She looked right back at him. ‘Well, as rule I look after numero uno. But I made an exception for you. It’s a long time since I fucked a messenger boy, and as I remember they’re lively little things. And take away the influential parent and what are you? Not much more than a messenger boy in an Armani suit.’
He got to his feet, not easy considering the shape of the table. ‘I’ve had it with you. You are a manipulative—’
‘That’s a very Seventies word,’ she told him calmly.
‘A manipulative, calculating, cruel girl. I’d call you worse names, but you’d probably have an orgasm right here.’ He signalled to Svetlana who was loitering with intent to sell the story to Private Eye. ‘I think it’s so incredible the way you’re sitting there lecturing me about love, and my love for a good and honest woman at that, when you fucked that last guy to death, you’re fucking my father to an early grave and you probably still fuck that guy you live with when you can’t get to sleep and you can’t be bothered to jerk off.’
He was beautiful when he was angry. She felt her groin contract; she rubbed her thighs together and almost spasmed with desire. ‘Wait.’ She put a hand on his. He shook it off. ‘Do you want to fuck?’
He looked at her, his eyes blazing. ‘Where?’
‘There’s an alley—’
‘OK.’
Up the alley beside the Kremlin Club, she picked her way on high heels until they came to an alcove where rubbish was dumped by neighbourhood bars and restaurants. She could see his angry, beautiful face in the moonlight. ‘Here,’ she said.
He pointed at a dustbin. ‘Get over that trash.’
She stepped out of her shoes and tights, and laid them on top of her briefcase. She bent over the dustbin, holding on to it. He stepped up behind her, opened her thighs and entered her immediately. He jabbed deep, hurting her and meaning to, a dozen or so times before stopping, ejaculating and withdrawing so fast that she cried out.
She turned and smiled at him. He was wiping his cock on her tights. They had cost fifty-two pounds from Fogal of New Bond Street. Never mind, she would claim a new pair on expenses. She could just see Max’s face as he read her weekly claim sheet: ‘New pair of Fogal tights to replace ones ruined by boss’s sperm.’ She laughed.
‘Is it like that with her?’
‘No.’ He zipped himself up and threw her tights down. ‘That’s why I love her.’ He walked away in the moonlight without looking back.
‘Hello, stranger,’ Susan said as Joe Moorsom slid on to the stool beside her at Annie’s Bar with a wary smile. Stranger was right; it had been three years since they had last met. At first she had been hurt by his avoidance, but she was sensitive enough to understand that he had been severely shaken by what they had gone through together. It was like being in a car crash; you just wanted to walk away from it.
He had talked about it on the phone soon afterwards. ‘I feel dreadful, Sue,’ he had said. ‘I can’t help it. I’m a socialist, I believe in treating people as I would wish to be treated. And we bullied him, just because we’re adults and professionals and know how to throw a scare, and he’s just a defenceless boy.’
‘Joe, are we talking about the same person? Because your little friend was about as defenceless as a cruise missile crossed with Barbra Streisand.’
‘There must have been a better way,’ he said stubbornly.
‘Yes. It’s called garrotting.’
Since then his career had ascended uninterrupted by any whiff of sell-out or scandal. The mood of ‘affluent altruism’ predicted by the market researchers to be the political wave of the Nineties made him even more of a cinch for the next Cabinet. At thirty-nine he had the harassed good looks of a man with too many responsibilities for his years, which only served to make him more respected. Only a few people knew that the look was the look of a man with a secret and a fear.
Within a year of their collusion, Susan was kicked upstairs and made an editor. They had both been busy people, though not too busy to talk on the phone every six weeks or so. But the calls had stopped the day Pope bought the Best.
‘Hello.’ He smiled tightly. ‘Though I shouldn’t really be talking to you.’
She couldn’t believe his cheek. ‘I’m still the same person, Joe. Are you any less of a socialist because the man who’s your leader now is more right-wing than the man you were voted in under?’
He shook his head irritably. ‘It’s not the same.’
‘He’s your boss.’
‘I answer only to the people,’ he said pompously.
‘And they’re a hard jury, aren’t they, Joe?’
