“How to get rid of a fat actress by wasting her with an articulated truck.”
“Fuck you, Cheb. There’s some kind of road safety angle. Anyway, the interview gives me a chance to talk about my film career.”
*
He got her moving eventually. Out on the street, he pointed down the road and told her Piccadilly was that way. She would find a key-cutting stall inside the tube station. He told her he was fucked if he was letting her walk off with his only set.
Jools said, “I’m too hassled for this shit. Just give me yours. I’ll be in the flat when you get back, so you won’t need them.’
Cheb hung onto his keys. Jools screamed, “Give them to me.”
‘No way.”
“Okay. I’ll cut a new set Where’s Piccadilly?”
Cheb pointed out again. Down this street, over Old Compton Street and right at the bottom. She couldn’t miss it.
Jools nodded, Okay… Okay… Okay.
Cheb said, “And leave the suitcase.”
Jools had tight hold of her case. He knew she had no intention of getting the keys cut The second she was out of sight, she’d grab a taxi and that would be it. Now he was faced with a massive embarrassment of a stand—off, right out front of the restaurant. The two of them wrestling for possession like street muggers. It would only take the police to walk up now—that would crown his day.
Jools had a new thought, “You get the keys cut. I’ll stay here.”
No No No. “Leave you in the restaurant? Fuck that. I’m irresponsible, I’m not a jerk.”
Jools put her case down, “Okay. So where’s Piccadilly?”
Cheb waved his arms about, exasperation turned to maximum amplification, “I don’t fucking believe you. It’s down the road. See this road, it’s at the other fucking end.”
He had his arm out, sticking horizontally in the right direction when Jools swung the sham edge of her handbag onto his wrist. The keys he’d been holding fell to the floor. He was still shrieking and clutching his wrist as she bent for them but he managed to kick them away before her hand closed around the ring. She didn’t even try and chase them. Instead, she gave him a pitying look, like tut-tut—tut, and punched his nose in. He was left reeling in the street while she scooped up the keys and started away with her suitcase in her hand.
Cheb screamed after her, “You don’t have the address, you stupid cow.”
She heard him but kept on running. Cheb was sure she didn’t have the address.
Fuck, she must have the address. He started after her, remembering the mail lying in his case, cold on the bartop; all of it addressed direct to Hogie’s home. She must have lifted it, though Christ alone knew how or when. The girl was pure deviant; she’d be incapable of even walking straight, even if her fat bum didn’t throw her off-kilter.
He caught her as she was hauling on a taxi door. He slammed it shut. She could shout at him all she wanted but he wasn’t going to move.
He said, “You’ve got every key, you moron. The restaurant, my mam’s house in Manchester, all my keys for everything.”
“You’ll get them back.”
“I’m taking them back.” He pulled her bag off her shoulder, the keys weren’t in her hand so they had to be in there. Dodging away to the kerb side, he opened the clasp and found them stuffed between the stolen wad of letters.
“Look at these. Look at them.” He fanned the letters out, waving them at her. “What else did you find?”
“What?”
He could feel it boiling. “I said, what else did you find? Where else did you go looking?”
She couldn’t have gone into the kitchen, he was sure. But not too sure.
“Nothing else? What are you talking about, Cheb?”
“The kitchen?” He said it. “Did you go in the kitchen?”
“What is this, Cheb?”
The blood was shunting about his brain. His scalp was drum-tight, too thin to cope with all the pressure. He sank down to the pavement, head in hands, trying to hold the throbbing in place.
“No. I didn’t go in the kitchen. What is your fucking problem?”
The taxi pulled away. There was nothing she could do about it so she joined him, sat at the kerb. It looked like she had finished fighting but Cheb hardly cared. He was down to a cracked whisper when he said, “I don’t need this grief. I don’t even know why you bother.”
She said, “Come on, Cheb.”
He was ready to tell her. He didn’t want another scene, but he was ready to tell her the truth. “Hogie’s a freak. You know you’re wasting your time but you still show up.”
