Dream On

by Gilda O'Neill

  He poured himself another drink, spilling most of it on the table. ‘Now I ain’t got a pot.’

  ‘They’re always going on about needing workers in the papers and on the wireless lately,’ she said warily, as she screwed the lid back on the bottle for him. ‘You could always try and get a regular sort of job.’

  ‘What, like you? In some knocking shop?’

  Ginny winced at the injustice of his words. She hadn’t done anything wrong. All she was doing was trying to pay off some bills, make ends meet, keep his mother in food and earn a bit extra for some of the things that other people took for granted, that she had once taken for granted. Admittedly she was enjoying the job, but there was no getting away from the fact that she was working bloody long hours, which was a damned sight more than either Ted or Nellie had ever done.

  Ted was staring into the middle distance. ‘You know what it is, don’t you?’ he asked, his drunken speculation losing Ginny completely. ‘It’s since that bastard’s had it in for me. If I ever get the chance to get my hands round that whoreson’s throat . . .’

  ‘Who? Who’s got it in for you?’

  ‘Him. The one who’s been haunting me.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘The arsehole’s ruined my business, ruined my life and you don’t understand?’

  Ginny looked blank.

  ‘The bastard who grassed me to the law, you silly bitch.’

  ‘What, over the bank job?’

  He hesitated for a moment, as Ginny’s words worked their way into his mind. ‘Yeah,’ he said with a nod. ‘You’re probably right. The same bloke. The one who stopped all the dockers trading with me, the one who—’

  Now Ginny had tuned in to the corkscrew logic of his thinking, it was all she could do to stop herself laughing. ‘You ain’t talking about that feller from all that time back, surely? The one who had the police round here. I can’t even remember his name it was so long ago.’

  ‘Can’t even remember his name?’

  The low menace in his voice had Ginny wishing she had kept her mouth shut.

  And as all his hatred and bile spewed out – as he slammed the truth about him and Dilys at her, and about Susan being his, and how he thought Ginny was just about the stupidest bitch he had ever laid eyes on, let alone fucked – Ginny wished she had never been born.

  ‘Why Ted?’ she whispered into her chest. ‘Why?’

  ‘Why not?’

  She couldn’t think of an answer.

  ‘Be honest with yourself for once, instead of floating around like a bleed’n’ idiot with your head in the clouds. You must have known.’ He laughed cruelly. ‘I mean, every other bugger seems to.’

  Ted set about refilling his glass. ‘You got any money?’

  Ginny handed him her purse, turned her back on him and walked slowly from the room.

  Upstairs, she packed her belongings into the suitcase that had once held packets of silk stockings, French perfume and chocolates. Things of which Dilys had no doubt had more than her share. Ginny vowed to herself that she too would have those things. But she would buy them for herself.

  She’d been a mug for long enough. What did she have to lose?

  Less than an hour later, Ginny walked into the club just as Carmen was fixing the cigarette tray around her neck.

  ‘Innit your night off?’

  ‘Yeah, it is,’ Ginny said, striding past her without a glance. ‘I’ve come in to see Leila.’

  By the time Leila arrived, the club was about to close and the girls were almost bursting with curiosity.

  What was going on? Why was Ginny sitting out the back with a face like a fiddle, bruises on her cheeks, a suitcase by her side and no explanation? That’s what they wanted to know. But as they rushed to follow Leila into the dressing-room to find out, they were disappointed.

  ‘Do me a tiny favour, girls,’ she purred over her shoulder, ‘get back to your customers and leave me alone with Ginny for a few moments.’

  There was a general mutter of frustration.

  ‘Please,’ said Leila, her smile still in place, but her voice and eyes hardening.

  The girls obeyed and Leila lowered herself elegantly on to one of the shabby little chairs. ‘Now, what’s all this about? Gloria said—’

  ‘I want to do what they do,’ Ginny interrupted her.

  ‘Hostessing?’ Leila suppressed a much broader smile. She’d been right about her all along. She could always tell, no matter what Shirley said.

