Best Supporting Role

by Sue Margolis

  “So, will that be credit card or account? … Account. Fine.”

  Ah … So big boy wasn’t her boyfriend. My next-door neighbor was a hooker. Fabulous.

  “OK, Pete, I hope to hear from you again very soon. Bye for now.” She let out a lengthy sigh and put her phone down on the coffee table. “God, I wish that man would stop calling me honey tits. It’s so demeaning… . And in case you’re wondering, I’m not a hooker.”

  “You’re not? … I mean … sure, whatever. Look, it’s none of my business… .”

  “What I do is strictly verbal masturbation.”

  “Right. Excellent.”

  “There is never any physical contact. Nobody gets invited here. Ever. A friend of mine runs an agency and I do twenty hours a week. For the time being it puts food on the table and I get to work from home.”

  “Cool. In fact it’s more than cool. It couldn’t be cooler.”

  “Great. I didn’t want you to get the wrong idea… . I’m Rosie, by the way.”

  “Sarah. I’m your new neighbor.”

  “I know. I was putting out the trash earlier and I saw you getting out of your car. And this little chap is Will. He’s eight weeks.”

  Before I had a chance to coo over the baby, she was apologizing for taking so long on the phone. “But you can’t rush these men or they complain they’re not getting value for money.” She lowered the baby into a Moses basket and planted a kiss on his forehead. “Sleep tight, noodle… .”

  “But doesn’t it turn your stomach—talking dirty like that?”

  “Not really. It’s all done from a script—a bit like working in a call center. OK, you have to improvise, but essentially, you learn the spiel, recite it and switch off. It’s the only way.”

  “And they never ask to see you?”

  “Of course they do, but I’m very clear that it’s not an option. And they don’t have my landline number, so they can’t find me.”

  I didn’t know what to think. This woman could easily be lying when she said that her services were limited to verbal masturbation. She could still be a hooker. On the other hand her living room couldn’t have looked less brothel-like. (Not that I’d ever had cause to visit a brothel, but the ones on those BBC 2 documentaries always had shiny silver wallpaper and lava lamps.) I took in the painted white floorboards and matching sofas, the fresh tulips in those edgy stainless steel vases you got in Ikea, the copy of the Guardian on the glass coffee table. Then there was the baby stuff: the muslins, the bunnies and rattles, the Moses basket. Of course she could have been some upmarket, two-grand-a-shag call girl who worked in posh hotels, but if she were, then she wouldn’t be breast-feeding (I doubted that many guys were into the lactation option), plus she would have been able to afford a damn sight more than a terraced house in a scruffy street in SW21. No, if this woman was a hooker, I was the king of Luxembourg.

  “Look, it’s none of my business, but don’t you worry about people finding out what you do? I mean how do you know I’m not going to start gossiping to the entire neighborhood?”

  She shrugged. “I’m past caring what people think of me. The only thing I’m concerned about is keeping a roof over my child’s head and I will do whatever it takes. And for the record, social services have already paid me a visit. I made the mistake of telling my ex what I was doing and he decided to report me as an unfit mother. The social worker disagreed.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. She thought it was all pretty harmless, particularly when I explained that I had no intention of carrying on once Will learns to speak. There is no way on this earth that ‘come’ is going to be my son’s first word. I even ended up giving her the number of the phone sex agency. She said she was getting married next year and that she was desperate for some extra cash to pay for the wedding reception.”

  Will let out what sounded like the beginning of a cry. Rosie leaned over the Moses basket and started stroking his cheek. “Ssh … Come on, noodle. Time for some shut-eye.”

  I went over and peeked into the crib. He was a chunky little fellow with the prettiest Cupid’s bow lips and a mass of hair the same shade of blond as his mother’s. “Aw, he is such a cutie.” I watched as he found his two middle fingers and began sucking. After a few moments, he dropped off again. “And that is a great outfit.” He was wearing a black-and-white striped romper suit. Across the chest it read: Been inside for nine months.

