What If?

by Shari Low

  I think about calling Kate back, but I doubt she’ll have finished with Hot N Spicy yet. I briefly consider phoning Carol instead, but she’s a nightmare to get hold of and never answers her phone.

  These days, Carol is still single, still beautiful and is the figurehead of the Elegante fashion house, spearheading all their advertising campaigns: ‘Elegante – The Nineties label for the Thirties Woman!’ Despite the more than healthy financial rewards, she’s pissed off because now everyone knows she’s circling thirty and she reckons that her appeal to rich, shallow men seeking a trophy girlfriend to lavish with copious amounts of expensive gifts, has decreased by 25 per cent.

  In saying that, it doesn’t seem to have deterred her current beau, who does something in finance and has just awarded her a Harrods charge card. She’s probably there now, sipping champagne in Chanel, while I’m drinking tea and dipping my dressing gown sleeve in dishwater. It would be so easy to be bitter.

  I decide to call Jess instead, but I get someone else in her office and I don’t want to admit that I’m just a pal calling for a chat, so I blatantly lie.

  ‘Could you please give her a message for me? This is her mother here. Could you tell her that my new hip replacement has fallen off and I need her to call me back immediately?’

  ‘Oh, you poor dear,’ she coos. ‘I’ll pass it on immediately.’

  Ten minutes later, Jess calls back. Her job as researcher for the Right Honourable Basil Asquith, MP, keeps her really busy, especially as it involves extracurricular activities that go WAY above the normal duties involved in serving your country. More of that later.

  ‘How’s your hip, Mum?’ she chortles.

  ‘It’s facing the wrong way, dear, I just keep going around in circles,’ I reply.

  She laughs. ‘Are you phoning about tonight?’

  God, I’d forgotten all about it – our monthly night out. Kate normally reminds me, but I clearly distracted her with my woes earlier. ‘What’s the plan? Can Carol and Kate make it?’

  ‘Eight o’clock at Paco’s and, yes, they’re both coming.’

  Fantastic! I haven’t seen Carol for weeks. ‘I’ll be there, but that’s not why I called. I’ve just been thinking…’

  ‘Don’t do that, you know it gives you a migraine.’

  ‘Sad but true. But anyway – guess who I was thinking about, and it involves sex.’

  ‘Brad Pitt. Patrick Swayze. Tony Blair.’ A pause. ‘Actually, that last one might have been me,’ she admits.

  ‘I thought you came down on the other side of the political divide?’ I tease her.

  ‘I do, but it doesn’t mean I’m not human.’

  ‘Nope, you just have really disturbing taste in men. Anyway, back to me,’ I chuckle. ‘I was thinking about Nick Russo.’

  ‘Nick who?’

  Typical. One of the most important events in my life and one of my best mates has no recollection of it.

  ‘Nick Bloody Russo,’ I reply. ‘Remember, Benidorm, the Invaded Vagina?’

  ‘Good God, Cooper, you need to get out more. What made you think of him after all this time?’

  ‘I’m having a midlife millennium crisis and it’s making me reminisce about past glories.’

  ‘You really do need to get out more. Listen, I’m just heading into a meeting but you can tell us all about it tonight, presuming that your phantom hip loss hasn’t affected your ability to get to Paco’s.’

  My reply was half words, half giggle. ‘It’ll be a struggle, but I’m sure I’ll manage.’

  ‘Excellent. And, mother, remember to wrap up warm – a chill at your age could be life-threatening.’

  I hang up and make another coffee, suddenly cheered by the prospect of a night out where the conversation will revolve as always around men, sex and gossip, with the latest tale of premenstrual trauma thrown in for good measure.

  It’s amazing that we’ve stayed so close all these years, even though we’re all so different. Even more amazing is that we all ended up living in London, a few hundred miles from where we grew up. Our friendships have lasted longer than most marriages. From stilettos in Benidorm to facials in Belgravia (courtesy of one of Carol’s boyfriends, who was richer than most oil states), we somehow manage to alternate our dramas and disasters, so that the other three are always there to pick up the pieces. And, of course, every small cause for a celebration gets treated like it’s the best thing that’s ever happened on the face of the earth – new jobs (all), salary increases (mostly Jess), new men (mostly Carol and me), negative pregnancy tests (Carol), marriage and births (Kate).

