Sugar Mummy (49 page)

She looks down at the counter.

'Not here. Ring me tonight if you want. Vinny's got the number.'

'Jane, I've finished with Marion.' It feels good to say it finally.

'Andrew, please, not here.' Something is wrong. I try to catch
her eye, hoping that my news just hasn't sunk in, that she hasn't understood yet.
I reach across the counter and try to touch her hand but she moves back.

'Jane, I've left her.' I take a deep heath and say it. 'Look,
I love you. I want to talk.' She winces and looks away.

'Oh shit, Andrew.'

'What's the matter?'

'Please, not here, not now. Can we talk about it later?'

'All right, all right.' I try to look her in the face but she
is still staring down at the counter. 'Just tell me everything's all right, that
you're pleased and ...'

But she doesn't. Then she looks Lip, but not at me.

'Are you all right, Jane?' A woman is now standing next to me
at the counter.

'Yes, I'm fine. Sorry. Can I just have a few minutes off the
floor?'

'Of course, I'll get Belinda to cover for you,' says the woman,
looking at me. I'm still staring at Jane, trying to work out what she is thinking.
Silently she leads me across the shop and we go out through the fire exit into a
long, dimly lit corridor. Jane stands against the wall opposite me. 'Andrew ...
oh, Christ, how can I say this?' Finally she looks me in the eye and begins to shake
her head very slowly.

'Oh, no, please.' I realise it's me speaking.

'Well, what did you expect? I thought you might try and ring
me the next morning. I don't know what's going on. You're living with another woman,
for God's sake-'

'I know but like I said, I had no money-'

'Let me finish.' She stares at the wall next to me. Then she
laughs bitterly. 'I was going to say I thought it was over but it was never really
on, was it?' I can't answer that. 'Was it?

Andrew, if you really cared about me you'd have rung me the day
after we had that - we didn't have that stupid drink in that stupid bar. You just
went back to her. What did you expect me to do?'

'I had to get things sorted out.' No, I don't really believe
that.

'Sorted out?' She laughs again. 'All you had to do was to end
it with her - if you really wanted to.' She looks at me.

Now I'm looking down, trying to avoid her eyes. 'I told you I
wasn't the sort of girl who'd be the other woman and I meant it.'

'I know you did.' I take a deep breath. 'Jane, look, I'm sorry,
I've been so stupid.'

'It's not that,' she says softly. 'You've been so weak. That's
what got me. Andrew, I really liked you, I think I still do, but you've been so
pathetically weak.'

I open my mouth to speak but I can't think of anything to say.
Jane is silent. The fire door bursts open again and a woman walks into the corridor
and looks slightly startled. She mutters something apologetic and then carries on.

'I told you, it's too late. Look, this is my last day here. I'm
going to South America tomorrow.'

'What?'

'I'm flying to Buenos Aires tomorrow afternoon.'

'Why? Who with?'

'A friend from university. I handed in my notice here the day
after we met and they let me go early. Remember we talked about South America in
the pub that night? Well, I'm doing it.'

'What about when you get back?'

'Andrew, I've told you. Please don't make this worse. Look, I've
got to get back to work.' She sniffs back a tear.

'Goodbye.' She walks back towards the door and pauses for a moment.
'I'm sorry,' she says, without looking round.

The sun is breaking through the clouds as I leave the shop. I
begin to walk down Tottenham Court Road towards Oxford Street. As I approach the
Tube station a girl comes up to me, looks me in the eye and says something to me
in a sad, soft voice. She has long blonde hair and pale blue eyes. But it's her
skin - so clear and so pale you can almost see the veins underneath it. Her eyes
open wider, almost in fear, and she speaks to me again.

'What did you say?' I ask. I've got no money if she's begging
or looking for business. She seems so vulnerable, so unworldly that I wonder whether
perhaps I've found someone who's in worse shit than I am, somebody who has managed
with great skill and determination to fuck up their life more badly than I have.

She fixes me with a desperate look and touches my arm 'I say
you want learn English?' I look down. She has a flyer in her hand.

'No,' I tell her. 'No, thank you.'

