Lucky Bunny (9780062202512) (19 page)

And there's another thing that didn't occur to me then, in those early days of meeting Tony, days when it felt like everything he did was charmed, every gesture or glance: the way he rested his hands on the tan leather of the steering wheel as if he was about to start playing the piano when he was waiting at traffic lights; the way he sometimes narrowed his eyes, staring at me, like I was some kind of blinding sunlight; the way if I stood close to him, he was always so clean shaven, never even a suggestion of stubble, as if he shaved and bathed three times a day; the way he strode into a room and paused first, possessed it, snagged all eyes, before he would move or talk. I loved the way his hands smelled of the coffee grounds from the café, or faintly of oil from his car, and how this combination was good, was masculine and sexy, when it came from Tony. But the thing that only occurred to me later was this. Stella. She wanted him first and went for him, and Tony chose me. Well, I'm sure you've figured out by now that I'm vain, or that I'm proud; I like to compete and win. That might be why I fell for him, after all, or why I stuck with him for too long. Simply the fact that he singled me out, and made me feel chosen—the best. I was young and silly and, God, above all else, I wanted to feel that.

S
o this first night Tony drives us up to Soho, and we agree on a cut for him: three pounds for him and three pounds ten shillings each for me and Stella, per client. He shakes his head slightly as Stella suggests this, as if it's not the money that matters to him.

“You're tough as old boots, aren't you? You can look after yourself . . . I'm just coming along for the ride,” he says.

I'm sitting up front with him, acknowledgment of my almost-girlfriend status. I catch Stella's eyes in the rearview mirror; see the irritation. She has a new hairstyle, though, and it looks great. Short but sort of piled high. I know she's modeled herself on Gina Lollobrigida, that photo we saw of her the other night, in the
Daily Herald
. Me, I've gone for another pinup calendar. Flat ballet pumps, capri-length slacks, shirt tied just under the bust. I sleep in rollers to make my fringe really puff up over my black-eyelinered eyes. It's a warm evening, with a holiday feel to it. The streets are full of girls smoking on doorsteps and boys flattening their hair with combs. Nice wholesome teenagers from milk bars.

Stella slips out and disappears the minute we arrive. She says she'll see us later, around eleven, when things start to change and the clientele is more to her liking. Tony parks on an old bombsite. We head for a café Tony knows first; past the smells of Russian tobacco, of French pastries from the bakeries; of Italian sausages and Algerian coffee; past the slim girls in their headscarves and slacks milling on the streets; past the sandwich-board man advertising a concert by the Trinidadian steel band; a huddle of West Indians laying out some cards on the pavement; towards the Italian cafés on Brewer Street. This doesn't feel like going to work, I'm thinking, trotting like a little dog beside Tony's huge strides; it feels like a date.

Tony chucks his hat onto the crowded hat stand by the door and squeezes us into a booth. The tiny woman in black behind the counter has already spied him and comes racing over, flapping menus at us and shrieking.

“Tony—Tony, where you been? And who's this, eh, who's this lovely?”

Tony gives her a short smile, friendly and comfortable, and orders us two coffees while we decide. The Gaggia machine at the counter swishes noisily. In truth, I know he's going to decide for me. Red wine in tooth-mugs and a huge bowl of something hot and tomatoey, with fragrant green leaves on it, and cheese to shake on it from a glass sugar pot. At least Tony says it's cheese, but to me it looks like yellow semolina, and it stinks to high heaven.

I do my best not to let on I haven't eaten this kind of food before, and to answer Tony's questions without speaking with my mouth full.

I like the things he asks me. The more he wants to know about me, the more glamorous I feel; the more conscious I am of my bracelet tinkling, and my hair curling softly at the sides of my cheeks in the new style; my soft expensive perfume floating up from my wrist. Yes, I think I'm the most beautiful girl in Soho when Tony asks me questions about myself. How many people have ever asked me simple things like how do I know Stella and how come he ain't seen me around in Bethnal Green before?

