She dropped a quick kiss on Amber’s cheek, light enough not to smudge either of the girls’ makeup, but still full of affection.
‘You’re a really nice girl, Amber,’ she said again. ‘I wish I’d got to know you years ago. We’ll have a great time in Dubai together, OK?’
And then, in a swirl of Valentino Rock’n Rose perfume and leopard-print chiffon, Mara opened the bedroom door and threw herself into the swing of the party without looking back.
Skye
‘Babe!’ Maria croaked two hours later, looking Skye up and down as she walked into the changing room at the Lounge.
‘What the hell! You moved to Park Avenue all of a sudden?’
‘Don’t worry,’ Skye said wryly, pulling her baby-blue hotpant outfit from her clutch and waving it at Maria. ‘I got my scanties right here.’
‘Well, that’s a relief!’ Maria chortled, sipping coffee. ‘I thought you were going off to work in some fancy art gallery!’
‘Yeah, making a couple of hundred bucks a day if she’s lucky,’ Jada said, smoothing down her flyaways with heavy-duty hair cream.
But Skye barely heard them. She was staring down at the tiny wisps of fabric in her hand, shiny sequined Lycra that looked even more cheap and tacky than ever in contrast with the classy, expensive sweater and pants she was wearing.
Weird. I don’t want to put these on, she thought in surprise. The admiring glances from the men in the Bryant Park Cellar Bar, from guys on the street as she hailed a cab to take her across town to the Lounge, must have had more of an effect on her than she realized. She’d spent the early evening looking like a Manhattan career girl, sleek and groomed, the kind of woman you’d want on your arm. Now she was about to take off almost all her clothes, and turn herself into the kind of woman you’d pay to sit on your lap. The idea was growing less and less attractive.
‘What happened with that journalist guy?’ Jada asked, turning away from the mirror, her cornrows now perfectly defined.
‘I can’t tell you,’ Skye said absently, still looking down at her handful of pale blue Lycra.
‘Oh my God – it was that freaky?’ Jada’s eyebrows shot up practically to her hairline. It was really hard to imagine any proposal that could shock an exotic dancer so badly she couldn’t even talk about it.
Skye laughed drily. ‘In a way. But I mean I literally can’t talk about it. They paid me to sign a confidentiality agreement.’
‘You’re kidding,’ Jada breathed, enthralled now.
Skye shook her head. She felt strangely detached: her body was here in the dilapidated, sweat-and-smoke-stinky dressing room, but her mind was still back at the table in the Cellar Bar two hours ago, her eyes wide with amazement as she exclaimed: ‘A grand just for listening to you?’
‘And for signing this.’ Kevin Sanders had extracted a piece of paper from his briefcase and slid it across the table, where it joined the discreet white envelope containing a grand in twenties that Lew had just placed in front of Skye. Lew James wasn’t an experienced National Investigator journalist for nothing; he knew there was no better way to focus a subject’s mind than showing them the cash up front.
‘Take your time, honey,’ Lew said amiably. ‘Read it through. All it says is you can’t talk to anyone about what we’re going to propose to you, OK? It ain’t exactly that enforceable, but the legal department loves this shit.’
Kevin flinched.
‘Hey, she’s a smart girl, and we want her on our side, Kev,’ Lew said, as Skye scanned through the document, nodded, and reached for the pen that Kevin was holding out to her. She signed at the bottom. Then she took the envelope, opened her D&G clutch and wedged the cash firmly inside, snapping the clasp. Whatever they proceeded to suggest to her, she was damn well holding onto that grand.
Lew snorted a laugh of approval as Kevin said: ‘Skye, you ever had Joe Jeffreys in your club?’
She shook her head. ‘I wish.’
‘That’s good,’ Kevin observed, looking at Lew. ‘She’d be fresh meat.’
‘Excuse me?’ Skye said sharply.
‘Sorry, no offence meant,’ Kevin said, adjusting his wire-framed glasses and leaning forward. ‘You read the Investigator? You read that Joe likes the strip clubs, big-time? Watches the ladies dancing, drops big bucks, gets his liquor on, parties hard. And you know who he always picks to get up close and personal with? Pretty blondes like you. The all-American type, if we can say that any more.’
‘Nah,’ Lew muttered. ‘You can’t.’
