The Valkyrie (11 page)

“How funny, you
know my love that if you really must dye your hair then please at
least let it be blonde. Although I do admire your choice, it is so
brave of you to turn your hair blue. And those gold coloured
contacts, why I could not get away with it, but you, you really
try.” Victoria gushed explosively as if she had swallowed a verbal
laxative. That’s really, really done it now, she thought. Where the
Hell did that silly little speech come from? Victoria always got
defensive over her nicotine habit but never to the point of
suicide.

Britannia
laughed. Rude little whore she thought. Victoria had piqued her
interest now. She had a spark and the right sort of desperation
that meant that ultimately she’d do quite well out of this life,
but probably not the next. Although Britannia was in the mood to
let it slide, the blue hair comment was slightly below the belt,
she was an Oceanid after all. It’s why she liked ships so much.
“Well darling, a century ago I would have smote you for that, but
as it stands I’m bored and in need of amusement. Amuse me. No, I
shall amuse you. I’ll tell you all about the time I owned the
world.” Britannia relished going all Shinto and spilling her guts
out to this girl. A hari kari confession: what a blessed relief.
She was sure the mortals knew who she was but they couldn’t be
bothered to make it into a daytime TV biopic. They couldn’t even be
bothered to teach it properly in schools any more. They even
mercilessly took her off the fucking fifty pence piece. No one knew
her name.

Britannia
cleared her throat. She didn’t need to. Of course she didn’t, she’s
a goddess, but she believed it to be customary before one makes
something along the lines of a speech. Her mental approach to all
this was akin to the self-deprecating actress who firmly doesn’t
believe she deserves the Oscar but appears to have a little
something rehearsed. And thus she started:

“Right, well.
Well I suppose it all began about five hundred odd years ago
because I had quite had enough of everyone else crashing in on my
party. Firstly the Olympians and then the Norse, I had well over a
millennium of it and quite frankly that was it. Now don’t get me
wrong about the Picts, oh and that Pendragon bloke – I should never
have lent my sword to him – we would have spats but they were
mostly jocular, but no one day I snapped and said no I shall stand
up for myself, they will respect my sovereignty. There is always
that fine line where the bullied becomes the bully. Sometimes I
ever so briefly wonder whether I momentarily crossed that line. I
probably didn’t but who can tell. It’s all academic.

In the
beginning you see there was the nation state, now your lot were so
intent on that Jesus chap so I wasn’t going to get you to worship
me the old fashioned way so I had to get inventive. There’s very
little difference between religion and state and darling I should
know, I practically invented recreational addictions. I put the
idea into Henry VIII’s head, brute of a man but I have a weakness
for a red head. So that was that sorted. These movements tend to
grow organically as weeds in bi-polar crazy paving. Square one, as
I believe they say in board games.

So then it was
pirates. Darling do you like pirates? I adore them. Theft, sails
and desperate young men: three of my favourite things in this
entire universe, let alone all the parallel ones; just my cup of
tea. I got my dashing young sailors all hungry for riches, girls
who weren’t their second cousins and adventure. I’m frightfully
adventurous. I’ll try anything once. So that carried on for a bit
and then eventually the mortals got their shit together and formed
a proper navy, complete with these adorable little uniforms and
everything. They did have some cracking jaunts; Jenkins’s Ear that
was a jolly. Oh and Napoleon, lordy that was a laugh. But by then I
had to coerce the neighbours into joining the collective celestial
enterprise, but I really think they all enjoyed it too. There is a
reason after all darling why the Jamaican sprinting team sounds
like they should be from either the Valleys or the Highlands.

And the theft,
it continued. I have the stickiest fingers, like they’re covered in
sugar: sweet illicit sugar. I did tell you darling that I invented
recreational addictions. Sugar, caffeine, opiates, mass produced
crap, cheap labour. Darling I’d steal land, I’d steal resources,
heck I’d steal people. I like to think I also stole hearts. Look
what I did to India, Africa, America, that funny island with the
kangaroos and the other one next to it where they filmed Lord Of
The Rings. This whole miserable rock, I owned that bitch. I mean
for fuck sake they took me off the fifty pence piece. I pushed you
miserable amoebas. You have your silly democracy, your machines,
your medicine, your science, your civilisation, your superiority
complexes: your country. I even gave you tea, tea. And you take me
off a silly little coin. I am modernity itself for which I am
proud. And you, you should be fucking grateful that you aren’t
French.” Britannia said in true soap box fashion.

