Connections (6 page)

The suburbs of London began, then gradually the air became brighter and more lurid, the houses closer and closer together. As the progress into the impure city atmosphere went on Fleur found it easier to forget about Bucknells and her mother and stepfather.

She climbed the steps to Adelaide House feeling almost satisfied, thinking, I've got a home and a job, that's good enough
for now – and saw Dominic standing outside his open front door, talking urgently into a mobile phone. As she advanced she heard him saying, “Please – please – hurry.” He looked at her as if, for the moment, he didn't know who she was.

“What's the matter?” Fleur asked.

“It's Van,” he said, starting back inside. Over his shoulder he said, “It looks like an overdose.”

Fleur, cringing inwardly, followed him. “Is there anything I can do?”

Dominic crouched down beside a mattress on which Vanessa lay motionless. Her face was grey, her eyelids fluttered. Outside the brilliantly coloured oriental bed covering one pale, thin arm dropped. A lamp with a scarf over it burned by the bed. The room was painted dark green, and was poignantly tidy. On a cheap chest of drawers stood a hairbrush, a paperback book and the bear, propped up, with a fresh red ribbon round its throat. There was a poster on the wall – an impressionist painting of a meadow with flowers – a chair on which lay a pair of jeans and leather sandals underneath, side by side.

Dominic crouched down, took Vanessa's limp hand and started talking to her. “Van – Vanessa – I'm here. You're going to be all right. Joe's coming. The ambulance is on its way. Hang in there, Van. We all love you. It's going to be all right.”

To Fleur Vanessa looked as if she might be dying.

Dominic was massaging Vanessa's hand. “It's all right, love. I'm here. You'll be all right soon.”

“Dominic,” Fleur said from the doorway. “I'll go down and wait outside – I'll tell the ambulance men which flat.” She was relieved to have found something to do which kept her out of that room.

Joe, skinny and fast, came running up towards her as she got to the stairs. “What?” he cried, his eyes staring, his face alarmed.

“It's an overdose, probably,” Fleur told him. “I'm going down to wait for the ambulance.” Before she had finished the sentence he had bolted past her into the flat.

She sat down on the bottom steps where she had a good view of the gates and the road. She was startled when a wet nose was
pushed into her hand. She looked at the big black and white dog, Jason, who looked back at her, head on one side. In the distance she heard the faint blaring of the ambulance siren. “They're here,” she said to the dog.

The ambulance arrived, lights flashing. Fleur stood in the road and pointed them into the area outside the flats, then told the paramedics which flat to go to.

She watched them carry the light stretcher down the steps. There was an oxygen mask over Van's small face. She must still be alive, at any rate. Joe jumped in and the ambulance moved off.

Dominic watched it go then turned to where Fleur was waiting in the shadows. He bent and put his hand over his eyes. “I've got Jason,” Fleur said, moving forward.

“Couldn't take it, eh, Jase?” Dominic said to the dog. To Fleur he said, “I got him off an addict. He's seen it all before, when he was a lot younger. Didn't like it.”

“He's a very clever dog,” Fleur remarked. She added, “How's Vanessa doing?”

“I think she'll be OK,” Dominic said. “I couldn't go with her. Hospitals make me come over faint. I can't do anything about it.”

“People always say that,” Fleur said dourly, “as if they thought there was a whole race of other people who love hospitals, can't get enough of them, go round visiting patients they don't even know just for the experience.”

“Well, thanks,” said Dominic.

“Think nothing of it.” She turned to go. She relented. “Come over to the wine bar. I'll get the manager to give you a brandy.”

He hesitated. “I'd rather go to the Findhorn. Come with me. Money's not a problem.”

No, thought Fleur, crossing the road with him. Money isn't the problem. It's where it probably comes from that is. For all she knew it was Dominic's trade that had put Vanessa's life in danger. She couldn't think why she was going with him, except that somehow that was what you did after an event like that.

She stood beside him while he bought the drinks.

“What was all that about?” said Patrick from behind the bar. He had evidently seen the whole thing through the pub windows.

