Size Matters

by Judy Astley

  Katinka sniffed in the van all the way from the station. Jay, parking outside Mrs Howard’s, handed her the box of tissues from the glove compartment but Katinka refused. They’d all get streaming colds at this rate, Jay thought, pulling out a wad of the tissues and stuffing them into Katinka’s hand. This was like taking small children around. Any minute now she’d have to resort to cramming a tissue over the girl’s nose and shouting ‘Blow!’ at her. Mrs Howard wasn’t going to be impressed by a constant sniffer and they could really do with this gig, now that Mrs Caldwell and her folding fetish had buggered off to another company.

  Mrs Howard at least looked delighted to see them. She was, Jay could tell, the wonderful sort of woman who tidied up the place before cleaners arrived. You’d never have to sort through a week’s strewn-about newspapers and a sea of socks in this house. They should be through in a couple of hours, no problem.

  ‘A nice cup of tea before you start, ladies?’ Mrs Howard asked. Katinka immediately plonked the Henry down on the hall floor and brightened up. Jay wanted to get them well under way before they slowed down for a break, but Katinka was always happier and speedier after coffee and a biscuit. Two of Mrs Howard’s lodgers were making their way down the stairs. They were tall girls, very leggy and pretty. They said hello and then carried on talking to each other in a mid-European language. Jay followed Mrs Howard through to the kitchen but Katinka and Anya lingered, chatting cheerily to the two girls as they collected coats from the hooks on the hall wall.

  ‘That’s nice, isn’t it?’ Mrs Howard said as she switched the kettle on and offered Jay one of the high kitchen chairs by the counter. ‘Someone new for them to chat to. My girls don’t get to meet others who speak their language around here. They don’t get out in the evenings either, well they do for work but not socially. They’re always so busy, poor things, but in the daytime, when they’re up and about, they’re good company and they like to have somewhere safe to be.’

  ‘Safe?’ Jay was curious. Were these suburban avenues, perhaps especially this square mile where each road was named after an English poet, full of leering predators? Were there hundreds of men who, like her, had mistaken this place for a house of ill repute? Perhaps, at night, the gatepost was thronging with raincoated potential punters lurking in the shadows and kicking themselves for getting it so wrong.

  ‘Well, you know, they’re pretty young girls, a long way from home and working in the entertainment business. Someone’s got to take care of them.’

  Jay began unloading her box of cleaning products while Mrs Howard bustled about putting flapjacks on a plate and measuring spoonfuls of tea into her flowery teapot. The girls would feel spoiled, she thought, wondering why all their clients didn’t treat them as royally as this. It would make a nice change for them to feel cherished, if this kind of treatment continued, so long as they didn’t take too much advantage and start hanging around the kitchen like hopeful, hungry puppies. They’d soon suss that Mrs Howard was the caring sort and could well end up being cooked a three-course lunch every time they came to clean.

  ‘You bring all your own equipment, do you?’ Mrs Howard asked, looking over the selection of products and dusters that Jay had unpacked on the worktop. ‘Because you don’t need to, there’s plenty in that cupboard over there.’

  ‘Ah but you see, the girls are used to what we’ve got,’ Jay explained. ‘If they come up against unfamiliar brands everywhere we go then you’ll never know if they’re putting neat bleach on your floor or washing-up liquid down the loo.’

  Katinka and Anya were in very giggly spirits. Jay found it hard to get them to concentrate as they chatted away to each other. When they were up in the top bathroom she could hear them shrieking with laughter.

  ‘Happy souls, aren’t they?’ Mrs Howard commented, coming into the big terracotta sitting room where Jay was giving a hand, polishing photo frames.

  ‘They’re not always so noisy.’ Jay felt she should perhaps apologize. Another time, there might be sleeping people to consider. She’d have to have a word.

  Anya and Katinka were still in high spirits at the end of their couple of hours. They were off to the Dachshund Man in the afternoon so she hoped they’d still be feeling energetic enough to get round his book-filled, musty house with appropriate gusto.

  ‘You two sound very happy,’ she said as they loaded the van. ‘What was so funny?’

  ‘Is the girls,’ Anya told her in little more than a whisper and glancing back at the house, smirking. ‘They dance.’

  ‘I know, Mrs Howard told me. Some kind of theatre work.’

