Heartbreaker (43 page)

Dry-mouthed with fright I realise I have to come a little cleaner.

“The whole disaster dates back to last weekend,” I say, prepared to edge closer to the truth but still editing carefully as I go along. “I was so bored that I flirted with Elizabeth’s
bête noire.
”

“Bate what?”

“Elizabeth’s enemy, the girl who’s currently running the St. Benet’s fundraising campaign.”

“Oh, her. Cartwheel-something.” Naturally Elizabeth’s been moaning to her right-hand woman about Colin’s house party.

“Carta Graham. I was just so pissed off with everything that I couldn’t resist a little flutter to cheer myself up. I mean, it was nothing serious, just a few hot looks—”

“Pass me the sickbag! Okay, you were nutso enough to give the Cartwheel a whirl. Then what?”

“Colin intercepts one of my hot looks and later dumps the PIs on my trail. When he finds out I’ve conned him sex-wise he figures I’ve got the con-power to be part of a wider scam involving Asherton and GOLD.”

“Bad news. Okay, I can see why he wants to beat you up, but—”

“Colin was my last appointment yesterday, right? Well, Carta was dead keen to know if he was planning to donate to her Appeal so I told her to come to Austin Friars at six-forty—”

“Oh yeah, I get it. The Cartwheel gets on tape when you take her up to the bedroom for a—”

“Wrong. I mean, right—she gets on tape, but shagging isn’t on the menu, I feel like shit and have to be horizontal. Carta brings me a cup of tea and summons the St. Benet’s doctor who also gets taped—”

“Okay, this is beginning to hang together, but it’s still not right. Come on, pinhead! Do you really expect me to believe that Moneybags decked you?”

“Well, he . . . well, I . . . Okay, this is the way it was. He charges at me to beat me up. I want to avoid a fight because I don’t want to be videoed winning it—much better if he’s just shown as the aggressor. So I get off camera and try to bolt but then I lose my footing and fall down the stairs, knocking myself out—here, you can feel the bump on my head if you don’t believe me!”

“Okay, I’m convinced—I still don’t believe you’ve told me the whole truth, mind, but I believe enough to accept you have a big problem with those tapes. Now tell me why I should help you and risk getting into deep shit.”

I slide my tongue around my dry lips. “I’ll pay.”

“What kind of price are we talking about?”

“Name it.”

There’s a silence which lasts seven seconds. I’m counting. Then she says: “I don’t want cash. I want drinks at the Ritz and dinner at the Savoy. Tonight.”

“Done. What’s the combination of the safe?”

“Hold it! If you seriously think I’m going to hand over the safe combination and sit back while you go merrily on your way, you’ve made a very big mistake!”

I nerve myself for the next round of negotiations.

Susanne gnaws her thumbnail before saying: “Elizabeth keeps a record of the safe combination in her en-suite bathroom, behind the porno-pic over the toilet. If she ever finds out about all this, you’re to tell her you found the number by accident when you took down the pic for a closer look. She’s never to know I’ve grassed.”

“Fair enough.”

There’s a pause, probably because we’re both thinking of Elizabeth’s bathroom pictures, but finally I ask: “What exactly’s in that safe?”

“No need to get excited—all the top-secret stuff’s in a locked steel box, and no, I don’t have the key to it. If Elizabeth’s ever arrested my instructions are to chuck the box in the river and take my final bonus. There’s five hundred quid in an envelope which is also kept in the safe along with various papers, some jewellery and the keys to the basement stairs.”

“I can’t understand why she keeps those keys in the safe! What’s wrong with the kitchen hookboard?”

“She keeps them in the safe for the same reason that she has two fancy locks on the basement stairs door even though Tommy’s a locksmith and could pick them. She wants to make sure that if any burglar gets into the main part of the house it’ll be more trouble than it’s worth for him to get into the basement. Why do you think Tommy’s flat’s like a fortress? It’s because of the hard-core porn he produces for Asherton when the S&M group’s filmed.”

