The Birthday Party (39 page)

Then she checked herself in the mirror for the hundredth time – the skirt was sexy but not tarty, the T-shirt nicely clingy
but not too revealing, her heels were high but not sluttish. She applied another layer of YSL gloss to make her lips shimmer
and glisten. She wanted to look irresistible.

Benedict came to collect her at six. He led her outside, where the Bentley was waiting.

‘I hope you don’t mind,’ said Benedict. ‘I booked us somewhere out of town. It’s such a beautiful evening.’

‘I don’t mind at all,’ replied Coco, intrigued.

Benedict reached over to help her with her seatbelt, and as his hand brushed against her nipples they hardened. Their eyes
met briefly, momentarily, then the driver started the engine and they both sat back.

He had found the most exquisite and tiny restaurant on the banks of the Thames.

‘One of my ex-chefs,’ he told her. ‘It’s one of my best-kept secrets. The food is sublime. Worth at least two stars, but he
refuses to apply. He doesn’t want the hassle. He’s content to have happy customers.’

They sat out on a terrace, and were brought tiny little
amusegueules
to eat with their aperitifs as they watched boats chugging up and down in the evening sunshine.

Nevertheless, Coco found it hard to relax. As they moved inside to take their place at the table, she still felt under the
weather. She knew perfectly well it wasn’t the after effects of the massage. She knew exactly what would put her right. And
she knew it was lying in her handbag. As she sipped her kir royale, she gave herself a pep talk. She had to sit it out. Eventually,
the craving would leave her and she would learn to relax. For the millionth time she cursed herself for succumbing in the
first place, and for letting her habit get the better of her.

She chewed the inside of her lip, as if the pain would take her mind off it.

Benedict looked at her barely touched plate, concerned.

‘Are you OK? Is this not your sort of food?’

‘No, no – it’s lovely. And I’m sorry. I’m being very rude,’ Coco told him. ‘It’s just … I’m worried about my mother.’

He frowned. ‘Tell me.’

Coco hesitated for a moment, but decided she trusted him. Benedict was a man of the world. He wasn’t going to betray her confidence
by running to the nearest phone to alert the press.

And so she told him about Raf, and Delilah’s disappearance, pouring out her heart. And he was wonderful – understanding and
soothing, and even promising to see what he could do to try to find Delilah.

‘I’ve got contacts,’ he twinkled at her, and her tummy did a flip. God, he was gorgeous. So gorgeous she had almost forgotten
her craving. It was him she was longing for now, not the little bag of white powder.

As the waiter took away their dessert plates, Benedict reached over and put his hand on hers. It was strong and powerful;
and as he stroked the inside of her wrist with an incredible gentleness, Coco felt her insides melt, becoming as syrupy as
the Sauternes they were drinking.

‘I booked a room,’ he told her. ‘In case we didn’t feel like going back.’

She looked into his eyes. They were wise, warm, sexy. The confident eyes of a man who knew damn well he wasn’t going to get
no for an answer.

They abandoned their table with almost indecent haste, passing the waiter who watched them go with a knowing smile.

The bedroom was minute, with a sloping wooden floor and a four-poster bed stuffed with lace-edged linen in front of a leaded
bay window. But they weren’t interested in their surroundings. Benedict pulled her to him and kissed her properly for the
first time. Coco felt a surge go through her; a high better than any drug could give her. She unbuttoned his shirt with trembling
fingers, then bent her head to kiss his chest. She could feel his heart beat beneath the warmth of his skin.

She felt his fingers on the inside of her bare thigh. She wanted to freeze this moment in time for ever.

Afterwards, he looked at her, and she thought she saw tears in his eyes.

‘You don’t know how long I’ve waited for you,’ he whispered.

And as he trailed his index finger down her body, Coco knew that from now on, she was going to be able to cope. For him, she
would give up breathing.

Tyger reacted to her father’s bombshell by going on an insane shopping spree. Even Louis was shocked by her ability to spend.
It was almost frenzied. She scarcely seemed to give any of the items she bought proper consideration. She tossed item after
item at the sales assistants, asking them to ring it all up.

‘Tyger.’ He put a restraining hand on her arm as she picked out three more dresses. If she wore a different outfit every day
for the rest of the year she wouldn’t get through everything she’d bought. ‘Calm down. This is comfort buying.’

