by Ruth Jacobs
What else had she forgotten? DNA. Only the other week there was a television programme about it. Why hadn’t she thought of it at the time? Would her DNA be in the suite at The Lanesborough? If it was, could it be used to track her down? How would they know it was hers?
Her brain performed a spin cycle and produced the notion that hospitals kept DNA records. They took samples from every person when they took blood for whatever reason. The Royal Free Hospital DNA database would share their records with the police – and that would be how they’d find her.
Another hit was what she needed but she couldn’t take one. Shooting more gear wasn’t an option so close to seeing family. This evening she was expected for dinner at her Aunt Elsie’s house and after last night, she was praying she could keep up the pretence of normality.
To deflect the board’s fear-ridden stampede, she busied her mind with a different occupation – vacuuming. Her flat was immaculately clean, having been scrubbed, polished and vacuumed two days ago, but there was always dirt lurking somewhere. Once she’d finished with the Dyson, she rearranged her bookshelf. Currently kept in an unorthodox height system, she switched the books into a conventional alphabetical order. Accomplished, and with still another twenty minutes left before she had to leave her flat, she progressed to her videos. Already stored alphabetically, she reorganised them by genre.
She’d barely made a start on the video shelf when she heard the phone. She knew who it was. Clients calling direct used her mobile, as did the madams she worked for and the girls she worked with. Only the escort agencies had her landline from when she first started working, but they’d long since been eliminated in favour of the higher paying madams. She had fewer friends than she dared count and they rarely phoned. At quarter to seven, it had to be her mother. And if her mother was calling her now, she wouldn’t be at Aunt Elsie’s tonight.
“I’m sorry, dear.” Rita’s voice was so quiet that Shelley could barely hear her.
“That’s okay.” Shelley tried to raise her tone to conceal her disappointment. “Will you make yourself dinner?”
“I’ll be fine. I’m not hungry.”
“You have to eat, Mum.” There was silence as she waited for the distant voice to reply.
“I’ll have something later. You needn’t worry about me.”
But Shelley was worried. She was always worried about her mother.
***
After an aggressive brushing, her hair was eventually untangled. She put on the Tiffany necklace she’d bought herself last week. Then she lifted her jean jacket from the hook behind the bedroom door and went over to the window to ensure it was locked.
Shelley never left her flat without checking it was safe to be left. Once she’d checked the windows in her bedroom, she did the same in the second bedroom, lounge, kitchen and bathroom. Each window handle was pushed in rhythmically in time to her counting aloud. Not believing her eyes, she needed to feel and hear each window was locked. And she needed to feel it and hear it at least twenty times.
The taps were next: a twisting ritual performed in the bathroom and kitchen. Taps, like windows and doors, were counted in four sets of five, but after last night, she kept losing count. Every time that happened, she had to start over from the first set of five.
Finally, she moved on to the six-knob oven. For this, she didn’t keep to the four-sets-of-five pattern. Counting to five twenty-four times unbroken – no mind-wandering allowed – was impossible. The oven needed special treatment. Each of the six knobs was patted, as if in congratulations, five times. She worked from the first on the left through to the last on the right. Most days, even with distractions, the six sets of five took no more than a couple of minutes. But today was not most days. For twenty minutes, her feet were fixed on the black and white floor tiles as the waxwork face stared up at her from the glass in the oven door.
***
Shelley entered the terraced house on Queens Grove using her own key. Stopping off at a payphone to call The Lanesborough had added to her pre-existing condition of persistently abysmal timekeeping.
“Come on through.” Aunt Elsie’s dulcet voice drifted out to greet her, as did the safe smell of musty, old house.
Shelley made her way down the long hall to the kitchen. Her aunt stood by the stove, stirring the contents of a pot chugging away on the back hob. It sounded like a train expelling the same two words on a loop that Shelley heard every time she was a passenger: damaged goods.
Her aunt rested the wooden spoon against the side of the pot, removed her vine and grape patterned apron, and then drew Shelley in for a hug. On releasing her grip, she raised a forkful of fish pie to Shelley’s mouth.
