Anyway. I figure it out. The bath is cold. I ought to run it hot again to warm myself up, but I know that I won’t be able to tell the difference between warm and scalding, so I just get out.
Towel dry.
Underwear on.
My hair. I know that hair can sometimes be wet, sometimes dry. If it’s wet, you have to make it dry. I don’t know why that’s so important, I just try to follow the rules. It’s quite hard to tell, though. I think my hair is dry, but maybe a bit steamed up, and I don’t know if that makes it wet or dry.
If Buzz were here, he could tell me. But if Buzz were here, he wouldn’t let me do what I’m about to do. And anyway, he’s not here.
I decide to dry my hair. I don’t think you can make hair too dry.
A clock tells me the time. Upstairs, I only have analogue clocks, the sort with hands. I find those harder to read when I’m like, this, so I go downstairs where there is a friendly green digital clock on my oven door. It says 19:15. I look at it for a while. It’s nice. Then it says 19:23. A bit after that it says 19:51.
Then I go upstairs.
Usually I choose safe clothes when I’m in this place. Easy ones that aren’t complicated to understand or wear, but those won’t work now. I need a dress. I take three dresses from Kay – her castoffs – and put them on the bed. I’ve never worn any of them.
I take the middle one and put it on. Look at myself in the mirror. No, that’s wrong. Not myself. I have to imagine the person in the mirror is someone completely different. I don’t quite manage that, but I can tell I look more normal than I feel.
I sit down on the bed and try to remember what happens next.
Shoes. I need shoes.
I don’t like putting them on, but I manage. I ought to put makeup on too, but all I have is a few disconnected words and phrases. ‘Eyeliner.’ ‘Lip gloss.’ ‘Mascara.’ ‘Blusher.’ There are some things on a bathroom shelf and there are some words in my head. I wait around to see if anything joins up, but it doesn’t. Then I see a tube of lipstick and my mind goes ‘lipstick!’ and I know what I’m supposed to do with it, so I make my lips go red. I wait a bit more, but nothing else joins up, so I leave all the rest.
The person-in-the-mirror still looks reasonably normal, I think, though I can’t be too sure. Normal enough.
I still don’t like the shoes.
Downstairs, the clock on the oven says 21:38.
I spend some time looking for my car keys, then decide that maybe driving isn’t a brilliant idea. So I get the phone and a card with the number of a taxi firm on it. The number seems quite long, but I manage it by dividing it up into slices of one number at a time. I’m quite pleased with myself when a man answers. I ask for a taxi. He says, ‘Right away?’, and I say, ‘Oh no, in a minute will be fine,’ and hang up. Then the phone rings and it’s the man again, asking for an address. I give him my address and put the phone on the floor in the corner, because it made me jump when it rang.
I sit there waiting. Watching the phone in case it rings, watching the nice green clock on the oven door.
22:18.
I’m not frightened.
I don’t know why I’m like this.
I know that it’s a good idea to connect with people when I’m in this state, so I try to think of the people I love. I can only think of three. My dad, Buzz, and Mary Langton’s head. I know that’s not a very good list, but it’s a start.
Dad. Buzz. Mary Langton.
I count them off, one after the other. After a bit I manage to add Mam, Kay, and Ant. They’re blurry, but they’re there.
Outside, a car swings up in front of the house. Headlights on. The doorbell rings. There is a wooden knife rack on the counter containing six knives, at least four of which would make effective weapons, but I decide the doorbell man is probably the same as the taxi man, so I decide it’s safe. I leave the knives, answer the door. It is the taxi man.
I’m about to walk straight out, when he says, ‘Don’t you want a coat, love? It’s freezing.’
I go back and get a coat and also remember that I hadn’t got house keys, money, bank cards, phone, or bag, so I get those things too.
I get in the car, which is nice and warm. He asks me where I want to go and I tell him. The name of the street, not the name of the place. He says, ‘Right you are,’ and off we go.
His car seems very clean. It smells like bubble bath. The streets slide by very easily. Croescadarn. Pentwyn. Eastern Avenue. There is no noise except that his radio talks quietly all the way.