I suspected Tommy did this. When he was training me in his flat I was never left on my own to explore, but I knew one room was set aside for his film-work even before he started dealing with the tapes from Austin Friars.

“Tommy’s put in a new alarm system since you were trained,” Susanne’s saying, “but Elizabeth made him put the control panel on the wall just by the stairs. That way she just punches in the switch-off code when she makes an unscheduled visit to the flat and punches in the switch-on code when she leaves.”

“You know the codes?”

“There’s a note of them in the safe along with the keys, and Tommy’s forbidden to change any number without telling her. Weird, isn’t it? Like some nutty version of the dominatrix game . . . Hey, are you going to change your mind about coffee? Because I’m going to throw out those dregs and make myself something drinkable.”

I decide this offer’s worth accepting, and when she produces some expensive individual filters I feel we’re approaching a state which could be described as an
entente cordiale.

“So you see the problems, don’t you?” she says after we’ve finished mulling over the pervy relationship between Tommy and Elizabeth. “Retrieving those tapes is so tricky that I’ve got to be on hand to stop you making a balls-up. Have you ever opened a safe?”

I have to admit this is still on my list of things to do.

“You might make a muddle opening it. Or you might open it and make a mess inside so that Elizabeth would know she’d been raided. Or you might make a mess of the alarm system—oh, there’s no end to the messes a pinhead like you could make, specially if you’re in a dozy state after banging your head! You need supervision.”

I don’t argue. In fact deep down I’m pleased to have help after so much time spent battling away on my own. I say: “I’d appreciate the back-up. Thanks,” and at that point she orders me to book the table at the Savoy.

We move into the living-room, which has a long sofa sprinkled with cushions and cat hairs. On the self-assembly shelving beyond the jumbo TV stand a herd of china pigs, a couple of candles which stink and a load of Mills and Boon paperbacks.

“If you make some snotty comment about anything in this room I’ll hit you,” she says as I check out the titles.

“I think it’s great you read books,” I say seriously. “Most people don’t.” The
entente
shudders but survives.

I’m handed a phone directory, and when I make the call I’m told that the Savoy’s currently holding dinner-dances in the main restaurant on Saturday nights. “You want dancing?” I ask Susanne, my hand over the mouthpiece. “It’ll only be wrinkly stuff. Not like going clubbing.”

“What do you think I am—some poor cow of a teenager who only wants to get pissed, stoned and shagged out of her skull? I’m twenty-bloody-six, for God’s sake! I’ve got
aspirations
!”

I remove my hand from the mouthpiece and book a table for two in the River Room.

Once we’ve got the evening sorted, we plan our assault on Tommy’s flat.

As the result of breakfasting with Elizabeth I know her plans for the day: she’s shopping in Oxford Street before meeting Norah for a matinée. Nigel’s plans I also know, since they’re the same every week: after buffing up the Austin Friars flat, he shunts off to the pub for lunch with the weekend regulars. So the house is going to be empty when we begin our raid at one.

Eventually we prepare to leave her flat. She pulls on a black leather coat over her lime-green spangled blouse and black stretch-pants, and exchanges her fluffy pink slippers for a pair of high-heeled boots. By this time she’s caked herself in make-up, flounced up her hair and shovelled on the cheapo jewellery. Suddenly I realise that the make-up and the tacky trimmings are her equivalent of my Armani suits: something to hide behind, something to generate courage, something to boost a morale which always seems to need pumping up. But I notice that unlike me Susanne never glances at her reflection when we pass the mirror in the hall. She’s confident now the armour’s in place. In her world, the world where she has the freedom to be herself, she’s more secure than I am.

When we get to Lambeth I park in the nearest side street and go ahead to make sure everyone really is out. Once Susanne joins me the raid begins.

We retrieve the number from the back of the porno-pic in Elizabeth’s bathroom and return downstairs to the living-room where the safe lives behind an oil painting of a virginal girl who’s clasping a bunch of lilies.

