by Lisa Jewell
‘Ah, then you are purebred Aryan ...’
They both turned then at the sound of a sash window being raised across the courtyard. Betty stiffened and grabbed Joe Joe’s arm. ‘It’s Dom Jones!’ she hissed.
‘Who?’
‘You know, Wall?’
‘What?’
‘Wall, the band. You know?’
He shuddered daintily. ‘I hate the Wall. I hate all that Britpop shit.’
The sash window came rattling up and there he was, pulling a cigarette out of a soft packet, clamping it between his lips, searching his jeans for his Zippo. He didn’t notice them at first, not until he’d finally located the lighter and taken his first drag. His eyes narrowed at them over his exhaled smoke.
Betty gasped. ‘See,’ she said to Joe Joe through clenched lips. ‘It’s really him.’
‘Urgh, he is disgusting.’
Betty glanced surreptitiously over her shoulder at the open window. Dom Jones sat perched on the windowledge, one skinny buttock overhanging, staring into the half-distance. He saw Betty looking at him and threw her a half-smile.
‘All right?’ he called out.
Betty blanched, every drop of blood in her body rushing violently to her head. ‘All right,’ she replied in her best approximation of a cool mockney hipster’s response. She turned away then, as nonchalantly as she could.
‘He is so ugly,’ said Joe Joe.
‘Ssh ...!’
‘Why? Why ssh? He is ugly. I can’t say this?’ He put his hand against his heart and looked at her beseechingly.
‘Well, no, not that loud. And anyway, he’s not ugly, he’s ...’ she threw another surreptitious glance in his direction and took in the mop of thick dark hair, heavily lashed eyes, petulant mouth, designer cashmere V-neck in baby blue, ‘... he’s cute.’
‘Yes,’ said Joe Joe disdainfully, ‘cute like a baby monkey.’ And then he started making baby monkey noises, very loud baby monkey noises. Betty hit him on his arm. ‘Stop it,’ she hissed, and Joe Joe laughed.
He stopped as the sound of ringing cut through the air. It was the distinctive tone of a mobile phone. Across the echoing courtyard they heard Dom Jones answering the call.
‘No,’ they heard him mutter. ‘No, I know. I fucking know that. But she’s left me with the baby. Yeah. I know. She’s doing a shoot. In Kentish Town. Yeah. Yeah, she sacked the nanny. I don’t fucking know. Probably just to fuck me off. Yeah. They were supposed to be sending someone over. No, I don’t know, just some girl from the PR department, Clare something. Never heard of her. No, she’s not here yet. They sent her on the fucking tube. Yeah, I mean, for fuck’s sake. She’s probably stuck in a tunnel. Yeah. No, of course I can’t bring the baby. What the fuck would I do with a fucking baby in the middle of a fucking radio interview? No. She’s ill. I don’t know, a cold or something. She told me she’s got to stay indoors. Yeah. I know. Anyway, I’ll call you when the PR gets here. OK? Oh, fuck, that’s the baby crying. I’ve got to go. Yeah. Later ...’
He turned off his phone, extinguished his cigarette and headed back into the house. He left the window open and Betty could hear the plaintive mewling of a small baby.
Six months old, according to the reports in the newspapers.
After a moment the mewling stopped. And then, a minute later she saw him, Dom Jones, infamous philanderer, excessive drug-taker, extreme boozer, habitual frequenter of every members’ club in London W1, friend to every debauched artist, musician and journalist in Soho, cockney/mockney art school dropout and darkly gleaming rock-and-roll supernova, clutching a small bundle of pink baby against his shoulder, rocking slowly from foot to foot and whispering tenderly into her ear.
Betty dropped any pretence at surreptitiousness and simply stared. Her stomach folded up against itself and she gulped. The man in the blurred photographs receiving sexual favours in a toilet cubicle and the man shouting aggressively into a mobile phone only five minutes ago faded away into the furthest reaches of her subconscious, and all she could see was a beautiful man soothing a tiny baby.
‘Oh, look!’ said Joe Joe, clasping his hands together gleefully. ‘So cute! The baby monkey has a baby monkey all of his own!’
‘Joe Joe,’ Betty chastised, ‘don’t be mean!’