‘Everyone’s got a type,’ Skye said, sipping her mojito, waiting to see where this was going. Joe Jeffreys’ name definitely had her full attention. Not only was he a huge movie star – A+ list, no question – but he was super-hot. Skye had straightforward tastes in guys. No skinny Williamsburg hipsters or short, spectacled intellectuals need apply. She liked her men muscly and well built: square-jawed, with handsome faces. All-American guys, like Joe Jeffreys – or Bike Boy. She bit her lip in self-reproval at the memory of what she’d done last night.
‘Joe Jeffreys is engaged to Jennifer Downs, which probably isn’t news to you either,’ Kevin continued. ‘They’re America’s sweethearts. Big movie about to open, huge publicity push being planned. Only problem is—’
‘He can’t keep it in his pants,’ Lew finished.‘We’ve got photos of him in a strip club, getting it on with a young lady who’s pretty much a dead ringer for you.’
‘And you want me to pretend to be the girl in the photos?’ Skye said, baffled. ‘Because she won’t come forward or something?’
‘Uh-uh,’ Kevin said, shaking his head. ‘That’s all sewn up. We got her story, done and dusted. Nah, we’re after the next scoop. Joe’s people are making him go into rehab for sex addiction. Cascabel, in California. Only way to spin this. He’ll be in there for a few weeks, they’ll say he’s cured, and he’ll have to swear off the strip clubs from now on.’
‘But just imagine,’ Lew said, hunching his elbows on the table to put his face closer to Skye’s, ‘if while Joe was in rehab for sex addiction, he met a chick who’s exactly his type, and got it on with her? And there were photos? Or even a video? I mean, how hot would that be? We’d all make fucking fortunes!’
Skye had just taken another ladylike sip of her mojito when the significance of Lew’s words made her snort it up her sinuses in shock. Managing to find the tabletop with her glass, if only barely, she said, ‘You want me to go into rehab?’
‘Sure! We’ll pay for everything, of course!’ Lew beamed. ‘You can pick your addiction – drugs, booze, sex – whatever you like. We’ll set you up with a spycam in your bag; Kevin already found some orderly there who’ll smuggle it in for you. Then you get to work on Joe. You do him, you get it on film, we give you a big old bonus, everyone’s happy.’
‘Get to work on him? Do him?’ Skye pushed her chair back from the table furiously. ‘I’m not a whore!’ she said, her voice rising. ‘How dare you? Just because I work in a strip club – I don’t even get naked!’
And then she remembered herself, just last night, taking off her G-string because that Wall Street creep had paid her a thousand bucks extra, and she felt a red angry flush flooding her face as she jumped to her feet. She stalked out of the bar, her head high, her demeanour so completely that of a respectable young woman who has just been deeply offended by an indecent proposal that heads turned, shocked, to stare in her wake at the two men at her table who had clearly suggested something absolutely filthy to her.
Now, looking down at her handful of costume, Skye felt like the biggest hypocrite in the world. Who was she kidding? She stripped for money all the time. She’d done naked dances in the private room, of course she had. She’d come pretty close, on occasion, to being a whore. Or at least, she’d walked a line so fine that it would be almost invisible to the naked eye.
‘Baby girl, you just went somewhere else,’ Jada said, laughing. ‘That must have been one hell of a conversation you had.’
&nb
sp; ‘You better get changed, Skye,’ Maria said warningly. ‘Your shift’s starting, and you know what Paulie’s like about timekeeping. Here.’ She poured Skye a mug of coffee and tipped in some Kahlúa. ‘That’ll get you going.’
Slowly, automatically, Skye dropped the tiny top and hotpants on the bench in front of her locker, undid her Tiffany necklace, and started to pull the sweater over her head. She was standing there in her black minimizer bra and cigarette pants when she heard a sound that made her heart sink to the soles of her suede ankle boots.
Dog nails, clicking on the painted concrete floor. Clicking heavily, because the body above them was so overweight that the nails were carrying much too much pressure. And a painful wheezing sound, rasping, panting for breath. Skye closed her eyes for a moment, hoping that when she opened them she wouldn’t see what she was expecting to see.
But the sight before her was exactly what she knew it would be. It was a small pug, the beige of dirty cream, and so fat its rolls of flesh were stacked one against the other like doughnuts lined up on their sides. Skye could barely see its feet; they were hidden under the mass of its flesh.
