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.

Everything had blown up just over a year earlier. Louisa had been nearing the end of her PhD program at the University of Liverpool. Her research concerned the historiography – not the history, she’d explained over and over – the historiography of highly contagious viral diseases. She had lost whole months reading up on the so-called Spanish Influenza of 1918 to 1920, a pandemic that had spread across China, America and Europe, claiming more lives along the way than all the grenades, rifles, bayonets and people-swallowing mud rivers of Ypres and The Somme. (The idea that the disease was of Spanish origin was both xenophobic and factually incorrect.) When she’d started out, it had been a niche topic. Then it had become suddenly and nauseatingly relevant.

That was not why everything fell apart for Louisa. For some time, she’d been blissfully engaged to a fellow researcher, a biochemist, until she surprised her fiancé in bed with his second cousin (a girl named Dora who collected tropical fish) midway through an act of love-making that was not just incestuous and a gross betrayal of trust, but at that moment, given the latest restrictions, actually illegal. Her first ludicrous response was to dial 999 and, before Cousin Dora could wrestle the phone from her hand, ask for the police. It was grotesque; the pair were sweaty and unclothed. Later, the biochemist apologised weakly. Louisa was overreacting. With learned reference to genetic diversity, random variation and cultural relativism, he explained that second cousins wasn’t really incest anyway.

That same day she slotted her ring through the grills of a public sewer, a rash act followed immediately by massive regret. It was an original art deco piece with trinity diamonds. The biochemist’s parents were wealthy. Louisa’s weren’t. Clutching the grills, she yelled obscenities.

Within a week, she’d abandoned her program of study and moved to London, where she rented a spare room in a decaying Georgian house and took on tutoring work while she figured out next steps. She was still figuring. There was an understanding among her friends that she had suffered an unprovoked emotional collapse. Some kind of chemical thing, they muttered knowingly. For a while she told both other people and herself that one day she’d return to her doctoral work. But once the restrictions were lifted and the horizons of life stretched towards their former distance, just the thought of academic solitude depressed her. Too much life already had passed in dusty alcoves.

Now she was in a city she had never wanted to visit to do a job that repulsed her. When she handed the driver a sheet with the address, he acknowledged the destination with a furrowed brow. Those furrows troubled her. Was it far? she asked. “Yes,” he said, “far.”

By the time they reached the village where the family lived, there was no one on the streets. The car pulled to a stop. Louisa paid the driver and alighted. Before winding up the window, he wished her luck, speaking with bemused admiration, as though he had brought her to the start of some perilous but ultimately silly quest.

There had been no preliminary Zoom to let everyone get to know each other. One of the stranger conditions of the job was that the client insisted on anonymity. Though odd, this wasn’t, for Louisa, a deal-breaker. The clients were probably minor celebs, nervous of stalkers and clingers on. And the idea of being welcomed into fame’s inner sanctum was the one thing (aside from the money) that actually appealed.

Having dragged her suitcase up to the front door, Louisa rang the bell and waited. Nothing. The porch light that had flickered into life as she approached died. A fog descended. Looking over her shoulder, she couldn’t see more than twenty feet behind. She rang again, waited another minute. Before she could ring a third time, she heard a patter of feet within. Then, as if a toe had been stubbed: “Fuck, shit, fuck.”

In the gap between the door and the frame, a man appeared. Mid-fifties, at a guess, and starting to let himself go. His fringe hung past his eyebrows. Yawning now and rubbing the back of his neck, he stared at Louisa, looking like he could have done with a good night’s sleep. In fact, were those silk pyjamas he had on under his robe, the pocket embroidered with a rearing horse? Still hopeful of a brush with fame, Louisa wondered if the man was familiar. He was, but only the way everyone is. A face totally unlike any other would horrify.

“You’re, erm –” he began at last. He seemed confused, caught off guard.

“Louisa,” she said brightly. “The tutor you hired?”

“I was going to say ‘early’. We were expecting you tomorrow.”

He hadn’t moved from the entrance and was still holding the door ajar.