I never went back to Marion's. Slowly I walked all the way from
Tottenham Court Road to Fulham. I'd probably have walked even if I'd had the Tube
fare. I rehearsed all the things I should have said to Jane, trying to cap her arguments
as if winning these little battles would help me win the war I had so hopelessly
lost. At the beginning of Knightsbridge I nearly started back again at one point.
Then I stopped at Hyde Park Corner, watched the traffic for a while from the safety
of the pavement and carried on walking west again.

By the time I got back to Vinny's it was gone four o'clock. I
sat down on the step to wait. It rained again, I think, and at one point a woman
walked past with a pushchair and a Walkman, telling the little boy running alongside
her 'No! I said no. You've already had one - don't be greedy.'

'Andrew?' says Vinny. I look up at him.

'Hi,' I say, my voice surprising me with its huskiness.

'What you doing here?' he says, apparently only slightly surprised
to see me. 'Fuck knows.'

He lets me in and we have a long game of One A Side Indoor Football,
silent and intense. Both gasping and gleaming with sweat, we come to a sort of natural
full time and Vinny takes a couple of my remaining beers out of the fridge. He chucks
me one. I open it on the side of the kitchen table and drink.

'Well?' says Vinny after he has done the same.

'My room still free?'

Vinny smiles. 'Yep.'

'Good.'

'Wanna talk about it?'

'No.' I take another swig of beer. 'Well, not yet, anyway.'

*

I found a job in a pub round the corner the next day. My mum
and dad were horrified when I told them I'd left the media sales business (OK, I
couldn't bring myself to say 'sacked') to go and work in a pub. Later though, my
dad was quite impressed when I told him how much I got cash in hand with overtime.
I had visions of him trying to find a reference to this in one of his selfhelp
books. ('Don't be a service industry wuss! Implement multi-directional manual glass-stacking
procedures to suit your personal dynamic opening time schedule!').

The flat's landlord still had my deposit and I calculated that
I could actually make my rent quite easily with my new income - and I didn't have
to start work until ten. Yes, Marion did ring for me - three or four times. Each
time she just left a tight-lipped message asking me to call her as if she was chasing
up a debt or ringing to enquire why I'd missed a dental appointment. I never returned
her calls.

I got into the habit of letting the answer machine click in rather
than answer the phone just in case it was Marion again, or Mark or Jonathan or a
dozen other people I didn't want to speak to. But one evening when I was at home
between shifts drinking tea and reading the paper in the living room I picked it
up without thinking. It was Sami.

'Sami?' I gasped.

'The one and only,' she giggled. 'The notorious.'

'What, what? Where are you? Are you all right? I've been trying
to get hold of you but I didn't have your - are you alright?' I was cradling the
receiver as if the connection might break at any moment.

'All right, all right,' she laughed. 'I'm staying with a friend
at the moment. I'm OK.'

'Thank God. I rang the office and they wouldn't give me your
number.'

'I bet they wouldn't - probably Debbie's attempt to punish both
of us.' Her voice sounded different - deeper, more selfassured.

'So what happened? You and Wheatley? I can't believe it.' She
laughed. 'Neither can I. Neither could anyone else.'

'How ... when?' There were so many questions.

She told me their affair had started about six months ago when
he called down to our office for some figures. Sami was working late and she happened
to know where the relevant papers were kept so she brought them up to him.

'We spent some time going through them in his office and by that
time it was gone ten o'clock so he offered me a lift home. We stopped for a drink
in a wine bar nearby,' she said, sounding rather well rehearsed. No doubt she had
told this story to quite a few people already. 'After that we had a drink or dinner
together a few times, very discreetly, of course, and then-'

My mind was racing for more clues. I remembered Sami's strange
reaction - more than simple embarrassment - when we bumped into him that morning
in the lobby.

'But he's such a creep,' I blurted out.

'Don't laugh, but he's actually quite charming when you get to
know him and quite funny actually.' She giggled at my stunned, sceptical silence.
'Really. Anyway, I suppose he made me feel good, special. Suddenly a rich, successful
... I don't know ... powerful man takes an interest in you, someone who knows how
the world works, someone older and more sophisticated who takes you to expensive
restaurants .. .' Sounding less practised, he drifted off for a second. 'Do you
see what I mean?'