Joe Joe shrugged and snatched the roll-up from Betty’s hand.
‘Here,’ he said, ‘let me learn how to do this.’
He put it between his full lips and he sucked in deeply, his cheeky cheeks disappearing into hollows. He held the smoke for a count of three and then he expelled it loudly and dramatically, his eyes pouring tears, his face red raw, coughing so loud that Dom Jones across the way grimaced and pulled down the sash with his free hand, giving Betty and Joe Joe a slightly withering look, tinged, Betty couldn’t help but feel, with a hint of melancholy. And then he was gone.
She grabbed the roll-up back from Joe Joe and rubbed it out. ‘You silly bugger,’ she teased. ‘What did you do that for?’
He smiled through his tears. ‘I don’t know,’ he wheezed. ‘But I have burned my lips, look.’ He turned the skin of his lip outwards and showed her a roll-up-shaped burn running down the centre of both of them.
‘Ow,’ said Betty, ‘and good. Now hopefully you won’t do it again.’
He smiled at her sheepishly, with his burned lips. ‘So,’ he said, ‘I have a special request. I want you to have a party.’
‘A party?’
‘Yes! We must have a party! In your dinky little flat. Maybe tomorrow night!’
Betty balked. ‘It’s Wednesday tomorrow.’
‘I know! And you are not working. And I am not working. And I think, Betty Boo, it is time for you to have a housewarming.’ He looked at her beseechingly.
Betty frowned at him.
‘Pleeease.’
‘But, Joe Joe, my flat’s not big enough. It’s –’
He interrupted her with his hand. ‘Have you not seen Breakfast at Tiffany’s?’
She frowned again.
‘Holly Golightly. She lives in a tiny teeny weeny flat, just like yours. She has the best party ever! Small is good! More sweat. More, how you say, proximity. Please please please, Betty, can we have a party? Please!’
Betty narrowed her eyes and considered the proposal. How could she resist a comparison with Holly Golightly? ‘OK,’ she said, ‘but don’t invite too many people. Please.’
18
BETTY’S TINY FLAT was bulging at the seams with what looked like a casting queue for a Benetton advert, packed tightly wall to wall with young, attractive, interestingly attired people from all corners of the globe, people that Joe Joe had collected on his journey through London’s language schools and fast-food purveyors and nightclubs. By eleven o’clock Betty had drunk so much that her vision was beginning to separate and her words were starting to bleed into each other. She was having an unnecessarily animated conversation with a Japanese American girl called Akiko, who spoke with a very strange Trans-Asian accent and kept calling Betty ‘Mandy’ because she looked like an old friend of hers called Mandy.
‘And you know what, Mandy, that’s, like, the really weird thing about, like, life, you know. The way it, like, just keeps changing, you know, every time you think you know where you are, it just totally changes again ...’
Betty smiled tightly. She knew without any shadow of doubt that she was about to be sick. She could feel it rising ominously through her like bad weather, sour and suffocating.
She felt her skin prickle and a flush of sweat blossom from her upper lip. She said, ‘Excuse me, I need to go to the toilet,’ and the girl called Akiko looked at her curiously and said, ‘I beg your pardon?’ and Betty realised that she had actually just said, ‘Squeeze me, needa godo toily.’ She pushed her way through a mass of backs, through banks of densely packed humans, each glancing at her in turn as she passed, brown eyes full of curiosity, blue eyes full of alarm, black eyes filled with amusement.
‘Out of her way!’ she heard someone
shout with hilarity. ‘She’s going to spew!’
She pushed against the bathroom door and it gave way against her, suddenly, as though someone had been holding it closed from behind and had let it go at the last moment. She stumbled through the door and landed with a thud against the edge of the bath, feeling the faint sensation of a bruise forming across her thigh, her silver beret falling half across her face, and became aware of John Brightly standing behind the door, looking at her with his usual expression of bland amusement.
‘Oh my God,’ said Betty. ‘It’s John Brightly. It’s John Brightly. In my bathroom. Why are you in my bathroom?’ She pulled the hat from her head dramatically and put out a hand to balance herself against the bath. And then, before he had a chance to answer, she was on her knees with her head arched over the toilet, dimly aware that it was blocked up with wads of pink toilet paper and urine, that there were fag ends buried in the mass and that as much as all this appalled her, she absolutely was going to have to be sick on top of all of it.
