Plastic (14 page)

The girl stopped and turned back. ‘It’s just over there. I’ve got a bar tab running, this rich Indian bloke pays when he’s in town. Loaded, some of the Indians, and as nice as the Arabs if they haven’t been gambling, but they’re all a bit crafty when it comes to getting something for nothing.’

I looked at the girl, who smiled hopefully back. Thin face, greasy blonde hair cropped at the jawline, hardly any makeup. Fleshless legs in pale green stockings, black leather coat, worn-over shoes. ‘I’m not what you think,’ I said apologetically.

‘At this time of night who is?’ The girl tried a nervous flicker of a smile. ‘I’m Cassandra. That’s my working name. My real one is Saffron, I hate it.’

‘I’m June.’

‘That’s nice. Summery. My name means yellow, but my mum called me that because she likes Indian food, you know, rice. I changed it to Cassandra ’cause someone told me it means ‘helper of men,’ which fits.’

‘It also means disbeliever of men,’ I told her.

‘Oh well, that fits too. It’s just over here. You can use the washroom to get some of that stuff off you.’ We waited to cross the road as three police cars, one behind the other, jockeyed toward the river, sirens howling. I glanced back; Stitch-Head hadn’t moved. What if he was looking for me?

The hotel was a step down from the last one. Dusty plastic panels of strip-lighting illuminated the lobby as brightly as a petrol station. Room rates were posted in italic stick-on letters, black on gold. A pot of greying plastic daffodils stood on a table covered with dog-eared leaflets for shows that had already closed. The desk-clerk ignored us as we walked through to the bar, a crimson-draped room with round formica-topped tables and brass lamps that belonged in a medium’s parlour. Several of the other working girls were there with punters, forcing laughter from lame jokes or ignoring their clients completely, leaning across them to speak intimately with each other.

‘If you’re not a working girl, why are you dressed like one?’ asked Cassandra, leading the way.

‘I didn’t know I was,’ I replied miserably. ‘I’m from the suburbs.’

‘Well, you ain’t a professional, you look more like you’re after some extra housekeeping, and that’ll get you cut if you’re trying to do business around here.’

‘I wasn’t... I mean I’m not,’ I explained. ‘Would you do me a favour? See if that man is still standing on the corner?’

Cassandra pressed her face against the window. ‘Big fat bloke, head like a half-sucked grapefruit? He’s coming this way.’

‘Oh no.’ I twisted away, dropping my head. What if he came inside? Where could I hide?

‘Listen, I’ll be back in a minute,’ said Cassandra, abandoning me. ‘Washroom is in the corner. Tell the barman what you want. It’s all right, he’s cool. We cover for him while he does call-outs.’

I cleaned my face and neck with wet paper towels, but couldn’t do anything about my top. Then I returned to climb on a stool while the barman poured gin into garage glasses.
Did she mean he’s a rent boy or a drug dealer?
I wondered, studying him in terrified fascination. Hamingwell kept its vices hidden. Secretly, I liked the idea of having them on public display; it felt more honest. The evening was wearing away the last vestige of snobbishness I had brought with me, but it was difficult to pinpoint the motives of strangers when you were more concerned with staying in one piece. I dropped my head into my hands, nerves fizzing, waiting to feel a meaty fist on my shoulder.
I’ve been set up,
I thought,
she’s told him where I am. I’m dead.

But nothing happened. Cassandra returned, and some of the colour had come back to her face. ‘That’s better,’ she said. ‘I can’t drink unless I’ve had a jump. Tell me something, if you’re not on the game, why did you get chucked out of The Waterloo?’

‘It was a misunderstanding,’ I explained as Cassandra shot me what my mother would call an old-fashioned look.

‘Cheers anyway.’ Cassandra raised her glass. ‘First of the night. I know it’s always busy this time of the month but it’s a bleeding joke tonight. They’ve all been paid. I usually work right through. Half of them have been drinking since six and are too pissed to do anything, so it’s easy money. I like Christmas best, though.’

‘I thought it would be quiet then.’

‘You’re having a laugh, incha? The thought of spending two days in front of the telly with relatives all round them brings them pouring in. I feel sorry for them, stuck at home in their little houses, all fucked off with each other.’

I tried not to cry, but couldn’t stop myself. I wiped hopelessly at my face with a squashed Kleenex.

