The driver showed us how to turn on the intercom, how to unlock the laminated drinks cabinet (soft beverages only) and how to operate the sound system, but none of it felt right, like the interior had been stripped out and poorly rebuilt. Then he slipped inside and sat in the heat of the car’s interior, waiting for Sofie and Bethany to calm down.
‘It smells like somebody died in here,’ Bethany complained. ‘Hey, can you turn the air-con on?’
The driver pressed a button, then slid the partition shut so that he wouldn’t have to hear Sofie’s excited screeching. I could tell by the look on his face that he was thinking Shit, the one with the blond bunches is really annoying.
Sofie had swiped vodka from her mother’s cupboard, and had even printed out some cocktail recipes so we knew which mixers to use. Bethany had filched a joint from her brother, although there was nowhere to smoke it. She plugged in her iPod and jacked up the sound, a girl band mix that even I liked. The stretch coasted over the cambers of the suburban roads like a carnival float, and joined the evening traffic to the West End.
It was 6:00 p.m. on a hot, muggy and slightly wet July night, the clouds clamped in a brown lid over the buildings, but we were girls on the town and at least two of us were dressed to make men weep. In photographs I took before we left the house, Sofie and Bethany were devastating; there was a stillness in their knowing eyes. They had slightly parted lips, swept-back hair, limp pale arms, long thin thighs. Their outfits had the accidental effect of making them look like Victorian schoolchildren in a divinity play, at least until they opened their mouths. Me, I stayed out of the frame. I don’t do pictures. I don’t want something to turn up on Facebook twenty years later, thank you.
‘The driver’s seriously fucking sexy,’ said Bethany, ‘but I don’t think he speaks any English.’
‘He doesn’t need to speak, does he?’ said Sofie. ‘I saw him looking at your legs as you got in. He’s a bit old for you, though, twenty at least.’
‘Fuck right off. I’d have a go on him. He’s got massive feet.’
‘That’s because he’s—’ She mouthed the word ‘black’. ‘They’re used to walking around without shoes.’
I tuned out of their trash-talk. Mostly, they copied stuff they’d seen on TV. I watched the street slide past the window: takeaway, betting shop, pizzeria, pub, Oxfam, café, minicab firm, the same drab parades endlessly reordered like a playlist with a limited selection of bad songs, the same dumpy figures loading white plastic bags into their homes. I looked back at the others, who were waiting to hand me a glass with some lurid pink concoction in it.
‘Come on, Jennifer, wish me happy birthday,’ said Sofie, raising her drink. She toasted us, but the glasses were plastic and couldn’t provide the ring of celebration.
The partition slid open. The driver leaned his head back and tapped a long forefinger on a notice taped to the glass: ‘Do not spill drinks on seats’. Sofie pulled a face and giggled once the partition closed. She had a nervous energy that unsettled me, like an actor finding little bits of business to perform in the background of a play, and the more she did it, the more nervous she made everyone else. There’s a tension around a birthday that can break like the end of a hot day.
We were finishing our third drink as the stretch hit the great grey field of Trafalgar Square. Bethany opened the window and yelled at passers-by.
‘Beth, don’t be such a chav,’ said Sofie, pulling her back into her seat.
‘What’s the point of having a limo if they can’t fucking see you?’ The vodka had flushed Bethany red to her bleached blond roots. She shimmered and shook with slender threads of Tiffany jewelry, gifts granted by her parents in exchange for buying time away from her. Bethany’s folks had a pool they never swam in, a sauna they never used and two children they preferred to forget. I think Bethany wore their presents to remind them she was still there.
We sat among the plastic ferns of the Tropical Café and ate tough, dry pineapple burgers while electronic bird-calls bleated around us. As I chewed and tuned out the chatter, I studied the dust-caked tops of the fake palms and figured that the cleaners were probably Filipino, because they obviously couldn’t reach the tops to clean them. Half the restaurant’s space was taken up by a retail outlet peddling winsome ethnic tat to children. The whole enterprise struck me as cynically manipulative, but nobody else seemed to mind. I finished my shake and the conversation faded back in.