Aunt Elsie made the best fish pie with salmon, cod, eggs, potatoes and Shelley wasn’t sure what else, but whatever was in it, she loved it. The taste usually evoked happy memories from her childhood. And as those good few were the oldest, they were the rarest recollections.
After three mouthfuls, nothing was recalled. The pot’s incessant chanting at her, and her fear of being arrested, prohibited that happening.
“Is something wrong?” Aunt Elsie asked, reinstating the apron as protection over her dusty rose twinset.
Before replying, Shelley ran her tongue over her teeth to remove the particles of fish pie she could feel stuck to them. “No. I’m fine, thanks.”
“But that spasm’s back on your lip again.”
“No, it’s not from— I woke up like this. I think I got stung in my sleep.”
“Oh, thank goodness. You had me worried.” Aunt Elsie clasped her hands together. “You should get an allergy test done. Go to the doctors to be on the safe side.”
“I don’t know if my surgery does that.”
“Well, you can afford to go private.” Using her wrist, Elsie swept back the long, red strands of fringe falling over her eyes. “I’m sorry about Mum. We’ll have another dinner, the three of us, before you start. I promise.”
The family dinner was meant to be celebrating Shelley’s offer of a place at university. She’d had a fleeting idea the year earlier to become a mature student. Before the idea fleeted – as all her others had over recent years – she’d acted on it and applied to a number of London universities.
Until the post arrived yesterday, she didn’t know if she’d actually be going. She hadn’t yet received an offer, and with unspectacular A-level grades and limited spaces for mature students, she wasn’t sure she would. The offer from University College London was the one she’d least expected. Failing to get clean in advance of their interview and assessment day, she was sure being high impaired her ability to carry out the reasoning and numerical tests. And even if it didn’t, staff from the psychology division would be the most likely to pick up on pinned pupils. That’s what she’d thought.
***
After dinner, they took tea in the swirly-patterned lounge. Shelley felt sick as she sat next to her aunt on the brown, velour sofa. It wasn’t that the wallpaper, carpet and curtains looked like living, breathing entities – though they did – it was the fish pie.
Apart from croissants and ice cream, Shelley seldom ate. However, she found that most of the time, if she left a few hours from her last fix, she could eat a child-size portion of most food. But tonight, not being like most, the meal wasn’t either. She’d had to force down every mouthful so as not to upset her aunt.
Like her living-breathing living room, and every other room in the house, Aunt Elsie was trapped in the seventies. In the three decades she’d lived there, nothing had changed, except once in 1985. The year Elsie’s husband left her and the house for a younger woman and a country cottage.
The five-bedroom house was Elsie’s compensation. She didn’t get any money. She’d been scrimping to save for years with what she earned as a school secretary, and still couldn’t afford to redecorate. She could barely afford to heat a couple of rooms during winter. Shelley wanted to give her the money and she’d offered a few times, but her aunt wouldn’t ac
cept it.
“I’m so proud of you.” Aunt Elsie beamed at Shelley. “Soon I’ll have to call you Doctor Hansard.”
Shelley looked down at the trip-inducing carpet. “I don’t know if my savings will stretch to a PhD.”
“If that’s what you want, we’ll make it happen. You can live here and I’ll take in lodgers. I’m not having anything spoil this for you.”
“Let’s see what happens,” Shelley replied, with no intention of allowing her aunt to rent rooms in her house, not after the last time. “I don’t know how I’ll get on. It’s scary. I’m going to be so much older than everyone else.”
“What are you talking about? You’re practically the same age as the kids going straight from A-levels. Don’t worry about that. You’ll be brilliant.”
Starting university at twenty-two years of age wasn’t what worried her, but she couldn’t tell her aunt what was really on her mind. That last night she was at The Lanesborough, smoking crack and sucking on some old guy’s cock when he died in her mouth mid-fellatio, wasn’t confiding-in-Aunt-Elsie information.
“Have you told Foxtons you’re leaving yet?”