  Ginny nodded. ‘I want to earn more money.’

  ‘You’ll certainly be able to do that.’

  ‘And there’s something else. I need somewhere to stay.’

  ‘That shouldn’t be a problem.’ Leila draped her emerald-silk-clad arm around Ginny’s trembling shoulder, her mind working overtime as she considered which of Saunders’s properties might have a bedsit that wouldn’t frighten her off completely. Ginny had something about her that men went for and Leila wasn’t about to miss the opportunity of pleasing the governor by getting her to cash in on it.

  ‘We’ll find you somewhere. But you mustn’t expect too much, you know, sweetie. Not at such short notice.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Ginny said flatly. ‘I ain’t used to much.’

  Chapter 12

  1952

  CARMEN SASHAYED INTO the dressing-room, a half-smoked cigarette dangling from her lips, her big brown eyes narrowed against the smoke. Apart from her hair, which was smoothed round big, fat rollers in an attempt to straighten its tight natural curl, she was made-up and dressed, ready for the evening’s work ahead.

  She tipped her head towards Ginny, who was sitting in the far corner of the dressing-room by the sink putting on her make-up. Rather than sharing one of the big communal looking-glasses that were propped up on the junk-covered tables, Ginny was doing her best to use a small handbag mirror.

  ‘What’s up with her?’ Carmen asked Yvette.

  Yvette flashed her eyes, shook her head and flapped her hand, in a pantomime signal for her not to ask, but Carmen was never one for subtlety.

  ‘What’s up with you then, Ginny girl?’ she asked, flicking her cigarette into an already full ashtray. ‘Penny for those dirty thoughts of yours.’

  Ginny raised her eyes slowly; beneath them were dark mauve smudges like fading bruises, but they weren’t marks of violence, they were marks of exhaustion and lack of sleep. ‘Sorry, Carmen? What did you say?’

  Carmen tutted amiably. ‘I said, penny for them. You’re miles away again.’

  Ginny lowered her chin and returned to painting her face. ‘I’m all right.’

  Yvette glared at Carmen; she of all people should have known what it was like to feel troubled, to want to hide away in a corner and be left alone.

  Patty, who up until now hadn’t said anything – she had been far too preoccupied constructing a fat, overspilling reefer – suddenly chipped in, in her increasingly London-tinged Irish brogue: ‘It’s about time you moved out of that room of your’n, Ginny. That dump’s enough to get anyone down. And I should know. Didn’t I stay there myself for a couple o’ weeks? I nearly went barmy. And you’ve been there for what . . .? It must be getting on for eight months now.’ She paused to lick the paper and to light the expertly rolled joint. ‘That’s what’ll be upsetting you, living in that rat hole.’ She paused and flashed a knowing look around the room. ‘Or you’ve got yourself into a bit of debt maybe?’

  Carmen took the cigarette from Patty and inhaled deeply. ‘Well, it’s either that.’ She laughed. ‘Or the fact that Elizabeth Taylor has gone and snapped up Michael Wilding. You’ve lost your chance there, darling.’

  Ginny said nothing, but Patty wrinkled her nose and made a gagging sound. ‘Michael Wilding? No thanks.’

  Carmen handed back the cigarette. ‘Not your type, eh, Patty.’ Playfully, she flicked a clump of lipstick-stained cotton wool at Ginny’s back. ‘Hark at Miss Fussy Drawers, Gin. Making out he’s not her type and we al
l know she’d go with Laurel and Hardy, the bloody pair of them at once, if they paid her well enough. She’d go with anyone.’

  Patty leaned towards Carmen and hissed angrily, ‘D’you mind. Unlike some people, I know where to draw the line.’

  ‘Aw yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. And I definitely wouldn’t go with some of the old rough I’ve seen Ginny go with.’

  ‘Shut up,’ snapped Yvette; she could kill Carmen and Patty at times, they acted just like a pair of kids.