“Sorry, but you definitely said today. I checked. Like, five times.”

Louisa knew she could sound cold and imperious. (Her ex-fiancé had said so.) Peppering her speech with the word “like” was designed to soften her first impression.

“My mix up, I’m sure,” the man said, though his tone of voice carried no apology. Mostly he sounded sleepy and irritated. “Even so, it’s not the best time. Do you think you could come back?”

Louisa looked around. The taxi had long since gone, the snow was coming down in sheets, and on the hour-long drive from the airport, she hadn’t passed a single hotel.

This lack of welcome only confirmed what she already knew: she should never have come. After all – did she believe in over-educated people giving an extra leg-up to the grossly advantaged children of the rich and powerful? She wasn’t a psychopath. Indeed, she believed herself distinctly opposed to this method of entrenching the status quo. She had read history. More than that, she had a personal history to contend with, having been raised as one of four by a single mother. Among the things she hated most: bourgeois entitlement, the class segregation perpetrated by England’s private schools and happy families. (The unexamined life, etc.) She wanted, like any conscience-bound person who escapes the fate of their peers thanks to hard work and the encouragement of some farsighted teachers, to give back, to use what gifts she had to bend the world, however fractionally, in the direction of justice. She did not want to massage the egos and life chances of posh little cunts.

In fact, she had been on the verge of packing in tutoring altogether, refiguring her life, when she got a call from the agency about a rather specialist job.

“Specialist how?” she had asked, confident she would turn down whatever role was proffered. This was a fortnight earlier.

“Well, it’s a residency position, one week abroad. The client is a little foggy on the details. And it’s rather a lot of money.”

At this point, Louisa was two months behind on her rent. Her housemates were patient and understanding but they were not saints, and their pockets had bottoms. Just that morning, her mother had texted to say that her boiler was kaput. Again.

“What are you calling a lot?” she said.

So she had confirmed her interest, setting in motion a chain of events that led her to this moment, when she was about to be turned out into harsh weather in a strange and forbidding country. Conversely, if she was now taken into this unknown house and murdered – a possibility that seemed low rather than non-existent – she could only blame herself. She was tempted to laugh. Instead, she sighed. At which, the man said, “Christ, all right, you’d better come in if you’re gonna make a song and dance. I suppose you should meet Alexandra anyway.”

“My student?” Louisa asked.

The man gave a big, stagey laugh. “Lexi? Try teaching her anything.”

As Louisa followed the man into the house, she understood why he’d been reluctant to admit her. The place was a tip. The landing stretched out towards an open-plan kitchen and diner, and every inch was littered with crap. Coming through the doorway, she’d almost lost her balance as her foot rolled over a cork. Now she felt like retching. The dank smell of stubbed cigarettes filled the air. Bent and twisted cans lay scattered, and at the foot of the stairs, a smashed wine bottle bled out onto the tiles.

Stepping carefully through the chaos, the man led her towards the study, where lessons would take place. “You can leave your shoes on, by the way.” Louisa hadn’t considered removing them.

The man introduced himself as Konrad. “With a K,” he clarified, as if he wanted her to write it down. He apologised for not being able to touch base before flying her out. If it were up to him, he said, they’d have had a phone call first. But Lexi was very particular. “She thinks the whole world is spying on her.”

“Is it?” Louisa asked. “What does she do anyway?”

Rather than answer, Konrad said he’d better let his wife control the flow of information. “She’ll make more sense when you meet her.”

The study was marginally better than everywhere else. In front of an empty stack of shelves lay a sad spill of books, their pages aggressively dog-eared, spines white and broken. There were wine glasses on all the surfaces (including the large wooden desk at which she was supposed to teach), some bearing red stains in the bowl, others half or two-thirds full. At least the floor was clear.

“I hope you don’t mind a little clutter,” Konrad said.

Seven thousand pounds, she kept telling herself. One thousand pounds for each day I’m here.