‘Lev just loves Auntie Maria!’ cooed a harsh, familiar voice. ‘Lev couldn’t wait to get to Auntie Maria, could you, Levski?’
‘Oksana . . .’ Maria started, as Lev came to a halt in front of Maria’s chair and squatted down in front of her, jaw open, tongue lolling, whining for a pat. Reluctantly, Maria leaned down to drop a couple of taps on the dog’s head. ‘He shouldn’t be here, you know, Oksana. Paulie don’t like you bringing him in,’ she said.
‘Oh, Lev can sleep under Aunt Maria’s chair, can’t he?’ Oksana insisted. ‘Lev loves it under Aunt Maria’s chair!’
‘Oksana, you gotta get that fucking dog out of here,’ Jada said firmly. ‘It gave Sugar a damn asthma attack last time you brought it in.’
‘Lev is a he! My little lion! He is not an it!’ Oksana squealed.
‘He, she, it – I don’t care if the dog’s a fucking hermaphrodite! He can’t be here, OK?’ Jada snapped.
‘You don’t talk to me like that!’
Oksana bristled with menace. As usual, she was wearing so much foundation that her face looked like an orange mask. Her fur gilet, which bulked up her skinny frame, was the same colour as her white-blonde bleached hair and the tight white jeans tucked into cowboy boots. Huge diamanté hoops glittered in her ears. Oksana believed in dressing up for any occasion; she probably put on full makeup before she went to the toilet in the middle of the night. She was pointing a finger at Jada, its terrifyingly pointed acrylic nail shining with fake diamonds.
‘Hey,’ Skye said, feeling that she needed to wade in on this one. ‘Jada’s got a point here. You can’t make another girl sick—’
‘Sugar isn’t working tonight, I check it out,’ Oksana interrupted. ‘So Lev can be here! He gets lonely at home,’ she added, as Lev collapsed to the ground with a loud groan and started making stertorous noises.
‘He can’t be here at all – it’s the hair and the dander,’ Skye said, sighing. ‘You know that, Oksana.’
‘You shut the fuck up!’ Oksana hissed. ‘You two! Coke whores, both of you! I know you both fuck that bouncer for drugs! Why should I care what you say?’
‘Why, you nasty little—’ Jada strode across the room towards Oksana, over six feet of fury. Skye had to give Oksana credit; despite being much smaller than Jada, the Russian girl didn’t flinch. Instead, she clamped her hands on her hips and faced Jada down.
‘You hit me, you get sack!’ she said triumphantly. ‘You put one finger on me, you get sack! Go on!’
‘Jada, leave her alone,’ Skye cut in, seeing Jada’s hands clench into fists. ‘I mean, you can’t get mad at someone who can’t even speak the freaking language properly.’
As Skye had known it would, this snapped Oksana’s head round. Oksana was very sensitive about her command of English and her heavy Russian accent; it was her Achilles heel.
‘Fuck you, you stupid American whore!’ she yelled. ‘You don’t talk bad to me! All you think about is drugs and fucking!’ Looking around her frenziedly, she snatched up the brimming cup of coffee Maria had poured for Skye and threw the contents directly at Skye.
Maria screamed. Good reflexes meant Skye managed to jump partially out of the way, avoiding a mugful of hot coffee in the face, but enough of it landed on her bare torso and trousered legs to make her curse and wipe herself down frantically with both hands. Jada grabbed a bottle of water, uncapped it and threw it over Skye, cold after hot, making Skye yelp.
‘Trying to cool your skin down,’ Jada explained, ‘so you don’t get burned.’
‘What are you, crazy?’ Skye yelled at Oksana.
Her trousers were drenched, her boots – the lovely new suede ankle boots she’d barely worn – were ruined. Lev, who had been sniffing round Maria’s big handbag, suddenly reacted to his mistress’s anger and broke into a series of shrill, angry yaps. Coffee dripped down the wall, and the polystyrene cup rolled across the uneven floor, chased by a hysterical Lev.
‘I’m going to Paulie!’ Jada said in fury. ‘You’ll get canned for this!’
‘No!’ Oksana’s shrill voice rose above Jada’s. ‘I go to Paulie! I tell him you are fucking the bouncer for drugs, and he sacks you!’
