Ambition (2 page)

It was all so predictable somehow, her irresistible rise. She sat on the principal’s window sill, biting her thumbnail and looking out at the playground where her heart had been broken
and her fate had been sealed and she wished that somehow she could have been given some choice in the matter of her ambition and the success it would inevitably bring.

Six weeks later she was sitting in the lap, if not of luxury, then of Gary Pride, sniffing amphetamine sulphate through a fifty-pound note. In theory, she worked at
The Beat
during the day and slept at the YWCA at night. In fact, she spent the day slouching against the office partitions cleaning her nails with a switchblade and sneering at her colleagues.
In later years such action would be known as a ‘career move’
.

At night she slept with Gary Pride in his coffin in Limehouse. Gary Pride was a rising young pop star of twenty-two who made awful records which contained the words ‘Pride’,
‘Soul’, ‘Joy’, ‘Respect’ and ‘Dignity’ repeated many times in various permutations. He said they were a homage to Motown. They sounded marginally
less black than mid-period New Seekers. That didn’t stop people buying them or Susan sleeping with him. Secretly, she held a deeply felt belief that he should be formally executed for crimes
against the memory of black music.

Gary Pride had an ugly face and a beautiful smile which made you forget how basically worthless he was. At least, everyone but Susan. She thought he was a scumbag.

She slept with him because she had quickly learned that a teenage country girl with the legs of a dancer, the behind of a boy and the lips of a Port Said suck artist was a sitting Danish
pastry for every disease-carrying flyboy in the shop window, not to mention the streets, offices and subways of the big city. Gary was her protection. By doing one unpleasant thing (Gary) she was
made immune to the multitude of unpleasant things she might otherwise be cornered into doing. It was, if you wanted to be vulgar, immunization by injection. In later life she would calculate that
at least eighty per cent of the girls she had known had tolerated their boyfriends for this same reason.

Of course, Gary Pride didn’t know this. Like all shallow men he believed in True Love, taken frequently. He wrote songs for her – ‘(I Saw You) Dancing By Your
Handbag’ and ‘Never Love A Soulboy’. She was so embarrassed she wanted to die, or preferably to kill him. Instead she accompanied him to the
Top Of The Pops
studio and to
horrible places like Aylesbury where the band always tried out before London. She learned how to ignore the girls who hung around the stage door and spat at the band’s girlfriends, even when
it stuck to her face.

‘You’ve got dignity, gel,’ said Gary. (He liked that word.) ‘You’re just like the Queen Mum.’

He stayed faithful, by and large, to her because she was lividly young and pale, still uncalloused inside her Lewis Leathers second skin. Also because she worked on
The Beat.
(‘Yeah, my girl’s a writer,’ she once heard him boasting to some fellow warbling cretin. ‘Not some record company slag.’)

Also because she had been a virgin.

His first!

He could laugh about it now, which he did loudly and lewdly and often, in front of his entourage, squeezing her thigh and referring smarmily to their first night of passion. It was like
living in a Carry On film.

But at the time, he had almost killed her . . .

‘You’re a
what?’
Gary Pride jumped from the king-size coffin and stood in the middle of his Limehouse warehouse, naked except for a 666 tattoo on his
shoulder.

‘A virgin,’ she whispered. Things had gone very quiet. Everyone was looking.

‘Jesus, Susan!’ He turned on the room, where his entourage lay sprawled on the flagstones watching
The World At War
with the sound turned down and the 1910 Fruitgum
Company on the Dansette, snorting, swigging, guzzling and groping yet another night away. ‘Out, the lot of you liggers! OUT! Before I call the Bill!’

Shooting Susan poison looks, blaming her for displeasing their master and mealticket, the revellers staggered out into the cold night air. Gary Pride bolted the huge doors and stalked
purposefully back to the coffin where Susan lay on her back with her eyes closed, trying to make herself look as much like the red silk lining as possible.

‘Susan! God ’elp me, gel, if you don’t open your eyes right now I’ll close them for you permanent!’

She opened her grey eyes wide. The effect she was hoping for was that of those wretched Third World urchins with the big eyes and raggedy clothes in those awful Woolworth’s prints her
mother had such a liking for. She couldn’t swear to it, but she thought they were called things like ‘Chico’.

