"Yes and no. You?" asked Mish.

Meredith shrugged. She wanted badly to tell her friend about the handsome gynecologist and the G-test and the Pap smear that never was, but felt it was perhaps better not to mention anything fertility-related for now. She was worried Mish might break down. Actually she was more worried she might break down, but worrying about other people breaking down helped her to not break down herself.

For two hours they spoke of every amusing thing they could think of that didn't particularly matter and ate eggs and b.u.t.ter and cheese and pastry. Afterward, Meredith ordered decaf coffee, explaining her new theory that caffeine was the devil, and Mish teased her for being such a priss.

After lunch, Mish wanted to stop by a pharmacy to pick up cold sore ointment (the clown had left her with that special tingling) and Meredith said she would come with. Wandering around drugstores was something they did very well together. It was just like high school, except that Meredith no longer worried about Mish stealing cosmetics.

"Hey, remember the summer you stayed at my house and we put this in our hair?" Mish was standing in aisle three holding up a box of Flirt.

"Totally." Meredith smiled. "It was meant to be burgundy but it turned our hair pink."

"Mine was more fuchsia. It matched my fluorescent bikini."

"c.l.i.t pink. That was what my mother called it when she met me at the airport."

"Didn't she think it was so cool she copied it or something?"

"Yup." Meredith took the box from Mish's hand and placed it back on the shelf. As she did, she saw something flash in the corner of her eye. A big diamond ring-like the one in Us magazine-on the very small, slender hand of a very young girl. Meredith tried not to stare but it was hard-the girl was so pretty. She was indeterminately Asian, or possibly Middle Eastern-with the sort of fine boned, sloe-eyed darkness that politically incorrect casting directors described as "exotic." In a wife-beater tank and grubby, frayed jeans, she was doing the rich-hippie thing. The look was one Meredith had always admired but had never been able to pull off.

"h.e.l.lo? Fashion moment," said Mish, who always talked to strangers after a couple of gla.s.ses of wine. She winked at the girl and pointed approvingly at her outfit.

"Uh, thanks," said the girl, grabbing a tube of organic lemon--verbena toothpaste-not, Meredith sensed, because she wanted it but because she wanted to get away from the weirdly complimentary gawking women.

Meredith wondered if they looked middle-aged to her. She was just about to say this to Mish when she noticed him. The handsome gynecologist. Farther down the aisle, choosing conditioners. As Mish wandered away, Meredith watched surrept.i.tiously while the rich young hippie sidled up to him. Dr. Veil smiled and said something to her. She giggled, took the bottle of conditioner from his hand and exchanged it for another. Then confidently, almost c.o.c.kily, she walked away. He waited a dignified amount of time before following her out of the aisle, an adoring expression on his face. He did not seem to notice Meredith at all.

Meredith found Mish in the contraceptives aisle, looking at a box of condoms. "Who do you suppose the ribs are actually for, anyway?"

"Listen, can we go? There's someone here I can't really run into."

Mish paused, but Meredith was already halfway out of the store.

When they were outside and a full block away, Mish put her arm around her friend's waist. "One-night stand?" she asked. "High school enemy? Shrink? The host of a party you got totally wasted at and ended up dancing topless on top of the freezer? Or wait-that wasn't you. That was me."

Meredith laughed. "Worse," she said. "That modelly looking Asian chick? The one with the diamond? Did you see that guy she was with? The tall, good-looking one about twice her age? That's my gynecologist."

Mish wrinkled her nose. "I hate people," she said. "Don't you hate people?"

5.

