Incarnate (10 page)

“She can come and play after school. She said she wants to.”

“That’s right, you look after her.” Mummy was opening the packs of frozen food. “Don’t get the idea it’s all her mother’s fault. The father left them years ago. Eve hardly remembers him, but you can tell she misses him. I’d like to get my hands on him.” She was talking to herself now. “That’s marriage for you,” she said, “a snare and a delusion. Something men believe in as long as it’s convenient for them.”

Susan took Eve’s book into the main room. She never liked it when Mummy talked like that, and just now it reminded her of the photograph of Daddy she had found when they were packing. Mummy had snatched it from her, smashed the glass and torn the photograph. “You’d love to come with us, wouldn’t you?” she’d cried at the pieces she was tearing up. “Would you like me to tell Susan how you left us just when I needed you most? There, that’s what we think of you.” Susan sat by the gas fire and tried to read Eve’s book, but found herself looking at the pictures—misty forests with eyes between the trees, castles with turrets that poked the clouds—while she listened to conversations shouted across the roadway and big portable cassette players turned up full. The street was waking up.

Soon Mummy brought dinner through from the kitchen, and milk in the new mugs. It must have been the gas fire that made the food taste dusty. When they’d washed up, Mummy said, “Bed now, young lady. School tomorrow, and I’ll go hunting jobs.”

Susan stared at her. “I thought—”

“No need to look at me like that, Susan. Jobs aren’t quite as easy to come by as I thought they would be. Maybe you’ll find that too when you grow up.” Her smile was warning Susan to keep quiet. “We aren’t completely penniless, you know. We won’t starve while I look for a job.”

Susan washed herself with her Snoopy soap and brushed her teeth in front of the bathroom mirror. A face much like her father’s in the photograph and not at all like Mummy’s gazed back at her, a long face with large nose and eyes that were almost black. She shouldn’t think of him as Daddy, Mummy never let her call him that. She looked squashed against the wall above the bath, the room was so cramped. She pulled on her pajamas and hurried across the drafty hall, yanking at the cord to remind herself of the layout of her room. “Good night, Mummy,” she called, and Mummy came to tuck her in. “Good night, darling. You’re my best girl,” Mummy said and gave her another kiss before she pulled the cord and left her. The dark felt cool and soothing. Susan was on her way to sleep when the day’s events crowded in. The things Mummy hadn’t told her nagged—Mummy’s lack of a job, her having met Eve already. She remembered the squish of the beetle and shuddered, remembered how Eve had watched her and thought for a moment that she had met her before, seen Eve’s eyes watching her. She must be jealous of Mummy for having met Eve first, she told herself, and with that she was asleep.

9

“
S
OHO
,” Molly said. “Why not Soho, Martin?”

Leon grinned at her inspiration. “Can it wait until we’ve finished?”

“I was only thinking that’s one way Britain’s changing,” she went on. “People finding that all of a sudden they’re living in the sex center of the country, above porn shops instead of delicatessens. It’s never been done on television, not from the inside.”

“Sounds possible,” said Martin. “Especially if we can find aspects that are specifically British so that people don’t think they’re looking at Times Square. Maybe we can go along there later and prowl around.”

“I’ll take a look now,” Molly said.

“Well, maybe you shouldn’t go by yourself. We’ll only be an hour or so, right, Leon?”

“Don’t be such a Southern gentleman,” Molly said, patting Martin’s arm. “I’ll steer clear of the white slavers.”

“Okay, make sure you do.” He turned back to her as Leon ushered him away to be interviewed. “I mean it, look after yourself.”

After the relentless central heating of MTV, the open air felt like a cold shower. A single lemony cloud hovered where the western sky grew pale, a lorry piled with Christmas trees held up traffic on Edgeware Road. In Oxford Street windows half a mile apart displayed placards that seemed to prove Father Christmas could be in two places at once.

She was at Wardour Street in fifteen minutes, and turned toward Soho. Film companies exhibited posters for Christmas treats and next year’s hopes, but it was the neon of Soho that drew the eye as the street grew darker. She mustn’t walk too slowly, in case someone thought she was plying for trade. When she glanced behind her, a man turned quickly to look at the Columbia posters.

