Ambition (6 page)

Susan sat at her desk staring into space for at least an hour, and by the time the phone rang and Kathy said it was Mr Pope from Munich, her mind was made up.

‘I’ll do it,’ she said flatly. ‘I’ll do anything.’

As the car turned into the weeping neon wasteland of Saturday night King’s Cross, Tobias Pope whooped with all the good-humoured excitement of a young American boy at a
baseball game.

‘Fast, Susan! Fast food and fast sex! I love it! These are our people, Susan – just the place for a fast mover like you to end up!’

Beside him in the back seat, Susan Street shivered inside her Nicole Farhi overcoat and clenched her fists. End up? What did
that
mean? The simmering fear that her first task might be
to turn a trick came bubbling up inside her, making her heart pump hot blood into her cheeks.

‘Ah, here we are. Come up and see my etchings, my dear.’

Up two flights of stairs, between a place which called itself Family Fun and was filled with middle-aged men staring hungrily at young boys feeding endless coins into shrill and fruitless fruit
machines, and a fast-food restaurant called the Meat Machine (though this name would have done just as well for the alleged amusement arcade, she reflected sourly as she followed three steps behind
the eager Pope looking for all the world like a sullen Muslim bride), Susan faced her first task.

The taskmaster turned out to be a large man wearing a rubber apron and scratching a greasy pigtail, looking suspiciously at Tobias Pope as the immaculate American pumped his hand
enthusiastically.

‘Let me shake the hand of artistry, my good man! And are your services available at this very moment?’

The man’s expression changed to one Susan recognized as Let’s-Skin-The-Tourist. ‘Yep. Which one you want?’ He gestured around the room.

On the walls, liberally interspersed with colour photographs of the Princess of Wales torn from tabloids, smiling down like a Madonna of the mezzobrows, were dozens of ornate, scrolled designs,
of ships, wild beasts, hotrod cars.

‘Not me, my good artisan. My daughter here. A more elegant and subtle motif, don’t you think?’

Susan sat down quickly, conveniently in the subject’s chair. She was in a tattoo parlour! Of course she’d read about them; she had even commissioned a feature on them when she worked
at
Parvenu.
She and Isabella had screamed with laughter and pantomimed retching over the photographs taken to accompany the piece until the editor came out to investigate the racket. The
sheer ugliness of the blank-eyed human flotsam who cared so little for themselves that they had reduced themselves to the level of walls to be mired in graffiti had appalled and repulsed her,
despite her laughter. If anyone had told her she would one day be sitting in such a hellhole, not as an observer but an offering, she would have offered to call the men in white coats for them.

She got to her feet and, like the mythical drowning man, the faces of every man who had doubted her determination and ability to get to the top seemed to pass before her eyes, stopping at the
assembled male mass of the
Sunday Best.
Dozens of ugly, resentful men, laughing, chattering, pointing as she cleared out her desk and walked through the newsroom and out the door for the
last time. She could almost taste the salty tears of rage that coursed down her face.

No, no, no! Anything but that . . .

It might be a small design. In some hidden place. She knew that some bold girls about town had discreet lizards or birds on shoulders and ankles. She sat down.

Pope was conferring with the tattooist, smiling at her over the man’s shoulder. She gestured to him frantically.

‘Excuse me, my good man.’ He crossed the room and looked down at her contemptuously. ‘What’s wrong with you? Not refusing at the first jump, are we? Like a common little
carthorse.’

‘Do you seriously intend for me to have one of these things?’

‘Just a small one.’

‘You mean a life-size representation of the HMS
Brazen
?’

‘Just a small one.’

‘How small?’

‘Just a four-letter word. In letters no bigger than those of an upper-case typeface.’

Her mind raced, furtively thumbing and speed-reading the pages in her memory bank’s dictionary of obscenity. ‘Cunt?’ she whispered finally.

Pope drew back and made a little moue of disgust. ‘My dear Susan. You make your origins horribly obvious at times. No,
not
your job description; we both know that already.’
He chuckled. ‘A
clean
word. The cleanest word in the world, expressing all the beauty and symmetry of the free market.’

She shook her head blankly.

‘You’ll soon see, my dear.’

The tattooist cleared his throat in Technicolor.