Susanne says idly as I remove the picture from the wall: “I had a pervy punter once who could only get it up if I drenched myself in lilies-of-the-valley perfume. Turned out he was a convicted rapist.”

“Nasty.” I watch as she opens the safe. As soon as the door swings open I see the locked steel box, but the next moment Susanne’s grabbed the little Jiffy bag containing the keys, and the door swings shut.

Having unlocked and unbolted the door to the basement, I allow Susanne to go ahead of me to fix the alarms. She punches in the codes. The infra-red eye fades. We’ve penetrated the fortress.

As I move forward I shudder at the memory of my training sessions. Suddenly I say: “I hate Tommy.”

“Yeah, he’s filth.” Her voice is as matter-of-fact as it was when she was talking of the disgusting punter, and her face is as expressionless as it was when we were surrounded by the bathroom porno-pics. This is the way things are, she’s thinking. You don’t throw a fit and waste vital energy. You grit your teeth and accept what you can’t change, but this isn’t condoning the filth. It’s surviving it.

The three tapes, one for each camera, are easy to spot as soon as we enter Tommy’s workroom. They’re bound together with a rubber band on one of the counters, and beneath the band is a card bearing yesterday’s date. Elizabeth rents space in a warehouse for the tape archives, so only the current videos get stored in the basement flat.

Setting the used tapes aside I slip the rubber band around the three blanks and tuck in the card. I’ve just put them back on the counter when I notice another stack of tapes at the far end and I move over to take a closer look. These tapes are also bound together with a rubber band, but this time the card reads TUCKER.

“What’s the matter?” demands Susanne as I freeze.

“These are the spliced versions of my sessions with Gil Tucker. Look—Tommy’s written ‘edited’ and dated each one—”

“Careful! Don’t mess them around or Tommy’ll know they’ve been handled!”

I straighten the rubber band but find it hard to tear myself away. “Wish I could nick them. This bloke just shouldn’t be mixed up in this kind of crap.”

“Yeah? Personally I think punters deserve all the crap that’s going— and if you nick those tapes you risk winding up as dog-food for Bonzo’s Great Dane.”

I’m diverted. “You’ve heard about that dog?”

“Elizabeth was talking about it the other day and saying it would be unreliable now Bonzo’s dead. She said Alsatians are better at sex tricks than Great Danes anyway.”

Leaving Susanne to reset the alarm I return to Elizabeth’s living-room and check my tapes out on the video. The scene with Colin comes up from three different angles. We’re in business.

I take Susanne home, thank her profusely for her help and promise to pick her up at six-thirty. Out of Pimlico I drive and over the river, but on the far side I park the car by the entrance to Lambeth Palace and walk to the middle of the bridge. Here I chuck into the river the three tapes recording my Friday night activities with Colin, Carta and Val.

I’m safe.

Awash with relief I head home to recharge my batteries for the megaglam evening ahead.

We’re both worried in case Norah or one of the girls sees us together, so we’ve worked out a plan: I’ll drive down the quiet Pimlico backwater and toot twice on the horn as I pass Norah’s house. Susanne will count to fifty, leave the flat and teeter round the corner into the next street where I’ll be waiting.

The plan unfolds without a hitch. Susanne’s wrapped in a big black cloak and I daren’t guess what’s underneath it. Her thick black hair is swept up and skewered with diamanté clasps and her long legs are encased in shiny tights and her large feet are stuffed into high-heeled silver shoes which have a strap across the instep to ensure they stay on while she’s dancing. She’s also wearing false eyelashes and false fingernails in addition to the shovelled-on make-up. I sympathise with her desire to wear morale-boosting armour, but how can I walk into the Ritz with such a trashy piece? God, I sound like my mother, constantly worrying about what people will think. Hey Mum, look at my new girlfriend! Instant stroke.