Irma Moore feasted her eyes on the buffet of horror laid out before her. Terminal 4, Heathrow International, at seven a.m. was, she decided, a magnificent contemporary restaging of Dante's lowest circle of h.e.l.l, or perhaps, if she closed her eyes to freeze its last image in her mind, Pica.s.so's Guernica. Trails of human sausage links tangled and writhed across the industrial-tiled floor, and Irma was one of them, bravely navigating her small form through the seething ma.s.s. The din was dampened only by a faint misting of perspiration. The weight of this respirated atmosphere pressed down on Irma's head like a dumbwaiter. Everyone took a place in line: queues of the paranoid waiting to have their old suitcases wrapped in cellophane. Mothers and infants in rows outside a metal door bearing a sign of a grinning cartoon elephant and the words BABY PIT STOP. A whole generation of smartly swaddled Saudi ladies waiting in line to get their VAT tax-back forms signed after their vodka-and-Prada sprees in Knightsbridge.

Irma paused to watch a customs official, his nose decorated with gin blossoms, glare over the counter at a small Muslim woman shrouded in a Gucci-logo-print head scarf. He pointed at the woman's bag on the floor. The woman bent down wordlessly and hoisted it onto the counter, spilling its contents before him. He held up a flimsy pile of paper and made a dismissive, uncooperative gesture. The woman stamped her foot and raised her hand in frustration. They stared at each other for a moment before the woman-perhaps because of a language barrier, perhaps because of sheer annoyance-swept up her purchases and her carry-on bag in two arms and clopped away, burka swishing out behind her.

More than any other version of h.e.l.l, Irma Moore preferred the h.e.l.l of other people. As someone who had rarely behaved normally-let alone well-in her life, Irma thought it was lovely to watch otherwise polite people lose it. This was especially true in public. For this reason, she had a soft spot for airports. She cruised over to the arrivals board but couldn't get a view for the mobs of people standing in front of her.

"Ucchh," she said. The Ulsterwoman's trademark articulation of frustration. An involuntary, guttural reflex that she often made, and the only discernible trace of her middle-cla.s.s upbringing in Belfast.

"A poor-bog Irish peasant girl" is how Irma liked to describe herself, though in fact she had grown up in a tidy Protestant suburb. Her father was an eye surgeon, not a potato farmer as she sometimes pa.s.sively led people to believe. But Irma had never been much of a fan of unadorned facts-the truth, in her mind, was too barren and plain. She preferred a more cluttered version of reality.

Being a poet, Irma was big on metaphors. She rarely thought of things as they were, but instead imagined them as what they represented in the larger scheme of things. Human existence, in her mind's eye, was a vast, messy castle with high turrets and secret pa.s.sages, crocodile moats and magic suits of armor that might spring to life at any moment. Life was loud, animated and bloated with waste, not unlike Heathrow's Terminal 4. But in the case of the great metaphoric castle, she mused, while craning her neck to read the flight numbers on the screen, there was one crucial difference: the castle contained only one royal personage. And that was Irma.

Ah-ha. BA flight from Toronto due to arrive at 7:05 a.m. Just minutes ago, Irma noted, checking the pocket watch she carried in her handbag. For once, her daughter was late. Even if it wasn't Meredith's fault, Irma couldn't help but take a bit of pleasure in this uncharacteristic tardiness.

She pushed on, toward the arrivals gate at the other end of the terminal. When she got there, a man in uniform informed her this was the arrivals gate for domestic flights only. She would have to go back and check the message board to find the right gate. Irma reached through her batwing sleeve and scratched at a spot under the restrictive c.u.mmerbund of her traditional geisha's kimono. (What had possessed her to put on this wretched thing anyway? She really should have worn the rabbit-fur poncho instead.) Another message board, with more encoded messages. She flung her head up like a garbage can with a spring lid, and her red velvet beret came loose from its bobby pin and Frisbeed off her head.

Ucchh.

She bent down with some effort and, after a couple of lunging steps, caught the hat midair by its peac.o.c.k feather. She had taken to wearing hats after noticing a bald spot at her crown reflected in a restaurant mirror she had made the mistake of sitting in front of during a recent gallery board-members' luncheon in Soho. Getting old was a b.u.g.g.e.r-a point she planned to impress upon her daughter. The young should be grateful, if only for the fact that they are not yet old.

The only thing that delighted Irma Moore about being a mother was the tyrannical irreversibility of it. She was a fatalist.

