*

The delight of Lucy is understandable. She is the fictional East Africa representative of an Oxford-based aid agency called WorldFeed, a leading member of a cast of journalists, diplomats, aid workers and politicians assembled in my novels set in Kireba. Doing good and easing suffering are part of the raison d’etre of Lucy and the tens of thousands of well-meaning European aid workers based in Africa.

But another of my characters, the Oldest Member of the Thumaiga Club, a gin-drinking survivor of colonial rule who is ending his days in his favourite chair on the club’s red-polished veranda, looks at the aid agencies with a jaundiced eye. In the third of the novels, now under way, the Oldest Member lets rip, his hardened cynicism a marked contrast to Lucy’s idealistic enthusiasm.

“It is time for another revolution”, he declares, while taking care to make clear that he is not abandoning his conservative roots. “Never had any sympathy for the last lot, but they had one thing going for them,” he goes on to argue.

The Kenyattas and the Kaundas, the Nkrumah’s and the Nyereres were able to tap into the nationalist fervour of the time, and channel this sentiment into a force that  liberated the continent from colonial control. Today, the Oldest Member maintains, international aid has sapped Africa’s resolve and dignity, instead of freeing the continent from readily eradicable disease, help educate the children, provide jobs for the for the unemployed and feed the hungry.

“It’s time we had a fresh look at the aid johnnies,” he tells anyone who will listen.

“All we hear about are debt relief, mosquito nets and even more aid. Only encourages the chancers and second-raters who come to Africa and get paid a fortune to run it all. No wonder they all cry: Dish out more aid! Comes out like a bloody mantra. Reminds me of Pooh Bear and his hums. Think of the first line, and if you sing it fast enough and often enough, says Pooh, and you’ll be singing the second line before you know it”.

After helping himself to a handful of his favourite cashew nuts and washing them down with a swig of his gin and tonic, the OM delivers his verdict on foreign financial support: “It doesn’t do what it says on the tin.”

A 70-something white man, a former district commissioner during the days of the country called Kuwisha was under British rule,  is an unlikely banner carrier for a revolution.

But his concerns are understandable.

The high hopes that accompanied Africa’s wave of independence some fifty years ago have been largely dashed. The story of the continent has been dominated by debt, disease and disaster, both man- made and natural.

And in the 20-odd years since the World Bank first sounded the alarm bells, and warned of the disasters that lay ahead, billions of dollars of aid has failed to bring about the changes that were promised. More people in the region are living in poverty than ever before. Something is missing from the development strategy, argues the Oldest Member. And so profound is the failure of aid that we must consider the possibility that there is a link between the role of the development industry, Africa’s low self-esteem and the continent’s failure to conduct a radical reappraisal of its relations with the West.

Traumatised by its past, demoralised by post-independence failures, and accepting its victim status accorded it, Africa is in danger of missing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

It should be re-assessing old alliances and forging new partnerships with that group of countries whose stunning economic growth poses a challenge to the old dominance, cultural as well as material, of Africa’s traditional partners – the so-called Bric states: Brazil, Russia, India and China.

Instead, the 50-odd countries that make up sub-Saharan Africa are behaving like one of the late President Mobuto sese Seko’s cabinet in the last years of  the country then called Zaire.

Asked the significance of one of the dictator’s many reshuffles, the US ambassador memorably replied:
“What do you get when you shake up a can of worms? Dizzy worms”, he drawled, “dizzy worms.”

Five decades after Ghana led the way to independence from colonial rule, Africa displays as much sense of purpose as a can of confused worms. Its diplomatic thrust is still focused on Washington, Paris, Brussels and London. Trade with China is not a partnership, but is led by Beijing’s determination to secure access to Africa’s oil and minerals. Africa’s business schools and universities fail to do justice in their courses to the powerful new economies; and not a single African media outlet has its own correspondent in Beijing, capital of the world’s most rapidly growing economy.

The result is that at a time that should be exciting for Africa, shaking off an unhealthy preoccupation with a declining West, the continent is moribund and drifting. If ever there were a point at which Africa’s friends should speak out, this it.

But their voices are silent.

Celebrities have nothing to offer on the subject, no fresh ideas to put forward; they keep their heads below the parapet of conventional wisdom and accepted opinion.

It is said that one can know a man by the nature of his friends. If this maxim holds good for continents, Africa is in a bad way.

Its many trials and tribulations are trivialised by the attention of  lightweight personalities from show business, who boost their profiles by adopting black babies or use the continent as a location for their latest TV series, while pop stars lecture and hector from arenas around the world.

