Ralph's Party

by Lisa Jewell

  ‘Ralph …’

  ‘Um?’

  ‘D’you remember that morning, the morning of the accident?’

  ‘Uh-hum.’

  ‘When we were in the kitchen and I was going to tell you something?’

  They separated and held each other’s hands.

  ‘Yes.’ Finally. He had known it would only be a matter of time before she remembered that unfinished business.

  ‘Well, I just wanted to say …’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I just wanted to say that I think you’re very special …’

  So fucking special.

  ‘ … and that I’m very, very glad to know you and that … that … well, whoever you finally fall in love with is going to be a very lucky girl. I really enjoy being with you and I feel very close to you – very close. I hope you feel the same way.’

  Ralph smiled and squeezed Jem’s hands. ‘Oh, God, oh, yes, I really do. Really, really. I … I … I …’ Was it the moment? Was this the time to come clean, to tell Jem that he was hopelessly in love with her? ‘I … I …’

  ‘What?’ urged Jem. ‘Spit it out!’

  He exhaled. ‘Nothing – nothing. I’m very glad to know you, too, that’s all. I think you’re extremely special, too. Smith’s a very lucky bloke.’ He laughed nervously. No, it wasn’t the right moment. Not yet.

  Jem kissed him on the cheek and leapt on to the bed again. ‘Come on!’ she grinned, ‘chill out. This is one of life’s great surreal experiences – don’t miss out on it!’

  He smiled, finally relenting to the spirit of the night, unlaced his shoes and joined her on the bed.

  ‘It’s your fault if we get gang-raped and hacked to pieces by twenty-two Triads with machetes and stainless-steel dildos, though.’

  Jem made them a spliff and they sat on the gently bobbing bed watching Chinatown from the window, feeling like they were on the deck of a huge white yacht moored in the middle of Soho. Pete came back into the room with a handful of lagers and they passed him the spliff.

  ‘What a place to live,’ said Jem, cracking open her can. ‘Something to tell your grandchildren about.’

  ‘Too right,’ he said, inhaling. ‘But it’s got its drawbacks. I have to be out of here in seconds if the man wants to bring a whore back. And then I have to change the sheets afterwards. And if I want to chuck in the job – bang goes the flat. But you’re right, it’s a real experience.’ He wandered towards one of the wardrobes, rustled around for a few moments and came back clutching hangers.

  They watched him slip into a pair of flat-fronted purple jacquard trousers, a silk lilac-patterned shirt with a monstrous collar and enormous flapping double cuffs, a fat orange satin tie and a black frock-coat with preposterous lapels.

  ‘So,’ he said, giving them a twirl, ‘whaddaya think? Cool or what?’

  ‘Incredible,’ said Jem, stunned by the transformation. He looked amazing. He looked like a pop star. ‘You look amazing,’ she said, ‘you look like a pop star.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, smiling happily. Jem had obviously said the right thing. ‘This is all vintage stuff, you know – collectors’ items. I get it all from a stall at Greenwich market,’ he said, clipping on enormous diamond-studded cuff-links. ‘Here, do you two fancy coming out for a boogie? I’m going to Nemesis, it’s just around the corner,’ he added, noting the blank expressions on their faces. ‘It’s a really nice place, not pretentious or anything.’

  Ralph and Jem looked at each other. They both knew that the other didn’t really fancy it and shook their heads.

  ‘Nah, thanks, Pete. Not really dressed for it, are we?’ Jem said, looking at Ralph.

  ‘Thanks anyway, mate,’ said Ralph, who had finally satisfied himself that Pete wasn’t about to make them the grizzly victims of a butchering that would have hardened Soho detectives turning green and throwing up into their hands. Psychopathic murderers just didn’t wear silk lilac shirts and diamond cuff-links.

  Pete stood at the mirror, adjusted his sideburns, tweaked his hair and straightened his cuffs. He offered them his flat for the night as he wouldn’t be back till mid-morning. When they declined, he insisted they take a spliff for the road and a couple more beers.

  ‘Any time,’ he said, ‘any time you’re round here, just come and see me at the supermarket or this place, and we can go out for a drink next time.’

  ‘Do you always let strangers into your flat?’ asked Ralph.

