Nothing to Lose (5 page)

‘It’s an ill wind, sweet . . .’ Daff always said.

April tiptoed into the dimly lit bedroom and peeped at the tiny truckle bed alongside hers. Her daughter, Beatrice-Eugenie, two and a half years old, the most gorgeous child in the universe, and the reason behind the roses-round-the-door dream, slept peacefully. Tired as she was, April allowed herself a few moments of sheer indulgence, just staring with total love, then dropped a kiss on the smooth forehead, pulled the discarded duvet over the tiny shoulders, and crept back out of the room.

Sliding out of the appalling French maid’s costume, too tired to put it on a hanger and knowing that if she didn’t she’d be too tired to iron it tomorrow, she went for the half-measure and folded it over the arm of the chair. Then pouring the dregs from the one remaining bottle of wine in the fridge, she slumped onto the sofa. It was a hot and sultry night. Gone midnight. Beatrice-Eugenie would be awake by six. And April had all three of her part-time jobs to do tomorrow. She lit her last cigarette of the day, and squinted through the smoke at the gallery of paintings around the wall.

Sometimes she really hated Noah for leaving her with all this. Sometimes. Most of the time she still loved him more than life. She wondered if she would ever see him again.

Because of her unhappy home situation, Noah had been the answer to all her prayers. At thirty he’d been the only grown-up boyfriend she’d ever had. He was tall, with a rugby player’s physique – even down to the broken nose and she hadn’t believed him when he’d said he was an artist. Artists, she’d imagined, were – well – like Jix. All sort of ethereal. Noah was anything but. His paintings were screaming blocks of colour which she didn’t understand, but which apparently were exactly what the loft-livers were looking for. When he asked her to move in with him, in his flat in up-and-coming Bixford, she hadn’t thought twice.

So number 51 had become her home, and Jix and Daff, and Joel and Rusty had become her neighbours, and life had been wonderful. She and Noah had lived on love and commissions for two years. Then, without warning, he’d decamped with one of the warehouse-living, share-dealing women for whom he’d been doing two paintings.

April blew a plume of smoke into the living room. It hovered in a blue stream on the still night air. The memory still hurt. Finding the note, finding Noah’s side of the wardrobe empty, finding his brushes and canvases gone from the kitchen cupboard . . .

She stubbed out the cigarette and hauled herself to her feet. Five hours’ sleep if she was lucky. Her eyes were already gritty at the thought as she switched off the lamps and the television and drifted into the bedroom. Beatrice – Eugenie stirred in her sleep, her straight hair fanned out in a halo on the pillow. Bending down to kiss her, April wondered how long it would take to give her child a proper life. A year? Two? Could she cope with another two years of non-stop work and scrimping and scraping?

With luck, though, she thought, sliding into bed, it would be sooner rather than later. All she had to do was to find Noah and tell him that he had a daughter. She pushed her head into the pillow, listening to the Bixford night-noises outside. With Jix’s help and contacts she’d already searched for Noah for over two years without success, but she was sure she’d find him one day.

April closed her eyes and felt sleep rush in. Noah hadn’t even known she was pregnant when he left. But when she found him, when he saw Beatrice-Eugenie, he’d come back, she knew he would.

‘Make that three tricolore salads, then – and one green. Two lasagnes, a spag bol and a seafood risotto. Garlic bread all round, fizzy water – oh, and a carafe of Frascati. OK, darling? Got all that?’

April nodded, smiling her bimbette waitress smile, the one that came slightly lower down the scale than her bimbette cocktail-bar one, and flicked closed her little spiral-bound notebook. Easing herself between the Pasta Place’s crowded tables, she padded towards the kitchen’s swing doors. It was almost two o’clock, and the hordes of lunchtime grazers were showing no intention of returning to their offices. Not that she blamed them: the temperature was in the mid-nineties.

In the kitchen Sofia was leaning out of the trattoria’s window, sucking in the foetid air from Bixford High Street, while Antonio, listening to the greyhound results on a 1960s transistor radio, flipped pasta with confident dexterity.

April wiped the perspiration from beneath her eyes and above her upper lip, and started to fan her face with the notebook. ‘Oh, sorry – yeah, table twelve’s finally made a decision.’ She ripped out the top page and handed it to Sofia. ‘They should be the last, and I put the closed sign up ten minutes ago. God, it’s so hot! Maybe we’ll get a storm to break it up.’

‘Maybe.’ Sofia hauled herself in from the window, studied the order, nudged her husband aside and began frying onions and garlic on autopilot. ‘But, of course, coming from Umbria. I’m used to this weather.’