Meanwhile Britain’s middle class despatch their restless teenagers to the continent, who regard Africa as little more than a gap year adventure playground; feckless young royals curry the favour of the London tabloids by ensuring they are photographed with African Aids orphans. Rich businessmen treat the region as a real-life laboratory for their philanthropic schemes.

Above all Africa is seen the best friend of  ten of thousands of non-government organisations who help stuff  billions of dollars of aid down the continent’s collective throat, like a force-fed Strasbourg goose – but one that stays infuriatingly thin, seemingly unable to put on weight.

Far from providing a reliable assessment of the impact of our aid dollars, the NGOs use a language which cushions and distances both user and receiver from reality. Thus challenge replaces problem, potential means disaster, as in the challenge of Zimbabwe and the potential of Congo, and budgetary anomalies means fiddling the books.

It serves a purpose: the language of aid agencies helps conceals the fact that international assistance has failed; or, at the very least, its performance has fallen short of the claims made on its behalf. Yet there is no systematic evaluation of development agencies’ performance, a multi-billion industry that should be opening its books to independent scrutiny.

True, much has changed in the years since the Economist warned of “Africa: the hopeless continent” in a cover story that caused a furore, as much because of the blunt language of the headline as the tough appraisal inside.

Africa’s economic growth is twice what it was then and its minerals are in huge demand. Military regimes have all but disappeared. State-owned corporations are either back in the private sector or under commercial pressure. Deregulation rules. Foreign investment is picking up. Mobile phones and the internet are sweeping the continent.

But the gap – material and technological – between Africa and the rest of the world is widening; Africa is losing the battle for sustained and self-sustaining economic and political recovery. Let us remind ourselves:
Three million children die under the age of five every year of preventable diseases, with AIDS adding ever-increasing numbers to that total.

The tragedy is more than a challenge to humanity – it continues to undermine Africa’s already limited management stock. Each year some 60,000 of the continent’s brightest and best leave for Europe and North America – medical workers, dentists, engineers, bankers, accountants and lawyers. There can be no more telling an example of Africa’s loss of self-confidence.

As skilled Africans leave, their places are often taken by some of the 100,000 ‘experts’ or ‘consultants’ who flock to the continent every year. Many of them will swell the ranks of the ever-growing non-governmental organisations – a movement whose impact on the region can often be damaging.

Foreign NGOs increasingly assume the functions of what should be the preserve of the state, routinely playing an important role in the provision of basic services – such as primary education and health facilities – with unintended results. They not only weaken Africa’s management capacity, but undermine the contract between citizen and state.

If the government cannot deliver the essential services its citizens expect in return for their loyalty, their allegiance is transferred to ethnic or regional leaders – the ‘big men’ who still dominate politics across the continent.

At the same time, Western donors unwittingly subvert local attempts to encourage the democratic process by funding African civil rights and good governance initiatives, thus creating a quasi-professional class of NGO activists. Donors fail to realise that the links between these activists and the people they claim to represent are all too often tenuous. The result is a growing number of organisations whose leaders are without a mandate.

Meanwhile the Western media remains the bogy man African leaders love to hate, regularly accused of misreporting the continent.

It is true that Western dominated news outlets are often guilty of arrogance and ignorance – but to focus on these shortcomings is to neglect the beam in Africa’s eye. Pick up the local papers, listen to the radio or watch local television and rarely will one find that the African media does a good job in reporting the continent to the world, and explaining the world to the continent.

Citizens who depend on their local media soon start to suffer from a form of intellectual scurvy: without perspective, lacking depth and without insight, the coverage lacks these vital ingredients.

There is no easy remedy for the debilitating condition called aid dependence, or for ending intellectual self-doubt. But Africa can begin the process in several ways. It can start by reducing the links with the donors, and raise a far higher proportion of funds for development from its own resources. The first step should be the radical reform of land ownership, the release of ‘dead capital’, and allowing land to serve as security against borrowing.

The continent needs to undergo a revolution of the mind, recalling its past achievements: from the ancient universities in Timbuktu to the bronzes of Benin. The recovery of self-confidence is as important a part of the development programme as any.

Will any of this happen? A hundred years ago the Afro-American writer WE du Bois raised a taboo which resonates to this day.

“Between me and the other world,” he wrote,  “there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.”

Yet without the revolutionary change in attitude that answers the awkward questions raised by du Bois, the Oldest Member’s fears will be borne out.

“I can hear the blighters all singing their hearts out, ‘Aid for Africa, aid for Africa’.”
He takes a sip of his gin and tonic, then continues.
“The problem is, while they sing the first line well enough, I still cannot hear the next lines.”

