Oligarchy Page 2

  She hates the pact they made, that they would only communicate by letter from now on, because why? Because people might read the emails? Because the servers might go down? Because anything might collapse at any time: the electricity companies owned by the oligarchs, or capitalism. Capitalism might be the next thing to go. But the postal service? Natasha hates Nico’s faith in the postal service.

  She hates his belief in aliens.

  His cold face.

  His bitten fingernails.

  His small hands.

  *

  Another trip to the Porter’s Cabin. A parcel from Tash’s father. At last. She hasn’t heard from him in weeks, not since the visit when it was decided about the English school. It’s a pair of boots in a wrapped box. No one in the school is allowed to order anything online: all parcels must be sent from home. But you can’t buy these boots online anyway: they have long since sold out and there is a lengthy waiting list. They are from the Balenciaga shop in Moscow, where someone knows someone who … In Moscow, ‘knowing’ sometimes involves guns and threats but not in Natasha’s world. Not yet. Not that she knows of. But anyway, why has he bought them in pink when she specifically asked for them in white? She sighs and asks who wants them, these useless millennial-pink sock boots in a size 39.

  She thinks her father would like this: she’s sure of it, in fact.

  Danielle’s eyes are wide. The boots cost a thousand pounds.

  Natasha gives them to Tiffanie, and at six o’clock she emails her father for the right colour. She complains to him about the email system here. About the food. It’s all so fattening, she says. So English. But she will probably get into an English university; that’s the main thing. And she’ll try out for the sports teams but she won’t develop too much muscle.

  The next day a padded envelope arrives. The porter raises his eyebrows. So much post for the sexy Russian girl. Inside the envelope is a book of Chekhov’s short stories in the original Russian, and hidden in a hole cut out of the story ‘Peasants’ is a thin, shiny, silver 5G-ready iPhone which connects to a secret network and allows its owner fast unlimited internet access for free, wherever they are in the world. It has an Apple Music account activated, which is useful, and an app called DarkWeb, which is frightening. The phone has been set up so its owner can look at literally anything: beheadings, anal penetration, how to make bombs. Not that Natasha would want to look at those things, of course. She really only wants to look at girls who are about the same shape and size as her wearing clothes she hasn’t thought of wearing. And boys with longish dark hair and freckles. And fierce-looking ponies.

  Sellotaped to the back of the phone is a black Amex card in her name, and a note in Russian, in handwriting she doesn’t recognise, saying, ‘Buy anything you need with this. You may not hear from your father for a couple of weeks, but don’t worry.’ The card is more solid than other credit cards: harder and more lustrous.

  Natasha hides the phone and the black Amex in the secret compartment in the lid of her trunk that her father showed her before she came. ‘If you have to hide something really dangerous,’ he once told her, ‘put it in someone else’s things. Some secret place they don’t even know they have. And then say it’s theirs.’ She has thought about that a lot. When he first said it to her she didn’t know what he meant, but she does now. It’s a bit like Tiffanie always hiding cigarettes in Donya’s wardrobe.

  That night Lissa goes looking for porn again through the school’s WiFi. Today, she manages to force through the parental controls some Victorian charcoal illustrations of a fat man in a top hat waving his massive dick at a frightened servant, and a woodcut of a Japanese man penetrating a peasant who has her legs tied to a broom handle. His penis is enormous.

  ‘Is that what they really look like?’ asks Danielle.

  ‘Haven’t you ever seen one?’ says Lissa.

  ‘Have you?’ says Danielle.

  ‘Of course,’ says Lissa. ‘Hasn’t everybody?’

  No one actually has, except Tash. And even then, she didn’t really see it.

  After lights-out everyone has something glowing under their sheets. They write to parents, siblings, attractive cousins; they listen to podcasts to help them sleep. They listen to music they have downloaded earlier. Then there are the secret things. And the things that are too banal to be made public. Tiffanie listens to French pop music and plans her modelling career, and then her wedding, and then her funeral, which will have a botanical theme.

  Bianca has downloaded Fanny Hill for free and has found details in it far more troubling and thrilling than anyone could discover with a search engine. But she does not tell anyone about it, because she does not really tell anyone about anything. She doesn’t tell anyone about the sadness and the failure and the light inside her that is a bright white colour but is never bright or white enough. She doesn’t tell them that she wants a black diamond like Princess Augusta’s that will take the light away, and purify it, and make it better.

