Can We Still Be Friends (11 page)

‘Sure.’ Jackson shrugged, sitting back down and turning emphatically back to Cruz, Simone and Gaby, who had continued to chatter while the conversation took place. ‘So, will I see you girls tomorrow night at Robbie’s thirtieth?’ He leant forward to Gaby, offering the flame of his Zippo to her cigarette, deftly excluding Annie and Sal from the table. Sal had completely forgotten to ask Annie about Trevor Eve.

As Jackson drove the two of them across London in silence, Annie didn’t have to look at him to know that he was angry. Worse, he was bored too, which is what she most dreaded him being when he was with her. He always made it clear that he had so many options. She wished that Sal had not interfered and that she could rerun the past hour and be somewhere that he wanted to be: a friend’s party, another bar, in bed. Instead, they were trying to find a parking space for his large car in this drab neighbourhood with its shadows and back alleys, and had spent at least five long minutes driving up and down small, dark sidestreets in an unsuccessful search.

The heavy door of the Chapel was firmly closed. Sal struggled with it, and when it finally opened it did so with a crash. Annie could see that she had passed the tipping point. After her confrontation with Jackson, she had probably necked down several more drinks. With Sal, it was straight from red to green, with no amber that she ever recognized.

‘Ssh,’ Annie whispered as Sal noisily pushed past the back row of seats, failing to notice as she knocked the backs of heads with a leather shoulder bag.

The room was almost full. That’s great for Kendra, thought Annie, peering around to see her friend. The band playing was picked out in a pink light that warped the traditional Rasta colours
of their T-shirts into murky shades and, in the corner by the side of the stage, she could see a tall figure wearing what could be an elaborate turban and, beside her, the equally tall but in comparison scaled-down Kendra. That must be Gioia. Annie was curious. As her eyes adjusted to the lighting, it became clear that it was no turban but an intricate style of plaits that was piled on Gioia’s head. Even from where she sat at the opposite end of the room, there was something in Gioia’s stance that radiated confidence. She could see her whisper something in Kendra’s ear, Kendra replying with a grin. Annie nudged Sal to look too.

The reggae band was replaced by a balladeer in a Hawaiian shirt slowly tuning his acoustic guitar. Kendra had told them that Chris Blackwell had personally signed him to Island. The opening chords spun into the room.

‘Sounds a bit like Jackson Browne,’ Jackson whispered to Annie. She could feel, with relief, his hand slipping into the waistband of her trousers and stroking her lower back.

Sal was tone deaf, and made no pretence of being interested in music of any kind. She was tapping her leg, slightly out of time, and was nodding her head a bit too often, like a furry dog dangling in the car window. Looking at the room, Annie wondered what it was that Kendra was so attracted by. It was a bleak place, with its small, high windows, linoleum floor and walls painted a dull grey. She flashed back to a concert during their last year at university. It was in the union building on campus and, while Sal and Annie had been there because they were interested in a couple of boys, Kendra had been part of the activist group outside who were handing out leaflets in support of Solidarity.

There was a crash, loud enough to make some nearby listeners turn their heads, as Sal’s bag fell to the floor, loose change, lighters, keys rolling out. Annie could see Kendra looking right at them, to where Sal was bent over, trying to stuff everything back.

‘Just leave it,’ Annie mouthed at her, and when this failed to stop Sal, gave her a kick. ‘Leave it till the end.’

There were three encores, ending in a reggae rendition of the old
hit ‘Can We Still Be Friends’, the audience joining in enthusiastically, swaying as they sang. As the pink light faded and the room brightened, the crowd broke up, some leaving, others milling around the emptying space. Uncertain of what to do next, Annie looked at Jackson for guidance.

‘Let’s go and see your mate. Now we’ve come all the way here, we might as well congratulate her.’ He strode towards Kendra, but Sal was already ahead of them, unsteadily but determinedly weaving her way to where the performers were standing around.

‘Kendra,’ she shouted across to where her friend stood talking to the Scottish guitarist, hands in the pockets of her wide khaki trousers, the sleeves of a plain navy sweater rolled up to her elbows. ‘That was fantastic, amazing.’ She put her hand on the singer’s arm. ‘You were fantastic, amazing.’

Annie wished that Sal would talk a bit more quietly and stop repeating herself, but she envied her her confidence. Kendra’s face was flushed, small beads of sweat on her hair line where the tawny curls were tied back in a cotton bandana.