Michael Holman was brought up in Zimbabwe, and was Africa editor of the Financial Times from 1984 to 2002, when he took early retirement to write novels. His first, Last Orders at Harrods, was acclaimed by Alexander McCall Smith as one of his ‘novels of the year’; the second, Fatboy and the Dancing Ladies was published earlier this year. He is currently writing Dizzy Worms, the last of the trilogy.Similar Posts:

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Richard Tyrone-Jones is a London-based poet and performer. He hosts and co-organises Utter! in Camden and Dalston. He can be contacted at www.myspace.com/richardtyronejonesSimilar Posts:

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• Issue 97: Cover Art

I have always believed in a system. Whether as simple as one good turn deserves another or the more wondrous revolution of the heavens. With order and piety, we bring civility and harmony to chaos. We all have our place in God’s plan – I don’t consider myself elected but ordained. My fellow townspeople trust in me and I trust in God to show me the path to follow.  It was that same direction that led me to accept Fürstbischof Johann’s conclusion that my wife had to be put to death.

The evidence given against her was compelling – witnesses were presented to the court and, whilst I was concerned by her dishevelled appearance in the dock, she can only have been shaking through the guilt her conscience held within her and the realisation of the severity of her punishment. She even admitted to those dark, Satanic accusations laid down by Weihbischof Fürner and Doktor Haan.  Of course, I was mortified to begin with but I have to accept that the Lord’s plan was for her to die as a warning to and as an example for those who try to follow that accursed route, to suckle upon the Devil’s bosom.

My darling children must now be raised properly to ensure they continue to worship the correct faith, especially in this tumultuous time.  We are fortunate in Bamberg, our home, that this war has not yet swarmed into Bavaria. Long may He protect us – so long as we continue to observe the Sabbath, say our prayers, read the scriptures, attend church and so forth.

Therefore, I was initially perplexed as to why the witch-finder, the Fürstbischof, wanted to take me in for questioning. I have always performed the duties required of me within my role as Bürgermeister with pride and good grace, as befits it. I am filled with concern about how Ellse Hopfmennin will care for little Hans Georg, Veronica and Beatrice. They are too young to comprehend what is happening, save for poor Veronica – she is to be fourteen years of age this winter and knows full well that her dear mama will not return. She was distressed, as young women tend to be of course, and it was my task to teach her how to get through her emotional state, to see that her Mutter did not deserve her pity. No servant of the anti-Christ should receive our sympathy nor our remembrance. She was buried in the corner of the cemetery and I forbid anyone from laying flowers upon her grave.

I am sure that once Weihbischof Fürner has finished his enquiries with myself – and some of the other fellow town officials I heard arriving yesterday – I shall be able to continue my duties. It was very kind and sensible for him to recommend that I remain in custody within the Drudenhaus and I have been her for a day now. It would be foolish of me to be strolling around the town when the Devil’s agents have good reason to see to my hastened demise. Fürner and I are part of the vanguard against the malevolence that has been proliferated through the countryside in the past few years.

Through my window, looking out upon the shimmering silver cobbles of the Kaulbergstrasse, I watched Wittich and Gebhard making their way to tend to the rosengarten. I could hear the gentle rippling of the Regnitz river, flowing, ambling beneath the beautiful Obere Brücke bridge, out of sight to the east. I could also hear – and faintly smell – Schlenkerla pub. As daylight receded behind the Bamberger Dom, it winked lustily off of the four Gothic spires, promising a bright future upon its return.  This night, as it advanced, I would spend once more listening to the noises of the guilty contained within the walls of the Drudenhaus, their screams for mercy coming too late.  If they were imprisoned here, then their guilt had been proven in court. That is our system. It is foolproof – it is God’s machine of justice – the only mercy they must pray for is upon the outcome of their Last Judgment.  Looking at the pin-prick stars, partly masked by the three metal bars, I felt sure that the morning would bring peace and resolution.

I cradled my right thumb against my rhythmic heart – the crushed bone fragment scraped together like shoed hooves grinding upon the granite of the Domplatz. The nail was gone but the pain crackled from where tip had once been all the way up to my shoulder. Oh Johannes, Johannes, what have you done?
At first, Fürner and Doktor Haan asked me about my former wife. I told them what I knew, what I heard in the courtroom and, upon my soul, they did not believe me. I cannot think why – perhaps she transfixed me somehow, made me blind to her actions and dumb to speak of those I saw. If that is proven to be correct, I deserve my punishment for being so foolish.  Töricht Jungen!