  ‘What?’ Patty was a picture of injured innocence. ‘What have I done?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Ginny said, standing up, her mouth and eyes set hard behind her bright mask of cosmetics. ‘Patty’s right, I do go with blokes that most of you would run a mile from. But why should I worry about being fussy? What have I got to lose?’

  She didn’t wait for their reply.

  It was barely half past one and Ginny was already leading her third customer up to one of the mercifully ill-lit rooms above the club. If the lights had been any brighter, the irrefutably sordid nature of the poky little cubby-holes, with their lumpy beds, and their faded and stained linen, would have been all too horribly apparent to anyone but the very drunkest or badly sighted of the customers that the girls took upstairs.

  The customers were actually referred to as ‘friends’ within their hearing – what the girls called them in the privacy of the dressing-room would have appalled them. The girls’ descriptions varied: according to how the customers had behaved; how far over the set rate their ‘tip’ had been; and – most importantly – how quickly they had managed to get it all over with. But customers is what they undoubtedly were, and the point in getting them upstairs and back down again as quickly as possible wasn’t only because the girls found them distasteful, but so that they could get on with buying more rounds of the ludicrously over-priced drinks and gifts from the cigarette tray, or be sent off into the night, with reassuring murmurings about their virility and their ability to drive a woman to the heights of ecstasy, so that the girls could get on with targeting their next likely punter.

  The girls earned less per trick if they took them upstairs rather than back to the flats they rented from the governor, but then they missed out on the commission from the extras and could only guarantee the one ‘friend’ for the night, so it was worth staying on the club premises. Plus, not only was working a foreigner – doing business on your own behalf without the governor’s knowledge – strictly prohibited, but most of the girls felt safer using the upstairs, as, like the door from the street, they were watched over by an ever-changing series of minders. These were huge gorillas of men, who stood, arms folded, guarding the door to the narrow staircase that led to the rooms high up in the roof.

  The minders safeguarded the girls and their customers from several potential hazards, ensuring that the men enjoyed their purchase for the evening in something like privacy and also ensuring that the club didn’t attract too much attention. For while the downstairs operated quite legitimately as a licensed drinking club, upstairs was another matter and was completely illegal.

  The first of the potential spoilers of the punters’ fun – and the club’s profit – was the local police. But because they were happy with their regular pay-off, they usually only bothered to mount the occasional, fairly half-hearted early-evening raid – at a time when no one of any importance was likely to be on the premises – more as a public demonstration of keeping the peace, than part of any genuine crusade to close what they all knew was a fully operational brothel.

  Then there were the young thugs who, after watching one too many George Raft films, fancied themselves as budding gangsters and would see if extorting protection money was as easy as it looked at the pictures. They were something of a joke and were swotted away as easily as an annoying insect at a picnic.

  There was, of course, the genuine article to be reckoned with: the real hard men. But they weren’t a day-to-day concern. For the most part, everyone had their own patch in Soho – the English, the Greeks, the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese – and they tended to live in a sort of peaceful co-existence, where everyone knew their place in the pecking order of the criminal underworld. There was the occasional outbreak of a territorial skirmish, when one of the local firms or families decided to chance its arm and see if it could expand into someone else’s manor. But those disputes were usually quickly, and often bloodily, resolved, satisfying everyone’s sense of fair play and of honour. Lately, however, with the increasing numbers of Maltese arriving on the scene, there were worrying signs that the newcomers didn’t intend to play by quite the same rules as the old firms.

  But for now, the intruders who caused the most trouble for the club were the sightseers – who would never have set foot in the place had they even begun to suspect the charges; the do-gooders and the moralists – who wanted to clean up the area and save the girls and the customers from themselves and eternal damnation; and the wives.

  The wives were a whole new breed of nuisance, who seemed permanently on the look-out for co-respondents to cite in the increasingly fashionable divorce courts. There, they were almost guaranteed deals designed to break their errant husbands, both in spirit and in pocket. Most men caught that way could only reminisce that that sort of thing would never have happened before the war when women knew their place.

