At home, she parked her car, kissed it goodbye and went up into the flat. She chopped some salad, cut some bread, ham and cheese and took it into the lounge. She put some music on and ate her lunch.
As a compilation classical music CD flooded the room, Ella’s mind cleared. She wasn’t a huge fan of classical music and didn’t really know her Chopin from her Mozart, but she liked the way it relaxed her. She lay down on the sofa and drifted into a trance.
It took ten rings before she heard the telephone and the answer-machine had clicked in before she could pick it up it. She heard Jackie’s voice, saying that Ella should meet her at 8 p.m. tonight at her restaurant. It wasn’t an invitation that required an RSVP. Ella went back to her trance.
At seven, she took a shower. It was only as she was washing her tangled hair that she realised she had spent all afternoon lying on the sofa. She felt a shiver down her spine: so much time spent without moving. It scared her that she could just lie still unaware of time passing. It was a habit she had developed since being in London. Something Eloise would never have done.
Eloise never sat still for more than five minutes at a time. Since childhood, she had been a bag of nervous energy, running around, barely able to stop, fidgeting in school, being shouted at frequently. And she was an incessant talker she was christened ‘Little Miss Chatterbox’ by her primary-school teacher. Eloise and Ella were so different, no one would have believed they were the same person.
Eloise used to laugh a lot and play practical jokes. She was known as the class clown, the person who did the minimum work and had the maximum fun. She was popular and she always led a crowd. She was the first girl to start smoking – B&H behind the bike sheds – she was the first to turn up to school with a joint, courtesy of Sam, and at thirteen she was the first to lose her virginity, to Pete Smith, the most rebellious boy in her class.
When Eloise left school at sixteen with a couple of GCSEs, she went to work in a trendy clothes shop. It was there, when she was seventeen, that she met Tony. He was every young girl’s dream. If sophisticated Ella saw him now she would cringe at his lack of style but Eloise thought he was the most stylish man in the world. He came to the shop three times before asking her out. His slow, lazy grin, his boasts of running the most popular nightclub in the area, his designer-labelled clothes and his overpowering aftershave meant to Eloise that this man, this god, was sex on legs. She agreed readily to a date.
He took her to dinner. Eloise had never been out to dinner before and, at seventeen, she felt incredibly grown up. When they left the local steakhouse, he took her to his club. He knew Eloise was under age but he plied her with cocktails, then took her back to his flat to smoke dope and shag her. When he drove her home the next morning in his second-hand BMW, he kissed her hard on the lips and told her he’d see her tonight in the club.
Eloise’s parents didn’t ask where she’d been and she didn’t tell them. They had always given her all the freedom she wanted. Sam questioned her and was not happy with the answers but he was being an overprotective brother. She ignored him and rounded up a group of her friends to take to Dino’s nightclub. She called Tony and cheekily told him to make sure they were all on the guest-list.
Ella shuddered at the memory of Dino’s. She would never set foot in such a tacky place now, let alone ask to be on a guest-list, but to her and her friends then it had been incredibly cool. The bar was huge and busy; the music was whatever brand of dance happened to be in vogue that week. Ella would have spotted straight away that it was a haven for under-age girls and paedophiles but to Eloise the scene was cool. The biggest prize a seventeen-year-old girl could have was an older man. Tony was twenty-five.
Not only did Eloise and her friends enter the club free, they were given free drinks all night. Tony lorded it around his club, shouting orders, greeting favoured customers, grabbing and kissing Eloise whenever he felt like it.
After that night, which ended with more dope back at Tony’s flat, this time with a number of his friends, then more sex, then being driven home in the morning, Eloise was well and truly in love.
Their relationship developed quickly. Tony seemed to adore Eloise too, and she was head over heels, arse over tit in love with him. Everything he did impressed her: the red roses he bought on their one-month anniversary, the champagne in bed, the kinky underwear and the sex. Eloise had only ever had sex with schoolboys before; now she was having sex with a man. She loved it.
