‘No thank you, Miss Pratt,’ said Susan firmly. ‘I think your talents might be somewhat wasted making tea.’
‘Then can I be a writer?’ Zero Blondell literally wrung her hands, like a Dickens orphan. ‘Oh, please can I?’
‘Let me think.’ She thought, and decided in double-quick time that this strange young person could be just what the chief sales rep ordered to secure the elusive ABC1 young professional audience every paper craved. They enjoyed a bit of controversy served up over Sunday brunch, and all the Best could boast by way of provocation was a middle-aged enfant terrible whose vitriol had been watered down with gin over the years and who was usually too drunk to actually write the column. Instead assorted hacks rallied round with stray squibs about the royal family and popular entertainers and why their bad behaviour was emblematic of a moral decline – and their star took more than fifty thousand pounds a year just for use of an old photograph and a byline. Looking at Zero Blondell’s hot copy and eager face, this didn’t look much like a bargain any more. ‘Let me talk to the editor. Take your piece away with you, and if you want to work in your lunch hour and cut it by six hundred words – well, I can’t make any promises.’
‘Oh, thank you, Miss Street! You angel! You saint!’ The beautiful girl leaned across the desk and squeezed her tight, leaving a faint but unmistakable odour of halitosis. Well, no one was perfect.
It took all Susan’s powers of persuasion and promises of the capture of the mythical young and female readerships to get her a licence for Zero from Charles. At first he had been appalled by Zero’s spite and spleen. Within a month he had realized that, unlike ninety per cent of the people employed in newspapers, she really could write. This presented its own set of problems. Unlike the more mediocre hacks, she was fierce about the subediting of what she wrote; she once walked up to a dozing sub just back from the pub and a liquid lunch, slapped his face and hissed, ‘I refuse to believe that you could derive full job satisfaction anywhere outside of an abattoir in the rush hour.’ Tantrum followed tantrum until Susan stepped in and took the task upon herself. Since then Zero had been sweetness and light. She could afford to be. At twenty-three, she was earning more than any other writer in the office and only slightly less than the editors.
As if this wasn’t enough to distinguish her, she was flamboyantly and violently lesbian.
‘Why do you hate men so much?’ Susan had asked her as they lounged over martinis at the Groucho.
‘I was married to one.’ Zero laughed.
‘Fuck. Off. I make two-fifty a word, so that just cost you a fiver,’ she spat at a middle-aged reporter who tried to put his arm around her in a fit of drunken bonhomie one Christmas Eve. She was civil only to Charles, Susan – and the secretaries. She made them coffee and tried to look up their skirts when they went up stepladders in search of research material. ‘Zero, back to your desk!’ Susan would scold if she caught her at either. ‘You are not being paid to make either tea or whoopee. You are being paid to write!’ Zero would pout furiously, as she always did on being found out.
‘When in doubt, pout,’ she once told Susan was her philosophy of life.
For someone who didn’t like men, Susan thought as she waited for the girl to arrive, Zero could do a pretty good imitation of the very worst sort. What a bastard she could be. Susan had seen literally groups of girls – three, four – sniffing and weeping in the street outside the Best’s main entrance while Zero sneaked in the back way in her veiled black pillbox and trenchcoat. She pretended to be appalled by the sensation she created, but when she wasn’t working hard at it her genuine glee crept through. ‘Look at them, Susie!’ she would hiss, leaning out of Susan’s window and squinting at her fan club below as they chainsmoked, compared case histories and complained shrilly to each other. ‘Look at the brunette! She’s Italian – what a beaut! I had her last week – no strings, no promises. Now she thinks we’re engaged or something, she’s threatening to get her brother on to me! Dig the redhead! What a dog, but what a pair! Her father’s in the FO – she wants to move in with me! Me, the milkman’s daughter!’
‘Zero, have you always had this effect on women?’