“Can I get you a tea or a coffee, by the way?” Konrad asked, and Louisa, casting an eye over her surroundings, declined. As get-rich-quick schemes went, hers was less harebrained than most. Still, there was a snag. The kid needed a seven or better in GCSE maths. Excluding the frantic study on the plane and in the two preceding days, it had been ten years since Louisa, then a GCSE student herself, had attempted an equation.

If her host had been the kindest man on earth, she’d have been on edge. As it was, she could hardly keep herself from shaking. Taking her fate in hand, she asked if Konrad wanted her to get started right away. She had materials in her suitcase. If they could just make a little space on the desk . . .

A nasty smile played with Konrad’s lips. “Bit difficult to teach an absent student.”

“You mean she isn’t here?” Louisa asked, hugely relieved.

“He. Willy’s gone skiing, I’m afraid. His godmother always takes him to les Alpes this time of year. He’s supposed to fly in late tonight. It’s why it really would have been much better if you’d arrived tomorrow.”

Louisa wasn’t sure if he’d pronounced the French correctly, but it annoyed the hell out of her that he couldn’t just say “the Alps”.

Konrad said that Willy was a bright boy. Good at sports and exceptionally creative. But they were worried about his maths – such a rules-based subject was stifling to a mind like his. Louisa had heard this before. All the little boys and girls who sucked at school were “wonderfully creative”. And it was always the subject’s fault that they weren’t doing better. English was too airy-fairy. History had too many dates.

“That’s where you come in,” Konrad said. “Professional maths whizz. Bring the boy up to speed.”

Unable to fake enthusiasm, Louisa nodded glumly.

Although she had allowed the misunderstanding with the agency to take hold, she had perpetrated no intentional misdirection. On the initial call, she’d been told the client wanted someone with PhD-level subject knowledge. This was ridiculous and unnecessary but not atypical of certain monied parents. And Louisa fit the bill, only her PhD was unfinished and in the wrong subject.

“You study pandemics, right?” the person at the agency had asked.

To which Louisa mmhm’d.

“So what, that’s mapping how a virus spreads? Statistical models and so on? Graphs, data, population counts, predictions . . .”

As any conversation about her aborted doctorate flooded Louisa with a cocktail of humiliation and rage, she merely said “sure”, and let her interlocutor leap to whichever conclusion she was headed for anyway.

“Perfect. I think they’re going to love the sound of you. So relevant!”

Which, apparently, they did; within the hour she’d received confirmation of her appointment.

Now Konrad was saying that Louisa should be careful not to leave anything out of her sight, the boy had a flimsy idea of ownership. On the verge of further damning his son’s character, he was cut off by the sound of glass clashing against glass. A woman came in from the hallway, towing a binbag that jangled horribly as it dragged over wooden boards. She wore a tight black dress and her makeup had run: clownish mascara underscored her eyes.

“My darling wife emerges.”

“The state of this place,” she said, addressing her husband and ignoring her guest. “Your friends are pigs.”

“Your friends too.”

He caught Louisa’s eye and made a face that said, what can you do?

The wife hadn’t finished grilling him. “When did you get up anyway? And why aren’t you helping? You’re not still drunk, are you?”

“Alexandra, darling, this is Louisa. Willy’s maths tutor. Do say hello to her, make her feel welcome.”

“I asked you a question.”

“Actually you asked three. And to answer the most important: cleaners. Very decent people. Remember?”

“Not bloody coming! Know what voicemail is? Try listening to one occasionally.”

“You’re joking.”

The woman gestured at the bin bag. “Is this what a fucking joke looks like? And why is the tutor here? It’s only Tuesday.”

“Tuesday’s what we said,” Louisa offered, tentatively. “And my name’s Louisa.”

“The pandemics girl? Well lovely to meet you or whatever. Don’t let me get in your way, you can begin whenever you like. Everything you need is in the cupboard under the sink.”

Konrad’s face tightened. “Darling, she only just arrived.”

Louisa didn’t understand what they were talking about. And then, looking around, she did. “The agency didn’t say anything about cleaning.”

Husband and wife exchanged a look.

Alexandra spoke. “Do you think I should pay you a thousand pounds a day to sit on your hands? Or is it that you’re above cleaning work?”