The blood bubbled out of my wound as I held it tighter, hoping that my caress would lessen the anguish. Mein Gott!  I prayed aloud, I prayed that He would guide their eyes and hands to the truth – the truth that I knew no more than I had spoke and would help them gladly in any way required of me.  But this treatment was beyond even my understanding, my faith.  I had seen the executions in the ‘platz. The very public deliverance of Holy Justice. The flickering tinder. The taper lit and leaping, anxious to obey. Kindling and larch glowing into life. Occasionally the merciful, if somewhat gruesome, thunderclap as the powder bag, slung around the heathen’s neck, brings to an end their life of sin. We cannot allow these wizards, these demons, to submit to or spread Satan’s will. These villains had their guilt proven for all to see in the town’s Catholic court. As yet, I have not been paid a visit from a judge nor a priest.

Although Doktor Haan did personally come into my accommodation and accused me, in the present of Fürner, of having visited the Steigenwald forest to dance upon the witches’ Sabbath. I was bemused but they told me that there were witnesses. I could scarcely believe what I was hearing. “I swear to Almighty God, I have no knowledge of this crime. I have never – would never – renounce God. Indeed I am the one wronged before him. I would like to hear of any man to have seen me at such gatherings.” Haan, after all, was such a respected councillor. Together, we had made Bamberg a prosperous place to live along with my fellow Bürgermeisters and the church. I know he presented the case against my wife, so I know from experience that he can be trusted, as he manfully performed such a vexing duty, and his faith was not in question.
Yet he treated me with some contempt, as if I were suspected of being a warlock myself. Haan and Fürner had been polite to me, yet now they seemed almost preoccupied with gleaning further information from me about the witches’ Sabbath – which I repeated I knew nothing of – and who was in attendance – of whom I know nothing.  Haan then accused me of attending a witch-gathering in the electoral council room, where we ate and drank to the Devil’s health. I swore it was an untruth. I staked my life upon it. He spat upon me.  My protestations resulted in the thumbscrews being applied.

Oh how I wept that night. I wailed for my wife, God keep her wicked soul, my beautiful children, even Ellse – oh Ellse, what would I say to her? Beautiful Ellse, who was caring for the children and our home. Even she was brought in front of me – the darling girl, she couldn’t bring herself to say a damning word. At least not in my presence. Oh the thought, damn my doubting mind, even St. Thomas was blush that I fear for her senses under such duress.

I praise Him for showing me a sign. The gaoler, I do not know his name for his face was concealed, brought me paper and some writing implements having been given to him by Fürner, presuming I would write my confession. That noble man jeopardised himself for me, though how I wish I shared his courage. Faith!  Glaube!  I must remain true to my beliefs.  I must tell sweet Veronica to be strong in my stead.

Now more gaolers have visited me – even Fürner cannot bring himself to see me in this state – and brought with them a sight that brought tears to my eye and a quake to my very being.  Beinschauben, the leg irons – they sucked the light from the room, how I shook, the black steel stole my tears had I any left to give, stole the words, unhatched, from my throat. If I had anything to confess I would have gladly done so, but I could not, would not, forsake my God, my truth.  The excrutiation!  Rette mich!  Haan turned the screw once more…

The black dog. Is it night time? Sitting on wet slabs – wet with what I cannot tell.  What is it?  Haan, he came in once more. He said he was sorry. Sorry. Wife. Sorry about the wife. I don’t remember details. Webhard and Gittich at the rosengarten – I remember them. What I told them is false, I know it is. The maid eight years ago, the succubus who led me to the witches’ Sabbath, the gold florin Beelzebub gave me as a dowry for wedding the maid, the goat, the maid, I don’t know, the demon. Something. The pain had to stop. I made it stop. Briefly.

The black winged dog again. Haan. Fögen. Rope tied around my wrists. Nothing. Füchsen. That was the name. Succubus. My succubus. Summer heat in the orchard. A wondrous August of my middle-age. Grass. Apples. Peace. Pain. The lever revolved. Feet hang below me. Body tears, pulls, wrenches. Save me Lord – nein, no more – yes, yes, He does not give us solutions, He gives us opportunities to save ourselves. Nothing. Nothing is spoken. The lever turns once more. The damp rope fizzes against the unlubricated winch. Sharp. Crack. The black dog’s wings envelope me.

