Into trouble? I turn back to see what he means but he’s got his nose in the newspaper. It was just a throwaway comment.
I really wish I had brought Jane with me. That way I wouldn’t feel like such a social leper – a forty-three-year-old woman stood in the queue for one of London’s trendiest nightspots with a bunch of clubbers young enough to be my children. A security guard walks past, pauses to glance at me, then continues on down the line.
I thought I’d feel overdressed in my knee-length John Rocha little black dress with its plunging neckline and diamante details on the shoulders but I needn’t have worried. Compared to the miniscule handkerchiefs masquerading as outfits that the other women are wearing I’m practically sporting a burka. Other than the beach, I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much female flesh on show in one place. It must be 5°C and yet none of the other women look the slightest bit cold while I threw on my jacket the second I got off the train and wished I’d brought my pashmina with me too.
‘’Scuse me?’ says the willowy blonde behind me. ‘Have you got the time, please?’
Her false-lashed gaze is fixed somewhere over my left shoulder but I’m pretty sure she’s talking to me because the only thing behind me is a wall.
‘It’s ten-thirty,’ I say, mesmerised by her pillow-like lips. She’s tanned within an inch of her life – a perfect match for the oak coat stand in the cloakroom – and her makeup is so flawless it looks airbrushed on. Her blonde hair is waist length and blow dried big so it frames her face like a Farrah Fawcett halo.
‘Fanks.’ Her glazed eyes flicker slightly.
‘Do you come here often?’ I cringe at my awkward attempt to initiate conversation.
‘Every weekend.’ She appears to be looking at the back of the head of the young man three people in front of me now.
‘Good music, is it?’
‘S’alright.’
‘Nice dance floor?’
She shakes her head. ‘Don’t dance. Not in these heels.’
I look at her feet and am surprised she’s even upright.
‘I hear a lot of footballers come here,’ I say.
Her blue eyes swivel towards me. The intensity of her gaze is unnerving. ‘Yeah, they do. Why, you after someone?’
She looks me up and down, as though seeing me for the first time then, having established that I’m about as much competition as Ann Widdecombe, she looks away again.
‘I was hoping to meet …’ I lower my voice so as not to announce it to the whole queue, ‘… Alex Henri.’
Her brow registers the slightest flicker of interest. ‘He’s fit.’
I wait to see if she’ll say something else but that appears to be it. Half an hour passes before someone talks to me again.
‘Sorry love,’ The security guard holds up his hand as I approach the gold rope at the entrance to the club. ‘Not tonight.’
I look at him in confusion. ‘What’s not tonight?’
He crosses his arms. ‘Being funny won’t help. Off you go.’
‘No … really … I genuinely don’t understand.’ I turn to look at Blondie who’s standing behind me looking as bored as she did half an hour ago. ‘What did he just say?’
She shrugs a shoulder. ‘He wants you to do one.’
‘Why?’
Another shrug.
‘Is it because I’m old?’ The security guard is about the same height as Brian but three times as wide and bald except for a neatly trimmed goatee beard that does little to disguise his double chin. ‘Because you can be sued for age discrimination. You know that don’t you?’
His facial expression doesn’t change. It’s still registering indifference. ‘You still here?’
‘You have to let me in because …’ I glance down the street, at the crowd approaching the club, the couples walking arm in arm, the groups of girls tottering in their heels, the gangs of lads laughing and throwing back their heads and the wide-eyed tourists consulting their maps and iPhones but my mind goes blank. He doesn’t care about Charlotte or Alex Henri or the accident. His job is to only let people in who fit the ‘young and beautiful’ brief. Neither of which I am. I look at Blondie in desperation but she shrugs her shoulders.
‘I’m her agent,’ I say in a flash of inspiration. ‘And if you don’t let me in she, and all her beautiful friends will go to …’ I say the first thing that comes into my head, ‘… Whisky Mist instead.’
One of Blondie’s friends gasps in surprise but is swiftly silenced by a jab to the waist from Blondie herself. She whispers something in her friend’s ear as the bouncer looks them up and down, then smiles sweetly at him.
‘In,’ the bouncer says as he unclips the rope and waves me into the club. His eyes don’t so much as flicker from Blondie’s cleavage.
It’s dark inside and I pause in the entrance, blinking to adjust to the gloom.
‘Twenty-five pounds,’ says a bored female voice. A black-haired woman is sitting in a smoked glass-fronted booth to my right. I rummage in my purse, pull out three ten-pound notes and slide them towards her. She takes them wordlessly and slides a five-pound note back. When she doesn’t say anything I take a step forward, towards the thud-thud-thud of dance music and tiny stream of light that’s escaping from double doors at the end of the corridor.
‘Stamp,’ the receptionist says then sighs.
I turn. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘I need your wrist.’ She looks dead behind the eyes, like she’d rather be anywhere in the world than here, now. I think of my sofa, a book, a glass of wine and Milly’s soft head on my lap and empathise.