz and a few more beers, Jim, the cab driver, dropped Sam at the corner of some dingy street a few metres down from wherever Sam happened to be living, generally north-east of the pub, and continued south with Mike.

‘What route?’

‘Don’t care. Chucking it down, nothing to see. No window shopping or beautiful women likely out. As slow or fast as you like. How about round The Royal Albert Hall?’

‘True. How was the quiz? You win? What about that clever beautician existentialist? You get her number yet?’

‘We won. Only ones that knew the answer to the Art question: only way to tie up the meta-structural links. Got the fifty-point bonus, and the fifty quid.’

‘The what? Oh, the quiz within the quiz. All a bit Shakespearean for me, Mike. So, what was it?’

‘Who painted Blanchisseuse from 1863? They all said Lautrec.’

‘Oh, the Daumier one.’ Jim winked at Mike in the mirror. Mike knew this. He knew a lot about Jim’s body language, even in the fractured dark of the cab interior. He didn’t know what Jim knew; nobody knew what cab drivers knew. It was too much for an intelligent passenger, like playing chess with a savant.

‘Hmmm. The beautician got it wrong. Sam knew it. No idea how. He’s useless at that stuff. Must have actually done what I asked him. That got him her number. And that got me her number. If Sam doesn’t renege. I gave him the fifty quid for it, on condition he didn’t call her. Doubt he will – not his type.’

‘That boy knows some stuff. Impressed. You better text her now. He won’t. He’s ok. Surely you know by now what his type is?’

‘Well, yes and no. Sam’s not easy to crack. So... I’ll text her when I get back.’

The cab slowed. Mike put his face up against the window, the way he’d put his face to the desk in maths lessons. A big ugly thing really, the Royal Albert Hall. The ellipse of it. Attempt an algorithm again—how many bricks to build The Nation’s Village Hall? It heaved off the rain pelting around it, lights harrumphed around it, the bald veiny dome coroneted it—a beautiful monstrosity that was above explaining itself but welcomed all like a great-great- grandfather who’d forgotten the names of his relatives. It yielded no answers.

‘I wish I wasn’t so fat,’ Mike said as if that were the result of his calculations. He leant back from the window—he’d left a kiss on it.

‘You’re not fat lad. You need a bit of toning. You use that gym in your basement?’

‘Sometimes. Not enough to interest her. She’s called Luce.’

‘Light! Here we are. Out you get. Not too much whisky. Otherwise, the text will be one that’s stupid or obscene or, worse still, sentimental tosh. See you tomorrow.’

These Monday nights concluded when Mike passed out on the finest whisky he happened to have bought that week—for cash—in Milroy’s in Soho. He walked by once when he was a student on a cheap night out at a steakhouse. It was love at first sight. There was choice in that shop before choice was born in the UK, before re-branding and re-packaging, graphic design, marketing, advertising, publicity and public relations (whatever the hell that was) professions had made life incomprehensible to simple men that liked stuff that was good and worked and no more. Choice in Milroy’s was blonde, brunette, red-head, mouse, honey, amber, caramel or butterscotch laced with—according to the provenances scripted on labels of other subtle hues—intimated promises of peat and exotic spices from sweaty plantations hanging in the space between the whisky and the glass. Choice was poured into different bottles before Mike even figured that girls dyed their hair. Whisky was his mistress before he’d read Philip K Dick or, truth be told, a teen boy’s magazine, or succumbed to the fantasy of the older woman that magicked into his head as soon as he packed his stuff for university and left his exhausted mother behind. Milroy’s was how a natural born sceptical shy boy like Mike grew to a man and understood the possibilities of diversity and hierarchy, and above all how to forget the world and its women—stylishly. Maybe champagne, shoes, and hair-dye did that for women. How was he to know? Milroy’s stood as it had stood since, really quite recently when he thought about it, the 1960s, and its windows exclaimed unformed desires for money and knowledge. He’d bought a miniature of Speyside. Unoriginal but a beginning.

He opened a bottle of Bourbon. He remembered that. He remembered it when he woke up and saw the empty little glass barrel on the Perspex coffee table by the door to the en-suite. Seventy-five quid’s worth of Bourbon. He remembered tasting toffee and vanilla and fire. Passion and pudding and witches. As he rubbed his eyes in the shower, poured a half bottle of shampoo over his dark thin shiny hair, scrubbed his armpits and slapped his body about with a flannel, he also remembered that he might have sent a text about two-thirds into the bottle. As ungainly and hung-over as he was, he exited the shower in an orderly way, towelled himself off, splashed cologne about, combed his hair and bent to dry between his toes properly—he had promised his mother he would always do this; it was the only thing he remembered promising her and he was evangelical about this ritual too. He got as far as getting a shirt and tie on and stood, sockless and trouser-less next to his bed. He couldn’t see the mobile phone. He went to open the silver Venetian blinds. A cold London light rushed in. A colder expensive apartment woke up. He expected noise, a hum of radio, a hiss of coffee, a sigh of bread, a crackle of cornflakes—surely, he’d paid for that too? He pulled the duvet off the bed. There it was.

