Size Matters (26 page)

‘That's nice, isn't it?' Mrs Howard said as she switched the kettle on and offered Jay one of the high kitchen chairs by the counter. ‘Someone new for them to chat to. My girls don't get to meet others who speak their language around here. They don't get out in the evenings either, well they do for work but not socially. They're always so busy, poor things, but in the daytime, when they're up and about, they're good company and they like to have somewhere safe to be.'

‘Safe?' Jay was curious. Were these suburban avenues, perhaps especially this square mile where each road was named after an English poet, full of leering predators? Were there hundreds of men who, like her, had mistaken this place for a house of ill repute?
Perhaps, at night, the gatepost was thronging with raincoated potential punters lurking in the shadows and kicking themselves for getting it so wrong.

‘Well, you know, they're pretty young girls, a long way from home and working in the entertainment business. Someone's got to take care of them.'

Jay began unloading her box of cleaning products while Mrs Howard bustled about putting flapjacks on a plate and measuring spoonfuls of tea into her flowery teapot. The girls would feel spoiled, she thought, wondering why all their clients didn't treat them as royally as this. It would make a nice change for them to feel cherished, if this kind of treatment continued, so long as they didn't take too much advantage and start hanging around the kitchen like hopeful, hungry puppies. They'd soon suss that Mrs Howard was the caring sort and could well end up being cooked a three-course lunch every time they came to clean.

‘You bring all your own equipment, do you?' Mrs Howard asked, looking over the selection of products and dusters that Jay had unpacked on the worktop. ‘Because you don't need to, there's plenty in that cupboard over there.'

‘Ah but you see, the girls are used to what we've got,' Jay explained. ‘If they come up against unfamiliar brands everywhere we go then you'll never know if they're putting neat bleach on your floor or washing-up liquid down the loo.'

Katinka and Anya were in very giggly spirits. Jay found it hard to get them to concentrate as they chatted away to each other. When they were up in the top bathroom she could hear them shrieking with laughter.

‘Happy souls, aren't they?' Mrs Howard commented, coming into the big terracotta sitting room where Jay was giving a hand, polishing photo frames.

‘They're not always so noisy.' Jay felt she should
perhaps apologize. Another time, there might be sleeping people to consider. She'd have to have a word.

Anya and Katinka were still in high spirits at the end of their couple of hours. They were off to the Dachshund Man in the afternoon so she hoped they'd still be feeling energetic enough to get round his book-filled, musty house with appropriate gusto.

‘You two sound very happy,' she said as they loaded the van. ‘What was so funny?'

‘Is the girls,' Anya told her in little more than a whisper and glancing back at the house, smirking. ‘They dance.'

‘I know, Mrs Howard told me. Some kind of theatre work.'

Anya looked puzzled. ‘Theatre? No,
club
.'

Jay was backing out of the driveway and turned round to see where she was going, in time to see Katinka miming the removal of her bra.

‘Club like no clothes,' Anya went on, patting her knees. ‘Sitting-dancing, for the men!'

‘
Lap
dancing? Those girls who live there?' Jay slammed the brakes on, unable to drive and think this through at the same time. Wow – the things that went on in the leafy suburbs, after all. Here was a perfectly-respectable looking house, owned by a woman of perfectly run-of-the-mill niceness, sheltering a selection of exotic dancers. It wasn't exactly the bawdy premises as reported by Rory's
Out for the Lads
magazine, but it was astonishingly close.

‘A
dinner
party? Uh?' Samantha didn't have to look quite so astounded. You'd think she'd never heard the term before. Perhaps she hadn't. Perhaps he'd really miscalculated her grown-upness and she'd rather munch a Macca on a bench down the town square than sit at a table with all the right poncy cutlery, nibbling
bits of squid and rocket and talking about something remotely intelligent. Rory tried to control his breathing. This was his big chance and he wasn't going to blow it now by stammering and backing off and blushing and looking like a total dick.

‘Yes. In this penthouse I use.' How nonchalant did that sound, or was it just ridiculous at his age?

‘You know. It's just usual stuff,' he shrugged. ‘Food, wine, music, conversation, all that.'

