‘Perhaps you will tell her I’m truly grateful,’ she said, feeling that the words were much too weak for the profound emotion behind them. ‘I can’t thank her enough. I feel I’ve been given the chance to start my life over again. Can’t I even write to her?’
Véronique nodded. ‘You can give a letter to me. I’ll see it reaches the woman you met. That’s who you mean, isn’t it?’
‘Oh stop pretending, Véronique. That was Madame Bernard, wasn’t it?’
‘Who knows? I have worked for her for twenty-five years and I’ve never met her. I never met the woman who talked to you either. I can tell you nothing. But I can tell you you are absolutely unique in the history of this organization, miss. Anyone who tried what you did would have been taught a lesson she would never have forgotten. You’re much luckier than you deserve to be.’
Monty felt reborn after her weeks of therapy. For the first time in her life she had seen herself as she really was, faced herself honestly, reviewed her life and acknowledged that so far her only strategy for dealing with pain had been to blot it out with drugs or drink.
Cathy was waiting for her at Heathrow, looking deliciously severe in a black suit with white silk shirt and a bootlace tie.
‘How did it go? Are you OK?’ she asked with concern as she hugged her sister.
‘More OK than I’ve ever been in my life,’ Monty assured her. ‘But it’s so good to see you. I’ve missed you so much.’
‘What kind of place was it? You just said it was something to do with drugs?’ Cathy gave her sister a keen glance, aware that she had been deceived.
‘It was a treatment centre for addicts,’ Monty said bluntly.
‘But you’re not an addict – I mean, you’ve always taken things, I’ve known that, but …’
‘Yes I am an addict, Cathy. Always have been and always will be. The only thing that’s different is now I know how to live with it.’ Realizing that her sister would be anguished if she knew the whole truth of how she had been living for the past few months, Monty told her only the barest details.
As she anticipated, Cathy was full of remorseful sympathy. ‘How terrible! Oh, Monty, I’m so glad you’re all right. If only I’d known what was going on. If only I hadn’t been so obsessed with my business. Why on earth didn’t you tell me?’ Suddenly she hated herself for her single-minded ambition. The signs had been there – Monty’s pallor, her thinness, the behaviour that seemed confident but had an undertone of lost hope. Why hadn’t she noticed, why had she failed the person she loved so much?
‘I didn’t want to tell you, Cathy. It was just something else I couldn’t deal with. I was ashamed, I guess, I was sure you’d disapprove. I think I wanted to kill myself, too. You know when you wanted to kill yourself, you didn’t tell me because you knew I’d have stopped you. I was determined to go over the edge.’
Cathy held Monty to her, ignoring the crush of the crowded airport around them. ‘We must never, ever, do that to each other again. You’re right, we’re each other’s lifelines. We keep each other afloat. If you ever let go of me again, I’ll know what’s going on.’
They walked to Cathy’s car. ‘I was in a different world, too,’ Monty continued, not wanting to hurt her sister any more. ‘I lied to everyone and most of all I lied to myself. I had no real idea how serious things were until I got to the Centre and had to do without the stuff. Then I realized I was just totally dependent.’
‘I should have known. I’ll never forgive myself.’
‘There’s no way you could have known, Cathy. When it comes to people who’re going down, it takes one to know one. That woman, Madame Bernard, knew where I was at because I suspect she’s hit the bottom herself a few times. And I sensed it. If you’d tried to pack me off on a cure I’d have resisted like fury. Coming from her, though, I could accept it.’
‘It just doesn’t make sense. Why would anyone do something like that for a total stranger?’ Cathy shook her head, her thick brown hair swinging heavily as she did so. ‘Nothing is for nothing, Monty. That woman wants something from you and she’ll call in the favour one day.’
In London, Monty found that a lot had changed in twelve weeks. At the apartment she shared with Cindy, she found a note saying, ‘Dear Miss Bourton, please telephone this number when you return.’ It was signed with a man’s name which she did not recognize. Monty steeled herself and called the number, and a man’s voice answered. ‘I’m Cindy’s brother,’ he explained.
‘I didn’t know she had a brother.’
