Before I Met You

15


1995




A BOOKSHOP, A comic store, two boutiques, a small gallery, a lingerie store, a brasserie and a cake shop all told Betty that they could not give her a job over the course of the next two days. One of the agencies she signed up with had offered her a three-day stint sewing on buttons in a tailor’s shop in Bloomsbury for £2.85 an hour, which she had accepted wearily. But within two minutes of entering the shop, a festering lint-filled tomb owned by three ageing Portuguese brothers with skin like parchment and hair blackened with boot polish, who looked at her as though she had just burst out of a birthday cake, she had made her excuses (something about sore fingers) and fled.

The other agency were waiting to hear from a zip factory in Islington about two days’ zip-sorting, and there’d been talk of a few days on reception at a photographer’s studio in Kentish Town but Betty didn’t hold out much hope for that, given her performance on the typing test they’d given her. She feared there were a dozen pretty girls with winning smiles out there who could type faster than thirty words a minute.

Betty was nearing the end of her first week in Soho and she still did not have a job. She felt a small wave of panic rise up through her. Then she did something that chilled her to her core, something that made her want to cry and be sick, both at the same time.

She rummaged through the clutter at the bottom of her shoulder bag until she found a biro. Then she rummaged through the clutter by the side of her bed until she found the application form for Wendy’s. She filled it in, very slowly, wanting to delay for as long as possible the moment at which she would pass it into the oily, miserable hands of a person who claimed to be in a position to decide whether or not she was worthy of a place within their oily, miserable company. She deliberately misspelled some words, trying to diminish her chances before she’d even left the house. She did not apply lipstick or put a comb to her hair. She threw on a baggy zip-up cardigan and a pair of trainers, and she made herself look as unappealing as was humanly possible.

As she slouched down the road towards Shaftesbury Avenue, she took on the demeanour of a loser. She did not want this job. She did not want this life.

The manager at Wendy’s was a very small Spanish man by the name of Rodrigo. He had a moustache that was black and hair that was white, and a very pronounced lisp. He took the form from Betty and sighed when he saw the tea ring stain and the ink smudges. He glanced up at her unhappily, through thickly lashed eyes and looked so incredibly sad that Betty almost wanted to hug him.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘What nationality are you?’

‘I’m British,’ she said brightly, trying to atone for her dismally presented application.

He looked at her in surprise, glossy black eyebrows shooting towards his silver hairline.

‘British,’ he repeated.

‘Yes.’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘how great!’ His sadness seemed to turn then to sheer joy, and Betty felt her own heart fill with something good and pure. Finally, someone was pleased to see her. Finally someone thought she was a good thing, by simple virtue of her existence, beyond anything she had said or done, or said she would do or could do. She had merely stated her nationality, a pure accident of her birth, and this small man with a nice face had wanted her.

‘I can have you in for an interview,’ he consulted a huge chunky plastic watch on his hairy wrist, ‘well. Now. Ith good for you? You have time?’ He looked at her keenly through those soulful eyes again and she nodded, very quickly, before she could change her mind. She could not have said no. It would have broken his heart.

His office was a small cubicle at the very end of a long breeze-blocked tunnel beneath the restaurant. The walls were painted gloss white and covered in motivational posters. Bits of paper covered every surface. He asked her some standard questions, but it was clear from the outset that he would offer her the job. And he did.

‘Could I have a trial run?’ she suggested. ‘Just a few days. See if, you know, well ...’

‘Thee if you can bear it?’ he asked with a broad smile.

‘Well, no, not that. Just, I’ve never worked in a restaurant before. I may not be very good at it.’

‘Oh.’ He smiled, his fur-covered hands gently holding the edge of his desk. ‘You will be good at it. I can promith you that. Thtart tomorrow? Nine a.m.? If you don’t hate it, we can fill in the paperwork and get you on board. Officially.’ He beamed at her again and offered her one of his furry hands. She squeezed it. It was soft and warm and reminiscent of a spaniel’s ear.

She beamed back at him and said, ‘Yeah. OK. Why not?’

Moments later she was being led back down the long grey tunnel, staring subconsciously at Rodrigo’s generous bottom squashed inside nylon trousers, and then she was shaking his hand again and wandering through the greasy mayhem of the restaurant, past the tables of junkies and drunks and back out onto the fresh, bright normality of Shaftesbury Avenue. She stood for a moment like a tree trunk in a rapid and let the crowds surge past her on both sides.

And then she slowly made her way back to the flat, her head suffused and subsumed with total and utter weirdness.


‘Wendy’s?’ her mother cried in horror. ‘You mean the burger place?’

‘Yes,’ sighed Betty, ‘that’s right.’

‘But – why?’

‘Because it’s good money. And regular work. Because the boss is really nice. Because it’s free dinners and free lunches. Because the people are ... interesting. Because it’s local and I can walk there. And because ...’ she sighed, ‘because there’s a bloody recession and no one else would give me a job.’

Her mother sighed too, a sigh weighed down with unspoken well-I-did-warn-yous.

‘It’s fine,’ Betty interjected before her mother could say anything annoying. ‘It’s absolutely fine. It’ll do for now. Stop worrying.’

‘I’m not worrying,’ her mother said. ‘Like you said, you’re twenty-two. Why would I be worrying?’

‘Because I’m your baby girl.’

‘Well, yes, obviously you’re my baby girl. But I trust you. You lived virtually alone in that big house with that crazy woman ...’

‘She was not crazy.’

‘Well, that sick old woman. You cared for her by yourself. I think you can cope with a bit of real life.’

‘No you don’t.’

‘Yes,’ her mother laughed, ‘I honestly do! As long as you’re happy, that’s all that matters. Have you made any more friends?’

Betty shrugged. ‘Sort of,’ she said. ‘There’s a guy at Wendy’s. A gay guy. Called Joe Joe.’