Victoria looked
at her ranting companion, who hadn’t drawn breath in three minutes
and thought quite simply ‘fuck’. The gleam in her eye had grown
manic, tempestuous and precarious. Now either this
woman/thing/monster next to her was on a very bad trip or she was
confessing to be a sociopathic, narcissistic, genocide-committing,
drill sergeant surveying the march forward along time’s linear
parade into the appalling abyss. She clearly believed every
flippant word that came out of her mouth. A mouth that was at once
both charmingly seductive and terrifying cruel. It was a mouth too
wide, with teeth too sharp. You could be consumed by her in a
moment.

“Are you
seriously telling me that you are the personification of all that
evil bullshit that was the Nineteenth Century? Pax Britannia my
arse, you’re a geopolitical whore. I can’t even like you
ironically.” said Victoria calling this nut job’s bluff. She could
see the rabid mixture of greatest pride and deepest unhappiness
emanating from Britannia. It smelt like that dummy nationalism that
comes out fighting with spittle flying everywhere in the comments
section of left-wing articles on the EU: it was divine
trolling.

“Yes,” was
Britannia’s maniacal reply, “so you have a history degree. You’re
right. Pax my arse, there’s nothing quite like slitting throats,
slitting veins and slitting wrists. Go on, say it. Say it. Say that
I’m brutal, say that I was so awfully, terribly, frightfully wrong
but nothing comes into this world that isn’t caked in parasitical
blood. I maimed maternally, I spent centuries in labour giving
birth to this: to your freedom and your people.”

“Well you’re
right about that, you did make my people. I am the genetic product
of your heroic escapades.”

“Ah you’re a
colonial aren’t you? Well sort of. I can see the Warwickshire
peasantry in your forearms, but there is something else.”

“My father’s
Jamaican.” Victoria said.

“And yet you
look Greek, or Algerian, maybe even a Spaniard? Has anyone ever
said that you look Israeli? That whole Middle East thing was me
again, I was a little drunk. So how do you like being ethnically
ambiguous? Hybrid vigour? I bet you can sing, no gospel please,
we’ll have none of that blasphemy here. Why aren’t you on the Team
GB hurdling team? That’s the perfect place for you half breeds. Oh,
do you have a brother? You do, wonderful. Has he ever mugged
anyone? Is he in one of those gangs? Do you
actually know
your father? Oh darling no, no, no, I don’t think post-colonial
angst suits you. I don’t think yellow would suit either, or paisley
for that.”

“Post-colonial
angst? Do you really think this is about my lack of empire empathy?
You had my name from me, and then proceeded to mock me with it too.
Do I look like an English aristocrat, because there’s a family with
my name, a coat of arms and a Georgian horror house of Palladian
proportions built from the blood of my blood. I carry your
brutality as a proper noun” Victoria said passionately.

“So you say you
hate me then, do you? I hate me, but you, you adore me. You just
can’t admit it. You’re proud of me. Wilfred Owen makes you cry in a
way that only your bitch of a mother has the cruelty to and you
love to cry, you love to think of your great grandfather in that
squabble’s squalor. Do you think there was an ecstasy of fumbling?
Face it darling you’re a middle class parody that relies on my
history to define you. You – with your bunting, and Jane Austen sad
act, lady wank, and your afternoon teas – are mine. You say you
hate me and yet I give you outline, I’m that boyfriend who went too
far when you were seventeen, but you’ve kept all the stubs from the
concerts he took you to. Now, may I suggest that you desist before
I kick your fucking face in?” Britannia said. Any pretence now
smashed like a piece of Worcester on a cold parlour floor.

“What?”
Victoria asked shocked.

“Did you
mishear me? Shut the Hell up and agree.” Britannia said as she
stood up from the bench in a stately manner. She needed a good
stretch after her over acquaintance with one of the park’s finest
chaise longues. Britannia rolled her neck, lifted her arms above
her head, touched her toes and gave her wings a bloody good shake.
She picked up her trident and threw it to the sizeable militia of
pigeons that had assembled to feast on the mangled remains of a
soggy sandwich. There were no fatal casualties; Britannia didn’t
like pigeons all that much. One of her feathers floated into
Victoria’s half empty salad box and stuck to the hummus left
splattered on the side.