‘She didn’t talk about her family much, I gather.’ He sounded reserved, upper-class. Why was he using the past tense?
‘Were you very close to my sister?’ the man asked her. Monty thought about the question. It was quite obvious, now that her reasoning faculty was no longer hiding behind a drug-induced indifference, that Cindy had waited with the deadly patience of a predator to catch her at a weak moment and get her using heroin; then she had become her supplier and financed her own habit that way. How fond could one be of a friend who did something like that?
‘I didn’t really know her very well,’ Monty told him.
‘I hope this won’t distress you too much, then. My sister was found dead a couple of months ago. She had accidentally injected herself with too much of some drug – you knew she was an addict, I take it?’
Monty made all the appropriate noises of sympathy. It seemed her brother cared very little about Cindy. Cruel and calculating as Cindy had been, Monty felt grief for her dead friend and at the back of her mind the conviction persisted that Cindy’s death had been no accident. She had always had her habit so well under control; Cindy just wasn’t the type to make a mistake about a dose, or get drunk and forget how much stuff she’d done.
She decided that she did not want to stay at the apartment. She could go to her sister, if she was in town, but staying with Cathy would be fine for only for a couple of days. Then the fact that Monty usually went to bed at 3 am and Cathy usually got up at 5 am would become more than ties of blood could stand.
Instead Monty called Swallow Lamotte, who at once suggested she stay with her and take up her old job. Since 1965 Swallow had rechristened the company three times, sold it twice and liquidated it once; its present title was Urban Survival Services. Everyone had white T-shirts with USS printed on them in red.
Swallow had also transformed herself, from a coltish good-time blonde to a dynamic woman with bright-red hennaed hair and the silhouette of an African fertility goddess. She still had fabulous legs and ripe, soft lips; obesity had not quieted her dress sense – she wore a purple boiler suit, a pink poncho and red cowboy boots.
‘You’re just in time,’ she announced to Monty. ‘We’ve got five people wanting punk waitresses for parties, and we have to find a tank for a David Bowie concert in Battersea Park next week. And you’re not staying with me, because we’ve got to look after the house Jack Nicholson’s renting while he’s away on location, so you’re staying there. And next week the Joe Jones Band are flying in; the joint’ll really be jumping then.’
‘I bet.’ Monty was depressed to find herself on the fringe of the music business, once more a kid outside the shop window of success looking wistfully at the good things which she could not have.
‘What are the Joe Jones Band here for – not another tour?’
‘No, another album – they’ve decided to record at Paleward Priory. Now here’s the card-index …’ Swallow dumped a plastic box of file cards in front of Monty, ‘Find me six punks for Lady Swabo tonight, blondes if possible.’
Already, the defiant punks had been swallowed up by the British propensity for absorbing dissidents into the social structure.
Tourists were starting to penetrate outer Chelsea, looking for the weird creatures with safety-pins through their noses who obligingly dressed up on Saturday and left their homes in the suburbs for an outrageous paseo at the end of the King’s Road.
Biffo Records had been taken over by a big Amer
ican company and Sig Bear was being talked about as the first punk tycoon.
Swallow kept Monty so busy she had little time to think about anything but answering the telephones and getting out the mail. Once a week she went to a meeting in a room behind an Italian café, where for a couple of hours Monty again became Miranda who was chemically dependent, and derived strength from knowing her own weakness. She needed strength to pick up the gift of her new life.
‘Have a drink?’ Swallow invited her, uncorking her daily bottle of Liebfraumilch.
‘No, thank you. I don’t drink alcohol any more.’
‘Cigarette?’ The pack passed under her nose twenty times a day, the smoke permeated the tiny red-and-white office next to the punk leatherwear boutique.
‘I’ve stopped smoking.’
‘Fancy a line?’ Swallow’s friends were always borrowing her make-up mirror to chop up their cocaine.
‘Girl, you come at just the right time, we just skin up right now,’ Winston greeted her with a joint the size of a half-corona in his hand.