‘Oh,’ said her mother in delight. Her mother was nuts about gays, had got the ferry all the way to Portsmouth last year to see Julian Clary live at the New Royal. ‘What’s he like?’

Betty thought back to their first conversation the previous day. ‘Hi,’ he’d said, ‘I’m Joe Joe. Nice to meet you.’ His accent put him somewhere in the southern reaches of the Americas.

Betty had smiled. ‘Likewise.’

‘You are very pretty.’

‘Oh. Thank you.’

‘I like your hair.’

‘Thank you!’

‘And you have beautiful eyes. Like a cat. You know. Or a fish.’

‘A fish?’

‘Yeah. A beautiful fish.’ ‘Oh.’

‘I love your accent.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I love the British accent.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘I love your smile.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You have nice teeth.’

‘Oh, thank you.’

‘I’m from Argentina.’

‘Oh, right. Buenos Aires?’

‘Yes!’ he’d cried with delight. ‘Yes! Buenos Aires! How did you know? You must be, like, psychic or something!’

She smiled at the memory and said, ‘Mad. He’s mad. But lovely.’

At these words the front door opened and Betty found herself face to face with the Asian woman from downstairs. She averted her gaze at once in embarrassment and shuffled her bum across the step to allow the woman to pass her. The woman glared at her, through narrowed eyes. Betty looked at her askance and lost her thread for a moment.

‘And I’ve been getting to know the guy outside, you know, the record-stall guy. So I’m getting there, you know ...’ she petered off as she became aware of the fact that her downstairs neighbour had stopped halfway up the stairs and was now staring at her expectantly. ‘Erm, hold on Mum, just a sec.’ She put her hand over the receiver and looked at the woman. ‘Yes?’ she asked pleasantly.

‘You,’ said the woman. ‘You live upstairs, yes?’

‘Yes,’ said Betty, uncertainly.

‘You smoke, yes?’

‘Er, yes.’

‘I smell it,’ she chastised, wrinkling her face distastefully. ‘I smell it. It come through my window, into my home.’

‘Erm, sorry,’ said Betty, her heart racing slightly with the stress of confrontation. ‘I can’t see ... I mean, I smoke up there, right up there. On the fire escape. It’s not even on the same level as you.’

‘No,’ snapped the woman. ‘It come down. It come down the stairs. It come through my window. It come everywhere. I smell it. Everywhere on my clothes,’ she plucked at her sweater and pulled it to her nose. ‘Hmm? And in my hair,’ she held a lock aloft.

Betty gazed at her, nonplussed. ‘God, I, er, I don’t know what to say. I mean. It’s outside. I don’t really see where else you expect me to smoke.’

‘You stop smoking! Yes! You stop! Then no more problem!’ The woman smiled then, almost encouragingly. ‘Another thing,’ she continued. ‘You in bed over my bed. Your bed squeak. Every time you turn over, I hear squeak squeak. Squeak squeak.’

Betty stared at the woman, trying and failing to find a response that wouldn’t end in a bitch fight. Eventually she smiled and said, ‘Sorry. I had no idea. What would you like me to do about it?’

‘You stop moving so much. You move all the time.’

Betty blinked at her. ‘So,’ she said, ‘you want me to stop smoking. And stop moving in my sleep?’

‘Yes!’ she smiled again, as though delighted to find that she had somehow just solved all her problems in one fell swoop. ‘Yes! Thank you!’ She turned to leave. Betty watched her disappear up the stairs and round the corner. She waited until she heard the woman’s front door click closed behind her and then took her hand away from the receiver.

‘What was that?’ her mother asked curiously.

‘Nothing,’ Betty exhaled. ‘Nothing. Just a neighbour.’

‘Oh,’ said her mother in a tone of voice that suggested she liked the idea of a neighbour.

Betty brought the phone call to an end, her whole body so suffused with rage and indignation that she could no longer form a proper thought.

As she walked into her flat she felt the emptiness of it really hit her, for the first time since she’d moved in. She wished for a flatmate now, for someone to cry out to: ‘Oh my God! I cannot believe what just happened! You know that woman? The one downstairs. The one who f*cks so loud that it makes my ears bleed? She just told me that my cigarette smoke gets into her flat. And that my bed squeaks. When I move. Can you believe it!’

Betty took a bottle of cider and her tobacco pouch out on to the fire escape, where she deliberately blew her cigarette smoke through the gaps in the steps so that it would find its way into the woman’s flat. Afterwards she sat on the sofa, her head spinning with too much cider and too many cigarettes, her hair pungent with the scum of chip oil and Soho smog, the flat dark and empty around her.

The light faded beyond the windows outside and the Soho engine started revving up for the night: streetlights warming up, pubs unlocking their doors, the market dismantling and the drinkers arriving. Still Betty sat motionless, alone, letting the solitude filter through her system. Her job at Wendy’s would pay her two hundred pounds a week. Now she had a job she could finally focus on her search for Clara Pickle. But she still had absolutely no idea where to begin.





16


1920




LILIAN SEEMED TO think little of the notion of being painted by a man you’d met just once in the street. She turned the card over between her delicate fingers and said, ‘Well, why not? It’s a nice address. And he’s a Worsley. They’re a good set.’

‘You know his family?’

‘Well, I know their cousins. Or is that the Horsleys? Hmm, well, it is a good address. And just think, your portrait. How nice to have a portrait. In the year of your twenty-first. When you are the loveliest you will ever be.’

‘But alone?’ said Arlette, who needed no convincing of the benefits of having her portrait painted for free. ‘Surely that can’t be wise?’

‘Well, I shall come with you, if you’re feeling that silly about it.’

Silly, thought Arlette, silly? Surely the person who would walk into the home of a strange man unaccompanied was the silly one. ‘Would you really?’ she asked.

