I was astonished when, ten minutes later, he jumped out of a giant stretch limo, Callum at his side wearing a white-and-blue sailor suit.
‘Well, what do you think?’ He gestured to the giant white car. It was a monstrosity but I daren’t criticize him so I just gave him a big smile as he opened the door for me. I was happy to see that Callum, at least, loved it and bounced around the seats excitedly as Stuart instructed the driver to take us to the Graceland Wedding Chapel.
There’s no backing out of it now, I thought nervously, as I stepped out of the limo and surveyed the large gaudy billboard outside the Graceland Wedding Chapel. Inside, there was a colourful explosion of fake flowers and the floor was covered in Astroturf. Hmm . . . just what you expect to find in the desert. The place was busy, with various couples milling about the gift shop, having their pictures taken under the floral arch or waiting in the pews to be married.
While Stuart dealt with the arrangements, I took a stroll around the gift shop with Callum at my side, surveying the mugs, keyrings, T-shirts and champagne on offer, all at sky-high prices. This didn’t feel quirky or fun – it felt cheap and naff, just like those plastic keyrings. We took our places at the back and waited our turn.
In front of us was a large group of African-Americans in shiny white suits and red bow ties, who were shouting in a loud and good-natured way over each other. They seem so happy, I noted sadly to myself. I couldn’t help comparing their joyful, noisy group to our own sad little gathering. The whole thing is crazy. Crazy! Even inside the air-conditioned room, it was baking hot and I could feel myself sweating through my blouse so I tried fanning the material at my armpits.
‘Callum.’ I bent down and whispered to my son. ‘Callum, I’m really nervous.’
‘Don’t worry, Mummy,’ he whispered back. ‘I’ll hold your hand.’
All too soon, it was our turn and we approached the main chapel font, where a strange-looking man who called himself ‘the minister’ beckoned us forward. He was short and slim with slicked-back hair and wore a white Seventies-style suit, like the type Elvis wore at the end of his career. The whole bizarre ensemble was topped off with a thin leather tie and slippers.
‘So, who’s your best man?’ He spoke with a relaxed southern twang.
Callum’s hand shot up in the air.
‘Me, me, me!’ he shouted.
‘Now then, this little fella can be your witness,’ said the minister. ‘Just the three of you, is it? Okey dokey then! No need for a best man.’
There was very little preamble – just a quick confirmation of our names, then the minister started on the vows.
‘Do you, Stuart Michael Kelly, take Dawn Jean McConnell to be your lawfully wedded wife . . .’ I started to zone out. Is this really happening? That morning I’d woken expecting a day of sunbathing and sightseeing and now I was getting married! It was madness and I couldn’t take it seriously. I felt a quivering in the pit of my stomach and I started to giggle uncontrollably, until I heard Stuart say: ‘I do.’
Then the minister turned to me.
‘And do you, Dawn Jean McConnell, take Stuart Michael Kelly to be your lawfully wedded husband? To look after him in sickness and in health? To love, honour and obey him all the days of your life?’
Stuart was looking at me levelly now, his head bobbing up and down and his eyes signalling to me silently: ‘say yes, say yes – or else . . .’
Oh Christ . . .
‘Yes, I do,’ I said. I felt I didn’t have a choice.
The minister smiled and then asked Stuart for the rings. There was a moment’s hesitation and then Stuart said: ‘What do you mean? We don’t have any rings.’
‘You need a ring,’ the minister explained. ‘To seal the marriage.’
‘Right, Dawn, take off your earring.’ Stuart pointed at the hooped earring on my right ear.
He can’t be serious? He hasn’t even bought a ring?
I just wanted it all to be over as quickly as possible now so I didn’t object, I just slipped the earring out of my ear and handed it to Stuart, who gave it to the minister.
‘With this ring, I thee wed,’ he intoned. ‘I now pronounce you man and wife. You may kiss the bride!’