  Anya looked puzzled. ‘Theatre? No, club.’

  Jay was backing out of the driveway and turned round to see where she was going, in time to see Katinka miming the removal of her bra.

  ‘Club like no clothes,’ Anya went on, patting her knees. ‘Sitting-dancing, for the men!’

  ‘Lap dancing? Those girls who live there?’ Jay slammed the brakes on, unable to drive and think this through at the same time. Wow – the things that went on in the leafy suburbs, after all. Here was a perfectly-respectable looking house, owned by a woman of perfectly run-of-the-mill niceness, sheltering a selection of exotic dancers. It wasn’t exactly the bawdy premises as reported by Rory’s Out for the Lads magazine, but it was astonishingly close.

  ‘A dinner party? Uh?’ Samantha didn’t have to look quite so astounded. You’d think she’d never heard the term before. Perhaps she hadn’t. Perhaps he’d really miscalculated her grown-upness and she’d rather munch a Macca on a bench down the town square than sit at a table with all the right poncy cutlery, nibbling bits of squid and rocket and talking about something remotely intelligent. Rory tried to control his breathing. This was his big chance and he wasn’t going to blow it now by stammering and backing off and blushing and looking like a total dick.

  ‘Yes. In this penthouse I use.’ How nonchalant did that sound, or was it just ridiculous at his age?

  ‘You know. It’s just usual stuff,’ he shrugged. ‘Food, wine, music, conversation, all that.’

  He tried to keep his voice perfectly normal, as if she was the one who was being completely off the wall for not getting it, not him. It wasn’t easy. In the empty classroom she kept looking over his shoulder towards the door as if he’d got her trapped in there. More likely it was because Shelley Caine was right outside, earwigging at the gap in the door and geeing up to have a complete giggle-fest.

  ‘So, like, you can cook then?’ She sounded doubtful but not completely a lost hope. Put it this way, Rory told himself, she hadn’t actually said no straight off.

  ‘Yeah, course I can cook.’ He tried to make it come out in a ‘Can’t everyone?’ sort of way, but at the same time hoping he’d pitched it so she wouldn’t expect Marco Pierre bloody White.

  ‘OK then.’ Samantha suddenly beamed her full thousand-megawatt best smile at him. ‘I’d love to come,’ she said simply, and so, oh so very, very unexpectedly. Almost enough to turn him into a believer, just name your god, your religion, he’d take it.

  ‘I’ve got a dress that needs a try-out,’ she went on, slinking off towards the door, yellow hair wafting out. He leapt past her, pulling open the door to let her out ahead of him. Might as well start on the gentleman stuff now. They liked that sort of thing, dinner-party-type women.

  She looked back over her shoulder at him. ‘Let me know nearer the day, what time and where you want me and everything,’ she said, dazzling him again with the teeth. Oh he would, he promised, he would.

  Result! Fucking result! Rory punched the air, accidentally clipping the edge of the door frame as he did but not, in the exhilaration of the moment, feeling even the slightest pang of pain. He reached into his pocket for his mobile and punched in a text to Freddie.

  ‘Sorted. What next?’

  FIFTEEN

  Rosemary Conley

  Rory was looking at himself reflected in the glass-fronted cupboard opposite the table. He was stock-still and zomb
ie-ish, his mouth gaping unattractively and his fork suspended in the air as he lost all animation, stuck frozen with the piece of juicy pink steak halfway to his mouth. She couldn’t be saying what he thought she was saying. And if she was, why did she and Dad think it was so funny?

  ‘A houseful of lap dancers!’ She was all amusement and curiosity. ‘Only a few innocent tree-lined avenues away!’

  ‘I might have to escort you to work,’ Rory heard his dad saying. ‘Help you carry your mop.’

  Oh huge joke. So what about the Charles bloke, then? They didn’t know about him, did they? What had he been doing there?