That was it. She flared like a rocket: “Fuck off Cheb. Just because Hogie’s screwed your mother.”
He looked her in the eye: “Yours too, Jools. Yours too.”
She screamed as she let fly but she was running against the facts. He told her, “I’ll show you the polaroids if you don’t believe me.”
SEVEN
Susan was being followed. She sensed it soon after leaving the taxi. Trying to settle the fare on the street outside Harrods had been painful. She’d dumped her loose change in among her pesetas which meant every coin had to be individually sorted. Throughout this orgy, a figure skulked to her right. She assumed it was someone vulturing on her cab but once inside the store, she became aware of an uneven tempo threading its way among the anonymous crowd of shoppers. Something eager, something out of place.
She idled through menswear and bolted when she reached the tobacconists. Spinning through Harrods like a twisted wheel, she hoped to force her tail out into the open. Nothing happened except the feeling grew stronger. Standing in the delicatessen department, the fragrance of moist cheese never numbed her suspicions. She slipped past the cooked meats and circled a stack of jarred and pickled vegetables. She knew from experience that pickled baby eggplant was not worth eating. She only picked up the family-sized jar as a ruse and scanned the whole of the food department through the purple juice.
Someone was snifflng out there but the dog was staying hidden. There were some seriously maladjusted hairstyles, there were three brassy hassidic wigs to her left, but nothing that could be classed as sinister. If the feeling hadn’t been so strong, she would have blamed her edginess on post- flight jags. After booking a flight from Malaga to Manchester, she’d driven four hundred miles to Madrid and caught a different flight to London. The whole manoeuvre had been choreographed over the phone by George Carmichael; it was a safety play, based on the assumption that her husband would follow her. George rang off with a bon voyage and a promise to hide a spare key to her new flat under the doormat all ready for her to bed down. In the end, and thanks to an air traffic controllers’ strike, she didn’t reach central London until nine in the morning and by then she was too wired to sleep. She asked the cab driver to drop her off outside Harrods. Until Callum surfaced with her suitcase, she had no clothes. So she might as well shop.
The brassy wigs were a three generation family unit, the family that the family-sized eggplants had been waiting for. Susan handed them the jar and left them debating olives in the central aisle. She thought she would get a kick from doing her shopping in Knightsbridge. It would be a kind of welcome-back-London gig. But the feeling of being followed took all the kink out of the food hall.
She dumped her wire basket on the glass-topped fish counter and headed for the clothes department. Forget food, she had no appetite and no intention of buying anything anyway. Aside from the damage that the complimentary airline cocktails had done to her stomach, she had snuffled through all of Callum’s speed on the drive to Madrid. She was on the lam, it was a night flight-screw it, she could take a share of her son’s sulphate if she wanted.
The business-like amphetamine aura stayed with her as she marched through the perfume hall, waving away anyone who wanted to infect her with free samples. She strode ahead of her discomfort, keeping long shiny stretches of floorspace between herself and her suspicions. Leaving cosmetics, she was ready to
blame her paranoia on the Spanish amphetamine. Like Callum said, the speed in Spain is mostly good for clearing drains. But then she caught sight of a reflection, skipping across the panels of the elevator doors. The other shoppers faded out of focus, she had her man.
The doors slid open. Susan waited her turn to step inside. She pushed to the back, through the pair of Arabs, the plumped-up Japanese girl, the old drunk in the Burberry hat. The doors were ready to close when the last person stepped across the grooves. Susan turned to the mirrored walls, ready to look him over. She saw a tall boy with shoulder-length blond hair. A well-groomed moustache above an uncertain smile. A trimmed beard beneath his slight pout.
The car stopped at one, two and three. The overall balance barely changed: a mother and daughter combination replaced the two Arabs, the drunk was traded for a dried-out crone, then two veiled Saudis stepped inside as the mother and daughter left at three. Susan nudged her way to the front. Her man took the bait, assumed she was set to leave and stepped out of the car ahead of her.