While dismally ill-equipped for empathy, nurturing and polite conversation, Irma excelled in other departments. Smuggling exotic and dangerous house pets into Britain via Heathrow, for instance, and consuming large quant.i.ties of sweet Italian liqueurs. To date, Irma had concealed six snakes, twenty spiders, two lizards and four rare birds in her battered crocodile carry-on bag. Each night before bed she chugged a half-pint of Limoncello. She claimed it kept her young.

In her youth, Irma had littered the English-speaking world with a great deal of bad poetry. Highly acclaimed bad poetry in the vein of s.e.xton and Plath, except, as Irma famously pointed out in her Paris Review interview, "without all the depressing bits." All that left, naturally, were the s.e.xy bits, and Irma tore into the burgeoning sixties literary market of women "taking control of their own s.e.xuality" like a h.o.r.n.y priest at a boy-band convention. Her expertly timed 1969 collection, Dirty Girls on Acid, launched Irma as a sort of En- glish poetess counterpart of Erica Jong. For one perfect summer the international literary world couldn't get enough of her. She toured North America doing readings in every city and college town from Dartmouth to Denver. Accompanied by a smack-addled vanload of jazz musicians from Cornwall, bird-boned Irma had been a vision of threatening feminine liberation-a v.a.g.i.n.a dentata for a new era.

It was on her trip through New Mexico that she established her signature look of live jewelry (she often turned up at parties with a tarantula on her scarf or a defanged asp coiled around her throat). It was on the California leg of that trip that her daughter was conceived.

Righting herself slowly, Irma was stopped dead by a word.

"Mom!"

She looked up and spotted her daughter jogging toward her in a velour leisure suit. Clearly some kind of awful Canadian trend.

"h.e.l.lo, dear. Lovely to see you."

They kissed apprehensively and began to push through the crowd.

Meredith's luggage cart jammed in the exit door, and she stumbled over the hem of her pants.

"Mom! For G.o.d's sake, what's the hurry?"

Irma put her hand to her pumping heart and glowered at her daughter. They'd been together less than a minute and already Irma felt misunderstood. Much as she enjoyed the antic.i.p.ation of going to a place, as soon as she had reached her destination, she was filled with a compulsion to leave. She wanted out of this airport. Now. She was well known for disappearing between courses at dinner parties and fleeing the theater at intermission. As a quitter, Irma never quit. Just the day before, in fact, she had coolly broken it off with Jose, the South American refugee poet. Her reasoning had been simple: it could never last, and anyway, this was probably her last chance to make a man under the age of forty weep. And weep he did.

Irma took in the whole of her daughter with a glance, noting with relief that while Meredith's style remained grimly conservative, she had not yet grown fat.

"Well..." Irma said conclusively. She smiled and placed a hand on each of Meredith's cool cheeks.

"I thought we could take a taxi into town this time, Mom. On me."

"Oh dear, would you mind terribly if we don't?" Irma winced. "I just loathe making chitchat with the drivers. And besides, the tube is so good for you."

"Good for you? How?"

"Lots of novelty bacteria for your body to absorb. A real workout for your immune system."

Meredith looked too tired to argue.

"Come along now, don't get scratchy just yet. Wait till we're back at the flat." Irma grimly hauled a knapsack from Meredith's luggage carrier and wriggled it onto her back. "There's a brave old sausage."

With that, they stepped aboard the escalator that would take them down deep, hundreds of feet below the teeming city, the buzzing, ancient catacomb of laughter, conniving and stink that is London.

The flat on Coleville Terrace was located on the third and fourth floors of an ivy-strangled town house. The building had originally been intended as an upscale single-family dwelling, but had been chopped up into several apartments sometime during the postwar boom.

