‘Come on,’ Louise said, taking Gloria’s arm. ‘Let’s give it half an hour and then make off with the silver.’
Gloria smiled faintly. They ran up the steps and pushed through the door. They had to wait inside the hallway because two men were trying to manoeuvre an upright piano into one of the downstairs rooms. One of the men wore a winged superhero cap. The other was pissed and giggling. It was taking for ever and it wasn’t funny.
‘Maybe you’d better come back later,’ the man in the cap grinned, meaning, Gloria suspected, Stay, I fancy you.
‘Maybe I won’t bother,’ she said. She wondered why she had come in the first place. She felt jaded, highly strung, unlike herself. Parties. Just a lot of fucking babble. And there was always some jerk with a chainsaw laugh that sliced through all the other voices and set your teeth on edge. Christ, she thought, I am in a bad mood.
‘Gloria?’
Gloria turned. It was Amy. Amy wore a pink designer cocktail dress. Her smile was a strip of white neon in the gloom of the hall. She held a piece of cake and a lit cigarette in one hand, and a glass of champagne and a toy revolver in the other. Embracing would be difficult.
Amy aimed her gun at Gloria. ‘Peeow,’ she went. Some people said Amy was a scream.
‘Amy! What’re you doing here?’ Gloria had to heave the words into her mouth. They felt like too much luggage.
Amy took a step backwards, mimed astonishment. ‘It’s my party, Gloria.’
Christ, so it was. Gloria had forgotten. She shook her head at Amy, attempted a grin. ‘My memory sometimes,’ she said.
‘So anyway,’ Amy swept on, ‘how’ve you been?’
‘Oh, you know. OK.’
‘Still singing?’
‘When I can be bothered to open my mouth.’ Gloria turned to Louise. ‘This is Louise. Friend of mine.’
Amy acknowledged Louise with a wave of her hand. The smoke from her cigarette did something Chinese in the air.
‘What’s the piano for?’ Gloria asked.
‘Somebody’s playing later on. Marvin Gaye’s brother or something.’ Amy’s hand moved through the air again, suggesting mysterious and glamorous events. Her champagne glass tilted, anointing a white tuxedo as it went past. Not that Amy noticed.
‘Is he any good?’ Louise asked.
Amy’s mouth hung open for a moment, and Gloria wondered why it seemed so dark in the hallway all of a sudden. Then she realised. Amy wasn’t smiling any more.
The doorbell rang and Amy went to answer it. Gloria and Louise seized their opportunity and slipped upstairs.
‘Jesus, someone should pull her plug out,’ Louise said. ‘Did you see the way she chucked champagne all down that guy’s back?’
Gloria turned on the stairs and flung her arms out wide. ‘Marvin Gaye’s brother,’ she proclaimed grandly.
They collapsed on each other laughing, then both thought the same thought and looked round. They didn’t want to offend Marvin Gaye’s brother and for all they knew he could have been standing right behind them.
*
Moses and Eddie arrived late. They had been delayed by two litres of Italian red wine and a Hawaii Five-0 video. Moses hummed the theme tune all the way from Vauxhall Bridge to Holland Park. Eddie wrestled with the car radio, but couldn’t shake the interference. A joint crackled in his fingers.
‘Music,’ he muttered. ‘Where’s the music?’
The party proved easier to find. Moses parked fifty yards down the road and they walked back. A girl with pale skin and black lips opened the door and draped herself along the leading edge. She was gazing at Moses and Eddie, but they seemed to have no more significance for her than the bushes or the garden path. Either she was very cool or she was very fucked in the head. Moses didn’t know which, and hesitated.
Eddie moved in front of him and explained that they were very old friends of the people who were throwing the party. The girl’s see-through eyes fixed on Eddie’s face. She let the door swing open.
‘You’re so predictable,’ Moses told him.
Eddie smirked. ‘I got you in, didn’t I?’
‘I didn’t need to “get in”,’ Moses said. ‘I was invited.’
They rifled the kitchen for something more vicious than Cinzano Bianco. Five minutes of frustration and contempt, then joy as Moses turned up half a bottle of brandy under the sink. Somebody had obviously hidden it there for later on. But, as Eddie said, later had a way of turning into never.