It was all so bizarre, so utterly unreal. I could hardly believe it when the minister finished and handed us a goody bag. This was to start our married life together. I took a quick peek: washing powder, one condom, bleach, paracetamol, a White Chapel keyring and some soap.
‘Smile!’ The photographer grinned cheesily as we stood underneath the arch of fake white lilies and the bulb flashed, once. Instantly the image was printed and we were offered a range of products upon which to memorialize this magical moment forever. We turned down the T-shirts and opted for a normal framed picture and a mug.
The mug broke on the flight on the way home, which seemed pretty apt. As for the photograph, I hid it away as soon as we got in the house, unable to bring myself to look at it.
Many years later, I came across the picture again and, for the first time, I properly examined our wedding photo. There I was, a small woman aged just twenty-two, clutching the arm of a man who was more than two decades older and starting to go to seed. I looked so frightened, so utterly terrified, that even while my mouth was smiling, my eyes were screaming.
Screaming for help.
‘Oh, I’m so pleased!’ Mum exclaimed when I told her our good news on our return. ‘That’s so good for Callum because he’s starting school at the end of the month and it would have been terrible for him to start school with unmarried parents. Can you imagine? Poor boy would have stuck out like a sore thumb.’
Really? Is that all she cares about? Mum’s snobbishness never ceased to amaze me. Dad, meanwhile, was polite and shook Stuart’s hand but he didn’t seem all that bothered. Neither of them offered warm congratulations to us. Fine, I thought to myself. That suits me just fine. I wanted as little fuss made as possible. To me, it didn’t feel like something to celebrate.
The fact was, I couldn’t get used to the idea that I was now married to Stuart. There was no engagement, no run-up to the ceremony; it’s not even as if we had talked about the idea generally before the big day. No, it was just sprung on me and I was told I had to accept his decision or else. Or else I would be thrown out of that ‘circle of protection’ to who knew what wolves. I couldn’t let that happen to me and Callum.
Stuart and I didn’t even buy a ring together once we got back, he just handed me £400 and told me to ‘get something nice’. So I chose a simple gold band and, for the most part, I kept it in my drawer at home. Stuart didn’t notice that my wedding finger was naked much of the time, nor seem to mind that I kept my own name. I wanted to remain a McConnell. The world was already full of too many Mrs Kellys to my mind.
Apparently, Maria had cried when she found out we were married. Now working in a fish and chip shop, she didn’t have a penny to her name. Stuart liked to pop in there every now and then. He didn’t even order anything, he just wanted to rub her nose in it. He had to see for himself that he had ‘won’. For he hadn’t just left her, he’d taken it all from her: the money, the lifestyle, even her self-respect. And he’d laughed about it with me when he told me how she had cried.
I think he expected me to laugh too – but I wasn’t a love-struck teenager anymore, in competition with Maria and desperate to hang on to Stuart at all costs. When I’d been caught up in my obsession for my much-older lover, swept away by his words and by his promises to keep me safe, I hadn’t cared one bit that we were hurting her, but things were different now. Unlike my new husband, the pain of others wasn’t something in which I found my entertainment.
In fact, for the first time, I felt a pang of sympathy for my ex-rival. Oh, just leave her alone, I thought angrily.
Thought, but didn’t say – I wasn’t brave enough for that.
We’ve all moved on since those days, I told myself. Now our son was old enough to start school himself, I knew that I’d left the
young, innocent schoolgirl I’d once been far behind me.
But funnily enough, the man who had led her astray was still yanking at that invisible lead he had tied firmly around her neck.
Chapter 16
Hotel from Hell
About a month after we got back from the States, Stuart made a new investment in a hotel with Adam, and installed his friend Kevin as the manager. The Cavendish had eighty-two rooms, two bars and two nightclubs on the premises. It had once been a grand Victorian building but, in the last decade, it had been run into the ground. Several previous owners had failed to make the capital investments needed for the upkeep so the place had become an eyesore. Crumbling and much unloved, it was run as a doss house for council tenants. And this, Stuart felt, was a perfect money-spinner.
