The Love She Left Behind (10 page)

NASH: Show us your tits.

Impassively, and still on the lookout, SARA pulls off the top part of her gown, revealing her bare breasts. NASH and GIL don't see this, as they've walked DS.

NASH: Farting in the wind.

GIL: Speak for yourself.

NASH: The lot of them. Farting in the wind.

GIL: Pissing in the wind, isn't it?

NASH: Fuck off.

GIL: Pissing in the wind, whistling in the dark.

NASH: Farting in the wind.

GIL: Shitting their kegs.

NASH: Fuck off. The lot of them, is what I'm saying.

GIL: We'll all be shitting our kegs come tomorrow, Nashy boy.

NASH: Fuck off.

GIL: The lot of us. Them and all.

GIL and NASH turn back. They see SARA.

GIL: You slag.

NASH: Sure you're waiting for someone, love?

SARA: He's late.

GIL: Pull the other one—it's got bells on.

NASH: Mine hasn't.

SARA: I'm waiting for the colonel. Do you know him?

GIL: Oh, we know the colonel all right, don't we, Nash boy?

NASH: We know the colonel like the back of our hands.

SARA: With bells on?

NASH offers SARA a cigarette from his packet. She declines it.

NASH: Go on, it's good for your health.

SARA shakes her head.

NASH: Save it for later then.

He takes the cigarette and places it behind her ear. SARA takes it and offers it back to him.

SARA: It's a waste.

GIL: Give it to the colonel. He likes a smoke, doesn't he, Nash boy?

NASH: Not half. Fag-ash Lil, the colonel.

SARA replaces the cigarette behind her ear.

NASH: Do I get a little kiss?

GIL: For the snout?

NASH: Just a peck on the cheek.

SARA takes the cigarette and again offers it back to NASH.

SARA: I think the colonel smokes a different brand.

NASH doesn't take the cigarette. SARA drops it to the ground.

NASH: Got it first time, Gil; she's a slag.

GIL: Right little slapper, anyone can see that.

NASH: Tits hanging out for the world to see.

GIL: Flashing her lilies.

NASH: How much does the colonel pay you, love?

SARA: How much does he pay you?

NASH and GIL move in. GIL holds SARA as NASH rapes her. SARA doesn't resist, but as the attack escalates, her cry pierces the air.

SARA: England!!!

END OF ACT 1

(From
Bloody Empire
, 1982)

 

Now

AUTUMN

T
HE MAGAZINE
page had dropped from the pristine flyleaf of an unused recipe book. The book was part of a sparse collection that all looked, from the honeyed glazes and maraschino garnishes of the shots on their covers, to have been acquired at the same time—the 1980s—and never looked at. Sara was no cook. Mia would have known that from the state of the kitchen, even if Patrick didn't often make the point himself when she served him a meal. Sometimes it was announced as a compliment, as he took the first approving bite, or as exculpation, when his palate faltered at an unfamiliar, and to his mind exotic, dish. That was his age, not Mia's cooking. She was a really good cook. It was what she'd enjoyed most about the summer weeks, having the run of the clapped-out kitchen.

Mia shook the spine, expecting to release the article's facing page, but all that resulted was the protesting crackle of elderly glue. Her fingers slipped along the sleek, still inky-smelling pages of Chicken Marengo and Spanish Puffs. Empty; this was all there was. Most of the magazine fragment was taken up by half a picture. Looking at it, Mia recognised young versions of Patrick and Sara. There was more of him than of her, their dark bodies invaded by white text.

‘He Doesn't Even Like Me To Say the B-Word!'
Woman's Own meets controversial playwright
Patrick Conway and his wife, Sa
their rugged Cornish retreat.

Mia replaced the page in the flyleaf, setting the book on the pile already taken from the shelf. Along with the others she had removed, the book's negative was visible on the grimy wall behind. This reminded her about chasing up the last lot of painters for a quote: she already had two stored in her mobile, and it would be good to make a start.

