Midnight Girls (11 page)

‘We’re absolutely dying to see it – aren’t we, Midge?’

Imogen couldn’t think of anything more glamorous and exciting than to go to Colette’s. ‘Oh, yes,’ she breathed. ‘Could we?’

David gave her a wise glance. ‘Not yet, my darlings. You’re not quite ready. Remember little Liesl’s song in
The Sound of Music
? How she is unprepared for a world of roués and cads? I think the same about you. You’re still very young. Some of the beasts in there would be happy to tear you to pieces.’

Imogen was disappointed. They looked so grown up and here they were, sipping fine champagne. Were they really not ready?

Allegra made a face. ‘It’s just a club! How dangerous can it be?’

David pursed his lips and said quietly, ‘You need to learn a little more about the world before you get there – otherwise it could be a painful surprise. And I don’t want to
have
to answer to your parents if you’re corrupted too young.’

Allegra giggled. ‘No one will corrupt me!’ she declared. ‘I can do a perfectly good job of that on my own, thanks very much.’

‘I’ve no doubt. But that doesn’t mean I have to help you along the way. You’ll get into Colette’s all in good time, I promise you that. Now, girls.’ He offered them an arm each. ‘Shall we perambulate? Let’s go and look at some of the fearfully nasty hats on show. Ten pounds to the spotter of the worst.’

Chapter 8

New York
Autumn 2000

AH, THIS IS
it! This is what it’s all about. Sex, drugs, cooking. It doesn’t get much better than this. Living the dream, man, living the dream
…

Mitch closed his eyes and let out a long sigh of appreciation as the cute waitress he’d hired only the night before sank to her knees in the alleyway and took his cock into her mouth.

He knew he’d enjoy the whole thing a lot more if he wasn’t high and three-quarters drunk, and if he weren’t clutching a box full of lettuces under one arm, but he wasn’t one to turn down an opportunity like this. He’d known she was up for something since the moment she’d arrived, from the way she’d wagged her little derrière at him, and when she’d found out he had a stash of heroin that he might possibly share with her, he’d seen that eager hunger in her eyes and known she’d do anything to get some.

He grunted happily as she slid her warm wet lips up and down his shaft, and then tickled the top with her tongue. That felt good – hell, it felt more than good, it was delicious.
Sex is like eating
, he decided.
It answers some kind of need right in the centre of us. When it’s done right, it’s the ultimate physical satisfaction, it’s the reason to be alive
.

The problem was, his nerves were so strained and his body so jaded from the rigours he submitted it to, it was hard to feel that peak of pleasure any longer.

I’m fucking tired
, he thought to himself. The waitress had brought her hand into play, rubbing his cock in firm straight strokes while sucking hard on his glans.
So fucking tired
.

He could feel that circling tingle deep within his balls that meant a climax was not far off.
But it’s like a slot machine. Put your money in, you get your game. Doesn’t mean it’s worth the price of the play
.

The waitress increased her pace, stroking him hard and tickling faster with her mouth. Mitch felt his orgasm begin; he looked down at her blonde head bobbing up and down on his cock and it gave him the push over the edge: he groaned as he felt himself spurt into her mouth. He throbbed three or four times, his face contorting with the sweet agony of coming, then the ejaculation subsided and he quickly pushed her away.

‘Did you like that, Mitch?’ the waitress asked, wiping her mouth.

‘Yeah, baby, thanks.’ He tucked his cock back into his pants as best he could with one hand, the other arm still occupied with the box of Romaine lettuces destined for that night’s Caesar salads. ‘Very nice, honey.’

‘Have you … Can I have …?’ Her high voice faded away and she blinked big, needy eyes at him.

‘You want the junk? OK, no problem.’ He pulled a small plastic bag of pale brown powder from his pocket. ‘Here. Have it.’

Her eyes widened even further. ‘All of it?’

‘Sure.’
I’ll regret that
, he thought. ‘Take it all. Just don’t fuck up on the job, OK? And you’d better show up for your shifts or I’ll fire your ass so fast you won’t know what happened. Smack is no excuse for not working, understand?’

She nodded happily, evidently itching to get her hands on the treat he was holding out to her. ‘You got it.’

‘Good. Now, that was nice. Maybe we can do it again some time.’

