B004M5HK0M EBOK (2 page)

The knives she was carrying had short, stubby blades and ornate handles – probably they’d be better described as daggers, rather than knives. The girl ran full-tilt into one of the rooms further along the corridor. Emily followed, curious. Perhaps there was to be another entertainment. Emily opened the door and peeped in. The room had been done out like a frou-frou boudoir, with swathes of pink velvet draped above a very large bed, gilt mirrors on the walls, and a fancy white and gilt dressing table with a very large hole smashed in the side, as if someone had kicked it. That was the only clue that it might have been rescued from a skip (though of course it could have been damaged recently in an argument). The gilt mirrors were spotted and cloudy, and their frames were chipped. But, at a glance, the decorative effect was decadent and appealing. The girl with the knives lay on the bed – the knives were in a box next to her. She looked thunderously angry, registering emotions of the sort of intensity that might easily have resulted in a piece of furniture being kicked. Another blonde girl in a slightly less tatty blue-grey costume sat on a pink velvet-upholstered chair in front of the dressing table. She touched up her make-up, leaning in toward the gilt mirror propped above it, flicking at her lashes with mascara, her lipsticked mouth a pornographic O. Emily noticed that there were surprisingly few things on the dressing table – just a hairbrush, a jar of foundation, a big pink pot of blusher with a long-handled brush to apply it, and an uncapped red lipstick in a gorgeously old-fashioned gold casing.

At first sight, because of their matching costumes, hair colour and make-up, the two girls looked almost identical, but as Emily looked from one to the other she began to see differences – this one had higher cheekbones, that one had fuller lips, and so on. It was disconcerting because the dressing room mirror was angled so that Emily could see into it from the doorway. The result was that Emily could see three near-identical faces, though there were only two sisters in the room.

As Emily was gawping at the sisters, the door to the en suite bathroom opened to the boastful sound of the toilet flushing, and Emily’s Japanese neighbour Midori stepped into the bedroom. The flushing continued loudly. It sounded like applause. Midori certainly deserved it: She was wearing white PVC hotpants, long white clumpy boots, white eyeshadow, pale pink lipstick. She came towards Emily with a smile, shaking her still-damp hands as if she hadn’t been able to find the guest towel. Even if she’d improvised by wiping her hands on her clothes, as Emily might have done, there would have been no point: she was wearing nothing absorbent.

The sisters looked up at Midori, apparently unaware that she’d been using the facilities, and then they looked at Emily. They didn’t seem pleased to see either of them.

‘Zizi!’ said the girl with the knives to her sister.

Zizi got up from the dressing table. As Midori stepped out of the bedroom past where Emily stood gawking in the doorway, Zizi shut the door in Emily’s face. It seemed unnecessarily rude - but then again, it could have been part of a performance.

‘Heh!’ said Emily to Midori, by way of acknowledging that this place was exciting, but also really rather unsettling.

Midori said, ‘Emily, right?’

‘Yeah. We live in the same street.’

‘I seen you with your dog. Very old.’

‘She died.’

‘Oh. I’m sorry, Emily.’

‘That’s OK. You look nice, Midori. I wish I’d dressed up a bit.’

‘I’m DJ. I’m playing tonight – only neighbour involved in the party. Very exciting.’ She twisted her hands and linked her fingers together, and then she moved her hands up and down a few times, as if attempting a handshake of self-congratulation.

‘Hey,’ said Emily. ‘That’s great, Midori!’

‘I got a DJ stage name: “Hana-bi” - Japanese name. You know what it’s mean?’ Emily obviously didn’t look like much of a linguist because Midori didn’t wait for her to reply before supplying the answer: “Fireworks”. The words say “fire flowers.”’

‘That’s lovely.’

‘I’m on in a half hour – going to the kitchen to have a bite to eat. You wanna come?’

‘Yeah, why not? Food’s always comforting at a party.’

‘Those sisters upset you, Emily? Very rude.’

‘No. It’s fine.’

