Pinstripes (11 page)

“
Well, in that case, I’ll stick to Charlie.” Clara laughed and went to powder her nose again.

When she got back they left and took a cab to Mezzo. At the bar, men surrounded them. After another few lines of cocaine, they started to behave like a double act. Clara would flirt and get drinks bought for them, then Jenny would pull each man to pieces until they could endure the misery no more. They were both having fun; the men they met were not.

By the time they got to China White, they were as high as helium balloons. They walked straight past the intimidating doorman, who smiled at them, and sat down at a table. Clara tossed the reserved sign over her head. Although the staff gave them odd looks, no one questioned them. When they were together, they could get away with whatever they wanted.

After their first drink, two men approached them. Unlike the rather sad types who had mobbed them in Mezzo, this pair wore trendy suits, had slick haircuts and model good looks. They said they worked in the music industry, then proceeded to prove the point by plying the girls with champagne, cocaine and talking about bands Clara and Jenny had never ever heard of. Mick and Jerry – which couldn
’t have been their real names, even Clara could see that – took it in turns to flirt with each girl, giving them no clues as to who fancied whom. And the flirting was full on. They were touching cheeks, hands, knees, as well as giving the girls the most amazing eye contact.

When Mick and Jerry made a trip to the loo, together, Jenny and Clara had an opportunity to gossip.

“I think we’ve met our matches. Perhaps we’re too pissed but I can’t figure out what the hell is going on,” Jenny said despondently. Whatever game they were playing was beyond her.

“
Only because we’re wasted. Listen, Jen, I think they want to sleep with both of us. You know the sort of thing – they’ll entice us back to their flat, give us more champagne and cocaine and then they’ll make a move. They’ll probably suggest sleeping with both of us, some sort of orgy. I bet that’s what they want.”

Jenny wasn
’t shocked. “Are you sure? Cheeky bastards. Listen, Clara, I’m way past the stage of reason. I’ve got my date tomorrow night and I’m not really up for an orgy tonight. I just want to go home and pass out.”

Clara looked thoughtful.
“You’re probably right. I’m not sure I want sex anyway.”

“So,
you don’t mind if we make a move?” Jenny asked.

“
No, but I want another drink and I think we should say goodbye to them.”

“
Do you mind if I split? I don’t want them to try to talk me out of leaving.”

“
Of course not, darling. I’ll explain, have another drink, then go home too.” Clara was glad Jenny was leaving first, because she wanted sex and she needed it. If it had to be with two men, she was ready for it.

Mick and Jerry returned to find only Clara at the table.
“Where’s your friend?” Mick asked.

“She
had to leave – she had a headache. I hope you don’t mind that I’m staying,” Clara said.

“
No, not at all. But that leaves us with a problem,” Jerry said.

“
Why?” Clara asked innocently.

“
Because there’s two of us.”

“
Yes, and there’s one of me. But I think I’m enough for both of you.”

***

At half past two, they left to go back to Mick’s flat in Primrose Hill. In the cab, they were both groping Clara, who made sure she gave both men an equal amount of attention. The cab pulled up outside a mansion block and they all got out.

The flat was big and untidy. Mick made a half-hearted attempt to put all the mess in one pile, and they sat on a battered leather sofa. The men were obviously excited, but seemed unsure of what move to make. Jerry lined up the cocaine; Mick produced a bottle of champagne. They took turns at kissing Clara as the other drank or snorted the coke. Clara decided to take control.

“Do you want me to undress?” she asked, pulling herself out of her suit.

Mick and Jerry
’s eyes were wide.

“
Come on, boys,” Clara teased, and they tore off their clothes.

Clara had sex with both men several times. They proved insatiable and expert – she couldn
’t remember the last time she’d had such good sex. Her libido was working overtime when the realisation hit her that perhaps she would always need two men to satisfy her.