Füchsen. Vixen. Veronica. The letter. The house. Ellse. I heard Ellse. I recognised her cry. Two, three cells away. Füchsen – married to her by the Devil himself. A second wife. Is it still night? I cannot hear the river, it must be night. Discite justitium momiti et mon temnere divos. How could you forget? Carved atop the door of the Drudenhaus. Krix. He called me Krix. The baptism in the woods. No, no, it was in the electoral chambers. The black dog nears. Wrists tighten. Fürstbischof calls my name. Is it my name or is it just a name? Staggering silence. “Johannes Junius.” The strappado, or is it the vice? Suffering is a currency with no value now. “You colluded with the Devil, ja? You undertook sacrilegious acts with your succubus, witches and Beelzebub himself.” Head movement. No matter. Blinking goodbye to Füchsen, black wings flap back.

Who stood before me? Upon what street do they live? Die lange gasse? I know of no-one at that address. “Barbara Schwartzein, the tanner’s wife, she lives there.” Gears rub. “Bürgermeister David Beyer on the Zinkenwert. He cannot have earned that big house through honest, Godly means.” Ropes twist. I only feel myself blink. I know no-one. Names fall into my ears. Roof tiles after a storm. Shattering. Smashing. Hofmeister. “The market place.” Dietmeyer.  Neudecker. I see their doors slam open. Paintings are torn from the walls. Money possessed, property seized. Orchard. Füchsen. Her eyes, her words. Was it love? I know not but that she enchanted me when I was penniless. Ellse must have betrayed me. Haan said accomplices had confessed.

Light burning at my eyes. Daylight? “Hofmeister Ursel?” Yes. “Anna Dusslin, Martha Spessin, Anna Füchsin, Christiana Morhauptin.” Yes, yes, yes, wait, yes – Morhauptin. Familiar. The Sabbath. She was there, they were both there. Coins. Remembrance of a gold florin. That at least could not be taken from me – Veronica would pay my messenger with it. The black dog has not visited for so long. “Doktor Braun?” My brother-in-law. He visited. He accused. The names came to me. Above, below, who knew where from. “God forgive you, kinsman, for misusing an innocent man.” Is that what I said to him, oh foolish. God challenged us to bear his torture – I bear it badly. Darling Veronica. “Over the Obere Brücke, onto the Georgthor – speak without fear. Who there do you know?” Fear. Strange. No longer feeling fear. My letter is sent, my children are safe. Füchsen again, maybe Morhauptin. Words, clouded words. Kill the children they said – it cannot be, God forbids it. They demand blood. The horse’s carcass lies in the orchard now in Friedrichsbronnen. Krix. That is whom they speak to but I would not do it, those sirens. At the Pfarrkirche, St. Gangolf’s, on Wednesday. Or was it St. Martin’s on Sunday? It is unclear. Beelzebub was clear. The brown horse was not sufficient. Yes, they were His words.

More words closer to me. “Junius.” Who was he talking to? “Johannes Junius. Who did you see in the council chambers?” Yes. Was that my voice? Yes. “Who?” Who indeed. Who. Veronica appeared – an illusion perhaps, what I see appears as if viewed through a sleeve of milk. Safety for her. My sacrifice made it possible – perhaps that in itself is God’s will. “Who was in the council chambers?” An urgency not detected before, anger.

The black dog’s wings fluttered once before the familiar shattered into hundreds of thick, pitch ravens – screeching, panicking, no one else saw it but I cowered from the flock.  “The knave is damned – take him away.”  There were no tears left, as I was dragged away, just the ringing in my ears of the final, prophetic word.  “Haan.”  “He was there?”  “Haan.”

Mark Wilson, 28, has written for newspapers, magazines, theatre, short films, poetry collections and reference books. He was nominated for several international awards in the process (Guardian Student Media Awards and South Australian Young Journalist of the Year).Similar Posts:

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Charlotte shook herself free of her cape and bonnet and had just picked up a handful of skirt to remove a mud stain when Isabelle Rose glided in. Isabelle Rose, girl in a dream, all peaches and cream, all frothy and pinky in white lace and curls in a chignon.

“Morning Charlotte,” she sang. “Stepped in a puddle did we?”

Her heart-shaped face squeezed into a smile but Charlotte felt no inclination to reply. “It gets worse, I’m afraid: Mr Guest wants to see you in the board room straight away.”

Charlotte let go of her skirt and pulled back a greying thread of hair. She turned her back and looked at her reflection in the mirror on the door, tidying herself.

“Wants to see me instead of you, that does make a change.”

Isabelle Rose wagged the perfect egg of her head and sat down by the window in what had once been Charlotte’s seat, but which she had given up as the newcomer suffered from claustrophobia.

“Comes to work here, where there’s no room to swing a cat, suffering from claustrophobia. Ha!” Julia had ejaculated.