She left him on the third floor. All it took, the scent of indecision, a moment humming over the department menu, then she shook her head and shrunk back behind the closing doors.
*
Hogie could have cried. He banged the buttons on all the remaining elevators and when none of them opened looked about for a staircase. The store signs pointed him away from the elevator hall, too far to run to. The swish of a descending elevator raised his hopes, but he had to wait another half minute before he caught one travelling his way. He had lost her, for sure.
The fourth floor was almost entirely given over to women’s fashion. Standing on the landing, Hogie had to make a decision. From what he had seen of her, from the taxi onwards, he believed he could guess her tastes. But now he didn’t have a clue which direction to take.
After blowing out the restaurant that morning, he decided to spend a cool day cruising department stores. The sight of the red-headed woman, the reach of her inside leg as she stepped out of the taxi, was just what he’d been waiting for, a live throbbing goddess. The way she swayed through the ground floor was unbelievable. Her square-shaped bottom rubbing at the material of her linen suit-like dress. He could sense a superior kind of underwear beneath the fabric. When she reached the food hall, he believed that he‘d have his chance. All she had done, though, was stare at a jar of pickles. How was he supposed to spin an interesting line from a chance meeting over an aubergine?
He caught an elevator to the most boring floor, the one that catered for the bland unisex stretch of chicks and pricks aged fifteen to twenty—plus. Hogie slid past the dressing rooms and rails with his dick slackening inside his strides. He tugged at different suits hanging off their rails and messed through the piles of sweaters but couldn’t be bothered to pull out any of his credit cards. When he decided the only thing to do was eat he went looking for the furthest, most unfashionable coffee shop. He was going to sit and watch the older women pass by.
The signs took him through hall after hall of women’s fashion. Not all of it, strictly, fashion. Hogie saw gold chains, scary buttons, glittermania, none of it to his taste until he thought of the women who might wear them. He was thinking Jewish, maybe Arab. He knew he could get excited about their flesh tones, as long as they were not too short, fat and mama-ish. He liked the early 1960s style bouffants that Jewish women wore, a touch of the Jackie 0’s but bleached white—through-to-orange rather than true Jackie black. Hogie slowed down as he passed a very particular middle-eastern chick, late-forties, medium-firm… giving the assistant a hard time with her foxy white teeth jagging out of ultra-red lipstick.
Into Americana and all the pale country shades: white shirt and slacks. Too simple. But a corn—fed cleavage seen through the lines of buttons on a pressed shin; could be irresistible. Especially if the ensemble was rigged on top of horse-ridden buttocks. But there was nothing remotely like that around today.
Hogie passed on to another French room where he had a more complex reaction to the styles on display. He loved the big freeze feeling of haute couture, the hint of suspense, the still-life shoe displayed on a plinth. On the minus sheet, the styles were favoured by the bonier older women and he had an aversion to them. He could appreciate the wafer-thin silhouettes thrown by ultra-rich ageing chicks, but it was a strictly hands-off experience. Best to leave the better-dressed fully dressed, that was his motto.
What he did find was a collection of dresses styled after lightweight macs. These were a live turn-on because any dress that resembles a coat looks like a coat worn directly over underwear. Which is next door to naked.
The next hall was where they draped the underwear. Hogie almost collapsed. The changing rooms loomed over to his left. He wanted to run in there, punch-out the hag at the entrance and kick down each door. Juiced with sexual fury, he had to find somewhere to sit, smoke and calm himself.