“Not yet.” As the lie left Shelley’s lips, guilt rose from her gut. It wasn’t vomit she could taste in her mouth. She couldn’t swallow it back down, but she tried.
5. The Party
After four days holed up in her Willoughby Road flat, shooting speedballs – her preferred amalgamation of heroin and crack – Shelley was glad to receive a call from Tara. Tara Barnes wasn’t her first choice for company. Nicole O’Connell was. But Nicole was in Mustique. A client had flown her out there for a job ten days ago. She was due back tomorrow but for the past ten days, Shelley had no one to confide in. Although she hadn’t yet decided if she was going to tell anyone about what happened at The Lanesborough last week, she wanted to be in company where she could be herself, so she accepted Tara’s invitation to party at her flat.
‘Party’ in their terminology wasn’t meant in the conventional sense. Guests, or a reason to celebrate, were superfluous. To party for them meant taking drugs. One could just as easily have a party on their own. In fact, Shelley had been partying on her own constantly for the past ninety-six hours, minus the fifteen or so hours of GHB induced sleep. And though she wasn’t celebrating it, at some point during the party, her upper lip had returned to its non-twitching state.
On ending the call with Tara, Shelley phoned Jay to place an order for her self-prescribed medicine. She hoped he wouldn’t take much longer than the fifteen minutes he said he would, but he was rarely on time.
She cooked up the last of the heroin, mixed in the final few crumbs of crack, shot up and waited. At seven o’clock, an hour had passed, the sun had set and Jay hadn’t arrived.
“How much longer are you gonna be?” She tried to conceal the impatience in her tone.
“Soon come,” Jay said in his low, soothing voice, but Shelley wasn’t soothed.
“How soon is soon? You said fifteen minutes and that was an hour ago.”
“I’m just pulling into your road now, love.” He cut the call.
Thirty minutes passed with Shelley staring out of the lounge window of her first floor flat. Jay couldn’t use shortage of parking spaces as an excuse. Shelley had her eye on two spaces directly opposite. She called him back and told him not to bother coming because she had to go out. He insisted he was at the top of her road, and persuaded her to wait for him, which she did.
After forty minutes, he still hadn’t arrived. She called him again, and again he tried to convince her that he was at the corner of Hampstead High Street and her road.
“I’m looking out my window. If you’re not here in one minute, I’m going out.”
“Wednesday’s a busy day, love. Give me a break. I’ll be fifteen minutes.”
“Forget it. I’ve gotta go now. I’m late for a job,” she lied. Why would Wednesdays be busier? Had it been decreed the national giro day?
Although Shelley was craving the next fix and would be unable to use heroin at Tara’s, she had to leave her flat. Once it started, this waiting for Jay could go on for hours. His older brother had been the same, before he went to prison and Jay – formerly known as Turgay – took over.
Starting the process again with her other dealer, Ajay, would be insanity. His time keeping was so appalling that in comparison, Jay and his brother, Ali, were as punctual as Big Ben. She would have to make a stop at Camden on the return journey from Tara’s and score her gear on the street. Tara could at least score the crack.
***
On the drive to Tara’s, Shelley pulled up at a phone box on the Edgware Road. It was the first opportunity she’d had to make the follow-up call with The Lanesborough. The curt receptionist told her the guest in that suite had checked out and she denied knowledge of Shelley’s previous call reporting the death. Shelley insisted on speaking to another member of staff but again, she was fobbed off with the same story. They must have been briefed on what to say by the management. The discovery of a dead body wouldn’t exactly be something they’d want publicised.
When Shelley arrived at the third floor flat – on a side street off the Cromwell Road – Tara was already high. She was paler than usual, and spots had formed in clusters on her chin, cheeks and forehead. Her thin, mousy hair was loosely tied back in a bun. A failed attempt to disguise its greasiness. She had been an attractive girl but her beauty was deteriorating.
“How much do you want to get?” Tara asked as they walked through the narrow L-shaped hallway.
“A hundred,” Shelley replied, following her into the lounge.