‘Of course,’ Lilian replied flippantly. ‘Whyever not?’


Two days later she and Lilian took a hackney carriage to a street of tall white houses by the river in Chelsea. The street number took them to the door of a small cottage painted powder blue. Arlette breathed in deeply, touching the fabric of her favourite dress, a drop-waisted chiffon affair in dark plum, which she wore under a matching coat.

‘Good afternoon ladies,’ said Gideon, greeting them himself at his door. He wore a white shirt, unbuttoned to a quarter of the way down his chest, and tight brown trousers, held up by elastic braces. He looked as though he were either halfway through getting dressed or halfway through getting undressed. Either way, it was a rather informal fashion in which to meet two ladies, Arlette could not help but feel, almost risqué, and she was glad for the bristling, effervescent presence of Lilian at her side.

‘Good afternoon,’ said Lilian, ‘you must be Mr Worsley. I am Lilian Miller. It’s very nice to meet you.’

‘Gideon,’ he replied expansively, ‘call me Gideon. And Miss De La Mare, how charming to see you again. As beautiful as I recall. Do come in. Please.’

He held the door open for Lilian and Arlette, and ushered them into a small hallway piled high with coats and boots and packing crates and tea chests. ‘I would like to say that I have only just moved in, but no, sadly, I have been in the cottage for over a year and still have not found the time or the inclination to unpack my possessions. And of course, the more time that passes the more convinced I become that whatever lies within those boxes is clearly not needed and maybe I should just dump them in the river and let the dead folk pick them over.’

Arlette noted that the house was also dirty and wondered if maybe Gideon Worsley lived without help. It seemed unlikely, but not impossible.

‘I am terribly excited,’ he continued, leading them through to a small sitting room furnished with three ancient armchairs, a brass-topped table, a credenza full of books and a statue of a naked woman carved out of old stone. The naked woman was dressed in silk lingerie and a hat. And there was indeed a cat, a Persian, extravagantly, dreadfully furry and in dire need of grooming, who sat on a cushion in the window watching them suspiciously. ‘I’ve been brooding over the memory of your face for ten long days. And now, finally, you are here! Now,’ said Gideon. ‘Tea. Stay here and I’ll bring it through.’

Arlette nodded uncomfortably. She had never before been brought tea by a host. She could not imagine how he would possibly be capable of doing such a thing.

‘Bohemian,’ whispered Lilian when he’d left the room.

‘Well, yes, I did warn you.’

‘Strange, though, he has no housemaid, or so it seems. He is clearly a man of substance and this house is in a very desirable area.’

Arlette surveyed the room again. On the brass-topped table sat a tray full of half-smoked cigars and cigarillos, and on a silver tray sat three cut-glass tumblers, sticky with the residue of Calvados poured from the bottle next to them. The air smelled sour and rancid, like the air that blew from the public houses that Arlette passed on her way to and from work. It did not smell like a home should smell, of wood-smoke and beeswax and dust. It had no order, no method. It both appalled and excited Arlette in equal measure.

Lilian was agog. ‘Well,’ she continued in her stage whisper, ‘it is entirely what one would imagine the home of a reckless artist to be, I suppose. And do you think he covered over the lady purposely, to spare our blushes?’ She nodded at the scantily clad statue and giggled. ‘As though we haven’t seen a naked woman before,’ she laughed breezily.

Arlette laughed breezily, too, although she had never in her life seen a naked woman. Not once. The only possible notion she had of how a woman appeared underneath her clothes was the one she saw reflected in her bedroom mirror. She assumed that she was not unique in her arrangement of dips and peaks. She had spent a week in hospital two years earlier when she’d been struck down with the Spanish ’flu, and had been examined in most every respect from ankle to neck, and no one had at any point ventured the suggestion that there was anything unconventional about her physiology. She wondered for a moment how Lilian, a girl of just eighteen, had had the opportunity to see a naked woman, but assumed it was just another example of the yawning gulf between their upbringings.

‘Here,’ said Gideon, returning with a paint-splattered wooden butler’s tray bearing a pot and three cups and a small jar of sugar cubes. ‘I’m afraid there was no milk. Or at least what milk there was seems to have given itself over to a terrible attack of the lumps. So I hope you will forgive me and drink it black?’

‘Oh, I prefer it black,’ Lilian offered overfervently. ‘Thank you.’ She took a cup from his outstretched hand and perched herself on the edge of an armchair.

‘So, you’re here to ensure that nothing unseemly happens to your friend, is that correct?’ he asked Lilian.

‘Yes, indeed.’ Lilian smiled and smoothed down the skirt of her dress. ‘She is three years older than me but has had a rather sheltered upbringing. On an island.’

‘Ssh,’ Gideon put his finger to his lips dramatically. ‘I have promised Miss De La Mare that I will be able to divine her provenance using instinct alone. So no clues, please,’ he smiled. His teeth were not good, not for a man of his standing, but this did not detract from his general air of raffish handsomeness, and, despite the near-squalor of his home, Arlette couldn’t help but notice how nice he smelled, of a scent, rather than of himself, of something to do with cloves and peppermint.

Lilian and Gideon chattered for a while, trying to find some common ground, and failing. The closest they got was a girl called Millie who’d possibly gone to the same school as his sister, but for only two terms. Arlette sipped her tea, clearly an expensive blend, served in cups that were also of a very good quality. She looked for clues as to the direction this experience might take.

‘Well,’ said Gideon, after a few more moments, placing his empty cup onto the brass-topped table, ‘I think, if it’s agreeable with you, Miss Miller, I would like to take Miss De La Mare up to my studio now.’

Arlette felt her stomach wobble. She wanted, she suddenly knew without a doubt, to do this alone, yet she could not judge the wisdom of this idea. She looked at Lilian for reassurance, trusting, for some reason, that this headstrong eighteen-year-old girl would know better than her whether this man with his half unbuttoned shirt had good intentions or bad.

