by Dawson, Jill
“How much?” asks Bobby, and I know this strikes him as a good solution.
“Hundred quid,” Tony says, walking away from us. “Talk to my uncle.”
“Fucking hell,” says Bobby, more to us than Tony. “I think I’ll get me dad to do me a medical certificate, off of this doctor in Stepney.”
Tony gives me a sort of wave, but the way he walks off, decidedly, hands in pockets, tells me that’s my lot, for this evening. He gave me the tap on the shoulder. He’s not going to beg, for God’s sake. I stare after him, making sure not to show Stella or Bobby with the smallest gesture or expression that I’m in any way disappointed.
Bobby prefers a pub called the Bag O’ Nails near the Wellington Barracks at the back of Buckingham Palace to coming to Soho with us. Stella rolls her eyes, and whispers, “Guards officers.” So we go on our own. We end up having a hot salt-beef sandwich in the Nosh Bar near the Windmill, and we’re starving: biting into the thick white bread and the juicy slices of meat so that the fat dribbles down our chin, making our lipstick slide off our mouths. We dab at our lips with Quickies, clean ourselves up in Stella’s pocket mirror.
Then to a spieler in Ham Yard, and because we’re young and new, all these men keep coming up to us. Stella plays along—she’s fearless—but they get on my wick, and the truth is, like that time in the lorry running away from Approved School, I’m a bit frightened. The place is full of the Maltese pimps I’ve heard about—Epsom Salts (Malts), Stella calls them—and they don’t look friendly. Although it was a few years ago, I do remember hearing in school about Black Rita, found shot in her bed in Rupert Street.
I sip my port and Guinness standing up, trying to spot the next man about to make a pass at me and head him off. It’s a crush, and so noisy with shouting and music from somewhere over the street and the men squeezed in the fug of smoke at card tables, now and then smacking down cards with a yelp. Stella weaves between them, her hand at my elbow, guiding me to the dingy basement lavatory. She wants to know about the firm Bobby’s working for, haven’t I noticed that London’s changed since we’re out and it’s not the Whites running things anymore? Billy Hill and Jack Spot teamed up, she says, to get rid of them, and she’d be interested to know who Bobby’s working for since he left borstal, because you want to be sure, she says—staring at herself in the cracked square of mirror as she redoes her lipstick—that your brother’s backed the right horse.
Coming back up the stairs from the lavatory, one of the men, this short Yank with a sweaty head, gets up at one point and makes a kind of lunge for me. He’s sort of half out of his seat, and I can’t help myself, my hand just comes out and swipes him, really hard across the face. My temper again—I’m instantly embarrassed and sorry for him. A couple of his card-playing friends look up—one big heavy is obviously from Scotland Yard, you can spot them a mile off—and laugh at him, as he rubs his cheek.
He’s standing up, dazed, and Stella has wedged herself beside him in a moment, at his ear, apologizing.
“She’s a virgin,” she whispers. “Ten quid.”
The man freezes. He was about to step behind a screened-off table where his friends are, but instead he moves closer to me, elbowing Stella out of the way, and looks me up and down the way Dad studies a greyhound: appraising. My palm stings where I slapped him, and I rub it down the side of my skirt.
As she sees him move towards his jacket pocket, Stella moves in again and says, “We need another ten quid key money. Key money, you know. For the room.”
She jerks her head towards the door and towards Archer Street and beyond, to some imagined hotel far away.
The Yank is grinning now. We’re squashed up against one another; he is pressing against my chest and he puts an arm around my waist and squeezes up closer. “You really not popped your cherry, honey?” His breath is hot in my ear and smells of whiskey and cheese. “Or you just kiddin’ me? Cos you know I don’t really care—I’m loaded,” and he brings out another couple of notes.
Stella gives me a Look. The look says, “Don’t let on that the white note is a ten. He obviously thinks it’s a fiver.”
She doesn’t need to give me the look twice. The notes are hot, down my bra, tucked in.
“OK, it’s just over there. Soho Square. We’ll show you the way,” Stella says. She’s pointing confidently, but we’re not near Soho Square and I know she has no idea where the nearest hotel is. Now my palm is really stinging, and sweating, too. I know what she’s about. I look around. What if he gets nasty?