‘So what?’ she demanded. ‘I can take it all back if I don’t like it.’

He knew she wouldn’t. When would Tyger ever have time to pack it all back up and return it to the store? She lived on full
steam ahead. She never went backwards.

‘Humour me,’ she begged him, and so he did.

Half reluctantly, half gratefully. All the time they were out shopping was putting off the moment of reckoning. He had made
himself a promise that morning. And he was going to keep it. The longer he put it off, the worse it would be. And he had to
admit that he had admired Raf for his stoicism earlier. There weren’t many men who could stand in front of the three Rafferty
sisters, confess their sins and walk away unscathed. He was going to take a leaf out of his father-in-law’s book.

Louis reckoned Raf was a pretty good role model. He knew he had to change. The persona he had built for himself might have
sold records, but it had never sat comfortably. He had
been floundering in a shallow and meaningless existence for long enough, feeling the pressure to behave badly and irresponsibly.

Tyger had given his life meaning. He had something to fight for. Someone to share things with. He wanted them to have a home.
Maybe even a family before long. If his record company didn’t like it, then tough. Worse people than him had cleaned up their
act and had continued success. Not that he was going to be as pure as the driven snow. Just knock some of his murkier excesses
on the head.

But first …

He piled all the glossy carrier bags into the back of the taxi that was waiting. Tyger had wanted to carry on, but eventually
he’d put his foot down.

‘I’m knackered. And you’ve got enough here to open your own shop.’

As the cab made its way back to Tyger’s flat, Louis felt increasingly nervous. He had to do it. If he bottled out, he would
hate himself. He could feel the words stick in his throat. He had to find some way to loosen them. A drink would help. Just
a shot. He didn’t want to start rambling, or saying things he didn’t mean.

Tyger unlocked the door. Louis followed her in, dropping all the bags in the hallway, and followed her into the living area,
where she collapsed on the sofa.

He loved her flat. He loved his too, for its stark, industrial minimalism, but he loved hers for its Tyger-ness. It was a
kaleidoscope of colours and textures. It was dominated by a luxurious pillar-box-red sofa in jumbo cord piled high with fur
cushions, a jewel-bright chandelier dangling overhead. There was a work-station in one corner surrounded by cuttings from
magazines and fabric samples. Next to it was strung a washing line where she hung interesting motifs she had found: cocktail
monkeys, plastic cherries, sweets, pieces of ribbon – all things that had been incorporated into her collections at some stage.
There was a cardboard cut-out of the Pink Panther in another
corner. A huge range of coffee-table books – everyone from Rothko to Weber to Warhol – were spread out on a silver coffee
table. There was a nineteen-fifties cocktail cabinet, a rococo sideboard, a set of Eames chairs – all eras and decades were
represented and sat together. Just like Tyger, it was a crazy mishmash of influences and contradictions that somehow, inexplicably,
worked.

God, he loved her.

Louis went to the cocktail cabinet and poured himself a Southern Comfort, downing it in one.

She was flopped on the sofa. She’d kicked off her shoes. Her head was resting on a zebra-skin cushion, her skirt riding up
her long, bare legs. On any other occasion, he would have had his hands in her knickers before you could say knife.

Not this time, though.

He put another tiny splash of Southern Comfort in his glass and went and stood in front of her.

‘Tyger,’ he said bravely, ‘I’ve got something I need to talk to you about.’

She looked up at him, frowning, unaccustomed to the serious note in his voice.

‘What?’ she asked.

To his horror, he could feel tears welling up. Were they a Pavlovian reaction to the memory, or in anticipation of the fallout?

‘It’s pretty awful, what I’m going to tell you.’

She sat up, alarmed. ‘Are you ill? You haven’t got cancer—’

‘No, no, no – nothing like that. I need to … tell you something about my past.’

She laughed. ‘Louis, I know all about your past. The drugs, the drink, the sex, the hotel-trashing – nothing you can say can
shock me.’ She grinned up at him.

He didn’t smile back. ‘Yes, it can.’

W
hen Louis was five, his father ran off and left him and his mother.