Opposite the Ritz’s Palm Court, there’s a place where we leave our coats, and as soon as Susanne removes her cloak my jaw sags. She’s wearing a hot-pink dress with a short skirt, and her deep, deep cleavage is guaranteed to stop dead any heterosexual male from nine to ninety within a radius of fifty yards. The bowling-ball breasts are like marble sculpted by Michelangelo or some other gay artist with enormous talent but only an approximate idea of what women look like. It’s pseud but it’s great pseud. Extraordinary.

We close in on the Palm Court. Two waiters converge to offer us a choice table by the gold statue. All the male punters at the other tables are ogling Susanne and all their female friends are ogling me. We’re a maximum-impact couple. Everyone thinks we’re sensational.

“What do you want to drink?” I drawl in a suitably languid voice as if we do this kind of stuff every night. Automatically I use an upmarket accent.

“Champagne!” rasps Ms. Essex-Girl, heavy on the estuarine twang. “And loads of it!”

I want to say to the waiter: “Bring us a bottle of Krug,” but that’s the kind of conspicuous consumption that’s crude and would mean a discussion of vintages plus a wait while the bottle’s being chilled. So I just say with restraint: “Could we please have a bottle of your house champagne?” and before Susanne can demand something with a poncey label I murmur to her: “The Ritz champagne’s very famous.” That shuts her up.

As we swill the fizzy stuff, I think of the times I was brought here by sad rich elderly women during my career as an escort. Meanwhile Susanne’s gazing and gazing and gazing, beady black eyes taking everything in. There’s something touching about this wide-eyed childish absorption. She loves this place,
loves
it. She’s like a priestess worshipping at a shrine.

Finally she says: “It’s like
Hello!
magazine come to life.”

I somehow doubt that the Ritz’s PR team would welcome this comment. But on the other hand, perhaps they might. We all have to move with the times.

“Weren’t you ever brought here when you did escort work?” I say.

She shakes her head. “I never got the top punters. They went to the girls who spoke plummy.” She gulps some champagne before adding: “I got taken to the Strand Palace once.”

The Strand Palace no doubt gets the thumbs-up approval it deserves in the AA Guide, but it’s hardly sharing a five-star rating with the Ritz.

I don’t laugh. I don’t make some snotty remark. I just look polite and say nothing.

“I always dreamed I’d get to the Ritz one day,” says Susanne. “I like dreams. It’s dreams that keep you going.”

“Right. I dream of buying my own boat and sailing away into a golden sunset.”

We don’t say much more, and finally we stream out, leaving behind a trail of open mouths, fractured conversations and an atmosphere humming with pushbutton lust. Outside we turn to look at each other and I know we’re sharing the same amusement.

We giggle like a couple of schoolkids.

Then we set off for the Savoy.

Parking’s tough in that area at night as the Strand’s part of theatreland, so I decide to leave the car in the Savoy’s garage. I’m spending money like water, but I tell myself I shouldn’t grudge a penny of it. This girl’s got me out of a very tight corner.

Into the hotel we glide and after the necessary visit to the cloakrooms we’re creaming our way through the huge lounge to the restaurant which overlooks the river. More heads swivel. More jowls quiver. More old men turn puce with the shock of unfamiliar erections. As I realise with astonishment that I’m enjoying myself I realise too that I’m having far more fun with trashy Susanne than I’ve ever had with upmarket Serena.

The dancing hasn’t started so we have a quiet time to brood over our menus. Unfortunately Norah’s lessons on menu-French aren’t much use to Susanne here as the French is pretty impenetrable, even to someone like me who learned menu-French when growing up.

“Why can’t they use English?” says Susanne crossly. “I mean, is this England or isn’t it?”

I make a snap decision. Grandly I say: “We’ll get them to translate.”

“Won’t they look down on us for not knowing?”

