13 | Mercedes
The reception room is filled with people. Tall people, tall like gods. And they’re having a party.
How did you get in here?
Mercedes rushes from god to god, tugging on sleeves, calling out. You can’t be in here. This is not your home. You need to leave. Leave! The owners will be back soon and they mustn’t find you here!
A crash of glass and a gale of laughter. Someone has overturned a table and the floor is thick with shards. The gods guffaw as her hands fly to the sides of her face. They are drinking Pepsi-Cola from champagne flutes as thin and as tall as they are themselves.
She overflows with panic. No! No! I’ve only just cleaned this! Don’t you see? Don’t you see? She’ll walk in and everything will end! If Tatiana sees this, all these breakages, my debt will grow again and I’ll never get away.
Mercedes starts to weep. Feels her shoulders shake, the tears pour down her face. She opens her mouth to howl, but no sound comes.
The gods ignore her.
Through her panic, a single thought: I must clean it up. If I can’t make them leave, I must clean it up.
They’re getting taller, and louder, and she can never make them leave, but, if she sweeps and sweeps, perhaps the glass will be gone before Tatiana comes.
She weaves her way between the legs. The store cupboard, behind the stairs. There are brooms and mops and portraits. If I can open the door, I can …
Her sister Donatella stands at the far end of the corridor. Thirty years gone. Soaking wet. Her hair clings to her blue face like seaweed. She holds her hands out. Help me, Mercedes. Help me.
Mercedes hears herself call out, and suddenly she knows that she is dreaming. You’re dead, my darling. You’re dead and I am lost.
Donatella raises a hand and points to the blank white wall behind her. I’m in here, Mercedes. Help me. I’m in here.
She jerks awake in her white single bed. Dawn light filters between the curtains. The sheets are soaking wet, as though she has been in the sea.
She puts her hands to her face and forces herself to breathe.
The helicopter blats in overhead just after lunch, and three minutes later the phone rings with the courtesy call from the heliport. Tatiana will be here in twenty minutes. Neighbours helping neighbours. Her employers would never think to call ahead. They assume, she sometimes thinks, that house staff are like robots. That they wait on charge until a motion sensor or a call bell trips them into action.
Mercedes’ uniform is black. A matronly black shirt dress, white piping at the edges and white cloth-covered buttons from collar to knee. Not a practical garment, for a physical job. It gapes when she has to stretch or bend, so she has to wear a black slip underneath that traps the heat. But the Meades like uniforms, and that is all that matters.
In the Hollywood mirror, bright LEDs encircling the frame to highlight every flaw, she checks herself over. Shadows beneath her eyes from her bad night, though Tatiana will never notice those. A couple of locks have strayed from the chignon she wears at work, though, and she will see that in an instant. She fishes in her pocket for her spare hairgrips and fixes the locks back in. Then she checks her face for smuts and her fingernails for grime, and strides out in her orthopaedic shoes to inspect the troops before the boss does.
Tatiana has lost weight. A perpetual struggle for the daughter of Matthew Meade. She went through her twenties and thirties on a diet of steamed fish, boiled eggs and amphetamines, but every year her will broke and her taste for Pop Tarts reasserted itself. Her poor starved body would put on eight kilos in a fortnight and she’d be off for a month in rehab. In a world where half the women look like tiny dolls made of pipe cleaners, being cursed with a builder’s frame that will never go below a size 40 must be torture.
Mercedes steps forward, and puts her best smile on. She’s belonged to the smiling classes all her life. Has often envied Felix for a job that lets him frown all he wants.
Gaunt, she thinks. She looks gaunt. She’s done it. She’s found someone to give her that gastric band.
‘Wow,’ she says, ‘you look fantastic!’
Tatiana is pleased. ‘Oh, you flatterer,’ she says. She smooths her satin pencil skirt over her thighs and turns back to the car. There’s nothing left of her buttocks. She’ll be having implants put in to make up for that.
The house staff are lined up in the shade of the porch. Smiling.
Mike, Tatiana’s personal bodyguard, gets out of the front passenger seat and glares up and down the empty road from behind his dark glasses as though he expects Al Qaeda to rise from the tarmac like wraiths. Self-important, Paulo says. But he’s employed as much to look as though he’s doing his job as he is to actually do it. Only A-listers want their bodyguards to look as if they’re not there.
Satisfied, he turns and looks at Paulo. Nods. Paulo nods back. The chauffeur starts to unload the boot. And as Tatiana’s Vuittons pile up, a thin little leg six feet long in its cheap platform shoe emerges from the darkness, attached to a thin little girl in a bustier top and a pair of denim hot pants.
The gardeners rush forward to collect the bags. Carrying bags is their main chance to spend time in the cool indoors. And sometimes, of course, there are tips. Unlikely today, though. These girls are virtually children, and children don’t generally do gratuities.
Another little girl steps from the limo, even thinner than the first: so blonde and pale that she could be albino. She looks about twelve, thinks Mercedes, and swiftly dismisses the thought.
Another girl, another halterneck: a tiny little thing from east Asia, all waist-length hair and amber eyes. And then the last one. Maybe seventeen. Golden-brown skin, a mop of dark brown corkscrew curls highlighted gold blonde, a fat little nose and full, shapely lips. An expression of innocence that must be worth a fortune.