We pick our way through the sticky beer-slopped floor and the crowd to get to the door. Not easy in a stiff full-circle skirt that swishes around, threatening to knock glasses to the floor. I lean against the door and it gives, so that we tumble out.
“Leg it!” Stella screams, and we’re off, tottering, careering, running, squealing actually, we can’t help it. We race up Archer Street, past a couple of colored blokes already queuing up with their instruments outside the Musician’s Union. They watch us and whistle, while Stella pauses for a second to consider climbing up a fire-escape ladder near the stage entrance to the Apollo but thinks better of it, seeing the height we’d have to climb and hearing the Yank come out of the spieler behind us. She tugs my hand and we stumble against the stage door, where a brass is fixing her stockings and tells us to shove off, so we run on, past the tramps sleeping on Rupert Street. A six-foot tart, wearing nothing but thigh-high boots and a red bra, laughs at us as we pass a half-open doorway, and Stella squeals again. Stella drags me in the direction of Brewer Street market, where they’re already starting to put up the stalls, and the clank of metal twangs in the distance. We finally, panting, ribs aching, stop in the bad-fruit-smelling alley under Maurice House, knowing we lost the Yank long ago. My ankle turned over once in my heels and a pain shot up my leg, so now I take my shoe off to rub it, and Stella leans against me, laughing and breathing heavily.
Stella’s doing this quiet, soft sort of cowgirl hoot. I don’t think she planned it, but it was the speed which threw the Yank off. He shouted once, made this hopeless gesture with his arm. He must have been drunker than he seemed in the spieler because he gave up the chase so quickly. I hardly dared glance back, but over my shoulder I had a sense of him, just outside the closed club door, stumbling along a little way, and then caving in, heavily, against the doorway of the Artisans’ Dwellings on Archer Street. A sorry pang twangs through me. Then I remember his whiskey breath, and him squeezing up close to me, shoving something hard against the side of my leg. I might be a virgin, but I’m not an idiot.
I feel like hugging Stella with the relief, and the triumph. Rolling. A well-known trick. Getting the key money for the room and then not putting out. Thirty pounds in total! Silly sod thought he gave us twenty. That’s fifteen quid each and a bloody great goldmine we’ve just discovered.
So, that was how we started, Stella and me. Or how I remember it: our first business venture. Chance, the first time, and then after that, more deliberately. We never got quite as much money as that first occasion; we usually asked for twenty and settled for ten. We did it for a few weeks on our own, finding we could make nearly two hundred pounds a week: a phenomenal sum, at a time when working in Lyon’s Corner Tea House would have paid us three pounds a week plus tips. We used some of it to pay the rent in advance on a lovely new flat, one on the new council estate on Well Street that I’d had my name down for since getting out of the Young Offenders place: the Frampton Park Estate.
It was a top floor flat with a balcony and a washing line and a little hatch from the kitchen to the front room. The rent was three pounds a week, but we didn’t bother saving any after we’d paid the deposit; we used it to buy all the things we could think of: a brand-new gas cooker, blue and red patterned curtains, soft pile carpets, new beds and cabinets and a whistling kettle, and sixty bottles of Babycham to keep in a crate in the kitchen. Standing sipping one from a dainty glass
in our kitchen, I would look out and watch birds and clouds and the green spire of the church over at Lauriston. That flattened me a bit. I thought that, after all, I should have aimed for somewhere further away.
Yanks in Soho were generous. Gamblers were easy because they were already distracted. We had to avoid the Epsom Salts and any girls that they ran, who’d tear our hair out if they caught on that we were stealing their business. Stella didn’t stick to rolling; she was soon back to her old tricks. She genuinely did need money for the key, and she’d disappear for ten minutes—the ten-minute rule, one of the Malts had started that, to make the most of business—while I waited nervously downstairs, just inside the door, smoking one after another cigarette, waiting for another likely punter to send up to her. Then one night this greasy old fellow pulled Stella into the doorway of Barney Lubelle’s sax shop and started laying into her with his fists. I was screaming blue murder; I took off my stiletto and went for his eyes and we managed to get away, but it shook us. In the end, what we needed, though we hated to admit it, was a heavy, some muscle. A man to be in the background if anyone, you know, took it to heart.
