He settled on the name Pepper. Day remembered the rest of that night in stop-motion — galloping, shimmying, the speakers turned up so loud that the singing shook the air and the beat of the music was like being knocked on the head. The backbeat was a hammock you fell into. Ring a ring o’roses, pan flutes, trumpets, and yodeling — Day was holding hands with Luca, who held hands with Aisha, who held hands with Maisie, who held hands with Pepper, who held hands with her, dancing around in a circle with bags and coats stacked in the center, cheering for the countries whose stage performances made the most effort or projected the most bizarre aura. Luca and Thalia became Day’s too. “For life, yeah? Not just for Eurovision…”
Thalia didn’t even like Eurovision. She said she’d come along to meet Day. “This one’s always going on about you,” she said, gesturing toward Pepper.
—
DAY’S STEPDAD, Anton, who’d had trouble remembering Michael’s name, hailed Pepper with joy, even as he teased Day about the times she’d said Michael was the one. Day just shrugged. Pepper wasn’t always on the surface, but whether she was with Pepper as Pepper or Pepper as Michael, Day had found the one she’d always be young with, eating Cornettos on roller coasters, forever honing their ability to combine screams with ice cream.
—
SO… WHO is a Homely Wench?
—
DAY WROTE about Luca, muscular and much-pierced Luca, and how that first Eurovision they spent together his hair was the same shade of pastel mint as the dress he wore. He and Thalia were a bit older, in their early twenties. By day he sold high-fashion pieces: “Everyone wants to fly away from here but not everyone can make their own wings… so they buy them from me…” By night he was an unstoppable bon vivant, deciding what kind of buzz was right for that night and mixing the pharmaceutical cocktail that had the least tortuous hangover attached. He’d had nights so rough he could hardly believe he was still alive: “But this can’t be the afterlife. Ugh, it can’t be.” Luca laughs long and loud and his body shakes as he does so. He’s better at forgetting than forgiving; he says this is the only thing about himself that scares him. Speaking of him Day’s father says, “So… vulnerable,” at the same time as her stepdad says, “Brazen!” Neither is quite right. When Luca was younger he got kicked out of his parents’ house for a while; they’d hoped it’d make him less brazen, but it didn’t — he stayed with friends and got brasher, and when he came home it was like he took his family back into his heart rather than the other way around. Day knew Pepper and Luca were together. She’d also heard that Luca liked to pursue straight men. Thalia referred to this tendency as “Luca’s danger sport.” Pepper said Luca’d be fine. “He’s got us.”
—
OH, AND THALIA — DAY had to talk about T. Thalia’s aesthetic was the most civilian (Pepper had learned the most from her YouTube makeup tutorials) and Thalia was her full-time name. She was composed, reserved, she lived with an older man none of her friends had met; the only reason her friends even knew about the older man was because of a week when T had been ecstatic because she’d sold five triptychs and received a really considered, insightful note about them from the buyer. But then she found out the buyer was her boyfriend, so she was furious for a couple of days, and then the fury mingled with elation again. Luca argued that the boyfriend was merely investing in an artist who’d be famous one day, and whenever Thalia heard this she said, “Care,” to indicate that she didn’t. Thalia painted scenes onto mirrors, dramatic televisual two-shots from stories that had only ever been screened in Thalia’s mind. Her mirror paintings left gaps where the facial features of the characters would normally be, so that your face could more easily become theirs. T’s brushstrokes are thin, translucent, and mercurial in their placement; they swirl into one other. Her colors are white and silver. Around the images Thalia paints a few words from the script: an alphabet frame. Day’s favorite was a voiceover:
The poison taster is feeling a bit ill. He’s well paid but he hates his master so much that today, the day he finally tasted poison, he’s eaten a lot and is managing to keep a normal expression on his face until his master has eaten at least as much as he has. Eat heartily, boss, don’t stop now…
Who’s a homely wench? Luca is, and Day is, and so are Pepper and Thalia and Hilde and Willa and anyone who is not just content to accept an invitation but wants more people to join the party, more and more and more. Day can just hear Pepper and Luca climbing up onto a tabletop at such a party and screaming out (they’d have to scream through megaphones, as she’s envisioning a gathering that’d fill Rome’s Coliseum many times over): Hello everyone, it’s great to see you all, you homely beasts and wenches.
Send.
—
THE HOMELY WENCHES have no fixed headquarters, and all the members agree that this keeps them humble, relying as they do on the soft furnishings and snack-based offerings of whichever member is host to Wench meetings for the month. February was Day’s month for hosting meetings, and this particular meeting had been called to discuss articles for the Lent term edition of The Wench. There were to be two interviews: one with a bank robber who’d turned down a place at Cambridge and now half regretted it. Marie was covering that story; she had a feeling for bittersweet regret and mercenary women. The other interview was with Myrna Semyonova, author of a novel, Sob Story, which she’d written to make her girlfriend laugh, consisting as it does of a long, whisky-soaked celebration of all the mistakes two male poets (one young, one middle-aged) had made and were making in their lives. The narrator of the novel was the bar the two poets drank at, and since Semyonova had published the book under the pen name Reb Jones she was hailed as the new Bukowski. Willa was covering that, and her reaction to Sob Story’s being taken so seriously was the same as that of Semyonova’s girlfriend: It made the joke twice as funny. Ed was working on a piece about hierarchies of knowledge for female love interests in the early issues of her favorite comic books; how very odd it must be to operate within a story where you’re capable, courageous, droll, at the top of your field professionally and yet somehow still not permitted the brains to perceive that the man you see or work with every day is exactly the same person as the superhero who saves your life at night. “Seems like someone behind the scenes clinging to the idea that the woman whose attention you can’t get just can’t see ‘the real you,’ no?”
—
DAY LOOKED FROM face to face. Marie might get on with Thalia; they both favored grave formality and never letting a single hair fall out of place, though Marie’s Zaire French accent and her tendency to wear jackets over her shoulders without putting her arms in the sleeves gave her attitude more impact than Thalia’s. The society was too small to have a leader, but if they’d had one, Marie would’ve been it. Sometimes, when Marie and Willa spoke together in French, glancing around as they did so, Day felt that they were disparaging her mode of dress, but Ed had reassured her that that was just how people who could only speak English naturally responded to fluent French speakers. Ed, named after Edwina Currie, was much easier to get to know. You could chat to her about anything. If she didn’t understand a reference you made she just said so. Rare, very rare for anyone Day had met at Cambridge to admit to gaps in their understanding… but Ed would ask to hear more. This puckish, boyish young woman was black like Marie and a Londoner like Willa, but, as she put it herself, “a different kind of black, and a different kind of London”—it was hard to picture a time, place, or opportunity other than university and the Homely Wench Society for the likes of Ed, Willa, and Marie to find out that they really got on. For one thing all three had a tendency to assume that everybody else was joking all the time and responded accordingly — Willa with breezy levity, Marie with frank disappointment, Ed with various micro-expressions, semi-smiles, really, that made you want to laugh too, even if you really did mean what you’d just said.