‘I need a drink!’ said Clem, waving his hands in front of himself like he’d had simply the most unbelievable evening.
‘Thing about the travelcard stuff,’ said Clem, as we sat, staring at our cocktails, ‘is that it’s just inclusive enough. Everyone’s seen a travelcard; everyone’s bought a travelcard. So when I say, “This travelcard says I can get to King’s Cross by ‘any route permitted’”, and then I say, “so I can go via the moon, can I?”, it gets a big laugh, because everyone’s seen a travelcard, but no one’s thought of going to the moon with one.’
We were ten minutes in to Clem’s dissection of a five-minute set, and we were still on the first joke. Dev had zoned out the second Clem had started speaking, staring around the bar of the Charlotte Street Hotel: Clem’s little treat to thank us for our support. I don’t think he’d realised that his little treat would cost him about £30 a drink. He’d tried haggling with the barman but that hadn’t worked, so now he was going to make us work for our cocktails.
‘If you had to pinpoint a favourite moment,’ he said. ‘What would that be? I’m just interested.’
‘Um …’ I said, pretending to think. The windows were open and outside, the pavements filled with tables and chatter and wine. An elegantly-dressed doorman fiddled with his cuffs, pretending he wasn’t waiting for the end of his shift, while Dev stared at a group of girls, all straightened hair and Louboutin shoes, their Blackberry Pearls forming a caravan around three Sauv Blancs and two vodka limes, as if to say, ‘Yes, we are high-powered and successful and work-oriented, but here on Charlotte Street we play hard, too.’
‘Because my favourite moment,’ said Clem, oblivious to the fact that no one had replied, ‘was probably that ad-lib, where the guy dropped the glass, and I said, “Careful, now!”.’
‘That was a good bit,’ I said, encouragingly, and Dev seemed surprised that someone else was talking.
‘Oh, what am I doing?’ said Clem, mock-slapping his forehead. ‘Tonight’s not all about me. What were your favourite bits?’
‘You just asked that, didn’t you?’ said Dev.
‘But you didn’t answer,’ said Clem.
‘I liked the ad-lib,’ said Dev.
‘But that’s what I said,’ said Clem.
‘Well, there you go,’ said Dev, and Clem looked grumpy.
‘I should head off anyway,’ said Clem. ‘Need to work on my material. Big giggle at the Smile High Club next week. Need to nail it. Then the aim is corporates. That’s where the money is.’
He drained his cocktail and banged the glass down on the table.
‘Cocktail is a funny word, isn’t it, considering it contains neither?’
I forced a laugh and he smiled, broadly.
‘Well, that’s going in the set!’ he said, and then, as I worked out what my reaction should be, he seemed to have spotted someone at the bar.
‘Oh, was your brother at the giggle?’ he said. ‘Kept that quiet!’
‘Who?’ I said.
‘Your brother. Isn’t that your brother at the bar?’
‘Jase hasn’t got a brother,’ said Dev.
I turned to look.
‘I never forget a face,’ said Clem. ‘Or a watch. Or a watch face!’
The man he meant was deciding which beer to go for. He was asking questions and tapping the pumps. And then he half-turned, and … oh …
‘Not that I can see his watch now, of course,’ said Clem. ‘But I could in that photo you had.’
I froze.
People sometimes say they froze, but they don’t mean it like I mean it. I froze, good and proper, because it was him. He was here. He was here in this bar.
‘What does he do again?’ asked Clem. ‘What does he do, your brother?’
‘Yes,’ said Dev, now realising, now recognising, now smiling. ‘What does your brother do?’
‘Chiropractor,’ I said, quietly reaching for the memory of whatever I’d told Clem that day.
‘I thought he was an orthodontist?’
‘He dabbles.’
‘And his wife has yellow hair?’
‘All over her head.’
‘Right. Well, anyway,’ said Clem, as I stared on, and he started to say something about getting his things together and wondering if he should get the bus or the tube or maybe splash out on a taxi, but I’d stopped listening, because here he was – the man, Chunk, the chunky watch man, and maybe that meant that she would be here, too.