‘Right. Now do you mean to tell me—’ To her horror she noticed he was getting another erection. She hadn’t seen anything so disgusting since her beloved grandmother
had given up eating pigs’ trotters on account of her dentures. Gary fastidiously threw a buffalo skin (Magnificent animal, innit, the buffalo? Sorter . . . majestic. Dignifield. I fink
I’ll write a song about a buffalo) on to her smooth white body. ‘Do you mean to tell me you are an actual virgin?’

‘Was.’

‘Don’t rub it in, gel!’ He smote himself dramatically. ‘WAS.’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh my God.’ He sank on the stone floor theatrically, then jumped up as the chill flags touched his behind. ‘People think I’m a wild sort of guy. I guess I am.’
(He always assumed an American accent when talking about himself.) ‘But I got my own code of honour. And do you know what the number one rule on my code of honour is?’ He paused, one
hand in the air, like Simon Rattle about to strut his stuff.

‘No, Gary,’ she whispered. She had always envisaged that getting shot of her virginity would be like having a tooth out: painful, boring, but basically banal and hopefully over
quite quickly. She hadn’t expected a cross between
Twenty Questions
and Armageddon.

‘I don’t sleep with virgins, that’s what!’ He glared vengefully.

‘I’m sorry, Gary.’ She thought he might strike her.

‘ ’Ow was you to know?’ He looked at her with weary compassion. ‘You ever read any books about knights?’

‘Only
Ivanhoe,
at school.’

‘That’s bollocks. You wanna read the real stuff . . . the Crusaders, the Knights of Simon Templar . . . magic! Well, I see myself as a sort of urban parfait knight. You know what
that is?’

‘No, Gary.’

‘They got a code, like all outlaws.’ He thrust out his jaw, looking like something on loan from the Natural History Museum. ‘AND VIRGINS IS RIGHT OUT!’

‘I’m sorry, Gary.’

He shook his head with infinite wisdom. ‘ ’Ow was you to know? You’re a good gel, Susan.’ He lifted the buffalo skin and looked at her body, the gleam of infinite
lechery dawning in his bloodshot eyes. Suddenly he vaulted back into the coffin, showing a remarkable agility. ‘Might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, I suppose!’

Before the night was over she was sitting on his face. Now she was sitting on his lap in his dressing room after a show at the Hammersmith Odeon, and he was shoving her
towards an exotic-looking girl with a nose-ring. What a fucking parfait knight he was.

‘I fancy a nice bit of dyke action,’ he was whispering. Charming.

The crowd did a passable impersonation of après-ski Red Sea as Susan and the girl slid to the floor.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Shira.’

‘Mine’s Susan.’

‘Yes, I know. I see you around with the band.’

‘Weren’t you in Birmingham the other night?’

‘Yes, right, when you . . . ’

‘Jesus H!’ yelled Gary Pride. ‘You want the room cleared so you can tell each other your life stories? Now eat it!’

The two girls slipped from their scuffed leather skins, under which they were naked. The silence dripped saliva. Shira had surprising emerald-green pubic hair and a tattoo just below her
navel warning KEEP OFF THE GRASS. Susan got down to grazing, with a vengeance.

Gary Pride bought time.

He bought friends.

He bought a season ticket to Highbury, but he didn’t dare go. (More than my life’s worth. I’d be ripped apart by the love of my people.)

He bought books on the English Civil War, the code of the Samurai and the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, but he never read them. (Life’s too short, innit? Look, the
snooker’s on.)

He bought suits of armour. Of course he never wore them. When they began to collect dust he had them packed in a crate and sent to his family in Kent. (He claimed to be a Cockney; it was his
whole
raison d’être.
His first album was called ‘Cockney Pride’. There must have been a strong wind blowing south from the vicinity of Bow Bells the day Gary Pride
was born, Susan secretly thought.)

He bought lutes, mandolins and lyres and threw them down in fits of pique when they failed to respond in exactly the same way as a 1976 Fender bass.