Konrad said something about it not being fair. Alexandra responded in a language Louisa didn’t recognise. After a harsh exchange, he reverted to English. Smiling at Louisa, he said, “Look, we’ll all pitch in together. Many hands make light work, yes?”

Louisa did not relish the idea of spending several hours in the company of this awful pair. And at least cleaning the house, however tiresome, wouldn’t expose her poor numeracy.

“It’s fine,” she said. “I don’t mind lending a hand. But you two go relax.”

They agreed so quickly it was obvious neither Konrad nor Alexandra had ever intended to “pitch in”.

By seven, she had restored the study, kitchen and dining room to something like order. She had run the dishwasher through four cycles, dragged a mop across the floors, wiped down tables, thrown out empty bottles, and arranged the furniture as neatly as she could. What the hell kind of party had they thrown anyway? At one point she’d scraped what looked like dried blood off the underside of a table. And rolling around the bathroom sink, too big to fall through the plughole, was someone’s glass eyeball.

Meanwhile, she’d made note of what she assumed were valuable items. Upstairs, she’d found a taxidermized otter, its eyes replaced by precious stones. On the first floor landing, a huge canvas depicted a battle at sea, surging waves encircling a doomed vessel: the effect was Turner-esque, if not actually Turner. And above the living room fireplace, hung a ceremonial dagger. According to Konrad, who noticed her interest, it was the most beloved possession in his collection. “Nearly a thousand years old,” he boasted. “The handle is woven with human hair.”

“What was it used for?” she asked. To which he smiled and said nothing.

Now her biceps ached. Agreeing to clean the house was objectively demeaning. She did not think of herself as easily exploited. But these rich families were all the fucking same. Once, she’d been paid to fetch groceries and fill out school application forms. Another time, she made £90 an hour reading bedtime stories to a four-year-old, while Mummy (who did not work for a living) scrolled Instagram and sipped from a gin and tonic.

That evening, Konrad, Alexandra and Louisa ate together. While neither of them presented as chefs, she had not expected frozen pizza. Nor could she be bothered to express dietary requirements. Konrad added tinned anchovies and capers to his slices, and even so insisted on extra salt.

As no one was talking, Louisa asked her hosts what they did.

“My work is pretty confidential,” Alexandra said. “But I work with machines.”

Konrad raised his hand. “Lotus eater here. She makes the money and I eat the lotus.”

This was clearly a practised routine.

“What kind of machines? Like, manufacturing?”

Alexandra squirmed, agitated. “No. What? Nothing like that. You think I’m building combine harvesters? Christ. Why don’t you tell us about yourself. How did you get into pandemics anyway?”

What initially caught her interest was that the First World War was one of the most well-studied and culturally digested things that had ever happened, while an even greater slaughter that took place at almost the same time was basically invisible. Ask school children: they didn’t know. Nor did most adults. There was no cenotaph to the Spanish Flu. No mass graves, no two-minute silence. No poems. They did not trot out survivors of the great pandemic to tell horror stories of the dark spots that appeared over cheekbones, of faces turning blue and limbs turning black. The insane numbers (somewhere between fifty and a hundred million) were not deployed to induce public sorrow. Why not? She had studied for years, driven herself half crazy, then given up just as her thinking coalesced around a final thesis. She recalled the tussle for a phone, two slick, naked bodies.

“I just kind of stumbled into it,” she said.

“And what’s your take on the politics of it all?” Konrad asked. “Were you one of the ‘every human life is precious crowd?’ Or more of an economic realist?”

“Wow,” said Alexandra, putting down the slice she was about to bite into.

Louisa said she didn’t think those were the only two options.

“I’m kidding,” Konrad said. “I got the vaccine! Wore a mask to the grocery store.”

“You have never been to a grocery store in your life,” Alexandra said.

“Figuratively! I meant figuratively!”

Changing the subject, Alexandra said she wanted to talk about mathematics. She’d been a math major herself, at MIT in fact. How much money do you have to have, Louisa thought, before you turn down British universities to opt into American tuition fees?