But almost immediately alarm bells started ringing. For just six weeks after Kevin had been installed as the manager Stuart came to talk to me, needing my help.
‘We’ve got a problem,’ he said grimly. ‘It’s Kevin. I think he’s stealing.’ He wanted me to look at the books.
It didn’t take long for me to figure out what was going on. After spending just one week at The Cavendish, I saw how it all worked. This wasn’t a hotel for tourists, it was more like the hotel from hell – peeling wallpaper, tatty carpets, broken windows and battered furniture. For £20 a night anyone could get a roof over their head – and I mean anyone – so it was here that the very dregs of society washed up. In The Cavendish the council housed its very worst tenants, the people they couldn’t put anywhere else. There were heroin addicts, shoplifters, murderers, rapists and sex offenders. But I wasn’t worried about this – to my mind, people were just people underneath and I had run pubs before where hard Glasgow men drank nightly. I had dealt with flashers and the criminal underworld and I knew I could cope. The council was happy to pay £140 a week for each resident on a bed-and-breakfast basis – though many weren’t up in time for breakfast – as long as the hotel could ensure the residents stayed in one place and didn’t skip town. There was even a weekly register for the council tenants to sign, just to ensure we kept tabs on our guests.
From looking at the books, I saw that Stuart was right: Kevin was stealing on a grand scale and he was doing it so openly, so brazenly, it was shocking. The hotel had its fair share of permanent council residents, which brought in a lot of money, but it also took in business off the street: customers who paid cash. The bars and clubs were also cash businesses. But there was no cash in the safe – no cash anywhere at all! I estimated that in the past few weeks, £40,000 had gone missing from the business. Stuart had installed his pal to run his hotel but Kevin had had his grubby little hands in the till the whole time.
‘Right, he’s out,’ Stuart told me decisively after I went through all the figures with him. ‘He doesn’t get away with this. I’ll sack him tomorrow. You think you can step in?’
I nodded. I didn’t really have much choice and with Callum at school now, I suppose I was ready for my next challenge. This was a big one – a hotel, two bars and two clubs – but already I could see the potential. With the right management, and good practices, this place could be a gold mine!
The following morning Stuart confronted Kevin at the hotel and the pair had a massive row. I was taking Callum to school at the time so I didn’t see what happened and, when I got to work to find Stuart had a busted, bloody nose, he didn’t want to tell me either.
‘He’s gone,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘That’s all you need to know.’
Now I took over running The Cavendish and for a while I just sat back and took notes, watching how the business worked.
Our residents weren’t the average type of person. On the first floor we kept the shoplifters and elderly people, the ones who had spent their lives in and out of prison. These old folk were institutionalized. They didn’t like to leave the hotel for any reason, eating their meals in their rooms in front of the TV and sending out the younger shoplifters to get their booze and fags. On the second floor were the junkies, the heroin addicts who stayed in their rooms unless they went out to collect their methadone prescriptions, which they frequently sold to each other to buy bags of heroin. On the third and fourth floors there was a mixture of standard housing-benefit tenants, who smoked weed all day or had a drink problem. They were constantly thinking of ways to make a quick buck, usually by stealing.
These residents brought in a steady revenue stream from their rooms but it was clear that we had the chance to make some big money from our bars and clubs, which I was surprised to find were mostly empty during the week. How is this possible? I wondered. We had over eighty people in the hotel at any one time, people who didn’t work and had nothing to do all day. Where are they going? More to the point, where are they spending their money? I knew if I could persuade them to stay and spend money in the hotel, we’d be onto something good.