  The minder on the door tonight was Terry, a man with a neck wider than his head and fists like boiled hams. Usually silently inscrutable, he frowned as Ginny tottered past him on her high-heeled shoes, dragging a sweating, over-weight old man who looked barely conscious behind her.

  ‘You all right?’ Terry growled, his great bald head creasing like an ill-fitting overcoat. It took a lot to shock a man like him, but this pretty little blonde was going at it like some rough old street tom. Anyone could see she could make a much cushier living if she wanted to. There’d be plenty of blokes more than willing to have a doll like her to keep to himself – him included if he had the dough. But it was as though she just didn’t care. And the old geezer she had in tow this time, well, it was enough to make Terry want to fetch up his tea.

  Ginny stopped in her tracks and turned to face him. ‘Why shouldn’t I be all right?’

  Terry shrugged and, returning the professional blankness to his gaze, opened the door and let Ginny and her ‘friend’ through to the upstairs.

  As he stood stolidly on guard, Terry usually left the door slightly ajar so that he could hear the girls and the mug punters performing – he considered it one of his perks. But this time he made sure the door was shut tight. It made him shudder even to think of what was going on in there.

  Less than two minutes later Ginny pushed past Terry with her hand over her mouth. Her hair wild and dishevelled, her lipstick smeared all over her face, her dress unbuttoned and hanging off her shoulders. And there was sick all down her front. Terry couldn’t be sure if the vomit was hers or the customer’s. Both maybe.

  The next night, the other girls had already gone through to the club to size up the first of the customers, but Ginny was still in the dressing-room, sitting alone, looking at her painted mask of a face in one of the big shared mirrors. She couldn’t bring herself even to stand up, let alone shift herself out into the club to face yet another parade of men.

  She traced a finger round her deep-carmine-tinted lips, then round the scarlet rouge highlighting her cheeks, and finally round the bold black lines defining her eyes. It was as though she was looking at a stranger; someone she knew nothing about. Someone she didn’t recognise in any way at all. Someone her mum and dad would have been ashamed of.

  She thought about what had become of Violet Varney . . .

  Sticking her whole hand into the big jar of vanishing cream that the girls used to clean their faces, Ginny scooped out a great gobbet of the stuff. Ignoring the stray hairs and bits of cotton wool sticking out of it, she closed her eyes and plastered it all over her face. She would wipe it clean of every trace of paint
and colour and walk out of the club. She didn’t know what she would do then, but that didn’t matter, she just knew she couldn’t do this any more. Patty had been right about her debts, but she would find a way to pay back every penny. She would—

  ‘Not ready yet?’ someone cooed from behind her.

  Ginny’s eyes flashed open. Peering into the glass through the thick grease smeared over her lashes, she saw the reflection of Leila standing in the doorway with Shirley just behind her.

  Leila’s presence had Ginny’s resolve collapsing into stammering guilt. ‘I was just doing my face.’ The part of her that had learned to please and appease people, regardless of her own feelings or wishes, could still instantaneously demolish any decision she had made, as surely as a bulldozer could clear a bomb-site.

  ‘Don’t get worked up, sweetie. I only want a little word.’ Leila turned to Shirley. ‘How about waiting for me at the bar?’ It was an order not a question.

  ‘But, Leila—’ Shirley began, not wanting to miss whatever it was that was about to take place.

  ‘There are customers waiting,’ Leila said evenly.

  Shirley flared her top lip at Ginny’s reflection, then flounced out. That little cow was just asking for her comeuppance and it looked as though it was about to happen. Shirley prided herself on having a nose for other people’s misery and she could smell tragedy coming off Ginny as strongly as if someone had spilt a whole bottle of the stuff all over her. She was only disappointed that she wasn’t able to witness it personally.

  Leila, checking that Shirley had closed the door properly, said casually, ‘You don’t like doing this, do you?’