dead ends, repeating themselves.
The cook leans across the counter and pulls at the centre of the shutter. It clacks noisily up into a hidden recess. The people on the other side are mostly men, already in a line. They know how this works. A few glance up, noticing the unexpected robed figure, but most are focused on the food. They shuffle past blindly as Clementine ladles bowls full of aromatic stew. There’s a faint waft of sumac and bursts of something else more exotic, a spice that leaves an almost uncomfortable heat on the tongue. Still, it’s good food. The homeless in Europe have been killing rats for more than a decade now. An unwanted memory sends a shudder through her: not just the homeless.
The act of serving becomes automatic and she stops noticing the faces in front of her until one of them hisses thanks. She looks up to see the yellow eyes that watched her in the doorway. They see through the disguise of her robe. The features around them are hidden behind shadows and layers of ragged cloth, the blotched red wrist of the hand that takes the bowl seems almost to strobe out of existence in the flickering yellow ceiling light, but the scars of radiation sickness are unmistakeable.
Clementine suppresses a start of surprise and resumes the mechanistic act of filling the bowls, looking around her to see if anyone else has noticed the stranger. The cook wrestles the dead weight of the second pot, oblivious. The homeless continue their dead-man shuffle.
A few make attempts at conversation when she steps out from behind the counter to gather bowls and spoons, but they’re nonsensical, or perhaps in some dialect of the damned she doesn’t understand. She smiles dumbly; none of her language training prepared her for this. As she clears away, she looks in vain for the yellow-eyed stranger.
The small, dark cook makes empty conversation as they share the duties of washing up and putting away. She answers Clementine’s questions about recipes and ingredients with gentle incredulity at her ignorance, unable to grasp the exoticism of her fare to someone who comes from a place where spices will not grow. The rest of her talk is platitudes and local gossip: political scandals, acts of outrage by a cult she calls ‘the Machine people’. The stories mean nothing to Clementine. There is no threat of meaningful dialogue. She has already disappeared.
She follows the cook’s directions to the dormitory. A windowless corridor floored with colourless, hard lino takes her there. The geography of this place is unsettling, hard to follow even for someone like her. It doesn’t correspond at all to the featureless white box visible from the outside. Walls have been knocked away into nearby buildings and tunnels dug between to link them. It is a warren of the faithful with many entrances. The exteriors are all facades. It makes her wonder who else is hiding here. Or is this just what pragmatism looks like in the ruins of the Holy City?
The hostel dormitory is small and cramped compared to the cavernous dining hall. There are people already here, most dressed in the ragged uniform of the poor. Some chat with cautious familiarity. Hilda had explained the hostel’s twelve beds were allocated on the basis of a benignly rigged lottery. At 5 p.m. every day applicants were invited to draw straws for a place. Recent winners, and known substance abusers, chose from a lot that contained no long straws. Some perhaps suspected their fate was sealed, but it was fairer than chance. Clementine had bypassed the lottery entirely, for reasons as yet unclear.
Fully half her roommates are women: the lottery’s work again. They look genderless in the garb of poverty and the skin of their faces and hands is hard from days spent outside in the streets. The eyes of the men follow her hungrily across the room to an empty bed in one corner. Their scrutiny is relentless, their thoughts obvious, but signs proclaiming the Mission’s code of conduct hang like silent sentinels on the walls. Nobody wants to find themselves losing the lottery.
Nobody undresses. Instead, there are token gestures towards the rituals of preparing for bed: outermost garments are put to one side; one of the men prays in a style Clementine has never seen before, rocking backwards and forwards while murmuring atonally. Another uses a bowl of water to perform lengthy, ritualistic ablutions confined to the limited areas of flesh accessible without removing further layers. They all seem to move to some unspoken timetable. By the time the fluorescent strip light on the ceiling flickers out, they are already lying still.
Clementine stares at the ceiling in the darkness. She can feel the eyes of the men and hear their thoughts. Still, this is the safest she’s been for months, since before leaving France. She thinks of the people she left behind. How many survived? Most would be dead, the bravest. If there were any survivors, they’d likely been sent to join the punishment battalions in the east. Not everybody got the chance to disappear. She was lucky, lying here in a hard bed amongst the hopeless. Still, sleep would not come.
A rustle of cloth and a stifled gasp is the sound of a man masturbating in the dark. Clementine pushes her bedcovers aside and walks to the door, picking her way faultlessly through the pitch black, the path and distance memorized through instinct honed by months of training. In the corridor, she blinks three times rapidly and a film descends over her eyes. Monochrome outlines appear out of what was total blackness and she retraces her steps through the warren until she reaches the smoked glass of Hilda’s door and knocks.
A light blossoms behind the glass and the older woman gestures her inside wordlessly. She doesn’t seem surprised. Even roused from sleep, she still wears the same gentle, slightly calculating expression. Clementine slips out of her robe and crawls into the recently vacated bed, still warm from Hilda’s body. The older woman smiles as she leans down to pull the blanket across to cover her nakedness. The light flicks off, the door clicks closed, and she is gone. Tears of relief and gratitude well in Clementine’s eyes. She has to blink three times before they can fall.
Yusuf is pretending to be busy when I get back, chin on his elbow, bodyweight pushing a dent into the clouded zinc of the bar while he listens to some no-hoper trying to sell knock-off shisha tobacco from India. If the guy bothered to look at Yusuf’s face he’d know he wasn’t making a sale, but he just keeps talking, stuck on a script that won’t work without a clean data feed he can’t get this deep in the Old City. Any other week, Yus wouldn’t be giving this schmuck the time of day, but he’s still smarting at getting cut out of the Silas deal. He makes out like it’s all a big fuck-up, but jealousy is what it is. This is the kind of petty shit he does as payback. The tobacco guy only lets up after Yusuf promises to try a sample batch, which is never going to happen. Through me he gets Zanzibar gold leaf at closer to wholesale than is decent or reasonable. That’s the other part of our agreement.
The door curtain rattles behind the tobacco guy. Yusuf gives me a look while the rainbow beads swing and slow to a stop; then he moves to the door, fingers picking at the knot of his apron as he walks. Smoke swirls through the chink of light striping his face while he watches the guy disappear down the street. ‘So?’
‘So what?’
He sits opposite, bulk filling half the table. The way he moves, quick, crisp, he’s excited about something. ‘So you’re still here. It can’t have gone that bad.’
‘Yeah, it went pretty good actually.’
‘You got yourself a cheap thief?’ There’s an edge in his voice, like I put a little dent in his excitement.
‘Not that good.’
‘Have you thought about …’
‘I am not going to Gaza! Will you shut up about Gaza?’
‘Ya rab, Levi! Forget about Gaza. Did you hear about your girlfriend?’
‘Again with this?’ It’s the girl. I should have known. His ability to drop things is zero.
‘Hear me out. A few people saw her come in here. You expect that. Well, it turns out she had a little trouble on her way over: a couple of boys from the