Spin (2 page)

She hugged her
thoughts to herself until they became too heavy to carry. Then she
asked Iona if it was true.

“
Don’t be ridiculous,” said Iona. Her face flushed a deep,
turkey-wattle red, and Layla was reminded of something she didn’t
usually think of: that Iona was the butcher’s daughter, that when
she wasn’t cooking and cleaning for Idmon Vargas she was in the
slaughterhouse, boiling up buckets of blood to make black puddings.
“Your mother wouldn’t have known a needle if it jumped up and stung
her. She wrote things, that’s all, stupid things. She had no time
for clairvoyancy, just as she had no time for the law or for the
forum or for honest work, come to that. Don’t you let your father
catch you asking questions about her or he’ll tan you
one.”

Layla felt
like striking Iona across the face with her outstretched hand,
pushing her backwards into the meat larder and reminding her that
Idmon Vargas had never ‘tanned her one’ in her entire life. Instead
she went to her room and lay down on the bed, digging her
fingernails into her hands to keep from crying. It wasn’t that she
objected to crying so much; it was just that she wasn’t going to
let Iona Phillipos catch her at it. Later that evening she began
work on what she later recognised as the first of what she called
her panoramas, larger scale tapestries of the length and breadth of
a dining table or even bigger, large enough to tell whole stories
rather than just illustrations of particular scenes.

This first
panorama showed a squad of triremes sailing out of the circular
harbour at Limeni. In the foreground by the harbour wall two
fishermen were dragging a woman’s body out of the water. The
woman’s feet were bound. Water streamed off the naked torsos of the
fishermen in rivulets of transparent aquamarine. The water effect
was particularly hard to attain and Layla had worked on this
obsessively, unpicking and stitching over until it was right.

The master of
the leading trireme, a stocky, dark-haired man with a square black
beard, was talking into a mobile phone.

When her
father saw the weaving he went very quiet.

“
Who told you?” he said at last. “I didn’t want you to know
about your mother until you were older.”

“
No one told me anything,” said Layla. “I made it
up. All by myself.” She felt a flame-coloured spurt of annoyance,
that he might think she had
copied
,
assume that the images he saw in the tapestry were not her own. At
that same instant Iona entered the room, her sturdy body purposeful
as a steam train as she salvaged three dirty coffee cups, a slew of
magazines, a plate of toast crusts. Iona was not supposed to enter
Layla’s room without knocking, and Layla knew she was only doing it
now because her father was there. She opened her mouth to
remonstrate, but that was when Iona raised her head and caught her
first glimpse of the panorama.

The coffee
cups crashed to the floor. Two of them smashed, and Layla saw the
third roll out of sight beneath a chair. (She retrieved it a month
later, busy with mould.) Iona was pressing her hands to her mouth,
and Layla saw with shock that there were tears in her eyes.

“
It’s all right, Iona,” said her father. “Layla and I will
finish tidying up in here. You get yourself home. You look
tired.”

When Iona had
left and they had eaten supper, Idmon Vargas told his daughter how
her mother had died.

By the time they came into Corinth it was too dark
to see anything much. The
streets of the Old Town were steeped in a deep twilight, the
ancient, bitter purple of woad. Layla put her work away and sat
with her face pressed to the window glass, trying to see past her
reflection to the city outside. Most of Corinth had been destroyed
in the war with Carthage a century earlier, but pockets of older
buildings remained: a cluster of narrow townhouses around an old
pump-well, the shadowed bulk of a six-storey department store clad
in traditional protective ironwork. Here and there a pale gold
light stretched feeble fingers through the slats of a shuttered
window. There was a deep silence, as if the place was still in
mourning for itself, and it was not until the bus crossed the
bridge into the modern portion of the city that Layla realised that
Old Corinth was little more than a stopping-off place for tourists
doing the rounds of the ancient sites.

