Zenobia; or, the Fall of Palmyra by William Ware (mind reading books .TXT) 📕

through a heavy white door, heading for one of the sitting areas. These were really just two faded brown armchairs and a table with an ashtray, next to a big machine that if you put in 10p would violently spit a plastic cup into a recessed tray. Often the cup then fell over, and the machine would dispense hot coffee directly into the tray. I got 10p once from my aunt so I could try it. I made sure to hold the cup in place even though it burned my fingers a bit. The coffee was the same colour as the armchairs, and tasted like the cup. The sad women came to these chairs to smoke, which smelled good with the coffee.

I had only just started following this pink lady when she broke the rules. She spoke to me. Her voice was clear and startling in the white space, like the sheer pink of her soft cardigan. Everything about her was sad and she smelled expensive. She wanted to know why I was there, and my name and how old I was. She pulled out a cigarette and lit it between bright pink lips, waiting for answers.

I told her I was seven and a half (I was probably five). I said my mother was upstairs, and I was just waiting for her. She nodded, calmly accepting these statements.

“I’m waiting for someone, too,” she said. “I don’t think she’s ready to see me yet. What’s your name?”

She’d noticed the evasion. I don’t like telling people my name. It takes too long to say “Victoria” and it gets awkward in my mouth. I have to perform the whole thing. It might as well be an entire Shakespeare play. I could use shorter versions of the name, I know, but they wouldn’t be me. I like my name, I just don’t like saying it to other people.

“Someone,” I said. The pink lady and I stared at each other for a second, then we both laughed at once.

—

Sometimes the sad women were going into the toilets to redo their mascara. This was a mesmerizing procedure. My aunt, too, always wore mascara. One of my earliest memories is sitting on the loo in our cramped bathroom, watching her flick at her lashes with the little black wand. Up up up. Only up, never down. The tip of her thin nose almost touching the mirror. She was very short-sighted, but had to do her eye makeup without the aid of her glasses. I asked her why she was doing it, and she told me not to worry about it because I was young and beautiful.

“Only old hags like me need to wear makeup,” she giggled. She must have been about forty.

I’m thirty-nine now, and I wear a lot of makeup. I still couldn’t tell you exactly what the point of it is, but I put all this stuff on my face in the morning, before I ride the bus to campus. It takes me about an hour to get it all on there. Why do I give up this extra hour of sleep? Couldn’t I lecture a hundred undergraduates with a bare face? Couldn’t I go to a meeting at the Dean’s Office and have everyone look at my bare eyelashes? My eyelashes aren’t so bad. My face is prone to cystic acne—I have big red bubbles on both sides of my chin, but I don’t hate them. These jewelled cherries can be beautiful when I look at them the right way. I paint over them for the people who cannot. Private and secret are different things, I suppose, and my real face is private. I learned as a child to wear my hair pinned down across my forehead. Other kids teased me for being a “slaphead,” and my aunt once told me nobody thought girls were pretty if they had big heads.

—

I was always afraid of loud sounds, and of angry people. And of the night. This is all quite normal. You know who else was afraid of the night? Zeus, that’s who. It says so in the Iliad. Mrs. Schmidt, my classics mistress, would later teach me all about this.

“And Zeus,” she would add with a wink at any available opportunity, “was a very naughty boy.” Indeed he was. The original and biggest Big Man.

There was something else I was afraid of, though. Something I couldn’t put a name to so easily. Something around my aunt and uncle’s house. I knew it as a moving shadow, permanently in the corner of my mind. Something that would chase me, send me running desperately into the bathroom, into the bright light, to lock the door and read a book until it had gone away. Sometimes it waited, biding its time inside cupboards or under beds. But usually it was right behind me, just over my shoulder. If it came too close I could feel it, flakes of ice on my skin. It was always with me on the staircase.

The staircase was the main point of the house, the heart of its Victorian ambitions, for all its dark-carved banisters were dusty now, battered with the laying on of too many hands, and appearing to have at one time endured the attentions of a toothy puppy. I was never allowed a pet, and my aunt would point to the banisters as proof that animals ruin your house. She didn’t say it, but I figured out that she had never intended to have any children in her house either. She taught me tidy habits and good housekeeping. In the evenings, she would shuffle me cheerily along the worn runner carpet “up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire,” as if it were some trivial thing, but its height was unfathomably immense to my fledgling senses, amplified by a skylight of telescopic proportions. Swirls of old floral wallpaper trailed and tangled down the walls, green beanstalks fading into pale blue, each peeling join a frayed vertical plumb line from one