That’s where Tony came in. The third time I bumped into him, he was driving a car down Well Street back in Hackney. A nice car: a Rover saloon. Glossy burgundy with black paintwork. New looking. Much too flash for someone who had a new job working part time in his uncle’s café. That told me he did other things. Hadn’t he boasted to Bobby that he could get an impersonator to fail the medical for him, for national service, for a price? He didn’t seem to work for a firm but he definitely had money. He was strongly built. The window of the car was wound down and he rested his arm on it, shirtsleeves rolled up above the elbow, his forearm tanned and softly furred with hair, as if to show me. It was the top of his arm that really impressed. Even through his shirtsleeves you could tell: it was about the size of my thigh.
He had film-star looks. Like I said, Montgomery Clift. Or maybe even Tony Curtis. Something intense that you couldn’t fail to notice, that drew all the girls in a room to him. Black hair, short at the sides but folded at the top of his head in a not-quite stiffened quiff; a full mouth, those unusual eyes. This day he smiled and opened the car door, and smiled again briefly as I said “nice,” to the burgundy leather seats, and took me for a spin, and though he didn’t say much, his actions said it all. Like he nodded towards a bracelet I was wearing and he caught hold of my wrist to look more closely at it, and a little shiver ran along my arm. I was thinking: he’s smooth all right, he’s confident, because he held my wrist a little too long and then looked straight into my eyes until I blushed just a tiny bit, and then he seemed satisfied, and dragged his eyes away and back to the road.
It was Stella who asked him directly, eventually, when he dropped me off, back at the flat on the Frampton Park Estate. I knew she was jealous, steaming that it was me who seemed to have hooked him, but she put that aside and her practical nature took over. She made him come in for a cup of coffee (he wanted Italian coffee of course—dark and bitter—but we only had Nescafé). We need a driver, was how she put it. She showed him the bruises on her arms from the man in the doorway of the sax shop and asked him if he knew what rolling was. “Queenie’s a virgin, can you believe,” she added, for good measure. We both peered at him when she said that, to watch how the black pupils in his eyes widened. The irises, once I saw them in daylight in our kitchen, were the palest of blues. I felt dimly that his eyes, or maybe his coloring, made him familiar to me, resemble someone I already knew, but it was years later that I realized who it was. Dad, of course. How corny was that—and shouldn’t it have been a warning to me? That my first love was, in some way only vaguely noted, like my father?
And there’s another thing that didn’t occur to me then, in those early days of meeting Tony, days when it felt like everything he did was charmed, every gesture or glance: the way he rested his hands on the tan leather of the steering wheel as if he was about to start playing the piano when he was waiting at traffic lights; the way he sometimes narrowed his eyes, staring at me, like I was some kind of blinding sunlight; the way if I stood close to him, he was always so clean shaven, never even a suggestion of stubble, as if he shaved and bathed three times a day; the way he strode into a room and paused first, possessed it, snagged all eyes, before he would move or talk. I loved the way his hands smelled of the coffee grounds from the café, or faintly of oil from his car, and how this combination was good, was masculine and sexy, when it came from Tony. But the thing that only occurred to me later was this. Stella. She wanted him first and went for him, and Tony chose me. Well, I’m sure you’ve figured out by now that I’m vain, or that I’m proud; I like to compete and win. That might be why I fell for him, after all, or why I stuck with him for too long. Simply the fact that he singled me out, and made me feel chosen—the best. I was young and silly and, God, above all else, I wanted to feel that.
So this first night Tony drives us up to Soho, and we agree on a cut for him: three pounds for him and three pounds ten shillings each for me and Stella, per client. He shakes his head slightly as Stella suggests this, as if it’s not the money that matters to him.
“You’re tough as old boots, aren’t you? You can look after yourself . . . I’m just coming along for the ride,” he says.