Dragging her luggage uphill from the tube, Meredith listened to her mother's rant about the neighborhood. Over the past couple of centuries the area had risen and fallen in its fortunes, and risen and fallen again. In the four decades since Irma moved in, the area had changed dramatically, and in her view, for the worse. The West Indian flophouses had been bought at a pittance and renovated into gleaming mausoleums by the offspring of ailing rock legends. She could barely leave the house to buy a can of sardines without running into one of these trustafarian twits, on the way to the salon to have their hair matted or tuning up their vintage kit cars. They put her in a bad mood, the bohemians of today. Such pretenders. So rich. The village was nothing like in the old days when drugged gypsies flopped for the night in doorways playing bongo drums and everyone pretended not to mind. Back then, Coleville Terrace was dirty and uncomfortable and real. Now it was a movie set inhabited by upscale squatters.

Of course Meredith didn't remember it this way. Her early recollections of life here were hazy. Literally. A film of smoke permeated the inner atmosphere of the flat from morning to night-cherry tobacco fumes emanating from a hookah pipe Irma kept smoldering in the corner of the living room. There were visitors-hundreds of them, coming and going, sleeping and dancing, eating and throwing up in the loo. These happy wanderers lit fires in the sink and sang campfire songs, pinched Meredith's ears and knees, and roared through the night at jokes she didn't understand.

Early childhood-preboarding school, pre-Canada-was murky territory for Meredith. She had been back to Coleville Terrace only once (on a layover flight to Croatia, where she was working on a sci-fi vampire Canadian-European coproduction) in the twelve years since graduating.

Now, standing outside the chipped front door, Meredith was suddenly starving. This was unusual. Like her mother, she ate little and was particular about what she did eat. Unlike Irma, she abstained for reasons of health and vanity rather than defiance of social conventions.

She watched Irma fumble, muttering, in her handbag and, after a minute or so, withdraw a h.e.l.lo Kitty key ring from which hung two bra.s.s keys. One of them she detached and handed to Meredith with a ceremonial air. The other she slipped into the lock.

"Mom?"

"Yes, dear? Oh, and before I forget, if you must call me that, could you at least p.r.o.nounce it in a way that doesn't make you sound like a cashier at Wal-Mart?"

Irma rammed the key into the keyhole, withdrew it and rammed it in again.

"All right, then. Irma."

"Yes?"

"Do you have anything in the fridge?"

The door swung open with a thud.

"To eat?" said Irma, as if her daughter had just suggested they spend the afternoon inline skating to Brighton. "I'll pour you a nice gla.s.s of London tap and that should curb it. They say eighty percent of hunger spells are actually caused by dehydration. Particularly after a long flight. Murder on the skin. You look parched."

Meredith began to drag her roller suitcase up to the flat. She remembered her prenatal yoga instructor's words: "Be mindful of your body, and the bodies of others." She translated the words into a mantra of her own: "Try not to smack your mother, no matter how much she tempts you."

The flat was not so much dirty as decimated. Whole pieces of furniture were simply lost-buried beneath the heap of abandoned human implements: paper, cloth, metal, plastic. The odor of wet wood shavings was overlaid with the suggestion of long-forgotten fruit. For a moment Meredith considered the hopeful possibility she might be hallucinating from exhaustion. She gave her head a shake. No luck.

The front hall opened onto the third floor of Irma's building and served, illogically, as the upper floor of the flat: it housed the two bedrooms and the bathroom. Immediately to the right of the front door was a largish bathroom, the walls covered with crumbly tiles. To the right was the master bedroom, discernible by the piles of books, board games and discarded bottles of Limoncello. Under a huge heap of velvet and a Cossack coat hulked Irma's single bed. Beside it was a tea tray bearing half a honeyed crumpet. Somewhere, from under something, a transistor radio brayed yesterday's football scores.

Irma opened a door that led to her daughter's childhood room. Meredith was relieved, and even touched, to see that it was tidy compared to the rest of the place, even if it was barely the size of a pantry. The only furniture was a narrow military-issue sleeping cot pushed against the far wall and made up neatly with a yellowed, but quite possibly clean, eyelet bedspread. The walls were bare except for a framed and yellowed fingerpainting of a flesh-toned blob on a gra.s.sy expanse under a teal sky. Meredith had no memory of executing this work, but figured she must have done it during one of her summer holidays spent with her mother's artist colony in the south of Spain.