When Clara woke up it was seven in the morning. She got out of the bed and found a large, messy bathroom where she splashed herself with cold water and dressed. She knew she had behaved like a whore; she liked the feeling. When she kissed them goodbye they thanked her like gentlemen and Mick offered her his number, suggesting a repeat performance. As she went outside to get a cab, Clara decided she wouldn
’t want to see either of them again, ripped up the piece of paper Mick had given her and left it on the pavement. She got into the cab and laughed as she felt in her pocket the two grams of cocaine she had taken from the sitting-room table. It was her reward and she deserved it.

Clara directed the cab to Kensington. She felt ill from lack of sleep and over-indulgence as she pulled off her suit once more and fell into bed. As she slept, she dreamt of nothing.

Chapter Eight

Ella spent Friday night alone. She awoke early on Saturday and decided to blow away the cobwebs. She took the lift to the underground car park and stood admiring her pride and joy: her beautiful blue TVR. Although it was cold outside the sun was shining, so she put down the roof and drove off. She drove for the sake of driving. She loved driving fast more than anything in the world, and as soon as she found the road clear she put her foot down, broke the speed limit and risked the wrath of the law. It was at times like this that she forgot she had a fake driving licence and a fake identity.

She drove for about an hour before she decided to turn round and head home. She didn’t know where she’d gone, had paid no attention to road signs or scenery: she had been lost in her thoughts.

She thought of Tony: dead perhaps, buried somewhere; alive perhaps, kicking the hell out of another poor woman. She thought of Sammy. She hoped he had moved out of home – after all she
’d given him enough money to get a place of his own. She hoped he had a nice girlfriend, a job he liked. She hoped he was happy. Clenching her jaw to stop herself crying, she accelerated like a Formula One driver.

She stopped at the supermarket, bought some food for lunch and the newspapers. She walked round in a daze, not taking in anyone around her. If she had, she would have noticed people giving her odd looks. She was stalking round the supermarket, hair askew from driving, and wore a vacant zombie-like expression on her face.

At home, she parked her car, kissed it goodbye and went up into the flat. She chopped some salad, cut some bread, ham and cheese and took it into the lounge. She put some music on and ate her lunch.

As a compilation classical music CD flooded the room, Ella
’s mind cleared. She wasn’t a huge fan of classical music and didn’t really know her Chopin from her Mozart, but she liked the way it relaxed her. She lay down on the sofa and drifted into a trance.

It took ten rings before she heard the telephone and the answer-machine had clicked in before she could pick it up it. She heard Jackie
’s voice, saying that Ella should meet her at 8 p.m. tonight at her restaurant. It wasn’t an invitation that required an RSVP. Ella went back to her trance.

At seven, she took a shower. It was only as she was washing her tangled hair that she realised she had spent all afternoon lying on the sofa. She felt a shiver down her spine: so much time spent without moving. It scared her that she could just lie still unaware of time passing. It was a habit she had developed since being in London. Something Eloise would never have done.

Eloise never sat still for more than five minutes at a time. Since childhood, she had been a bag of nervous energy, running around, barely able to stop, fidgeting in school, being shouted at frequently. And she was an incessant talker she was christened ‘Little Miss Chatterbox’ by her primary-school teacher. Eloise and Ella were so different, no one would have believed they were the same person.

Eloise used to laugh a lot and play practical jokes. She was known as the class clown, the person who did the minimum work and had the maximum fun. She was popular and she always led a crowd. She was the first girl to start smoking – B&H behind the bike sheds – she was the first to turn up to school with a joint, courtesy of Sam, and at thirteen she was the first to lose her virginity, to Pete Smith, the most rebellious boy in her class.

When Eloise left school at sixteen with a couple of GCSEs, she went to work in a trendy clothes shop. It was there, when she was seventeen, that she met Tony. He was every young girl’s dream. If sophisticated Ella saw him now she would cringe at his lack of style but Eloise thought he was the most stylish man in the world. He came to the shop three times before asking her out. His slow, lazy grin, his boasts of running the most popular nightclub in the area, his designer-labelled clothes and his overpowering aftershave meant to Eloise that this man, this god, was sex on legs. She agreed readily to a date.