‘Well,’ Arlette said, ‘shall I stay on, alone?’

‘Oh, yes!’ said Lilian, springing to her feet, ‘I absolutely don’t want to hang around here, disturbing your artistic juices, not to mention your attempts to work out where the mysterious Miss De La Mare might have sprung from. I will leave you both to your afternoon and, Arlette, I will see you at home. If you’re not back by six o’clock, I will send out a search party.’ She laughed and pulled on her coat. Gideon saw her to the door and then he reappeared, looking, now that Lilian was gone, suddenly threatening and rather obscene.

‘Come,’ he said, cupping his large hands together, ‘come up. Let’s get started.’

Arlette placed her cup carefully upon the table, smiled the best smile she could find, and followed this strange man up uncarpeted stairs towards who knew where.





17


1995




THE NEW DAWN brought the dreadful realisation that Betty had slept through until 9.05 a.m. Her shift at Wendy’s was due to begin at 9.00 a.m. and, to save time, Betty jumped, unwashed, straight into her uniform, brushed her teeth perfunctorily, glanced in the mirror and wished she had washed her hair the previous night, thought about applying some make-up, looked at the time and decided against it, forced down a mouthful of dry cornflakes, leaped out of the front door onto the street and straight into the path of Dom Jones.

‘Whoa,’ he said, putting out his hands to protect himself from her.

Betty gazed at him in shock and awe. ‘Shit,’ she said, ‘sorry.’

He looked at her, half amused, half appalled, taking in the crumpled polo shirt and the nylon trousers and the baseball cap in her hand.

He said nothing for a moment, looked as though he were about to walk away. Then he looked back at her briefly. ‘You’re the girl,’ he said, in his pop star voice, ‘the one from over there.’ He pointed behind him. ‘On the fire escape.’

She nodded, not wanting to say anything, aware of cornflakes between her teeth and the fact that she had not brushed her teeth for long enough to take away the staleness of sleep.

He appraised her again. Even from here, at such close range, on this muted May morning, dressed down in a nondescript T-shirt, unshaven and puffy-eyed, it was clear that this man was a somebody.

Dom Jones nodded at her and then walked away, a slight smile playing around his lips.

Betty rocked back on to her heels, as though he had created a small hurricane in his wake. She gulped. And then she smiled.

Dom Jones.

He’d seen her.

He’d talked to her.

He’d recognised her.

She was on his radar.

And then, very suddenly, she stopped smiling.

She was wearing her Wendy’s uniform.

She thought of every single time she had stepped onto this street from her flat in nice clothes. She thought of the cool T-shirts and the denim minis, she thought of the days her hair had gleamed in the sunlight and smelled like dewdrops, the slicks of red lipstick and the flourishes of liquid liner that had rendered her hard to resist. She thought of every single time that Dom Jones could have bumped into her outside her flat and threw down curses upon the gods of chance and timing.

Not that she wanted Dom Jones to fancy her. Particularly. He was a cheating scumbag and far from being the best-looking member of Wall.

But still.

Dom Jones.

She shivered away the memory of their encounter and walked very, very quickly to work.


Betty saw John Brightly, as she turned the corner a couple of days later. He was leaning against the wall of her house, smoking a cigarette. She wanted to talk to him. But she had no idea whether or not the wall John Brightly built around himself could be dissembled at all by the use of charm and familiarity, or if she was in fact putting up an even bigger barrier every time she tried to engage with him.

‘How’s your sister?’ she asked, rather desperately.

He turned and grimaced at her. ‘No idea,’ he said.

She smiled tightly as another row of metaphorical bricks landed on the wall between them.

‘Seen anything of Dom Jones lately?’ she offered, as a last-ditch effort.

He shook his head. ‘Not really.’

Not really? Not really? What did ‘not really’ mean? He either had, or he hadn’t. She sighed, and was about to head back into the flat when he turned again and smiled and said, ‘He was asking after you.’

She spun round and stared at him. ‘What?’

‘Dom Jones. A couple of days back. He was at my stall, looking at my stuff. He said, “Who’s the blond in the Wendy’s uniform?”’

‘Oh my God! What did you say?’

‘Nothing much,’ he shrugged. ‘I said you’d just moved in. That you lived on the second floor.’ He shrugged again.

‘Oh my God! Did you tell him my name?’

He grimaced at her again. ‘Well, I’m not sure how I could have told him your name when I don’t know what it is myself.’

‘Betty!’ she almost shrieked. ‘My name is Betty.’

He nodded knowingly.

‘Oh God. What else did he say?’

‘Nothing much. Just that. Who’s the blond.’

Betty blinked and tried to stop a huge stupid smile take over her face. ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe it!’

John Brightly looked at her then as though she had just plummeted to even lower depths of stupidity.

‘Did he buy anything?’ she asked.

‘What?’

‘From you? Did he buy anything?’

‘Nah. He was looking at a rare Dylan, but he didn’t buy it.’

She nodded encouragingly, paused for a moment wishing she could think of something salient to say on the subject of rare Dylans and then she went indoors.


Ten days into her career at Wendy’s Betty had already gained enough weight to subtly change the contours of her face: her cheekbones were less pronounced, her jaw less defined. The hours spent on her feet had done nothing to counterbalance the deleterious effects of two free Wendy’s meals a day, and she could feel the waistband of her size eight denim skirt beginning to dig into her flesh. Her complexion, too, was starting to suffer. It had lost its petal-like gloss and she even had a few spots here and there. And then, two nights ago, unable to justify a visit to the hairdresser’s on financial grounds, and with roots so grown out that they were now longer than the bleached bits of her hair, she had smeared a tube of something by Wella described as ‘Deep Caramel’ through her hair and turned herself inadvertently into a kind of low-rent, two-tone, washed-out brunette. She hadn’t realised it until that very moment, but the colour, really, virulently, did not suit her in the slightest. In an attempt to get rid of the colour she had now shampooed her hair five times. The only effect that this had had was to turn her hair a kind of mouldy shade of green.