So Emily went down to the kitchen with Midori to have a bit of food. The kitchen was crowded this time, with people lining up to put food on their plates. Emily cheered up a bit, and then she saw that her cheesy potato bake hadn’t gone down well. It was rather grey and congealed and she overheard one of the other revellers being rather rude about it. She recognised him as one of the Australian lads who lived on her street.

‘What do you make of that, Jake?’ he said to his friend.

‘It’s proof of life on the moon,’ said Jake. ‘It
is
made of cheese, and grey rocks, and some scientist is gonna be sorry his wife has raided his lab, and brought a sample of his work to the party instead of the shepherd’s pie she was supposed to bring.’

‘Oh hey, shepherd’s pie? I wouldn’t mind some of that. Can you see any? Wahey, Chris! Great party.’

This last remark was addressed to a fair-haired English man who was eating a green apple. He nodded.

‘Midori,’ said Chris. ‘You’re all set up outside, whenever you’re ready. You OK for food?’ The pyramid of food teetering on Midori’s plate suggested that this was so. ‘You want a drink? You want a glass of punch?’ He ladled some punch into a paper cup and handed it over. ‘How about your friend?’

‘Emily,’ said Emily. ‘No, I don’t think so. Thank you.’

‘Chris is in charge,’ said Midori. ‘Party’s his idea.’

‘So you sent the invitation?’ said Emily.

Chris said, ‘Not personally.’

‘I didn’t expect you to be English. I thought everyone in this... collective... was Spanish or Polish or...’

‘Yeah. All except me.’

‘So you all chipped in to buy this place?’

‘We don’t go in for ownership. We’ve got a network around the world, to help us identify abandoned spaces. We identify, occupy, beautify – we fix it up and make one little corner of the world a prettier place. And then we move on. We’ve been on the road for a long time.’

‘And now you’ve come home,’ said Emily.

‘Home?’ said Chris. ‘Home is where the art is, Emily.’

He had an intense way of looking at her, as though he was assessing her worth – and had found her wanting. She didn’t like his slightly sardonic way of talking. She found she disliked him. But what was it she objected to? His intensity or his flippancy? Or just the way he looked at her. She hated to admit that there was nothing intellectual about her reaction – she was probably just out of sorts after overhearing Jake’s comments about the food she had made.

Emily wanted to get away from the kitchen but Chris was still here, hemming her in by the buffet. ‘Are you enjoying the party?’ he asked.

‘I am. I never know what’s going to happen next.’

‘It’s all great. Just don’t miss the knife throwing.’

‘Is that the sisters? Zizi and...?’

‘Zizi and Zsa-Zsa. They’re awesome.’

‘Yeah. They didn’t think much of Midori using their bathroom while they were trying to get ready.’

‘Did she? Where was that? Upstairs?’

‘I tried to get a look in case it was a performance, like Elise−’

Ah, poor Elise. I wonder if she’s got anyone to take her suitcase to that man yet.’

‘She asked me. Was I supposed to say yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘So which one is it who throws the knives? Is it Zizi or Zsa-Zsa?’

‘You’ll have to see it to find out,’ Chris said. He looked amused.

‘There’s no audience participation, is there? They both looked in such a mardy mood just now, I don’t think I’d want to take my chances.’

Chris smirked. The expression made his nose look very long and straight, and his mouth looked strangely sexy. Emily thought she had detected in Chris’s accent and demeanour a sense of entitlement that only comes from rich, well-educated people – the sort who can afford to go swanning off around the world with a troupe of performers in the name of art.
If you were really so well brought-up,
Emily thought,
you might ask ‘do you mind if I smirk?’ before puffing your condescension all over me
. But then she remembered her dog had just died, and probably that was making her thin-skinned and emotional, and she was at a party and she seemed to have forgotten how to enjoy herself, and she had better start.

And then a tall, dark-haired man edged in next to her at the buffet table and took charge of things, as though he had heard her silent command to get the party started. ‘Joe,’ said Chris, nodding in acknowledgement. Was there a hint of antagonism in the way he said Joe’s name?