‘It’s blocked,’ she heard John Brightly mutter from somewhere behind her. ‘I tried to flush it. It’s fucked.’
She sat on her knees in dim, ringing silence while she waited for the tidal wave of nausea finally to engulf her. She groaned, she groaned again and then it came, loud and violent and everywhere. Upon the pink toilet paper, on top of the accumulated piss of a hundred party guests, the old fag butts, the toilet seat, the wall, the floor, the pipes, a hand towel, a spare toilet roll and the edge of the bath.
‘Jesus Christ,’ said John Brightly.
Betty groaned again, wiped away a drool of vomit from her lower lip and ran her hands through her hair.
‘Is that it?’ asked John.
Betty nodded and groaned again. That was it. She was done. She got slowly to her feet and turned to face the mirror. As she’d expected, she looked too horrible for words.
‘Here.’ John Brightly offered her a piece of chewing gum.
‘Thank you,’ she said. She turned back to the mirror. If she was a man now she would splash her face with icy cold water straight from the tap. As a woman, however, if she were to do that, the already dreadful reality of her clammy complexion, green hair and red eyes would be compounded even further by melted mascara and streaked eyeliner. Instead she dabbed at her cheeks with wet hands and ran her fingers through her hair, chewing the gum urgently to rid her mouth of the sour juices of regurgitated vodka and cider.
‘I’ll get you some water,’ said John Brightly.
Betty locked the door behind him and stood for a moment, staring at her face and listening to the strange noises of the party still, inexplicably, going on around her.
There was a soft knock at the door and she opened it a crack. John Brightly peered through the gap at her and Betty looked at him then, properly, for the first time since she’d come hurtling through the bathroom door. He was more handsome than she’d anticipated him being. She let him in and took the plastic cup of water from him.
‘How long have you been here?’ she asked.
He shrugged. ‘An hour or so.’
‘An hour or so? How come I didn’t see you?’
He shrugged again. ‘No idea,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t hiding.’
‘But, why are you here?’
He laughed. ‘Because I was invited. Your friend with the ginger afro invited me.’
‘Ah.’ She picked her beret off the floor, and sat down on the side of the bath. ‘But still. You didn’t have to come just because you were invited. Why are you really here?’
‘I have no idea,’ he said, joining her on the edge of the bath. ‘I think, if I’m going to be totally honest with you, I came because I was curious.’
‘Curious?’
‘Yeah, about what lies on the other side of that door.’ He gestured beneath his feet. ‘You know, I’m out there six days a week, I see people come and go. I wondered what it was like in here. And I suppose ...’ he paused, ‘... I suppose I was curious about you, a bit.’
She laughed. ‘Why would you be curious about me?’
‘I don’t know. The mysterious blond girl, with the fur coat and the big eyes, suddenly morphing into this brown-haired girl in a Wendy’s uniform. The changes you’re going through. Fresh in town. Wide-eyed and innocent. All that. It’s interesting. You’re interesting.’ He paused again, clearly re-evaluating the wisdom of his last comment. ‘Kind of,’ he added.
She nudged him with her elbow and said, ‘Huh.’
‘Well, you asked ...’
She smiled at him, feeling the euphoria of a recently emptied stomach, the sense of never having felt better in her life. ‘I’ve been curious about you, too,’ she said.
He raised an eyebrow at her and she thought that he looked very cool when he did that.
‘Yes, curious about why you’re so offish with me.’
‘Offish?’
‘Yes, ever since that first day, when I was wearing the fur. You’ve always been a bit, I don’t know, a bit like you don’t like me.’
He laughed wryly. ‘I don’t even know you. How could I not like you?’
She shrugged. ‘No idea,’ she said. ‘Everyone likes me. But you’ve just acted like you didn’t.’
He looked at her with a dry smile. ‘I think,’ he said softly, ‘that that’s just my personality. I don’t really do effusive, you know. I don’t really do all that fake stuff.’
‘Why does it have to be fake? Why can’t it just be, you know, friendly?’