The New
Town was a garrison town, a place people passed through or left
from, and seemed to consist mainly of a series of truck stops,
connected by strips of broken grey asphalt and illuminated by the
harsh neon lighting of the all-night bars and convenience stores
that encircled them. The bus ratcheted its way across the potholed
tarmac of the inner ring road and then drew itself to a standstill
outside a sagging lopsided carcass of a building with fake
Corinthian columns and a flashing fluorescent roof-sign depicting a
bull. The place was called the Hotel Europa and Layla realised with
a sinking feeling that it was their overnight rest stop. She had
never been in such a place before. On those few occasions when she
had travelled to Atoll City with her father they had invariably
been put up in the luxurious private homes of one or other of Idmon
Vargas’s business associates, and in Atoll City itself there were
the plush corporate hotels strung out along the western end of the
harbour front in cross-hatched gleaming diagonals of steel and
glass. Her father held standing tariffs with at least two of them
on account of his sales reps. The Europa was not much better than a
truckers’ hostel, the kind of place Iona would call
a
dive
.

Layla glanced
around anxiously, wanting to see what the other passengers might
make of it. Some would be ending their journey at Corinth of
course, they wouldn’t be staying at the Europa in any case. As soon
as it became stationary the bus erupted into hubbub and general
upheaval as people hauled their bags down from the racks and rushed
to stow stray possessions in their hand luggage. Layla waited until
the bus was almost empty before making her way forward to the exit.
She understood that a night’s stay at the Europa was included in
her ticket price, but she wasn’t sure of the procedure for checking
in. She glanced at the driver, a stout peasant with elaborately
lifelike tattoos of handcuffs on both wrists and his black beard
combed and stiffened to resemble a dagger.

“
Excuse me,” she said. He rattled something at her in what
sounded like Aramaic and waved his hands. She thought she
recognised the words ‘ticket’ and ‘reception’.

“
Okay,” she said. “Thanks.” She stepped off the bus and walked
towards the hotel entrance, tagging along behind a group of shark
fishermen who she remembered boarding the bus at Kalamata. Once
inside they clustered around the reception desk, joshing and
throwing mock insults in loud voices. A black woman in a teal blue
headscarf was handing out keys. She was young, still under thirty,
her dark skin lustrous as teak. Layla wondered where she was from.
She was not used to seeing African women, although two of her
father’s murex farmers were from Ethiopia. Idmon Vargas said they
had a natural feel for the work, that the murex snails liked
them.

The black
woman handed Layla a key on a piece of red string.

“
You’re on the third floor,” she said. “It’s a bit of a climb
but at least you ought to get some peace and quiet.” She glanced
pointedly towards the shark men and smiled. As she turned her head,
Layla was horrified to see that the right side of her face was
heavily scarred; a tube of twisted, thickened tissue cut through
the taut, shining flesh of her cheek like a dug trench. The result
of a knife wound, probably. Layla wondered if such things were an
occupational hazard at the Europa.

“
Don’t worry,” said the woman. “I consider this as my ne’ssary
inoculation against bandits.” She laughed, a high, hiccoughing
sound, like the call of some exotic bird. Layla shrank back,
ashamed that the woman had caught her staring. There were tiny
faceted gemstones in her ears, the yellowish, sun-spattered green
of peridots. The sallow gleam of the overhead bulb seemed to spool
itself around them like a tapeworm. Layla took her key and went
upstairs. Her room was tucked under the eaves, and the light from
the flashing bull sign threw coloured patterns across the bare
lino. There was a smell of sun bleached air and spent tobacco and
from somewhere within the depths of the hotel there came the muted
but insistent droning of a crying baby.

It was
such a relief to be away from people that Layla barely noticed
these minor discomforts. She took off her trainers and lay down on
the bed. She thought she would fall asleep immediately but the
strangeness of the place and the accumulated heat of the day,
stuffed beneath the rafters like a goose-down quilt, kept her from
doing so. She dozed, a series of images from the day’s events
flickering across the backs of her eyelids like trapped moths. She
was jerked out of this half-sleep by someone knocking at the door.
She drew in her breath, heart hammering, thinking about the woman
with the knife wound and wondering how loudly she would have to
scream in a place like the Europa before anyone would take any
notice. She waited to see what else might happen and when nothing
did she tiptoed across to the door and cracked it open. Outside in
the corridor stood a crock of water and a tin bowl filled with rice
and
keftedes
.
Layla’s innards seemed to swoon. She realised she had not eaten
since the crab sandwich on the harbour front at Kalamata. She
wolfed down the food in less than ten minutes and soon afterwards
she fell asleep for real. When she woke it was morning and daylight
was pouring in through the uncurtained window. She pulled on her
trainers and reached for her rucksack. She noticed how different
the little room looked in daylight, less tawdry. There was a framed
print on the wall, a page from Agnes Sartoria’s
Manga Aeneid
. Layla hurried downstairs. She felt
certain it had been the black woman who brought her the food the
night before and she didn’t want to leave without thanking her, but
there was no sign of her in reception and the desk was now being
manned by a youth with a lurid crop of pimples on his forehead and
flimsy-looking wire-framed glasses.

