Lucky Bunny (9780062202512) (18 page)

His eyes are a pale color—impossible to work out in this light—but he has thick, silky black lashes and black eyebrows so that they are all you notice, sort of hypnotic they are; and he looks a bit like Montgomery Clift. He assesses me with equal openness and seems to like what he sees: I'm wearing a black dirndl skirt with bands of colored ribbon round the hem and a paper nylon petticoat to stiffen it out. I've cinched it in further with a thin black belt, and I have on a low-cut black lace top, black shiny courts, and Tahitian black-pearl earrings. (I've nicked all this: a South Sea island girl look, based on a pinup calendar).

“Let's go up West,” Stella says, breaking in and tapping me on the shoulder pointedly. She has to shout over the music and I feel a blast of warm breath on my cheek as she does. “This place is dead as a doorknob; I mean, a
swing band
? Come on, Queenie.”

Tony stops dancing and pulls out a cigarette. He flashes the pack towards me and—after a second's thought—towards Stella, and begins walking back to the sides of the dance floor. We both take one and stand once more at the edge of the dancers, smoking. I like the way Tony smokes, holding his cigarette very lightly, inhaling gently like he doesn't really need to; lifting his chin and turning his head ever so slightly to one side to blow smoke out of the side of his mouth, not in my face. He continues to stare at me.

“The strong silent type, are we?” Stella says, shouting again.

“Can't hear myself fucking think over this racket,” he replies, mildly.

“Well, we're off,” Stella mouths, signaling over his head at Bobby, who has lost his mate Landy to a blonde in a red dress. “Up West. Ciao,
Tony.
See you.”

She says “Tony” with a pointed Italian accent. He doesn't rise to the bait.

Tony turns slightly to see who Stella's waving to. He nods to Bobby and—is it my imagination or does Tony seem pleased that it's only my brother, the pansy, that I'm heading up West with?

Outside on Upper Street, Tony and Bobby have a five-minute chat about the fact that Bobby's nearly old enough and surely just about to get call-up papers. Tony's done his national service, he says (he's older than I thought, then); but he knows a fellow who has an enlarged heart and who'll impersonate you—you know, give your name, anyway, they don't know what you fucking look like—and fail the medical. He's done it about seven times now, for seven different medical boards.

“How much?” asks Bobby, and I know this strikes him as a good solution.

“Hundred quid,” Tony says, walking away from us. “Talk to my uncle.”

“Fucking hell,” says Bobby, more to us than Tony. “I think I'll get me dad to do me a medical certificate, off of this doctor in Stepney.”

Tony gives me a sort of wave, but the way he walks off, decidedly, hands in pockets, tells me that's my lot, for this evening. He gave me the tap on the shoulder. He's not going to beg, for God's sake. I stare after him, making sure not to show Stella or Bobby with the smallest gesture or expression that I'm in any way disappointed.

B
obby prefers a pub called the Bag O' Nails near the Wellington Barracks at the back of Buckingham Palace to coming to Soho with us. Stella rolls her eyes, and whispers, “Guards officers.” So we go on our own. We end up having a hot salt-beef sandwich in the Nosh Bar near the Windmill, and we're starving: biting into the thick white bread and the juicy slices of meat so that the fat dribbles down our chin, making our lipstick slide off our mouths. We dab at our lips with Quickies, clean ourselves up in Stella's pocket mirror.

Then to a spieler in Ham Yard, and because we're young and new, all these men keep coming up to us. Stella plays along—she's fearless—but they get on my wick, and the truth is, like that time in the lorry running away from Approved School, I'm a bit frightened. The place is full of the Maltese pimps I've heard about—Epsom Salts (Malts), Stella calls them—and they don't look friendly. Although it was a few years ago, I do remember hearing in school about Black Rita, found shot in her bed in Rupert Street.

I sip my port and Guinness standing up, trying to spot the next man about to make a pass at me and head him off. It's a crush, and so noisy with shouting and music from somewhere over the street and the men squeezed in the fug of smoke at card tables, now and then smacking down cards with a yelp. Stella weaves between them, her hand at my elbow, guiding me to the dingy basement lavatory. She wants to know about the firm Bobby's working for, haven't I noticed that London's changed since we're out and it's not the Whites running things anymore? Billy Hill and Jack Spot teamed up, she says, to get rid of them, and she'd be interested to know who Bobby's working for since he left borstal, because you want to be sure, she says—staring at herself in the cracked square of mirror as she redoes her lipstick—that your brother's backed the right horse.

