Lucille McCabe, my assignment for the evening, lived in the Spanish quarter of the city, and to avoid any catcalls — those of us doing our patriotic duty were figures of fun, not envy — I had dressed in my Castilian Waiter costume. The apartment was in a nondescript building kept on its feet by an armature of crumbling fire escapes. An elevator surely booked into a museum of industrial archaeology carried me grudgingly to the seventh floor. The bell hung by a single exposed wire, and I had to tap several times on the door. The silence made me hope that Miss McCabe, a lecturer in English literature, had been called away for the evening.
But the door opened with a jerk, revealing a small, white-faced young woman with spiky black hair, dressed in a polka-dot leotard like a punk circus clown.
‘Miss McCabe…?’ I began. ‘Are you—’
‘Ready to order?’ She gazed with mock wide eyes at my waiter’s costume. ‘Yes, I’ll have a paella with a side dish of gambas. And don’t forget the Tabasco.’
‘Tabasco? Look, I’m David Bradley, your partner for—’
‘Relax, Mr Bradley.’ She closed the door and snatched the keys from the lock, which she jingled in my face. ‘It was a joke. Remember those?’
‘Only just.’ Clearly I was in the presence of a maverick, one of those wayward young women who affected an antic air as a way of rising above the occasion. ‘Well, it’s wonderful to see you, Lucille. I’ve always wanted to know about English literature.’
‘Forget it. How long have you been doing this? You don’t look totally numbed.’ She stood with her back to me by the crowded bookshelf, fingers drumming along the titles as if hunting for some manual that would provide a solution to the problem posed by my arrival. For all the bravado, her shoulders were shaking. ‘Is this where I fix you a drink? I can’t remember that awful script.’
‘Skip the drink. We can get straight on with it if you’re in a hurry.’
‘I’m not in a hurry at all.’ She walked stiffly into the bedroom and sat like a moody teenager on the unmade divan. Nothing in my counselling sessions, the long hours watching porno videos in the church hall, had prepared me for all this — the non-regulation costume, the tousled sheets, the absence of flattering chitchat. Was she a new kind of undercover inspector, an agent provocateur targeted at those potential subversives like myself? Already I saw my work norm increased to seven evenings a week. Beyond that lay the fearsome threat of a testicular booster…
Then I noticed her torn assignment card on the carpet at her feet. No inspector, however devious, would ever maltreat an assignment card.
Wondering how to console her, I stepped forward. But as I crossed the threshold a small, strong hand shot up.
‘Stay there!’ She gazed at me with the desperate look of a child about to be assaulted, and I realised that for all her fierceness she was a novice recruit, probably on her first assignment. The spiked tips of her hair were trembling like the eye feathers of a trapped peafowl.
‘All right, you can come in. Do you want something to eat? I can guarantee the best scrambled egg in town, my hands are shaking so much. How do you put up with all this?’
‘I don’t think about it any more.’
‘I don’t think about anything else. Look, Mr Bradley — David, or whatever you’re called — I can’t go through with this. I don’t want to fight with you…’
‘Don’t worry.’ I raised my hands, already thinking about the now free evening. ‘I’m on my way. The rules forbid all use of force, no fumbling hands or wrestling.’
‘How sensible. And how different from my grandmother’s day.’ She smiled bleakly, as if visualising the courtship that had led to the conception of her own mother. With a nervous shrug, she followed me to the door. ‘Tell me, what happens next? I know you have to report me.’
‘Well… there’s nothing too serious.’ I hesitated to describe the long counselling sessions that lay ahead, the weeks of being harangued by relays of nuns brandishing their videos. After all the talk there was chemotherapy, when she would be so sedated that nothing mattered, and she would close her eyes and think of her patriotic duty and the next generation, the playgrounds full of laughing tots, one of them her own… ‘I shouldn’t worry. They’re very civilised. At least you’ll get a better apartment.’
‘Oh, thanks. Once, you must have been rather sweet. But they get you in the end..
I took the latchkey from her hand, wondering how to reassure her. The dye had run down her powdered forehead, a battle line redrawn across her brain. She stood with her back against the bookshelves, a woad-streaked Boadicea facing the Roman legions. Despite her distress, I had the curious sense that she was as concerned for me as for herself and even now was trying to work out some strategy that would save us both.
‘No…’ I closed the door and locked it again. ‘They won’t get you. Not necessarily..
