‘What’s your name?’
‘Shira.’
‘Mine’s Susan.’
‘Yes, I know. I see you around with the band.’
‘Weren’t you in Birmingham the other night?’
‘Yes, right, when you . . . ’
‘Jesus H!’ yelled Gary Pride. ‘You want the room cleared so you can tell each other your life stories? Now eat it!’
The two girls slipped from their scuffed leather skins, under which they were naked. The silence dripped saliva. Shira had surprising emerald-green pubic hair and a tattoo just below her navel warning KEEP OFF THE GRASS. Susan got down to grazing, with a vengeance.
Gary Pride bought time.
He bought friends.
He bought a season ticket to Highbury, but he didn’t dare go. (More than my life’s worth. I’d be ripped apart by the love of my people.)
He bought books on the English Civil War, the code of the Samurai and the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, but he never read them. (Life’s too short, innit? Look, the snooker’s on.)
He bought suits of armour. Of course he never wore them. When they began to collect dust he had them packed in a crate and sent to his family in Kent. (He claimed to be a Cockney; it was his whole raison d’être. His first album was called ‘Cockney Pride’. There must have been a strong wind blowing south from the vicinity of Bow Bells the day Gary Pride was born, Susan secretly thought.)
He bought lutes, mandolins and lyres and threw them down in fits of pique when they failed to respond in exactly the same way as a 1976 Fender bass.
But most of all, he bought drugs. And these he certainly knew what to do with. Hash, speed, cocaine, opium and LSD. It was the acid that broke the cretin’s back. He woke up in the coffin one morning screaming about the Rotarians. And the Freemasons. And the Tongs. Through a lurching amphetamine fog hangover Susan saw him pull on his nearest clothing (a Samurai ceremonial robe – was he going to get stopped at Customs!) and rifle through the bureau for his passport. She never heard from him again. A month or so later his record company told her he had gone to the volcanic island of Vanuatu to get his head together.
She was eighteen and sick to the back teeth of asking crooning morons too stoned to remember their own phone numbers what their views were on the situation in Rhodesia, which had become as essential to a Beat interview as a favourite colour was to the teenybopper magazines. If you failed to ask them to their stupid faces you had to call them at home and pop the question, and doing it in isolation made you feel even dumber. Then a posh cow called Rebecca called her at the office one day and asked if they could have a drink.
In a bar in Jermyn Street Rebecca sighed deeply into her Kir Royale and murmured something about New Blood. About the Street. About the Blank Generation. Susan watched, fascinated. Rebecca talked into her drink like a ventriloquist drinking a glass of water while screeching ‘Gottle of geer!’ and sounded like a Labour Party Manifesto. Then suddenly she rounded on Susan, looking her straight in the eye, and said in a completely different, mid-Atlantic voice, ‘Well?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Fifteen thousand a year, pathetic really, no car, expenses, as much depilatory as you can use and endless free samples, well, of everything really.’ Rebecca fished in her Fendi bag and threw a glossy magazine on to the bar. A girl in a tux pouted furiously at them. PARVENU. ‘We’ll call you associate ed, if you want. Doesn’t mean anything. But everyone else is an editor, even the messenger, so you might as well be.’ Her mission complete, Rebecca wilted elegantly again and began to murmur into her cocktail about Working Class Energy.
Susan knew of Parvenu. It was a magazine which proclaimed, subtitled on the cover of every issue, ‘LIFE IS A PARTY’. It was frivolous, snobbish and shallow. But after The Beat, where thirty-year-old men looked for the meaning of life in plastic platters, it came as a breath of fresh carbon monoxide. So she murmured into her Black Russian about a Time For Everything and the New Selfishness. Displaying a healthy measure of it, Rebecca shot off five minutes later leaving Susan to pay for the drinks.
In her two years at Parvenu Susan learned how to call dinner lunch, how to call enemies ‘Darling’, how to dress, how to drink and how to tell the perfect lie. She also learned things about men that made Gary Pride look like a verger.
One afternoon after a fashion shoot she went to bed with three male models. In the morning one of them asked her if she had ever done it with an Afghan.
‘Guerrilla?’
He ruffled her hair and laughed. ‘Hound, silly.’