Within a year Eloise was given a job at the nightclub; Tony said that they would be together so much more. Eloise was the luckiest girl in the world; Tony was a real gentleman, a real romantic, a dream come true. He was everything a seventeen-year-old could wish for.
The relationship carried on in the same vein for two years. As Eloise left her teens, they were a couple. She worked with Tony; she slept with Tony. Tony behaved like the king of the world. Eloise’s parents were wildly impressed with him. He had a nice car and a good job, everything they wanted for their only daughter. Her brother Sam thought him an idiot. It was the only subject on which Eloise and Sam disagreed, and it got to the point where they avoided talking about it. But Tony didn’t like Sam: he knew that Sam was a threat to his relationship.
On Eloise’s twenty-first birthday Tony proposed. He believed he was in love with her. Normally after a few months he switched his girlfriends and a year was the longest anyone had lasted before Eloise. But Eloise made him laugh, had an amazing body and liked to please him. At twenty-one she wore clothes selected by him, styled her hair as he suggested and used the makeup he liked. Eloise was Tony’s doll.
She moved into Tony’s flat as soon as the engagement ring was on her finger, and her mother started planning the wedding. Two months later, Tony and Eloise had a fight over a man who had flirted with her at the club and she received her first black eye. Eloise was baffled. She said that in her job men flirted with her. Tony accused her of enjoying it. Of course, he apologised afterwards, and said it wouldn’t happen again. Two months later, she got her first all-over beating: he kicked her in the legs, the stomach and the back. Her bruises resembled a cloudy sky, dotted all over her body. This time he cried when he apologised.
With each beating, Eloise lost a little more of her spirit. She stopped making jokes, stopped laughing, chewed her fingernails and constantly had panic attacks. When the beatings were so bad that she needed medical help, Tony would escort her to the doctor and say that she had been attacked in the nightclub, or that she’d been mugged, or fallen, or been pushed. Every casualty department in Manchester took turns to treat her: Tony was far too clever to arouse suspicion. He also fed her Valium and sleeping pills. She worked at the nightclub less and less, she saw her parents only on the occasions that she was bruise free and she hardly ever met up with Sam. The wedding plans ground to a halt.
Eloise didn’t think any more, she didn’t dare look and she hardly dared to speak. The man she loved was a monster, but she couldn’t see that. All she could see was that she was a rag doll and she had no will to live. She didn’t know how she felt about Tony because she’d stopped feeling about everything. She didn’t know about love, she didn’t know about hate. The only thing she knew now was physical pain or doped up state. Those were her only realities.
A couple of years passed before she received the worst beating of her life. She had become a zombie, a shell, and the only person who saw this was Sam. He had spent the last year trying to get to her but Tony, with his slick excuses, had fended him off. When Tony had had a row with the owner of the nightclub about the lack of profits and was told his job was hanging by a thread, he went mad. He got home that evening to find Eloise had cooked him chicken stew. He threw it at her. He then proceeded to hit her, blackening both eyes, and knocking out a tooth. Eloise didn’t make a sound. Increasingly frustrated, he threw her repeatedly against the fridge. Then he held her arms and slammed her back into it. Still she made no sound, so he threw her to the floor; the blood on her face was mixed with chick
en stew. As he kicked her in the ribs, screaming, swearing at her, “Bitch, slut, cunt, cunt, cunt!” still she made no sound.
He broke her arm then gave up and left her on the floor.
After an hour he went back to her. She lay still, contorted, and Tony began his clean up. He apologised, put her in the bath, put her in the car, took her to yet another casualty department. Eloise still made no sound.
She spent the night in hospital. It was the first time Tony had allowed her to stay overnight but before he left he made up yet another elaborate story of how she had come by her injuries. When the hospital mentioned the police, Eloise shook her head. When Tony left he kissed her and whispered in her ear that she had better keep quiet.