Perching on the edge of the navy sofa, Shelley took off her jacket and lit a cigarette. At the other end of the room, Tara stood by the glass dining table, talking to her dealer on the phone.
While they waited for him to arrive, Tara made up a pipe for Shelley from the lilliputian rocks she’d saved. Shelley enjoyed the first hit but it wasn’t the same without heroin. The effects subsided rapidly. She was left with the jitters and the craving for another pipe.
In less than an hour, the dealer delivered the crack – and in less than two hours, it was smoked. At midnight, Shelley wanted to get heroin and get home. Tara, however, wanted to score the next batch of rocks.
***
“I haven’t got any more cash on me,” Shelley told her. The money she had had heroin stamped on it.
Tara insisted on walking her to the cashpoint. They left the flat and went out in the cold night. Shelley was surprised Tara hadn’t changed her clothes. She hadn’t expected her to go outside wearing the tracksuit that was also functioning as her food diary.
“I won’t get my card in,” Shelley said, staring at the hole in the wall on Earl’s Court Road. “Some idiot’s stuck matchsticks in the slot.”
“Urgh! That is so council.” Tara zipped up her shiny, black bomber jacket and walked on. “This area’s meant to be gentrified. What a load of shit.”
Shelley stopped after taking a few too many steps in the opposite direction from Tara’s flat. “I’m not going far. It’s bloody freezing.”
“It’s only five minutes. Get your car, if you want.”
Shelley wasn’t willing to walk, nor was she willing to drive. If she was going to get in her car, it would be to score heroin, but she couldn’t tell that to Tara. All the call girls she knew – Tara included – disdained smackheads and injecting users. As if snorting cocaine and smoking crack somehow elevated them to a superior plane on a hierarchal structure of drug users.
“I’ll give him my laptop for your share,” Tara said.
“You’ve got a laptop? What for?” Shelley had never even seen a laptop. No one she knew had one. She thought she was technologically advanced herself for having the internet on her computer.
“Exactly! What do I want with a laptop?” Tara started skipping along the pavement, back in the direction they’d come from. “I don’t even know how to use it.”
“Yo
u shouldn’t sell it,” Shelley said, running after her to catch up. “I’m not gonna let you. I’d never sell anything I owned for drugs.”
Tara stopped skipping and turned round. “You sell your body. What’s a laptop in the grand scheme of things?”
“I can’t believe you just said that. How could I sell my body? You can only sell something once. I rent my body and sell my time. What do you think you sell?” Shelley peered through the wide glass window of an all-night cafe, thinking about what she could be doing in their toilet right now instead of traipsing the streets. “I’ll go home. We’ll have another party when Nic’s back.”
***
While they were waiting for the dealer, Shelley sat on the navy sofa and lit three cigarettes: one to smoke and two to burn in the ashtray. They needed to stockpile clean ash for when the crack arrived.
She didn’t like the thought of smoking Tara’s laptop, even more so because it had been a gift from her parents, but Tara had persuaded her. She’d said the Toshiba was better off being traded for something she could actually use and with technology constantly changing, it was best to do it now before it became obsolete and unsaleable.
“Have a shot of vodka. Live a little.” Tara returned from the kitchen, carrying two glasses. “You can’t have it on its own – it’s a child’s drink.” The glass of lemon barley water clinked with the glass top of the coffee table as Tara set it down.
“No. It’s fine as it is.”
“How can you smoke crack and drive? It’s hypocritical,” Tara said, unscrewing the cap on the bottle of Smirnoff.
“Crack makes me more alert. It’s not the same thing.” Shelley put her palm over her glass, preventing Tara gatecrashing with the uninvited vodka. “I mean it. I don’t want any.”
Trying to ignore the smudged fingerprints sullying the glass, Shelley sipped her lemon barley sans vodka. She never drank when she was driving. She couldn’t, not after what happened to her grandparents. Even though Tara knew this, now and again, she’d try talking her into a drink, forcefully, and interestingly, only when they were alone.