Then she interviewed a hot young actor at a hotel in Kensington. They stayed in his room for a week, ordering cocaine, champagne and caviar from the hotel’s various pantries. On the day of his departure he was very quiet. He didn’t look at her as he packed and she guessed that he was already psyching himself into his next role: that of loving, faithful boyfriend to the filthy rich Manhattan heiress he was engaged to.
‘Aren’t you going to give me anything to remember you by?’ she finally asked flirtatiously and desperately from the bed.
He pulled on his cowboy boots, stood up and looked down at her. ‘I have,’ he said quietly. ‘Herpes.’ Then he was out of the door, carrying the one canvas tote bag that made up his luggage, a man-of-the-people affectation that had charmed her a week ago and now revolted her.
It took two weeks, a week’s wages and a private clinic before she was sure he was just a sadist with a kooky sense of humour. Herpes was the new urban folk demon; people told jokes against it as if to inoculate themselves. What do the couple who have everything have embroidered on their towels? ‘HIS’ and ‘HERPES’.
She shared a flat in SW10 with a cousin of Isabella’s, the girl at the next desk in the Parvenu office. The girl called herself Trash. She was impossibly rich, had five A-levels and worked in an Arab clip joint in W1. Her family were related by marriage to a certain Family who shall be nameless and blameless. She wore her evening clothes only once: on coming home, around four in the morning, she dropped them into the matt black dustbin as other more frugal girls might drop them carelessly on to the floor after a hard day at the office. Occasionally, she burned that night’s dress in the sink, scat singing arias from Madame Butterfly as she did so.
Trash had two hyphens, not one, in her surname. Susan once didn’t see or hear her for six weeks. They never talked. Trash seemed to regard conversation as a breach of good manners. Once Susan, a little drunk and lonely, stopped her as they passed in the hallway and asked her why she needed a flatmate. Trash smiled like a game-show host.
‘Because I can’t stand a cold toilet seat.’
When she killed herself in the bath one Monday morning, Susan discovered that Trash had really been Georgia. ‘But I always called her Trash!’ she said to Isabella as they waited for the lift down one night. Somehow it seemed very important.
Isabella smiled absently. ‘Oh, don’t worry. Everyone called her Trash. Even her ma.’
‘That’s not the point.’
‘Sorry?’
Who, what, why, where, when? This was supposed to be the mantra of journalism. It went through her head, more and more, like the slick black backbeat of a soul song. She couldn’t answer any of them. She read cereal packets and racing results to find an answer. She spent a preternatural amount of time listening to the lyrics of popular songs. A song called ‘Boogie Oogie Oogie’ drove her to distraction for a few weeks; she bought the single and stayed at home in the evenings with the stylus on auto, listening to it fifty times in a row. She was convinced it was trying to tell her something.
She got drunk every night and every morning woke up with a headache where her memory had once been. The thought of suicide was always there, comforting, like old money to be fallen back on in desperate times. Sometimes only the thought of death made life bearable. A greyhound winner called Too Much Too Young made her laugh for half an hour. WHO, WHAT, WHY, WHERE, WHEN?
Then she met Matthew.
Matthew Stockbridge sat at his desk in the big South London hospital and looked across at the pretty, sick-looking girl who was trying to insert a cheese sandwich into her tape recoder.
‘I’m ver’ sorry,’ she slurred. ‘Some sort of malpractice.’
He laughed, a little shocked. ‘No, Miss Street, you came here to ask me about malpractice suits. Didn’t you?’
‘Malpractice. No, malfunction.’ She dropped the sandwich on to the desk and stared at it. ‘Oh look,’ she said brightly. ‘I wondered where that got to.’ She looked up at him, her pupils almost completely covering her grey irises.
‘Miss Street, which drug are you on?’
She rifled through her bag and triumphantly shoved a twist of foil under his nose. ‘Sulphate. Almost pure. Want some?’
‘No thank you.’
Now she was gazing over his shoulder into the far corner of the room with something between amusement and terror.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘There’s a bird in that corner. It’s the Roadrunner,’ she said matter-of-factly.
‘Really?’
‘Oh yes. It’s the Roadrunner and it’s doing the Charleston.’