“
The bus is out front,” he said. “You’d better hurry or it’ll
leave without you. You overslept.”

He grinned as
she ran for the door. The bus was full again and because of her
lateness Layla had to make do with an aisle seat. She closed her
eyes against the glare of the sun and did not open them again until
they were pulling into the Atoll City bus depot.

Macy Persimmon was there to meet her as arranged.
Macy was Idmon Vargas’s Atoll
City accounts manager. Layla suspected she was also his mistress,
or at least had been at some point in the past. Layla had never
seen her hair the same colour twice and on the day she arrived in
Atoll City it was lapis blue.

“
Oh my God, you’re here!” Macy cried. “Was the bus ride
terrible? I bet it was. I told your father he should have made you
come by skyway.”

“
It was no problem,” Layla said. “Honestly.” She had forgotten
how exhausting Macy could be. She felt like saying her father was
no longer in a position to make her do anything, that he had
offered to pay her skyfare and she had refused because having to
rely on his money at the very moment she stepped into her new
independent life as an adult would have seemed like an admission of
defeat. She said none of these things of course. Macy Persimmon
with her mirror-glass hair and effortless elegance always had a way
of making her feel like a tongue-tied child.

They drove in
Macy’s car to Macy’s flat in Amberville, a part of the city beyond
the financial reach of anyone but the intercontinental shipping
magnates and the spice traders. Macy’s apartment was about the size
of a large broom cupboard. It was also a tip, a compost heap of
expensive perfume and designer underwear. Macy had offered to put
Layla up on her zed-bed until she found somewhere more permanent.
The zed-bed was in the corner of the lounge-cum-kitchen, jammed in
behind a stack of cardboard boxes overflowing with fashion
magazines and an enormous vTV monitor. Macy’s bed was on a platform
above, accessed via a wrought-iron ladder that appeared to double
as a clothes-drying area.

The whole
apartment buzzed with colour, but of an inferior, ephemeral kind,
the plasticised glare of acrylic as opposed to the lustrous patina
of oil. Layla couldn’t help feeling there was a mismatch between
the clamorous brightness of the things Macy owned and the nervous
way she darted about, as if in spite of her sparky confidence she
feared close scrutiny. Layla gazed at the cast-aside stockings, the
strew of magazines and old takeaway menus and felt the pressure of
tearful laughter beneath her ribs. She knew she could not work
here, that the dusty cubby hole at the Europa would have been
preferable. She would have to make her escape as soon as she could.
She did not want to feel uncharitable towards Macy – it was Macy
after all who had found her the job at Minerva Textiles – but the
tottering profusion of unnecessary objects filled her insides with
a miasma of despair.

“
I’m meant to be in meetings all day, really,” Macy was
saying. “Will you be all right by yourself until I get
back?”

“
I’ll be fine,” Layla said. Macy nodded and smiled,
but her thoughts were clearly miles away already. She was like a
bird of paradise, Layla thought. One of the high-stepping lorikeets
that were kept in wire enclosures in the Botanical Gardens. Mostly
the birds died, because the European winters were too cold for
them. But those tough enough to survive went on for years. Macy
fluttered about the flat, shoving things into her handbag and
chattering incessantly. Eventually she left. Layla went to the
window and looked down, watching Macy’s blue head bobbing along the
street like the cursor in a game of
Hive
. Once she was out of sight Layla fetched a drinking glass
from the cupboard over the sink and ran herself some water from the
tap. The water tasted slightly sour, the way Atoll City water often
tasted, especially in summer. Layla turned the glass in her hand,
noting its weight, the blue-green depths of the crystal, the
pattern of vine leaves etched around the rim. It was a beautiful
thing, at odds with almost everything else in the flat, and Layla
could not avoid what she knew, that the glass had been a present
from Idmon Vargas. She could feel his fingerprints on the crystal
as if he had been holding it in his hands the day before. She did
not know how she knew this, but she did. It was like a smell she
picked up, a trace of something left behind from a person’s
memories. The same thing she tried to weave into her
panoramas.