  *

  It is Exeat, which is Latin for getting the fuck out of here, and means a weekend at home. Some of the girls can’t go home, because home is too far, and so they stay. Tash gets a day out in London with a glamorous aunt she’s never met. The aunt, Sonja, is in cyber-security, or something like that. She has her own company. It turns out that she is the one who sent the iPhone. She is Natasha’s father’s sister.

  ‘Well,’ says Aunt Sonja, kissing Tash on both cheeks, when she meets her at Kings Cross. ‘You look adorable. So fresh and young. Like a flower. I’ve been absolutely dying to meet you. Why did your mother hide you away for all these years, huh?’

  Aunt Sonja has a car with a driver parked outside the German Gymnasium. They are driven to a Chinese restaurant down a back street behind Tottenham Court Road that smells of incense and is full of millionaires in white jumpsuits drinking jasmine tea and eating lotus-bulb salads.

  Natasha feels empty and vaguely rotten inside. To her it is older people who look best. They have wisdom, experience. They have had proper sex. They know how to use make-up. They can go out in the day and buy useful things. They do not have to go to school, and no one tells them what to do. They can flaunt their power. Get fat. Spend whole days alone and naked. They can buy horses and diamonds without having to ask anyone’s permission. They can get piercings and dye their hair. They can talk to people without blushing, without the words cracking halfway through. They know who their parents are at all times. Even wrinkles are attractive to Tash because they talk of real life and age and knowledge. All she wants – what she yearns and yearns for – is knowledge. She doesn’t know anything. Well, nothing useful. She particularly does not know how to talk to this woman, with her blow dry and smooth forehead and perfect pink nails.

  Aunt Sonja looks more like a young person than old people usually do, and this means that she spends thousands of pounds, Euros and roubles each month on every tiny part of her. But nevertheless something about her still looks wise. Is it in her eyes? Is that how you tell someone has knowledge and experience?

  ‘I don’t know how to talk to young people,’ says Aunt Sonja. ‘It’s been so long. I don’t even talk to clients’ children now, although I used to enjoy scaring them.’ She winks, and Tash notices that she has somehow managed to put mascara on in such a way that each long, black silken lash is separate. When Tash puts on mascara it just clumps into a massive dead squashed spider.

  Tash tries to smile encouragingly; she raises her shoulders and it comes out as a shrug. Aunt Sonja has been speaking Russian but now switches to English.

  ‘You are not on social media?’

  ‘No,’ says Tash. ‘I mean, only to follow people, not to post. At school we’re not really allowed. At home I …’ She shrugs again. How to explain home to this person?

  ‘Good.’ Aunt Sonja switches back to Russian. ‘In my job I come across – used to come across, because now I do more blockchain work – billionaires’ children who had no clue. They’d put up pictures of
the family castle on Instagram. The helicopter they were flown there in. Names of pets. Pictures of the interior of their bedrooms. The names of their gyms. Their personal trainers. They may as well have sent out invitations to be kidnapped.’

  Natasha shudders. But she’s in the UK now. No one kidnaps anyone here. That’s what her father told her mother. He is almighty, and it is OK. Also, Tash is here because he is super-cautious, not because he’s in any sort of danger. And she has been invisible all her life so why not just stay invisible now? And prepare for the future: university at Oxford or Cambridge, followed by—

  ‘Can I curse in front of you or are you too young?’ says Aunt Sonja in English.

  ‘We swear at school,’ says Tash in Russian. Then in English: ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘Fuck and cunt, or just fuck? I need to know where the boundaries are.’

  ‘Whatever you like.’ Tash blushes like a pathetic child. She wants her aunt to say cunt; then again, she doesn’t. Or fuck. At least she’s not saying them in Russian, which would be awful. Something about swear-words in other languages is amusing and comfortable. Tiffanie says putain all the time, which is French for ‘prostitute’ and is apparently one of their worst swear-words. Putain, merde, she says, every time she drops something in the dorm. Putain mer-DE, she says, emphasising the last syllable of the word so it sounds like murder. All the other girls say it now too, whenever they want to swear.