“I miss math,” her hostess added wistfully. “I use it in my work, of course, but wish I could just look at the numbers in a void, without trying to map them onto real life.”

“We all get disappointed by real life,” her husband said.

“Can you be quiet for two minutes? I’m trying to talk. Pure maths is absolutely the best. Don’t you think so, Louisa?”

Gambling that she was more likely to get caught out by emptily agreeing, she shook her head.

“I don’t know,” she hedged. “There’s something to be said for using mathematical models to solve problems in the physical world. I think there’s beauty in the correspondences. You know. Like metaphors.”

Alexandra fixed Louisa in her gaze. “Metaphors! Is the girl cracked? I was talking about numbers.”

An unbearable silence massed.

Konrad broke it. “Here’s a question. I’ve been wondering about you. What kind of person takes on a job like this anyway? Flying across the world to an undisclosed location.”

“We could be anyone,” Alexandra said. “We might not be nice people.”

“Vampires,” Konrad said, baring his teeth. “Ghouls. People of the night. We might sell your organs on the dark web.”

Louisa smiled. “Seven grand for a little maths tuition? Literally anyone takes that job.”

Alexandra and Konrad giggled. Then laughed properly.

“I don’t want to pour cold water, but seven thousand isn’t that much,” said Alexandra.

“Your vital organs,” Konrad said, and they both cracked up again.

Once ensconced in her room, Louisa found an old leather valise deposited on her bed. Inside was a thousand pounds, in bundles of twenty-pound notes, each wrapped with an elastic band.

She counted out the money twice before she went to sleep.

After waking at seven, she rose, showered, dressed and set herself up in the study with a coffee from the machine. Konrad and Alexandra had yet to materialise. She set out a textbook, some old exams scripts, a wodge of squared paper, several pencils, a ruler, two calculators, a protractor and a set of compasses. She angled the light on the desk and waited.

The night had not passed easily. She had, of course, spent a fair portion of it googling her hosts. Or trying to. Despite her snooping efforts, she’d not uncovered their surname. Soon after giving up and attempting sleep, she’d been woken by voices: an argument muted by distance. Worse, she was almost certain she’d later heard a knock on her door, Konrad’s voice whispering her name. Even when she returned to sleep, her dreams were strange and disjointed.

She was disturbed from her thoughts by a young man, roughly her own age, throwing open the study door. Without acknowledging Louisa’s presence, he started turning things over, looking for something. Louisa asked if she could help.

“Sure,” he said, hardly glancing at her. “I think I misplaced some banknotes. Don’t suppose you’ve seen any cash lying around?”

“Not here,” she said brusquely. “These are my things.”

She put her hand down on the textbook he was about to pick up.

The man stopped what he was doing and looked at her properly. “Bloody hell,” he said, taking in the neatly arranged desk. “You’re not fucking around, are you?” His accent was cartoonish. He spoke the English of the feral rich.

Louisa asked who he was.

“William! Keep up. I thought my parents explained all that.”

A few moments passed while she tried to process. Maybe he just looked older?

“Yes, I just expected . . .” she began, before trailing off.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Sit down. Perhaps we could look at a past paper, try to figure out where the gaps in your knowledge are.”

“You want me to… do a past paper? What is this? GCSEs maths? Oh my God!”

The young man hugged himself and cackled. Louisa waited.

“You thought I was going to be a spotty fifteen year old, didn’t you? Ha-ha! Got to hand it to them, fair play to mum and dad. The look on your face!”

Louisa wondered if he would care to explain.

“What’s the rush? Now put those ridiculous books away and help me look. I’m sure there’s loose change lying about somewhere. If you’re thorough, this place always gives you something.”

In fact, Louisa had learned this already. The day before, she’d found nearly three hundred quid wedged under sofa cushions. Needless to say, she had not handed it in, and did not believe it’d been misplaced by this man.

“You look worried,” William said. “I get this must all seem odd. It’s actually true that I don’t have GCSE maths. Took the exam and failed it years ago. Mum likes to nag me about it every so often. One of her little jokes. She says it’s going to be hold me back in my chosen career.”