He tried to keep his voice perfectly normal, as if she was the one who was being completely off the wall for not getting it, not him. It wasn't easy. In the empty classroom she kept looking over his shoulder towards the door as if he'd got her trapped in there. More likely it was because Shelley Caine was right outside, earwigging at the gap in the door and geeing up to have a complete giggle-fest.

‘So, like, you can cook then?' She sounded doubtful but not completely a lost hope. Put it this way, Rory told himself, she hadn't actually said no straight off.

‘Yeah, course I can cook.' He tried to make it come out in a ‘Can't everyone?' sort of way, but at the same time hoping he'd pitched it so she wouldn't expect Marco Pierre bloody White.

‘OK then.' Samantha suddenly beamed her full thousand-megawatt best smile at him. ‘I'd love to come,' she said simply, and so, oh so very, very unexpectedly. Almost enough to turn him into a believer, just name your god, your religion, he'd take it.

‘I've got a dress that needs a try-out,' she went on, slinking off towards the door, yellow hair wafting out. He leapt past her, pulling open the door to let her out ahead of him. Might as well start on the gentleman stuff now. They liked that sort of thing, dinner-party-type women.

She looked back over her shoulder at him. ‘Let me
know nearer the day, what time and where you want me and everything,' she said, dazzling him again with the teeth. Oh he would, he promised, he would.

Result! Fucking result! Rory punched the air, accidentally clipping the edge of the door frame as he did but not, in the exhilaration of the moment, feeling even the slightest pang of pain. He reached into his pocket for his mobile and punched in a text to Freddie.

‘Sorted. What next?'

Rory was looking at himself reflected in the glass-fronted cupboard opposite the table. He was stock-still and zombie-ish, his mouth gaping unattractively and his fork suspended in the air as he lost all animation, stuck frozen with the piece of juicy pink steak halfway to his mouth. She couldn't be saying what he thought she was saying. And if she was, why did she and Dad think it was so funny?

‘A houseful of lap dancers!' She was all amusement and curiosity. ‘Only a few innocent tree-lined avenues away!'

‘I might have to escort you to work,' Rory heard his dad saying. ‘Help you carry your mop.'

Oh huge joke. So what about the Charles bloke, then? They didn't know about him, did they? What had he been doing there?

The steak finally made its way into Rory's mouth. He had to pretend nothing was out of the ordinary (apart from that his mum was now Official Cleaner to a cathouse) or she or Ellie would start asking him what was wrong. In his head he was jumping, no,
leaping
, to a good dozen sleazy conclusions. He hadn't much taken to Charles, partly out of suspicion (and oh how
right, well how
nearly
right) about what he was doing coming out of a brothel. For one thing he'd almost completely ignored Ellie and Freddie and himself, as if when he was working out how best to do his impressing of Delphine's family he'd put ‘talk to teenagers' right down the bottom of the list. And although Rory had been listening really hard, hoping to catch a clue or even a mention about what his connection with Masefield Avenue was, he'd hardly given away anything at all about himself. All they knew after he'd been and gone was more or less what they knew before he'd arrived. He flew planes and was going to marry (why, for buggery's sake when there was all that aircrew totty?) Auntie Delphine. Oh and they knew he bought flowers in great big impressive bunches and that he was ‘interested' in dancing. Well you could bloody say that again.

‘Dancing', my knob, Rory thought. What was it Cathy had said after he'd gone? Oh yeah, that he wasn't a ‘high divulger'. Well you wouldn't want to divulge that actually you were a club-owning pimp, would you? Not to a bunch of total strangers, some of whom were about to become a set of in-laws. No wonder he'd been a bit shifty about his ‘club' venture.

Should I say something? Rory wondered. What would Freddie do? Keep schtum or blurt it out for a laugh? He'd go for the laugh, every time, that was Freddie. So would he . . .

‘Um . . . so that place, sorry I wasn't really listening,' he began, shrugging a nonchalant lack of interest. They were all attention. That was the trouble with having really polite parents, they did actually stop what they were gossiping about and listen to you. Sometimes, when you were wittering on, you just wished you had parents who said, ‘Oh give it a rest, Rory' instead of
saying, ‘Oh I see' and, ‘How do you feel about that?' and stuff.

