Oligarchy, page 7
Lissa texts Suze. We’re in Cambridge. Can you buy us alcohol for our end of term party? Suze texts back: Fuck off. Lissa tries again: Please please please oh beautiful sister? Suze eventually replies with the name of a small old-fashioned off-licence with an owner called Bob. He likes young girls, she says. But don’t say I told you that. Just smile and let him see slightly down your top and he won’t ask for ID. If you tell Mum I’ll fucking kill you.
*
The Malibu tastes like medicine. Tash thought it would taste nice. It’s supposed to taste of coconuts and desert islands and holidays, not that Tash has ever had a foreign holiday. She’d never even flown before coming here.
She and Tiffanie are locked in an attic bathroom with one bottle of Malibu: Lissa, Rachel and Danielle are locked in a different bathroom with the other, although it’s a fair guess that Rachel isn’t drinking much now she’s so healthy. Donya isn’t allowed to drink because of her religion, so she’s acting as lookout. Why doesn’t Malibu taste nice? It’s as disappointing as smoking the first time, and coffee. Do you get to an age where liking these things is automatic, or do you have to learn it? It’s cold on the bathroom floor, where Tash is sitting. Tiffanie is sprawled in the bath, one leg hanging out, with her silk dressing gown open over a black bandage dress.
‘Dis-goose-tange,’ says Tiffanie.
‘Yeah,’ says Tash. ‘Oui. Je sais. Mais …’ She shrugs and takes another swig.
‘Where are you go-ange for ex-mass?’ asks Tiffanie.
‘Aunt Sonja,’ says Tash. ‘London. Then some castle. I don’t know.’
‘And your mother?’
Tash shrugs. Passes the bottle to Tiffanie, whose hand dangles over the edge of the bath. Her fingernails are a strange Oriental shade of green that’s almost blue.
‘It’s cold in Russia. Better to stay here. You?’
‘Paris, bien sûr,’ says Tiffanie. For Tiffanie, only two places ever exist: wherever she is at that moment, and Paris.
‘Why are you at school in England?’ asks Tash.
‘C’est cheap.’ She shrugs. ‘Thérèse est ici. My father is the cousin of her father, so. They are rich together in bonking.’
Bonking? Right: banking. Tash takes the Malibu back and swigs.
‘If they’re rich, then …?’
‘Rich people love the économique, of course. Why are you here?’ Tiffanie asks.
‘I didn’t know my father until last year. He found me. He’s rich.’
‘Mais not that rich,’ says Tiffanie. ‘Because it is so cheap to come here.’
‘Perhaps. I don’t know. I think he might have a helicopter?’
‘Quoi?’
Tash mimes flying. When Tiffanie says ‘le avion’, she shakes her head and twists her finger round and round.
‘Ah! Hélicoptre,’ says Tiffanie.
Tash laughs. ‘That’s what I said, Estella.’
‘Je suis pas Estella. Je suis Aunt Sonja,’ says Tiffanie, with a wink.
‘Et moi?’
‘You are Princess Aw-goose-ta,’ says Tiffanie. A pause. ‘Avec les GHDs.’
Princess Augusta with hair straighteners. ‘Yeah, maybe. Bianca probably looked more like Princess Augusta.’
‘Oui.’ She sighs. ‘Bianca.’
Tash sighs too. ‘Yeah.’
‘Quand même, ceci est un privet school pour les économiques. Les pauvres.’
Les pauvres pêcheurs. The poor fishermen. Tash laughs.
‘Les fishermen,’ she says. ‘Les men du fish. This is a school for fishermen?’
Tiffanie laughs too, with her head back on the white porcelain of the old bath. She opens her green eyes wide and in them Tash sees perfect simplicity, perfect friendship. They could just as easily be toddlers in a nursery, or kittens in a basket. She goes to swig from the bottle and realises there isn’t much left, so she passes it back. She doesn’t feel that different yet, except she wants to undress and get Tiffanie to replay the tutorial she gave them all last week on the uses of tit-tape and she wants to write to Nico and tell him she does in fact like his tongue and … Tash blinks.
‘Not fishmen,’ says Tiffanie. ‘The poor rich. Les pauvres riches.’
‘Is that a thing?’