“Which is?”

“My chosen career?” William said. “Why would I want one of those?”

“Most of us don’t have a choice.”

“Oh you’re so sweet and earnest. I love it!”

Louisa fought the urge to tell him to go fuck himself. Instead, she asked if he was ready to get started.

“Oh dear, you don’t seem to get it. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but we’re not actually going to sit here and do maths.”

“Of course we are. I’m being paid –” (she was about to say “quite a lot of money’, but then remembered the laughter at dinner) “– to help you with your resits. So where shall we start, calculator or non-calculator?”

The young man winced. “You really are cute. How much are they paying you anyway? A hundred, two hundred a day?”

“Seven grand, plus expenses.”

For the first time, he lost his composure. “Fuck, really? Do you know what I’d have to go through to get that out of them? Anyway, speaks to my point – they haven’t flown you all this way to go over my times tables.”

“Okay, so why do they really want me here?”

William rolled his eyes. “I should have thought that was obvious. To feast on your blood then play with your pale corpse.”

Without another word, he left the room. Outside, he cried: “Seven grand! Fuck!” The front door creaked open and slammed with a bang.

Sometime later, she found William’s parents tapping away at laptops in the kitchen, apparently playing online games. Konrad was amused to learn of his son’s behaviour and commented approvingly of William’s spirited self-assurance. Alexandra was not amused.

“You must have an approach for reluctant students. You can’t expect me to believe that my son is the first kid you’ve met who thinks there’s better things to do than punch numbers into a calculator?”

“Your son is in his twenties.”

“So?”

Louisa explained that if an adult man did not want to retake his GCSE maths, then there wasn’t much she could do.

“I’m supposed to pay you a thousand pounds a day to hear this?” Alexandra said.

“I thought it wasn’t that much money.”

Konrad raised his hands in a calming gesture. “I’ll talk to him. Let’s reconvene after lunch. Please don’t take offence, Louisa. Willy’s a wayward boy. He has this idea that because his parents have done well in life, we can just pay for him to be a big kid forever.”

“I’ve done well. You eat the fucking lotus!”

Konrad smiled long-sufferingly. “The boy needs to learn to grow up. We’re counting on you, Louisa.”

Hearing these words, she felt as though she was being entrusted with something stranger than an overage student. Perhaps they wanted her to be a kind of mentor? On paper, at least, she was high achieving and independent.

“How did you sleep, by the way?” Konrad asked, before the conversation could be allowed to die. “Not kept up by any bumps in the night, I hope.”

“Like a baby,” she said.

Why did they all think it was funny to keep dropping gothic hints? Though she was not a big fiction reader (and held supernatural fantasy in particular disdain), Louisa had read Dracula at school. She was reminded now of the story’s set up. Jonathan Harker, an English solicitor, is summoned to a mountain retreat in Eastern Europe to work through contracts on a house purchase for a reclusive count. Only the count is – surprise – a vampire! But look what brought Harker there in the first place. Conveyancing. An occupation every bit as quotidian as maths tuition. What was it her English teacher had said? The dullness of Harker’s backstory accentuates the nightmare that follows.

After lunch, William’s attitude was notably altered; he agreed to sit down and work on a paper. They chose non-calc. He got through the first two pages without difficulty, and Louisa was confident she was telling the truth when she said he’d got everything right. On the third page came a question that involved diagrams and a worrying amount of text. A bold number in parentheses informed her it was worth six marks. At this point, William looked up and said, “I don’t know how to do this one. Can you show me?”

Something in his tone suggested he wasn’t truly baffled. Bored, maybe. Testing boundaries. Louisa said he should try it on his own first. She would support him if he got stuck.

He scanned his eyes over the text once more, then put down his pencil. “Show me how to do it,” he said again, more firmly now. “That’s what we’re paying you for, isn’t it?”

Louisa took a breath. “You’re not sixteen. You should know it isn’t nice to dangle someone’s pay cheque in front of their face.”

William shrugged. “I’m not very nice.”

“So what, I should teach you ethics?”