"So what do you think?" Irma said.

"It's very nice. But is there somewhere for me to work? I need to prep for tomorrow."

"Hold your horses."

Meredith dumped her suitcase and followed her mother up the stairs. At the top, she surveyed the main room.

"Hasn't changed a bit, has it," said Irma.

She walked into the kitchen (really just the southeast corner of the room), refilled the prehistoric electric kettle and set it to boil with a flick of the switch. Meredith's heart did not sink, it plummeted.

The room-a postage stamp of living area tacked onto a narrow galley kitchen-had the look of a well-loved bomb shelter. There were books and papers and china teacups and strange swaths of gauze and feathers and tree bark and fur and antique hospital equipment. Sc.r.a.ps of fabric that had once been ladies' undergarments had been left to disintegrate on every open s.p.a.ce. Piles of human consumer waste-records, shoes, cutlery, ornamental gourds, dried-up potted plants, decorative papier-mache party place-setting cards left over from a long-forgotten dinner party, discarded auto parts, socks-were scattered about the place.

Meredith longed for a cheap hotel room but had to concede the truth. She was broke.

"Where, then?"

"Over there." Irma pointed to a heap of books on top of an old steamer trunk.

"A trunk? You want me to work on a trunk?"

"No, dingbat, beyond it. In Jose's old spot."

Irma crossed the room, turned on a standing lamp and pulled away a saddle blanket to reveal a child's school desk, the kind with a plastic chair attached by a curved metal bar.

"You aren't serious." Meredith rubbed her face and reopened her eyes.

"Ucchh, of course I am." Irma took her daughter's hand and held it to her chest. "This is where Jose wrote his best poem." Her eyes shone with emotion. "It was only six lines long and it was about my hands. He called it 'The Digits of Experience.'"

She fanned her fingers out for Meredith to see. The knuckles on her third and fourth fingers were thick with arthritis. A liver spot on the back of her left palm looked like a tiny map of Africa cut adrift.

"What did it say?"

"I'm not sure. It was in Spanish. But it was beautiful. Poets communicate in a universal language." Irma retreated across the room toward the whining kettle.

As her mother puttered over the tea, Meredith fell asleep on the leaky beanbag chair in the corner of the flat. She awoke several minutes later and wandered into the kitchenette.

"What is it, dear?" Irma had been reading a story in a tabloid newspaper about an eleven-year-old single mother of twins living in Yorkshire.

"Nothing."

Meredith was overcome by a sudden need to tidy. To organize and itemize. She felt weightless, as though she were floating just outside her own body. Forget food-instead she would clean. If she could do something to introduce order, that would make her feel better. She would start with something small, a surmountable task at the core of the chaos.

Irma vanished down the stairs to her bath (she had one every Sunday). Meredith observed her going as if from a great distance. She searched the room for where to start. Of course! She would defrost the freezer.

Her mother's icebox was a stout Frigidaire from the nineteen-sixties, a barrel-chested soldier of an appliance. Meredith held her breath, gripped the stainless steel handle, pulled down hard and felt the latch give and the door swing out toward her. Inside, the fridge was startlingly bare and bright. She sniffed. Nothing but the faint chemical smell of working electrical machinery. The appliance hummed a meditative om and Meredith exhaled in unison. She reached up and flicked open the smaller blue plastic freezer door-and was blinded by a glittering flash. There was a loud crack, a stab of pain and then, nothing.

When she came to, she was staring into a house of glinting mirrors.

"Silly goose!" her mother called from somewhere above her head. "Wake up and stop this nonsense, would you? There'll be no dying on my kitchen floor."

She felt a hand on her forehead, but still the prisms glittered. In desperation she dragged herself a few inches along the floor, until her mother pulled her up by the shoulders and propped her against the cupboard like a doll. Oh, poor, poor head.