The world outside looks like a film of itself.
When we arrive, the man says, ‘Have a good evening, okay?’ and I say, ‘I will.’
22
I’m outside it now.
It. The club. Dad’s beast. His first real step into the world of legitimate business.
I’ve been inside only three times in my life. The first time, when Dad first set it up, when it was still at the sawdust-and-paintbucket stage. The second time was when I had just passed my driving test and I swung by to surprise Dad with the news. I entered the club at around eight in the evening, well before the place was busy. I found Dad, told him my news, and we were out on the street again within five minutes, maybe ten. The third time was the other night with Buzz, when again we arrived before the place had really started to fill up, and in any case, we spent almost all our time buried in paperwork in a back room. So in a way, tonight is the first time.
The Virgin & Unicorn.
Simpering pink. Fleshy red.
The neon glow lifts the street out of Cardiff and deposits it somewhere else altogether. New York. Tokyo. Bangkok. Montmartre.
I feel like a wooden toy.
I approach the club and the two black-suited, black-shirted doormen who stand guard outside.
‘Entry for one,’ I say. I’ve no idea what you’re supposed to say.
‘You know what this is, darling?’
‘Yes. I’m joining friends.’
They exchange glances but don’t object. Just start running through the rules. No touching. No photographs. No videos. No fighting. No excessive drinking. No propositioning for sex. The dancers are dancers, not prostitutes. Yadda yadda. It sounds like some dispatch from a foreign war zone, infinitely alien. The doorman who is speaking has a head shaped like a bullet. There are three gold rings on his right hand.
Whenever there’s a gap in what he’s saying, I say, ‘Okay.’ After a bit, I’m still saying okay and he’s not giving me more rules, so then I shut up and he says, ‘You can go in.’
I thought there was an entry fee, but no one asks me for any money.
I go inside. Tables with shiny black tops. Chrome seats with black leather seats and backs. Dark red walls. Low lighting. Framed pictures of art-house porn.
Which is just a way of saying porn.
I can’t feel anything at all.
Everything looks sleek and dark and glossy. Leering and acquisitive. Like the sort of men your mother warned you about.
I know there is music playing, because it creates a pressure in my head, but I can’t tell if it’s loud or quiet, or what songs are being played. There are people in the room too, but I can’t look at them yet. I have fragments – legs, shoes, a man’s wrist with intense black hairs and a Rolex-style watch – but I’m not yet ready to join the pieces. There is a platform, strongly spotlit, at the end of the bar. I sense it the way I sense a headache.
This is Khalifi’s place. I can feel the energy of it chiming with the energy of him. His apartment and this club: They’re the same thing. Different slices from the same loaf.
He feels more real to me already.
Purple silk. Black marble.
I go to the bar and order one of my non-drink drinks. Mineral water. A slice of lime. Ice. I don’t care about the lime or the ice, I just don’t want to look like the out-of-place person sipping a mineral water. I’m out of place enough as it is.
The barman gives me change. A man standing next
to me leans in and says something. I don’t hear what he says over the music and the buzzing in my head, but it was a friendly thing. Not hostile. A beery welcome.
And that’s all I need. Something alters in my head, as sudden and complete as flicking a light switch. I’m still out of body. I still couldn’t feel a lighted cigarette butt pressed up against my arm, but my other senses suddenly intensify.
There are about fifteen customers in the place, including one other woman. The men are dressed well enough. Jackets. Dark trousers. Shoes that aren’t awful. My newfound clarity allows me to look at the pole-dancing platform too. It’s got all the class of a Las Vegas casino personally styled by Donald Trump. There are three poles, three dancers. One of the girls is really pretty, the other two just thin. They’re all either big-breasted or, as I assume, have had boob jobs. Also, big hair, lots of makeup, fake tan. The aesthetic is unashamedly Playboy. It’s like these women have disassembled themselves into their sexual parts only. Remove the brain, enlarge the tits.
I don’t have a moral reaction to this – not now, anyway. Those parts of me just aren’t available. I can dimly feel that the glass in my hand is cold, but only dimly. The music remains just noise. It’s not just the Unicorn that has made me like this. It’s also Khalifi.