“And neither, as it happens, are you.”

Why should she care what he thinks? And yet, she was outraged. “What makes you say that?”

William smiled. “If you’re so nice, how come you’re not married?”

“The two things have nothing to do with each other. Anyway, I’m young!”

“Too personal, okay. Then why did you drop out of your PhD? Or is that also sensitive?”

For a second, she stared at him in horror, believing he had access to dark channels of information. Then she kicked herself. There was no need for dark channels; the internet would do. Anyone with a little patience and an agenda could have learned as much.

She considered her responses. “Okay, if we’re really talking, I have a question for you.”

“Oh yes?”

“How come a kid with all the advantages in the world – expensive education, private tutors flown in from overseas – how come a kid like that fails his maths GCSE? Are you a fucking idiot?”

William laughed. “Wow! When did you cue that one up? That’s really very good. Only, I do know what you’re doing.”

“What am I doing?”

“You’re a fake.”

William had said this in a quieter voice, as though he didn’t want to be overheard.

“What are you talking about?”

“There you are, calling me a fucking idiot, when you’re the one who can’t even add up. I’m actually quite good with numbers, despite my exam record. Look here,” he said, turning back the pages and pointing. “I got these two wrong on purpose, just to confirm. And you ticked them! You never were researching statistics or whatever you told my parents. You’re a historian. Or were. Now you’re nothing, some kind of shit conman. Can you imagine what they’re going to do when they find out? Dad might find it funny, but Mum’s gonna slice you up.”

William was smiling horribly.

“Except she’s not going to find out,” Louisa said.

“And how do you figure that?”

“Tell me, William, why would rich boy like you go hunting for lost pennies?”

In her room, she googled flights back to London. There was one that left just after midnight. If she got her act together and ordered a taxi, she would make it. It was sorely tempting. Beyond the window, fields of snow glimmered in the headlights of a passing car.

The deal she had struck with William was simple. He agreed not to disclose what he knew in exchange for a share of her tutoring pay. She had suggested 60/40 in her favour, he’d asked for 70/30 in his, and they’d settled on an even split.

Now she was faced with a choice. Either she did the “honourable thing’ – fess up, lose her earnings, get struck off by the agency, and come home with her tail between her legs – or the dishonourable thing: wait out the week, hope William could be trusted, pay him off, take the money, run. The “honourable thing” would leave her with nothing to pay back her house mates or sort her mother’s boiler. And she loathed this particular notion of “honour’, a conservative ethics that served only to keep things as they are. However, the alternative meant spending another week in this prison.

With a spark of inspiration, she concocted option three. Confess nothing, settle for two grand, don’t pay off William, run away tonight and, if possible, poach a high-value item on the way out.

Which is how she came to steal the ceremonial dagger that hung above the fireplace. The theft wasn’t difficult. William had gone out for the evening, and his parents were blind drunk and sniping at each other in some distant corner of the house. After dinner, she’d left them bickering as Konrad worked the cork out from bottle number four. Now she slipped the dagger from its perch and carried it to her room. Heavier than it looked. She was momentarily transfixed by its glinting blade, before snapping back to and making for her room. By the time it was missed, she’d be long gone.

It did occur to her that there might be trouble getting a sizeable (if ancient) weapon through airport security. But it was so obviously decorative, she assumed it could go in her checked luggage without causing problems.

All she had to do was pack. Most of her clothes had never left her suitcase. The only issue was where to stash the money. How did one pack two thousand pounds of hard cash? Perhaps her toiletries could be sacrificed to make room. Speaking of money, she hadn’t opened the new valise with the day’s payment. As she did, she was irked to see they’d paid her in local currency. A note at the bottom, signed by Konrad, said he thought she might like some spending money. Oh well, she’d just have to exchange it in England.