‘Any time, Mitch, any time.’

He watched as she went happily off down the alleyway, her little reward stuffed into the pocket of her denim jacket. She’d go back to some dive she shared with a boyfriend, probably a cook too, someone who lived in the same strange world of crazy hours, intense work, heat and pressure, someone who also experienced the mad high of the post-shift euphoria and who craved the same release that drugs brought.

Was it really nearly a year since he’d come to New York? Mitch found it hard to remember that innocent young man who’d got off the bus at Port Authority then. That kid had never dreamt he’d get involved in this kind of world. He’d been a hard-working boy who wanted to make something of himself, clean-living, a young man whose only idea of a good time was downing a few beers and watching the baseball. His one vice was smoking – he was addicted to Camels. The only time he didn’t have one hanging from his mouth was when he was cooking. That was the crazy thing: he could go for eight hours straight without even thinking about a cigarette but, the minute he stepped out of the kitchen, he felt like he’d die if he didn’t have one of those babies within about ten seconds.

He’d never experienced physical hardship like working in a New York kitchen in a proper fancy restaurant. Working in diners out West was nothing compared to this. He started at seven o’clock in the evening when the first covers came in – rich men and women who knew good food and expected it on their plates when they were paying top New York prices – and then did not stop until almost two in the morning:
cooking
, tasting, seasoning and plating up, producing the same dishes to the exact same standard of perfection over and over again, as the kitchen grew hotter and tenser and more and more like his idea of hell. He thrived on the atmosphere and the manic way time passed but, with his working hours flashing by, it was no surprise he began to feel the need to live intensely outside of work too. Half his life was being swallowed up by it. There had to be moments when he felt alive and engaged with the world beyond the kitchen.

But there was nowhere else he’d rather be. He’d fallen in love with New York, and he’d fallen hard. Once he’d learnt how the place worked, once he’d found Herbie, the wild-eyed pastry chef from New Jersey who’d taken him under his wing … well, things became a lot easier for Mitch. He grew up fast. His first job was tricky, having to master making pasta from scratch in an hour, but Herbie had helped him. Then, just as he’d started to get the hang of it, the restaurant suddenly went bust, and shut. This came as no surprise to the other commis-chefs: they shrugged their shoulders and moved on, giving friends a call and finding a new position sometimes within hours. This was how it worked apparently: restaurants opened, a team was assembled to work there – usually friends and associates of whoever was hired as head chef – and then the great scam began. The cooking and waiting staff knew this world well. They knew it better than their fresh-faced, eager bosses, usually pleasant enough people who’d decided it would be fun to run a restaurant and had sunk all their money into it, that this world was a tough one.

‘No one can make money out of restaurants,’ Herbie told him. He looked even crazier than most chefs, with his mad curly hair and a criss-cross of burn scars up and down his arms and all over his hands. ‘Except for the lucky few.
They’re
the ones who give all the others the impression that this is somehow a sure-fire way to make bucks. But you know what? It’s a sure-fire way to lose your house, and that’s about it.’

While the new restaurant was still afloat, the staff were quick to make as much out of it as they could: over-ordering food and selling it on; walking out with hundreds of dollars worth of prime seafood or top-notch fillet steak concealed under their coats. They drank themselves stupid at the bar and stole bottles of wine, cutlery, linen, and anything else that wasn’t nailed down. They worked hard, too, but often while drunk or stoned.

‘These guys are going to go bust,’ Mitch said to Herbie disbelievingly.

‘Uh-huh. Then we’ll all move on. I already heard about a new joint opening up in the Village, if you’re interested.’

‘But shouldn’t we try and help them?’

Herbie made a face and said, ‘Nah. They were stupid enough to open a French bistro when everyone’s crazy for Italian, and to paint it this shade of puke green, and to have a menu that gives me the shits just reading it. They deserve it.’ He saw the expression on Mitch’s face. ‘Aw, c’mon, man. Don’t feel sorry for ’em. That’s just the way it is. We gotta feed the beast. This place has gotta die so others might live. It’s harsh, but there we are.’