*
The upper circle café was a late 1960s extravaganza, based on a circular design and never fully re-habbed. The main entrance was a white plaster archway, almost a perfect circle, and the walls were dotted with port holes open to the rest of the store. The main colours were white and green, space-age vinyl white and leather racing green. Although it was reminiscent of either one of Stanley Kubrick’s films, the café looked even more like one particular German porn flick. In the film, the white shag carpet in the hero’s living room led to a huge circular sofa The curving walls had round arches carved out of the plaster with a different woman naked in every alcove. The hero walked around sipping champagne, having his willy stroked or his bum tickled as he wandered round. Susan couldn’t remember the name of the picture but it was better than most of the obscene dross Frankie used to borrow from his pal with the cine club on Great Windmill Street. She must have seen it around seventy-one or two. They had watched the film together in a Chelsea flat with a big plate of prawn crackers, a crate of pale ale and a bottle of Hennessy’s. Chelsea had been swish, although they didn’t live there long. They bought the leasehold on the proceeds of a bank job Frankie pulled in Southgate and gave it up when he was arrested two months later. At the time she was pregnant with Callum and the apartment was too small for a family anyway.
It was a while before Susan noticed the blond boy who had been following her. She gave him a puzzled stare, he looked back down at his coffee. He was no professional, but it would have taken a clairvoyant to have followed her today. Wouldn’t it? Sulphate only makes you paranoid as you’re coming down and she didn’t feel at all down.
At last, it came to her. Hogie’s sheepish smile, his blush, the way he played with the bangs at the side of his head. She should have guessed earlier.
Susan looked away, not wanting the giggle that was pushing at her lips to be misinterpreted. She lit a cigarette to give her mouth something new to do. She sipped her coffee. She wondered if she was doing too many things at once. She did not want to give the impression she was either embarrassed, perturbed or flattered She decided to lead him around for a while to test his seriousness. She took her time over her coffee or her cigarette. She gave him a feeling that there was both time and space to play with and waited until he lit a fresh cigarette. Then she collected her bags together and left abruptly. She cast a cool glance over her shoulder as she left and for a second, their eyes locked.
Descending to the lower halls by escalator made it easier for him to follow. She took her time between the cosmetic stands, using the mirrors to keep watch on the boy.
At the exit, she paused to button her lightweight mac before stepping outside. He was still behind her, reflected in the glass of a display case. She watched him tangle with a crowd of Japanese tourists. He had only the faintest impression of her as she pushed through the doors and turned to her right. She tacked across the swelling pavement, avoiding the busier traffic. When she reached Sloane Street she stepped crazily into the traffic. He was stranded on the opposite pavement, watching as she disappeared through a side door at Harvey Nichols.
Hogie hustled around the back of a bus but was held up by the on-coming traffic from Knightsbridge. He had no hope of catching the woman. He pushed through the doors into another cosmetic hall knowing his only strategy was to take things slowly, floor by floor. Providing she wanted to be tracked down, he would find her. Hogie looped around the separate stalls before taking the escalator.
She wasn’t on the first floor. It should have been his safest bet, it carried the kind of labels that she looked to favour. The second floor was a white-out, too. He had no faith in the third floor, the clothes there were either too young or too frowsy. The food hall and restaurant on the fifth would be more likely. Hogie only passed through the third floor for the sake of completeness. Then he saw a flicker of reddish-blond hair at the far side of the floor. He checked the possible exits and circled wide, trying to throw a dragnet across the whole department.
There were no further flashes but he knew that whoever’s hair he had seen, they couldn’t have got past him. He had narrowed all the possible foxholes to a series of changing rooms and the women’s bathroom. He waited.
*
The red-head woman swinging out the changing room door was an American called Lauren. When she heard the pounding of boots across the wooden floor and turned to see the blond kid charging her way, he was already almost on top her. He went into a slide, skidding to a stop only inches from her painted toes. So she said something like: ‘Whoa, hold on there.”
He didn’t hit her. He did surprise the hell out of her.
“I’m sorry, I fucked up. I thought you were somebody else.” Calming himself with a few deep breaths as he picked himself up and dusted himself down. “I thought you were this woman I’m after.”
He’d made a bad call, what could she say? “Well, I guess I’m not.”
“No.”
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