  The steak finally made its way into Rory’s mouth. He had to pretend nothing was out of the ordinary (apart from that his mum was now Official Cleaner to a cathouse) or she or Ellie would start asking him what was wrong. In his head he was jumping, no, leaping, to a good dozen sleazy conclusions. He hadn’t much taken to Charles, partly out of suspicion (and oh how right, well how nearly right) about what he was doing coming out of a brothel. For one thing he’d almost completely ignored Ellie and Freddie and himself, as if when he was working out how best to do his impressing of Delphine’s family he’d put ‘talk to teenagers’ right down the bottom of the list. And although Rory had been listening really hard, hoping to catch a clue or even a mention about what his connection with Masefield Avenue was, he’d hardly given away anything at all about himself. All they knew after he’d been and gone was more or less what they knew before he’d arrived. He flew planes and was going to marry (why, for buggery’s sake when there was all that aircrew totty?) Auntie Delphine. Oh and they knew he bought flowers in great big impressive bunches and that he was ‘interested’ in dancing. Well you could bloody say that again.

  ‘Dancing’, my knob, Rory thought. What was it Cathy had said after he’d gone? Oh yeah, that he wasn’t a ‘high divulger’. Well you wouldn’t want to divulge that actually you were a club-owning pimp, would you? Not to a bunch of total strangers, some of whom were about to become a set of in-laws. No wonder he’d been a bit shifty about his ‘club’ venture.

  Should I say something? Rory wondered. What would Freddie do? Keep schtum or blurt it out for a laugh? He’d go for the laugh, every time, that was Freddie. So would he . . .

  ‘Um . . . so that place, sorry I wasn’t really listening,’ he began, shrugging a nonchalant lack of interest. They were all attention. That was the trouble with having really polite parents, they did actually stop what they were gossiping about and listen to you. Sometimes, when you were wittering on, you just wished you had parents who said, ‘Oh give it a rest, Rory’ instead of saying, ‘Oh I see’ and, ‘How do you feel about that?’ and stuff.

  ‘That house in Masefield Avenue.’ He munched on some salad. Perhaps they’d tell him not to talk with his mouth full, then he’d be able to cop out. Silence: they were all ears, all three of them. ‘Is it that one with the blue fence, called something beginning with an “H”?’

  He didn’t want to look at his mum. He reached across for a piece of garlic bread that he honestly didn’t feel much like eating.

  ‘Halcyon. That’s the one. Why?’

  He looked at her. She was trying not to laugh. Why? Oh yeah – she’d been poking about in his room. She’d said she’d seen what he read. She’d been in Out for the Lads.

  ‘No reason.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s just I saw Delphine’s beloved fiancé coming out of there before he came to us for lunch, that’s all.’

  ‘Charles?’ They both shrieked it together, his dad cracking up into laughter again. ‘But you can’t have!’

  ‘I did!’ he insisted, ‘It was his car outside and everything. Me and Freddie saw him coming out of the gate. He had the flowers. And then he came here, straight after.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you say “Hello, I just saw you in Masefield Avenue”?’ Trust Ellie to ask the tricky question.

  ‘Well . . . er I wasn’t sure. I didn’t see the car when he arrived, not till he was going and only then cos we went to the front door because of the rat.’ He could feel himself getting hot. Ellie was looking at him with her face all screwed up with hard thinking.

  ‘So what were you doing down Masefield Avenue anyway?’

  He was just about ready for this one, thank goodness. ‘We’d been down the park to kick the ball about. We were on the way back.’

  It would have to do. It wasn’t what you’d call a short cut and they all knew it, but if they asked anything else about him, well, he’d just have to remind them who was the one who was turning out to be a bit iffy in this conversation. It wasn’t someone whose name began with ‘R’, that was for sure.

  ‘Delphine can’t possibly know, can she?’ Jay asked Greg while she was lying in the bath that night up to her neck in enough hot bubbles to obliterate all trace of any lingering Eau de Flash (pine). ‘She surely can’t have any idea that the man she’s going to marry has some kind of involvement with a houseful of lap dancers? She’d go ballistic. It’s so not her. She was always a bit prissy about sex. Same way that Win is.’

  Win’s advice regarding men had been firmly old-fashioned and ruthlessly trade-led.

  ‘A man won’t expect to pay for goods if he’s already used them for free,’ she’d warned the two girls on the day that Delphine (then sixteen) was getting ready to go on a date with a twenty-two-year-old man from her Latin American formation troupe. Audrey was amazed at Win for allowing Delphine to go, certain that this was someone far too old for her. She was, though, so deeply curious to know if the girl was going to glam herself up to look as if she could lie about her age, that she’d sent Jay round with a swatch of Lycra fabrics for Delphine to look at for a dress for her next dance contest.