The third painter never seemed to answer his phone. Mia decided not to leave another message. As she waited for the Yell app to buffer so that she could go about finding someone else, Mia retrieved the magazine page and chucked it in the bin.
So much crap.

It was interesting though. Overall. Mia reminded herself of this whenever Patrick went on about things she found boring, or repeated himself; that to someone on the outside, her situation was very interesting indeed. Through July and August she had enjoyed imagining people on her course reading the artfully casual update she'd put on Facebook: ‘
She's got an internship with this old writer, he has this amazing house in Cornwall?
' For maximum impact, they'd have to know who Patrick was. Or at least they should know that Patrick had been famous, back in the day, if not properly, then at least famous enough to know some really famous people, the kind who were quoted and whose deaths got announced everywhere. It was old school, but Mia didn't care. She was so used to being different, she not only liked it, she sought it out. For example, the way she dressed: only people who knew could see the quality of what she wore, so lengthily saved for, her boots shined. It made her a different kind of person, just as her
dad had always told her.
Don't run with the crowd, babe.
The point was, being here would look amazing on her CV, burnished into ‘PA to playwright Patrick Conway'.

CV apart, though, it was getting harder to deny that money was on the verge of becoming an issue. After Patrick had invited her to stay for the vacation, Mia had given notice on her flat-share back in Newcastle and cleared out all her stuff. She didn't have the cash to keep the rent up all through the summer without a serious job, and the ‘board' Patrick was offering her turned out to mean little more than a roof over her head. It had panicked her a little, putting her belongings into store, although she didn't want to renew the tenancy on the flat, which was a rip-off, miles from the town centre and freezing in the winter, with tiny, gloomy rooms. Besides, she'd have had to find flatmates to replace the two Italian girls she'd been sharing with, who had gone back to Turin at the end of term. It was beyond irritating, interviewing people you had no interest in even talking to but had to evolve a kind of intimacy with, however much you lived your own life; their unflushed crap in the toilet. Never again, she'd vowed, not if she could help it.

Patrick himself wasn't an entirely reliable flusher, but he was old. So was his toilet, for that matter. And although he wasn't paying her anything apart from what he called housekeeping, at least he had proved flexible with the sums he doled out to her. Mia was scrupulous about giving Patrick change and receipts (which he never looked at) and the only money she held back was for things like toiletries. She could imagine Patrick calling this category ‘unmentionables'. He could be quite funny, in his way. Mia had been truly surprised to find this during their first week alone together, because, as she had told him, his play was so serious.

‘Of course it's serious, my love, but it's fucking hilarious! Haven't you ever seen it?'

Obviously she hadn't. She'd actually only skip-read it on the
train on the way down to see him that first time. It was hard to imagine it being funny. Mia had never really got plays, and the ones about issues, which this one clearly was, she found the most unfathomable, Shakespeare apart. She had come to
Bloody Empire
purely because her dissertation subject, controversy as media commodity (her supervisor Jonathon's suggestion), needed a period that was academically uncolonised. Mia's idle googling had turned serious as she had begun to realise that the Falklands War, which had taken place eight years before she was born, almost certainly had a dissertation in it. She knew that Jonathon would object if he could, so she ensured that when she suggested ‘Conflict (re) solutions: media controversies in representations of the Falklands crisis, 1982', she was confident it hadn't already been done. Since their thing, Jonathon had become very severe, overcorrecting the bias that had led to their thing in the first place. It was all a bit late in the day, in Mia's opinion. And although she definitely wasn't going to make that mistake again, she doubted very much that she could say the same for Jonathon. She had seen him leching over that fat-arsed girl with the piercings in their seminar group. So needy.

Outside the kitchen, Mia's phone finally flagged up a sturdy little xylophone of reception; there was no rhyme or reason to the coverage in the house, you just had to take the opportunity. Proceeding alphabetically, she rejected the firm called Abel Decorators because she knew Patrick would make a comment about the name, as though she hadn't noticed. She settled for Atkinson Home Décor, who answered promptly and sounded professional. ‘Décor' was itself hardly a Patrick-friendly word, but she would just refer to them as Atkinson's if they came back with a competitive quote.

