The Company of Fellows

by Dan Holloway

  “I could come up with a hundred clichés, you know. About spending my life with beauty, about the things I’ve seen on seven continents. I could compare them all with you, but I won’t. Let me just put it on record that you’re breathtaking. Now, let’s put you an outfit together.”

  “So you’re taking me out?”

  “Yes, I am. Where to start?” He stood in front of her and took one of her hands, pulling her to her feet. “At the top,” he said, running his fingers through her hair, cupping his hand around her cheek and kissing her lips, “working down.” His fingers followed his eyes down the contours of her pale brown skin. “Or at the bottom,” the pads of his fingers on the inside of her calf, “working up?” pulling them slowly up, barely making contact with her skin.

  “God, Tommy.”

  “Let’s start,” he paused, words hanging, “in the middle.”

  Rosie closed her eyes, and he felt the sudden breath against him.

  “Black leather skirt. I’m making an assumption you have one, don’t shoot me if your wardrobe’s full of Laura Ashley prints.”

  “Let’s go and see.” She led him into the bedroom and opened the wardrobe. “Look what we’ve got here.” She took out two black leather skirts and held them up for him to choose.

  “That one, I think.” He pointed to the shorter. Rosie opened her chest of drawers to offer him a choice of underwear. “Only what I tell you. And not yet,” he said.

  “You know what Emily said to me last week?”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said you she thought you were dangerous. She didn’t mention you were a kinky fuck.”

  Tommy smiled. “Want to go for pizza instead?” he asked.

  “Fuck, no.”

  “Good. Bright red bra, black string top, leather jacket. Definitely the belt you had on the other day. I’m guessing you’ve got a choker and cuffs to match.”

  He laid her outfit on the bed. “Now, let me get this on you.” He sat on the bed and picked up the skirt. “Come here.” He held the band of leather between his knees. She stepped toward him and he could see her skin beginning to glisten. “Now, get in.”

  She lifted one leg inside, then the other, feeling his breath on her as he pushed her skirt up over her thighs. He stood up, turned her round, pulled her arms up over her head, and tugged her top down to her shoulders so she couldn’t move her arms. Hands firm on her skin, running over her stomach, up the small of her back, snapping the clasp of the strapless bra and grabbing her top, lowering it over her torso.

  As he finished zipping the second boot up to her knee they heard the low purr outside. “Time to go.”

  Tommy led her out onto the Banbury Road and opened the Jaguar door.

  “Good evening, Dr West.”

  “Good evening, Simon,” Tommy said, fastening himself in. “Simon, this is Rosie Lu. Rosie, this is Simon Maddox.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Miss Lu.”

  “Hi Simon.” He smiled back at her just long enough to be polite before he raised the dark glass.

  Tommy watched Rosie’s eyes following the glass up, and opened the coolbox. He took out the small tin, with its unmistakable blue label, opened it and took out a scoop of beluga on his finger to offer her.

  “Whoa, Tommy. Where the hell are we going?”

  “Welcome to my other world, Rosie. Simon works for a client of mine, Farlow Bateson.”

  “Farlow Bateson the record producer?”

  “He’s not actually as American as his name suggests.” Tommy grinned. “I’m surprised you’ve heard of him,” he lied. “Not many of my acquaintances know him from Adam Ant.” Bateson was about Tommy’s age. Almost every hard core metal and thrash act in the south of England knocked at his door. Tommy had seen about 30 CDs on Bateson’s Arterial label in Rosie’s collection.

  “You’re full of surprises, aren’t you, Tommy? How long will it be before I always know what’s coming?”

  “I don’t know, but I hope you stick around to find out.”

  “So do I”, she said. “So why are we going to Farlow Bateson’s”

  “To hear a band, of course. A new band holed up for a few days recording their first album. They’re giving a private show for friends and colleagues. And for some reason I get to be in the position of being paid the best part of half a million pounds and being included on the guest list.”

  “So I’ll get to see some of your work?”

  “Only if you get to the bedrooms.”

  “Half a million pounds for bedrooms?”

  “He has bands round all the time. Bands like bedrooms.” Tommy smiled and took a mouthful of beluga, feeling the salt exploding on the sides of his mouth. He put another scoop on his finger for Rosie and felt her tongue curl around his finger as she ripped it away voraciously.