'I know exactly what you mean,' I said quietly.

'And it wasn't just sex - it was more than that. We only slept
together a few times, at weekends away and things.'

'I think I can understand.'

'Not many people can. My parents don't know why I left such a
good job, they're always going on at me. I told my sister a while ago and she just
couldn't believe it, kept asking how I could do a thing like that. Then my brother
overheard us talking about it one evening and the next morning he went round to
the office and just blew up. He won't speak to me but apparently it was awful.'

'So Maria told me.'

Sami said, 'Then I realised that you were doing something similar
... I mean, going out with an older woman.'

'Sort of,' I said, comparing Ken Wheatley to Marion for a moment
but then feeling slightly distrusted at the thought of both of them. 'I don't think
I was as much a victim as you were, though. I asked for it.'

'Victim? It takes two to tango.' Sami and her phrases. 'I suppose
so. But that's all over now.'

'You split up?'

'Yep.' Then I said, 'Sami, why didn't you tell me?'

'I couldn't believe it was happening at first and then, well,
you had troubles of your own, didn't you? How could I?'

I swallowed hard. 'Oh, fuck, I'm so sorry. If only I hadn't been
so wrapped up in my own problems, so-'

'Half asleep at your desk?'

'Well, yeah, I suppose so. Otherwise perhaps I would have noticed
something.'

'Andrew, men never notice these things.'

I laughed. We made a date to meet for a drink, the first evening
out I'd planned for a long time and I hadn't been so excited about a date since
Jane.

One weird thing I noticed was that although my biggest work concerns
were checking that we weren't running out of clean glasses during opening times
and my greatest challenge was trying to understand how the till worked, I was actually
enjoying the experience of working again.

When I was with Marion at first I thought that if a day off work
was enjoyable and a week off was even nicer then, by simple arithmetic, a lifetime
off must be better still. Every day a holiday! Just what I always wanted. Like winning
the Lottery.

But it's not. It's like being unemployed except that you're not
even aiming towards something. You fill your days but in the same way you kill time
on a rainy Sunday afternoon. 'A task fills the time allocated to it' or something
like that, says Parkinson's Law, according to what we learnt at college and it's
amazing how long you can spin out going to the shop to buy a newspaper if you work
at it. While I was serving one evening some men in suits came in shouting about
bonuses and it occurred to me that you can place the various different ways you
can get money on a sort of ladder of merit. You can earn it (which is pretty high
up), you can make it yourself (also quite high up - unless, perhaps, you're poor,
sad Errin's dad), you can earn cash in hand (like I'm doing now and that is slightly
lower down), you can inherit it (quite far down), you can steal it (further down)
or you can beg for it (just a bit higher up, perhaps?).

I'd probably put Marion, a serial alimony beneficiary, quite
low down and the same with Jonathan the pimp, Viv the hooker and Mark the rent boy.
I don't quite know where Channing, Charles and Victoria and lots of the other people
I met would come because I still don't know how they made their millions but I'd
put the scheming, desperate little shit I became somewhere beneath all of them.
I was right when I was at Errin's that night - the way you get money can bugger
you up. Like I said: make it and it can turn you mean and bitter, inherit and it
can make you soft and decadent. Beg it from someone you're living off, leaching
off, and it makes you both.

I do miss the expensive restaurants and the holidays but not
the stress that went with them. I realise now that I never felt comfortable travelling
or eating out with Marion - I knew people were staring at us discreetly in those
restaurants, shops and business-class lounges. Going out with Vinny and Male the
other night for a curry just felt so easy and natural.

However shocked I was to discover that I was playing slave to
Marion's sadistic master, the truth is I can hardly I blame her, of course. Like
Chris said, I was just trying to earn a living off her and so perhaps she was right
to expect something back - although it wasn't quite what I could ever have imagined.
I was doing better out of her than Chris in many ways and Mark, if I'd bothered
to ask him, would probably have given me seven out of ten for a first go.