Monty decided to look up some old friends. ‘Let’s meet for lunch,’ suggested Rosanna, and they went to San Lorenzo in Beauchamp Place, a choice Monty immediately regretted when she was greeted by half a dozen music business types to whom she had to explain that, contrary to what Sig Bear had told them the week before, she had not just finished recording her album for Biffo in the South of France.
‘You know the children and I are on our own now?’ Rosanna mournfully tucked a shred of radiccio into her mouth and tore her eyes away from the sweet trolley. ‘Jonathan left us. I found out he’d been staying over with his secretary half the time when he was supposed to be abroad on business. Could anything so corny happen to me?’
‘It seems to happen to all of us, sooner or later.’ Rosanna was distinctly plump, in a deliciously appetizing way. She wore a Karl Lagerfeld grey suit with a pink crépe-de-chine ruffled blouse.
‘I’ve got the house, of course, and he’s been very generous, but I’m not going to be another alimony drone, Monty. I’ve got an agent and he thinks he can get me some opera work.’
‘Terrific. You always had a better voice than I did.’
‘It’s just a pity I didn’t start using it when you did. I have to lie about my age, you know. My agent says none of the European opera houses will look at a singer under thirty. Do you think I look thirty, Monty? Tell me honestly.’
‘No, of course not,’ Monty lied. Rosanna sighed as she finished her salad.
‘You’re so lucky. You’ve got talent, Monty. I wish I had. And you’ve got a proper career, I’m just messing about amusing myself.’ The sweet trolley passed their table again. ‘How many calories do you think there are in a chocolate profiterole?’
‘Millions. Let’s have some.’ Monty waved to the waiter. She felt uncomfortable having Rosanna envy her when her career was becalmed and her talent seemed like a responsibility that it was impossible to fulfil.
‘What did they do with you at that Centre?’ Swallow demanded when Monty came back from the office completely sober after lunch.
‘We just sat around and talked. I’ve never felt so loved, Swallow. It was wonderful just to be with people and show them who you really are, and have them accept you.’
‘Well at least your skin doesn’t look like cold potatoes any more. What about your clothes?’
Monty wore the USS T-shirt and jeans everyday, with her old acrylic fur coat if it was cold.
‘They’re all at Cindy’s, unless her brother’s got rid of them. I don’t want my old clothes any more, Swallow. They weren’t anything to do with me, only with the people I was posing as.’
‘That leather dress was fabulous.’
‘It made me feel like a whore.’
‘Fucking hell. I can’t stand all this bloody purity. Why not join a convent?’
‘Well, I felt ridiculous vamping around with my tits falling out everywhere.’
‘And what are you going to do – change your image?’
‘I don’t know, Swallow. I don’t want to be Ruby Slippers any more, that’s for sure. That was just a bad dream.’
‘What are you going to tell Sig?’
‘I don’t know, I’ll have to think about it.’
‘Well you’d better hurry up, he’s outside right now.’
Monty gasped with fright, then made a determined effort to calm herself. She knew that she had been avoiding dealing with Sig. Sig never avoided dealing with anything; his style was the pre-emptive strike. That was probably why he was a tycoon and she was a mess.
‘Baby!’ He stood in the doorway, fat and smiling, his black hair now cut with a Mohican scalp-lock, wearing a very expensive-looking black leather jacket. He held out his arms to her.
‘Hello, Sig.’
‘Baby! Is that all – hello? No kiss for Siggy? Where’ve you been all this time? Not even a postcard! I missed you.’ He gave her a kiss on the cheek.
‘I’ll leave you two lovebirds together,’ Swallow told them, stomping out of the office. ‘I’ll be in the pub.’
This is a confrontation, Monty told herself. She tried to remember all the role-plays she had done at the Centre, learning to be assertive in situations like this. First, check the body language. Why was she cowering behind her desk, allowing Sig to stand over her?
‘What’s this I hear – you’re off the stuff?’ Monty nodded. ‘Great, girl, just great. Now we’ll really be back in business.’
‘Have a chair,’ she invited him, pulling out Swallow’s seat for him and walking across the office to sit opposite. That was better. Now the eye contact. Monty wanted to look Sig in the eye like she wanted to kiss a cobra, but it had to be done, and she did it. His eyes were rather bloodshot, she noticed.