Moses poured them both a glassful and tucked the bottle inside his jacket. They wandered out into the corridor. Moses noticed a girl standing alone at the foot of the stairs.
‘Promise me one thing, Eddie,’ he said.
‘What’s that?’
‘Don’t do another Barbara on me tonight, OK?’
‘I wouldn’t do that, Moses.’
‘I mean it, Eddie. I don’t want any more of your bloody messes to clear up.’
Eddie shrugged, smiled. A girl in red approached. Her eyes seemed to stick to Eddie, pulling her head round as she passed by. With Eddie there would always be messes.
‘I’m going to look for Louise,’ Moses said. ‘See you later.’
The house distracted him, though, with floor after floor of lavish rooms. Beyond a pair of locked French windows a conservatory glimmered, its glass solarised by moonlight, its plants in jagged silhouette. Chandeliers of crystal chinked and glittered overhead. Two dozen bottles of champagne littered the top of a grand piano. A lot of people stood about – plastered, but ornately, like the ceilings. He was drawn into a few desultory conversations. He gave facetious answers to predictable questions. What did he do? He was a missionary, he sold insurance, he worked in a factory that made disposable rubber-gloves. Where did he live? Worthing (he was older than he looked). The brandy dwindled.
Emerging from the second-floor toilet, he was trapped by a man with a beard, glasses and a tartan shirt. The man smoked roll-ups (as a matter of principle, no doubt) and measured out his words like little parcels of brown rice.
‘A pink nightclub? Interesting. Now tell me. How did that come about?’
Moses began to explain, then lost interest. Left a sentence dangling. The man was lighting another of his cigarettes. The wisps of stray tobacco glowed red like filaments. Moses suddenly felt like snatching the cigarette out of the man’s mouth and hitting him. Thok! Right in the middle of that earnest political face of his.
The man blew his match out, looked up. ‘You haven’t finished your story.’
‘No,’ Moses said.
*
At one in the morning he was leaning against a wall on the third-floor landing. He was drinking red wine again. An open bottle stood at his feet. He felt relaxed, awake. The wall he was leaning against was a good wall.
There was still no sign of Louise. He asked Eddie if he had seen her. Eddie said he hadn’t.
‘Let’s go downstairs,’ Eddie said, ‘and talk to people.’
‘What people? I like it standing here. I don’t want to talk to people.’
But life has things up its sleeve that it can produce at a moment’s notice. Life is a great magician. Look:
‘Who’s that girl with the eyebrows?’ Moses asked suddenly.
‘Which girl with the eyebrows?’
‘That girl with the eyebrows.’
Eddie turned and stared into a room across the landing. It contained about twenty people. At least half of them were girls. And, so far as he could see, all the girls had eyebrows.
‘They’ve all got eyebrows,’ he said.
‘Sometimes, Eddie,’ Moses said, ‘just sometimes, I think you do it on purpose,’ and with a kind of weary strength he seized Eddie by his jacket lapels, hoisted him, and pinned him to the wall like the social butterfly he was.
‘All right then,’ Moses said, ‘let’s try again. Who’s that girl with the earrings? The diamanté earrings.’
Eddie studied the open doorway very hard.
‘I can see t
wo of those,’ he said finally, grinning at Moses
‘No kidding. One in each ear?’
‘No. Two girls, I mean. With diamanté earrings. Two girls. Four earrings. All diamanté:’
Moses let Eddie go. It was useless. It really was.
He shook his head and sank down on to the top step, his face in his hands. Even with his eyes covered over he could see her. And it had been her eyebrows that he had noticed first. They were pencil-straight, charcoal-dark, and they slanted at an angle to one another like the hands on a clock. When he first saw her, they said quarter to two. And it was. He would always remember that, and would be able to pinpoint their anniversaries exactly, to within the minute. She would like that, he thought.
He was still sitting there in his own personal darkness wondering whether she would ever have time for him when he heard Eddie’s voice whisper in his ear.
‘Her name’s Gloria.’