‘Oh no, bach, only since I was seventeen. Right after I was married. It went awful from the start; I was a good chapel girl, knew nothing about the dirty deed. I couldn’t ever fancy fucking the pig. I thought I was frigid, he told me enough times I was. He was a right slag, even after we were married. So, I was sitting in the doctor’s waiting-room one night waiting for my monthly supply of instant thrombosis and I read in some magazine about how to improve your marriage. Well, mine could use the improving. And rule one was “Interest yourself in your husband’s hobby”. And I realized that Dai’s hobbies were rugby and women. I’m not athletic, so women were all that was left. So I interested myself in them.’ Zero sighed at the memory. ‘All those coffee mornings and girls’ nights out. There certainly wasn’t any lack of opportunity. You’d be amazed how easy it was, Susan bach. Men are such bad fucks that a girl can get a girl as easy as that’ – she snapped her fingers – ‘when the lights are low and the Babycham is flowing. Well, within a year I was the Lothario of the valleys. You bet I had to leave town! So I came here, to sin city. I had my typing, didn’t I, the working-class girl’s weapon. And I made a point of temping for media women. So within weeks I learned about the Muffia, and I knew that was the world for me.’ She pouted. ‘But all those other media tarts just wanted my body, not my copy. You’re the first editor to love me for my mind, not my behind.’
Zero maintained the existence of something called the Muffia, a loose affiliation of media lesbians who spent their lives laying, lunching and launching each other up the ladder of success. Susan had never caught a whiff of it in all her ten years of journalism. But maybe she had been looking – or sniffing – in the wrong places.
‘Zero, why are you so mean to those girls?’ she had asked.
‘Oh, I don’t mean to be mean, bach. But girls are such pretty things, and there’s so many of them in this city. It’s a city full of pretty girls. You think you’re having drinks with the cutest girl in the world, and then you look up into the waitress’s eyes and you could drown in them. You can’t help yourself leaving your card with the tip. I always write on mine, “Heaven is seven numbers away.” ’
Susan made a retching noise.
‘No, it’s an old lie about girls being nicer to girls than men. They’re not, they’re just more fun. Going with girls, no Pill or pregnancy or losing your figure – why, it’s just like being a teenager all your life! You should try it, babes, you really should.’
‘It sounds wonderful. There’s just one snag.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t fancy girls.’
Now the girl herself was walking through the door wearing one of her legion of black dresses, this one plain except for a striking tail proudly standing out behind. She carried the trade press, which she threw on to Susan’s desk. ‘Hi, babes. Seen these?’
‘TOOTH OUT – POPE INFALLIBLE?’ they screamed. Susan shook her head. ‘God, the standard of journalism in this country.’ They laughed.
‘So what’s happening to you? Being kicked upstairs?’
‘Yes. Right into his bedroom.’
Zero made wide eyes. ‘No!’
‘Seriously. You wouldn’t believe what he wants me to do.’
‘I’d believe anything of men.’
‘He wants me to do six tasks for him. Just do what he wants six times.’
‘Isn’t that just like a man?’ Zero laughed. ‘It’s called being married. Only it doesn’t end after six times.’
‘Should I do it?’
‘What do you get?’
‘I think I get the editorship. Don’t tell anyone.’
‘Don’t tell anyone, but I think you should do it.’
‘Do you think I could?’
‘I don’t see why not.’ Zero’s face went very young and hard, as it never failed to do whe
n talking about sex with men. Specifically, about Susan having sex with men. ‘You don’t love Matthew. Charles wasn’t the most appetizing morsel of man-meat I’ve seen in my young life. In fact he was a real dog. But you did that.’ She pouted accusingly. ‘For years.’
‘I liked Charles.’
‘I fail to see exactly where or why your feelings have to be engaged. It’s business, not pleasure.’
‘YOU wouldn’t do it.’
‘Ah, but I’m not a career girl. I’m a congenital genius. If I were a career girl, and one of many after the same thing, I’d use anything I had to get it. I would work on a Protean basis – I would recreate myself constantly. I’d be a bitch in the boardroom and a slave in the sack. I’d be what I had to be until I could be what I want. We’re lucky: we’re women. We can recreate ourselves in a way men can’t because artifice doesn’t become second nature to them in childhood as it does to us.’