That was the beginning of it, Charlotte decided – the disruption had begun with the chairs, and from then on everything else about Isabelle-Rose, from her lace to the scent of lavender and vanilla that clung to the place, even in her absence – everything was upset, unmoored, adrift. The chair that had always been Charlotte’s and the view from the window onto the street and the heavy brick offices – all this had been taken by the newcomer.

“We are being watched,” remarked Isabelle Rose, tipping a finger at the window.

Charlotte swept from the mirror and peered out at the new hoarding that had gone up overnight. It showed a green-eyed blonde, brazenly inviting in her black filigree brassière. Look into my eyes, the advertisement said, and beneath was the word Triumph in red letters.

“You’ve surely got better things to do than look at that!” she murmured.

“Mr Guest told me that King Philip IV of Spain could only digest human milk towards the end of his life. Can you imagine that, having a huge wet nurse at the dinner table?”

Charlotte, startled, could not imagine it and blushed. Why was everything so disconcerting these days? She moved away, cutting her eyes at Isabelle Rose. The young woman noted it and nodded:

“You look just like Julia.”

Like Julia? Charlotte darkened and glanced at her reflection as she pushed through the door and swayed into the next room where Mr Guest was waiting for her. He was drumming his fingers on a long polished table, a habit that left pock marks on the surface of the wood.

“Waistcoats,” he remarked, as Charlotte appeared and descended on to a chair with a puff. “That’s what I wanted to see you about, Miss Wyecliffe, waistcoats.”

Charlotte looked at him with grey, uncomprehending eyes.

“I’ve just got too many of them, you see, so I’ve decided to have a sort out. There are waistcoats that just need a stitch or a button sewn on, but others are beyond repair and these you can pack up and take to the charity shop in Earlham Street.”

“You want me to do this?”
“You and Isabelle Rose can help, of course, and the other…”
“Miss Strickland, Julia.”
“Excellent! The three of you.”

Somewhere a siren sounded and Mr Guest left his place at the table and went to look out of the window. He stood absorbed by the scene below.

“Every hour you hear them, every hour.”

Mr Guest had busy, swivelling eyes that took everything in with a single searchlight sweep. No surprise, then, that those eyes had keenly alighted on Isabelle Rose.

“Is she a model, or something?” he had inquired when she first arrived, and soon after it was Isabelle Rose who was asked to bring his afternoon tea and biscuits, not Charlotte or Julia, as it had been. To be sure, they both noticed how much longer it took for Isabelle Rose to leave his room than it had either of them.

“He has a liking for chorus girls,” Julia had hissed through pursed lips.

“She must have tea with him,” Charlotte adjoined. Julia’s lips curled and her expression was so loaded that Charlotte knew where both their thoughts were headed. She had been surprised, all the same, how much Mr Guest’s interest in Isabelle Rose had provoked a swell of darkness in each of them. This excrescence had outgrown them, existing unacknowledged in the office, underlying every remark, making the air vibrate with malice. As for Isabelle Rose, she remained infuriatingly separate, fulfilling her job description with barely disguised indifference.

“She belongs in a poem or a painting. She’s not real.”
“She’s real,” Julia retorted. “I’ve seen it all before: Isabelle Rose looks after Isabelle Rose.”
Pop.
“Is there anything else you need to know, Miss Wyecliffe?”

Mr Guest had left the window and both hands were drumming on the table as he leaned towards Charlotte, gimlet-eyed.

“Yes, I just wondered…” she trailed off. I wonder, Mr Guest, why there is nakedness on the walls, in the square, while we are bagged up in our cotton skirts and crinolines, swathed and suffocated by our cloth.

“Then I’ll send Nobby down with them right away.”
“Right you are, Mr Guest.”

Charlotte forced a smile and retreated. “So, today is to be a different day from yesterday and tomorrow. Today is waistcoat day.”

The office, five metres in length and narrow, could barely accommodate the three work desks and small side table with tea-making facilities. Now, it was filling up with cardboard boxes as Nobby, a stumpy muscular cockney with a cigarette glued to the corner of his bottom lip, brought them in and ranged them along one side of the room.

“We’re going to be walled up like those women in the past when they went mad,” said Isabelle Rose, almost gaily.

“Now we can see with our own eyes what he spends his money on while our wages are kept low, year on year,” put in Julia, as the cardboard box wall grew higher. She regarded the number of waistcoats as an unpardonable excess for, as Charlotte had already noticed, Julia had only one walking dress, which she wore daily, a dull black cotton draped over the steel hoops of her crinoline cage.