This thing I’m experiencing wasn’t the connection I was seeking, but you can’t pick and choose. You take what you’re given and this is what he cares to give.
I’m confident now, know what I’m doing.
I walk to one of the best seats in the house. Close to the dancers. I’m aware for the first time of what I’m wearing. A gold beaded dress. It’s short enough on me, would have been micro on Kay. My shoes don’t quite go, but almost do. Good enough. I exchange glances with the other woman customer. The unity of the sisterhood, you’d say, except that, in here, the sisterhood serves a pretty thin gruel.
When I turn my eyes back, there’s a girl in front of me. Blood-red shoes. A sequinned bikini. Nothing else. She wants to know if I want her to dance. It’s twenty quid. I say yes. The current song is coming to an end. In the gap between songs, she tells me that I can touch if I want to. ‘Supersexy,’ she says, in an accent that could be Polish or Slovenian or Finnish or Dutch. Then the next song starts and she starts dancing, lips open, eyes half shut. I don’t touch her. A couple of times she tries to put my hands on her thighs, but I move them away. Halfway through the song, she turns so that I have her bum in my face. She’s not performing for me now, but for everyone else. A porno-pantomime. At the end of the song, she takes my twenty quid but her eyes are already on the hunt. That’s why she wanted me to touch her. Get the guys so aroused they’d buy the next dance.
It’s not about the dancing, but about the hustle. That’s what the tits and the hair extensions are for. There’s an intensity to the sell I don’t think I’ve experienced before. Silent. Furious. Unrelenting.
I realise I’ve got Mary Langton wrong too. Not completely wrong, but enough. The core of her is what I’ve already seen: the hockey player, the English student, the girl with the sensible mam. But no one works in a place like this just to earn some extra cash. To work here, you have to have something self-hating. The dancers in front of me slide up and down their poles like marionettes. Drug-fuelled. Drugs or drink.
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower. The poem up in Langton’s room. How did she get from there to here? Why did she work here for one short year, then stop? What brought her here? What drove her away?
I don’t know. My picture of her has just grown more complex, more ambiguous.
I think of her mother’s sobs, her father’s choked numbness. The grief that filled that house.
Because I am who I am, I tend to spend more time thinking about the dead than the living. I bond easily with Langton’s head, with Khalifi’s elusive shadow. But there are other victims too. Living ones. Mary Langton’s parents. Her two siblings. Sophie Hinton: not my favourite person, but her life was damaged too. Ayla and Theo: their worlds have never recovered from their father’s death. Perhaps they never will.
And Khalifi. Who mourns him?
I don’t have an answer to that, but I do feel Khalifi now. Feel him strongly present in this room. There’s a lovely unity between his lonely corpse, shredded like some macabre goulash on that empty reservoir, and this place now. Over to my right, the dancer who almost gave me a mouthful of bottom is dancing with another girl right in the face of a guy in a black jacket and dark navy shirt. A guy who looks to have all the charm of a car salesman just made Salesman of the Month. The two girls hardly make eye contact with each other. They happily stroke each other’s breasts and mime oral sex, but their eyes are roving for the next target. The next twenty quid.
No touching.
No photos.
No fighting.
There isn’t a difference here. No exploiter and exploited. The men are dragged here by their cocks. The women dragged by their self-destructive lives. The only person who is emphatically not exploited is my father. The man who makes money from all of this. That’s the same man who put down a 30 percent deposit on my house, who bought me my car, who paid the first year’s insurance, who would pay for just about anything if I let him. So I’m an exploiter too.
The two dancers have finished with the Salesman of the Month, but he hasn’t finished with them. He tucks twenty-pound notes into their bikini bottoms and pulls a fifty-pound note from his wallet. He’s on his feet. His mates are clapping him. The place has got more crowded since I’ve been here, and there’s a din behind me.