Now, say what you want in nice, cool language that isn’t giving him a whole lot of emotive subtext.
‘Sig, I don’t want to be Ruby Slippers any more. I felt that it wasn’t working and I think I made a mistake about the direction I ought to go in. I know we have a contract, and I’m willing to fulfil it, but not like that.’ Now a touch of negative enquiry, just to top the whole thing off with a bit of style. ‘I expect that isn’t what you wanted to hear?’
‘You’re dead right, it isn’t.’ He stood up and shoved his hands into his pockets with aggression. ‘I wanted to hear that you’d had the sense to sort yourself out, get off the stuff and come back to reality, and you were gonna get down and finish my album.’
‘I will finish your album, but not if it costs my identity.’
‘Your fucking identity! Don’t give me that shit!’
Monty felt very much like throwing the card-index at him, or lacerating him with sarcasm, or screaming. In an effort to stick to her game plan, she took a deep breath and told him.
‘I feel frightened when you shout, Sig.’
‘God, you’re pathetic,’ he spat, walking around the office with stiff, angry strides. ‘All right then, have it your own way. I can’t get blood out of a stone, I know that. You want to fuck up a brilliant career, it’s your business. You won’t be so lucky again, you know.’
Monty said nothing; she felt better, not frightened any more.
‘You’re definitely not coming back, then?’ he asked her, leaning on his knuckles like a gorilla.
‘I don’t want to come back,’ she told him.
He flung round and grabbed the door handle. ‘I love you, girl,’ he said, ‘remember that.’
Then he was gone, and the door slammed behind him. A few minutes later Swallow reappeared.
‘I saw him go – he didn’t look too pleased,’ she announced.
‘He said he loved me.’ Monty sounded doubtful.
‘Obviously he loves you, it’s written all over him. Why else would he come crawling round?’
Monty stood up and fluffed out her hair. ‘Well, if he loves me, he sure had a funny way of showing it. He did a fairly good job of wrecking me, after all. All he wanted was a custo
m-built artist to make him some money.’
‘All men have a funny way of showing it,’ Swallow said, locking up the office and leading Monty off to the pub. ‘They just don’t want to make themselves vulnerable. They don’t trust women. Sex is all down to power in the end, haven’t you sussed that yet?’
It was a beautiful early evening in May, one of those evenings when London seems like a clean new city. Monty squared her shoulders as she crossed the road, feeling hopeful for no good reason other than that the air was fresh and she was free.
Next day, Swallow took a telephone call which made her give a low, dirty chuckle as she took notes.
‘Here you are,’ she said to Monty, tearing off a page of her notepad. ‘We want a boss vehicle for Joe Jones.’ The note said ‘US car, big, customized???? Red pref.’ Monty picked up her handset and called London’s custom car king, who lived in a house behind the gasworks in Fulham.
‘I might know where I can get my hands on just the thing,’ he told her. ‘Is the guy renting or buying?’
‘Buying,’ called Swallow. ‘Up to fifteen thousand.’
That afternoon the car arrived, a gleaming 1950s Chevrolet encrusted with chrome and with so many fins it looked like a pirated space shuttle. It was painted a glowing metallic variant of Chevrolet red, which would have been fine for a lipstick but was excessively vibrant for the ordinary London traffic jam. The price was £16,500.
Swallow and Monty had long ago perfected their car-buying act. Monty crawled inside, taking care not to scuff the white leather seats.
‘The stereo doesn’t work,’ she called out.
Swallow eyed the custom car king bleakly. Monty opened one of the back doors.
‘The other door doesn’t open,’ she shouted.
‘It’s a beautiful job,’ the car king said, licking his lips. ‘Mechanically immaculate. Does 110, steady as a rock.’
Monty tried the starter. The vehicle’s response was sluggish. ‘Reckon it could stand a new battery,’ she announced.
‘Tell you what.’ Swallow said to the fidgeting customizer. ‘Get all that seen to, have it back here by this time tomorrow and let’s say fifteen thousand.’ She turned away with finality. ‘Then you can drive it down to Paleward Priory,’ she told Monty.
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