Victoria stared
at the goddess in front of her, then at the salad box and back
again into those immortal eyes filled by a very mortal fear.
Everyone else in the park appeared oblivious to Britannia. Victoria
had read enough Ovid (in translation, she went to a dodgy
comprehensive after all) to know to shut up or be turned into an
animal, plant or mineral. For all her lofty lefty ideals, she knew
she was a hypocrite. Her soles bore the fruit of the new corporate
colonialism and her soul was bored into by Girl Guide guilt. Shut
up, put up, and run away. “I see. Well I was jolly annoyed when
they took you off the fifty pence piece. I wrote an angry letter to
the Royal Mint about it and everything. Huge letter it was, reams
of paper, it was practically a small novella. Frightfully mad I
was. Oh look is it really that late. I’ve got to dash I’m
outsourcing a load of jobs from Birmingham to Delhi today, lots of
calls to make.” Victoria said as she grouped her things together in
haste.

“Oh how
wonderful. I hope you started an e-petition. Outsourcing is that
colonialism? You never told me your name.” said Britannia, placated
like a sobbing toddler given a sweet. She wished that her daughter
was as agreeable as this girl who had clearly seen that Britannia
was right in everything she had done.

“Victoria” was
her companion’s reply.

“Enchanting,
well I shall send you back to your office Victoria” chirped
Britannia happily. She was clearly buoyed by the prospect of a
letter writing campaign.

***

The weather was
gloriously splendid as Britannia headed towards the Royal Mint. You
could have followed her that day. The blood that dripped from her
hands left a charming little trail all the way from the City, where
she had threatened to tear out the throat of the Chief Executive
(unfortunate man, he was only a civil servant) until he put her
back on that bloody fifty pence piece. He went off work with stress
following a psychotic episode with hallucinations not long after
that, poor lamb. What Britannia didn’t admit to Victoria was that
none of that had been her work it was only her brand seal stamped
on everything, but as long as everyone thought it was her she was
almost happy with the situation.

Glory sat on the steps of
her mother’s townhouse in Mayfair. The invitation said to be
prompt. It also said that she should be there no later than 4pm, it
was now 5.30pm and Glory had been there for over two hours. During
most of that time she had stared wistfully at a pair of squirrels.
The male had aggressively tried to mate with an unwilling female.
Glory felt like she was watching a reconstruction of losing her
virginity staged by little furry animals. She checked her phone and
the two messages that she had failed to answer yesterday had been
joined by another from the same source. She gave Valour a quick
call but it went straight through to voicemail. Glory felt her
mother’s presence turn the corner of Grosvenor Square. She stood up
and rearranged the beautiful dress she was wearing ahead of
Liberty’s ‘impromptu’ engagement party. Britannia arrived at her
front door to see her daughter there looking stiff.

“Good afternoon
mother.” Glory said. The rigid formality of her greeting stuck to
her throat.

“Oh it’s you,
again. Why are you here?” asked Britannia looking like a bulldog
chewing a proverbial wasp.

“It’s been a
hundred years. Besides
you sent me
an invitation to tea.”
Glory was getting annoyed that she’d bothered coming at all as
mother didn’t appear to remember inviting her. She must have done
so drunk. Glory’s presence clearly wouldn’t have been missed.

“Really? It
felt like only yesterday that I was disgraced by your presence.”
Britannia walked past an awkward Glory and opened the large black
door herself. There were no servants to open it for her these days.
Britannia beckoned Glory in with as little enthusiasm as was
possible. Her gesture said ‘well you’re bloody here you may as well
come inside you stupid girl.’

Britannia’s
house of horrors would have been smart a century before, but now
the paper had all but peeled off the walls, the chairs had grown
mould and the curtains were in tatters. Britannia’s beloved Barbary
lion Henry – she had loved Henry more than her only child – had
been stuffed and was keeping guard in the drawing room. If Miss
Haversham had have been immortal she would have kept it tidier.
Dank, damp and decrepit and that was merely the house. It looked
like she’d forgotten to tidy up after a riotous tea party in
1867.