He looked at her sharply. ‘Well, Sue, what can I do for you?’
‘You can let me buy you a drink.’
‘I’m on duty.’
‘How’s Jill?’
‘Fine.’
‘And the kids?’
‘Great.’
‘They must be teenagers now.’
He looked at her hard. ‘That’s right.’
‘Talking of whom, did you ever hear from our mutual friend again?’
‘No. Never.’ He looked at his hands. ‘We scared him all right. Much more than was necessary. I still think about it.’
You still think about him, you mean. ‘He’d be . . . seventeen now?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘Joe,’ She sipped her vodkatini. ‘People are talking. My editor, the reporters. They’re scared of what you’re doing, the questions in this place, and they’re asking around the grapevine about you. They don’t know his name and age yet, but rentboys are not known for their loyalty—’
‘—any more than journalists.’
‘—or politicans. If someone hangs around enough bars flashing enough notes, sooner or later someone’s going to come along who knows someone whose BF slept with that divine butch NUM politico. And the hack will cross his palm with a piece of silver or a Gold American Express card and he’ll lead him straight to Rupert Grey. And Joe, you know Pope. This, with your record on child abuse, is a gift to him.’ She drained her glass.
Joe Moorsom laughed softly. Then he shook his head and looked at her with loathing. ‘And you’re the gift wrapping, aren’t you? You’re the one they sent along to put the pressure on with a pretty please and a bit of harmless flirtation.’ He whistled. ‘God, I knew women could be crafty bitches. But you really take the prize, Susan.’
Scratch a fag and find a misogynist, Zero often said; like Gertrude Stein, she was a lesbian who believed that male homosexuals were male first and homosexual second, and thus worthy of loathing: ‘They’re all woman-haters.’
‘But that’s like saying that all lesbians are man-haters!’
‘Of course they are – why on earth do you think we only sleep with women?’ Zero looked at her as if she was a cretin. ‘We vote with our cunts. But the difference is that it’s fair to hate men and unfair to hate women. It’s like blacks and whites. Blacks are quite right to hate whites, after all they’ve put them through. But if a white hates blacks, there’s something wrong with them. Nessy pa?’
Susan could never think of a good argument against this point. Looking at Joe Moorsom’s sneering face and hearing him spit ‘women’ as though he was talking about syphilitic mass murderers, she resolved never to bother to try to think of one again.
‘Just stop that right now,’ she hissed. ‘I don’t know whether it’s escaped your notice, but you’re in this mess because of what some scheming little boy did to you – not your wife, not your mother and certainly not me. Not even really the Best or Tobias X. Pope. This started with a fag.’ She decided their friendship was history now anyway and hit him with her worst shot. ‘Two fags, counting you. And I really resent having my gender used against me when this whole situation arose because, yet again, some man was led by his cock and didn’t give a damn about how many people would be hurt by his sordid little bout of sexual incontinence.’ She stood up.
‘And I resent having my sexuality used agains
t me,’ he hissed, sliding off his barstool to face her. They sounded like two rattlesnakes on the verge of divorce. ‘Especially by the type of newspaper which thinks that morals is a surname common in Latin America and little else. I think you can find your own way out. Just leave by St Stephen’s Gate and follow the gutter and the stench. Eventually you’ll get back to your paper.’
‘So you won’t co-operate?’
‘I’ll co-operate with whoever wants to destroy your newspaper, Susan, that’s who I’ll co-operate with. I’ll nail your boss if I have to lose my career, my wife and my deposit in the process. I’m not some naive little rentboy you can throw a scare into, remember.’ He banged on the bar and called to the barman, ‘Another vodka for the lady. Better make it a double.’ Lowering his voice he leaned close. ‘You’re going to need a little Russian courage to go back and explain to your boss what a cock-up you made of your nasty little mission. Goodbye.’
She awoke that night from a troubled sleep to hear the black Braun alarm clock beside her bed doing what came naturally. She peered at the dial: just after 3 a.m. This couldn’t be so – the clock had never contradicted its daily time-set once in the five years she had owned it.
‘What?’ she heard Matthew moaning. ‘Whassat?’