Susan looked at her suspiciously. ‘Did you swallow a thesaurus?’
Zero giggled. ‘No, I ate out a Kenyan girl, second-year PPE at Oxford. God, did we have some classy pillow talk.’
‘So what you’re saying, stop me if I’m wrong, is that I should behave like a whore?’
Zero shrugged elaborately. ‘You become a whore the minute you sleep with a man. I’m just asking you to be a pro.’
‘I think you’re horrible.’
‘Yeah, well, go and ask your girly boyfriend what you should do if you want the blushing broad angle.’
‘But he’s over fifty.’
‘All the better for you. How much can it take to keep him happy?’ Zero rifled through the ‘Strictly Confidential’ file. ‘God, is that all Pascoe’s getting? No wonder he gives me the fish eye. You know the new metropolitan measure of how well you’re doing? You have to get your age in thousands. At least. Where’s the wife?’
‘In the Sunny von Bulow Clinic, I think. Upstate New York. Stop that, Zero. Rich alkie or something.’
‘Where’s the son?’
‘America. Big daddy has yet to persuade him to check out his new toy printing set.’
‘Didn’t he used to hang around with Caroline Malaise? The old man, I mean?’
‘God, yes. I’d forgotten. All those pictures of them in Dempster three years ago leaving Langan’s.’
‘Talk about Beauty and the Beast! Wasn’t she some sort of vague royal? – the blue-blooded bimbo they used to call her. Now there’s a career that spontaneously combusted.’
‘Didn’t some French director say she was the new Catherine Deneuve?’
‘Do me a favour. They didn’t know what to do with the old one once she lost her milk teeth, But Caroline Malaise! Well – and now he wants you – little Susan Street from Nowhere-on-Sea!’
He wanted her, she thought. He did. But not half as much as she wanted power.
‘Well’ – Zero rose, straightening her tail fastidiously – ‘It’s all up to you, I suppose. You’re the one who’s got to do the dirty deed. Deeds. But I’ll tell you one thing for nothing.’ She paused with her hand on the handle. ‘There are forty-four ugly, stupid men in this office, give or take a messenger boy or two. Not one of them isn’t bitter and doesn’t hate women and because of that not one of them hasn’t crystallized his fear and loathing of modern women in you. And right now every one of them spends a good part of his waking hours wetting himself with glee because he’s got a ringside seat for the downfall of Susan Street. If you fail, you’re not just failing for yourself. You’re in the inspiration game now, babes. I’d hate you to sleep with Pope, you know that. You must know I’m in love with you. But more than anything I’d hate to see you fail.’ She closed the door quietly.
Susan sat at her desk staring into space for at least an hour, and by the time the phone rang and Kathy said it was Mr Pope from Munich, her mind was made up.
‘I’ll do it,’ she said flatly. ‘I’ll do anything.’
THREE
As the car turned into the weeping neon wasteland of Saturday night King’s Cross, Tobias Pope whooped with all the good-humoured excitement of a young American boy at a baseball game.
‘Fast, Susan! Fast food and fast sex! I love it! These are our people, Susan – just the place for a fast mover like you to end up!’
Beside him in the back seat, Susan Street shivered inside her Nicole Farhi overcoat and clenched her fists. End up? What did that mean? The simmering fear that her first task might be to turn a trick came bubbling up inside her, making her heart pump hot blood into her cheeks.
‘Ah, here we are. Come up and see my etchings, my dear.’
Up two flights of stairs, between a place which called itself Family Fun and was filled with middle-aged men staring hungrily at young boys feeding endless coins into shrill and fruitless fruit machines, and a fast-food restaurant called the Meat Machine (though this name would have done just as well for the alleged amusement arcade, she reflected sourly as she followed three steps behind the eager Pope looking for all the world like a sullen Muslim bride), Susan faced her first task.
The taskmaster turned out to be a large man wearing a rubber apron and scratching a greasy pigtail, looking suspiciously at Tobias Pope as the immaculate American pumped his hand enthusiastically.