  That thought rewinds in my head as something jars with me. ‘The other three.’ There used to be five of us in our teenage gang. It suddenly strikes me that the difference between then and now, apart from a few wrinkles and the need for Wonderbras, is Sarah. We lost touch just a couple of years after that Benidorm holiday. I must remember to ask the others about her tonight. Maybe one of them has heard something through the Glasgow – London grapevine.

  I put my feet up and flick through the copy of Metro I picked up on the tube the other night. I stop at page sixteen where there’s a poignant article about a guy called Joe Brown from Maidenhead. Joe, it seems, discovered he only had a year to live. He embarked on a kamikaze mission and in those twelve months ran up £20,000 worth of debt, doing everything he’d always wanted to do. The Monte Carlo Grand Prix. The carnival in Brazil. Jazz cafés in New Orleans. He did it all. The poor guy died in the end, but despite the sad ending, I know he’s a man after my own heart. It starts the brain cells ticking again. Life really is too short. What if I died tomorrow? There’s so much I still want to do. I want to travel. To meet my soulmate. To find a job I don’t hate and a home that I love.

  A realisation hits me. To achieve any of that, I need a cunning and devious plan to change my life. I’m never going to love my job. And Mr Wonderful, successful but not a workaholic, sensitive but strong, gorgeous but not vain, rich but not flash, is not going to find me sitting in my kitchen eating her second stale croissant of the morning.

  A smile overtakes my lips as an idea starts to form. Joe Brown did it the right way. He lived on his own terms and it’s time I started doing the same. There is less than a year until the new millennium and if I want to get my life sorted out by then, I have to get a move on.

  Within moments, I’ve made my mind up. Sod it. What have I got to lose? I frantically search for my bills box, source of many a tear, and empty it out, searching for my bank statements.

  I know what I’m going to do. I just need the nerve to see it through.

  But first, I need to tell the girls.

  4

  Respectable – Mel & Kim

  I never did go to university. The thought of having to dress constantly in black, wear eyeliner out to my ears and spend my life in the Student Union discussing the scourge of capitalism was too awful to contemplate. Incidentally, I’ve no idea if that’s what University is really like, but I can see now that I painted that picture in my mind because four years at university meant four more years staying at home, and that was the part of the equation that really did fill me with horror. I loved Callum. I loved Michael. But a drunk dad and a highly strung mother who could barely stand the sight of each other didn’t make for a fairy tale existence for the rest of us.

  More importantly, I was desperate for excitement, fun and adventure but didn’t have a clue where to start.

  ‘What should I do, Callum?’ I implored of my sixteen year old brother, as we sat huddled on my bed with four packets of Golden Wonder pickled onion crisps and two Yorkies to sustain us. My younger sibling, Michael, thirteen now and all gangly limbs and freckle-faced cuteness, was lying at the foot of the bed, his head on my shins, but he was wearing headphones, eyes closed as he listened to his favourite Guns and Roses tape on Callum’s old Walkman.

  Callum’s reply came with an eye roll and a shoulder nudge. ‘Give it up, Carly. You’ve been asking me the same thing for wee
ks and I still don’t know. Just make a decision and go with it.’ Insightful, emotional chats weren’t his strong point. He made up for it with killer bone structure and brooding good looks.

  His argument had merit though. I had been in the same room, having the same conversation, eating the same junk food ever since my mum had grounded me because I wouldn’t go to university. I didn’t even have pals on hand to break me out of domestic jail, because, as planned, Jess and Sarah had both left for their respective universities in Aberdeen and Edinburgh, Carol had gone to London to try to get some modelling work, and Kate was working fourteen hours a day as a junior hairdresser. Callum was the only one brave enough to risk my mother’s wrath, not to mention the barbed wire around my bedroom door and the threat of land mines in the hallway, to sneak in to talk to me.