Moses squinted through his fingers. ‘How do you know?’
‘I asked her.’
Gloria? He had never met anyone called Gloria before, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to now. He was happy with his small life. There had been girls in the past – a week here, six weeks there, months in between sometimes – but the affairs, if that wasn’t too pretentious a word for them, had always tailed off somehow. Things began in a heightened state – sex on coke, something like that – then rapidly went downhill. The more you got to know someone, the less you actually liked them. Nothing in the cupboard except skeletons. Something had been knocked together, improvised, faked really, so it wasn’t long before cracks showed. How terrible that felt. To look at someone and suddenly realise the two of you had fuck all in common, nothing except the day of the week and the sheet you were lying on. Girls thought him nice, funny, strange at first. They ended up accusing him of vagueness and indifference. They shouted things like, You’re incapable of having a relationship. He agreed with them, not knowing any other answer, not wanting to make excuses. Their anger, his sadness. And that was it.
He was no Eddie, though. He could have counted his previous lovers on the fingers of one hand. Well, two maybe. Just.
But now there was this Gloria. The same old pattern reared its ugly head. He felt painfully divided into areas of fascination and dread. Gloria. What kind of name was that, anyway?
Shit, he thought. Not all that again. You expect some things at a party. You expect a certain amount of drinking. Yeah, drinking’s definitely involved. Drugs too, usually. You expect a bit of idle gossip, bullshit, repartee. And there’s usually a guy in a tartan shirt and a beard who you have to try and avoid. What else? Well, there’s always the chance of a fight or a brush with the law. You might throw up too. Blackout, even. Tailspin. Head down the bowl. All that. But – he looked up and yes, she was still there and yes, she was still beautiful – someone called Gloria, someone with extraordinary eyebrows called Gloria, you didn’t expect that. No, you didn’t expect that at all.
And what if she was interesting too? He watched disconsolately as she said something and the two men she was with bent double laughing.
He moaned. He sat on the top step. People kept squeezing past him and saying sorry, and jogging his shoulder with their knees. He sat there, his face propped in hands that would probably never touch the girl with the eyebrows.
‘What’s wrong?’
Eddie was back again. In the dim greenish light of the landing, he definitely looked too good-looking to have been born in Basingstoke. Moses sighed. All the demons were coming out tonight.
‘Gloria,’ he said.
‘What about her?’
‘She’s beautiful, I think.’
Eddie nodded.
‘And interesting.’
‘She’s a singer,’ Eddie said.
‘How do you know?’
‘She told me.’
Well, that’s it, Moses thought. He reached for his wine with a distant smile. Either Gloria was unattainable or she was Eddie’s, it didn’t really matter which. She was already moving out of reach, he saw, turning her back on him, walking away into the room.
Gloria. What kind of name was that, anyway?
*
Sitting on the stairs, he remembered an incident that had occurred the year before on Bond Street. He had been on his way to some job interview. The discomfort came back to him. A humid grey morning. He was late, sweating, his open coat tugging at his legs. It had been like walking in water. He hadn’t really noticed the two girls coming towards him, but, just as he stepped into the gutter to let them by, one of them shot a hand out with something orange in it. He stopped dead, stared, drew back – all in one fluid instinctive movement.
‘Would you like a mandarin?’ the girl said.
Moses was momentarily stunned, paralysed by the bizarre simplicity of this. A mandarin. On Bond Street. He gazed at the surprising fruit, then at the girl whose palm it nestled in. She looked eager and harmless.
‘No,’ he said, ‘no thanks,’ and hurried away, as if from a threat, a piece of unpleasantness.
The girl shrugged. Shadows entered the open pores in the skin of her face. She looked injured somehow.
He didn’t get the job.
Afterwards he thought about the mandarin. He saw it again, resting solidly, like an orb, in the cupped palm of the girl’s hand. It looked complete, sure of itself. It seemed, in retrospect, to be glowing, like something invested with real magic powers. And he had turned it down. He had said no to the mandarin.
He was certain now that he had failed some kind of test on Bond Street that morning.