‘Mais oui.’
‘Do you feel drunk?’
‘Oui.’
‘Shall we go to the disco?’
‘Oui, Estella!’
It’s more difficult than they thought, getting up. They giggle and sit back down. Perhaps they’ll try again in ten minutes, or never. Maybe they’ll have to stay here forever. They are windlestraws. Mere fluff. This is ridiculously funny, and—
Someone’s knocking at the door. A teacher? Big eyes. Silence.
‘Tiffanie? Tash?’ It’s Donya’s voice.
‘Oui?’ A giggle. ‘Do you have a dib-dob?’
‘No! Shhh. You have to come out. They’re asking about you downstairs. Becky’s going to tell the teachers that you’re drinking.’
‘Merde,’ says Tiffanie.
Tash gets up. She feels amazing and awful at the same time. She could fly, really fly, with her own little cobwebby wings. She could soar through the air, if only she didn’t feel so … so …
‘I think I’m going to be—’
‘Estella!’
*
Dr Morgan struggles to like the girls’ choice of music, with its vocoders and sudden, vertiginous changes in BPM. Each song is like three songs rolled into one. Three bad songs. Everything this generation likes is corrupt or degraded in some way: tinny music on cheap headphones; tragically low-res MP3s. He looks at Madame Vincent when he doesn’t think she will notice. She is the same vintage as the LPs he covets but never buys. She is as solid and unbreakable as vinyl. She is analogue, old-school. Her natural-tan tights are wrinkled behind her knees in thin folds that do not conceal her varicose veins. He thinks of the hot nothingness she makes him feel, like whisky hitting your throat. But not now: he doesn’t feel that now. He only feels it in the dark times, when he has given in and stopped struggling and gone under.
His lungs filling with algae. His absolute need for that pain.
Her flesh that is slightly powdery and smells of stale roses.
He sometimes sees his problem as a beaker that will not fill. At the bottom of the beaker are the girls and their classes and meals and registration and the crushlets swarming like little clouds of insects and the older girls starting to look at him and then look away. Except … But we’re not there yet. The next part of the beaker is his work: meaningless, of course. You don’t change the world as a biology teacher in a school like this full of ridiculous little madams with their contraband lipstick and their all-consuming eating disorders and their lack of profound thought. Stimulating young minds. That’s what the job advert had said. These minds do not need further stimulation, of that he is sure. Quite what they need he doesn’t know. His days are filled with waiting for them to end. He reads New Scientist. Does crosswords. Sends letters to newspapers. Sends off the crosswords.
That is a life. That is enough. It is.
He no longer prays, but he does read every email sent by the Humanist Society.
So why will the beaker not fill? It’s not that it doesn’t want to: it wants to fill and froth and steam and spill over like those ridiculous pictures of drinks on social media that the older girls like. The effervescence of online role-playing games. The things he sometimes accidentally sees on his iPhone’s Private Browsing mode, when his fingers type words into search engines that come from a part of his mind he cannot completely control. Not the whole phrase, just part of it. Boys. Spanking by. Female teacher. If your fingers add the word hentai you get Japanese cartoons instead of real people, which are better because a) they are cleaner, and b) you can feel less guilty. The only problem is that the Japanese really like pictures of well-endowed male teachers giving it to their young – like paedophilically young and extremely tiny – female students, which is such a dumb thing to be looking at in a girls’ school even on Private Browsing mode. And anyway, these images are not the ones he wants. He wants women to be towering, high-heeled, armed with riding crops and mean. Like Madame Vincent is sometimes, when she is in the right mood. The froth pulses like liquid nitrogen, fizzes like those stupid experiments with magnesium that he does for the crushlets, but does not spill. Not yet.
Becky from Year 11.
Not in reality, of course, but in his mind. In the froth. Lost in it.
All the things in the froth are wrong. They bubble over and never settle. OK, they stop him thinking about the rest of the beaker for a few hours but then if he’s not careful he is up all night doing beastly things, the things the village boys no doubt also do, perhaps more often but not with such vile intensity, such desperate concentration, such animal depth.
‘Sir?’
‘What is it now, Becky?’
‘My name’s Donya, sir.’
‘What is it, Donya?