As she groped for the clock, the burglar alarm screeched. Matthew sat bolt upright. ‘Shit!’ He ran downstairs as she fumbled with the clock. It wouldn’t stop. Yet it wasn’t stuck.
‘It must be stuck!’ she heard Matthew yell. She ran to the window and leaned out; other people in the quiet square were doing the same, throwing down ice-cold early morning oaths like buckets of water on a rogue tom-cat. Behind her the telephone rang, adding a third voice to the shrill duet. She picked it up.
‘Are you sitting comfortably?’ a familiar voice purred. ‘Then I’ll begin.’ There was a laugh, and a click.
Down in the street, the horn on Matthew’s Renault and the alarm on its door started up in unison and earnest. Her head seemed full of white noise, ready to burst; tinnitus with a production job courtesy of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound. She lay down, pulled a pillow over her head and screamed.
The model looked like a beautiful Martian but she was, Susan quickly discovered, the only human being in the place.
The place was a secluded Scottish castle which looked like an extortionate Hollywood stage set for a sword and sorcery epic but was, in fact, a health farm. She had called in sick at work and fled there the morning after Lejeune’s latest assault, fearing for her composure. She had had to use her press connections to pull strings, since the establishment only took twenty-four clients at any one time, and now here she was on the fifth day of her week, sitting by the indoor pool with the model.
Six foot one, with albino hair and matching pink eyes courtesy of contact lenses, she was known professionally as the Mouse. She was the thinnest girl Susan had ever seen, so much so that the translucent skin of her twenty-two-year-old face was pulled tight over her bones to an extent normally only seen in severe cases of face-lifting.
She had come to the castle on the insistence of her agency, who had driven her there both physically and metaphorically by threatening to strike her off their books. They were the best, and Mouse had been used to the best ever since she abandoned Arkansas and the given name Clare for London and fame at the age of eighteen. She had complied, and here she was; not to lose weight, of course, but to lose a career-menacing habit comprised of narcotics and a taste for the lowlife.
Now Mouse swished her hand in the water and pulled out a bottle of Krug. ‘Nearly cold enough, fuck it. This last old rich guy I had, he was such a wine snob, and so possessive. “Let it breathe, Jean-Pierre” he’d say to the waiter. Shame he didn’t feel the need to let me do the same . . .’
She had been in residence for a week when Susan arrived and had already made waves in more places than the hydropool: with her stubborn refusal to join any of the exercise classes, her loud screams of anguish and confusion whenever a suntan in any shade or form was mentioned, the chaos she had caused when persuaded to try her hand at archery, her habit of streaking naked through the leisure craft classes shrieking ‘WOOOOOOOH! I GOTTA WEAVE A BASKET!’ and her ceaseless demands for sweet foods from kitchens ‘which make the soup line during the Depression look like the horn of Cornucopia,’ she told Susan with some feeling (her father was a history professor and the Mouse had a good education and brain, which she concealed the way less modern and gifted girls concealed spots). She had been discovered on the second morning of her stay scratching at the kitchen doors and begging, ‘Cheesecake, cheesecake!’
Susan, venturing out from her room after a good night’s sleep, had found the Mouse in the indoor pool. After five self-conscious minutes the Mouse had swum over with a long, lean, lazy crawl; she swam as though she was modelling the new Gaultier but was in fact naked. She cased Susan’s off-the-shoulder black swimsuit before venturing an opinion. ‘Montana?’
‘Yes.’ Susan smiled encouragingly. She was pleased for a chance to talk to this strange creature she recognized from the covers of Marie Claire and The Face.
‘Guess where I got this?’ The Mouse heaved herself up out of the water, exposing her long ribcage, and fell back giggling and splashing. ‘ARKANSAS!’
‘Could they do me one the same?’
‘Hey, you’ve got a great shape. You’ve got a shape, period, which is more than I do!’ The Mouse trod water for probably the first time in her life. ‘So why aren’t you out showing it off in one of those cute little tennis dresses? Or golfing slacks? Or playing croquet in a Chanel two-piece? Or jogging? Or doing yoga, or aerobics, or cycling, or clay pigeon shooting? Or availing yourself of any one of the facilities we’ll have to hand over an arm and a leg for when we finally get sprung?’