  “Yeah, it always makes people laugh. My son, on the other hand, is less than amusing. Before you arrived, he’d been screaming nonstop for five hours. And he’s like that most evenings. He starts around four and it can go on until midnight.”

  “Ah, the colic months,” I said. “I remember them well.”

  “You have kids?” she said.

  “Two.” I assured her that Will would grow out of the screaming phase in another month or so, but she didn’t seem convinced.

  We sat down and she asked me about Dan and Ella, what I thought of the neighborhood, had I met Betty yet.

  “Oh yes. I’ve met her.”

  “Did she tell you what a disgrace I am—being a single mother? God knows what she’d say if she knew what I did for a living. In fact one day I might just tell her, just to see the expression on her face.”

  I started laughing. “Be careful. The shock might kill her.”

  “Nah—she’s a tough old bird. It would take more than that to see her off. The thing is, I’ve explained several times that Will’s dad and I were married, but she either forgets or she chooses not to remember.”

  I said that it was probably the latter. “So you’re divorced?”

  “Not quite. It’s still going through.”

  I wasn’t sure if she wanted to elaborate, so I decided not to press her on the subject.

  “I threw the bastard out when I was three months pregnant,” Rosie said, clearly more than happy to elaborate.

  “Wow. That can’t have been easy.”

  She shrugged. “I had no choice.”

  She said that when Simon wasn’t chasing other women, he was lying on the sofa, smoking weed. “He thought he could make it as a screenwriter, but no matter how much I tried to drum it into him, he never understood there was more to writing than sitting with his MacBook in Starbucks.”

  These days he was living on a houseboat in Chelsea that belonged to his rich actress-slash-model girlfriend. Rosie had no idea if he was writing or earning any money, but she was going after him in the courts for child support anyway. “Suffice it to say that so far I haven’t seen a penny.”

  “Bloody hell. Can’t be easy.”

  “It isn’t. Money’s been a real issue for me since Will came along, hence the phone sex. It pays way better than an office job and like I said, I can do it from home.” She paused. “Why don’t I make us something to drink? I’m on the wagon while I’m breast-feeding, but I do a pretty decent hot chocolate. None of your powdered rubbish—I’m talking melted Green and Blacks and cream. I think I might even have some marshmallows somewhere.”

  I said that sounded great. Rosie went off into the kitchen while I watched Will. Ten minutes later she was back with two mugs of thick, dark chocolate and a plate of marshmallows on cocktail sticks. Under her arm was an industrial-size sink plunger.

  “The Clog Sucker should sort you out,” she said. Apparently, Clog Sucker was its real name.

  We sat for a few moments sipping and dunking, me telling her how heavenly the hot chocolate was.

  “Well,” I said, helping myself to my third marshmallow. “I certainly know how it feels to be hard up.”

  I told her about Mike’s gambling and how it had pretty much bankrupted us. How long had I known this woman? Ten minutes? And I was already telling her my life story. But there were some people you just clicked with from the get-go. It had been like that with Mike. When I described how Mike had died, her eyes filled up.

  “I can’t imagine what that must have been like. How on earth did you cope?”

  I
said what I always said, that you just find the strength—especially when you’ve got kids. “Counseling helped. My emotions were all over the place. The problem was that after Mike died, I had such mixed feelings. I was overwhelmed with grief, but at the same time part of me was relieved that he’d gone.”

  “And you hated yourself for feeling that.”

  “You’ve got it. The guilt was unbearable.”

  I realized that I was talking about stuff that I’d only discussed with my mother and Judy the grief therapist. I hadn’t talked to Steve about my conflicting emotions after Mike died because I wasn’t sure that he’d understand. But Rosie understood. Talking to somebody who had also been in a lousy marriage was a bit like group therapy. We carried on chatting about Mike’s death, me telling her how it had affected the children and how I’d been forced to sell the house.

  “Wow, so you lived in one of those amazing houses on the other side,” she said, emphasizing the last two words.