She thought of ‘the blond’, the elfin, fresh-faced girl that Dom Jones had bumped into ten days ago outside the flat and wondered if he would even recognise her any more. She applied some eyeliner and some pinkish blusher from a tube. Then she scraped her cheap greeny-brown hair back into a stubby ponytail and sucked in her stomach.

She had invited Joe Joe back to her flat after work, after he’d pleaded with her to let him see it, and he was now standing at her kitchen window saying, ‘Wow, I can’t believe you live here. This is the best flat ever!’

‘I’m going outside for a smoke,’ she said, waving her roll-up at him.

‘Can I come, too?’

She shrugged. ‘Sure.’

‘Maybe I should start to smoke,’ he said a moment later, dangling his feet over the edge of the fire escape. ‘I always feel so left out when everyone else is smoking. All those little gangs, puffing away together, puff puff, chat chat.’

‘Don’t start smoking,’ said Betty. ‘That would be a really stupid thing to do at ... how old are you?’

‘Twenty-four.’

She threw him a look of surprise.

‘You thought I was younger than this? Yes, I know. I look very young. Everyone always says this about me. I think it is my freckles. And my cheeky, cheeky smile.’ He demonstrated his cheeky, cheeky smile and she laughed.

‘So where does it come from, your colouring, your hair?’

‘Ha,’ he laughed. ‘I am like a stray dog, you know, with many, many genes. I have some Mexican, some Jamaican, some Argentinian, of course, and also, going back, like, a hundred years, so far back that no-one really knows, there was an Irishman. And his genes, they are like the genes of a god. Just in my generation, of thirty cousins, there are seven of us with this red hair and this white skin. Seven, in thirty. It is amazing.’

Betty stared at the wild amber afro and nodded her agreement.

‘What about you, what is on your genes?’

She smiled. ‘Nothing much,’ she replied. ‘Bit of English. Bit of Welsh. Some German.’

‘Ah, then you are purebred Aryan ...’

They both turned then at the sound of a sash window being raised across the courtyard. Betty stiffened and grabbed Joe Joe’s arm. ‘It’s Dom Jones!’ she hissed.

‘Who?’

‘You know, Wall?’

‘What?’

‘Wall, the band. You know?’

He shuddered daintily. ‘I hate the Wall. I hate all that Britpop shit.’

The sash window came rattling up and there he was, pulling a cigarette out of a soft packet, clamping it between his lips, searching his jeans for his Zippo. He didn’t notice them at first, not until he’d finally located the lighter and taken his first drag. His eyes narrowed at them over his exhaled smoke.

Betty gasped. ‘See,’ she said to Joe Joe through clenched lips. ‘It’s really him.’

‘Urgh, he is disgusting.’

Betty glanced surreptitiously over her shoulder at the open window. Dom Jones sat perched on the windowledge, one skinny buttock overhanging, staring into the half-distance. He saw Betty looking at him and threw her a half-smile.

‘All right?’ he called out.

Betty blanched, every drop of blood in her body rushing violently to her head. ‘All right,’ she replied in her best approximation of a cool mockney hipster’s response. She turned away then, as nonchalantly as she could.

‘He is so ugly,’ said Joe Joe.

‘Ssh ...!’

‘Why? Why ssh? He is ugly. I can’t say this?’ He put his hand against his heart and looked at her beseechingly.

‘Well, no, not that loud. And anyway, he’s not ugly, he’s ...’ she threw another surreptitious glance in his direction and took in the mop of thick dark hair, heavily lashed eyes, petulant mouth, designer cashmere V-neck in baby blue, ‘... he’s cute.’

‘Yes,’ said Joe Joe disdainfully, ‘cute like a baby monkey.’ And then he started making baby monkey noises, very loud baby monkey noises. Betty hit him on his arm. ‘Stop it,’ she hissed, and Joe Joe laughed.

He stopped as the sound of ringing cut through the air. It was the distinctive tone of a mobile phone. Across the echoing courtyard they heard Dom Jones answering the call.

‘No,’ they heard him mutter. ‘No, I know. I f*cking know that. But she’s left me with the baby. Yeah. I know. She’s doing a shoot. In Kentish Town. Yeah. Yeah, she sacked the nanny. I don’t f*cking know. Probably just to f*ck me off. Yeah. They were supposed to be sending someone over. No, I don’t know, just some girl from the PR department, Clare something. Never heard of her. No, she’s not here yet. They sent her on the f*cking tube. Yeah, I mean, for f*ck’s sake. She’s probably stuck in a tunnel. Yeah. No, of course I can’t bring the baby. What the f*ck would I do with a f*cking baby in the middle of a f*cking radio interview? No. She’s ill. I don’t know, a cold or something. She told me she’s got to stay indoors. Yeah. I know. Anyway, I’ll call you when the PR gets here. OK? Oh, f*ck, that’s the baby crying. I’ve got to go. Yeah. Later ...’

He turned off his phone, extinguished his cigarette and headed back into the house. He left the window open and Betty could hear the plaintive mewling of a small baby.

Six months old, according to the reports in the newspapers.

After a moment the mewling stopped. And then, a minute later she saw him, Dom Jones, infamous philanderer, excessive drug-taker, extreme boozer, habitual frequenter of every members’ club in London W1, friend to every debauched artist, musician and journalist in Soho, cockney/mockney art school dropout and darkly gleaming rock-and-roll supernova, clutching a small bundle of pink baby against his shoulder, rocking slowly from foot to foot and whispering tenderly into her ear.

