How Much is a Lot?

We’ve not included any fiction on The Mortar yet, but this week we’re changing that with two extraordinary stories from a pair of London-based literary journals. They’re both brilliantly strange, and today’s is a diabolical post-pandemic horror that comes from the latest issue of Somesuch Stories. I was on the train when I first read this story and I was so engrossed that I missed my stop – I hope you enjoy it just as much as I did.

Though an idealist, Louisa took a certain masochistic pleasure in betraying her beliefs. On careless nights, even four years deep into her veganism, she would find herself devouring a burger on the tube, before leaving its greasy remains to travel on into the night. So when she agreed to exchange a week of her life for seven thousand pounds, paid in daily cash instalments, and thus took on a job she considered morally bankrupt, she was not doing it for the money alone.

Besides, she was still in freefall. In freefall, you grasp the handhold available.

She flew in late December. Her plane was crowded with families returning from their holidays: children newly encumbered with the season's toy harvest and parents already missing the reliable slog of the working week.

Somehow, neither the man at passport control nor the women behind the “Information” desk spoke English. It was an airport! But when she asked instructions, they stared at her tight-lipped and impatient, pointing and gesturing as though she were a child. Louisa refused to believe these emphatic Europeans could not speak her language. They clearly understood her, otherwise what were they pointing and gesturing at? And yeah, she got it. The English abroad. Roving the street in packs, bellowing anthems, clogging up national treasures. How they never bothered to learn any language but their own, not even in countries they’d subjugated, plundered, and then abandoned to their fates. But who likes being tarred with the general brush?

Whether by design or happy accident, the dumbshow that had been staged for her worked; soon, wide automatic doors swiped open, and she found herself on the street beside a taxi rank. Drifts of snow fell from a sky the colour of dishwater. She’d been informed by the client – via the agency – that private car was the only way to the house from the airport. She did not intend to argue. Five cars from the front of the line, a head leaned out of a window and caught her eye.