by John Harvey
Sharon smiled.
"You've been watching too many of those TV movies, Doris. That's the only place girls like you get paid to talk to the likes of me."
Doris stood uneasily, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, cigarette cupped in her hand.
"From what I've seen, your sort are either looking to bang you up and slap the hell out of you, or they're sniffing round for freebies."
She gave Sharon a look that was meant to be provocative. "Which is it with you?"
"Neither. I told you. I just want to talk."
"And I said, what about?"
"Marlene."
Doris dropped her cigarette to the pavement, quickly ground it out and began to walk away.
"Doris…"
"No," she called over her shoulder.
"I already told you everything I know."
Sharon released the hand brake and let the car coast after her.
"All right," she said through the window, 'we'll talk about something else. "
"Yeah? Uke what? Swap recipes and tips on chipping away old nail polish?"
"If you Uke, yes. Why not?"
"You know sodding well why not!"
Sharon let the car roll on down the hill, Doris, head down, crossing the road behind her. By the time Sharon had stopped the car and got out, they were level.
"Come on, Doris. A deal."
Yeah? What's that? "
"I'll buy you a meal and we'll talk and if you don't want to say anything more about Marlene, that's fine."
"I thought I didn't get paid for my time?"
Sharon was standing next to her now, taller, having to stoop down; Sharon wearing a leather jacket, unzipped, over her souvenir T-shirt from a Prince concert, blue jeans and a pair of ankle-high Kickers, green with a grease mark on one heel.
"This isn't buying your time, it's buying you lunch."
Lunch? "
"Tea, dinner, whatever. Come on, when did you last eat?"
"That's where I was going now." "So fine. Where to?"
Doris grinned, just a little, not giving it too much. "McDonald's.
Got these vouchers I've been saving from the Post. Two McChicken sandwiches for a couple of quid. "
"Okay," Sharon said.
"Why don't we go in the car? That way, we could go to the one by the canal, what do you say?"
Sharon told Doris to keep her McChicken vouchers for another occasion and splashed out on two Big Macs, fries, apple pies, cola. They had stopped at the paper shop on Lenton Boulevard so that Doris could buy another twenty Bensons, king size. There was a seat by the window, and although they couldn't actually see the canal from there, they could work out where it was, across the other side of Sainsbury's car park, to the right of Homebase.
Doris picked out most of the middle of her Big Mac, toying with the bun but never really eating it. The fries she dunked in a generous puddle of red sauce. Sharon ate slowly, saying little, trying to make the younger woman feel at ease.
Doris told her about a childhood bounded by Hackney Marshes and Homerton Hospital; Dalston, Clapton, Hackney, Leyton. A familiar enough story, familiar to Sharon certainly, not so very different from her own; the same story many of the working girls had to tell.
When it was told at all. And Doris, not a product of what sociologists and politicians called a broken home; no one-parent family hers. Her father, on the dole, had always been there. Always.
Through the unbroken veil of cigarette smoke, beneath the slow-fading bruise, Sharon looked for the child in Doris's eighteen-year-old face but it had long been driven out. she says: if only I could be three again, struggling with my shoe laces; start all over, go back to the beginning shake my mother abuse my father "You reckon her for it, don't you?" Doris said suddenly, pushing away the carapace of her apple pie.
"That bloke got himself knifed. You reckon her for that."
"Do you know where she was, Doris? That evening? Where she was working? Was it the hotels?"
"I already told you, I hadn't seen her since the Tuesday."
"Tuesday afternoon."
"Right."
"When you lent her the money. The fifty pounds you never got back."
Doris mouthed an oath. Sharon reached for her cola and drank a little more. Doris lit another cigarette. Two lads walking past outside shouted something they could neither of them make out and one of the lads went into a swagger, cupping non-existent breasts. His mate laughed so much he nearly got clipped by a passing car.
"She wanted it for drugs, didn't she?" Sharon said.
Doris nodded.
"Crack."
"How bad is she?"
It seemed a long time before Doris answered.