She looked at her friends and then across the room to where Gioia was rolling a cigarette, talking to the Rastafarian contingent. Annie could see her trying to decide whether to make the introduction.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Come and meet Gioia.’ Kendra led the way, offering up her two friends to her employer. Gioia looked up, her face at first ungiving, with bright dark eyes hard like shiny pebbles. She drew slowly on the roll-up.

Kendra persevered. ‘Here’s Sal and Annie – they thought it was ace.’

Jackson intervened. ‘You guys – didn’t I hear you at the Tabernacle a few months back?’ Annie felt proud. That was one of the things she loved about Jackson, the way he always knew the right thing to say.

‘Welcome, Sal. Annie …’ Gioia took a deep drag.

‘And this is Jackson, Annie’s boyfriend,’ Kendra added.

Annie felt her face go crimson. Of all nights not to mention the boyfriend word, this was it.

‘Yeah, we had to drag him out of the Chelsea Bridge party to get here. We were worried we might miss everything,’ Sal chipped in, still tunelessly humming ‘Can We Still Be Friends’
.

Gioia surveyed the group, her unreadable face breaking into a big smile. ‘Well, it’s great you did. It’s been a mega gig. Good for the Chapel. Kendra here, well, she’s been a fine girl. Couldn’t have managed without her.’

Jackson looked at his watch. ‘OK, girls. Time to split. Sal, I can drop you somewhere.’ Annie could see that Sal was considering staying on, hunkering down into the aftermath of the gig, but she knew that the last thing Kendra needed was to inherit her for the rest of the evening, since by now Sal was demonstrating the too familiar signs of clumsy, drunken exuberance. She took the unwilling departee by the arm, waving goodbye and moving her firmly towards the door.

‘Let’s stay for a bit. I like the look of that band. There’s a bar at the back –’

‘We’re going, and we’re taking you with us.’ Annie’s natural gentleness was replaced by an unusual determination. She wasn’t sure how much longer Jackson’s good humour was going to hold out and she didn’t want to push her luck any further.

It was well after one o’clock by the time the last chairs had been loaded back into Gerassimos’s van. Gioia and Kendra stood outside in the street and waved him off.

‘Nightcap?’ Gioia asked Kendra. ‘I’m just round the corner and I’ve got a bottle of Amaro. Good stuff – just what we need after tonight. You don’t want to be pedalling that bike of yours all over London at this hour. You could stay over.’

In spite of the late hour, Kendra was wide awake. They walked through the small streets, Kendra wheeling the bicycle between them, and stopped at a tall house. The roads were silent save for the odd screech of a distant siren. By the time they had carried the bike up the four flights of stairs, trying to manoeuvre it around the narrow landings, they were both breathless.

‘Next time we leave it downstairs.’ Gioia unlocked the door.

Ahead was a square room with wooden floorboards covered in rough woven rugs, a kitchen counter across one wall and a large bed in a corner underneath a skylight, the ceiling sloping at the side.

Kendra perched on the sagging sofa piled with soft cushions in the middle of the room as Gioia rustled around in a cupboard for the Amaro.

‘You’ll love this,’ she said as she unscrewed the top off the tall, dark bottle, poured then held out two tumblers.

‘Cheers.’ Kendra took a sip of the bitter drink, which burnt as she swallowed. ‘How long have you lived here?’ She looked over to Gioia, who was riffling through an untidy pile of LPs on the floor.

‘Two years next month.’ The arm of the turntable clicked as the needle landed on the record. ‘Satie. He’s one of my favourites.’

Kendra closed her eyes briefly, listening to the music: eerie, almost mystical. Gioia asked her about her family, but she just shrugged.

‘It’s complicated. I don’t want to think about them now. They’re fine. I guess I’m lucky. But it doesn’t feel that way.’

‘Yeah, can’t live with them, can’t live without them. I know. I had to get my arse out of Glasgow. There were thousands of us there. All jumbled in together. Everybody knowing everything about everybody else. They call it community, but it can be as suffocating as a coffin. Killing you with love. Still, I do love them. It’s just better from a distance. A big distance.’