‘But lo, the muse is tugging at the sleeve of our primitive genius, bidding him hurry.’ He patted her arm. ‘I suggest we close our eyes.’

She closed her eyes. She felt a hand pin back her thick dark fringe. She heard the little cocktail tray of paints being wheeled up beside her. She heard the miniature dentist’s drill being
switched on. She heard the tattooist telling her to relax and starting a long rambling story about a Hell’s Angel client who collapsed while having a Harley Davidson inscribed on his scrotum,
which really helped her trepidation.

Then suddenly the pain started, filling her entire head with white sound. It was as though a laser beam of pain, no bigger than the point of a needle and as sharp, was moving across the centre
of her forehead. She was just about to scream when it stopped. The room danced red and gold before her open eyes and she collapsed against Tobias Pope. The smell of his aftershave was grotesquely
reassuring.

Money and a bandage changed hands, and then he carried her out to the car as though she was something infinitely precious to him, and laid her along the back seat.

‘Drive,’ he said.

‘Where, sir?’

‘Just drive.’

He slipped a silver flask between her lips and she gulped Hine brandy hungrily. He smoothed back her fringe and tugged gently at the bandage. She winced. He took a small flashlight from his
pocket and examined his new
objet d’art.

‘Hmm, not bad. It’s bleeding a little, and beginning to swell, but do you know what? I think it will look rather smart when it clears up.’ He replaced the bandage.

‘More brandy.’

‘You’ve been very brave, Susan. That’s enough, you don’t want to go home drunk as a sailor on shore leave.
Very
brave. Some men would have collapsed. Proves what
I say about women being the stronger sex. And getting stronger all the time: soon we men will just be used as houseboys, changing fuses and such. You’ve got much stronger stomachs already,
I’ve always said so. Men couldn’t work as prostitutes
en masse,
they’d be throwing up every time a new baggy body came through the door. They couldn’t give birth,
they’d die of fright. They can’t take a tattoo without passing out. I admire the strength of you women, I really do.’ He shone the flashlight in her face. ‘Hmm, you
don’t look quite as green as you did a minute ago. Ready to go home?’

She nodded painfully.

‘Good girl.’ Leaning forward, he tapped on the glass. ‘The first Saturday night of next month, Susan. Keep it free.’

He had picked her up just around the corner from the
Best
at nine, and he had her home before ten. She had told Matthew she was going to Tiger Bay with Zero for the
weekend, so of course he was out drowning his sorrows – in alcohol-free lager, naturally. She fell into bed fully clothed, grateful for her thick dark fringe. But when she awoke, late on
Saturday morning, Matthew was looking sternly down at her and her brow was bare. She grasped feebly at her missing fringe. Too late.

‘Susan, you appear to have a tattoo on your face. Do you for a moment begin to comprehend what this can do to your blood? And the danger of infection from those wretched needles is beyond
belief. In this day and age, and with your knowledge of the subject, I particularly thought you might . . .’

On he droned, about AIDS and Hep B and the whole yucky kit and caboodle. This was typical of the way their relationship had gone. Not WHY?, but a Government Health Warning. It wasn’t much
fun living with a pamphlet.

Finally, after touching briefly on the social stigma of tattoos in contemporary society, he asked her how it had happened.

‘Zero and me had dinner at 192 and got so drunk on Velvet Hammers we missed the sleeper from Paddington. She dared me.’

He looked at her dubiously.

‘I was drunk, Matt! You should see Zero! She’s got a Sandinista on her thigh!’

‘Left or right?’

‘Left, of course.’

He sighed. ‘You’re impossible, Susan.’ Rolling off the bed he pulled on his tracksuit. ‘I’m going jogging. See you.’

She lay there miserably for a few minutes, then when she heard the door slam jumped out of bed and ran to the window. She touched her forehead gingerly; the bandage had fallen off and she could
feel small brittle beads of dry blood. Slowly she pulled aside the curtain, picked up a hand mirror and stepped out on to the balcony.

The righteous light of the sun shone mercilessly into Susan Street’s face, clearly picking out a word in small red capital letters on her forehead.

SOLD.