"Look, you know as well as what I do, there's girls out there, they don't keep high, they go crazy and once it gets like that, there's nothing they won't do to score. These dealers, they play 'em along, let 'em get in debt, serious now, hundreds I'm talking, easy. Once it's like that, they can do what they like with them. Sex shows, dyke stuff, animals. This one bloke, charged his mates a tenner each to wank off over this girl while his alsatian licked her out." Doris shuddered and made a face.
"Marlene, though, she wasn't like that. She was bright, dead clever.
Older, too. Been around, but it didn't show. That's how come she could 200 work the hotels. Me, now, I walk in and they've got me walking right out again, regular revolving door. Not Marlene. That's why I was surprised when she started doing crack. Oh, we'd have the odd spliff once in a while, who doesn't? But crack. " Doris shook her head.
"First, it was just weekends, fifteen, twenty quid a rock. You know, when we was busy. Never ends up like that, though, does it? Marlene, she could see what was happening to her. Kept trying to kick. Even went to that place, you know, down by the Square. What's it called?
Crack Awareness, something like that. Got worse anyway. Got so she hated what she was doing, couldn't stand being touched. Being with some bloke, any bloke, but, of course, that's what she had to do.
Keep earning, more and more, trying to stay ahead. "
In another part of the restaurant, twenty or so eight- and nine-year-olds were having a party, flicking Chicken McNuggets across the tables, wearing cardboard cutout hats.
"How much," Sharon asked, 'had she got to hate it? "
"She used to say, next man who touches me, I'm going to kill him."
"And you thought she was serious? You thought she meant it?"
"No, don't be bloody stupid, course I didn't! We say that all the time."
"Then what?" Sharon said.
Doris took a long drag on her cigarette.
"Week or so back, the night that other bloke was done, you know, stabbed. It was in the paper, found him starkers in the road."
Sharon waited, Doris taking her time.
"I ran into Marlene," Doris said, 'she was leaning on this wall off Forest Road, looked like she'd just been throwing up. There was blood all down her front. Up her hand and arm. "
To an almighty roar from the children, one of the McDonalds staff jumped up on to the middle of their table dressed as Mr McChicken, and started napping his wings.
Sharon bided her time.
"Who did she cop from, Doris?"
Doris blinked at her across the smoke from her cigarette.
"Richie. I don't know… I don't know where, but yes, Richie that's the only one I ever heard her mention. That's who she said."
Dorothy Birdwell's fingers fumbled with her water glass, almost sending it tumbling, and for once Marius was not poised to intervene and set everything to rights. Marius, in fact, was nowhere to be seen. It gave her a pinched feeling in the back of the throat, making it difficult to breathe. And as for talking. Dorothy steadied herself and, with almost exaggerated care, brought the glass to her lips. The forty or so people who had gathered to hear her thoughts on Christianity and the crime novel, with special attention to the work of Dorothy L. Sayers, watched and waited patiently. After all, she
could sense them thinking, at her age you can't expect too much.
Well, expectations were strange things. She reached out towards the small table at her side and lifted her copy of Such a Strange Lady into her lap.
"As we can be only too aware," she began, 'living as we do in these particular times, it is difficult not to see the art of biography and the wish of the individual for privacy as being incompatible. Think then only of a young woman, an only child, born at Christchurch Cathedral Choir School, a Christian scholar whose second book of poems was titled Catholic Tales and Christian Songs, and yet who nevertheless became pregnant out of wedlock and secretly gave birth to an illegimate son. How irreconc'l- able the gulf between the life that is apparent and expected and the life that is actually lived. "
She paused and caught her breath. If only she had not been forced to have words with Marius earlier that afternoon some of them, she would have had to agree, significantly less than Christian. If only Marius had not stalked off in such high dudgeon, no word of where he was going or when he might return.
Dorothy looked out at her audience and continued.