Oksana turned on her heel and pushed at the dressing-room door so hard that it slammed against the opposite wall, her stilettos tapping furiously on the concrete as she stormed out.
‘Just for that,’ Skye said furiously to Maria, ‘I’m not stopping her little mutt from getting drunk and buzzed.’ She nodded to Lev, busy lapping up a pool of Kahlúa-laced coffee.
Maria flapped her hand. ‘Let him drink, honey. He’ll run round for a while and then pass out. Believe me, he’s much less trouble asleep than awake. And now he’s here, he’s staying the night. No way she’s gonna take him home.’
‘She could have really hurt you!’ Jada exclaimed to Skye. ‘You could have got your face burned! Should I go after her? Tell Paulie?’
Both girls looked at Maria, who had decades of experiences of stripper fights and rivalries, for advice.
She put her lips together and blew out her breath noisily. ‘Nah, honey, leave her. Paulie’ll let her run her mouth off, but he won’t do nothing. You’re his top girls, you three. He won’t want to lose any of you. You work the room hard tonight and he won’t say a word to you. Just keep it under wraps with DeVaughan, OK?’
‘God, I hate that bitch,’ Jada fumed.
Maria shrugged. ‘Oksana’s good, you know? She works the guys. You know how it is, Skye. You’re good too. You get extra slack cut you if you know how to work the guys, right?’ She topped up her coffee with more Kahlúa. ‘Those Russian girls, you gotta respect them. They know men. They got cash machines for hearts, but they know men. Paulie ain’t gonna sack her. Not unless she cuts someone.’
Maria wasn’t speaking anything less than the truth. Skye knew that. No one in the Lounge was looking out for your welfare; no one cared about anything but the bottom line. She’d known that coming in. And yet a cold, hard ball of anger and resentment was forming inside her as she stood there, liquid dripping off her trouser hems and into the once-beautiful ankle boots for which she had paid hundreds of bucks not a fortnight ago, the shock of thinking she was about to get badly burned not yet dissipated from her body.
‘That’s it,’ she heard herself say.
‘What?’ Maria looked at her.
‘That’s it,’ Skye said, louder now.
She’d been so offended when the National Investigator guys thought they could pay her to seduce Joe Jeffreys. Well, she’d been an idiot. What did she do all her working hours but seduce guys who weren’t half as sexy as one of the world’s most famous movie stars? Hadn’t some dickhead put his finger up her last night and scratched her deliberately? Hadn’t she done something she couldn’t even remember with a coke delivery boy just last night?
What Skye knew m
ost clearly at this moment was that she wasn’t going to stay around the Lounge to work with Oksana every day, to hear that bitch call her a coke whore, and feel, in her heart, that the words weren’t that far off the truth.
Lew had already left two messages on her cell in the time it had taken her to find a cab and make the cross-town drive. He wanted her to reconsider. He’d promised her a lot of money – some upfront, but plenty on the back end if she managed to catch Joe Jeffreys with his pants down, on film. Plus, of course, all travel expenses and the huge rehab fees.
I’ve never been to California, she thought. Lew says Cascabel’s got a great pool and better food than a five-star hotel. It’ll be like a spa holiday, he says. With one of the hottest movie stars on the planet.
She grabbed her sweater and pulled it on. Her feet squelched in the damp suede boots as she bent down to grab her clutch, but she didn’t care any more that they were ruined. Who needed boots in California?
‘I quit,’ she announced, seeing Maria’s jaw drop in shock, Jada’s eyes bug out. ‘And you can tell Paulie it’s all that slut Oksana’s fault, OK? Maybe that’ll get her the goddamn sack!’
Petal
Petal had been asked to leave three schools. Not actually expelled, because her father was too famous for the schools to do that; but asked to leave, in interviews with various headmistresses attended by various nannies. She had always hated school and everything about it, but most of all she loathed the regimentation. You kept having to do what other people told you to do, not what you wanted. Lesson now; lunch now; assembly now, each new hell announced by a series of loud, incredibly annoying bells. On and on, the bells, ringing and ringing, not letting up until they made her do what they wanted her to do, like someone standing over her, ringing a huge hand-held bell, its clapper clanging against the metal, louder and louder and louder—
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