It was Herbie who got Mitch a place in the next restaurant as soon as the one they were working in went down, just as he’d predicted. He also got Mitch a bed in the apartment he was renting, though it meant sleeping on a futon affair in the tiny sitting room and folding it away every day before heading off to the restaurant. It was Herbie who brought him into the underground world of the chefs, kitchen staff and waiters, who worked and partied together in the small hours when the city’s respectable citizens were all asleep.

It was Herbie who introduced him to heroin.

By the time Mitch had been working in New York six months, he was on the brink of a nervous breakdown. He was frying steaks, broiling chops and roasting Beef Wellington at his meat station in the restaurant, and then doing it all over again in his sleep. It felt like there wasn’t an hour of the day when he wasn’t sweating over a roasting hot grill, or slicing bloody meat, or crisping off fat.

‘You need to calm down, man,’ Herbie had announced, looking at Mitch’s red, tired eyes and trembling hands. ‘Here, try some of this.’ He’d tossed a small bag of brown powder towards him.

‘Uh-uh.’ Mitch shook his head. ‘I’m not going there.’ He had a healthy disregard for drugs: only the losers in his town had taken stuff like that. He may have left small towns behind him, but he still had their attitudes.

Herbie laughed. ‘Don’t worry, kid. Don’t like injections, huh?’

Mitch shook his head again. He’d seen some of the other guys shooting up – even stumbled across one of the kitchen porters in the alley outside the kitchen, pulling a bit of tubing tight round his arm, holding one end with his teeth so he could stab a syringe into a vein with his free hand. It had looked sick, and so did the porter, with his grey face and desperate eyes.

‘You don’t have to slam it. You
smoke
it. It’s not addictive that way – well, not much. And it sure helps to calm you down. It’s like stepping into Nirvana for a little while. Everyone does it, honest. I’m tellin’ ya, man, it’s amazing, and you won’t get hooked. Ever heard of junkies who don’t inject?’

He never had. Smoking didn’t sound too bad. Mitch loved to smoke, after all. He’d been at it since he was fourteen and hiding under the bleachers from the football coach.

‘Here,’ said Herbie. ‘Lemme show you. Once ain’t going to hurt.’

He had fetched a good-sized piece of aluminium foil and given Mitch a toilet roll tube to hold over the little pile of powder.

‘I’m gonna heat the dope till it turns into vapour, OK? You inhale it through the tube. Nod your head when you’ve had enough and I’ll stop burning. It’ll smoke for another couple of seconds after that, so don’t waste it.’

Am I really gonna try this stuff?
he wondered, as Herbie assembled the gear. But he looked up to the other chef, who knew so much more about how the world worked. Herbie was too smart to fuck up, wasn’t he? If he said it was OK, then it must be. And Mitch would love to feel good again, and shake this bone-crushing tiredness, just for a while.
Maybe once … it can’t hurt, not just the once. So I can see what all the fuss is about
.

He had watched while Herbie clicked his cigarette lighter under the piece of foil, heard the crackle as it heated and the heroin glowed. He sucked in the smoke, held it deep within while it worked its magic, and then released it.

The minute he did, he knew that his pal had been lying to him. There was no way this was not addictive: the feeling of utter bliss and warmth that filled him to the top of his skull was the most beautiful sensation Mitch had ever had, and he wanted it again as quickly as possible.

‘Nice, huh?’

Mitch nodded.

‘See? What did I tell you?’ Herbie grinned. ‘Don’t say I never do nothing for ya, man.’

Oh, wow. That hits the spot. It really hits the spot
.

Chapter 9

Westfield Boarding School for Girls
Spring 2001

IMOGEN AND ALLEGRA
were in Allegra’s room, putting off finishing their evening prep and painting their toe nails instead. Life in the sixth form was much better than lower down in the school – they were finally in Warwick House, where they were treated more like adults and had their own private study bedrooms.

When they’d returned to Westfield the previous September, armed with their respectable GCSE results, they all seemed to have grown up over the holidays, as though the months away from school had allowed them to digest and accept what had happened the previous term. It had changed them, there was no doubt about that. They were quieter than before, and their group of three became more and more insular, trusting only each other.

The teachers understood that Sophie Harcourt’s death had affected some of their pupils more deeply than they could know – after all, Martha Young had never returned to Westfield after the holidays – but even so, they were surprised that their most rebellious characters had mysteriously settled down and begun to apply themselves to their books.