‘Miss Street, I assure you it’s not. It’s amphetamine sulphate, which has gone to your liver and been transformed into mescalin due to extreme abuse and lack of food and sleep. Am I right?’
She smiled knowingly at him. Then she leaned across the desk and shot the best part of the litre bottle of Perrier water she had been drinking into his lap. Then she began to laugh, so hard that she fell off her chair. She lay on her back, retching up a vile yellow bile and laughing.
Matthew Stockbridge dodged around the desk and knelt beside her. She looked at him.
‘Who, what, why, where, when?’ she asked weakly.
‘Whatever you want.’ He laughed too. ‘It’s all right now, Susan.’
That had been seven years ago. Time, the great vandal, had had its bash at them, and love had gone about halfway through, but she still hadn’t got around to moving out. When you were both busy moderns, there was very little time for elaborate things like leaving. You were always too busy buying things and signing things and throwing things, from dinner parties to dishes. There weren’t enough hours in the day for you to move out. Even when everything else had gone.
She was twenty when she met Charles Anstey, a man with a mission to take the void out of tabloid, at London Fashion Week. He was with his tall, dark and ugly clothesaholic French wife Lorraine. Twenty years ago she must have seemed like good value to a provincial boy in the outer suburbs of his youth but now she had the bitter, disappointed face and grudgingly anorexic body of the fading fashion victim in danger of becoming a fashion fatality.
They sat on either side of Charles, Lorraine nagging for clothes, Susan hustling for a job, like cross caricatures of pre- and post-feminist woman.
‘The young reader,’ Susan elaborated enthusiastically, telling him things he knew already but doing it in such an excited way that he couldn’t help but nod seriously, ‘that’s what you want – no one needs a dying readership. Get them young. And the women readers – don’t marginalize them. Think about them on every page. Newspapers aren’t just about news any more. You should be taking readers from the women’s magazines – not just from each other.’
She never found out if Lorraine got what she wanted from Charles Anstey – but she did. A week later he called her at Parvenu and asked her if she would like a job as a feature writer on the new Sunday Best.
She was a good journalist, but not that good. She had once thrown a scare into a rentboy trying to sell the dirt on a Labour MP just because she was young and idealistic and believed in the things he stood for. And because he was fun to lunch. She wouldn’t do that now, she thought. And a really good tabloid reporter would never have done it. She had been pleased when promotion to features editor lifted her out of the scramble for stories. And then for almost two years she had been deputy editor and next in line to the editor’s chair. Until now.
She was jolted in her seat and out of her dreams. The train had arrived.
And so had she.
TWO
The next day was a Tuesday, first day of the working week for the Sunday papers. She slept like a baby – one hour sleeping, one hour crying, and so on – rose early and dressed carefully.
Her best Azzedine Alalïa, plain and black and respectful. Ok, so it was tight as a tourniquet and had only a passing acquaintance with her thighs. But Charles had always been a leg man. Her earrings were small and jet, Cobra and Bellamy, and her shoes were simple and black, Kurt Geiger, with a very modest four-inch heel.
Talking of shoes, she expected it would be fairly easy to step into Charles’s, and she didn’t mean the ones still waiting patiently outside the Brighton bedroom fresh from their overnight cleaning. Poor Charles; he had died not with his boots on but his hard on.
The Best’s proprietor, Lord Tooth, was a sweetie, and a fairly senile one at that. Susan’s protégée, Zero, called anyone over forty a Senile Citizen, and Lord Tooth qualified nicely. He was fond of Susan, thought her very young and daring, and always asked her if the Beatles had re-formed yet. She didn’t have the heart to tell him that one of them was really dead and the other three were brain dead. It was a cinch.
It was nothing of the sort.
As she walked into the open-plan office, people sniggered in small groups. She thought she heard someone hum a few bars of the Dead March from Saul. Holding her head high she walked into her room and shut the door.