I suppose it made sense I’d bump into him here. They both must work around Charlotte Street. He’s well-to-do, with his Alaska flat and his watch and his tan and his special edition car. Makes sense he’d be schmoozing at the Charlotte Street Hotel, where you can either buy a drink or pay your rent. He’s probably wooing a client, sealing a deal.
My eyes scanned the room again. Was she here? Was she here too?
And then something strange happened. I began to wish that she wouldn’t be. It swept over me and stayed there, this feeling of absolutely not wanting her to be here. I would hate it if she were here, in fact.
I didn’t feel ready, for one thing, though my eyes scanned the room, just in case. I hadn’t had a haircut, and I didn’t like what I was wearing, and I felt like a self-conscious teenage girl dressed for church and surprised by the news she might be about to meet that guy from a boyband who happens to be a friend-of-a-friend of her parents.
Second: if she was here, in this ground floor bar on Charlotte Street, in amongst the Blackberry Pearls and the shiny hair and the Louboutins, that meant she was here with him. And if she was here with him, there’s no way she could ever be here with me.
And third (God, there was a third!): if she was here with him, and not here with me, that would be it. It would be over. The romance and mystery and intrigue of stealing a girl’s photographs and then using them to try to stalk her – that classic Mills & Boon plotline – would be over for good.
I studied the man for as long as I could without feeling like I might be noticed. Well-cut classic navy blue suit, light-blue shirt, silk tie. Shiny shoes, but with silver buckles. I felt glad about that. I’m not sure I could love any girl that loved a guy with buckles on his shoes. He was built well, which makes me feel better than saying he was well-built, and his hair was longer at the back than it looked on the photos.
He was wearing no wedding ring.
‘You should go up and talk to him,’ said Dev. ‘Find something out about him. Ask him if he’s got a girlfriend.’
‘You think I should walk up to this stranger in a bar and ask him if he’s got a girlfriend?’
‘Not straight away, no. Ask him what football team he supports, something manly, and then ask him if he’s got a girlfriend.’
‘So I should walk up to a man in a bar, ask him what team he supports and then say, “Do you have a girlfriend?”’
‘You are deliberately trying to make this sound like a gay thing.’
I looked over at him again, drinking his half of Peroni, and laughing with another man. Colleague? Friend? Whoever he was, he was leaning up against the bar, like he belonged here, like the Charlotte Street Hotel was his, and this was his party, full of strangers he’d allowed to drop by.
Our plan had been to drink these and then slope off to the Newman Arms for a couple amongst our own kind, but now Dev looked excited.
‘I’m going to go up if you don’t,’ he said. ‘He must work round here, and either she was visiting him when you kept seeing her, or she works here too. They might just be colleagues.’
‘Do not go up,’ I said, fixing him with a very serious look indeed. ‘This is not about him, it’s about her, and she’s not here.’
But what I was really afraid of was Dev striking up a conversation with the man, explaining the photos, saying what a terrific coincidence this is, and then somehow agreeing to hand them over to him. Because then I would be robbed. Robbed of the chance. Robbed of the moment. The moment I craved. The moment I hadn’t told him I felt coul
d be the start of something. The beginning of a story. The kind of thing Sarah, now older, now more cynical, jaded by life and jaded by me, would laugh at, but which I never would. The kind of thing men aren’t supposed to want, or crave, or admit to, because it’s far easier to say only women want these things, and all we want is to watch Top Gear in our Top Gear T-shirts and have silent, bowed women bring us our Top Gear magazines.
And as I was about to explain that to Dev, he stood up and marched straight over to the bar.
FIFTEEN
Or ‘Man on a Mission’
‘Well, it thrills me to say,’ said Dev, minutes later, outside the Fitzroy Tavern and shaking slightly with delight, ‘that now we know you’re definitely in with a shot. I think you’re definitely in with a shot.’