  Aunt Sonja looks at one of her pink nails as if seeing it for the first time. ‘What do you talk about with your friends? Boys, I suppose. Diets. Shoes. Ha!’ She laughs. ‘Just like we did.’

  But surely it’s not like it was? Despite her talk of social media, Aunt Sonja has that quaint air of someone who grew up before memes and YouTube families. How can Tash explain that in conversations nowadays boys have been reduced to their body parts, or really just one body part, and that her friends’ diets are so secret and weird that you could never, ever discuss them with an adult? Why is that? Because they are ridiculous. Because their diets, and everything they think, and everything they do, is ridiculous when compared to real life.

  For Tash, real life is somewhere between a known unknown and an unknown unknown. Categories which are themselves unknown unknowns. Well, sort of. Her father said something like that once, didn’t he? The first meeting or the second one. Last year.

  ‘Do you look at porn on the internet?’ asks Aunt Sonja.

  She blushes. ‘No. We try. But no.’

  ‘It’s corrupting. Don’t. Use your iPhone to shop for clothes and cheat in exams.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Have you had a lesbian experience?’

  More blushing. ‘No.’

  ‘Do it. It’s underrated. But not with someone from school you have to see every day. I’ll call someone. Someone discreet.’

  ‘Nono. You really don’t have to. Please. I’m—’

  ‘Look at your beautiful skin … I didn’t appreciate my skin when I was your age.’

  A pause to finish digesting the lesbian comment. For it to be processed and removed.

  ‘Your skin is nice too.’ It is. It glows in a way that is unnatural but all the more beautiful for that.

  ‘But yours. Fuck. It’s the skin of a baby.’

  But everyone has it, this skin that says I’m young and I know nothing. Literally everyone she knows apart from Lissa has the same skin – even Lissa’s would be OK if she used the right toner – and so to compete she needs something else. Why do adults not understand that? And it’s not boots from Balenciaga, either. It’s nothing you are born with; nothing you can buy. You have to go into the woods and fight monsters for what she needs, but no one will let her, and she doesn’t even know where the woods are, if they are even in this country, and these new monsters might actually be real and—

  ‘I want to give you some advice,’ Aunt Sonja says. ‘Ask me anything you like.’

  How do you …? Tash shrugs yet again. How do you be interesting without having to be a lesbian? How do you style your hair? What are you supposed to think about at night? Why did my father ignore me for the first thirteen years of my life? But the words don’t come.

  ‘All right, then. I’ll tell you what I wish someone had told me when I was your age. Do everything you can to keep your beauty. Exams are not important. If you’re clever it’ll show anyway. I wish I’d done less studying and simply learned more about people – this is a skill you need in the real world, trust me. Take off your make-up every night. Moisturise. Exercise. Never let your skin see the sun. You can take vitamin D intravenously instead; I’ll give you the number of the clinic I use in London. People think it’s vanity to worry about beauty when you are beautiful naturally and you don’t have to. But I guarantee you that when you are my age you would rather spend the day in an art gallery, or recline in a garden eating persimmons in the dusk, or lie around reading stories set in the tropics in a silk dressing gown without having to spend all your free time in fasting clinics like your father’s ex-wife does. And your mother? I assume she still does that too? I haven’t seen her for so many years. Anyway, if you put the weight on once you will never, ever take it off. Well, you can do it temporarily, but once it has been there it will always long to return, like a missing lover, like a weed, like a boy gone to the army. So you have to avoid it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Don’t eat before lunchtime. Ever. Well, only fruit. Not bananas or dates. Never drink alcohol – it’s empty calories. If you need to relax, try chamomile, meditation or Valium. If you really want to try drugs don’t buy them from some tragic dealer in a nightclub – call me and I’ll find you something safe and untraceable. The rest is common sense. Don’t have too many calories but don’t have so few that your body decides to hoard all its fat. Have two meals a day. No sweets. Brown things, but not chocolate. That’s it. Save your brain for important matters.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And always carry this in your handbag.’ Aunt Sonja gives her a small red can. It says Deep Heat on it. ‘If anyone ever tries to attack you, spray this in his face.’