Coming back up the stairs from the lavatory, one of the men, this short Yank with a sweaty head, gets up at one point and makes a kind of lunge for me. He's sort of half out of his seat, and I can't help myself, my hand just comes out and swipes him, really hard across the face. My temper again—I'm instantly embarrassed and sorry for him. A couple of his card-playing friends look up—one big heavy is obviously from Scotland Yard, you can spot them a mile off—and laugh at him, as he rubs his cheek.

He's standing up, dazed, and Stella has wedged herself beside him in a moment, at his ear, apologizing.

“She's a virgin,” she whispers. “Ten quid.”

The man freezes. He was about to step behind a screened-off table where his friends are, but instead he moves closer to me, elbowing Stella out of the way, and looks me up and down the way Dad studies a greyhound: appraising. My palm stings where I slapped him, and I rub it down the side of my skirt.

As she sees him move towards his jacket pocket, Stella moves in again and says, “We need another ten quid key money. Key money, you know. For the room.”

She jerks her head towards the door and towards Archer Street and beyond, to some imagined hotel far away.

The Yank is grinning now. We're squashed up against one another; he is pressing against my chest and he puts an arm around my waist and squeezes up closer. “You really not popped your cherry, honey?” His breath is hot in my ear and smells of whiskey and cheese. “Or you just kiddin' me? Cos you know I don't really care—I'm
loaded
,” and he brings out another couple of notes.

Stella gives me a Look. The look says, “Don't let on that the white note is a ten. He obviously thinks it's a fiver.”

She doesn't need to give me the look twice. The notes are hot, down my bra, tucked in.

“OK, it's just over there. Soho Square. We'll show you the way,” Stella says. She's pointing confidently, but we're not near Soho Square and I know she has no idea where the nearest hotel is. Now my palm is really stinging, and sweating, too. I know what she's about. I look around. What if he gets nasty?

We pick our way through the sticky beer-slopped floor and the crowd to get to the door. Not easy in a stiff full-circle skirt that swishes around, threatening to knock glasses to the floor. I lean against the door and it gives, so that we tumble out.

“Leg it!” Stella screams, and we're off, tottering, careering, running, squealing actually, we can't help it. We race up Archer Street, past a couple of colored blokes already queuing up with their instruments outside the Musician's Union. They watch us and whistle, while Stella pauses for a second to consider climbing up a fire-escape ladder near the stage entrance to the Apollo but thinks better of it, seeing the height we'd have to climb and hearing the Yank come out of the spieler behind us. She tugs my hand and we stumble against the stage door, where a brass is fixing her stockings and tells us to shove off, so we run on, past the tramps sleeping on Rupert Street. A six-foot tart, wearing nothing but thigh-high boots and a red bra, laughs at us as we pass a half-open doorway, and Stella squeals again. Stella drags me in the direction of Brewer Street market, where they're already starting to put up the stalls, and the clank of metal twangs in the distance. We finally, panting, ribs aching, stop in the bad-fruit-smelling alley under Maurice House, knowing we lost the Yank long ago. My ankle turned over once in my heels and a pain shot up my leg, so now I take my shoe off to rub it, and Stella leans against me, laughing and breathing heavily.

Stella's doing this quiet, soft sort of cowgirl hoot. I don't think she planned it, but it was the speed which threw the Yank off. He shouted once, made this hopeless gesture with his arm. He must have been drunker than he seemed in the spieler because he gave up the chase so quickly. I hardly dared glance back, but over my shoulder I had a sense of him, just outside the closed club door, stumbling along a little way, and then caving in, heavily, against the doorway of the Artisans' Dwellings on Archer Street. A sorry pang twangs through me. Then I remember his whiskey breath, and him squeezing up close to me, shoving something hard against the side of my leg. I might be a virgin, but I'm not an idiot.

I feel like hugging Stella with the relief, and the triumph. Rolling. A well-known trick. Getting the key money for the room and then not putting out. Thirty pounds in total! Silly sod thought he gave us twenty. That's fifteen quid each and a bloody great goldmine we've just discovered.