Bethany was explaining some kind of complex arrangement with her sister. ‘Danii said she was going to stay out with him, because he’s got a car, and Mum said if you do you needn’t come back, so she said you can’t tell me what to do anymore, it’s just because you don’t approve of Jack, and Mum goes as long as you live under this roof—’
Then I drifted away again. I was sitting under a freezing air-con unit, so I started thinking of polar reaches, of blue translucent ice rising in wind-sculpted scoops above a dark and violent sea. I tried to imagine being so cold that you couldn’t feel your body. What would it be like to become stranded at the top of the world, with nothing and no-one to save you? The arctic wind cutting across the floes and stinging like needles, scouring away everything except the moment, the water a sharp blue glass that could draw me in and suck me down into its depths. And then I was back at the table, watching Bethany suck a glittery pink soda from a blue plastic parrot. I wondered what they put in it to make it sparkle like that, iron filings perhaps.
‘Jen? Come back, honey, we’re about to be sung to.’ Sofie and Bethany were staring at me. Three waiters wiggled between the tables with a sickly chocolate cake covered in sparklers. They sang, but it turned out two of them didn’t know the lyrics to ‘Happy Birthday’, so they just mumbled along. The third carried the song, then encouraged the other diners to applaud, but nobody could be bothered. If they couldn’t wish someone happy birthday, I wondered what they thought about the rain forests.
By the time we finished the cake and Bethany had queued to buy a cuddly gorilla for £19.99, we were running late. It had started to rain. Korfa was seated in the stretch around the corner from the restaurant, half asleep. He flashed a look of annoyance when Sofie knocked on the window, but smartly stepped out to let us in. Bethany made a show of entering the Lincoln, but nobody was looking at her. It was hot and oppressive, rising towards a rainstorm, the way London always spoils things on a summer night.
‘You know what we should do,’ said Bethany, ‘we should pick up a cute guy and invite him along with us.’
‘So not happening.’ Sofie waved away the idea with her fingertips, as if drying her nails. ‘This is a girls’ night out, remember?’
‘Okay, whatever, only don’t complain that you didn’t have anything to remember your birthday by, yeah?’ Bethany snapped back. ‘Pour us a drink, for fuck’s sake.’
We arrived at Glitterball, an old warehouse with a fake stressed-steel frontage, to find a queue of sour-faced inner city teenagers who scanned us as if we were dirt. Sofie had instructed Korfa to drive right up to the club’s entrance, so that we could disembark in front of the crowd, but the bouncer made us stand behind everyone else, which took the edge off our big entrance.
Korfa picked his nails and read the paper, ignoring us as we stood in the softly falling rain waiting to get inside. ‘I fucking hate him,’ Bethany told Sofie. ‘We’re the clients and he looks at us like we’re fucking trash or something.’
‘He’s got a boring job,’ I pointed out. ‘I don’t think he means any harm.’
‘If it’s so boring, why doesn’t he go back to his own country and tend cattle for a living?’
‘Let it go, Beth.’
‘No, you let it go, Jen-if-ferr,’ Bethany barked back, her hands on her narrow hips. ‘You’ve been looking down your nose at us all evening like we’re shit on your shoes, honey. It’s all so beneath you, isn’t it? I don’t know why you wanted to come in the first place.’ Bethany wasn’t really angry; she just enjoyed finding drama in situations an
d acting as if she was in some kind of crappy American rom-com.
‘I came because it’s Sofie’s birthday,’ I explained.
‘You don’t really like her, though, do you? Ever since—’
‘What?’ I dared her.