Kendra stood up and walked over to the books that were housed on a row of rickety bamboo shelves. The spines of old paperbacks were jammed together. She recognized a collection of old James Bond novels, some Raymond Chandler. Further along, Truman Capote’s
In Cold Blood
. They had the same book at home in Art’s study. She took reading seriously. One of Art’s friends had told her, when she was still a child, that he only had the time left to read good books. There weren’t enough years to waste on junk. At the time, he had seemed ancient, but he could only have been about forty, she realized. Old, but not about to die.

As she stood at the shelf Kendra could hear – or was it feel? – Gioia’s presence behind her. Instinctively, she moved to the side. A hand stroked her hair, pulling the cotton bandana back and running fingers through, firmly massaging her scalp. She turned.

Gioia leant forward and kissed her forehead, dotting kisses deliberately along the line of her hair before moving down towards her mouth. ‘Do you want to try this?’ she murmured, taking Kendra’s glass from her hand. Kendra watched as Gioia unbuttoned her own shirt, revealing olive-skinned breasts, the large nipples prominent, one pierced by a ring. Her stomach was flat and muscular where the waistband of her trousers lay. She unpinned the coils of her hair.

Kendra felt unable to move and let Gioia guide her to the bare wall near the bed and place her against it, removing her sweater, unzipping her jeans and slowly placing her hand between her legs. Kendra could feel the metal and silk of her bracelets against her thigh. Then Gioia knelt, as Kendra looked out through the skylights opposite, where the clouds were scudding across the man’s face on the moon.

It was debatable whether the heels on Sal’s pixie boots were the right height. If they were too low, she knew the cone shape could make her appear squat. She extended her leg out from under her desk to examine them. But if they were higher, surely they would look strange? She had already run the gauntlet of good-humoured teasing around the office.

‘Well, well, well, here comes the garden gnome,’ taunted Doug, a much happier man now he had started an affair with the best friend of his estranged wife and his shaving kit had graduated from his desk drawer into her bathroom.

‘I forget. Are you Dopey today, or would Grumpy be closer to the mark?’ mocked Ollie as he flicked through the day’s papers. ‘Dwarves and pixies. ’Course they’re all the same to me.’ But, despite the teasing, Sal was delighted with the black suede ankle boots she had treated herself to a few weeks earlier. She had been planning to get ahead with some Christmas shopping but instead had found herself looking covetously in the windows of Dolcis.

It didn’t seem to be a slow morning for anyone else, but Sal was struggling to make her story stand up. Andrea, who organized features, had tossed her the job about a new chain of pizza restaurants to rival Pizza, Pizza, Pizza, announcing in strident Roedean vowels, ‘I gather everybody’s interested in
pitsa
nowadays.’ She made it clear that she was
not
everybody. ‘The
Pitsa
wars – we could do worse. It’ll make a nice filler.’ But, so far, Sal had only managed to dig up an unacceptably anodyne quote from one of the managers of Pizza, Pizza, Pizza in Wimbledon: ‘We have a loyal clientele here and an unbeatable menu.’ Where was the drama in that?

On the far side of the huge room, Sal could hear an unusual amount of noise. Chairs were being pushed back, the usual buzz of
conversation ramped up to shouts. She could see the news desk struggling into their jackets, pens between teeth as they stuffed belongings into their pockets, half running, half walking through the room to the ancient lifts.

‘Big news coming in,’ Sal heard someone shout. ‘Something’s going on at Harrods.’ Outside the editor’s office in the corner she could see Stuart, his long arms waving like a conductor’s. Since their disastrous evening, they had only exchanged cursory sentences, but she had heard that he had moved on.

‘Stu’s knocking off one of the girls on the
Times
diary,’ Ollie had told her, unaware of her own unfortunate encounter. ‘Can’t understand how she’d go for him, but I’ve sussed that girls like a married man. Can’t be any other explanation.’ Ollie’s own love life was a series of unrequited passions. On the rare occasions Sal did see him with a female, it was almost always his doughy flatmate, who he had trained to evacuate their small flat on the nights he had an inkling he might get lucky.

‘Come on, come on.’ Andrea pushed past her as Sal followed Marsha along with a crowd of others to cram into the editor’s office. Despite having been at the
Herald
for several months, Sal had never been directly addressed by ‘The Editor’, as Patrick Lewis was always referred to. The paper was almost military in its hierarchy, and the formality of this term was intended to induce the same unquestioning obedience as on the battlefield.