  I asked her about Simon.

  “Not much more to tell. Like I said, he was an idle, philandering bastard. I threw him out. End of story.”

  “Fair enough, but what I don’t understand is why he would want to play around when he was married to a woman as beautiful as you.”

  Rosie turned pink, which surprised me. She didn’t come across as the type who was easily embarrassed. “I don’t know about that,” she said.

  “Oh, come on. You could easily be a model. You’ve got the figure, the face … the …”

  “Big tits?”

  “Well, yes, now that you’ve said it.”

  “It’s not just the breast-feeding. I’ve always had them.”

  “Me, too. But you’re lucky. I couldn’t help noticing that yours are still perky.”

  “They are. People tell me that’s quite unusual.”

  “You bet it is. I can practically throw mine over my shoulder. You do realize this means I shall have to kill you.”

  “Oh, please don’t. If it helps, I have stretch marks on my stomach.”

  “Above the panty elastic or below?”

  “Below.”

  “Sorry, doesn’t count. No, I really do have to kill you.”

  By now we were snorting with laughter.

  “But seriously,” I said. “You could have walked into any modeling agency and they would have signed you up on the spot.”

  “OK, I admit that when I was seventeen or eighteen, I thought about it, but if I’d gone into modeling, my mother would have disowned me.”

  “Why?”

  She told me about her pushy mother, her dad who had walked out when she was four. Her mother had raised her alone, working two jobs in order to send her to a posh girls’ school.

  “I was meant to be a lawyer.”

  “What happened?”

  She shrugged. “The pressure got too much. I made it to university, but I dropped out. Mum never forgave me. She also never told me I was pretty. Not even once.”

  “That’s so cruel. Why would a mother do that? Jealousy?”

  I thought about my own mother, who still occasionally pinched my cheek and referred to me as her “beautiful, almond-eyed baby.”

  “No, it wasn’t jealousy,” Rosie said. “She was scared that I would start running after boys, get pregnant, and that would be the end of all her hopes for me.”

  “But you must have had boys chasing you, girlfriends telling you how beautiful you were?”

  “It didn’t make any difference what other people said. The damage had been done. All my friends told me to have a go at modeling, but my self-esteem was nonexistent. I felt worthless. I just drifted from one temp job to another. Then I met Simon.”

  Apparently the attraction had been instant for both of them. “We were both lost souls, black sheep who had disappointed our parents.”

  She explained that in Simon’s case, his dad had been an army major, a bully who expected his son to follow in his footsteps and go to military college. Simon rebelled, dropped out of high school and found a job in a bar.

  “When I met him, he was this brooding, wannabe writer living in a crappy flat in Balham. He convinced me that he was a creative genius just waiting to be discovered. I had found my very own struggling artist. How sexy was that? Except this was Balham—not the Left Bank circa 1930. Once we were married and I got pregnant, I saw him for the lazy git he was and it all fell apart.”

  There were two marshmallows left on the plate. Rosie handed me one, despite my protestations that it would be my ninth, and took the other for herself.

  “Round about the time I met Simon,” she said, chewing on her marshmallow, “Mum was diagnosed with colon cancer. They gave her six months. She lasted a year. The closer she got to the end, the more I hoped that she would find it in her to tell me that she was proud of how hard I’d worked as a kid, but she never did.”

  “That must have hurt.”

  “Oh yeah. It still does. But on the upside, the money she left me was enough for the deposit on this house.”

  “That was something, I guess.”

  I said that I didn’t understand why, if she had such low self-esteem, she found the confidence to have phone sex with strangers. It was something I associated with exhibitionists, not shrinking violets.

  She laughed. “Believe me, I’m no exhibitionist. But becoming a single mother with no income changed me. When you have a child, you do what you have to do to provide for them. Right now the only thing that matters is Will’s welfare and having enough money to live on.”

  I said I felt exactly the same about Dan and Ella. “But one day wouldn’t you like to have a proper career?”