‘That house in Masefield Avenue.' He munched on some salad. Perhaps they'd tell him not to talk with his mouth full, then he'd be able to cop out. Silence: they were all ears, all three of them. ‘Is it that one with the blue fence, called something beginning with an “H”?'

He didn't want to look at his mum. He reached across for a piece of garlic bread that he honestly didn't feel much like eating.

‘Halcyon. That's the one. Why?'

He looked at her. She was trying not to laugh. Why? Oh yeah – she'd been poking about in his room. She'd said she'd seen what he read. She'd been in
Out for the Lads.

‘No reason.' He shrugged. ‘It's just I saw Delphine's beloved fiancé coming out of there before he came to us for lunch, that's all.'

‘
Charles
?' They both shrieked it together, his dad cracking up into laughter again. ‘But you can't have!'

‘I
did
!' he insisted, ‘It was his car outside and everything. Me and Freddie saw him coming out of the gate. He had the flowers. And then he came here, straight after.'

‘Why didn't you say something? Why didn't you say “Hello, I just saw you in Masefield Avenue”?' Trust Ellie to ask the tricky question.

‘Well . . . er I wasn't sure. I didn't see the car when he arrived, not till he was going and only then cos we went to the front door because of the rat.' He could feel himself getting hot. Ellie was looking at him with her face all screwed up with hard thinking.

‘So what were you doing down Masefield Avenue anyway?'

He was just about ready for this one, thank goodness.
‘We'd been down the park to kick the ball about. We were on the way back.'

It would have to do. It wasn't what you'd call a short cut and they all knew it, but if they asked anything else about
him
, well, he'd just have to remind them who was the one who was turning out to be a bit iffy in this conversation. It wasn't someone whose name began with ‘R', that was for sure.

‘Delphine can't possibly know, can she?' Jay asked Greg while she was lying in the bath that night up to her neck in enough hot bubbles to obliterate all trace of any lingering Eau de Flash (pine). ‘She surely can't have any idea that the man she's going to marry has some kind of involvement with a houseful of lap dancers? She'd go ballistic. It's so
not
her. She was always a bit prissy about sex. Same way that Win is.'

Win's advice regarding men had been firmly old-fashioned and ruthlessly trade-led.

‘A man won't expect to pay for goods if he's already used them for free,' she'd warned the two girls on the day that Delphine (then sixteen) was getting ready to go on a date with a twenty-two-year-old man from her Latin American formation troupe. Audrey was amazed at Win for allowing Delphine to go, certain that this was someone far too old for her. She was, though, so deeply curious to know if the girl was going to glam herself up to look as if she could lie about her age, that she'd sent Jay round with a swatch of Lycra fabrics for Delphine to look at for a dress for her next dance contest.

Jay had sat on Delphine's bed, crumpling the satin rose-swagged quilt and watching while she did her make-up and put her hair up in an arrangement of artistically dangling Carmen'd curls. She
did
look older, Jay would be able to report back, a good ten years
older. She not only looked older but as if she was a relic from another generation. Whereas Jay and all her friends were a raggy mixed bunch of Goth, punk, New Romantic and charity-shop treasures, Delphine always looked as if she'd been worshipping at the Jackie Kennedy shrine and tended to get herself up in coordinated separates, pointy court shoes, pale, sheer tights and rigid on-the-knee A-line skirts. She was also keen on trims – pocket flaps and bows and collars and superfluous bits of frill always seemed to figure somewhere. Win approved deeply (not something a normal teenager would aspire to, surely?) and was forever pointing out to Jay and April that it always paid to be ‘well groomed'. The term made Jay think of poor old Cobweb, who would have appreciated Delphine's attention with a curry-comb a lot more often than she'd been prepared to give it.

‘I think your mum means you shouldn't shag on a first date,' Jay giggled to Delphine as soon as Win was out of hearing range.

Delphine had looked horrified, ‘I wouldn't . . . do . . .
that
even on a twentieth. Not without . . .'