“It’s madness,” she tutted. “Madness.”
“We’d better make a start then,” said Charlotte, opening a box and pulling out a waistcoat the colour of antique china with embroidered flowers on the front. “There’s so many to get through.”

The three women sat at their desks and applied the needle; Julia attacked with short, cross stitches, Isabelle Rose rethreaded hers several times over and fiddled with her hair.

It was uncomfortably hot in the room; the window had stuck and the heating, controlled by a central thermostat, could not be switched off.

The needle between Charlotte’s fingers began to slip and her attention wandered to the pattern of chrysanthemums in crimson and rainbow-hued birds on the silk panels. The birds faced each other with the bursts of flowers in between. “They have everything they need.” She caught a male scent and put the waistcoat to one side. Her skin prickled and the belt of her crinoline dug into her. She felt a trickle down the inside of her leg.

“I’ve a blister,” interrupted Isabelle Rose, scrutinising the bubble that had formed on her forefinger.
“Already?” asked Julia, not looking up.
“Why don’t you stop and make us tea? We know how good you are at tea-making,” Charlotte said quietly.

The young woman’s face shadowed and cleared in an instant, and she sashayed to the kettle, Julia and Charlotte watching beneath beetled brows. “Have you a gentleman friend tucked away somewhere, Isabelle Rose?”

Charlotte tried to imagine it, the secret lives of others.

“One sugar daddy is surely enough, if you can call that creature a man at all,” added Julia.
“What I have is surely no concern of yours.”
The kettle rumbled to the boil.
“How can you drink tea in this heat?” she asked, setting the cups down carelessly between the two women.
“I’ve heard we will have an Indian summer this year, that will be something to look forward to,” observed Charlotte.

Isabelle Rose pressed her nose against the glass.

“It’s still raining; no sign of sun at all.”

Charlotte could hear the splash of cars outside and a siren scream. Inside, her bodice stuck to her and her face had grown buttery, the needle gleamed as she pushed and pulled at her thread.

She realised at that moment that she had a wild hunger, an impossible need that could not be kept in. She realised that it would always be with her, that each time she tugged it back, it would re-emerge somewhere else – an endless, unbreakable thread running through her life. She thought about the limbless pregnant woman on the plinth in Trafalgar Square, and of the mother she had seen with a pushchair, the baby screened from the rain by a transparent plastic hood. She hiccupped and regretted her impending barrenness. She could feel all the possibilities of life leaking away, and with them the possibilities of any other life. When she considered the future at all, she saw more of the same; worse, she saw herself turning into another Julia.

“Charlotte, is there a war going on?”
“I don’t know. Is there?”
“I can see people marching, protesting down there.”

Far away, the chanting rose above the drone of traffic.

“Could you pull the blind down, Isabelle Rose, the sun is getting in my eyes,” asked Julia.
“It’s raining!”
“There is light and it’s dazzling me.”

Isabelle Rose reluctantly pulled the blind down and the room deepened into sombre space-age eeriness.

“Mr Guest will be wanting his tea soon, I expect,” said Charlotte, glancing up at the clock.
“He rings when he wants it,” said Isabelle Rose, who was still catching stray curls that had fought free of her chignon. “Guess what, I’ve heard Betty in accounts is retiring.”

Julia, who had developed a stoop with age and whose arms were fixed in permanent right angles to her body, bent over her sewing and refused to respond. Isabelle Rose continued:

“When do you think you’ll retire, Julia?”
“When I turn sixty.”

Charlotte could not imagine the office without Julia – she had always been there – she couldn’t ever recall seeing Julia outside in Bedford Street, she was always in the room, on that seat, impossible that anyone else should sit on Julia’s chair.

“Will you stay in London, do you think?”
“I will go to the country when the time comes.”
“You have a home in the country?”
“My sister lives in the country and I will stay with her. But I have no intention of retiring and I will be here for a good few years yet.”

“I don’t believe you’ll ever actually leave, Julia, you’ll be pining for the office the moment you step out of the door,” laughed Isabelle Rose, who was arching back in her chair and had given up all pretence of sewing.

“We’re all stuck here,” sighed Charlotte, and drank from her teacup for comfort.
“I can assure you, when I turn sixty I will leave. Nothing will hold me back.”
“But Julia…” puzzled Charlotte.

Suddenly, a bell tinkled and the three women fell silent. Isabelle Rose stretched again and yawned like a kitten, then got up, emptied the contents of the teapot into a pot plant and prepared a tray with two cups, a sugar bowl and milk jug. When the tea was made, she launched herself through the door.