‘Where are you from?’ he asked unexpectedly.
‘Guernsey,’ she replied. ‘Why?’
He smiled. ‘No reason.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing! Just I guessed it might be somewhere like that. Somewhere small. Somewhere where people are, you know, friendly to each other.’
Betty felt her defences pop up. ‘Not everyone in small places is friendly, you know. We’re not all these big cheesy, gurning stereotypes. Some of us are actually quite standoffish. And actually, I’m not even from Guernsey. I’m from Surrey. I just ended up in Guernsey. Through no fault of my own.’
He put a hand up to her, a signal to calm down. ‘Wow,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t meant to be an insult. It’s just, you can usually tell, with new people you can see the thinness of their skin.’
‘Have I got visibly thin skin?’ she asked, slanting her eyes at him.
He appraised her. ‘No,’ he said, ‘there’s something there. Something more than just a small-town girl.’
She smiled at him triumphantly, basking strangely in his approval. Those last few months in that house on the cliff, tending to the demands of a dying woman, had left an indelible mark on her and she was glad. She would have hated it to be as though it had never happened, all that time, all that youth, all that love.
Someone knocked at the door then and Betty jumped. She’d almost forgotten where they were. She tipped back the rest of the cup of water and said, ‘I’d better clean this place up a bit. Will you still be here when I’ve finished?’
‘Let me help,’ John Brightly said, getting to his feet.
‘What? No! God, no. I can do it. You go and tell whoever’s waiting outside that they’d better come back later.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Christ! Of course I’m sure. There’s no way I’m having you cleaning up my puke. That would just be totally gross. Get out of here!’ She pushed him away playfully towards the door, and as her hand touched his arm she felt a flicker of energy pass between them, something warm and vital, something real and human, a connection.
He looked at her with some genuine softness in his eyes for the first time since she’d known him. ‘Well, at least let me try and fix the toilet,’ he said.
‘I can do it!’ she said. ‘I used to live in a falling-down mansion. I’m an expert at fixing toilets. I promise you.’
‘Falling-down mansion? Wow. I can’t wait to hear all about it.’
‘Meet me outside,’ she said,
‘on the fire escape. I’ll tell you all about it.’
She closed the door behind him, opened up the cupboard beneath the basin, pulled out some spray bleach and a stiff J-Cloth and applied herself to the thoroughly disgusting job of cleaning up her mess.
The first person she bumped into when she finally emerged almost ten minutes later was Candy Lee, the angry woman from downstairs. She had a bottle of rum in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other. She was wearing a flowery blouse with a denim miniskirt and a denim jacket, and her shoes were denim mules with cork heels. Her hair was adorned with silk flowers and she had a big lipstick stain on her right cheek.
Her eyes widened at the sight of Betty.
‘What you been doing in there?’ she demanded.
Betty looked at her curiously. ‘Fixing the toilet,’ she said haughtily.
Candy Lee threw her a haughty look. ‘Why it take you so long?’
‘Because it did.’
‘Come in with me.’ She dragged Betty by the hand into the bathroom and locked the door behind them. Candy had clearly been carrying a heavy bladder for quite some time. Her urine was audible hitting the water in the bowl and she sighed with pleasure as she peed. Betty stared at her in horror.
‘Can I go now?’ she asked.
‘No! No. You stay. I like you. I want to talk to you.’
‘Someone’s waiting for me,’ Betty said, ‘outside. Maybe we can talk later?’
‘No,’ Candy leaned towards Betty and grabbed her wrist, ‘now. I want to talk now. Why it stink so bad in here? Someone been sick. So disgusting.’ She waved her hand in front of her nose and then pulled a canister of Impulse body spray out of a small bag slung diagonally across her chest, which she sprayed liberally around herself. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘you too. You smell of sick.’ Before Betty had a chance to argue, she had been aggressively perfumed with something that smelled like old ladies and toilet freshener.
‘Listen, you, you are a beautiful girl.’
Betty stared at her mutely.
‘You are prettiest girl I ever seen.’
‘Er ...’
‘Well, nearly prettiest girl I ever seen. Meg Ryan prettiest girl I ever seen. But you are close. I like girls.’ ‘Oh ...’