“I’d like to see them try!” I declare, and in fact the waiters all fall over themselves to be helpful. I pick a salad followed by grilled Dover sole, no veg. Susanne picks some lobster concoction followed by dolled-up duck. Veg galore. She even orders potatoes although the bird comes with rice. I hardly know where to look when she pops this request, but the waiter beams at her and writes it all down with a hand which never falters. I’m still recovering from the thought of potatoes nestling against rice when the wine waiter arrives.

“I want more champagne!” says Susanne, awash with greed, but I say firmly: “More fun to sample something else,” and select a vintage Chablis tart enough to encourage sipping instead of swilling. I also order a large bottle of water.

“So what do you make of this place?” I ask her when we’re finally shorn of flunkeys. “Like it?”

“I don’t mind.” She gazes avidly out of the long windows at the trees of the Embankment Gardens and the glittery ribbon of the river.

I don’t ask her to explain what “I don’t mind” means in this context. I already know. “I don’t mind” is what socially deprived people say when they adore something but are terrified that if they admit it they’ll be mocked. Or it’s what they say when they’re seething with excitement but want to seem ultra-cool. It’s an infuriating response, but I know that beneath those three syllables she’s in ecstasy. We’re only a few yards now from the Strand Palace Hotel, the apex of her ill-starred career as an escort girl, but we might as well be in another galaxy.

“Tell me about yourself,” I say to pass the time. “Got any family?”

“Nah.”

“Parents dead?”

“Hope so.”

“What happened to your mum?”

“Dunno.”

“What did she do for a living?”

“Guess.”

“What about your dad?”

“Didn’t have one.”

“Who brought you up?”

“Kiddie-home workers. Foster parents. Pervs.”

“How old were you when you went on the streets?”

“Thirteen. Then I was put in another home, but I met a pimp who helped me escape. Then I got to be sixteen so they couldn’t force me to go back.”

“What happened next?”

“The usual. Drugs. Beatings. Prison—I got done for theft. Had to steal because of the habit but in prison I got the chance to straighten out. There was this prison visitor, a middle-class cow with a face like a pudding. She says: ‘You’re a bright girl, I can tell. You’d enjoy learning things.’ And she says: ‘Once women are educated they get a better opinion of themselves and feel life should be more than slavery.’ I think of that lady sometimes. She made me feel special in spite of everything.”

“So you quit drugs?”

“Yeah. Went back on the streets, though. Well, how else was I going to live? Then my pimp got stamped on and I was grabbed by a new one who worked in a West End casino, and that’s when things began to look up because I saw escort girls living a better class of life. So I chatted one up and found she worked for Norah, and then a couple of days later my pimp disappeared, his body was never found but I reckon they topped him, he was into all kinds of shit. Well, that was my chance, wasn’t it, so before I could get grabbed by anyone else I went to Norah and . . . okay, I know that didn’t work out, but I got my big break when Elizabeth decided I had potential. Happy ending.”

“That prison visitor . . . Was she religious?”

“Dunno, don’t care. All I know is she gave me the will to get off drugs, the will to get a better life, the will to say in the end to Elizabeth: ‘What I want’s an education.’ And that’s when Elizabeth figured it was worth investing money in courses for me and training me to help run her businesses.”

We’re silent for a while. The first course arrives and we chomp away until Susanne says: “I bet you had a nice home with parents in it. So how come you threw it all away?”

“I didn’t. I couldn’t hang on to it, I wasn’t good enough, I didn’t measure up, so in the end I did my parents a favour by dropping out so that I wouldn’t upset them any more.”

“Then what?”

“Drink, drugs, casual jobs. But one day I was looking up something in the Yellow Pages and I saw the ads for escort agencies and I thought escort work was an easy way to make a buck. (Yeah—don’t laugh!) Well, I soon found I couldn’t face it unless I was stoned—thank God Elizabeth picked me up when I got fired! She was my equivalent of your prison visitor. She thought I was special and she gave me the will to get my act together.”