When he brought her home the next morning, Tony put Eloise to bed, unplugged the phone, then went out. In the background, she heard the doorbell ring, but as Tony had given her two Valium she was unsure and anyway she could not move.
That night when Tony returned, she heard her brother’s voice. This made her stir. She heard Tony telling Sam that Eloise wasn’t well and couldn’t be disturbed. She heard raised voices; then she heard Sam leave.
The next day, while Tony was at work, Sam broke down the door, packed Eloise’s things and carried her out to his car. He took her battered body to their parents” house.
Ella snapped out of her dream and realised she’d been in the shower so long that she’d turned into a prune. She dried herself and got dressed. She was verging on being late so she decided to get a cab. Standing on the street with her hair still wet she waited about ten minutes, cursing, before a black cab appeared.
She arrived at the restaurant, where the waiters greeted her as an old friend. It was a modestly trendy bistro, offering reasonably priced food, and Ella felt at home there.
“You’re late,” Jackie said, as she kissed Ella.
As they had dinner Ella told Jackie about the afternoon’s trance and her long shower. Jackie felt pleased that for the first time Ella had filled in the details of her relationship with Tony. They talked and ate, and before they knew it, the restaurant was emptying. It was midnight.
Ella helped Jackie close up. They had a last cup of coffee and left.
When Ella got home she jumped into bed and drifted into a dreamless sleep.
***
Saturday was Virginia’s chore day, and although she had a glimmer of a brand-new life, she still needed her routine. After showering and dressing, she cleaned her room. She dusted, hoovered and washed, then did her laundry. She divided everything into dry-cleaning (her suits), hand-washing (her jumpers), and launderette-washing, (everything else). Virginia’s weekly washing routine was so important to her that she often ended up washing things that didn’t need to be washed.
She did her hand-washing, then left the flat. She dropped off the dry-cleaning, then sat reading the paper while her washing whirred around in the machine at the launderette.
On the way home she thought of the new flat she would rent when she got her new job. It would have a washing-machine. Perhaps she could even have a flatmate. Virginia hugged herself as she let herself into the studio.
Once she had ironed, she put her clothes away then looked on her list for the next thing. She went to the supermarket to get her weekly shopping, then to Boots to buy her vitamins, and drove home.
She called her mother and kept the conversation deliberately short. She always phoned her parents once every two weeks to avoid being told that she was an ungrateful, neglectful daughter. She didn’t tell her mother about the new job, and her mother talked on and on about how well all her friends” offspring were doing. The call left Virginia feeling depressed.
Afterwards she had lunch – a tuna sandwich – then checked the flat for any missed bits. Satisfied, she took out all her old economics books and spent the afternoon reading.
In the evening, she decided to get a video. Her smile widened with irony as she selected Wall Street, and she allowed herself a bag of popcorn.
Cooking dinner that night, she whistled to herself, and watched the movie pleased that she was watching a normal film. She went to bed that night to dream of Gordon Gekko.
On Sunday, she had a full English breakfast, and went out to buy the Sunday papers. She willed the time to pass into Monday as she half watched the EastEnders omnibus.
That night she hardly slept a wink as she thought about her brand-new life. Weekends when she would no longer be alone. A social life, maybe even a boyfriend. She blushed to herself as she thought about meeting men. The new Virginia would know how to talk to men. That was another thing she was determined about.
***
Clara woke up at six on Saturday evening. She pulled out her emergency earplugs and saw her answer-phone flashing so insistently that it made her headache worse.
She sloped into the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge. She felt famished but the fridge was empty except for the chocolates Tim had given her. She grabbed the box and went into the sitting room.
She pressed play on her answer-phone then lay on the sofa eating chocolates as she listened to her callers: her mother, her brother, then Tim: he spoke in a whisper from some God-forsaken part of Scotland. She couldn’t even hear what he said. Clarissa had called to remind her that she was expected at a party that night, and a man Clara didn’t know had also rung.