‘Bloody hell.’ Cassandra dug in her handbag and pressed a small white pill into my hand. ‘Take this, it’ll put you back on top.’

‘What is it?’

‘Don’t worry, it won’t hurt you. They’re for depression. Down in one.’

‘Should I take it with gin?’

‘It makes no bloody difference.’

‘They might be addictive.’

‘Of course they’re not, I read somewhere that Liza Minelli takes them, and if anyone’s earned the right to be depressed it’s her.’ She held the glass and watched as I swallowed. ‘I’d better get earning in a minute. One more drink, though, seeing as it’s Friday.’ Cassandra checked her pockets, then her hands. ‘Actually I think that was an E, not a Valium.’

Whatever it was, Cassandra was right; it soon made things a little better. I found myself wanting to stroke the leather seats of the chairs, the wood of the table legs, even Cassandra’s pale arm, to touch the bruises at the crook of her elbow, just to feel the warmth of her damaged skin. For a few minutes I became fascinated by my shoes. I told Cassandra everything that had happened in the last few hours. She didn’t laugh or make fun of me. Instead, she seemed to give the problem serious consideration.

‘There’s no-one there now, right? Why don’t you just go back?’

‘I’m scared.’

‘Don’t be daft, stick a chair under the door and you’ll be all right. No-one’s tried to hurt you, have they? You just caught sight of someone else’s problem.’

Cassandra’s dangers were real enough: drunks who didn’t know their own strength, punters who turned evangelical after sex, men who assuaged their self-loathing by being nasty after they’d come. Foreplay folded into rough stuff for no reason, she said, and all you could do was lay still, or fight them off and face a row over returning payment.

‘It sounds terrible,’ I told her, sniffing. ‘Isn’t there something else you can do?’

‘Why do people always say that, as if working in a shop is better? I don’t think it is. Anyway, I don’t mind. If anyone hurts you, just draw on your inner child, imagine you’re a kid again and you soon get over it. Kids are strong. They can survive anything. My little boy’s like that – a tough little bastard.’

Behind us half a dozen women, fresh-faced and large-bodied, noisily entered the bar. They settled themselves at the circular tables, screeching with laughter, trying to order cocktails without crossing to the counter.

‘Right, I’ve got to get earning,’ said Cassandra, rising. ‘I have a couple of regulars to sort out. Take your time here, and remember what I said.’ She tapped her heart. ‘Inner child.’ She pulled the collar of her thin coat around her neck and walked out into the night.

I stayed to finish my drink. It was only when I felt in my jacket pocket that I realised my purse had been lifted.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Night People

I
HAD TO
leave. I was going to walk out and keep walking, but Stitch-Head was still standing at the entrance of the hotel. He was looking in the direction of the Ziggurat, his fists in his pockets, his scar livid beneath the light. It was simply not possible for me to slip past him. I had no idea what to do – no money, no purse – I could only turn around on my shaking legs and go back into the bar.

The raucous women who had filled the scalloped maroon seats in the corner turned out to be members of the Greenwich Baths Swimming Association Ladies Amateur Water Ballet Team. There was no escaping their conversation. Instead, I resignedly poured the remains of Cassandra’s double into my own glass as the disorder of the night began to recede in the boozy brown-ale warmth.

‘… the night I was born my mother had a fright and dropped me right there in the kitchen. Her brother had been in Friern Barnet for years, only he discharged himself to come and wish her happy Christmas. Walked into the house with his old keys and nearly gave her a heart attack. She broke her water still standing, and I fell out. Strong thighs, you see. She was a synchronised swimmer too, and her mother. The women in our house were always stronger than their men, but it was the men who told them what to do. Terrible, isn’t it?’

It was hard for the others to get a word in edgeways when Veronica, the team leader, was in full flow. She spread over the sides of her stool in floral folds, nudging and drinking. Her friends were all of a similar bulk, friendly smiles on ruddy taut skin, their faces buffed by regular immersion in chlorine. Veronica drew me into the group as she talked. I could still see the back of that terrible scarred head through the dimpled window. Until it was possible to leave I found myself listening intently, taking in every detail.

‘I didn’t think it had been around that long,’ said the barman, who had evidently been monitoring the conversation.