Thankfully the line suddenly started to move, and we found ourselves inside. The club was chocolate-box gaudy and overheated, a smart racket created by someone with an ugly empty building and an angle for sucking money out of teenagers. The ancient DJ cranked up old Girls Aloud hits that no-one wanted to dance to. They couldn’t have been more badly mixed if he’d used a plastic bucket and a stick. We stood at the edge of the floor making fun of the boys while Sofie tipped vodka into our Red Bulls. Bethany sulked because Sofie had taken over a conversation with a cute boy, and had been so charming and attentive that she’d driven him away. But then Sofie met another boy called Jamie who looked like a black wig on a stick and who tried to convince us that he was an art student at Goldsmiths, and within a few minutes they were feverishly snogging.
By the time we returned to the stretch with the godawful Jamie in tow, it was almost 10:00 p.m. Sofie’s father had instructed her to be home by eleven. Her mother lived in Wimbledon with an Indian property developer, and hadn’t been in contact since the previous Christmas. By now it was so muggy that I could smell my body beneath my signature scent, and I wanted to go home for a shower. The entire evening had been my idea of Hell.
By now, Korfa had dropped all pretense of civility. He didn’t like having an extra passenger on board and he stared at us in his mirror as if we were aliens. The stretch grazed through bleak streets on its way back to the suburbs, and the mood in the car was downbeat. We were on our second bottle of vodka and Jamie was virtually chewing Sofie’s face off when Bethany slid to the front of the compartment and opened the partition, and started desperately chatting up Korfa, and I was just wishing it was over.
Jamie spoke, but I couldn’t understand a word he said. He had a coolness impediment that stopped him from being able to talk properly or make any sense. Sofie translated; she wanted to go with him to buy some dope. She was fifteen and wanted to do a drug run. Classy. I asked her if perhaps she would like to go and have some facial tattoos while she was at it. By now we were running through the kind of neighbourhood where you expected to see the odd burning car, but Jamie was apparently from around here, and tried to convince us it was OK. I asked what had happened to the joint we had, and they just looked blankly at me, dissolving into giggles.
By now Bethany was hanging her thin arms through the partition, keeping up a non-stop barrage of conversation with Korfa. Sofie’s mouth was occupied with Jamie’s slug-like tongue, so that left me by myself, which was fine in my book. And Sofie broke off the tongue-wrestle to command Korfa to stop the car.
We were between a 7-Eleven that was a cross between a rubbish dump and a needle exchange, and a block of council flats that had steel grilles riveted over the ground floor windows. Jamie announced that this was where he lived, and he’d just run up to his apartment for a minute ‘to get something’. Sofie looked at the street, pulled a face and said no way, do you think I’m mad or something, so we drove on to a shopping parade with bleached strip-lighting and plenty of people.
Then I noticed Sofie and Jamie were conspiring, and she suddenly announced that they were going to the off-license to buy beer, and they’d be back in twenty minutes. Twenty minutes to buy beer? But before I could argue they were laughing and getting out and gone, and I looked through the store window but couldn’t see them. A moment later, Bethany was whispering something to Korfa, and he reluctantly got out of the car and held the door open for her, and she smiled secretively at me and said they’d be back in a few minutes, and the pair of them went off down the skanky alleyway at the side of the parade. She knew I wouldn’t complain, otherwise she’d tell Sofie that I had sex with her ex-boyfriend, and that he told me she’d never done anything more than kiss him because she had intimacy issues.
So I was left stuck in the stretch by myself. I couldn’t get out because he’d shut the door and locked it—I think he just did it without thinking—but at least we were parked legally, so there was nothing I could do but sit back, turn up the music and wait for them.
Another ten minutes passed, and there was no sign of anyone. I looked out at the streets and just saw crew boys hanging around looking in their baggy white pyjama-clothes, and a queue of wobbly drunk loners at the chicken outlet, and I started to get worried because I was shut in the car, and then, twelve minutes later, Sofie and Jamie reappeared with the beers, so I figured they just went for a smoke. Whatever else Sofie was, she wasn’t a slut. But she demanded to know why I let Bethany out of my sight, like I was her keeper. I explained that I hadn’t been put on earth to take care of her, and that she’d be back in a minute because Korfa would want to get us home and go off duty. I expected to see her coming round the corner any second.