My “adventures.” That's how Tony describes them, and I'm glad, because that's how I think of them, too. But what seems to be hovering over the meal, what has squeezed in to that crowded café with us, is Stella's remark in our kitchen on the Frampton Park Estate. I feel sure he's remembering it, too. He eats with hungry, serious attention, but every so often he looks up at me and then I see it in his expression. I recognize it at once, the word for it pops into my head just as easily as I named that look of guilt in Elsie's eyes, all those years ago. And I'm deciding, while telling him about Dad and Annie and that day at the Dogs, I'm deciding, in a quiet way, somewhere in another part of me, that yes, I'd like to. Give up my virginity to Tony.

“So you escaped the school in Kent . . . what'd you get up to next . . . your next adventure?” he says, offering me a cigarette from his pack and standing up, the signal that it's time to get to work. I realize that I've hardly found out anything about him. I see that he has money in his wallet, I've noticed that. But as for what he says . . . a few basics and that's all. Tony was born here, to an Irish mother and Italian father. His father was interned, one of those “alien enemies” that got sent on a ship to Canada at the start of the war, and died when the ship was sunk by a U-boat. The way he tells me this I know that it isn't unimportant; in fact, I'd say from his dazzling eyes, fringed with blackness, scarily intense at that moment, that this is probably the one essential fact, that it burns underneath everything else about him. He says that the thing to remember is that not so very long ago places like this had their shop fronts smashed, did I know that? And most of their owners sent to the Isle of Man, you know that, Queenie? I shook my head but tried to look concerned, to look like the sort of girl who would never make fun of an Italian accent. Not like Stella. Somehow I know that now he's told me about his father, he's never going to mention it again.

He pays, and fetches his hat from the hat stand, leaning over the counter to give the tiny old waitress in her enormous white apron a kiss. She shrieks and shouts and moans about the shortage of this and the lack of that, how's she supposed to make a living when these days you can't find almonds for love nor money? I know she's just trying to keep him a little longer. It feels to me like the whole place wants to bask in Tony's attention, that every woman in there is wishing she was me.

I
t's an eventful night. I catch up with Stella, and we drink some vodka from a flask she's brought. She's cross because one of the Messinas' girls insisted she move on from the room she was using on Glasshouse Street, and so she's come to join me; she'll give rolling a go, she says, because she's aching, you know, down there, and she needs the laugh. We make a few feeble attempts with the young crowd passing us, and after a bit of banter one possibility emerges, an older fellow, not nice looking but clean at least, well to do, but only about five foot eight, with this silly braying manner. Stella whispers to me that his sort, public schoolboys, usually lick the stamps on the other side and where's Bobby when you need him? But I nudge her fiercely and tell her to ssshh, because he's leaving his friends behind, he's crossing the road with us, he seems to mean it.

Stella gets the money first—ten pounds, each note carefully counted out—and then tells him she'll go on ahead to sort the room. Me and this fellow are to follow after five minutes. We stand awkwardly while this silly short geezer smokes his pipe and refills it and keeps looking me up and down and then suddenly tries to kiss me, with his stinking pipe-smelling mouth. I try not to be too rough as I tug away from him, saying, “Later, darling, come on, my friend must have sorted the room by now,” and lead him in the direction we've planned on, and where I know Tony will be loitering.

The vodka and the red wine have kicked in a little and I find myself woolly in the head, falling ever so slightly against him as we start walking. We pass the French pub on Dean Street where Stella will be waiting, counting to a hundred like a game of hide and seek; the plan is for me to start running then, where there are drinkers still standing outside, and where we will be in full view, and the punter will feel too daft to follow. In my flat ballet pumps I can usually run quickly—outrun anyone—but somehow, and I think it must be the alcohol, my jerking away from him doesn't quite work this time, and he's much swifter than I'd imagine, and he chases and catches me and pulls me towards a parked car, which he says is his. Now that I've made an attempt to run, I'm not sure what to do. I can hardly go back to pretending that all is as it should be, so as he opens the car door and jostles me to get inside, I start screaming.

Tony appears like a black cat, skulking in the shadows. I look around in surprise, wondering where he could have been watching us to materialize so quickly. And in an instant I feel the mood crackling around Tony, and my heart quickens and I'm breathless from the tussle, and panting.