  Caviar. That was it. That was what Becky had said. Shaw’s parties. The eulogy had mentioned Shaw’s parties. Parties with little caviar spoons sculpted from ice. He saw the table in his head. The water glass, the glass that had been poisoned. There had been cold condensation. But the ice pick wasn’t out and it was a hot day. Shaw didn’t have an ice tray. But he sometimes had caviar served in ice spoons that he ordered in. The poison was in the ice spoons. Shaw ate his caviar like Rosie, voraciously. He’d swallowed the poison when he ate the caviar and the saltiness disguised any taste. He’d let the spoon dissolve in his water. That’s how the poison got in the water.

  ____

  53

  Over the Thames via Remenham Bridge in the opulent heart of Henley, past the world famous Leander Rowing Club, the main road snaked steeply upwards. The casual traveller would barely realise that there was a village here, not the hyper-exclusive village of Remenham, but the even more exclusive Remenham Hill, a series of disjointed mansions fed by tiny secret driveways that wound into the woods and undulating greenery. Houses here overlooked the vast Thames floodplain, stared down on their poorer neighbours in Henley who only qualified as super-rich. Tommy had seven clients here.

  A tiny wooden plaque by a farm track proclaimed shyly in faded writing, “Shiraz House, Arterial Records”. Tommy knew that the name derived from the Australian grape rather than the ancient town in Iran. It was half a mile before there was any sign of life, a similar sleek black X-type coming in the opposite direction. Eventually Simon pulled up on the vast gravel drive alongside the Bentley Continentals, the Ferrari 430s and the Hummers. He opened the doors, Rosie first, and then Tommy. Tommy palmed Simon a little box containing his wife’s favourite Spanish saffron.

  “It’s not too late to go if you don’t fancy it.” Tommy kissed her lightly.

  “Are you kidding?”

  The vast oak doors opened as they walked up, and Tommy led her into the vast marble hallway. From the wrought iron balustrades on the double staircase to the old portraits that followed you around the room everything was pure Gothic kitsch. Tommy felt as though they were entering a set from the Masque of the Red Death.

  “Dr West.” They were ushered in by a man in black cashmere.

  “Steve.” Steve was the butler, who doubled as security. He didn’t exactly look like Jeeves.

  They were swooped on by waitresses in leather basques and fishnets proffering canapés and champagne. Tommy took an oyster and waved away the champagne. Underneath the excitement he was still exhausted.

  “Where is everyone?” Rosie asked. The only people milling in the hall were staff.

  “In the conservatory. Follow me.”

  It felt more like walking through a shopping mall dressed for Christmas than a house, but eventually they emerged into a vast room draped on every wall with black velvet.

  “Here’s everyone.” Tommy smiled as he watched Rosie’s face take the scene in. At one end of the room was a tiny stage packed to the ceiling on either side with speakers. The rest of the room was a shimmering sea of glistening black leather. At least 300 people were grinding against one another to move enough to breathe, occasionally pretending
they could hear enough to have a conversation but mostly keeping interaction to bear hugs and hand clasps, air kissing, hands on shoulders, and hands roaming with a little less discipline. The noise from the whoops of greeting and shouts of recognition was deafening and it took them a minute or so to realise that there wasn’t actually any music playing yet.

  “Mind your feet.” Tommy shouted into her ear.

  She looked quizzically.

  “Broken champagne glasses. That’s why you’re wearing those boots. Well, it’s one reason, anyway,” he said, sliding his hand inside the soft leather.

  He took her hand and snaked around the wall towards the stage, away from the primary crush zone in the doorway. Perfect timing. The noise died down as a microphone squeaked and the huge figure of Farlow Bateson took the stage. Powerlifting was an interest he and Tommy shared. In the New Year Tommy would be working on Bateson’s new basement gym, converting a wine cellar. He didn’t know whether to be pleased or disappointed.