She finished the chocolates and felt better. She phoned Clarissa. She had no memory of any party.
“Darling, where have you been? I’ve been calling all day,” Clarissa said.
“In bed. I got laid by two guys last night, had about a zillion lines of coke and the same amount of champagne and got home at seven this morning. What have you been doing?”
“Really, you are such a tease. You always make up such elaborate lies. Anyway, I’m having this party at my house, the one I invited you to months ago and I expect has a little star next to it in your diary.”
“Um.” Clara thought that this probably wasn’t the time to break the news that she didn’t keep a diary.
“So you’re in. Oh, darling, I have the most divine men coming. You’ll be spoilt for choice.”
At this Clara perked up. Until she remembered the kind of men Clarissa knew. “What time am I expected?” she sighed.
“Oh, you really are hopeless. I’m serving cocktails in thirty minutes. I need you here then.” Desperation had edged into Clarissa’s voice.
“I’ll do my best,” Clara said. She thought about trying to get out of it, but Clarissa didn’t take kindly to being stood up.
She had a line of cocaine, jumped into and almost straight out of the shower, put on a nice little black dress, pulled on a coat and ran outside to hail a cab. It wasn’t until she was in the taxi that she realised she had forgotten where Clarissa lived.
Clarissa was miffed when Clara called her from the cab.
“How many times have you been here? Clara, I live in the next street to you.” Clara laughed and directed the cab. She gave the cab driver a ten-pound tip because he looked pissed off.
Clarissa was one of Clara’s oldest friends although they had little in common any more. She was busy trying to be a society wife, although she didn’t even have a boyfriend; she would only drink in moderation and she thought cocaine was something gangsters took. Clara found it hard to understand how Clarissa had changed so much, especially as they’d been the first ones to give each other an orgasm at boarding school. Whenever Clarissa and Clara met, Clarissa always looked at her as if she was terrified of having that little secret let out.
“Darling, you look so gorgeous,” Clarissa said. Clarissa was stick thin, blonde and bony. The biggest thing about her was her nose. She looked awful.
As soon as Clarissa answered the door, Clara remembered why she hardly spent any time with her. Dressed in a style that would have pleased Clara’s mother, Clarissa looked like a rich-wife-in-training: a simple designer suit, matching gold earrings and bracelet, sensible shoes with just a little bit
of height, and a scarf tied neatly round her neck. Clarissa looked boring and middle-aged. Clara shuddered.
Clarissa had been Clara’s first best friend, and until the age of eighteen they had been inseparable. Then Clara had skipped off to finishing-school and Clarissa had gone husband-hunting at Cambridge University. After university, Clarissa became straight, poised, and ready to marry well. Her friends were the same as her.
Clarissa looked nervous, which she usually did when she gave a party. She placed so much importance on these social gatherings that she sprouted another wrinkle with every one.
They air-kissed and Clara tried to sound pleased to see her. She immediately saw a number of people she knew. They were old school friends, and suitable boys – so dull that she couldn’t bear to spend the evening with them. They all pounced on her, asked her what she was doing, and proceeded to bore her to death. If that wasn’t bad enough, the cocaine was wearing off.
Clara extricated herself from a lawyer called Jeremy, ran into the bathroom and closed the door. She took out her coke, cut up two lines and snorted them both. She sat on the side of the bath and felt her panic ease. Damn Clarissa and her friends. She had to think of a way to get out, but she knew she couldn’t leave just yet.
A different Clara swept back into the sitting room. She was relaxed and charming. She asked after Ginty’s horse, Laura’s young son and Kate’s divine husband, then asked Clarissa who she had her eye on. They giggled for a while, as they stood in the girls’ corner, and the suitable men watched them. Although she was bored, Clara managed to look as if she was having fun. Just as one of the braver men looked about to approach her, the doorbell rang.
“I’ll get it,” Clara said, and ran to the door. This was her escape plan. She would open the door, slip out then call someone to take her to a club.
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