‘Get away!’ April grinned. ‘You’re from Dagenham!’

‘But my genes are from Umbria,’ Sofia said, snatching at a handful of fresh basil. ‘It makes all the difference.’ April untied her white apron, and flexed her toes inside her sandals. Well, Daff’s sandals really. She seemed destined to spend her life in other people’s shoes. The previous night’s Manolo Blahniks were Sofia’s pride and joy. One day, when she’d found Noah and reunited her family, and got the cottage-in-the-country dream sorted out, she’d really have to buy a pair of shoes of her very own.

‘Will it be OK if I leave you to wait on table twelve? Only I’m due to meet Jix at the stadium in half an hour and I’d like to see Bee first.’

‘Of course,’ Sofia nodded. ‘You must spend some time with the little ’un. You work too hard,
cara.
’

‘Have to. Can’t pay the rent otherwise – and I certainly don’t want my landlord hammering on my door, do I?’

She and Sofia pulled mocking faces at one another. The thought was too awful to contemplate. Number 51 and the Pasta Place, and in fact a good-sized chunk of Bixford High Street, belonged to the Gillespies. Oliver and Martina had bestowed the leases of the properties to their only son on his twenty-first birthday eight years previously, when the Gillespie Greyhound Stadium was in its embryonic design stages and Oliver was still passing backhanders to the planners. As landlords went, Rachman was sweet and peachy in comparison to Sebastian Gillespie.

‘Sod it!’ Antonio dropped the pasta on to the counter with a sticky slap and snapped off the radio. ‘Beijing Bob has just won the two o’clock at Crayford!’

April and Sofia regarded him without sympathy. Living in Bixford, they both knew that gambling was a mug’s game, and that heaping any sort of fortune on to the nose of a greyhound was asking for trouble.

‘How much?’ Sofia raised her voice above the sizzling pan. ‘Not the bloody business tax money again?’

Antonio shook his head. ‘It’s not the money, Sofia, as I keep telling you. It’s the form what damages the odds. Beijing Bob is due to run here at Gillespie’s next Saturday, and I’d hoped to do him ante-post. Now he’ll be odds on. No one will give me a decent price.’

April winked at Antonio, shrugged at Sofia, and headed for number 51.

Beatrice-Eugenie, wearing just pants and a floppy sun hat, was splashing happily in and out of a washing-up bowl in the back yard. April paused in the kitchen doorway, watching her with love, and thinking that even if the country cottage and the lawn were not a million miles away, those refinements would currently be wasted on her daughter. At this moment, screaming with laughter, and having a water battle with Jix’s mum. Beatrice-Eugenie was obviously in heaven.

Daff was crouched on an upturned bucket, to the left of the doorstep in the high-walled yard. April knew it was just far enough outside not to bring on one of Daff’s panic attacks, but still close enough for her to rescue Beatrice-Eugenie in case of an emergency.

‘You finished? God, is that the time already?’ Daff squinted up at her, temporarily abandoning squirting plumes of water from a washing-up liquid bottle much to Beatrice-Eugenie’s chagrin. ‘We’ve been having a smashing time, sweet – and I’ve put loads of sun block on her so’s she won’t get burned.’

‘Thanks.’ April squatted beside the bowl and splashed water over her daughter’s smooth golden shoulders. ‘You be a good girl for Daff, Bee. Mummy won’t be long . . . and when I come back we’ll go to the park.’

Beatrice-Eugenie wrinkled her small nose, tilted back the sun hat with the nonchalant air of a junior Frank Sinatra, and gave her mother a gappy smile. ‘Ducks?’

‘Ducks,’ April confirmed, kissing the top of the sun hat. It had come from the charity shop next door to the Pasta Place, and despite frequent washings still smelled mouldy. ‘And we’ll go on the swing too. And then we’ll have tea in the garden . . .’

Some garden, April thought, kissing her damp daughter again and standing up: a six-foot-square piece of concrete, walled on all sides, with only the persistent weeds adding any greenery. Still, one day, when she was a proper mother, it would all be different. Right now, she had to shimmy out of the waitress uniform, scramble into something suitable for the afternoon, and be at the stadium before Jix left. Then tonight, in the frilly French maid outfit in the Copacabana, she’d start the treadmill all over again.

‘You had something to eat?’ Daff resumed the water-squirting. ‘I could get you a quick sandwich if you like. Me and Bee had Marmite.’