  She said that maybe she’d give it some thought when Will started school, but modeling was definitely out. In four years she would be thirty-three, practically geriatric in the modeling world.

  “So come on—what do you do?” she said.

  I explained how I used to be a fashion designer and that now I did something much less glamorous.

  “Hang on,” she said after I’d told her what I did. “You gave up running your own company to become an operator on the police nonemergency helpline?”

  “I needed to earn money—like you. And it has its moments. Only the other day, a woman rang to complain that the rabbit she’d bought didn’t have the floppy ears she’d been promised and what were the police going to do about it.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I referred her to the Sale of Goods Act. After which I attempted to eat my own head.”

  Rosie burst out laughing. “I’m not surprised… . So here we are, both in dead-end jobs with no hope for the future.”

  “Yep. Here we are.”

  “Shall I open another packet of marshmallows?”

  “Why not?” I said.

  • • •

  “Oh, by the way,” I said to Steve as we pulled up at a traffic light a couple of blocks from Selfridges. “I finally got to meet my next-door neighbor—you know the one with the baby, who’s been away all this time.”

  “Yeah? What’s she like?”

  “Unusual.”

  “How d’you mean?”

  “OK … you have to guess what she does for a living.”

  “I dunno… . She breeds badgers.”

  “Nope.”

  “She writes the predictions in fortune cookies.”

  “Nope.”

  “She’s a pet food taster.”

  “What? No. That’s gross.”

  “OK, I’m bored now. I give up.”

  “She does phone sex.”

  Steve blinked. “What? How does that work?”

  “You know … she gets paid to talk dirty over the phone.”

  “Nice. And you call that unusual? I call it perverted.”

  “Oh, stop being such a prude. She’s hard up and it pays the mortgage.”

  “I’m not being a prude. I just happen to think it’s not the greatest career choice, that’s all. What sort of a role model is she for he
r child?”

  “One that keeps a roof over his head.”

  “Money isn’t everything.”

  “It is when you don’t have it.”

  “OK, touché,” Steve said.

  “I really like her. Ever since I lost touch with Belinda in Sydney, I’ve had a girlfriend vacancy. I think I might just have filled it.”

  “So you spend a couple of hours with this person and suddenly she’s your best friend?”

  “I didn’t say she was my best friend. I just really like her, that’s all.”

  “Fabulous. My girlfriend’s new best friend is a hooker.”

  “Stop it. She’s not my best friend.” But I knew she would be. Rosie was fun, alive, a bit of a rebel. She couldn’t have been less like the conventional conformist Tommy Padstow mothers at school, who, even though I envied them, would never be my friends. I had nothing in common with those women, whereas Rosie and I had loads in common.

  “Plus she isn’t a hooker,” I went on. “It’s purely phone sex.”

  “And you believe her?”

  “Actually, I do.”

  Steve grunted.

  “Oh, look, we’re here,” I said, ignoring the grunt. “Make a left.”

  Villiers Mews, with its cobblestones, its lopsided antiquarian bookshops dotted among impossibly quaint Georgian cottages, could have provided the template for a Christmas cookie tin.

  Shirley Feldman Exclusive Foundation Garments was halfway down the street—the limp, dried-up shop between a swanky cigar shop and Chandrika Crew—Nannies for Discerning Mummies. The bra shop’s candy-striped awning—chic circa 1982—was faded and full of holes. As we got closer, I noticed that some letters had fallen off the sign. It now read: SHIRLEY FELDMAN EXCLUSIVE FOUND GARMENTS, which didn’t have quite the same cachet.

  There was a parking space directly in front of the shop. “Can you believe it?” Steve said, killing the engine. “We’ve actually found a parking space around the corner from Selfridges on a Saturday.” He took his cell out of his pocket and announced that he had to tweet this momentous news.

  While he tweeted, I carried on staring at the shop. I could see Aunty Shirley, all red lippy and big do, dressing the window. I could hear her swearing at the mannequins through a mouthful of pins when their arms fell off.