‘Can you help us, sir? It’s Tash and Tiffanie. They’re a little bit ill.’
*
‘Always make sure you have two paths,’ says Aunt Sonja.
They are in Selfridges, having tea. Natasha is avoiding anything that tastes like coconut. At the back of her gullet there is still the thick pukey whiteness of the Malibu. The gluey sweetness of it. Like tropical sperm, not that anyone would say that at school. It’s more the kind of thing they would say at home, the kids on the street and their brown-toothed mothers with their polyester cold-shoulder tops. They probably vomit all the time from alcohol. Natasha is never drinking again. She does not want to be those women; she barely wants to be herself. She wants to be pure inside like she used to be. Pure and slight like a backslash.
It is warm for Christmas week. The Christmas floor in Selfridges has been ready for all this since August, which is when all the mentally ill people bought their baubles. Is excess of sentimentality a mental illness? It should be. A lack of it is. That’s what Estella had; what was wrong with her. She was beautiful but had no heart. That’s what she says to Pip. If you could choose one or the other, what would it be? An excess of sentimentality or its absence? But really, though? Or is that a two-paths situation? What exactly does Aunt Sonja mean?
‘Two paths?’ says Tash.
‘Two potential paths. Choice. The chance to go in a different direction. Don’t go so far down a path that you can’t go back. Never go through a door that closes behind you. Leave the door open. That is the most important thing. I don’t mean in real life, although that is not a bad idea too. It’s a metaphor: an image. Do not do anything that’s undoable.’
Tash looks at her hands. The backs of her wrists. Her forearms.
‘You mean like a tattoo?’
Aunt Sonja shakes her head. ‘Get all the tattoos you want,’ she says. ‘Especially if you don’t want to get married.’
Tash is not sure exactly what that means. Aunt Sonja is expressionless.
‘No,’ Aunt Sonja says. ‘I mean conceptually.’ She taps her head. ‘In here. You smoke, right?’
‘No.’ One breath. Two. ‘OK, yes. Sometimes.’
‘Have you passed the point where you choose to smoke? Do you have to do it now?’
Natasha feels the stirring of a little creature inside her. A worm that needs feeding. A worm that was born back in Russia, by the old bomb crater behind her school. A group of them smoking for the first time, while Nico’s sister stood there smiling and coaxing.
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘That’s a mistake,’ says Aunt Sonja. ‘But you can use it to learn. Don’t let anything else give you that feeling. Some people are addicted to eating, for example. They eat as much as they can, and they are compelled to do it even when they don’t want to. Look over there.’ She gestures with her head to a girl of about Natasha’s age sitting on her own at one of the tables. She has a black headscarf and a chubby face. Tash has already noticed her. She’s basically bingeing in public. She has a whole afternoon tea to herself: three tiers of cakes and sandwiches. She’s eating her way through it as if this is an unpleasant task she has to complete as soon as possible so she can tick it off. But she also looks kind of like she will never complete the task, like that philosophy guy who has to keep rolling the rock uphill. Although rolling a rock uphill at least burns calories.
‘She doesn’t look very happy,’ Tash says.
‘Maybe she is. Who knows? Who are we to judge?’
‘Um …’
‘Maybe she hasn’t eaten for days. Maybe she’s celebrating. But I don’t think so. I agree with you. She looks miserable. She’s taken a path to a place that it is hard to come back from. She’s not choosing to do this any more. She can’t stop. It’s the same with alcohol. Cocaine. Masturbation, for some people. Dildos. Some people can’t help themselves visiting prostitutes. They say this will be the last time, but it is never the last time.’
Tash feels awkward. ‘Maybe we should stop staring?’
‘Yes. True. We don’t want to make her feel worse.’ Aunt Sonja looks at Tash. ‘Don’t let the door close behind you,’ she says. She sips her Darjeeling tea. ‘Even – especially – if you feel like you have entered paradise. I’ve had a letter from the school. You’re all anorexic, apparently. Is that true?’
‘No.’
‘But there has been some death?’
‘One girl died. She was my friend. But …’
‘But what?’
‘I don’t think it was that. I don’t think it was anorexia.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. I mean, she drowned in a lake.’
‘OK …’
‘I mean, she didn’t starve.’