“Don't ask,” said Dominic. “Just don't ask.” This seemed to explain enough to Patrick.

Fleur and Dominic sat down. “Contrary to what you might be thinking,” Dominic said, “I don't deal in what Vanessa had. I never have. A bit of blow, all right, when I needed to – never smack, or anything. Van got that stuff on her own.”

Fleur wasn't sure whether to believe him or not. A silence fell.

“I'd better go and ring the hospital,” he said.

“They won't know anything yet, probably.”

“Make me feel better,” he told her. He went to the phone, Jason following. Fleur sat there gloomily, planning to leave as soon as he got back.

“She's OK. They're waiting for the doctor,” Dominic reported when he returned.

“They know what to do without a doctor,” she said. “Look – I'd better go.”

But he was speaking, quickly: “She was getting off it. The local doctor's very good – she was in a programme. She was down to a bit of methadone a day. Then this. Joe and me were out working. She must have got down and lonely and went out and scored somewhere. Probably on the Yarborough. If we'd been around it probably wouldn't have happened.”

“She made her own choices,” said Fleur.

Dominic looked at her disbelievingly. “That's what people like you say, isn't it? ‘She made her own choices.' You don't know anything about Van, do you? You don't know what choices she ever had to make. You don't know a thing. You just come out with your little clichés so you don't have to worry. It's all somebody else's fault.”

Fleur got annoyed. “Come on, Dominic. No one held Vanessa down and stuck a needle in her arm.”

“Do you know what?” he said. “You don't know anything. I hope you never have to find out, the hard way.”

“You know everything, of course.”

“A little bit more than you do, that's for sure.”

“What the hell,” she said, standing up. “I'm going.”

“Sit down,” he said. “I didn't mean to insult you. I'm just worried, that's all. It'd be a help if you stayed,” he admitted.

Fleur sat down. “Has Vanessa got any family?” she asked.

“Her mum, Ellen, lives on the Yarborough Estate, but she and Van don't get on too well – because of something that happened in the past. Vanessa's mum's all right but there's stuff they can't put behind them. Basically it's me and Joe. We've usually looked out for her – as much as we could.” He groaned. “It's so frustrating – when everything was going all right. She could have been straight in six months.”

“She still can.”

“She'll lose confidence,” he said. “I've seen her do it before. You know – self-esteem. She's never been loaded with that, Vanessa.”

Fleur said, “I'm starving. Do you want some fish and chips?”

They ate from the paper sitting on the grass behind Adelaide House, facing the lighted tower blocks five hundred yards away. The sky above was city dark, the sound of traffic muffled. It was chilly.

“You'll have had more glamorous dates,” Dominic remarked. “Do you want the rest of those chips?” She handed them over. “May balls,” he continued dreamily. “The Groucho Club. Tea at the Ritz. Long lunches in expensive Italian places with men in cream suits. Little blobs of spinach on the plate – fifty quid a head. Funny how they lean on spinach in those places.”

“You seem well up on it.”

“I used to be homeless around the West End,” he said. “You see a lot.”

“What? You were living on the street?” she asked.

“Yeah – me, Joe and Vanessa. Not always in the street of course. Only when things went bad. Still, I'm no stranger to the doorway, church porch and alley.”

“My God,” Fleur said. She was appalled to think she was sitting here with one of the people she had thought so alien – wasted figures sitting on the pavement with handwritten notices, men
and women wrapped up in sleeping bags in doorways, faceless, anonymous as the dead in body bags.

“It was a life,” he said. “It had its compensations, along with the rest. But basically it's punishing and it has the habit of killing you in the end. So – what happened to you to get you here enjoying this picnic?”

She told him the story of the company, the documentaries, the accounts, her absconding partner.

“So you and the guy were close?” Dominic asked.

“That's right. Part of me still doesn't believe he won't turn up with an answer, several answers, and make it all right.”

“It's possible,” he said, and crumpling up his fish and chip paper he lobbed it across the grass. Fleur got up and went to get it. As she came back he flashed out his foot and tripped her, then moved to catch her as she fell. Suddenly she was on the ground in the hard arms of this sweaty, fish-and-chip-smelling drop-out. And suddenly she felt happier than she had for months – if not longer.