  ‘Deep Heat?’ she says, reading the label. It’s in English.

  ‘It’s stronger than normal Deep Heat,’ says Aunt Sonja. ‘It’s Russian. Be careful with it. Spray him first to stun him, then call me and I’ll have him killed.’

  ‘OK.’

  Aunt Sonja smiles. ‘You think I’m serious?’

  ‘I don’t honestly know.’

  ‘Well, hopefully you won’t have to find out.’ Aunt Sonja sips her jasmine tea. ‘And how is your mother?’

  *

  Somebody in a long-ago government decided that girls should read classic feminist literature and so they are studying Angela Carter and the school can’t do anything about it because it’s the law. The English teacher is called Mrs St John, which is pronounced Sin-Jin. She is extremely old and has a pink rinse and sometimes falls asleep in class, clutching at the pearls around her neck as she dreams, no doubt, of kidnap and servitude. She smells of rabbit fur and gin. One story has the word cunt in it. Another has cunnilingus performed by an animal. In fact, the licking of animals features in several of the stories. Girls have their skin licked off, or have their hands licked while they are resting in their laps – their laps, which means …

  ‘Do any of you girls know where the word cunnilingus comes from?’ asks Sin-Jin.

  Nothing moves in the room except for fifteen pairs of beautiful eyes that look down, or from side to side, or simply widen. Is a teacher really talking to them about this? Now?

  The girls are doing Bianca’s diet this week. Everyone thought Bianca’s diet would be basically nothing, but in fact all they are eating is cake. Bianca is throwing hers up, of course, but she hasn’t mentioned this to the others. And in any case, dieting is all relative and one of the most effective ones (the Einstein Diet, haha) involves simply making the people around you much, much fatter. Bianca feels particularly real this week. She is luminous; whole; sparkle-filled
. It’s as if she can see things others can’t: the invisible connections that bind us to each other, to our decisions, thoughts, friendships, strategies. She’s a weightless comet blazing through the dark sky; a fictional character; a wisp; a dream. She persists now only on puffs of icing sugar: the stuff that gets inside your blood before you can do anything about it.

  She flies … And then falls. She flies … And then falls.

  Each time the fall is greater, and each time the flying is higher, and the sky gets darker and darker until it seems entirely black and endless and—

  ‘Well?’ says Sin-Jin.

  ‘Princess Augusta doesn’t like it when we talk about cunnilingus,’ says Lissa.

  ‘She thinks it’s vulgar,’ says Danielle.

  ‘Except when Sir Brent Spencer does it to her,’ says Rachel. ‘Or the sultan.’

  The other girls giggle. Someone makes a slurping sound. Tiffanie says something like le sexe oral in her growly voice. Sin-Jin is trying to ignore all this in that way adults sometimes do, but it just gets the girls going even more. Goading someone who is not reacting is often even more fun than goading one who does.

  ‘Sir Brent Spencer was secretly gay,’ says Bianca. ‘He also liked bestiality. He once sucked off a horse. That’s why Princess Augusta drowned herself. Because she liked it too. She loved sex after she was ravaged by the sultan who gave her the black diamond and—’

  ‘Right, that’s it.’ Sin-Jin has finally snapped. ‘Headmaster’s office. Now.’

  *

  It’s Monday, and Natasha’s turn to invent an eating plan for everyone to follow. It is the most elaborate so far. Even Bianca looks interested in it. Tash repeats the list of what they are not allowed to eat. Farmed fish. Any meat at all. Any dairy at all. Any grains at all. Soya products. Trans fats. Any fats at all. Tomatoes. Aubergines. Any nightshade fruit at all. It’s called the Aunt Sonja Diet, but also owes a lot to the hundreds of American diet books her mother has at home. There are no other books in the house, just those. On the Aunt Sonja Diet there is, of course, to be no eating before lunchtime, except fruit. No dates. No bananas. Everyone loves Bovril and it only has 21 calories a cup, so that is allowed even though Bianca says it will give them all mad cow disease. In the Year 11 common room there is a job lot of Bovril that has been there since approximately 1988 and seems still to be edible. Bianca says 1988 was the pinnacle of mad cow disease, but no one has died yet.