But there was another way of looking at it too. In the end, of course, it was just a mandarin, a pleasantly refreshing citrus fruit, and why hadn’t he accepted it for what it was? It wasn’t poisonous, was it? It wouldn’t bite. I mean, for Christ’s sake, he even LIKED mandarins.
But he had said no.
Similarly now. He could ignore this – he checked again: yes – beautiful girl who he now knew was called Gloria. Simply pretend she wasn’t there. But he knew what would happen. This Gloria, she was another mandarin. And she would glow in his memory, glow and glow, taunting, unforgettable.
A big blue satin bow appeared in front of Moses’s eyes. It was attached to a blue dress and, inside the dress, was a girl. She was standing two steps below him, holding two glasses of wine.
‘Would you like a drink?’ she asked him.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I would. Definitely. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed.’
*
After that things happened very fast and in a way that seemed surprising and confusing at the time but entirely logical in retrospect. Moses was standing on the landing with his new drink when Eddie edged out of a nearby room. Moses heard a soft groan come from somewhere behind him. He turned just in time to see a blonde girl crumple vertically, in slow motion, like one of those old brick chimneys being dynamited.
‘Louise!’ Moses cried.
He reacted quickly, catching her before she hit the floor. He whipped the brandy out and moistened her lips with the few drops that remained.
‘What are you doing?’ came a voice from the stairs.
Moses swung round in a kind of frozen tango position, Louise flung over his arms, head back, eyes closed. It was Gloria. He almost dropped everything and ran.
‘It’s – it’s brandy,’ he stammered.
‘What happened?’ Gloria asked.
‘What happened?’ Louise murmured, eyelids flickering.
Moses spoke to Louise. ‘You fainted.’
He lowered her gently until she was sitting on the carpet with her back against the wall. Gloria knelt down, brushed the damp hair out of Louise’s eyes.
‘What happened?’ she asked again.
‘It was a friend of mine,’ Moses explained. He knew this was going to sound implausible, but he decided it would be better to tell the truth. ‘He’s got these strange powers, you see. He can walk into a room and everybody stops what they
’re doing and turns round and stares. The whole room sort of freezes. It’s some kind of chemical thing, I think. Sometimes people forget what they’re doing completely, or pass out like Louise just did. He was here a minute ago, so I think that’s probably what happened.’
‘You know Louise?’ Gloria asked.
‘I’m a friend. We work in the same place. Well, sort of work. Me, I mean.’
Gloria smiled. ‘You must be Moses.’
Her voice was menthol-cool, slightly husky, amused. Her lips moved like two halves of a dream that makes you feel good all day. Her eyebrows said ten past nine.
‘Hello, Gloria,’ he said.
*
‘How did you know my name?’ she asked.
He didn’t answer. He just sat on the carpet next to Louise, and smiled. A boldness had descended on him like a black cloak with a scarlet lining. He suddenly felt a bit like Dracula – sinister, magnetic, predatory.
‘I think Louise could use some air,’ he said.
Gloria suggested the garden. Moses guided Louise down the stairs. They followed Gloria into the kitchen, through a sunroom, and out on to a wide paved verandah.
It was a cold still night. The remains of the rain that had fallen earlier dripped from the trees. A stone balustrade, upholstered in moss and topped with giant carved urns, ran the length of the back of the house. Gloria led Moses and Louise down a flight of steps. They crossed a lawn. A high hedge loomed. They passed under an archway and into a miniature formal garden. Now and then somebody laughed or screamed inside the house, but otherwise they only heard the party remotely, like a TV three rooms away.
‘It’s good to be outside,’ Moses said.
Gloria took a deep breath, a form of agreement perhaps.
‘I feel better already,’ Louise said, and promptly stumbled on a loose slab of stone and almost toppled into the ornamental pond.
‘I give up with you,’ Moses said.
‘Bloody footpath,’ Louise said. ‘Jesus.’
‘Honestly,’ Gloria said, ‘fancy leaving a footpath there like that. Somebody could hurt themselves.’
Moses laughed.
‘What are you in such a good mood for, Gloria?’ Louise said. ‘I thought you hated this party. I thought you were leaving.’
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