  Bateson’s white polo shirt, moulded by his vast shoulders, fluoresced in black light. “Thanks for coming and spending some more of my money.” He laughed. His teeth shone like his shirt. “The least you can do is have a listen to a new band who are here recording their first album. I know you’ll do what you can for them – or you won’t be coming back here again.” He laughed again. He really wasn’t as tacky as his name and his act. Well, not once he got into the gym. That’s when you got to see the real intensity of a person, Tommy thought, the real focus they could fetch up. In Bateson’s case the focus was enough to corner a whole section of a cut-throat business. “The band’s from Newcastle.” Bateson paused. “under-Lyme. They’re called Pathology of Hate, and they’ve just finished their first album The Streets are Loaded.” He welcomed them on stage with a back-slap for each. Guests a mix of polite, pissed, and stoned whoops.

  Tommy had eased the two of them into the perfect pitch, just far enough back to be out of the direct line of fire from the amps but with a clear view of the stage; just enough wall to lean back against to avoid being felt up, but right on the suburbs of the moshpit.

  The band looked like they were still in their teens, he thought, with their slender boyish bodies and clean-shaven faces. On closer inspection he could see that the singer was a girl. It was a cool androgynous look that reminded him a bit of Placebo, and various other guitar groups from the turn of the Millennium, but they hardly looked hard-core in their jeans, black T-shirts, and McFly moptop haircuts. The singer wrapped one of her legs around the mike stand as though it were a pipecleaner.

  The room went black and a gipsy fiddle held a single note for close on thirty seconds. A single light shone on the singer’s face and she let out a vast, deep modulated muezzin cry. Then the whole stage was bathed in light, two bass guitars burst through the sub-woofers sending a shockwave through the room. The singer spun herself free of the stand like a top and in one movement leapt into the audience, landed with boots firmly planted on the shoulders of a pair of security guards at the front of the crowd who had clearly been primed for the stunt, and started coughing spite and bile into the audience. Tommy guessed it would have to be classified as North African metal. It was a cheap cash-in on anti-government, anti-war feeling, full of soundbites that would look great on the merchandising but sometimes if the sound is right even the cynics don’t care too much about the sentiment. And the sound was very much right. Tommy looked at the crowd punching the air with their fists and heads, and he looked to the corner of the stage behind the speakers that were struggling under the noise to stay stable on the stage blocks. Farlow was standing looking out at the reaction with his thick arms folded. He was smiled to himself for a minute or so and, satisfied that the excitement was building not subsiding, peeled away back into the house.

  “Back in a minute,” Tommy screamed in Rosie’s ear. “You OK here?” He was sure she hadn’t heard, but she certainly looked OK. He slid back along the gaps against the wall, and emerged eventually back in the expansive hallway. He felt like Dante led out of Hell as he blinked in the light. He knew the layout of the house intimately, and ambled down a long corridor lined with bianca carrara marble, past the gilded gesso tables and mirrors to the open door second from the end.

  The music in the room was so quiet Tommy could hear the sound of a cognac being poured and the clank of a stopper in the decanter. Farlow’s private study was all the refined understatement lacking in the public areas of the house. A thin, fine, spearmint coloured velvet carpet, a vast glass desk and a few van der Rohe chairs. The Bose Wave sound system was the same one Tommy had in his gym, but he knew that it never played the kind of music that had made Farlow his fortune. This is where he gave his ears a rest.

  At the moment it was playing The Bends by Radiohead.

  “Hi, Tommy, want a drink?” Farlow stood up and shook his hand cordially.

  “No, no thanks. Great sound.”

  “Thanks. Good to see you. Anything I can do?”

  “No, I think I’m feeling my age, needed to sit down.”

  Farlow smiled. “Trouble keeping up with your new girlfriend? She’s beautiful.”

  “Yeah, she is, and no, I’m not having trouble keeping up with her. It’s the rest of my life I can’t keep up with.”

  “Well, sit away.”

  “Thanks.” Tommy felt his eyes beginning to droop as he sat down and he felt himself fighting them. Radiohead drifted in and out of the background. Fake Plastic Trees.