S
o, that was how we started, Stella and me. Or how I remember it: our first business venture. Chance, the first time, and then after that, more deliberately. We never got quite as much money as that first occasion; we usually asked for twenty and settled for ten. We did it for a few weeks on our own, finding we could make nearly two hundred pounds a week: a phenomenal sum, at a time when working in Lyon's Corner Tea House would have paid us three pounds a week plus tips. We used some of it to pay the rent in advance on a lovely new flat, one on the new council estate on Well Street that I'd had my name down for since getting out of the Young Offenders place: the Frampton Park Estate.

It was a top floor flat with a balcony and a washing line and a little hatch from the kitchen to the front room. The rent was three pounds a week, but we didn't bother saving any after we'd paid the deposit; we used it to buy all the things we could think of: a brand-new gas cooker, blue and red patterned curtains, soft pile carpets, new beds and cabinets and a whistling kettle, and sixty bottles of Babycham to keep in a crate in the kitchen. Standing sipping one from a dainty glass in our kitchen, I would look out and watch birds and clouds and the green spire of the church over at Lauriston. That flattened me a bit. I thought that, after all, I should have aimed for somewhere further away.

Yanks in Soho were generous. Gamblers were easy because they were already distracted. We had to avoid the Epsom Salts and any girls that they ran, who'd tear our hair out if they caught on that we were stealing their business. Stella didn't stick to rolling; she was soon back to her old tricks. She genuinely did need money for the key, and she'd disappear for ten minutes—the ten-minute rule, one of the Malts had started that, to make the most of business—while I waited nervously downstairs, just inside the door, smoking one after another cigarette, waiting for another likely punter to send up to her. Then one night this greasy old fellow pulled Stella into the doorway of Barney Lubelle's sax shop and started laying into her with his fists. I was screaming blue murder; I took off my stiletto and went for his eyes and we managed to get away, but it shook us. In the end, what we needed, though we hated to admit it, was a heavy, some muscle. A man to be in the background if anyone, you know, took it to heart.

That's where Tony came in. The third time I bumped into him, he was driving a car down Well Street back in Hackney. A nice car: a Rover saloon. Glossy burgundy with black paintwork. New looking. Much too flash for someone who had a new job working part time in his uncle's café. That told me he did other things. Hadn't he boasted to Bobby that he could get an impersonator to fail the medical for him, for national service, for a price? He didn't seem to work for a firm but he definitely had money. He was strongly built. The window of the car was wound down and he rested his arm on it, shirtsleeves rolled up above the elbow, his forearm tanned and softly furred with hair, as if to show me. It was the top of his arm that really impressed. Even through his shirtsleeves you could tell: it was about the size of my thigh.

He had film-star looks. Like I said, Montgomery Clift. Or maybe even Tony Curtis. Something intense that you couldn't fail to notice, that drew all the girls in a room to him. Black hair, short at the sides but folded at the top of his head in a not-quite stiffened quiff; a full mouth, those unusual eyes. This day he smiled and opened the car door, and smiled again briefly as I said “nice,” to the burgundy leather seats, and took me for a spin, and though he didn't say much, his actions said it all. Like he nodded towards a bracelet I was wearing and he caught hold of my wrist to look more closely at it, and a little shiver ran along my arm. I was thinking: he's smooth all right, he's confident, because he held my wrist a little too long and then looked straight into my eyes until I blushed just a tiny bit, and then he seemed satisfied, and dragged his eyes away and back to the road.

It was Stella who asked him directly, eventually, when he dropped me off, back at the flat on the Frampton Park Estate. I knew she was jealous, steaming that it was me who seemed to have hooked him, but she put that aside and her practical nature took over. She made him come in for a cup of coffee (he wanted Italian coffee of course—dark and bitter—but we only had Nescafé). We need a driver, was how she put it. She showed him the bruises on her arms from the man in the doorway of the sax shop and asked him if he knew what rolling was. “Queenie's a virgin, can you believe,” she added, for good measure. We both peered at him when she said that, to watch how the black pupils in his eyes widened. The irises, once I saw them in daylight in our kitchen, were the palest of blues. I felt dimly that his eyes, or maybe his coloring, made him familiar to me, resemble someone I already knew, but it was years later that I realized who it was. Dad, of course. How corny was that—and shouldn't it have been a warning to me? That my first love was, in some way only vaguely noted, like my father?