I had it pinned to the wall of my office. The piece was almost sycophantic. I nearly got ‘elegant thug’ tattooed on my arm. The journalist did get a couple of things wrong, though. I wasn’t a ‘former singer’。 Though club business took up most of my time these days, every once in a while, like tonight, I took to the stage. It was a gift for my people. They saved me as much as I saved them. We were family.
However, in that moment the women were not looking at me as if I was their sister or the owner of their favourite club. They looked at me as if they either wanted to be me or be with me or sometimes both at the same time. I sang and I danced, the beauty of my movement filled them with painful yearning and then soothed it away. I smoothed a hand across my form, snug in my shimmering bead-net dress comprised of faience and black-and-gold cylinder beads, and tilted my chin up, pushing up against my deep-blue headdress, bejewelled with turquoise and a ruby that matched my lipstick. House of Aten was my kingdom.
Just before Akhen died, he kissed the inside of my wrist, as he always did – he said he liked feeling my pulse against his lips – and told me to run the business as I saw fit. He knew how I grew up and what I had seen on the streets; he wanted me to provide a home and haven for those who were like me, and had lived through what I had lived through. He told me to ignore the vultures who would try to slip into his place, who thought I would need a man to feel seen. Akhen was the only man I ever loved. He knew who I was, not just who I was to him. Before my husband left me, he said, ‘Thank you for letting me love you. Thank you for loving me back. Thank you for staying. I know it was hard, sometimes. I hope now you live free.’
And so I lived free, turning the House into a home for women only, a place for lost women to find themselves. I continued to protect the streets of Thebes that Akhen and I had ruled over together when he was alive, as equals, side by side. We fought against an oppressive government – the Isfet – and disrupted their peace. Akhen was a great man, but he was still a man. I no longer had to compensate for his blind spots. My husband often got seduced by the lure of quick money to bolster our work, and this usually meant bad business. It ended up getting him killed.
The House of Aten was far from holy, but it protected those who needed protection: the downtrodden and the abused. The Isfet portrayed us as the underworld, when it was them who were corrupt and would rob the poor and suppress the powerless to gain control. The wealth of the state was contingent on suffering and imprisonment. House of Aten was freedom. We were the deciders of our own destinies.
In the audience I saw that many had decided that their destiny was to be entwined with mine, at least for tonight. It was the magic of me on stage that called to them, I knew, because the reality of me, the flesh and blood and bone me who had to deal with flesh and blood and bone to keep us safe and the Isfet at bay, would eventually scare them away. Our circumstances were very delicate. They enjoyed the glamour but not the gore, not knowing that the gore was what gave the glamour its gleam.
I have a scar across my back from when they tried to kill me. Jagged, deep. The women loved to trace it softly and ask me how I got it, but they didn’t like it when I came home carrying the scent of blood. The women who surrounded me liked the power I had but didn’t want to know how it was kept. They didn’t want to know how many men’s bones I had to break to build the fences that protected them. They wanted to be with a queen, but no queen can be a queen without also being a warrior. I couldn’t hide it from them and so I stopped trying to. Relationships were out of the question. I retained my power by my distance . . . emotionally, anyway.
It was time for me to choose someone for the night. My gaze roamed, swam through the wanting and waiting women, and landed on her. The eyes were crystalline and black, piercing right through me, and making my soul stand still in shock. Her hair was neatly shorn at the edges, but soft and cloud-like on top, highlighting the cheekbones I wanted to slice my tongue on. The neckline of her black jumpsuit plunged to a depth I wanted to dive into. More than all of this, though, I saw she wasn’t flustered. She didn’t preen under my attention, even as I raised my arm and twirled my hand in her direction, singing to her and dancing directly towards her. She didn’t perform for my affection as the other girls often did. She stayed staid, with the corner of her mouth lifting ever so slightly, and she lifted her wine glass to her lips and sipped in challenge.
I needed to know her.
‘What do you mean she won’t come?’