  It was a noisy night in London, no rain to dampen the shouting and laughter. He’d handed in his thesis two days previously and adrenalin was pumping, keeping him awake, making every nerve end vital. He could feel lust creeping under his skin like a rabid hunger, the aching need snaking him across London too directionless to know how to diffuse it. In the flashing neon of Soho, theatregoers laughing their way home, friends staggering from pub to pub, coke-fuelled media types in search of coffee to send them even higher. Foreign businessmen in groups looking for a good time, teenagers not sure what they were looking for. Finding himself climbing unlit stairs, feeling things scraping on his shoes and not wanting to know what they were. Handing over £30 to a woman sitting with a book of Telegraph crosswords who waved him through, and sitting on the corner of a half-lit bed. Thinking he was alone until he saw the lifeless figure sitting next to him, no effort to hide the drained white track-marked arms, just a dirty vest she pulled off mechanically. A body that may have been a woman’s but was too thin to tell. Hollow haunted eyes staring from a lank red fringe, hands too weak to coordinate fumbling with his clothes. “Fuck me.” A thick Eastern European accent with no understanding of the words it was saying. “That’s it, fuck me.” Then a blank, nothing, it can’t have been more than a few minutes – similar voices outside, the same heated laughter and excited rut. Picking clothes up off the floor, a body motionless beside him, the same lifeless eyes. No, even the darkness had gone out. Looking down. A naked body that may have been a woman’s but was too thin to tell. Arms, a belt wrapped around one arm, just above a needle hanging limply. Tommy pulling his clothes on and flying down the stairs three at a time, crashing his shoulder into someone he hadn’t seen at the bottom of the stairs that he nearly went flying. Looking round to shout what he thought at whoever it was, but they were gone. Regaining his balance and running down Brewer Street, down towards and along Oxford Street finally pulling up on the Tottenham Court Road and throwing up in a doorway, all he could see the hollow eyes, the hauntedness gone, staring up from under the lank red hair.

  A life that seemed as though it came from somebody else’s past. Only it didn’t.

  Becky’s red hair with its roots beginning to show, dark eyes looking up for reassurance, for something to hold onto. “Becky,” He murmured under his breath, “I won’t let you down, Becky.”

  “Hey, Tommy!”

  Tommy opened his eyes. Farlow was standing over him. “Hey, what shit’ve you taken, you look fucking awful.”

  Tomm
y was sweating and shivering, tears beginning to form in the corners of his eyes. He wanted to curl up inside himself in a place where no-one would find him, but he couldn’t. It was the first time he had remembered anything from the weeks before his breakdown. Is this like revising when you’re drunk, he wondered? The only way to remember is to get drunk again. Does remembering mean he was on the way to another breakdown? He didn’t care. He felt sick and dirty and afraid.

  “Tommy!”

  “Eh? No, no I’m fine. Thank you. I’ve just been working too hard.”

  He felt Farlow’s hands on his face, saw him looking at his eyes. He seemed happy that Tommy’s pupils didn’t show the effects of anything worse than stress. “You want me to get Simon to take you home now?”

  “No, thank you. I’d better get back to Rosie.”

  “Rosie? Then who’s Becky?”

  “Becky?”

  “You called out Becky.”

  “It’s a long story.” One to save for another time.

  ____

  54

  Rosie was exactly where she had been, still dancing. The whole sleep and dream must have been over in little more than a minute. Tommy needed to calm himself as best he could before he went back to her. He knew that after tonight he mustn’t see her again until it was all over. The dirt from a world he had entered ten years ago was seeping out of his pores, clinging beneath his clothes. It was a world so far from everything else he knew that he couldn’t imagine how he got there. Except that he had been sick; sick with something that he had been terrified of ever since. Something that made him do things he couldn’t understand or explain, even at the time. Things that made him realise how much he loved the life he had now, how much he loved what he had, how much he loved Rosie, and how fragile his new life was, how easily this stupid thing in his head could take it away.

  Had he watched the girl die, he wondered as he watched Rosie, so full of life? Was that another secret his mind would let him in on when he wasn’t expecting it? Or had he been so fuelled with by his own lust that everything else had passed him by? He thought of her nameless eyes and wondered if anyone had turned up to her funeral, or whether they’d been too busy, like he’d been for Shaw. The girl had spent her whole life being used, and it made him sick to think that he was one of the ones who used her. No-one had even noticed when she’d died. Like Carol. Like Becky could so easily be.