Dominic pulled her closer and put his soft mouth on hers. Moments later she said, “I can't do this.”

“You are,” he said and neatly turned her over so that he was lying on top of her. Five minutes later they were entwined, staggering up the stairs of Adelaide House. In the bedroom Dominic shared with Joe they fell on his narrow, neatly made bed. Then came the sound of his belt, her shoes, his shoes hitting the floor.

I must get up, I must get out, was Fleur's waking thought. It was still dark and she was very comfortable and easy curled against Dominic's body, but she was worried – worried that she might stay, letting herself in for more of this madness. Then what? Fleur Stockley and this homeless hippie?

Hippie? Petty crook, drug dealer – and yet he was so sweet, she thought; sweeter, calmer, more passionate than Ben, if she had to tell herself the truth. Ben's attention was always – where? On the future, on the project, on Ben himself. Which, she told herself, was because Ben had a future, had a project, had a brain, had
a presence in the world. Not that the result of all that had been so great in the end.

Nevertheless – get up, Fleur, get up, she told herself. There's nothing for you here. One minute you were walking along the pavement, clean and tidy and pulling yourself together, the next caught up in a tornado, swept up, whirled round and round and landed in a totally different landscape – surreal, like Oz. She'd never known anything like that before, hadn't known it could happen.

Her mind went back to the previous summer, her row with Jess, her later SOS call to her. They'd met for lunch in a quiet restaurant, far from the all-knowing, all-seeing streets around Soho, and Jess had told her what she knew of the Channel Four deal Ben had secretly made. Fleur was no longer in any mood to attack Jess for her betrayal with Ben. She felt weak and confused, as if she'd been in a traffic accident. She told Jess, “I've got two orders to appear in court for debt, from a company making film and a haulage firm. I'm looking very hard at the fact that my flat's security for the company.”

Jess put her head in her hands, groaned and then looked up, saying, “Get to Gerry Sullivan as soon as possible. Do everything –
everything
– he tells you to. He's very good in situations like this.”

“It's over, isn't it?” Fleur said.

“Unless Ben turns up tomorrow in a red coat with a big white beard and a sack over his back, yes, I'd say it was over,” Jess said. She added, “I must say I'd never have thought Ben would do a thing like this.”

“Well, you took the opportunity of studying him at close quarters,” Fleur said bitterly. Jess said nothing. “Didn't you?” Fleur asked. “Go on, Jess – didn't you? Don't just sit there as if nothing had happened.”

“Oh – whatever,” said Jess. “Yes – I did it. I said I did it. But why are you blaming me – just me? What about him?”

Fleur considered this. There was no answer to it. A thought struck her. “How was it, anyway?” she said. “Where did you go?”

“My place. Adrian was away. It was OK.”

“OK?” said Fleur.

“Well, Fleur, you know,” Jess said, poking at some ratatouille on her plate. She looked up. “You know, Fleur – there's sex – and then there's sex.” She looked down again, then up. “Tastes differ, it's one of those things – you know.”

Fleur had uneasily agreed, but behind Jess's words found something she didn't care to analyse. It was as if Jess were a renowned gourmet, a person who had eaten at the best restaurants in the world, and Fleur had taken her out for a meal at a perfectly good, nothing-special local restaurant. As if she'd asked her, “How's the food?” and Jess had replied politely, “Fine. Well – there's food and food, you know.”

Fleur had known then that Jess had a point, but she wasn't precisely sure what it was. Now, lying peacefully beside Dominic Floyd, she thought she did know, but didn't want to face it.

Get up. Get out of here, she ordered herself and, reluctantly, eventually complied. You could stay, she told herself as she slid her feet to the floor. More sex in the morning – stagger up – nice walk to the park, feed the ducks – no harm in it. No, she told herself, creeping to the door, hastily gathered clothes under her arm – leave it. One night stand – good friends from now on …

“You going, darling?” came Dominic's sleepy voice.