‘I can’t stand physical jerks. In more ways than one.’
‘Hey, great!’ Mouse peered at Susan. ‘Are you here to lose weight?’
‘Only in the purse.’
‘I figured that. What you here for?’
‘Tired and emotional.’
‘Me too.’ The Mouse swam beside her. ‘This health stuff is a load of garbage. I never looked better than I did when I was twenty and I was taking two grams of coke a week, smoking horse three times a day, getting four hours’ sleep a night and having the crap kicked out of me every ten days by this fantastic spade I was fucking. I swear, I’ve never looked or felt better. But then I went crazy. Since then I’ve become versed in moderation.’ She giggled. ‘Only one gram a week!’
As a veteran, the Mouse had taken Susan under her spindly wing. They went for all-body massages – ‘Get off of my case and on to my face,’ the Mouse told a beautiful but gay masseur when he lectured her about her spine – and to the tennis courts to sneer at the hearties – ‘Hey, baby, want to lose ten pounds of ugly fat? Cut your head off!’ Now they had been corralled into the indoor, ozone-purified pool, where drink seemed a small concession towards keeping them quiet.
Mouse pulled the Krug’s cork with her perfect Arkansas teeth. ‘Jeez, but I’ll be glad to go home on Sunday. You too I bet. Promise you’ll call me?’
‘Of course.’
‘I swear, I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for. I visualized Disneyland with enemas. Horny masseurs. Dyke sessions in the sauna. All this place has given me is a raving case of alcoholism, on top of everything I came here to be cured of.’ She swigged hard and passed the bottle to Susan.
Susan drank. ‘You remind me of a friend of mine. Called Zero.’
‘Zero Blondell!’
‘The same.’
‘Christ! – that one. A man with a twat – the deadliest combination on the planet. I had a fling with her – oh, a couple of years ago. I was just coming out of this relationship with this guy who’d only go with girls who wore Little Black Dresses and nothing else. When he promised to shower me with the perfect adornments for the LBD, I visualized a wagonload of square-cut diamonds. But what he meant was a black eye eve
ry Friday. Said it completed the LBD like nothing else on earth. Look at Anouk Aimée in La Dolce Vita. Boy, do I know how to bring out the worst in a boy . . . ’
So said Mouse. She was beautiful, clever, fun, but Susan was left cold by her pink eyes and ennui. She wanted to be alone for a while, and thought she might as well utilize a few of the castle’s resources before she went home, so she stood up and, knowing the answer, said, ‘I’m going to take a sauna. Coming?’
As she had known, Mouse shook her albino crop violently. ‘Uh uh. It’s more than my job’s worth.’
‘I’ll see you in about half an hour then. Will you still be there?’
‘Sure thing.’ The Mouse reached into the pool for a second bottle. ‘In the zone called prone.’
The third sauna Susan tried was empty, and she peeled off her swimming costume and sank down on a bench with a sigh of relief. She lay down, closed her eyes and let her mind float up, up and away like a helium balloon cut loose at last. David, Pope, the paper, especially Lejeune – she left them all behind, earthbound, gaping up at her as she melted away into the shimmering heat like a mirage. She fell asleep with a smile on her face.
She was aware something was wrong even before she was awake: she knew in that half-conscious state that usually ends with a sharp start and waking. This time the start never came; instead she felt herself dip idly and shallowly into consciousness, sampling it as though she was testing bath water with her elbow. She was just about to give up waking or taking a bath as a bad job and go back to sleep when something inside her screamed: WAKE UP.
With an effort she pulled herself into a sitting position and almost fell off the bench with dizziness. It was the heat: the sauna was hotter than Rio, hotter than Sun City. The sweat on her body had ceased to bead, and now slathered her with a greasy second skin, making her think of the stuff cross-Channel swimmers covered themselves in.
She stood up and staggered to the door, colours dancing before her in changing formations as though she had kaleidoscopes pressed to both eyes. She clutched at the door handle as if it was David Weiss’s schlong, and tugged.
Ambition Page 14