Betty dropped any pretence at surreptitiousness and simply stared. Her stomach folded up against itself and she gulped. The man in the blurred photographs receiving sexual favours in a toilet cubicle and the man shouting aggressively into a mobile phone only five minutes ago faded away into the furthest reaches of her subconscious, and all she could see was a beautiful man soothing a tiny baby.

‘Oh, look!’ said Joe Joe, clasping his hands together gleefully. ‘So cute! The baby monkey has a baby monkey all of his own!’

‘Joe Joe,’ Betty chastised, ‘don’t be mean!’

Joe Joe shrugged and snatched the roll-up from Betty’s hand.

‘Here,’ he said, ‘let me learn how to do this.’

He put it between his full lips and he sucked in deeply, his cheeky cheeks disappearing into hollows. He held the smoke for a count of three and then he expelled it loudly and dramatically, his eyes pouring tears, his face red raw, coughing so loud that Dom Jones across the way grimaced and pulled down the sash with his free hand, giving Betty and Joe Joe a slightly withering look, tinged, Betty couldn’t help but feel, with a hint of melancholy. And then he was gone.

She grabbed the roll-up back from Joe Joe and rubbed it out. ‘You silly bugger,’ she teased. ‘What did you do that for?’

He smiled through his tears. ‘I don’t know,’ he wheezed. ‘But I have burned my lips, look.’ He turned the skin of his lip outwards and showed her a roll-up-shaped burn running down the centre of both of them.

‘Ow,’ said Betty, ‘and good. Now hopefully you won’t do it again.’

He smiled at her sheepishly, with his burned lips. ‘So,’ he said, ‘I have a special request. I want you to have a party.’

‘A party?’

‘Yes! We must have a party! In your dinky little flat. Maybe tomorrow night!’

Betty balked. ‘It’s Wednesday tomorrow.’

‘I know! And you are not working. And I am not working. And I think, Betty Boo, it is time for you to have a housewarming.’ He looked at her beseechingly.

Betty frowned at him.

‘Pleeease.’

‘But, Joe Joe, my flat’s not big enough. It’s –’

He interrupted her with his hand. ‘Have you not seen Breakfast at Tiffany’s?’

She frowned again.

‘Holly Golightly. She lives in a tiny teeny weeny flat, just like yours. She has the best party ever! Small is good! More sweat. More, how you say, proximity. Please please please, Betty, can we have a party? Please!’

Betty narrowed her eyes and considered the proposal. How could she resist a comparison with Holly Golightly? ‘OK,’ she said, ‘but don’t invite too many people. Please.’





18




BETTY’S TINY FLAT was bulging at the seams with what looked like a casting queue for a Benetton advert, packed tightly wall to wall with young, attractive, interestingly attired people from all corners of the globe, people that Joe Joe had collected on his journey through London’s language schools and fast-food purveyors and nightclubs. By eleven o’clock Betty had drunk so much that her vision was beginning to separate and her words were starting to bleed into each other. She was having an unnecessarily animated conversation with a Japanese American girl called Akiko, who spoke with a very strange Trans-Asian accent and kept calling Betty ‘Mandy’ because she looked like an old friend of hers called Mandy.

‘And you know what, Mandy, that’s, like, the really weird thing about, like, life, you know. The way it, like, just keeps changing, you know, every time you think you know where you are, it just totally changes again ...’

Betty smiled tightly. She knew without any shadow of doubt that she was about to be sick. She could feel it rising ominously through her like bad weather, sour and suffocating.

She felt her skin prickle and a flush of sweat blossom from her upper lip. She said, ‘Excuse me, I need to go to the toilet,’ and the girl called Akiko looked at her curiously and said, ‘I beg your pardon?’ and Betty realised that she had actually just said, ‘Squeeze me, needa godo toily.’ She pushed her way through a mass of backs, through banks of densely packed humans, each glancing at her in turn as she passed, brown eyes full of curiosity, blue eyes full of alarm, black eyes filled with amusement.

‘Out of her way!’ she heard someone shout with hilarity. ‘She’s going to spew!’

She pushed against the bathroom door and it gave way against her, suddenly, as though someone had been holding it closed from behind and had let it go at the last moment. She stumbled through the door and landed with a thud against the edge of the bath, feeling the faint sensation of a bruise forming across her thigh, her silver beret falling half across her face, and became aware of John Brightly standing behind the door, looking at her with his usual expression of bland amusement.

‘Oh my God,’ said Betty. ‘It’s John Brightly. It’s John Brightly. In my bathroom. Why are you in my bathroom?’ She pulled the hat from her head dramatically and put out a hand to balance herself against the bath. And then, before he had a chance to answer, she was on her knees with her head arched over the toilet, dimly aware that it was blocked up with wads of pink toilet paper and urine, that there were fag ends buried in the mass and that as much as all this appalled her, she absolutely was going to have to be sick on top of all of it.

‘It’s blocked,’ she heard John Brightly mutter from somewhere behind her. ‘I tried to flush it. It’s f*cked.’

She sat on her knees in dim, ringing silence while she waited for the tidal wave of nausea finally to engulf her. She groaned, she groaned again and then it came, loud and violent and everywhere. Upon the pink toilet paper, on top of the accumulated piss of a hundred party guests, the old fag butts, the toilet seat, the wall, the floor, the pipes, a hand towel, a spare toilet roll and the edge of the bath.

‘Jesus Christ,’ said John Brightly.

Betty groaned again, wiped away a drool of vomit from her lower lip and ran her hands through her hair.

‘Is that it?’ asked John.

Betty nodded and groaned again. That was it. She was done. She got slowly to her feet and turned to face the mirror. As she’d expected, she looked too horrible for words.

‘Here.’ John Brightly offered her a piece of chewing gum.