“See you later,” she smiled archly.
“Could you tell your sugar daddy that we are quite behind and need you back here at his earliest convenience,” asked Julia, contemptuously.
“He is not my sugar daddy!” Eyes ablaze.
“Whatever he is…”
“It’s true, Isabelle Rose, you can clearly see we need your help here…”

The door closed without reply.

The sun had almost set by the time the final hour of the day arrived. Livid red buses, self-contained bubbles of people, were barrelling along the Strand, oblongs of light spilled from the windows and from the shop fronts into black puddles on the tarmac roads. In the sky, streaks of crimson were being pushed down by the encroaching night. In the room, there were now two walls of cardboard boxes, heaps of folded waistcoats on the desks, over which Julia presided in the shadows like a seller in a Souk. She jerked her head at Charlotte.

“I’m going to check up on her. She’s been gone hours.”

Charlotte put down her work, a satin striped waistcoat. She felt she had been neatly sewing a button on to the bars of a cage. She waited, imagining Julia’s dark crooked shape lurching into Mr Guest’s room confronting the delectable whiteness of Isabelle Rose.

One hour left before home time. How could she kill this time? Spend it wantonly, wastefully, as she had her youth, her life, in this building where nothing happened?

Charlotte got up and went to the empty chair by the window, pulled up the blind and looked out. In the twilight, the vampire woman on the hoarding opposite threatened in her black brassiere. Triumph? Of what? Of youth and beauty over age and experience? All her memories were bricked up in this building. Sometimes, she felt dozy at this hour. One day, she thought she’d fall asleep there and never wake up. Languishing, she could hear footsteps and the rustle of a long satiny skirt, then scuffling, panting, a sob. Was the skirt sobbing, while the brassiere outside confirmed itself? A storm erupted in Charlotte’s head. What was happening outside the door? What was happening outside everywhere? She didn’t know. She didn’t understand. Everything kept changing; everything was fluxating. Her anxiety mounted – the world had split into a thousand fragments, and she stood in it, like a tiny figure in a snowstorm dome, the world falling about her, in splinters, and she didn’t understand any of it. All was alien: each splinter was alien to the other: inside, each floor alien to the one below, and then what was going on out there, well, she couldn’t tell. Where did she belong? She didn’t fit. Not into any of it.

The skirts came through the door like an explosion: first Julia, her eyes rolling, then Isabelle Rose, a small resolved, dissolving ghost.

“I said, Mr Guest, I said, enough is enough, she has been gone too long, she has left the room when there is work to be done, we are overrun, burdened by your waistcoats. She came out, meek as a lamb. She is back with us. Thought you were better, didn’t you? But let me tell you, you’re not, you’re part of the furniture.”

“I will never be part of the furniture!” scorned Isabelle Rose.
“Sit down, Isabelle Rose,” said Charlotte.
“I will get some water,” the young woman replied and backed out of the room, quietly shutting the door.
“The nerve!” croaked Julia. “I will be after her again if she’s not here in five minutes.”

The two women waited but the door did not open again. The air darkened and deepened, darkness was breaking through the window, into the room. Charlotte looked across and saw inside, outside, simultaneously.

Julia’s sharp face, outlined against the sinking day, was fixed in a frozen scream. Crouching on the window ledge was Isabelle Rose; shelless, in her stays and draws with chignon undone, like a featherless bird about to take off.

“Where is your crinoline, where is it?” screeched Julia, a gargoyle come to life. But Isabelle Rose was one of the pale damp people who belonged out there.

Charlotte sprang up, flinging her needle and waistcoat away, she waded through the cloth of her skirt and the boxes and attempted to wrench open the sash. Julia moved to the hand bell and rang out for Nobby. No reply. Charlotte rapped on the glass, thinking what a meagre divide, what a firm but paltry sum of elements kept one from the other.

“Isabelle Rose!” she cried. “We didn’t mean what we said, it’s too late for us, but…”

Shut eye. The young woman leapt from the ledge and out of life. She did it without a sound, Julia squawked for her and fell motionless.

Charlotte forced her way down the narrow stairs, out through the peeling door and into the street.

Grief, bundled up inside so long, unravelled; a wail streamed out of her, low and feral, it travelled down towards the Strand. Her skirts billowed as she knelt and took the white alabaster hand, feeling, with a start, the blister on the dead finger. As if through fog, she glimpsed flashes of coats, bags and legs marching past. Looking up, she saw the mean brassiere looming triumphant, the final view that Isabelle Rose was ever to see.

Deborah Nash is a journalist, writer and performer. She has written for The Wire, The Art Newspaper, The Oldie, The Independent and The Artists and Illustrators’ magazine, and published several children’s books.Similar Posts:

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