But most of all, he bought drugs. And these he certainly knew what to do with. Hash, speed, cocaine, opium and LSD. It was the acid that broke the cretin’s back. He woke up in the
coffin one morning screaming about the Rotarians. And the Freemasons. And the Tongs. Through a lurching amphetamine fog hangover Susan saw him pull on his nearest clothing (a Samurai ceremonial
robe – was he going to get stopped at Customs!) and rifle through the bureau for his passport. She never heard from him again. A month or so later his record company told her he had gone to
the volcanic island of Vanuatu to get his head together.

She was eighteen and sick to the back teeth of asking crooning morons too stoned to remember their own phone numbers what their views were on the situation in Rhodesia,
which had become as essential to a
Beat
interview as a favourite colour was to the teenybopper magazines. If you failed to ask them to their stupid faces you had to call them at home and
pop the question, and doing it in isolation made you feel even dumber. Then a posh cow called Rebecca called her at the office one day and asked if they could have a drink.

In a bar in Jermyn Street Rebecca sighed deeply into her Kir Royale and murmured something about New Blood. About the Street. About the Blank Generation. Susan watched, fascinated. Rebecca
talked into her drink like a ventriloquist drinking a glass of water while screeching ‘Gottle of geer!’ and sounded like a Labour Party Manifesto. Then suddenly she rounded on Susan,
looking her straight in the eye, and said in a completely different, mid-Atlantic voice, ‘Well?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Fifteen thousand a year, pathetic really, no car, expenses, as much depilatory as you can use and endless free samples, well, of
everything
really.’ Rebecca fished in
her Fendi bag and threw a glossy magazine on to the bar. A girl in a tux pouted furiously at them.
PARVENU.
‘We’ll call you associate ed, if you want. Doesn’t
mean
anything. But everyone else is an editor, even the messenger, so you might as well be.’ Her mission complete, Rebecca wilted elegantly again and began to murmur into her cocktail about
Working Class Energy.

Susan knew of
Parvenu.
It was a magazine which proclaimed, subtitled on the cover of every issue, ‘LIFE IS A PARTY’. It was frivolous, snobbish and shallow. But
after
The Beat,
where thirty-year-old men looked for the meaning of life in plastic platters, it came as a breath of fresh carbon monoxide. So she murmured into her Black Russian about a
Time For Everything and the New Selfishness. Displaying a healthy measure of it, Rebecca shot off five minutes later leaving Susan to pay for the drinks.

In her two years at
Parvenu
Susan learned how to call dinner lunch, how to call enemies ‘Darling’, how to dress, how to drink and how to tell the
perfect lie. She also learned things about men that made Gary Pride look like a verger.

One afternoon after a fashion shoot she went to bed with three male models. In the morning one of them asked her if she had ever done it with an Afghan.

‘Guerrilla?’

He ruffled her hair and laughed. ‘Hound, silly.’

Then she interviewed a hot young actor at a hotel in Kensington. They stayed in his room for a week, ordering cocaine, champagne and caviar from the hotel’s various pantries. On the
day of his departure he was very quiet. He didn’t look at her as he packed and she guessed that he was already psyching himself into his next role: that of loving, faithful boyfriend to the
filthy rich Manhattan heiress he was engaged to.

‘Aren’t you going to give me anything to remember you by?’ she finally asked flirtatiously and desperately from the bed.

He pulled on his cowboy boots, stood up and looked down at her. ‘I have,’ he said quietly. ‘Herpes.’ Then he was out of the door, carrying the one canvas tote bag
that made up his luggage, a man-of-the-people affectation that had charmed her a week ago and now revolted her.

It took two weeks, a week’s wages and a private clinic before she was sure he was just a sadist with a kooky sense of humour. Herpes was the new urban folk demon; people told jokes
against it as if to inoculate themselves. What do the couple who have everything have embroidered on their towels? ‘HIS’ and ‘HERPES’.

She shared a flat in SW10 with a cousin of Isabella’s, the girl at the next desk in the
Parvenu
office. The girl called herself Trash. She was impossibly rich, had five
A-levels and worked in an Arab clip joint in W1. Her family were related by marriage to a certain Family who shall be nameless and blameless. She wore her evening clothes only once: on coming home,
around four in the morning, she dropped them into the matt black dustbin as other more frugal girls might drop them carelessly on to the floor after a hard day at the office. Occasionally, she
burned that night’s dress in the sink, scat singing arias from
Madame Butterfly
as she did so.