‘Thank you,’ she said. She turned back to the mirror. If she was a man now she would splash her face with icy cold water straight from the tap. As a woman, however, if she were to do that, the already dreadful reality of her clammy complexion, green hair and red eyes would be compounded even further by melted mascara and streaked eyeliner. Instead she dabbed at her cheeks with wet hands and ran her fingers through her hair, chewing the gum urgently to rid her mouth of the sour juices of regurgitated vodka and cider.

‘I’ll get you some water,’ said John Brightly.

Betty locked the door behind him and stood for a moment, staring at her face and listening to the strange noises of the party still, inexplicably, going on around her.

There was a soft knock at the door and she opened it a crack. John Brightly peered through the gap at her and Betty looked at him then, properly, for the first time since she’d come hurtling through the bathroom door. He was more handsome than she’d anticipated him being. She let him in and took the plastic cup of water from him.

‘How long have you been here?’ she asked.

He shrugged. ‘An hour or so.’

‘An hour or so? How come I didn’t see you?’

He shrugged again. ‘No idea,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t hiding.’

‘But, why are you here?’

He laughed. ‘Because I was invited. Your friend with the ginger afro invited me.’

‘Ah.’ She picked her beret off the floor, and sat down on the side of the bath. ‘But still. You didn’t have to come just because you were invited. Why are you really here?’

‘I have no idea,’ he said, joining her on the edge of the bath. ‘I think, if I’m going to be totally honest with you, I came because I was curious.’

‘Curious?’

‘Yeah, about what lies on the other side of that door.’ He gestured beneath his feet. ‘You know, I’m out there six days a week, I see people come and go. I wondered what it was like in here. And I suppose ...’ he paused, ‘... I suppose I was curious about you, a bit.’

She laughed. ‘Why would you be curious about me?’

‘I don’t know. The mysterious blond girl, with the fur coat and the big eyes, suddenly morphing into this brown-haired girl in a Wendy’s uniform. The changes you’re going through. Fresh in town. Wide-eyed and innocent. All that. It’s interesting. You’re interesting.’ He paused again, clearly re-evaluating the wisdom of his last comment. ‘Kind of,’ he added.

She nudged him with her elbow and said, ‘Huh.’

‘Well, you asked ...’

She smiled at him, feeling the euphoria of a recently emptied stomach, the sense of never having felt better in her life. ‘I’ve been curious about you, too,’ she said.

He raised an eyebrow at her and she thought that he looked very cool when he did that.

‘Yes, curious about why you’re so offish with me.’

‘Offish?’

‘Yes, ever since that first day, when I was wearing the fur. You’ve always been a bit, I don’t know, a bit like you don’t like me.’

He laughed wryly. ‘I don’t even know you. How could I not like you?’

She shrugged. ‘No idea,’ she said. ‘Everyone likes me. But you’ve just acted like you didn’t.’

He looked at her with a dry smile. ‘I think,’ he said softly, ‘that that’s just my personality. I don’t really do effusive, you know. I don’t really do all that fake stuff.’

‘Why does it have to be fake? Why can’t it just be, you know, friendly?’

‘Where are you from?’ he asked unexpectedly.

‘Guernsey,’ she replied. ‘Why?’

He smiled. ‘No reason.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing! Just I guessed it might be somewhere like that. Somewhere small. Somewhere where people are, you know, friendly to each other.’

Betty felt her defences pop up. ‘Not everyone in small places is friendly, you know. We’re not all these big cheesy, gurning stereotypes. Some of us are actually quite standoffish. And actually, I’m not even from Guernsey. I’m from Surrey. I just ended up in Guernsey. Through no fault of my own.’

He put a hand up to her, a signal to calm down. ‘Wow,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t meant to be an insult. It’s just, you can usually tell, with new people you can see the thinness of their skin.’

‘Have I got visibly thin skin?’ she asked, slanting her eyes at him.

He appraised her. ‘No,’ he said, ‘there’s something there. Something more than just a small-town girl.’

She smiled at him triumphantly, basking strangely in his approval. Those last few months in that house on the cliff, tending to the demands of a dying woman, had left an indelible mark on her and she was glad. She would have hated it to be as though it had never happened, all that time, all that youth, all that love.

Someone knocked at the door then and Betty jumped. She’d almost forgotten where they were. She tipped back the rest of the cup of water and said, ‘I’d better clean this place up a bit. Will you still be here when I’ve finished?’

‘Let me help,’ John Brightly said, getting to his feet.

‘What? No! God, no. I can do it. You go and tell whoever’s waiting outside that they’d better come back later.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Christ! Of course I’m sure. There’s no way I’m having you cleaning up my puke. That would just be totally gross. Get out of here!’ She pushed him away playfully towards the door, and as her hand touched his arm she felt a flicker of energy pass between them, something warm and vital, something real and human, a connection.

He looked at her with some genuine softness in his eyes for the first time since she’d known him. ‘Well, at least let me try and fix the toilet,’ he said.

‘I can do it!’ she said. ‘I used to live in a falling-down mansion. I’m an expert at fixing toilets. I promise you.’

‘Falling-down mansion? Wow. I can’t wait to hear all about it.’

‘Meet me outside,’ she said, ‘on the fire escape. I’ll tell you all about it.’

She closed the door behind him, opened up the cupboard beneath the basin, pulled out some spray bleach and a stiff J-Cloth and applied herself to the thoroughly disgusting job of cleaning up her mess.

The first person she bumped into when she finally emerged almost ten minutes later was Candy Lee, the angry woman from downstairs. She had a bottle of rum in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other. She was wearing a flowery blouse with a denim miniskirt and a denim jacket, and her shoes were denim mules with cork heels. Her hair was adorned with silk flowers and she had a big lipstick stain on her right cheek.

Her eyes widened at the sight of Betty.

‘What you been doing in there?’ she demanded.