It was funny, now that she knew him well enough to second-guess his prejudices, to think that only a few months ago Patrick
had been no more than a couple of prospective footnotes. The email that Sara had replied to so scrupulously had been one of ten Mia had composed to possible key sources. Three of her authors, she later discovered, had been dead for some years, one had Alzheimer's and, of the rest, only Sara had been so quickly responsive. Mia was pleased by the imagined cachet of citing a conversation with a living author, however forgotten, in her dissertation. It was classy and attention-grabbing. It showed the kind of flair she could talk up in interviews as evidence of journalistic instincts, bound to impress.
Don't run with the crowd, babe.

So Mia had replied promptly and enthusiastically to Sara's email, which was formally composed, like a letter, with occasional, surprising spelling errors that might have been due to a lack of keyboard skills. The chance of meeting an actual person was far more appealing than spending any more time in the overlit faculty library, or surfing her laptop in some sticky-tabled café. When she had rocked up to discover that Sara had died, she was forced to roll with the punches. But she was good at that, she had discovered.

Only her excellent plan to wrap up her dissertation while performing her minimal duties for Patrick hadn't quite worked, in that it was now almost the end of September, and she still had about a quarter of the writing to go before term began. Mia was annoyed with herself about this lapse in efficiency, although it was something she had encountered before, when the making of meticulous schedules for undergraduate assessments had, it transpired, taken the place of actual work, and she had come close to failing more than one of the modules. (Thank God Jonathon had put in a good word about her MA application.) During her time in Cornwall she had made a point of applying herself regularly to her dissertation, but despite scrolling through the document, tweaking its formatting and amplifying its footnotes and bibliography,
she failed to inch much towards the full ten thousand words. She couldn't really blame Patrick for that, talkative as he could be. His family—the stepdaughter and stepson—had left them alone, although the stepson had announced the need for a ‘family summit' when he returned from his summer holiday in Puglia. The washing and cooking and shopping didn't fill much of the day. It was the house, and her plans for the house, that consumed her.

Mia's obsession with houses had bloomed when she started secondary, coincident with realising that she couldn't bring any of her new friends back to the humiliating Barratt box she and Mum had ended up in after her parents split. The teenage Mia had read
Wallpaper*
the way other girls read
Heat
. She had even had a declared period of wanting to be an architect before she discovered how much maths was involved, and her closest sixth-form friendship, with a girl called Jessica Norton, had been founded on discovering that she lived in a staggering Georgian terrace her parents had had gutted at the back and transformed by a brutalist extension featured in several interiors magazines. Jessica herself had been elusively silent, masking dullness, but that suited Mia, who herself preferred quiet. She had happy memories of the mute afternoons the two of them spent together, sprawled on the Italian modular sofa pretending to do homework, feet warmed on the underfloor heating, skin flattered by concealed lighting. At any moment she had felt they were worthy of an advertorial magazine spread.

Although Patrick's house was the squalid opposite of Jessica's, from the first time Mia saw it, fully expecting to meet Sara, she had been stirred by the potential amid the ruin. There was just so much of it, all original features: it was one big Before, waiting for her to turn it into a stripped-down, reglazed After. In the summer weeks, instead of analysing the examples she had chosen of the
primitive media's appropriations of the Falklands War, she had been clearing and rearranging, carrying out the smallest portion of the renovations and improvements she was undertaking in her head. Now though, she had to admit to herself that her time was running out. Term was about to start and she would be homeless in ten days. She'd done nothing about finding another flat, not so much as checked out a property website: from so far away, it was frankly quite hard even to believe in Newcastle. Staring at the block of dissertation text on her laptop screen, Mia deplored her increasingly unignorable provisionality. She had thought that she was following a plan.
Always have a plan, babe. Plan A, and plan B.
Thanks, Dad.