"In her religious play The Devil to Pay, Dorothy Sayers explicitly deals with Faustian themes, the extent to we are all of us prepared to go, the amount we will pay for happiness on this earth even though it might mean we risk damnation in the next…"
"How about a couple of drinks, honey?" Cathy Jordan said in a mock-seductive, mid-Western voice.
"One way or another, I reckon we've earned them." She was leaning against the frame of the bathroom door, a towel wrapped around the middle of her body. A tumbler of tap water, with the aid of which she had just swallowed aspirin, was held lightly in her right hand, wrist resting on the swell of her hip.
"Go to hell, Cathy, why don't you?" Frank said, nipping over the pages of the magazine he was reading a copy of Premiere he'd picked up at the airport, everything you ever wanted to know about Demi Moore except what does she ever see in that asshole actor.
"What does she ever see in that asshole actor?" Frank asked.
"Which particular one did you have in mind?"
"Demi Moore. You know. The one with Demi Moore."
"Oh, him."
"Yes. him."
"He was great in Pulp Fiction."
"Didn't catch it."
"Just terrific."
I still don't see. "
She lifted the magazine from his hand and then dropped it back down.
"They're a partnership, that's what it is. That's why it works." Playful, she nudged him with her bare toes.
"She works. He works. Simple. A partnership." She threw him a face and headed back towards the bathroom door.
"We should try it some time."
"What?"
"Nothing."
"What the fuck was that about?"
He was on his feet now, close behind her, and Cathy turned to face him.
"Work it out for yourself."
"Every cent you earned this last year, I earned as much."
Cathy shrugged.
"I had a bad year."
"Bitch!"
"Sure, Frank. Love you too."
For an instant, she flinched and closed her eyes, thinking he was going to strike her, but what he did was jerk the towel from around her, so that she stood before him, naked.
Her breasts were heavier than when he had first seen her, the skin across her belly less taut, but there was nothing to deflect from the fact that she was still a beautiful woman; more beautiful as she stood there now, unclothed, than in her boots, bright shirts and jeans. Most women Frank knew, the reverse would be true.
"Well?" Cathy gave him a look that said, what now? and he didn't know. She held out the glass towards him and automatically he reached to take it. Swiftly, she stepped back inside the bathroom and shut the door, flicking the bolt across.
Mollie Hansen was sitting in the Broadway Cinema Cafe Bar nibbling at a portion of cabbage stuffed with peppers and drinking Red Raw ginger beer. Slides of scenes from various forties films nows were being projected on to the far wall, and she was idly checking them off as she ate: Mildred Pierce, Gilda, The Lady from Shanghai.
"Hi. Mollie." Susan Tyrell was standing at her shoulder, an empty glass in one hand, a bottle ofCabemet-Shiraz in the other.
"Okay if I join you?"
"Sure."
Susan pulled out a chair and sat down.
"In for a long wait?" Mollie said with a grin, indicating the bottle.
Susan's eyes rolled upwards.
"David's just getting going on Hollywood femmes fatales. Stepping out of the shadows in tight black dresses with guns in their hands." She filled the glass to within a quarter-inch of the rim and brought it to her mouth without spilling a drop.
"Once he gets started on that little fantasy, I might as well be invisible."
Mollie forked up some more stuffed cabbage. Larger than life on the wall, Joan Crawford, in poor lighting and a fur coat, stood over the dead body of Zachary Scott.
"You see what I mean?" Susan asked,
"Who ever paid any attention to her when she was just plain old married Mildred, wearing an apron morning till night and baking pies?"
Mollie waited for the laugh, but it didn't come.
"That's a movie," she said.
"Not real life."
Susan drained her glass and began pouring another. "Try telling that to David."
Mollie looked at her seriously.
"Then maybe it's time to get out of the kitchen?" she said.
Susan looked away.
"Yes, well, I'm afraid that time is long past."
And then she did laugh, but it was loud and forced. 'listen to me, carrying on. Complaining about David to you of all people. "
Mollie leaned closer and covered Susan's hand with her own.
"If you feel this bad, you've got to sit him down and talk to him. Make him listen."
"Really. And when did you last succeed in doing that?"