The two girls are leaning in close to his mouth. He’s saying something. Half-shouting, half-miming over the music. But the deal is pretty clear. There’s a competition for the fifty pounds. The guy’s mates cheer. One is sent over to get champagne. Or rather, non-label fizz that sells for forty-five pounds the bottle. The pole dancers rest on their poles as the spots are trained on Salesman Guy and the two girls. It’s a striptease. Sexiest stripper gets to go to a private booth with Salesman Guy, the fifty-pound note, and the champagne.
The two girls do their stuff. They’re good. Not easy to tease with so little to strip. One girl is prettier. Blonder, skinnier, better features. But the other one, the brunette, responds with all-out technological warfare. Hair extensions. Pumped-up boobs. Lips so full they must have been collagened.
Blondie seems too casual. Like she assumes her looks will win, no matter what.
There’s nothing relaxed in the brunette. She’s like me. If there’s a fight on, she’ll fight it. Der totale Krieg. The doctrine of Ludendorff and Clausewitz. War without limits.
I watch keenly. Brunette’s gestures are big, her miming blatant. For a while I think she’s overdone it, but she knows her market. Salesman Guy makes a big show of awarding the prize to Blondie, only to pull it away at the last minute. It’s not her, it’s you, he tells Brunette.
The two of them walk past me with the booze. Salesman Guy is living in the moment. This is the highlight of his fucked-up car-selling month. Brunette isn’t like that. She’s still selling cars. Her face is still doing the spreadsheet, the maths, figuring out those cash-in/rent-out sums that will tell her if she has enough money over to feed her habit.
The sight clarifies everything.
I realise Khalifi knew Langton. That’s not a definite fact, but a highly probable one. Khalifi came to these clubs often enough that he’d have seen himself as a connoisseur. He’d have wanted to know the talent, so he could appraise it. Langton’s plump white hips might or might not have been his thing, but he’d have known her. When they’re back at work on Monday, Salesman Guy and his buddies will talk about and dissect every dancer here.
That’s not the main thing, though. The main thing was the transaction I’ve just witnessed. I’d thought lap-dancing clubs were about sex and it turns out they’re not. They’re about cash and addiction and status and anxiety. Khalifi’s status. His anxiety.
He was a lecturer – good, dili
gent, and well respected – but on a lecturer’s salary, a lecturer’s perks. No Lecturer of the Month bonus for him. No bottles of no-label fizz and crowds of mates hooting him on. He had his private-sector consultancy money, but how far does that go when bad-quality fizz is forty-five pounds a bottle?
What this place tells you has to do with Khalifi’s yearnings. He was a British-Moroccan guy. No amazing looks, no inherited wealth. One talent, which had to do with engineering savvy. Or two talents, really: engineering know-how combined with a flair for a certain sort of networking. He had parlayed those talents into his position at Cardiff University, where he acted both as lecturer and honeybee. Buzzing around. Making connections. Fertilizing projects.
But he wanted so much more. He had a half-million-pound apartment and wanted a million-pound one. Had a low-end BMW, wanted a high-end one. Fooled around with lap dancers and pubs and clubs, but wanted more. The same thing, but classier. He wanted the stick-thin model girlfriend, the yacht in the bay, the supercar in the garage. He went out with pretty, skinny Jenny from the office, hoping that she could be his trophy girlfriend, but she let him down. She didn’t want to snort coke from his kitchen worktops and bought her clothes in the sale at Dorothy Perkins. The harsh truth is that Khalifi didn’t have enough to attract the kind of girl he wanted. Not enough of anything. Looks. Class. Glamour. Cash. The only part of that he could change was the cash.
I spend another hour in the club.
My feelings are returning to me. I can hear the music as music, not just as relentless aural pressure. When I go to the loo and wash my hands, I can tell the difference between hot and cold. If I press my forearm hard against the side of the basin, I can sense the pressure, or almost can. I can’t feel my feet at all – I have to look down at them to even be sure they’re there – but feeling my legs and feet is the hardest thing for me anyway.
The face in the mirror is the face of a stranger. Gold dress, red lips. Lips that move in sync with mine. I don’t even try to join up with that face. It’s not mine.
Love Story, With Murders Page 14