Susanne says at once with fierce certainty: “There’s no way Elizabeth could ever be the equivalent of the Lady. The Lady would have looked at you and thought: he’s a bright boy, he deserves better. Elizabeth would have looked at you and thought: here’s a nice little earner, let’s exploit him.”

“No, she cared about me right from the start, she really did—”

But at that point I’m interrupted by a blast on the trumpet which makes us jump nearly out of our skins. We’ve been so busy reminiscing about our putrid pasts that we’ve failed to notice the band setting itself up on the other side of the room.

“Dancing!” exclaims Susanne, black eyes shining like polished volcanic rock.

It was Norah who taught us both ballroom dancing. She always insists her escorts are good dancers of the old school because many of the clients are wrinklies who were young in the days when it was a social necessity to know how to foxtrot.

The band are still warming up when our main course is delivered. We shovel the food down, and the moment we’re finally free to fling ourselves around, the band starts to play that sexy classic the wrinklies love: “In the Mood.” Susanne and I look at each other. We both know this one inside out. Norah used it for teaching. I can still remember it oomphing from her museum-piece record player in the corner of her living-room.

I jump to my feet. “C’m’on!” I shout, and we’re off, we’re skimming onto the dance floor, we’re showing all those wrinklies that not everyone under thirty thinks dancing means jigging up and down while zonked.

We swivel, we swoop, we sweat, we lunge, we twirl. We’re wonderful and everyone knows it. The other couples melt away. The blokes in the band are smiling. The waiters have stopped serving. The punters are goggle-eyed. There’s never been such a performance of “In the Mood,” never. It’s Saturday night at the Savoy, it’s Saturday night at one of the greatest hotels on earth, and Susanne and I are special, we count, we matter—and never more so than at this moment when we’re living out something that’s more than just our own truth. In an electrifying flash of understanding I know we’re proving that the human spirit can triumph over anything—
anything
—even the most soul-destroying abuse, and that the final word on such wasting lies not with the abusers but with the abused.

“Encore!” comes a shout, and instantly more people bawl out: “Encore, encore!” Everyone’s clapping and cheering. We bow. I suddenly realise Susanne’s not looking like a tart any more. She’s looking like the last word in cosmopolitan chic. Her eyes are shining, her cheeks are pink, the breasts deserve an Oscar for special effects.

As the band strikes up again to respond to the demands for an encore, I know what ecstasy is and it’s not a bloody pill. Ecstasy is me being not just myself but
all
of myself. My body, mind and spirit are finally working as one—but no, wait, it’s better than that because I see now my spirit’s not just one of a bunch of parts. It’s the force which permeates every cell that’s me and makes me
more
than just the sum of my parts. And the force isn’t just pushing me to be myself now—it’s pushing me to become the self I haven’t yet got around to being, the self I was designed to be—yeah, that’s it,
designed,
it’s as if there’s a blueprint situation going on and I’m a dream in the mind of the architect. He’s got me down on paper, all the dimensions dovetailing, and he’s breathed his spirit into his work the way creative people do, but the construction environment’s been so tough that the builders couldn’t cope so I’m still only a half-finished wreck. I need a big jolt to get the project back on course, and this is it, this is the big jolt, this is the architect grabbing the nearest blowtorch and turning on the power.

I’m being brought to life. Real life, not the life I had before. Maybe I’ve even been dead for a while without knowing it. Yeah, of course, that’s it, I get it—I was dead but I’m being resurrected, like The Bloke. The Bloke’s here now, obviously, putting that thought into my head. He was one of those people who called “encore,” and suddenly I see he’s already been calling me to life—calling me through Richard, through Carta, through Nicholas, through all those St. Benet’s people who rose to their feet as I entered that room. Okay, I’m still lost, I’m still in a dark, dangerous place, but I’m going to be all right because The Bloke’s determined to bring me back from the dead, he’s determined to bring me home—and meanwhile he keeps sending people, like visions, to give me hope of better times to come. Even Susanne’s a vision, drawing me into the dance which has raised my consciousness to the stars.