  Jay had sat on Delphine’s bed, crumpling the satin rose-swagged quilt and watching while she did her make-up and put her hair up in an arrangement of artistically dangling Carmen’d curls. She did look older, Jay would be able to report back, a good ten years older. She not only looked older but as if she was a relic from another generation. Whereas Jay and all her friends were a raggy mixed bunch of Goth, punk, New Romantic and charity-shop treasures, Delphine always looked as if she’d been worshipping at the Jackie Kennedy shrine and tended to get herself up in coordinated separates, pointy court shoes, pale, sheer tights and rigid on-the-knee A-line skirts. She was also keen on trims – pocket flaps and bows and collars and superfluous bits of frill always seemed to figure somewhere. Win approved deeply (not something a normal teenager would aspire to, surely?) and was forever pointing out to Jay and April that it always paid to be ‘well groomed’. The term made Jay think of poor old Cobweb, who would have appreciated Delphine’s attention with a curry-comb a lot more often than she’d been prepared to give it.

  ‘I think your mum means you shouldn’t shag on a first date,’ Jay giggled to Delphine as soon as Win was out of hearing range.

  Delphine had looked horrified, ‘I wouldn’t . . . do . . . that even on a twentieth. Not without . . .’

  ‘A condom?’ Jay ventured cheekily.

  ‘Without at least being very nearly engaged,’ Delphine had hissed, still outraged. ‘I’m not that cheap.’

  ‘Sex isn’t about price,’ Jay had told her, with all the high-minded hopefulness of seventeen. ‘Cos that’s what you and your mum make it sound like. Swopping sex for an engagement ring is just the same as prostitution.’ It sounded a good enough argument.

  ‘Well no-one has to have sex,’ Delphine had pointed out. ‘For payment, for rings or for irresponsible fun. I just don’t intend to till I’m ready. Men respect that. And right now,’ she said, twirling in front of the mirror and admiring her rather formal slate-blue shift dress with matching long jacket, ‘what I’m ready for is what I’m having tonight. I don’t know about the sort of boys you go out with but I prefer a man who thinks I’m worth being taken out for dinner and being given flowers and chocolates and being treated like a lady.’

  With that, she’d smirk
ed at Jay and flounced out of her immaculate floral bedroom, leaving a trail of expensive grown-up scent. Jay, whose various impoverished sixth-form boyfriends never came up with anything more in the way of sustenance than a half of cider and a packet of dry-roast nuts from the rack beside the optics, could only shrug and marvel at this sophisticated parallel dating universe that ladies like Delphine inhabited.

  ‘If Delphine doesn’t know, I don’t think you should be the one to tell her,’ Greg now advised. ‘Maybe she’ll be perfectly happy with Charles and never need to know anything about it. Maybe there’s nothing to know and he was just delivering a . . . a, I don’t know, a misdirected letter or a Neighbourhood Watch poster. On the other hand,’ and he chuckled, a deep-down dirty laugh.

  ‘On the other hand what?’ Jay asked.

  ‘On the other hand it could be he’s using his convenient working travel arrangements to link up with the dodgiest of the Russian Mafia and recruit a whole string of hookers for the London meat trade. He could be running a whopping great vice empire going on out there, starting with Masefield Avenue and ending up who knows where, maybe, ooh, all the way to Surbiton?’

  ‘Oh sure. OK it was a fun notion at first, but,’ Jay laughed, ‘I think not, somehow. I mean, look at the men around here – solid, respectable, a bit dull. A whole lot of Sunday car-polishers, Archers-listeners and armchair football pundits.’

  ‘Gee, thanks,’ Greg said.

  ‘Not you! But you know what I mean. I know you can only speculate on other people’s debauchery but if it was all going off in Masefield Avenue, Mrs Howard would have to have one of those special rails for tying up dog leads outside, like they’ve got outside Waitrose. Dog-walking is about the only chance for men from round here to get out on their own, unless they’ve tunnelled out to Homebase for DIY bits. They’re always being hustled into cars to do quality time with the kids on the school run, or they’re dragged down the tennis club with the keen wife. Two of the pubs along the main road have had to close for lack of traditional early evening bloke custom. All the men are rushing home to get the chicken breasts into a tangy marinade and knock up a salsa verde.’