Two more bizarre discoveries followed in quick succession. Looking for her charger in the bedside cabinet, she found a small jewellery box had materialised in its top drawer. Within it, an art deco ring – a gold band adorned with three diamonds, exactly like the one she’d been given by the biochemist. If it hadn’t been impossible, she’d think it was the very ring. What the actual fuck? Her mind was thrown back on her fiancé, that whole sordid episode. If only she’d seen it – his moral weakness, his constant excuses – she might have left him before he’d humiliated her. But she’d been in love. How stupid life was. He used to say she never followed through with her convictions. Realising he was not completely wrong, she hated him afresh.

At least the ring meant she wouldn’t have to try and get the dagger onto the plane. She would tell the flight attendants that she was engaged.

Still more troubling was the second discovery: her passport was gone. She was a meticulous person, she knew exactly where it ought to be – in the zippered compartment within her suitcase. Someone had taken it. She thought about those local bank notes, the ring by her bed. What message was being sent? That she would never leave? That they had elected her to be William’s bride? It didn’t make any sense. Nothing had made sense since the moment she’d got here.

In any case, without her passport, she couldn’t travel home. And there was no point alerting Konrad and Alexandra. What would they do, admit they’d stolen it and give it back? Once more she revised her plans. She had to get out as soon as possible. She would wait until the middle of the night, order a taxi, and ask to be driven to a police station.

All the lights in the house were dark. Through her window she saw a clear spray of stars. With the ring firmly on her finger, she held the suitcase in one hand, the dagger in the other. She just had to replace it before she left. The car was due to meet her around the corner – she didn’t want its approach to raise the alarm. Her room was two flights of stairs up. She had to make it to the bottom without a sound.

Once on the landing, Louisa found she could barely see. With the heavy case throwing off her balance, she banged into the wall. She froze; listened. Only silence in the house. Slowly, slowly, she descended the stairs, taking immense care with all she carried.

She made it to the first floor. Paused, caught her breath.

On the ground floor, enough light bled in for her to make out the front door. As her quivering arm threatened to lose its grip on her case, she crept over the hardwood floor. Mere feet from the door, a hand gripped her shoulder. She turned to see a dark shape amid the wider dark.

“What are you doing? You can’t leave now, dear. We’re only just getting started.” The voice belonged to Alexandra, though she sounded changed, jarringly sober. As if a performance had been dropped. The hand remained on her shoulder. Behind the woman, other figures seemed to shift in the darkness.

Louisa relaxed her grip on the case, which fell with a thud. So often, she’d been bullied and cajoled into actions she never wanted to take. Actions that had ultimately led her to this diabolical place. Why was she even here? What she did next, she did without thinking. With one hand, she embraced her hostess. As she did, her other floated up to plunge the dagger into the woman’s back. She would have thought there’d be resistance. But the blade sank into flesh like a trowel into loose earth. The woman crumpled. A perverse pleasure flickered then evaporated.

Though an idealist, Louisa sometimes felt an embarrassing squeamishness when living up to her beliefs. Since she was sixteen, she’d been a proud owner (and occasional wearer) of a t-shirt that screamed Eat The Rich. She still had it. She hated these people. The point one percent. As she’d often told her friends, she wanted them dead. Like actually, non-hyperbolically, culled. But the rise and fall of the ancient dagger, the woman’s convulsions, and the warmth of all that blood was something else. Now she was presented with a physical reality she didn’t know what to do with. It was a lot. She felt like a child who’d smashed a precious vase. Who was going to help her clean everything up?

Somesuch Stories is a literary magazine published by Somesuch, a production company with offices in London and Los Angeles. The magazine exists to showcase great storytelling around the world – you can see back issues and more Somesuch projects on Instagram.

Toby Lloyd is the author of Fervour, which was a finalist for two National Jewish Book Awards and the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. The novel has been translated into five languages. His essays and short fiction have appeared in the Fence Magazine, SomeSuch Stories, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Prospect Magazine and elsewhere. He lives in London and teaches creative writing at City Lit.

Irena Zablotska is a Ukrainian visual artist and illustrator based in London. She draws inspiration from Eastern European folk art, blending it with raw emotion to tell stories. Driven by childhood memories and personal relationships, her personal work is deeply rooted in the myths and fairytales she heard as a child. You can see more of her work on Instagram.

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