I’m sitting up front with him, acknowledgment of my almost-girlfriend status. I catch Stella’s eyes in the rearview mirror; see the irritation. She has a new hairstyle, though, and it looks great. Short but sort of piled high. I know she’s modeled herself on Gina Lollobrigida, that photo we saw of her the other night, in the Daily Herald. Me, I’ve gone for another pinup calendar. Flat ballet pumps, capri-length slacks, shirt tied just under the bust. I sleep in rollers to make my fringe really puff up over my black-eyelinered eyes. It’s a warm evening, with a holiday feel to it. The streets are full of girls smoking on doorsteps and boys flattening their hair with combs. Nice wholesome teenagers from milk bars.
Stella slips out and disappears the minute we arrive. She says she’ll see us later, around eleven, when things start to change and the clientele is more to her liking. Tony parks on an old bombsite. We head for a café Tony knows first; past the smells of Russian tobacco, of French pastries from the bakeries; of Italian sausages and Algerian coffee; past the slim girls in their headscarves and slacks milling on the streets; past the sandwich-board man advertising a concert by the Trinidadian steel band; a huddle of West Indians laying out some cards on the pavement; towards the Italian cafés on Brewer Street. This doesn’t feel like going to work, I’m thinking, trotting like a little dog beside Tony’s huge strides; it feels like a date.
Tony chucks his hat onto the crowded hat stand by the door and squeezes us into a booth. The tiny woman in black behind the counter has already spied him and comes racing over, flapping menus at us and shrieking.
“Tony—Tony, where you been? And who’s this, eh, who’s this lovely?”
Tony gives her a short smile, friendly and comfortable, and orders us two coffees while we decide. The Gaggia machine at the counter swishes noisily. In truth, I know he’s going to decide for me. Red wine in tooth-mugs and a huge bowl of something hot and tomatoey, with fragrant green leaves on it, and cheese to shake on it from a glass sugar pot. At least Tony says it’s cheese, but to me it looks like yellow semolina, and it stinks to high heaven.
I do my best not to let on I haven’t eaten this kind of food before, and to answer Tony’s questions without speaking with my mouth full.
I like the things he asks me. The more he wants to know about me, the more glamorous I feel; the more conscious I am of my bracelet tinkling, and my hair curling softly at the sides of my cheeks in the new style; my soft expensive perfume floating up from my wrist. Yes, I think I’m the most beautiful girl in Soho when Tony asks me questions about myself. How many people have ever asked me simple things like how do I know Stella and how come he ain’t seen me around in Bethnal Gree
n before?
My “adventures.” That’s how Tony describes them, and I’m glad, because that’s how I think of them, too. But what seems to be hovering over the meal, what has squeezed in to that crowded café with us, is Stella’s remark in our kitchen on the Frampton Park Estate. I feel sure he’s remembering it, too. He eats with hungry, serious attention, but every so often he looks up at me and then I see it in his expression. I recognize it at once, the word for it pops into my head just as easily as I named that look of guilt in Elsie’s eyes, all those years ago. And I’m deciding, while telling him about Dad and Annie and that day at the Dogs, I’m deciding, in a quiet way, somewhere in another part of me, that yes, I’d like to. Give up my virginity to Tony.
“So you escaped the school in Kent . . . what’d you get up to next . . . your next adventure?” he says, offering me a cigarette from his pack and standing up, the signal that it’s time to get to work. I realize that I’ve hardly found out anything about him. I see that he has money in his wallet, I’ve noticed that. But as for what he says . . . a few basics and that’s all. Tony was born here, to an Irish mother and Italian father. His father was interned, one of those “alien enemies” that got sent on a ship to Canada at the start of the war, and died when the ship was sunk by a U-boat. The way he tells me this I know that it isn’t unimportant; in fact, I’d say from his dazzling eyes, fringed with blackness, scarily intense at that moment, that this is probably the one essential fact, that it burns underneath everything else about him. He says that the thing to remember is that not so very long ago places like this had their shop fronts smashed, did I know that? And most of their owners sent to the Isle of Man, you know that, Queenie? I shook my head but tried to look concerned, to look like the sort of girl who would never make fun of an Italian accent. Not like Stella. Somehow I know that now he’s told me about his father, he’s never going to mention it again.