But when Korfa reappeared, he was alone. Sofie was very stoned, and Jamie had fallen back on the seat and looked like he’d checked out of his head without paying the bill, and Sofie asked where Bethany had gone. And Korfa replied, in his funny, heavy accent, that she’d got all weird on him and had gone off.
‘What was she doing going off with you anyway?’ she wanted to know. ‘You should have gone after her. We can’t just sit here and wait for her to come back.’ She was thinking about herself as usual.
‘She said she wasn’t going to come back,’ said Korfa. ‘She said not to wait for her.’
‘You’re lying,’ Sofie snapped back, holding up a spangly Tiffany purse. ‘She would never leave her stuff here.’ She called Bethany’s mobile, and a moment later it rang in the car—it was in her bag, ‘What happened?’ Sofie demanded to know.
‘I told you,’ said Korfa laboriously. ‘She pretty much pulled me into the alley. She started kissing me.’
‘Yeah, like you had to be dragged. She’s fifteen! You broke the law—we can have you sent back to your own country.’
‘This is my country,’ he replied. ‘I’m from Leigh-on-Sea.’
‘I thought you were from Somalia,’ I said.
‘I am, originally. It makes the time go faster if I act like I don’t understand English.’
‘What did you do to her?’
‘I told you, she started kissing me, then suddenly said she wanted to go and ran off. I know how it looks.’
‘Believe me, you don’t know how it looks. It’s going to be worse for you than you could ever imagine.’ Sofie waited for this one to pass over the footlights. She was acting now, wobbling her head and playing to the balcony. She’d been too young to grieve in public for Diana’s death, but she’d laid flowers outside the O2 when Michael Jackson died, although two hours later she was texting jokes about him.
I noticed she had no intention of getting out of the stretch to look for her best friend, so I suggested we search the alleyway.
Korfa agreed, and let me out. I took a walk into the trash-strewn gap between the buildings and had a look around. One end opened out into a neat little children’s playground with grass and two swings. I figured there had to be another way into the playground, but couldn’t see it.
‘That’s where we sat,’ said Korfa apologetically. ‘On those swings. Then she went off.’
‘Why did she leave?’
‘I don’t know.’ He shrugged.
‘Did you try it on with her?’
‘No, I swear! She was all over me. Then she just kind of went blank and stopped. She got up, said she had to go and ran off in that direction.’ He pointed to the far end of the alley, but there were no lights down there, and suddenly I was afraid of going into the dark with him.
We headed home. What else could we do? Sofie was stoned and needed to sort herself out before hitting her parents’ house. The mood was damaged now, everyone was antsy and upset. Even Jamie had roused himself and was blearily looking around, as if he realised that something was wrong bu
t couldn’t put his finger on the problem. Sofie explained the situation to him.
We’d been driving through the darkened streets for a while before I realised Korfa was rattled and lost. ‘You don’t know where you’re going, do you?’ I asked quietly. He didn’t reply, but kept glancing at the Sat-Nav and tapping the side of it.
Sofie decided to stage her next WTF moment by shouting, ‘Where are you taking us?’ over and over. ‘Take us home now! Now! Fucking idiot doesn’t even know how to use a Sat-Nav.’
‘They’re complicated,’ Jamie offered uselessly, siding with his fellow male.
‘What are you doing?’ Sofie was panicked. She kept picking up her mobile and toying with the idea of texting someone, then changing her mind. She didn’t want to talk to her parents in case they had a go at her.
‘Stop the car! Stop the car!’ she screamed suddenly, and kept doing it until, in annoyance, he did.
He slowly turned to look at her. ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘We have to find Bethany.’ She was whimpering and demanding, trapped between personas, trying to behave like a demanding pop-star but turning back into a little girl.
‘Does she have enough money on her to get home?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know, do I?’ Sofie’s tone was vicious. ‘How am I supposed to know?’
Red Gloves, Volumes I & II Page 13