Betty looked at her curiously. ‘Fixing the toilet,’ she said haughtily.

Candy Lee threw her a haughty look. ‘Why it take you so long?’

‘Because it did.’

‘Come in with me.’ She dragged Betty by the hand into the bathroom and locked the door behind them. Candy had clearly been carrying a heavy bladder for quite some time. Her urine was audible hitting the water in the bowl and she sighed with pleasure as she peed. Betty stared at her in horror.

‘Can I go now?’ she asked.

‘No! No. You stay. I like you. I want to talk to you.’

‘Someone’s waiting for me,’ Betty said, ‘outside. Maybe we can talk later?’

‘No,’ Candy leaned towards Betty and grabbed her wrist, ‘now. I want to talk now. Why it stink so bad in here? Someone been sick. So disgusting.’ She waved her hand in front of her nose and then pulled a canister of Impulse body spray out of a small bag slung diagonally across her chest, which she sprayed liberally around herself. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘you too. You smell of sick.’ Before Betty had a chance to argue, she had been aggressively perfumed with something that smelled like old ladies and toilet freshener.

‘Listen, you, you are a beautiful girl.’

Betty stared at her mutely.

‘You are prettiest girl I ever seen.’

‘Er ...’

‘Well, nearly prettiest girl I ever seen. Meg Ryan prettiest girl I ever seen. But you are close. I like girls.’ ‘Oh ...’

‘I like girls like you. Pretty girls, with big eyes and skinny bodies. You are my dream girl,’ she smiled. ‘You ever been with a girl before?’

Betty shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, feeling that there should be no grey areas whatsoever in her response. ‘Never.’

‘You should go with a girl. You should go with me. I am the best girl. The best one in Soho. The best one in London.’ She got to her feet, wiped herself and pulled up her lime-green pants. Then she pulled down her denim skirt and stared meaningfully at Betty for a moment. ‘See this,’ she said, stepping closer to Betty, ‘look.’ She stuck out her tongue and flashed a silver stud at her. ‘This is for pretty girls, missy. Pretty girls like you.’

Betty smiled. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘didn’t that hurt?’

Candy’s face fell. ‘No!’ she barked. ‘It did not hurt. It is for the pleasure of my girls. It is sweet feeling. I can make you come for ten minutes with this. Maybe some time fifteen.’

Betty tried not to flinch at these words. ‘It’s not really ... I’m not quite ... I like boys.’

‘Ha!’ snapped Candy. ‘We all like boys. Everyone likes boys! Boys are nice! But girls are nicer.’ She was standing very close to Betty now, close enough for the rum fumes on her breath to form a cloud around her head, close enough to feel her body heat, close enough to notice a small scar above her right eyebrow and a scattering of dandruff on the shoulders of her denim jacket.

Betty took a step back from her and smiled tightly. ‘No, really, honestly, it’s not my thing. It’s not ... I’ve never wanted to.’

‘I was twenty-eight first time I slept with a girl. All those years before I thought I didn’t want to. I was wrong.’ She threw her a bright smile, all small white teeth and glinting silver. ‘Come on,’ she put her hand to Betty’s hair and stroked it. ‘Come downstairs. Come to me. Come with me. Come ...’ She licked her lips with her studded tongue.

‘No!’ said Betty. ‘Thank you! Really. My friend is waiting, I really need to go ...’

Candy sighed and let her hand drop from Betty’s hair. ‘Well, lucky for you,’ she said, ‘I am only down there.’ She pointed beneath their feet. ‘Lucky for you, any time you want me, you can come and have me. Just knock on my door.’ She leaned across Betty’s body so that they were touching almost from neck to crotch and banged against the bathroom door with her knuckles, rat-tatatat. ‘Like this. Then I will know is you. What your name?’

‘Betty,’ she replied breathlessly.

Candy’s eyes widened. She trailed her fingertips dramatically across Betty’s cheek and then opened the bathroom door to leave, her beer in one hand, the rum bottle gripped beneath her arm. But before she went she turned one more time and looked at Betty sharply. ‘And stop smoking outside my window. So rude.’

She tutted loudly and pulled the door sharply closed behind her, and Betty let herself fall onto the side of the bath. She touched her cheek where Candy’s finger had just been and shuddered. Then she found her way to the kitchen and poured herself another tumbler of vodka. She noticed briefly that the party had thinned out, that the DJ was asleep on the sofa, that the music was quieter, that Candy was nowhere to be seen, that the Japanese American called Akiko was pensively writing something in a journal and that Joe Joe was rammed up in the corner kissing a man with a blond buzz cut and a vintage bowling shirt, his hands tucked casually in the man’s back pockets.

She absorbed all this numbly and slowly, as though on a two-second time delay. Then she took the tumbler of vodka and her tobacco pouch out of the flat and up towards the fire escape. She felt curiously excited, a swell of anticipation in her chest as she ascended the three steps to the fire-escape door. She could see where most of the party guests had gone as she pulled open the door. The escape was rammed with bodies, the air was thick with the smell of tobacco and marijuana, there was a low-level buzz of muted conversation, someone was playing a guitar. The only light out here came from the bulb on the landing downstairs.

Betty squeezed her way through the mass of people, searching for the reassuring shape of John Brightly, dying to tell him about her encounter with Candy Lee, dying to carry on their conversation, find out more about him, tell him more about her. She stepped over legs and climbed over couples, but it was soon obvious to her that he wasn’t there. Maybe he’d come out here, taken one look at this messy sprawl of stupefied youth and decided that he was too old and wise to hang around here.

She sighed and fell to her haunches.

She was tired now.

It was late and she was tired and she wanted to go to bed.

But she couldn’t because there was a party in her house. A party, probably, in her bed.

She rolled herself a cigarette and smoked it slowly and unhappily, surrounded by strangers, and she wished for a moment that she had never left Guernsey.