Marius Gooding had let himself back into the hotel suite he had been sharing with Dorothy En-dwell and locked the door. Pulling the blinds, he stripped down to his under- shorts and vest.
"Bitch!" he said, as he pulled out drawer after drawer of her neatly folded clothes and spilled them across the floor.
"Bitch!" as he jerked her satin and taffeta dress from its padded hanger and tore it neck to hem. Bitch! he scrawled across the photograph in the back of her new book. Bitch! in black felt-tip on the centre of the sheet. Bitch! on the wall above the bed. Bitch! along one arm, the inside of his legs, across his face, and all around his head. Bitch! Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!
Marius curled up on the floor, knees to his chest, head in his arms, and cried.
Thirty-seven Frank didn't recognise the woman sitting up at the bar; no reason that he should. It was early yet, early for serious drinking, and the place, long and narrow with stairs leading to a high balcony at the rear, was quiet. Music which he recognised as Joe Sample, Frank having been a major fan of the Crusaders since seventy-two,
"Street Life* one of his favourite records of all time, the one he always instructed DJs to play when he and Cathy hosted parties of their own – was pumping quietly from large speakers suspended from the ceiling.
The barman, fresh- faced and possibly as young as he seemed, set aside the newspaper he was reading and asked Frank what he wanted. The answer was a whisky sour, large, a little salt on the glass; iced water on the side. And something to pick on. He hadn't eaten since lunch and reasoned this was the start of what might prove a long night.
"Nachos," the barman suggested.
"Chicken wings? Potato skins? Onion rings?"
"Forget the nachos and the onion rings. Let me have the chicken and the potato skins, okay?"
"Sir." The barman passed Frank's order through to the kitchen and began to slice the lemon, fresh, for his whisky sour.
Frank toyed with the drink when it came, checking the temptation to swallow it right down;
ever since the talk with Cathy down by the canal, he'd felt like he was walking on the proverbial eggshells. He laughed and the woman four seats along turned her head; never understood 208 what that meant before, eggshells, what it was like. Now he thought if it was going to crack and let him tumble through, why not take a hammer to it, smash it first himself? Do unto others instead of being done to.
He finished his drink and called along the bar for another. The woman, sipping what Frank thought was some kind of rum cocktail, rum collins, cuba libra, one of those, glanced at him again. Not giving it too much. Still light outside, in the bar it was cool and dark.
There were rings on the fingers of both the woman's hands, Frank noticed; dark hair which fell past her face due to the way she was sitting, partly shielding her from his gaze. Thirty- five, Frank thought, forty. Waiting for a friend. Nothing to get worked up about.
"Your whisky sour, sir."
"Sure," Frank said.
"Thanks."
When Cathy arrived outside the main convention room for her interview, she had managed to patch up most of the damage, though the skin around her eyes was darker than usual and her face was pinched as if she were suffering from too little sleep. Which was partly the truth.
"You okay?" Mollie asked, concerned, stepping forward to greet her.
Cathy nodded: fine.
And from anything other than close up, she did look good: a cream linen suit with wide lapels, a green satin shirt and, poking out from beneath slightly flared trousers, the ubiquitous boots.
"Cathy, I think you know Sarah Dunant."
"Sure. We met at the Edgars last year."
The two women smiled and brushed cheeks and set off towards the platform, Mollie leading the way.
"So which part of the States are you from?" the woman was saying.
Ana, "how long are you over for?" And,
"Oh, interesting."
Frank all the while hearing Cathy's voice / wonder if that isn't long enough? Eight years. Close to. Saying it, it didn't seem so long. But living it. He shook his head. Some days he could scarcely remember when there had been anything else.
"Sorry," Frank leaned sideways towards the woman's stool. "I didn't catch what you said."
"I said, do you want another drink here or are you ready to move on somewhere else?"
The music had shifted again, back from some guitar band that reminded Frank of the Byrds, back to the Crusaders, the album they made eighty-one, eighty-two? – with Joe Cocker.