  All I had was a fourteen inch portable TV for company, the only channels were BBC1, BBC 2, ITV and, if the wind was blowing in the right direction, the stars were aligned and I managed to bend the aerial to some kind of angular perfection, I’d get Channel 4 for about ten minutes at a time, before the screen would go fuzzy again. There were only so many times I could listen to my limited album collection and I’d read every Jackie Collins, Judith Krantz, Shirley Conran and Jilly Cooper novel in the library. It was as close to house arrest as possible without turrets and an armed guard, and I was bored rigid.

  ‘Mum and Dad won’t let you stay here unless you go to uni, sis.’

  ‘You’re right, I need to move out, but where? I want to travel, to do something different.’

  ‘How much money do you have?’

  ‘About two hundred pounds.’

  That was a fortune to me, the result of working overtime at the posh café and the fact that my family had all given me money for my birthday a couple of months ago. Well, there was no point buying me clothes, they’d be out of fashion by the time my parents released me from my bedroom. Besides, unless Miss Selfridge started doing a natty line of prison pyjamas, I didn’t have much call for new togs.

  ‘I want to be sensible about this though. I don’t want to blow it and have to come back begging to Maw and Paw Walton downstairs.’ The Waltons was one of my favourite TV shows. Set in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia during the Great Depression, the Walton family consisted of a Maw, a Paw, grandparents, about sixteen kids, and every episode had some kind of tragedy that made my gran and me sob into our chocolate digestives.

  ‘Sensible? None of this is sensible, Carly. Sensible would be uni and a boyfriend called Jeremy who collects stamps. It’s just not you.’

  Callum was right. It was time to be assertive.

  Next morning, I dressed, waited for my parents to leave for work and then charged down to our local travel agent.

  ‘I want to go away,’ I blustered to the insipid looking woman behind the desk.

  Her default customer service setting was clearly ‘patronising and wholeheartedly indifferent’. ‘Yes, dear,’ she said, with treacly condescension, ‘and where would you be wanting to go?’

  ‘I’m not really sure. I want to leave tonight, I want to go abroad, one way, and it’s got to cost less than sixty pounds.’ A travel agent’s nightmare. I could see her visibly inhale, straighten up and sneer all at the same time.

  ‘Well, dear, the only options I can suggest would be by coach and ferry, and there are two leaving from Glasgow today. One is to Paris and one to Amsterdam.’

  I contemplated. Paris sounded great, but wouldn’t it be crowded with couples being nauseatingly romantic and tourists with huge video cameras that make you feel like you’re in the middle of a BBC outside broadcast?

  ‘I’ll have a one way ticket to Amsterdam, please.’ If all else failed, I could always buy a feather boa and get a job as a go-go dancer.

  I’m ashamed to say, I took the coward’s way out. Maw and Paw Walton were informed of Mary Ellen’s defection by a shamefaced John Boy later that night, when I was safely mid-Channel. Callum was a star and persuaded them not to immediately round up a posse and track down their prodigal daughter. I’d left Michael my entire stash of Wham bars, so he was nonplussed by the whole situation.

  I arrived in Amsterdam the following afternoon, exhausted, bedraggled and feeling like I hadn’t washed for a month. I made for the tourist information office and enquired after the cheapest hotel in the city. And cheap it was. Nestled behind the Grand Hotel Krasnapolski on the Damstraat, the gateway to the Red Light district, was the Dam Central Hotel. Or the ‘You’ve got to be damn well joking to call this a hotel’, as it’s better known.

  I humped my bag up four flights of stairs, dodging the holes and empty beer bottles to a room that made the tatty apartment in Benidorm look like the Hilton.

  After unpacking my clothes, I flopped on to the bed, ignoring the puff of dust that rose around me. I kept thinking I should be terrified, but I wasn’t. I was smiling like a Cheshire cat and feeling, well, exhilarated. I felt like the world was at my feet, alongside the ancient carpet that had more holes than a colander and some extremely questionable stains.

  That afternoon, I trawled the streets of Amsterdam, stopping in every café and bar to enquire after work. By early evening, reality had begun to dawn as I absorbed a few unassailable truths. I knew no one in this city who could help me. I had no work permit, so I was officially unemployable. And I wasn’t desperate enough yet to get my kit off and sit in a window.

