“Even more reason to make the most of it.”
“Mum, they know who I am.”
“Why do you care? They wouldn’t dare say anything. They need all the business they can get.”
“I don’t care, particularly. I just think we can do better elsewhere. Leave places like this behind.”
Anastasia concedes. They head elsewhere and debate the merits of different European cuisines before settling on an Italian restaurant that serves tasty but generic Tuscan fare to an exclusive clientele.
The Shortest Day | The Longest Night
Debbie McGee Redux
Debbie McGee is not dead. On the day she felt the tremors she walked into the building site at the center of Soho. She found the mouth of a vast hole, like a crater gouged by a mortar at the Somme. She found a ladder and steps. Through the dark, she felt her way. Her hands gripped the cool metal rail, and her feet found the rungs. She took her time. If she slipped, she steadied herself, waited, then continued. She climbed down, deep into the earth. She found tunnels, and walked along them, back and forth, up and down.
The tunnels led in every direction. There were tall tunnels that were big enough for trains to pass through. There were smaller tunnels, corridors that a person could walk along. There were tunnels that were narrower still, that she would have to stoop to pass through, or crawl along on her hands and knees. There were tiny chambers, capillary-like, that spooled out from the main arteries, for rats, moles, and other small mammals. And there were the seams big enough only for insects. Debbie McGee found tunnels that were fresh and new and lined with concrete; others that were old and worn out, held in place by rotting timbers and chipped bricks; walls of bare earth or cut from the bedrock. She felt the roots of trees, some alive, some dead. There were grubs and worms and other things she did not have names for. She walked for what felt like days. She drank the water that dripped. She did not eat. She lost herself in the darkness, feeling her way, seeing nothing.
And then, far off, she saw a light, and walked toward it. The light became larger and brighter. Its shape changed from ill-defined blur to a rectangle with horizontal lines. She reached with her arms into the light and moved as if to push against it. Her outstretched hands pressed a cool metal grate. She felt it shift in its holster, felt it give way, slip, disappear into the room with the light. She heard it clatter against a hard surface and the sound of the clatter ringing through the hole in the wall and bouncing around the dark tunnel, giving texture to the space. She placed her hands on the edge of the grate, pulled her featherweight body up and slipped through the hole. She blinked. She saw an expanse of rippling turquoise. A fevered Hollywood dream, a Kodachrome test-strip. It was a swimming pool, lit from below, lit from above. The swimming pool was lined with tiles in shades of blue. The walls from floor to ceiling were a photograph of a beach front, white sand, gently breaking waves, sun. The sides of the swimming pool were lined with tropical plants. Palms with leaves the size of parasols, long thin tendrils in a static, green explosion, and flowers as large as a baby’s cradle. Pinks, yellows, lilacs, reds. There were UV lamps, the like of which she had seen in marijuana factories. The plants, too, were fed hydroponically. It was an underground ecosystem, a subterranean oasis, a chlorine and halogen haven, a garden with walls on six sides. She walked around the pool three times, reaching out to stroke the plants, bending and crouching to smell the flowers. She stood on the edge of the clear water. She peeled off her sooty and ragged clothes, folded them and placed them in a neat pile. She stood naked and stretched her arms into the air. She could hear the calls of birds and the scratches of insects, parrots chattering, cicadas rubbing their legs together. Were there loudspeakers hidden among the plants? Did they broadcast the recorded sounds of the rainforest? Or was it that she saw the water and the plants, and smelled the flowers and the leaves, and felt the UV rays on her skin and had imagined these sounds to fit the scene? She crouched, then lowered herself into the water. She pushed out and began a breaststroke, remembering her childhood swimming lessons, paid for by a man she couldn’t quite recall: armbands and earplugs and swimming caps and Lucozade and KitKat afterwards. She took deep breaths, filled her lungs with the ersatz tropical air and dipped her head beneath the surface. She held open her eyes despite the sting of chlorine. The water swept through her loose hair and teased out strands of soot and oil. She surfaced, renewed.
She discovered an underground complex. In the room adjacent to the pool there was a lounge with a kitchenette, a large, gently humming fridge, and rows of expensive champagne. In the cupboards, she found pretzels, crisps, nuts, jars of caviar, globe artichokes, stuffed jalapenos, green and black olives, foie gras. She ate and drank as much as she could. The food in the cupboards was non-perishable but had been there a while. She opened a sealed packet of crackers that crumbled in her hands as she took them out. She found a jar of dill pickles that had mold growing around the lid. Some of the frankfurters she bit into were hard.
In the first few weeks she was sick. She didn’t know whether it was the food or the withdrawal. She lay on the sofa wrapped in blankets and