He sat down and swiped to the sent messages. ‘Crap.’ His fingers hovered over the phone. Then he tugged at his hair. He played she loves me she loves me not in his head as if a daisy grew there. He felt the adrenalin steam through him like espresso from a still. ‘Fear: delete. Flight: delete. What’s the I don't-give-a-monkey’s hormone? Do I give a monkey’s? Should I? Would an Existentialist give one? Am I neurotic? Was Marlowe?’

Chapter 3

Twenty phones sang a chorus from some Oratorio. Sam said, ‘Holy Shit!’ and pedalled the power switch on the vacuum cleaner—it had snaked about after him like a diligent little sausage dog for about an hour now. He’d finished cleaning the four sides of the square top floor. But not the saltire that ran across it. The phone near him vibrated across a marble-topped console table, edging too close to an expensive-looking vase. He lifted the phone and bent down. The sounds about the house were incantatory now. He was crouching on the floor.

‘Praying?’ said Honoré.

‘Fuck! You frightened me. You going to answer one of them? They all go off like that?’ He turned his head towards Honoré’s heels; his eyes moved up her legs. They were long. They were honed. They were sheened in some expensive hosiery, the type that’s just enough covering for you to see something beneath. Stockings?

‘Do get up Sam. You might see more than you like. Oh, I didn’t put the bloody phones in. You can’t trust anybody. Not even friends. Especially not friends. If the phone company don’t turn up till April Fool’s Day and you’ve left a friend in charge. Any good at telecoms? Electrical engineering? Wiring? Everyone calls me on my mobile phone. Bloody Mozart’s Requiem going off every time I get a junk call. It’ll stop in a minute.’ She stopped talking. It was shouting really, but there was nothing strident about it. She hesitated. Her eyes were the colour of cornflowers, her cheeks had a flush to them and her mouth was open, half smiling, half surprised. She looked like that ‘confused and embarrassed’ emoticon as if she’d caught herself off her own guard. She stroked the top of her thighs, straightening herself or her skirt.

‘Well. A Requiem's ok surely. When all those poor sods in Call Centres die of disaffection, we should hold a global requiem mass for them. Nearly took one of those jobs myself.’ Sam lay down, he put his hands behind his head, and he laughed. He wanted to add, ‘Get down here and laugh with me,’ but he closed his eyes and he giggled while she remained somewhere above him.

‘You take your coffee break laughing? I don’t pay you to laugh. I might do one day.’

Sam opened his eyes, looked a bit daft and sheepish, and brought himself to standing. ‘I get a coffee break? I really like coffee. I bet you have nice stuff.’

‘I do. I’ll make you one. Follow me.’

The requiem had stopped. They both took the stairs to the lower ground floor, a white cavern of marble, wall-to-ceiling kitchen technology, gleaming taps and copper pots, and wood that was thick enough to outlive generations of rodents. She led him through it, beyond it, into a smaller anteroom that had a rustic table covered in paper and discarded sketches of buildings, some more work surfaces and more kitchen stuff, but without the stupefying superiority or matching paraphernalia. A professional coffee-still occupied one whole surface. She got to work on it. Sam sat at the table and watched her.

‘I clocked an hour on that floor already. Hardly started really. I earned a coffee? Man, that smells good.’

‘Oh, don’t worry. I got rid of most of the staff. It’s boring, being responsible for people. Having to gossip with them. So, having someone to do what’s on show will do the trick. Just do what you can see. You need more hours? We can talk about that.’ Honoré turned around carrying two mugs of coffee, tilting her head towards the fridge, requesting milk. She sat down. ‘Now, what I want to know...’—she resumed her distant manner of last week’s interview. Sam checked to make sure the drop in temperature hadn’t cooled the coffee— ‘...is, you haven’t gone in any of the rooms up there? Mine is unlocked. That’s all I ask. By the way, did my face move for you today?’ A smile cracked her face, a hairline fracture on a porcelain plate that didn’t even show her teeth. Sam looked at his coffee. What you needed in a situation with a woman like Honoré, maybe, he was swiftly figuring, was a thermometer.

‘Nope. You told me not to. Bit curious. I like figuring stuff. Can’t help but wondering. But if people don’t want me to know, then they either lie—can’t stand people that lie—or they tell straight up: they don’t want this or that... Yeah, your face moved. Upstairs. Never saw a face like yours. TBH.’

‘Hmmm. I guess it’s a useful face. My mum said I wouldn’t get wrinkles early. Thank you. BTW. Maybe, if we get along, we can see into rooms and such. Anyway, you’re too young to have the time, and I’m old enough to be in a hurry.’ She raised her eyebrows in a faintly apologetic way.

‘Oh, I dunno, I’m not that much younger than you. How do you keep those rooms clean and stuff—for the houseguests I mean?’

‘I borrow hotel staff. They do all that. When there are people coming. It’s the humdrum daily stuff I want you to do, the bit when it’s a home. I’m going out now. I’ll leave some cash on the table here for you.’ Honoré got up, did that skirt- straightening thing she did, put her empty mug on the table and moved towards the bigger kitchen. She moved like a ballerina. She turned and looked quizzically. A valedictory sentence hung unspoken in her half-opened mouth. She left the room. She came back. ‘I enjoyed watching you laugh. BTW.’

‘Enjoyed looking at your ankles,’ Sam answered the back of her legs and her hips as they disappeared into and out of the house.

Sam finished his coffee and sat quietly for ten minutes or so. He went up to the entrance hall. A massive