He took her to dinner. Eloise had never been out to dinner before and, at seventeen, she felt incredibly grown up. When they left the local steakhouse, he took her to his club. He knew Eloise was under age but he plied her with cocktails, then took her back to his flat to smoke dope and shag her. When he drove her home the next morning in his second-hand BMW, he kissed her hard on the lips and told her he
’d see her tonight in the club.

Eloise
’s parents didn’t ask where she’d been and she didn’t tell them. They had always given her all the freedom she wanted. Sam questioned her and was not happy with the answers but he was being an overprotective brother. She ignored him and rounded up a group of her friends to take to Dino’s nightclub. She called Tony and cheekily told him to make sure they were all on the guest-list.

Ella shuddered at the memory of Dino
’s. She would never set foot in such a tacky place now, let alone ask to be on a guest-list, but to her and her friends then it had been incredibly cool. The bar was huge and busy; the music was whatever brand of dance happened to be in vogue that week. Ella would have spotted straight away that it was a haven for under-age girls and paedophiles but to Eloise the scene was cool. The biggest prize a seventeen-year-old girl could have was an older man. Tony was twenty-five.

Not only did Eloise and her friends enter the club free, they were given free drinks all night. Tony lorded it around his club, shouting orders, greeting favoured customers, grabbing and kissing Eloise whenever he felt like it.

After that night, which ended with more dope back at Tony’s flat, this time with a number of his friends, then more sex, then being driven home in the morning, Eloise was well and truly in love.

Their relationship developed quickly. Tony seemed to adore Eloise too, and she was head over heels, arse over tit in love with him. Everything he did impressed her: the red roses he bought on their one-month anniversary, the champagne in bed, the kinky underwear and the sex. Eloise had only ever had sex with schoolboys before; now she was having sex with a man. She loved it.

Within a year Eloise was given a job at the nightclub; Tony said that they would be together so much more. Eloise was the luckiest girl in the world; Tony was a real gentleman, a real romantic, a dream come true. He was everything a seventeen-year-old could wish for.

The relationship carried on in the same vein for two years. As Eloise left her teens, they were a couple. She worked with Tony; she slept with Tony. Tony behaved like the king of the world. Eloise
’s parents were wildly impressed with him. He had a nice car and a good job, everything they wanted for their only daughter. Her brother Sam thought him an idiot. It was the only subject on which Eloise and Sam disagreed, and it got to the point where they avoided talking about it. But Tony didn’t like Sam: he knew that Sam was a threat to his relationship.

On Eloise
’s twenty-first birthday Tony proposed. He believed he was in love with her. Normally after a few months he switched his girlfriends and a year was the longest anyone had lasted before Eloise. But Eloise made him laugh, had an amazing body and liked to please him. At twenty-one she wore clothes selected by him, styled her hair as he suggested and used the makeup he liked. Eloise was Tony’s doll.

She moved into Tony
’s flat as soon as the engagement ring was on her finger, and her mother started planning the wedding. Two months later, Tony and Eloise had a fight over a man who had flirted with her at the club and she received her first black eye. Eloise was baffled. She said that in her job men flirted with her. Tony accused her of enjoying it. Of course, he apologised afterwards, and said it wouldn’t happen again. Two months later, she got her first all-over beating: he kicked her in the legs, the stomach and the back. Her bruises resembled a cloudy sky, dotted all over her body. This time he cried when he apologised.

With each beating, Eloise lost a little more of her spirit. She stopped making jokes, stopped laughing, chewed her fingernails and constantly had panic attacks. When the beatings were so bad that she needed medical help, Tony would escort her to the doctor and say that she had been attacked in the nightclub, or that she
’d been mugged, or fallen, or been pushed. Every casualty department in Manchester took turns to treat her: Tony was far too clever to arouse suspicion. He also fed her Valium and sleeping pills. She worked at the nightclub less and less, she saw her parents only on the occasions that she was bruise free and she hardly ever met up with Sam. The wedding plans ground to a halt.