We stood, pints in hand, relieved to be back amongst our own, staring through the window of the dimly-lit bar. Dev had used the moment and was now revelling in the information he had brought back from the front.
‘And why do I think that? Because that man in there—’ he pointed, and I batted his hand down in case we were seen ‘— has absolutely no sense of humour. And you have the beginnings of one, so you’re winning.’
I looked to the glass again. The man’s friend must just have said something funny, because the man slapped him on his arm and reared his head back in laughter. From a distance, the man seemed to have a sense of humour, but I was willing to believe Dev on this one.
‘It’s always topping lists, isn’t it, sense of humour?’ he said, looking ponderous. ‘It’s always right up there, so I don’t know what he’s got going for him, other than money and looks and possibly charm. But you – you have nearly a sense of humour.’
‘Do you think Pamela will like your sense of humour? When she learns English, I mean, and memorises everything about videogames?’
Dev made a Dev face. I continued, with what I really wanted to talk about: ‘So what did you say to him? How did you start it?’
‘I went blank,’ said Dev. ‘So I got out my travelcard and I said, “Isn’t it weird it says ‘any route permitted’ on my train ticket? Does that mean I can go via the moon?” And he laughed.’
‘He laughed?’
‘He laughed. I followed that up with “Cocktail’s a weird name considering it contains neither”.’
‘Did he laugh again?’
‘No, he didn’t like that. I think he thought it was a little bawdy. But I was in.’
I had watched Dev talking to the man for a couple of minutes while he waited to get served (he’d ordered a tap water, and the barman hadn’t looked best pleased). I’d been nervous. I felt like at any second I was going to be rumbled or caught. As if the police were going to turn up and demand the immediate return of the photos or march me straight to Belmarsh. My stomach had flipped as Dev squeezed in between the two men, and tapped the beer pumps just as he’d seen the man do.
At one point, when it got too nerve-wracking, I started to come up with excuses I could make if somehow we were found out. I had got the disposable film mixed up with my own disposable film – that’s why we developed it. Or perhaps I could say that Dev was care in the community, and he’d done all this when I – his carer – had had my drink spiked by a jealous rival at the home. But as I looked over once more, I saw what everyone else in this room could see: just three men, standing at a bar, smiling and nodding and talking to each other.
And then – one of them had reached into his pocket and brought out a business card.
‘So who is he?’ I said. ‘And why did you ask for his business card?’
‘I asked them what line of business they were in.’
‘And?’
‘They’re restaurateurs. They even said it without the “n”. Or, at least, they’ve invested in one. So I said my dad owns restaurants on Brick Lane, and boom – one business card.’
He handed it to me. I read it. Just a name and a number, nothing more.
Dev had tried to convince me this was fate again. But again, I’d had to remind him that this was not fate: this was Charlotte Street. And people who work around Charlotte Street are likely to be found around Charlotte Street most days. Finding someone who works on Charlotte Street, still on Charlotte Street when their work on Charlotte Street has ended might be seen as lucky, but fate?
Fact was, I wasn’t that bothered by whatever it was. Luck, chance, circumstance, the name didn’t matter; what mattered was how it was making me feel.
I woke, the next morning, to hear Dev and his dad shouting at each other downstairs in Urdu. About once a month, recently, Dev’s dad had come round to shout at him in Urdu. Only recently had Dev started to shout back.
‘Family stuff,’ he’d tell me, sullenly, as he’d switch on The Wright Stuff, or make a coffee, and I’d let it slide, because that’s what you do when people say ‘family stuff’.
As I listened to them, I stared at the ceiling and tried to think of other things. There was Sarah, of course, but if there was Sarah then there was also Gary, so I passed on that. And there was last night. The man. And his business card.
‘Tell ‘em, then!’ said Clem, delighted. ‘Tell ‘em!’
‘Clem was magnificent,’ I lied, and Zoe cocked her head, and smiled; an excellent move to show Clem her delight but me her disbelief.