The beautiful black girl who had been born Sharon Sealey and was now Serena Soixante-Neuf laughed so loudly that the reporters peeking at her through the glass porthole in
Susan’s door recoiled with shock. Wrapped from head to toe in Donna Karan’s soft red leather and sitting on Susan’s desk, she recrossed her legs and lit a small cigar.

‘Well, Sue?’ she asked boldly, looking Susan straight in the eyes. They had met for the first time only half an hour earlier, but Serena was not one for gradually getting to know
people. Instant intimacy was her business.

Susan clicked off the machine and pocketed the tape. ‘Wonderful work. Thank you very much.’

Serena preened and smiled slyly. ‘And you’re offering . . . ?’

‘That’s not my job, I’m afraid. You’ll have to talk to our money man.’ She picked up a phone and punched an in-house number. ‘Kathy, can you tell Max
we’re ready for him now? Thanks. Tell him Miss . . . Miss . . . Soixante-Neuf is here with the recording.’

Serena screamed with laughter once more. The only thing she liked more than the sound of her own voice was the sound of her own name on embarrassed lips.

Mr Maxwell Sadkin, family man and pillar of his Reform synagogue, took one look at Serena, blanched and offered up a prayer to his God for protection – though whether from Serena or his
own affectionate nature he could not be sure. Susan left them alone to negotiate, Serena towering over the quaking money man. Holding the tape tight in her pocket, she knocked on Bryan
O’Brien’s door. ‘Bryan? I’ve got the Lejeune tape. Got a minute?’

Of course he had; he knew a hot putative front page when he smelled one. And this one had it all: sex, financial scandal and the supernatural, the Holy Trinity of the tabloids – even those
with pretensions to uptown.

Two years ago Constantine Lejeune had been an unknown Black Country clairvoyant who had turned up on the doorstep of a breakfast TV company claiming to know the whereabouts of a kidnapped
knitwear heiress. On the air he went into a trance; on the air the police located the girl, broke down a door and arrested her kidnappers. Since then Lejeune had risen irresistibly to a position
unparalleled by any other supernatural superstar.

He could stop clocks – once, spectacularly, Big Ben – bend cutlery – once, controversially, every fork on the yacht HMS
Britannia
– and find
bodies. But he was not content to be an entertainer or even a detective.

He held meetings which one journalist had compared scathingly to Nuremberg rallies – but then British journalists had a bad habit of comparing any public meeting with a charismatic speaker
and an audience which extended into double figures to a Nuremberg rally. But Lejeune did spout a strong populist line at his meetings: against immigration and international finance, he managed to
implicate a Second Coming into race riots and hinted strongly at having the ear of God. A Yorkshireman of alleged Franco-Greek extraction whose blunt speech was peppered with Gallic exclamations,
his greasy good looks and rabble-rousing rhetoric assured him a massive following amongst middle-aged women and overgrown boys. A book and several long-playing records of prophecy (‘Prophet
with a profit’, Lejeune’s detractors were fond of calling him) had sold millions.

Yes, if there were two things that Constantine Lejeune particularly hated they were miscegenation and high finance. And now here was a tape which not only had him engaged in sexual congress with
a prostitute whose St Lucian accent was clearly in evidence, but also breaking off from his exertions to receive calls from his broker. Constantine Lejeune, hater of high finance and people’s
friend, was using his strange gift to make quite a killing on the stock market.

‘I don’t know quite how he could make such a stupid mistake,’ Serena had said. ‘I only know he’s not the first famous bastard I’ve done business with. They
all seem to think that if you’re on the game you’re automatically deaf, dumb and blind too. But this is the first one I’ve been really interested in nailing. Call it personal,
because he’s a racist jerk, or call it business because he’s the biggest name I’ve had yet, and I know you’ll pay through the nose for him. Anyway, you can take that to the
bank.’ With that she had tossed the tape on to Susan’s desk. ‘You know all that stuff he peddles about the Second Coming? I’ve got it all down here. And the third, and the
fourth . . .’

Now that unmistakable Black Country-on-Seine voice groaned from O’Brien’s tape machine . . .‘
Sacré bleu
bah gum . . .’ The Australian laughed and clicked
it off.

‘Good work, Sue. I think I can do you a front page for this little beaut. “As Told To” suit you?’

‘Suits me fine.’ Susan Street smiled.