‘No, I’m fine. Sofia and Tonio fed me, thanks. And I’ve got to dash.’

With a last check to make sure that Daff and Beatrice-Eugenie were fully equipped with Nivea, lemon barley water and Pringles, April trudged indoors.

‘I thought you weren’t coming.’ Jix unpeeled himself from the deserted stands and stood up. ‘I thought you’d skived off to do a spot of sunbathing in the park.’

‘I wish.’ April pushed the stray strands of hair back into her scrunchie. ‘It’s so hot! I really wanted to stay with your mum and Bee and the washing-up bowl.’

Jix laughed. ‘Sounds tempting ... So – what do you want to do today? Stick together and take pot luck, or split and offer specials?’

‘You stick to offering the specials. I prefer keeping my clothes on, thank you. And anyway, it depends who we’ve got this afternoon. You know I’m no good with the sad ones. I can’t bear it when they cry.’

‘Me neither.’ Jix flipped through his clipboard. ‘And I always believe them when they say they can’t afford to pay – and I’ve been doing this for years. Sometimes I wonder why Oliver keeps me on.’

‘Because you know far too much about him for him to let you go. And anyway, as debt-collectors go, you’re ace. You never get heavy, and your softly-softly approach seems to work brilliantly. Even if it does take a bit longer to rake in all the money.’ She smiled at him. ‘And you don’t look scary, which has to be a bonus. I mean, if you turned up on my doorstep looking like that, I’d definitely give you my last quid.’

Wearing the velvet flares, with a trailing multicoloured scarf round his waist, a tie-dye vest, a wondrous New Age array of beads and bangles, and with his long hair freshly washed and silky, Jix looked like an early Mick Jagger. Only, of course, April decided, far better-looking. Prettier. Nothing at all like the rest of Oliver Gillespie’s henchmen, who were all scowling and pit-bullish.

‘Stop it – you’ll make me blush. Not. And you look pretty cool yourself.’

Cool, April thought, was absolutely the last thing she felt. The skimpy denim dress – like Bee’s hat, from the charity shop – was already sticking to her, and her bare feet were slippery inside Daff’s sandals. Still, the dress and shoes would do for tramping the back streets of Bixford, trying to persuade people even more broke than she was to repay Oliver Gillespie’s interest-loaded loans.

She’d been sharing Jix’s debt-collecting round for nearly two years. Unofficially, of course. Oliver would have had a fit if he knew that she knew his secrets. And Martina would squawk so loudly that they’d have no trouble hearing her on the Isle of Dogs, and without doubt April would lose her job at the Copacabana, which would completely defeat the object.

At first April had been reluctant to become involved in this truly dingy side of the Gillespie enterprise, but without support from Noah, and with an abhorrence of turning to the State for aid, she needed all the money she could lay her hands on for Beatrice-Eugenie. Jix said it saved him time, and was scrupulously fair about splitting his percentage with her, and to be honest, she thought wryly, they made a good team.

Jix wooed the women with his beauty and quiet charm, while April flirted with men who would otherwise have slammed the door in her face, and persuaded them to part at least with something. That was why she always wore low-cut, short, tightly fitting clothes for the debt-collecting. That was why she flirted and teased and vamped until the men paid up. Despite frequent propositions, and one or two pretty scary moments, she’d so far managed to keep her dealings above board. She knew that Jix went to bed with most of the ladies who owed Oliver cash. They said they’d happily pay him for sex, and if he decided to use the money to pay off their Gillespie debt then that was his choice.

If it was extortion, or prostitution, or a bit of both. April simply couldn’t afford to care. She and Bee had to survive, the dream had to be saved for, so it simply had to be done. If she lay awake at night wondering with hot shame whether the means she was employing could ever justify the end, by the close of each afternoon when she added another wodge of notes to the under-the-bed chocolate tin, her moral scruples were mollified.

‘I’ll do from Anthony Eden Close to Nye Be van Walk.’ Jix was studying the clipboard. ‘Which’ll leave you Hugh Gaitskell House. OK?’

April groaned. ‘God – not Mr Reynolds again! His terms were a fiver a kiss last week.’

Jix grinned. ‘You wouldn’t have to give me a fiver. I’d kiss you for nothing.’

‘No. he meant
I
had to kiss him and
he’d
pay a – Oh!’ She thumped him none too lightly on the arm. ‘Sod off, Jix! Come on, then – let’s make a move before I’m spotted here and given the third degree. I’m sure security must have clocked me a million times – and even if they are one burger short of a McDonald’s – they’re bound to put two and two together before long.’