When Susan picked up one of the three telephones that squatted smugly on her desk, she was greeted by the noise she most dreaded hearing, that of five smacking wet kisses in a row. It was in this way that Ingrid Irving invariably greeted her. A few steps behind Susan but climbing fast, and well connected to a long line of dukes and judges in a way Susan could only dream of, Ingrid was a regular fixture on BBC panel games – telegenic and, if her grasp of gossip was anything to go by, telepathic. She was always described in print as ‘vivacious’, which meant that she giggled a lot and sucked up to anything in boxer shorts. She was the only person Susan knew who wore taffeta before noon. An old song of Frank Sinatra’s that her mother had played to death came to Susan’s mind, slightly subbed, at the thought of Ingrid. Picture a tarantula in tulle . . . that’s Ingrid with the grinning skull.
Now the five kisses exploded wetly in her ear, making her wince. ‘Darling, tell me everything! Did he die with his boots on? Or his trousers?’
‘So far as I know, he died with his overcoat on. Hello, Ingrid.’
‘Hello, darling.’ There was a barrage of popping corks at the other end of the phone, much shrieking and a few bars of ‘Tomorrow Belongs To Me’.
‘Why are you at home, Ingrid?’
‘Oh, I’m not, darling. Nose to the grindstone. Come on, you know what it’s like . . . even the seccies stay drunk until Friday. Just having a few mates over – Jasper, stop it. Leave that poor little messenger alone.’
‘Listen, Ingrid, I know even less about this terrible thing than you. I’m going to find Oliver and get the story. See you anon, OK?’
‘See you for lunch, sweetie.’
Not if I see you first, sweetie.
She rose grimly to her feet and walked next door into Oliver Fane’s office; number three on the paper and a prize snoot to boot. Like the rest of his colleagues he loathed her – for her age, her gender and a horde of less important reasons, such as believing that she was spectacularly untalented. ‘A woman’s place is on the woman’s page,’ said a memo on her desk soon after her promotion. She was sure it came from him.
He was lounging, with a smile on his face and his feet on the desk, but jumped up when he saw her.
‘Susan, Susan!’ He came round the desk and took her consolingly by the arm. ‘Have a seat! Heard the news? No, of course not, you’ve been too . . . upset.’
‘News?’
‘We’ve been sold!’
/> ‘Sold?’ She sat down quickly.
‘Sold!’ he said triumphantly, like a gleeful auctioneer unloading a naff antique. ‘This very morning!’
‘But . . .’
‘To Tobias Pope!’ He leered. ‘Not very good news, is it? Especially considering what a . . . special relationship you had with old Tooth.’ That put the tail-switching little counterjumper in her place. He had a 2:1 from Oxford and had trained at the Times and done the mandatory NUJ stint at the provincial hellhole. There was nothing he hated more than someone who hadn’t paid their dues – unless it was someone who got paid more than him. Susan Street was both.
Susan Street was stunned. Tobias Pope was as different a prospect from old Lord Tooth as you could imagine. With a reputation somewhere between Rupert Murdoch, G. Gordon Liddy and the Marquis de Sade, he ruled his communications empire with fear and loathing – his employees feared him, and he loathed them. He had been heard to refer to the people in his pay and his pocket as ‘my reps’ – short not for representatives, but for reptiles. If Lord Tooth would have seen Silly Putty in her hands, Tobias Pope was going to be US Steel.
Oliver Fane was burbling on. ‘Apparently it’s been on the cards for months. Only that idiot Tooth didn’t have the heart to tell Charles. He thought he’d be upset or something, because of their special relationship – I think that means he bonked Charles’s mother on a house party thirty years ago. Anyway, he planned to tell him today, but as the fickle finger of fate would have it . . . Susan?’
There was a thump. Susan Street had fainted.
When she came to she was being slapped, much harder than was absolutely necessary. A suntanned man in his fifties, the lines on his face a conspiracy between climate and a cruel nature, was hitting her rhythmically around the face with a black-gloved hand. ‘Ah, here it is!’ he said, looking straight into her wide-open eyes and smiling. Taking a glass of water from Oliver Fane’s secretary, he threw it straight at her chest.
She gasped in shock and horror. The skintight Alalïa seemed as though it might burst open like a peach hit by a hammer under the weight and wetness of her breasts. The assembled staff of the Sunday Best stood around and gaped. In their wildest, wettest dreams, the rude awakening of Susan Street had never been so beautifully, humiliatingly realized.
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