‘Drowned?’ Aunt Sonja is nodding. ‘Or was simply found there?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Are people talking about this? Are they making theories?’
‘No.’
‘But you are making a theory?’
‘I don’t know.’
*
Christmas Eve dinner is brown rice and baked fish with broccoli. There is homemade chocolate mousse for pudding. The mousse has two ingredients: eggs and bitter chocolate. It has been setting in the fridge since first thing this morning when Aunt Sonja separated the eggs and melted the chocolate while listening to an English choir on Radio 3.
On Christmas morning, Aunt Sonja gives Natasha a paperback copy of the book Londongrad, about Russian oligarchs who come to London. ‘It’s all true,’ she says. Aunt Sonja also gives Tash a black Balmain dress with gold buttons in a French size 36, a pair of strappy Versace sandals, a Chanel lipstick in the shade Monte Carlo and a small pair of diamond earrings. Last of all, she gives her a Net-a-Porter gift box. ‘From your father,’ says Aunt Sonja. Inside is a large white-gold and black-diamond bracelet from De Grisogono that looks like a fan or a snake’s head. Tash is not sure she likes it, but she puts it on anyway. Then Aunt Sonja tells Tash to pack an overnight bag with these things and a toothbrush and whatever toiletries you need if you are a beautiful, clear-skinned fifteen-year-old. Some underwear; probably not a bra but ideally you need a thong with this dress. Tit-tape? Perhaps.
They go out for Christmas lunch to a private members’ club in Soho. Tash wonders what Aunt Sonja would be doing if she were not here. Most other people are in cheerful groups; they have the only table for two. She wonders where her father is; if her mother misses her. Her mother will be with Nana in the countryside by now, smoking outside by the woodshed, tapping things into her phone with her long clicky nails. She doesn’t email or call Tash any more. She waits for Tash to make contact, and then she responds in a strange false voice that Tash imagines is what her mother thinks her Anglicised daughter would now want to hear, or perhaps even the opposite. It’s so confusing. Are you English yet? her mother says. Are you rich? Has your father given you any actual cash or just promises? Tash doesn’t know what to say. It wasn’t her idea to come here. Her father sent money and her mother arranged it all through a lawyer in London called Mr Ross.
‘How are your theories progressing?’ asks Aunt Sonja. She is drinking a Snowball.
Natasha sighs. ‘If I tell you something, please don’t be angry.’
Aunt Sonja shrugs. Sips her Snowball. Switches to Russian.
‘It depends what it is.’
Tash fiddles with her bracelet. ‘I saw some pictures of the dead girl on Instagram.’
Aunt Sonja raises a microbladed eyebrow. ‘What, not actually …?’
‘Oh no. Nonono, I mean she was alive in the pictures. But they all had these hashtags like “thinspo” and “starving” and stuff like that.’ It had been an accident. Tash had done it the night after Anastasia’s talk. Just to see; just to have a proper look at more of those tiny pretty troubled girls and think about them. To think about their ribs and whether Tash also wanted ribs like that and what to do about it. It took longer than she expected and just at the point where she felt like she’d seen every anorexic girl on the planet, and read all their disturbing lists of #goals, she’d scrolled down, deep down into one of the weirder hashtags, and there she was: Bianca.
‘These are bad feeds,’ says Aunt Sonja. ‘Go on.’
‘OK, well, most of hers was basically just selfies. She did a lot of them in the dance studio at school, which has loads of mirrors. But …’
‘Yes?’
‘OK, some of the pictures were obviously taken by someone else.’
‘A friend?’
‘She didn’t have any friends, apart from in her dorm, and in mine.’
‘And it was not one of these friends?’
Tash shakes her head. ‘No.’
‘Why not?
‘Just because … I don’t know. She was so secretive about her eating disorder. She never even took her clothes off in front of us. And also, some of the pictures were of photographs. No one has photographs. They were slightly curled at the edges, like real life. Like Polaroids. And some were in frames, but real ones, not digital.’ One of Natasha’s mother’s English boyfriends had once had a Polaroid camera. Lyudmila would dress in her bikini and her fur coat and hold in her stomach and pose in the kitchen or on the balcony with factory smoke ruining her hair.