So the first thing I did was to simplify our drink and food prices. Everything was a pound – a cheese toastie was a pound, a shot of vodka cost a pound. A soft drink, pint, bag of chips – it was all £1. The only thing that was not a pound was the pool table, which I set at the below-average price of 20p a game. This encouraged people to play pool at our hotel rather than go to the pool halls, which charged 50p a time. So now we had cheap entertainment and the pool table was busy from eleven in the morning until twelve at night. That pool table made £700 a week; money that went straight into Stuart’s pocket.
But this was just the first step. Since most of the residents were on benefits and got £90 every fortnight each from their giro, we started up a ‘giro scheme’. I put a spreadsheet up on the wall with each resident’s name, followed by ninety spaces indicating 90 credits from the bars and hotel. At the start of every fortnight, they handed over their giro money to the bar and that would give them ninety credits. Every time they had something to drink or eat, a box was scored off. This way they could make their giro last longer, enjoy a social life in the hotel and know their money was safe. They could even earn extra credits by doing little jobs for us like taking out the rubbish or restocking the bars. The Cavendish was now a place where our guests could spend their days in the company of others instead of hiding out in their rooms alone.
So we became very popular with our residents and also attracted punters from outside – and they came from first thing in the morning till last thing at night. Because The Cavendish wasn’t for people who drank occasionally, after work or sociably, it was for people who drank all the time, which meant the money started rolling in. And this pleased Stuart no end. If there was one thing my husband liked more than anything else, it was money. As long as I could guarantee the cash flow, then I knew he was a happy man.
To be honest, though, it even surprised me how successful we became so quickly! We could earn £30,000 from one weekend in one bar alone. Once we’d paid all our bills and settled the staff wages, this meant we walked away with thousands each week. I worked out that after our first year, Stuart and I took nearly half a million from The Cavendish, and most of that was cash.
Of course, The Cavendish wasn’t a pleasant place to work; I banned Callum from coming to visit because I was afraid for his safety. Violence frequently broke out for little or no reason and we had to break up fights all the time. But I never felt scared for my own safety – I was The Boss, the one who kept the hotel open and under control, so I knew that most of my residents felt loyal towards me and would never threaten my safety. If anything, they wanted to protect me. With my new regime, I gave them a home, a place where they felt welcome; something many of them hadn’t had in years.
There were only a few rules at The Cavendish. No subs – if you didn’t have the money, we couldn’t serve you. And there were strictly no drugs in the bars and clubs. Of course, I couldn’t stop anybody shooting up in the privacy of their own room but in the public spaces we came down hard. The toilet lids were smeared with Vaseline to prevent them snorting cocaine from them, and anyone caught dealing drug
s in front of the staff was banned for life. I’m sure it went on all the time – I couldn’t change these people – but I warned them not to let me see it or I would call the police. So they hid from me, down the back stairs, in one of the many toilets on the landings, or in the fire escape. They huddled together in pairs, striking deals for dope, weed, coke, heroin, dihydrocodeine, methamphetamines, barbiturates, crack or valium – anything they could get their hands on. The junkies hid their wraps behind their backs when anyone passed by, and the men waited until the corridors were clear before visiting the hookers. In many ways, the debauchery was as bad as that of The Schoolhouse. It was hard to believe that I was actually running and condoning everything I was against at The Schoolhouse.
At The Cavendish we quickly came to an understanding with the police. They left us alone as long as we cooperated fully with their investigations. Frankly, they saw the advantage of putting all the criminals in one place so that they always knew where to find them. Often, they would call to ask when certain tenants were likely to be in, then they’d come to collect a key at reception and either take them in for questioning, or arrest them.
One time, six police cars screamed up to the front of the hotel and out jumped a dozen armed police, followed by several important-looking detectives. The chief detective said he’d come from London to arrest a man who was on the run from down south. To my horror, I learned that this new resident of ours was wanted for the rape and murder of a young woman in London. When he’d signed in with us a week before, he’d applied for full housing benefit. That’s what had alerted the authorities and they had swooped in to arrest him and make him pay for his crimes.
I Own You Page 18