No great loss. He barely spent any time at home anyway, as he was a long-distance lorry driver. But he left them without a
penny. Worse than that, he left them with debts. They watched in horror as everything was repossessed. It was only a matter
of weeks before their landlord turfed them out onto the street. The council re-housed them eventually, into a grim flat in
an even grimmer estate on the outskirts of Swansea. His mum never told the debt-collectors where they had gone – they had
nothing else to give them even if they could be found, but the sort of collectors that were after them didn’t care. They would
hound you into an early grave.

The walls in the flat ran with damp and Louis – or Little Dave, as he was known then, on account of his father having been
Big Dave – had a permanent runny nose and a persistent cough. In time, his mother got a job – barmaid at the ugly, flat-roofed,
concrete pub on the edge of the estate, with the optimistic name of The Bird in Hand. Louis was left alone in the flat while
she worked the evening shift. A neighbour was supposed to look in on him every now and again, but she was so drunk she never
remembered, just took the fiver Melinda paid her for doing it regardless. Anyway, Little Dave was a good, obedient child who
would never have got up to any mischief, and no one in their right mind would venture up onto the seventh floor of their block
– there wouldn’t be
anything worth nicking, everyone knew that. Only the total dregs lived up there.

Little Dave was always ill, so he rarely went to school. He developed asthma. His eyes were huge in his pale face, and he
didn’t move anywhere without his inhalers. His mother sometimes held him and cried when he had a bad attack, and that was
when he knew that she did love him. She rarely showed it. There wasn’t time. She was working in the pub at night and in a
taxi office during the day, and at last there was enough money for them to eat and to have some new clothes.

For his eighth birthday she bought him a radio/cassette player that someone had been trying to get rid of in the pub, together
with a box of tapes. These kept him engrossed while he was off school. He played them over and over, a totally random selection
of outdated bands – Led Zeppelin, Captain Beefheart, Pink Floyd – but they took him off into another world. He spent hours
deconstructing the music, analysing the lyrics, which he often didn’t understand, singing along, inventing his own counter
melodies and harmonies and wishing he had a guitar.

When he was nine, he noticed a change in his mother. She was brighter, almost care-free, and she had a sparkle in her eye.
She came home later and later from the pub, and a couple of times she didn’t come back until the next morning, sneaking in
at half past seven, thinking he wouldn’t hear. She bought more new clothes, started wearing perfume, and she bought him a
guitar. To assuage her guilt – he understood that, but he didn’t mind. His guitar became his constant companion. His guitar
would never let him down.

Eventually, his mother introduced him to the reason for her change: the guy who ran the taxi company she worked for. Little
Dave mistrusted Bernie on sight. He wore low-slung jeans and cowboy boots with a big belt, his stomach hanging over the top.
He had a handle-bar moustache and a lot of heavy gold jewellery. Little Dave knew that the best thing he could do in Bernie’s
company was to keep quiet, but he was
used to doing that, so nothing much changed. Except his name. He was now called just Dave – ‘Little Dave’ apparently reminded
Bernie that there had once been a Big Dave, and Bernie was a jealous sort. So Dave it was. He wasn’t really bothered what
he was called, as no one much used his name anyway. He was so rarely at school it was all his teachers could do to remember.

And then his mother told him that they were going to be moving. To Bernie’s farm. Bernie was rich. He did very well out of
the taxis, apparently. Dave was quietly beside himself with excitement. He had visions of a thatched house in the middle of
a patchwork of green fields filled with placid cows. He would have a swing – a rope swing – and maybe a tree house. And a
cat. And somewhere to ride a bike. And he could go fishing.

He should have known better than to get his hopes up. The reality couldn’t have been further from what he had imagined: a
stark bungalow in the middle of a concrete yard, surrounded by ramshackle buildings in various stages of disrepair. There
was a field beside it – not the lush pasture he had imagined, but a dry, barren wasteland peppered with ragwort, a huge electricity
pylon planted in the middle of it. He couldn’t ride a bike around the yard – not that he had one. In fact, he was warned off
the yard. It was dangerous, Bernie told him. There were hazardous things stored there. Dave imagined vats of noxious chemicals
and stayed away. He knew whatever was in there was valuable, because people arrived day and night to deliver and take things
away. But the big chain-link fence was always bolted.