  I was starting to feel despondent. What if this was a gargantuan mistake? What was I doing in Amsterdam with no job, no friends and only enough money to buy baked beans for a week? How insane was I? The only experiences I’d had of Holland, prior to giving up my whole life to come here, were clogs and bloody tulips. Not a firm foundation for a life altering decision.

  I trudged back to the hotel and had just turned the corner in to the Damstraat when a large gold sign illuminated above an impressive carved door caught my eye. ‘The Premier Club’, it said. It must have been closed when I passed earlier because I hadn’t noticed it. I checked it out. No women in windows trying to tempt business inside. No tacky lights. Just an expensive looking black stone façade and white spotlights that gave it an edge of glamour.

  I was about to walk on by when I summoned one last burst of energy. I marched up to the door, only to be stopped by a bouncer who made Lennox Lewis look undernourished.

  ‘Can I help you, mam?’ he enquired in an American drawl.

  ‘I’m here to see the owner of the club,’ I replied boldly.

  ‘Is he expecting you?’

  ‘Yes, he told me to come here tonight,’ I retorted indignantly.

  ‘Just one second, mam.’ He disappeared inside to return five minutes later. ‘Go right ahead, he’s in the office upstairs.’

  I couldn’t believe the bluff had worked, and I was suddenly wary. That was too easy. What was I doing? I was in the middle of a strange city, no one knew where I was, and I was about to go into the depths of some club that may or may not be entirely shady. If I had any sense, I would run. Flee the scene. Bolt to safety. But, of course, I had none, so I made my way upstairs and knocked tentatively on the first door I saw.

  ‘Come in,’ answered another American voice.

  I entered, trepidation echoing in every step. This guy could be a mass murderer for all I knew. He could be a pimp, a drug dealer or Holland’s biggest trader in white slavery.

  Sitting behind a large black glass desk, the man looked up and I could see the hint of a smile in his expression. He was about thirty-fiveish, broad chested, with hair that was thinning on top, wearing what could only be a designer suit. He was handsome in a rugged kind of way and I instinctively trusted him. Hopelessly naive, eternally optimistic. There was a pattern forming there already.

  ‘I’m Joe Cain.’ His eyes crinkled up at the sides as his smile widened a little. ‘And I may be losing my memory, but I don’t remember asking you to come here.’

  ‘I’m sorry I lied, but I just wanted to talk to you. I need a job.’
>
  And then, to my eternal embarrassment, I burst into tears. The full waterworks. There were fluids flowing from every facial orifice.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I gurgled, ‘I’m not normally like this, but I’ve had a really bad day.’

  He jumped up, obviously terrified of this apparition in front of him, a cross between a burst pipe and a Cabbage Patch doll. I’m so not attractive when I cry.

  He came round to my side of the desk and handed me a tissue. ‘Why don’t you tell me why you’re here. What did you run away from? Are you in trouble?’

  ‘I didn’t run away,’ I snottered.

  I told him the whole story. It sounded so trite, so pathetic. The gist of it was that my parents are a nightmare, I didn’t want to stay at home, I was stupid enough to think I could come here and have an epic adventure and I was a complete tit for doing it with no money and no back up plan.

  ‘So I came here and now I really, really need a job. I worked in a restaurant for years and I’m a really good waitress. I just need a chance.’ Ok, so calling the bistro full of snotty snobs a ‘restaurant’ was a stretch, but he had no way of knowing that.

  When I’d finished, he looked at me earnestly. ‘What age are you?’

  ‘Eighteen,’ I replied.

  ‘Do you have permits to work here?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you do drugs?’

  ‘God, no. The strongest drug I use is paracetamol.’

  He laughed. ‘This is a very upmarket club. No drugs, no sex, no gambling. There’s live entertainment and dancing every night and it’s strictly respectable. It’s one of the few places in Amsterdam where professionals can relax and entertain clients or bring their wives without masses of tourists or all the sleazy stuff. Do you think you could handle that kind of clientele?’

  It was a valid question – I was sitting there looking like a groupie for the Grateful Dead. I thought back to the unbearably arrogant women from the café. I hadn’t murdered any of them, so clearly I was cut out for this environment. And as an extra bonus, this was a classy venue so my previous fears of resorting to go-go dancing were fading fast.