Lights chased around the borders of neon signs in Old Compton Street, cards bearing women’s handwritten names were tacked above doorbells in shabby alleys. Spiky rubber penises stood in shop windows, masked women brandished whips on glossy covers, women bared breasts like a baby’s dream, improbably muscled young men looked made of bronze or chocolate. Women with faces that made sure nobody thought Soho had anything to do with them were hurrying home through the narrow crowded streets. Molly strode through the neon flood, trying to ignore the feeling she was being followed, and read the signs. Ram Books. Curious Bookshop, Lovecraft. and here was one of the kind she had been looking for, that could hardly be more British. She went in.

Two men left at once. Perhaps they had been leaving anyway, with purchases hidden in their expensive briefcases. That left five men, leafing through magazines or pacing past viewing booths the size of toilet cubicles, and as she ventured down the narrow shop their awareness of her was almost suffocating. She scanned the glossy magazines on the racks, the promises of spankings on the covers, spankings of schoolgirls old enough to know better, nurses and traffic wardens and schoolmistresses and wives and air hostesses and policewomen, while cries of simulated Cockney anguish came from the booths, and somewhere cries that sounded unnervingly real. Molly was sure that all the men saw her as a threat to be imagined as a victim. She turned. No wonder she felt she was being watched.

It was the shopman. His counter and the stool where he was perched looked too small for him, as did his short-sleeved red shirt from which his hairy arms protruded— arms, she thought, like Popeye’s. He stared at her for quite a time before he went on talking into a phone, and then she turned hastily to the magazines, to the sprawled women who were trying to look penitent or apprehensive or just to keep a straight face, and felt as if she’d walked into a Gents’ by mistake. “They’re both ‘under twenty,” the shopman was saying. “They’re ready whenever you want to start filming.”

All at once she was sure of herself. They couldn’t turn her into a victim of their fantasies, she was here to do a job. She went to the counter and waited until the shopman put his hand over the mouthpiece. “How would you feel about letting someone watch you make your films?” she said.

“All right, if you were going to be in one.” He stared at her and added, “When you were younger.”

He wasn’t getting away with that. “Seems to me you know some pretty elderly schoolgirls.”

“Hold on a moment,” he said to the phone, and pointed the earpiece at Molly. “You looking for work?”

“I’m looking for material.” She felt in control now. “For a television documentary.”

“Can’t help you there, love. Can’t have cameras snooping around in here.”

She nodded at the phone. “Hadn’t you better ask him?”

“What do you know about it, love?”

As he leaned toward her, his sleeves pulled back and hairs sprang up on his arms. Again she felt that everyone was watching her, but she wasn’t going to be daunted now. “Isn’t he the owner of the shop?”

The hairy man was smiling. “Don’t be so sure.”

“Well, why don’t you just find out if he wants to speak to me. MTV would pay quite decent money if we can use him.”

Perhaps the mention of MTV impressed him. He stared at her as he said, “Got a reporter here from the television wants to make a film about us. Want a word?” He listened, then passed Molly the receiver. He was smiling oddly. “Here she is.”

“I’m not actually a reporter, I’m a researcher.” The phone answered that with silence. Molly had to think aloud. “I understand that you’re making a film. If my director is interested, would you let us film you filming?”

“Come off it, dearie. They wouldn’t let you show a corporal punishment film on television and you know it.”

Molly had to take a breath, for the throaty voice was unmistakably a woman’s. “I think they would. I think it’s the only kind of pornography we might be able to show.”

The silence lengthened as Molly resisted an impulse to look round, to make sure the man who had last come into the shop wasn’t watching her. “What’s your game, dearie?” the woman’s voice said.

“We’re thinking of making a film about Soho. I believe my director would want to include your point of view. He’s Martin Wallace,” she said, and wondered why she should expect that to mean anything in Soho. “There’s nothing to prevent you from appearing, is there? Your kind of film isn’t against the law.”

Silence. Then: “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,” the voice said. “I’ll give some thought to what you’ve said and call you back at wherever you work. I can do that, can’t I?” The voice was all at once sharp.

“Of course you can. I’m at MTV,” Molly said, and gave the number. “Ask for Molly Wolfe.”