‘There was a great moment,’ said Clem, spinning around in his office chair, trying to be casual, ‘where someone dropped their pint glass, and I thought, “Right, I’d better ad-lib here” …’
I nodded and smiled my way through the rest, wondering when a good time to turn back to my computer and hit Google might be. My hand was in my pocket, my fingers around one side of the business card.
I hadn’t noticed how down and dour Zoe was looking this morning. I didn’t notice until long after Clem stopped speaking – which wasn’t for a while – when Sam took me to one side, and said, ‘What’s going on? Have you heard anything?’
‘Nothing,’ I’d said. ‘Heard anything about what?’
Truth be told, I was finding it hard to look at Zoe at the moment. Since seeing Sarah again, it was tough. Because every time I looked at Zoe I was reminded of the kind of man I could be. I forced it all out of my mind again, and felt my pocket for the card again.
Damien Anders Laskin.
What would we find out about Damien Anders Laskin?
Here is what I thought I’d find out about Damien Anders Laskin:
I thought I’d find out he was very, very rich.
I thought I’d find out much of this money came from his father, a wealthy aristo-industrialist, a man who’d turn out still to be around and who continued to push poor Damien further into the family business, which was probably called Laskin’s, and had something to do with vineyards and went back hundreds of years and had probably changed its name once or twice to hide its early involvement with slavery.
I thought I’d find out he went to Eton, clearly, and that he’d probably met some crown prince of an African country there, who was now only to pleased to grant him various weapons contracts, which he’d pursued in an effort to overshadow his father’s comparatively paltry wine-based ambitions, but had faltered when a military coup had somehow toppled his friend.
I thought I’d find out he had been married, once, to an Eastern European model he’d met while setting up Laskin’s of Prague, a mission given to him by his father but which would ultimately fail because Damien’s heart just wasn’t in Laskin’s Wines & Spirits and never would be, but they’d never had a child, because she was too worried about her figure and the contract she was hoping to renew with Clinique and it’s just so hard when you hit thirty and your husband only cares about his business and his mistress.
I thought he was probably good at tennis, having trained personally with Pat Cash or Ivan Lendl, whom he would’ve met on a celebrity golfing weekend in Maine, which Laskin’s had started in the name of charity, but probably only for tax purposes and OK magazine kudos. I thought he could handle a
sports car, and would say things like ‘I handle my sports cars like I handle my women’ and then finish by saying something witty that I couldn’t quite come up with just now, but which would’ve made Clarkson spit out his roast hog and clap his hands together at a bloated Cotswolds banquet.
And here’s what I thought about Damien Anders Laskin: I thought that wherever he went, people laughed with grace and volume at the things he said whether they were worth it or not, and when he walked into a room they would cut off their conversations just to nod at him in the hope he might nod back, and women wished he’d marry them, and men wished he’d piss off so the women they were with would stop wishing he would marry them, and that whatever hand life dealt him, he would always be okay, because Damien Anders Laskin had hope handed to him on a plate.
It all seemed so much. So different, and so much to contend with, so much to battle against. If, ultimately, I wasn’t enough for Sarah, if things had been ‘stale’ even when I’d …
‘Well?’ said Clem, interrupting.
And we’re back in the room.
Blank stares. Raised eyebrows. I had been asked for my opinion. But on what?
‘Well … I agree,’ I said, authoritatively, and with a flourish.
There was a hush.
‘Unless,’ I said, ‘you were talking about the man who shouted “You’re appalling” halfway through your set last night.’
Clem turned his back on me. Turns out they were.
It takes a man of enormous confidence simply to have a business card with his name and number on.
Dev’s business card took things even further, of course, and just had his name on, but that was because he knew the girls he gave them to would never call him, and that takes a man of very little confidence indeed.
Who, though, now, can escape the Internet? Who can stave off Google? A mention on a social networking site, a brief whisper on an industry news sheet, a vox pop in a local paper about bike racks or planning consent.
Sure enough, Damien Anders Laskin yielded results.
Plenty of them.
Which you’d expect, seeing as he was in PR.
Charlotte Street Page 20