“It's fine, this—gentleman's just getting in his car—nothing—” I say, re-knotting my blouse under the bust, patting my hair, and groping for one of my earrings, which seems to have dropped off. I know Tony carries a razor; everyone does. The sort that slides open; a Kropp razor. I want to rest a calm hand on Tony's arm, but feel strongly that I shouldn't; that it would be a mistake.

“I paid thirty fucking quid! I did,” says the man, in his posh accent, taking it all in: Tony as my minder, or perhaps my pimp. Poor sap still thinks he should get his money's worth.

“Queenie—walk back towards the French pub,” Tony says, in a cold, low voice that I haven't heard before.

“Queenie? Fucking Dorothy,
you
said—” squeaks the guy and then makes a snuffled, startled sound and I turn away from him, from his short, suited figure, not wanting to see any more.

I begin walking. A dark thick fog is closing in, the coal smoke filling the air, along with the garlic and cigars. I can hear music from a jukebox but that's streets away, along with the holiday mood of earlier, the coffee bars, and girls in their full skirts, smoking their Craven A's. Here it's so foggy suddenly that I can't see my own steps on the pavement, only hear them; the soft leather soles of my pumps. At last I can make out Stella at the end of the street, a grey shape in a fuzz of grey, waving madly, calling “Come, come on, I can hear the Old Bill!” So I run towards her without looking back.

My absorbing of all this, my understanding of Tony's mood, my anxiety, locks at once into a certainty, an inevitability. It's deeply familiar, as familiar as mash and liquor. It's not a reason to give him up. The certainty of its regular appearance makes you afraid, but you also long for it to happen, so that then it can be over. Prison taught me that. The nose, the instinct for it. Prison, and a childhood with someone like Dad. It's just this: your body can always predict when something violent is about to kick off.

I
t was later that night, or I should say, early the next morning, that Tony came to claim his payment, the gift he was promised in our kitchen by Stella. He came round to the flat as a pink sky was breaking over the Lauriston church spire, knocking softly on the door, having run, he said, smiling broadly, the five flights of stairs in one minute flat. I quickly snatched out my rollers, and opened the door wearing a new nightdress, a black and pink nylon negligee, hoisted, I have to admit, a few days earlier, with Tony in mind.

He made us drinks, in highball glasses that he'd brought with him, and he poured a lot more gin in mine, “for the pain,” he said, plainly. I remember how I felt, beforehand. I felt wobbly—almost dizzy—with fear, with anticipation. I wanted to, I'd heard so much about it, I wanted to secure Tony as mine, I wanted to know what everyone was talking about, what was going on in Soho and behind net curtains everywhere, if
The People
was to be believed.

When he kissed me, lifted my hair from my neck, I was surprised that a man so strong-looking could be so gentle, so affectionate. He took my hand and led me into my bedroom, which felt old-fashioned, the handholding, I mean, and then climbed onto the bed with me, carefully folding down the blanket first, peeling back the top sheet and smiling, grinning, as if to disguise his haste.

He was studied in his behavior, and deliberate, as he always was, and there was a mood about him, as unmistakable as the violent one had been; a feeling that should have been disturbing, but was, as I remember it, only thrilling. Tony, I realized, did not like to be thwarted. Maybe I should have known better, but I was a girl, and longing for someone to want me, so back then, the force of his personality, how
much
he wanted me, was new to me, was the trick and the power; it was dazzling.

I came to dread it of course, Tony's wanting me. The violence of his feelings, the strength of them. But not that night. That night, it was all new, and changed everything. He took care; he was practical; he knew what he was doing. But then he grew crazy, and I loved that he couldn't be deliberate any longer; he wasn't in control of himself. I felt like I stepped out of myself, watching astonished, while someone goes mad in a china shop. We woke Stella up; she was hammering on the wall, he made such a racket. And though I was embarrassed, he was undeterred. He had to have me three times, every which way he could think of, until I relaxed a little and his repeated worried questions and pauses to gather strength and pour me more gin did the trick at last, and it stopped hurting.