“I might just do that. Put Desmond back on now.”

Molly handed over the receiver. She was suddenly anxious to leave, however irrational that was. She had a vivid impression that the man who had come in last had turned when she’d given her name, had perhaps even said something. She went quickly to the door and glanced back. Her fists clenched. She had seen him before.

She dodged into the crowd at once. She was heading for Chinatown, to be out of Soho more quickly and onto Shaftesbury Avenue. She glanced back and saw him in the doorway, neon turning his spiky hair and his pimples green. He’d followed her from Wardour Street, where he had been pretending to look at the Columbia posters. As he caught sight of her and lurched out of the doorway, his eyes glaring like traffic lights at go, she struggled away, yearning for space to run.

But the street was narrowing. She seemed to be heading deeper into Soho; dim staircases led upward beyond doorways without doors, shops reverberated with amplified orgasms. The street was hot, suffocating. An endless oneway train of cars prevented her from stepping into the roadway. Now men were starting to try to detain her, and she shoved them out of her way.

Beyond the dazzle of the mouth of a neon side street, she looked back. She couldn’t see the man who’d followed her, and she wished she had confronted him at once. Had he slipped past her in the crowd? She dodged into the side street. The next turn left should bring her to Chinatown. She couldn’t understand why she wasn’t already there.

The next turn left was narrow and unlit. Nevertheless she stepped into it, for the side street had come to a dead end. Her neon shadow jerked ahead of her. and then she was in the dark, heading for the lights at the far end. She was halfway down the narrow passage before she began to glimpse the walls. There were open doorways here and there with staircases beyond, and many windows overhead, all dark. How could she have thought she was halfway down the passage? She was nothing like halfway, and all she could do was hurry forward, ignoring her impression of figures coming down the staircases and along the hallways, figures that looked pink and naked. Perhaps she should run back to the bright streets rather than stumble onward, but when she turned it seemed that the passage behind her was crowded. Where had the crowd come from? She was wishing desperately that she had something in her hand besides her handbag, which contained the letter that dismayed her as much as anything here in the dark. She fled past doorways in which figures loomed, almost certainly naked as babies. She couldn’t see their faces, nor did she want to. Some of them were close enough to touch now and so, she sensed, was the crowd at her back.

Panic must have blinded her, for the end of the passage came as a shock. So did the noise of the bright street, and she realized that she hadn’t heard any sounds in the passage, or if she had, they had been very soft and vague. More neon signs and bookshops, and she was struggling through the crowds before she realized she was out of Soho and at least a quarter of a mile from where she had meant to emerge. She was on Charing Cross Road, and there was a taxi, thank God.

By the time she reached MTV she felt calmer. Leon and Martin were still in the studio, working out which clips to use before they concluded an interview. She scribbled a note for Martin about the Soho possibility. It infuriated her that she had been so anxious to escape that she had neglected to get the woman’s name. She mouthed at Martin through the glass that she had left him a note and then made her way home to try and sleep off her panic.

She couldn’t help glancing round when she reached her gate, and when she found she was wondering if anyone was in her flat, she swore aloud. She stalked through the rooms muttering nobody, nobody, nobody. Nor was there, but it disturbed her that she wished she had company.

She switched off the lights and lay down on the bed. Just breathe and rest and then she would be calm. A car’s lights brushed her curtains, an airplane shrieked overhead. She hoped Martin would like the Soho proposal, if only because watching the film being made ought to defuse Soho in her mind, give her back her confidence that she should never have lost at all. The airplane was gone, and she felt as if she were following it into the quiet dark. If a pimply man had followed her through Soho then that was his problem, not hers. It didn’t matter whether he had overheard her name, there was no way he could trace her. Suddenly she realized what she’d thought he had said.

Panic seemed to jerk all her muscles. She felt as if her body was out of her control, for she couldn’t find the dangling switch. It didn’t matter, she wasn’t alone, she had only to call to her parents and they would come, they would open the door and drive out the dark, they would tell her that what she thought she recalled wasn’t real, just her imagination again, they were real and it was a dream. Then she had the light switch and was staring at the door, trying to inhale her lost calm, get hold of her thoughts, wake up.