‘OK, man,’ Joe said. He was strong-looking, as though he worked outdoors, and he spoke with a slight accent. He turned away from Chris, and as he turned away – he was half a head taller than Emily, so she had to tilt up to get a good look at his handsome face – she saw something she hadn’t been expecting to see in response to Chris’s antagonism. Not bitterness or aggression or anger or indifference. No, for a moment she thought Joe looked sad.

‘You got to eat something,’ Joe said, noticing Emily’s empty plate. He put a huge spoonful of her cheesy potato bake on her plate, and then he put an equally good portion of it on his. ‘It’s good,’ he said, as if she needed persuading. ‘We make it like this at home in Hungary. You have the meat, and you have the potatoes. I don’t understand this
layers
of things,’ he indicated the dish of lasagne, and the dish of cottage pie, ‘like they want to hide the meat in there because it’s shy.’

He looked towards Midori but her plate was full. She stood and scoffed her food right there in the kitchen in a ladylike but extremely efficient manner, plate to her chin, fork to mouth, fork to mouth, fork to mouth. With her crazy white gear and her repetitive movements, she could have been a next-generation robot demonstrating hoovering techniques.

‘Ah. Better,’ she said when she was almost done. She put her plate down and used both hands to snap the heads off two prawns that remained on it, then sucked the meat out of the prehistoric little bodies like a very genteel predator.

‘You want some punch?’ Joe said to Midori. He put a paper cup down on the table next to her.

‘Got some.’ She took an individually-wrapped, alcohol-soaked hand wipe from the pink plastic bag that was slung over her shoulder, the cartoon cats depicted on it bouncing at her hip, and she ripped open the packaging and carefully wiped all eight fingers and two thumbs on her hands like a proud mama. She swigged the cup of punch down in two draughts, and then she went out into the garden where her DJ booth had been set up.

Joe loaded up his plate with meatballs and salad, and every time he took something for himself, he first offered a serving of it to Emily. He took two paper napkins and two plastic forks from the table. He said, ‘You want to go outside and eat?’

Emily did. She had formed rather a good first impression of Joe, with his strong, muscular arms and his air of slight sadness. Added to that, he had been nice about the food she had brought.

Emily and Joe went and sat together on two plastic chairs in the enormous garden. It was much bigger than any of the other gardens Emily had glimpsed from her street. It was much bigger than her garden, which she tended lovingly in spite of the difficulties of maintaining a lush green lawn that arose from allowing an elderly Golden Retriever to piddle on the grass a couple of times a day.

The party house had once been a very grand house, and the size of the garden where Emily and Joe were now sitting was testament to that. There was a small orchard off to the west of the garden, with apple, cherry and pear trees in it. Nearer the house were neglected flower beds with overgrown shrubs and bushes, and midway between house and orchard, on what had once probably been a very fine lawn, there was a towering bonfire that had not yet been lit. It was stacked with sawn-up pieces of wood, branches and kindling. Emily surmised that it had been built by a man because in her experience men were good at making fires (goodness knows, she was self-sufficient, but building a decent fire in the grate in the decorative but functional tiled fireplace in her flat, was the one thing she never quite managed to do to her own satisfaction.)

Close to the house was Midori in her DJ booth, a temporary structure decorated with fairy lights and bearing a hand-painted sign with ‘DJ Hana-bi’ on it. Closer still was a barbecue with a man in a chef’s hat, an apron and checked trousers. He was carving roast pork from a pig on a spit, and serving it to a very long line of hungry customers. Emily wondered if there was any difference, ethically, between eating a dog and eating a pig. If so, then whether or not it was acceptable to eat a two year old child was another question that ought to be considered as part of the mix: Emily had read that dogs were supposed to be just as intelligent as toddlers, and she had read that pigs were cleverer still.

Emily didn’t think she ought to share with Joe her thoughts about pigs, dogs and toddlers. She didn’t want to allude to her assumption that he must be good at lighting fires as he was a man. She didn’t want to sit there and imagine him chopping up pieces of wood with an axe in his hands. She didn’t want to sound as though she was being suggestive, or simpering at him.