Eloise didn
’t think any more, she didn’t dare look and she hardly dared to speak. The man she loved was a monster, but she couldn’t see that. All she could see was that she was a rag doll and she had no will to live. She didn’t know how she felt about Tony because she’d stopped feeling about everything. She didn’t know about love, she didn’t know about hate. The only thing she knew now was physical pain or doped up state. Those were her only realities.

A couple of years passed before she received the worst beating of her life. She had become a zombie, a shell, and the only person who saw this was Sam. He had spent the last year trying to get to her but Tony, with his slick excuses, had fended him off. When Tony had had a row with the owner of the nightclub about the lack of profits and was told his job was hanging by a thread, he went mad. He got home that evening to find Eloise had cooked him chicken stew. He threw it at her. He then proceeded to hit her, blackening both eyes, and knocking out a tooth. Eloise didn
’t make a sound. Increasingly frustrated, he threw her repeatedly against the fridge. Then he held her arms and slammed her back into it. Still she made no sound, so he threw her to the floor; the blood on her face was mixed with chicken stew. As he kicked her in the ribs, screaming, swearing at her, “Bitch, slut, cunt, cunt, cunt!” still she made no sound.

He broke her arm then gave up and left her on the floor.

After an hour he went back to her. She lay still, contorted, and Tony began his clean up. He apologised, put her in the bath, put her in the car, took her to yet another casualty department. Eloise still made no sound.

She spent the night in hospital. It was the first time Tony had allowed her to stay overnight but before he left he made up yet another elaborate story of how she had come by her injuries. When the hospital mentioned the police, Eloise shook her head. When Tony left he kissed her and whispered in her ear that she had better keep quiet.

When he brought her home the next morning, Tony put Eloise to bed, unplugged the phone, then went out. In the background, she heard the doorbell ring, but as Tony had given her two Valium she was unsure and anyway she could not move.

That night when Tony returned, she heard her brother
’s voice. This made her stir. She heard Tony telling Sam that Eloise wasn’t well and couldn’t be disturbed. She heard raised voices; then she heard Sam leave.

The next day, while Tony was at work, Sam broke down the door, packed Eloise
’s things and carried her out to his car. He took her battered body to their parents” house.

Ella snapped out of her dream and realised she
’d been in the shower so long that she’d turned into a prune. She dried herself and got dressed. She was verging on being late so she decided to get a cab. Standing on the street with her hair still wet she waited about ten minutes, cursing, before a black cab appeared.

She arrived at the restaurant, where the waiters greeted her as an old friend. It was a modestly trendy bistro, offering reasonably priced food, and Ella felt at home there.

“You’re late,” Jackie said, as she kissed Ella.

As they had dinner Ella told Jackie about the afternoon
’s trance and her long shower. Jackie felt pleased that for the first time Ella had filled in the details of her relationship with Tony. They talked and ate, and before they knew it, the restaurant was emptying. It was midnight.

Ella helped Jackie close up. They had a last cup of coffee and left.

When Ella got home she jumped into bed and drifted into a dreamless sleep.

***

Saturday was Virginia’s chore day, and although she had a glimmer of a brand-new life, she still needed her routine. After showering and dressing, she cleaned her room. She dusted, hoovered and washed, then did her laundry. She divided everything into dry-cleaning (her suits), hand-washing (her jumpers), and launderette-washing, (everything else). Virginia’s weekly washing routine was so important to her that she often ended up washing things that didn’t need to be washed.

She did her hand-washing, then left the flat. She dropped off the dry-cleaning, then sat reading the paper while her washing whirred around in the machine at the launderette.

On the way home she thought of the new flat she would rent when she got her new job. It would have a washing-machine. Perhaps she could even have a flatmate. Virginia hugged herself as she let herself into the studio.

Once she had ironed, she put her clothes away then looked on her list for the next thing. She went to the supermarket to get her weekly shopping, then to Boots to buy her vitamins, and drove home.

She called her mother and kept the conversation deliberately short. She always phoned her parents once every two weeks to avoid being told that she was an ungrateful, neglectful daughter. She didn’t tell her mother about the new job, and her mother talked on and on about how well all her friends” offspring were doing. The call left Virginia feeling depressed.