“I’m well, yes, fine, fine. What are you doing here?”
“Is this ‘Surely you aren’t after a coffee’ what are you doing here or ‘Why aren’t you six feet under and decomposing?’ what are you doing here?”
“I don’t want to… but you were…”
“I wanted to talk to you about Dana.”
Her face tightened. She lowered the scissors and the phone with a conscious effort that shook her little frame. “Maybe somewhere more private.”
Mrs Mikeda was the daughter of a Russian émigré who, she’d always claimed, had fled the Russian Revolution in 1917 with the secrets of the Tsar’s court in his head, a loyal, steadfast and cultured aristocrat who’d died of a broken heart. However, that story had always seemed a bit remote from any likelihood, and since her father had only recently died, in a council flat in Bermondsey, the chronology didn’t quite make sense either.
She was of average height, and unusual width – being not so much fat as all-present, so that even in the largest of rooms there was never quite enough space for the crowd and Mrs Mikeda to coexist peacefully. Her skin had been dropped onto her frame like a curtain over a piece of treasured furniture; it was full of endless folds and hidden depths, suggested even beneath her voluminous puffed flowery shirt, and a giant navy-blue skirt from beneath which poked a pair of legs that were all kneecap. Sitting in her kitchen, she poured vodka into two plastic cups and said, “I know it’s a cliché, but the English don’t know how to drink.”
I steeled myself and as she did, so I too downed mine in one. We were horrified by the initial shock of it, then strangely fascinated as it burnt its way into the stomach and sent a punch up through our arteries straight to the brain, as if the whole thing had instantly combusted on touching our flesh and filled our veins with vapour. We didn’t know whether it would be safe to try any more; but to our relief, Mrs Mikeda didn’t make the offer. Instead, the vodka out of the way, she poured coffee and said, “So… I suppose you must get asked this all the time?”
“Asked…”
“About how you were dead.”
She passed a mug over to me and stood up to rummage in the back of a cupboard above a shining stainless steel sink with industrial shower attachments for cleaning purposes, until she found a packet of digestive biscuits.
“Oh. Yes. Dead,” I repeated vaguely, watching as she slit the plastic open with a single titanium-razored red nail. “It’s complicated.”
“Sure,” she said. “Always complicated. Knew it would be when I first met you.”
I took the coffee and felt grateful for the distraction of it: the nice social ceremony and the hot mug into which I could peer as if it held all my troubles. She sat down again with the groan of an ageing lady who spent too much time on her feet. “So? You want to talk about my daughter.”
“How is she?”
“You don’t know?”
“I… haven’t seen her recently.”
“Why not?… Oh… yes. Dead.”
“That’s the one.”
“She’s all right.”
“Is that it?”
“What, you were hoping for bad news?”
“No, no, not at all… I just… didn’t expect it to be so brief.”
“I don’t see much of her these days.”
“Why not?”
“Shouldn’t you be asking her? Or is there something you want to tell me?”
She looked at me with her head on one side and, even though she wore an innocent, almost childish expression behind her ruddy cheeks and big, curly, metallic-red hair, her eyes still had that gleam of sharp intelligence from when I’d first met her.
I found that I couldn’t answer.
“Biscuit?”
“What?… No, thanks.”
She took a biscuit from the package, bit off a corner, dipped the rest in the coffee, waited a few seconds, then ate it in a single bite. I watched her chew and she watched the floor. When she’d finished she let out a long sigh and said, “All right, let’s get through the list first. Is my daughter dead, possessed, demonically influenced or cursed in any way?”
“What? No! At least, not as far as I’m aware.”
“You don’t seem very far aware,” she pointed out reasonably.
“I don’t think she’s any of the above.”
“Well, that’s the essentials covered. Is there anything else you need to talk to me about?” She saw my expression. “I’m a good Christian mother, you know. I like to make sure that my daughter, while clearly a vessel for some mystical forces, isn’t breaking too many articles of the faith?”
“To the best of my knowledge, she’s not.”
“Good. Then what do you want?”
“Have you ever met Robert James Bakker?”
“Yes,” she said, in the weary voice of someone who knows where this conversation is going and can’t believe she has to wait at the traffic lights to get there.
“What do you think of him?”
“Nice man. Held her hand at your funeral; very nice man.”
“Yes,” I murmured. “I think he is.”
“But you have the look of a man with something to say on that count,” she added. “Come on, out with it. That’s what I liked about you, Mr Swift – always very straightforward.”
“Really?”
She grinned, and took another biscuit. “First thing you ever said to me: ‘Excuse me, ma’am, may I have a black coffee, strong, no sugar, and is a member of your family or your household acting peculiar bordering on mystical by any chance?’”
“I said that?” I asked, surprised at myself.
“Yes.”
“Just out of the blue?”
“Yes. You looked like you’d had a long day.”
“It was a while back,” I admitted.
“And you’ve probably been busy since then…”
“Yes…”
“Funerals, decomposition and so on.”
I smiled patiently. “As a good Christian mother…” I began.
“You sure you don’t want a biscuit?”
“Maybe one,” we said quickly, taking it from the package offered. “Thank you. As a good Christian mother,” I continued, “are you wondering about what the Bible has to say on the sanctity of resurrection when it’s not our lord and saviour?”
“You know, the Old Testament…” she began.
“I’m really, really not dead,” I said. “In fact, it’s starting to get a bit of a pain having to explain it all.”
“Dana thinks you’re dead. Explain it to her – leave me out of it. As far as I’m concerned what happens in your world stays in your world.”
“I’m sorry to come here like this…”
“Get on with it, Mr Swift. Bad news should at least be honest about what it wants.”
“Where’s Dana?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t know or won’t tell?”
