Elodie Harper - The Wolf Den

The only colour on the walls is the light reflected through Victoria’s treasured bottles of perfume, lined up carefully on the windowsill. Everyone uses Victoria’s cell when they work alone here; it’s the biggest and closest to the street. Outside the door, she can hear Fabia sweeping the corridor. The old woman must have scrubbed the entrance to the cell several times over, desperate to be invited in for company and food. Amara thinks of Cressa and heaves herself upright, swinging her legs off the bed.

“Would you like to share some lunch, Fabia?”

There’s the clatter of the broom dropping. The old woman scurries inside. “Only if you have some to spare.”

Fabia sits beside her, watching as Amara portions up the bread, olives and cheese. She says nothing, but her eyes follow every morsel like a starving dog waiting for a careless guest to drop a crumb from the table. The bones of Fabia’s thin hands bulge through her skin as she clasps them together. Amara suspects she is having to physically restrain herself from starting to eat before all the food has been shared out. Lunch with Fabia is never enjoyable. Either you have to eat at the same speed, meaning it’s over too quickly, or endure her agonized staring while she watches you finish. Amara chooses to eat quickly.

Fabia tears into the bread first, demolishing it in a few mouthfuls. It’s not clear how she manages to chew so fast without choking. Amara is never going to be able to keep up. “I always liked this cell best,” Fabia says, worrying away at an olive, extracting every last scrap of green flesh with her teeth. “It used to be Mola’s. She’s long dead now. That there, in the corner, is where I used to draw for Paris.”

Amara follows the line of her pointing finger to the very bottom of the wall. She squints and the crude scratch marks take on the shape of a dog. “It must have been hard, raising a child here.”

“My little boy,” Fabia says. “He didn’t always hate me. Everyone made such a fuss of him when he was small. All the other girls, they doted on him.” She discards another olive. “But the old pimp, the master here before Felix, he rented him out to work in the kitchens across the way when he was four.” Fabia pauses, contemplating the remaining bread and cheese on her knee. “I wish he’d sold him. But he never did. My boy was too pretty.” She gives in to hunger, gobbling down the last scraps of food, sucking her fingers and wiping them on her knees. “That’s what I tell Cressa. It’s better if they’re sold. Then you can imagine things turned out well for them. Better the heartbreak now, than later.”

Amara has barely said a word but still has a small pile of food left. She eats it as fast as she can, conscious of Fabia watching. “Is this the only brothel you worked in?” she mumbles through a mouthful of cheese.

“I suppose,” Fabia replies. “I started as a house slave. Had two little babies for the master, not that he cared, the ungrateful shit. Two little girls I never got to see grow up. After the second child, I thought he’d let me marry another slave in the household, the odd-job man. I quite liked him. He was kind, anyway. But then he died, and the master rented me out. It was only guests, family members, that sort of thing. But once they do that, rent you out I mean, you know they’ll sell you on.” Amara thinks of her time as a slave in Chremes’ household. It does not cheer her to see parallels between her past and that of the destitute old woman beside her. “You didn’t start life as a slave, did you?” Fabia asks, perhaps sensing her discomfort. “I can always tell.”

“How can you tell?”

“You still act like you matter.”

Amara knows Fabia doesn’t mean to be hurtful, but still, her last mouthful of food feels like a stone as she swallows it. “That bread was dry, wasn’t it?” she says, changing the subject. She reaches down to pick up the jug by her feet. “Would you mind fetching us some more water, please? Also, I think the other cells will need some more for this evening.”

Fabia takes the jug. She looks at Amara, the hunger still in her eyes. “What does it feel like?”

“What does what feel like?”

“Being free. What does it feel like?”

What did it feel like to be Timarete? Amara’s past life blazes into her mind’s eye, with all its love, innocence and hope. “When you see a bird flying,” she says, “that moment when it chooses to swoop lower or soar higher, when there’s nothing but air stopping it, that’s what freedom feels like.” She pauses, knowing that this isn’t the whole truth. The memory she tries to keep buried, the agony of her last day as a free woman rises to the surface. “But hunger feels the same, Fabia. Whether you are slave or free, hunger is the same.”

Fabia nods, satisfied. Hunger is something she understands. She leaves the cell, and the sound of her footsteps is swallowed up almost instantly by the thickness of the stone. Amara stays sitting on the bed, conscious of the world washing past the walls outside, even though she cannot see it. Out there, over unimaginable distance, her hometown still exists. People she knew: her neighbours, her father’s patients, the baker who always spared her bread, Chremes, Niobe. All the figures of her past will still be living out their lives in Aphidnai. But not her mother. Amara knows that her mother is dead.

She knew it on her first day as a slave. After the trauma of saying goodbye, Chremes took her to his bedroom. But instead of stripping her naked as she had feared, he seized the small bundle of belongings she had brought with her. Amara watched, bewildered and afraid, as Chremes rifled through her father’s old leather bag until he found what he was looking for. Inside, her mother had hidden the money she had been paid for her only child. A well-known trick, Chremes said as he counted out the coins, for naïve parents selling their children. A way to give them a head start towards buying back their own freedom.

Amara stands up. She doesn’t want to remember the rest of that day.

Everything her parents had hoped for, every gift they gave her, including her mother’s last desperate act of love, has been taken from her. Timarete no longer exists, except as a brief reflection in the eyes of a boy from Athens. She will have to survive as Amara.

One relic from the past is here with her. Her father’s battered, mouldering bag is hanging from a hook on the wall. When the leather was bright and flexible, he would take it to visit patients, all his herbs and instruments parcelled up inside. She lifts it from the wall. Sitting back down on the bed, she counts out the savings she has managed to collect at the brothel. At most it’s enough for a few day’s food. Nothing like the enormous sum she would need to buy herself from Felix. Amara tries to calculate the number of Marcellas she will have to bring him to get anywhere close. It’s impossible. Not unless her value drops over the years like Fabia’s. Then she might well only be worth the price of a week’s bread. Amara doesn’t pursue that thought. Perhaps she will earn more at the baths, if Vibo ever has them back? For a moment, she allows herself to daydream about meeting a fantastically wealthy patron, a man who would be fascinated by her conversation, somebody who would want her to charm him and not just screw her.

“Beronice?” It’s Gallus, calling softly from the corridor. Amara walks to the doorway and sticks her head out. “Oh. It’s you.” He’s disappointed. No free fuck for him today.

“We thought it was Thraso on the door, so I agreed to stay in.”

“Felix swapped him onto the night watch,” Gallus replies. “Is Beronice coming back later?”

“Only if she has a customer.”