‘Let me shake the hand of artistry, my good man! And are your services available at this very moment?’
The man’s expression changed to one Susan recognized as Let’s-Skin-The-Tourist. ‘Yep. Which one you want?’ He gestured around the room.
On the walls, liberally interspersed with colour photographs of the Princess of Wales torn from tabloids, smiling down like a Madonna of the mezzobrows, were dozens of ornate, scrolled designs, of ships, wild beasts, hotrod cars.
‘Not me, my good artisan. My daughter here. A more elegant and subtle motif, don’t you think?’
Susan sat down quickly, conveniently in the subject’s chair. She was in a tattoo parlour! Of course she’d read about them; she had even commissioned a feature on them when she worked at Parvenu. She and Isabella had screamed with laughter and pantomimed retching over the photographs taken to accompany the piece until the editor came out to investigate the racket. The sheer ugliness of the blank-eyed human flotsam who cared so little for themselves that they had reduced themselves to the level of walls to be mired in graffiti had appalled and repulsed her, despite her laughter. If anyone had told her she would one day be sitting in such a hellhole, not as an observer but an offering, she would have offered to call the men in white coats for them.
She got to her feet and, like the mythical drowning man, the faces of every man who had doubted her determination and ability to get to the top seemed to pass before her eyes, stopping at the assembled male mass of the Sunday Best. Dozens of ugly, resentful men, laughing, chattering, pointing as she cleared out her desk and walked through the newsroom and out the door for the last time. She could almost taste the salty tears of rage that coursed down her face.
No, no, no! Anything but that . . .
It might be a small design. In some hidden place. She knew that some bold girls about town had discreet lizards or birds on shoulders and ankles. She sat down.
Pope was conferring with the tattooist, smiling at her over the man’s shoulder. She gestured to him frantically.
‘Excuse me, my good man.’ He crossed the room and looked down at her contemptuously. ‘What’s wrong with you? Not refusing at the first jump, are we? Like a common little carthorse.’
‘Do you seriously intend for me to have one of these things?’
‘Just a small one.’
‘You mean a life-size representation of the HMS Brazen?’
‘Just a small one.’
‘How small?’
‘Just a four-letter word. In letters no bigger than those of an upper-case typeface.’
Her mind raced, furtively thumbing and speed-reading the pages in her memory bank’s dictionary of obscenity. ‘Cunt?’ she whispered finally.
Pope drew back
and made a little moue of disgust. ‘My dear Susan. You make your origins horribly obvious at times. No, not your job description; we both know that already.’ He chuckled. ‘A clean word. The cleanest word in the world, expressing all the beauty and symmetry of the free market.’
She shook her head blankly.
‘You’ll soon see, my dear.’
The tattooist cleared his throat in Technicolor.
‘But lo, the muse is tugging at the sleeve of our primitive genius, bidding him hurry.’ He patted her arm. ‘I suggest we close our eyes.’
She closed her eyes. She felt a hand pin back her thick dark fringe. She heard the little cocktail tray of paints being wheeled up beside her. She heard the miniature dentist’s drill being switched on. She heard the tattooist telling her to relax and starting a long rambling story about a Hell’s Angel client who collapsed while having a Harley Davidson inscribed on his scrotum, which really helped her trepidation.
Then suddenly the pain started, filling her entire head with white sound. It was as though a laser beam of pain, no bigger than the point of a needle and as sharp, was moving across the centre of her forehead. She was just about to scream when it stopped. The room danced red and gold before her open eyes and she collapsed against Tobias Pope. The smell of his aftershave was grotesquely reassuring.
Money and a bandage changed hands, and then he carried her out to the car as though she was something infinitely precious to him, and laid her along the back seat.
‘Drive,’ he said.
‘Where, sir?’
‘Just drive.’
He slipped a silver flask between her lips and she gulped Hine brandy hungrily. He smoothed back her fringe and tugged gently at the bandage. She winced. He took a small flashlight from his pocket and examined his new objet d’art.
Ambition Page 4