‘Since 1890, only it was called Scientific Ornamental Swimming then. Esther Williams did us a lot of good, of course. We do solo, partners and teams of four and eight.’ The others chorused their approval. ‘Worst thing is finding music for your technical programme. That and nose-clips. We came up tonight to see Michael Ball at the Palladium, but he was off sick so we knocked it on the head and went to a vodka bar instead.’

‘You should see us underwater,’ added another, ‘We’re like gymnasts, a four hundred metre freestyle event with no time to breathe, plus the moves of a skater, the strength of a polo player and the musical expression of a dancer, all in perfect coordination. Sometimes it’s a right bastard.’

‘You could take part,’ said Veronica, pointing to me. I didn’t want to draw attention. ‘You’ve got the hour-glass figure. We ask joiners to swim twenty-five metres, front crawl, back stroke and breast stroke, and submerge confidently. I teach everyone. My husband says I’m fat, but I feel light as a feather in the water.’ She stared into her drink, silent for a moment. A friend patted her, knowing what was coming. ‘My little boy. He drowned, you see. Just slipped in the bath, six years ago now and I never stop thinking about him. You have to make amends somehow.’ Veronica dug in her purse and produced a card, the association details printed in azure ink on a watery background. ‘Give us a call if you ever want a free starter lesson.’

Cliff Richard came on the jukebox, singing Summer Holiday. ‘I love this song,’ said a friend of Veronica’s. ‘Cliff invented the Chinese takeaway in 1958, when he ordered food on the set of
Oh Boy!
I know because my next-door neighbour’s brother-in-law painted his mother’s bathroom.’

Everyone immediately started discussing who else they knew by this curiously osmotic process of celebrity association. Distant connections to Shirley Bassey featured heavily, mostly in the region of house maintenance. I decided to leave before I discovered that one of the Water Ballet team had been responsible for Kurt Cobain’s death.

I checked the window and found no sign of my stalker. Outside the hotel, standing on the pavement with the bulky red battery lamp in my hand, the cool night air sobered me up. My first instinct was to look for a cab until I remembered I only had small change. I couldn’t bring myself to face the darkness of the Ziggurat again, but had no other destination.

It would be best to go to Lou first thing in the morning and force myself on the household, insist on staying with them and to hell with my dignity. Ahead was the illuminated entrance to St. Thomas’s Hospital, and beyond that the high brick wall of Lambeth Palace. The cadmium lamp lights were filtered by the flicker of branch-tops, the moist air folding into the wake of hushing cars. It was strangely peaceful now, not at all as I imagined London at night.

I’ve never been this alone,
I thought, loosening my coat. My parents had always been there, then schoolfriends and finally Gordon. It had been my own fault for not noticing that something was wrong. You can’t see changes when they move like slow tides.

Then suddenly there were people everywhere. A queue for a club, minicabs parked by the side of the road before a burger-stall. I found myself checking the faces around me, watching for small dangers.

The smell of frying onions made me salivate. I counted the loose change in my pocket. I had never needed to count coins before.

‘Oi, find any more dead bodies?’ called a familiar voice. Nalin looked down at me from beneath his peaked cap as he cracked frozen hamburgers out of a plastic tube. He could joke because he hadn’t held the girl as she died.

‘Hello. Could I have an eggburger? I’m thirty pence short.’

Nalin slapped a frozen pink disc onto the hotplate and tossed in a handful of onion clippings. ‘Sorry, I can’t do it. My business partner would kill me. But you can help yourself to chipolatas.’ He pointed at a plate of speared pink objects that might have been sausages, prawns or fingers, it was hard to tell. I tried one of them but it tasted tainted with petrol, so I discreetly spat it into the gutter. The burger smelled sluttily tantalising as it tanned on the hotplate. Behind me, two pissed-up lads were arguing about who was stronger, Lennox Lewis or Spiderman. Drunk men have the kind of conversations no woman can ever manage to sustain, yet they get bored when you start comparing moisturisers. I couldn’t get over the fact that the street was so suddenly crowded. By this time of night I was always in bed.

‘There you go, mate. Careful, it’s slippy.’ Nalin shovelled onions over the burger and handed the man next to me a bun wrapped in tissue. Watching the drunk attempting to eat the scalding meat, dropping most of it on the ground, I was forced to walk away, hungry, but Nalin called after me. ‘I might swing by your place later, come up for a drink or something.’ It annoyed me that someone with such potential should spend his nights trying to impress his mates. City life was for the confident, and those who had no faith in themselves were forced to fake it.