  Pete snorted. ‘Of course, mate. There’s no adventure in life if you don’t trust people, is there? No experiences. I work hard, I play hard, and if I die tomorrow, at least it would be better than ending up like me dad. Hates change, complains if they alter the layout in Tesco’s or if Countdown starts five minutes late. Doesn’t trust anyone, thinks everyone’s out to get him. He’s never been to London, let alone out the country. How I see it is like this: Some people have like, a travel-bug thing, don’t they? Want to go to Thailand and Africa and have adventures and wear shit clothes and carry all their stuff around in a fucking great bag on their back.’ He shook his head and grimaced. ‘Not me. I can have all the adventures I want right here. You’ve just got to have the right attitude. Look where we are – the greatest city in the world … all the people in the world are right here. Poor people living in dog-shit and second-hand clothes, rich people driving cars that cost as much as houses, artists, bankers, models, drug dealers, the ugliest people in the world, the most beautiful people in the world, Cambodians, Swedes, Nicaraguans, Israelis, Ghanaians, Portuguese. Go to Stamford Hill and look at the Hassidic Jews there, that’s an adventure. Rich Americans in St John’s Wood, or South Kensington. Japanese in Finchley Central. Arabs on the Edgware Road. Irish in Kilburn. Greek Cypriots in Finsbury Park. Turks in Turnpike Lane. Portuguese in Westbourne Park. And then here, Chinatown, noisier, ruder, more bad-tempered bunch of people I’ve never met before. But I love it. I’m open to anything that comes along in this city.

  ‘Ninety-nine per cent of the people in this city wander around in a little bubble. Like you, Jem. I see you at least twice a week and we have a little chat, and I can tell you’re a really nice girl and that you’ve got a bit of spirit, like, a bit of adventure, but you were still too scared to take it any further, weren’t you? We’d reached our little London point of contact, you were comfortable with that and if it hadn’t been for tonight we would have gone on like that for eternity.

  ‘Nah – life’s too short to live in Beckenham and lock your door every night when you get off the six-fifteen, not to let strangers into your flat. See you two, tonight, I bet you never thought you’d end up on an eight-foot water-bed watching some butcher getting tarted up for the night. I bet you’re glad you did though, arntcha?’ He laughed.

  ‘Ever seen that film After Hours about that straight guy who follows Rosanna Arquette into downtown New York and ends up stranded in the middle of the night with no money and meets all these weirdos and freaks? Now, some people might have watched that film and thought, Oh, God, what a nightmare, I hope nothing like that ever happens to me. Not me. That’s what I want my life to be like, every day – After Hours. I always think of it like this: You’re walking down the street and you pass a phone booth. The phone’s ringing. Now, there are two kinds of people, people who think, Don’t want to get involved, and walk on by, and people who are curious, nosy, and want to answer it. Chances are it’s a wrong number. But there’s always a chance you could be getting involved in some mysterious rendezvous, a lover’s tryst, anything. A phone ringing on the street – it could be anything. It could be the start of a film, like, or a book’ – he paused for effect – ‘I love it!’ He looked at his watch and slapped his thighs. ‘Anyway, enough of me philosophizing, I’ve got some partying to do.’

  They followed him down the dreary stairwell and back into the bright, multicoloured mayhem of Chinatown.

  ‘If I don’t see you before, Happy Christmas and all that – have a good one,’ said Pete, shivering a little
in the icy midnight air.

  He gave Jem a kiss on the cheek. He leant into Ralph’s ear as they shook hands.

  ‘Lucky man, Ralph,’ he whispered, Very lucky man.’

  Ralph almost corrected him, almost said, ‘Oh no, she’s not my girlfriend,’ but stopped himself. He wanted Pete to think he was a lucky man; he wanted Pete to think he had something special.

  And then he went. Jem and Ralph stood where they were, not quite sure what to do next that wouldn’t feel like an anticlimax after their rather peculiar experience and Pete’s closing inspirational philosophy.

  ‘Gosh,’ said Jem.

  ‘Indeed,’ said Ralph.

  ‘Food, then?’ said Jem.

  ‘Guess so,’ said Ralph.

  Jem’s face suddenly lit up with a wicked smile. ‘Come on,’ she grabbed his hand, ‘can we just do something before we eat – there’s something I’ve always wanted to do.’

  Ralph shrugged, smiled and followed her.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  A fat Mexican in a sombrero played panpipes by the pagoda phone boxes, watched and appreciated by no one. Restaurants closed down for the night, scrawny men in grubby overalls wheeled large bins of leftovers into the street. Two drunk transvestites in feather boas and Baby Jane make-up passed them noisily and disappeared into a bar above the Chinese barbers’ with red velvet curtains at the window and fairy lights around the door. A couple stood outside the Dive Bar lost in a neverending kiss.

  They crossed Shaftesbury Avenue, weaving through the perpetual traffic jam and crowds of coated, scarved and hatted people.

  ‘Where’re we going?’ asked Ralph.

  ‘Just you wait!’ smirked Jem.

  They turned left from Greek Street into Old Compton Street, Ralph peering as inconspicuously as possible into the steamed windows of chrome-and-glass gay bars, into a world he had no place in, an exclusive world. Funny, he thought, how the word ‘exclusive’ had come to mean chic, fashionable, private, select, when what it really meant was that you weren’t allowed in, you were excluded. It was quite a horrible word really.

  Right and left into Brewer Street.

  ‘Here,’ said Jem, stopping outside a darkened shop with beaded curtains at the doorway and an amateur window display filled with sun-bleached packaging and nasty nylon underwear. A sign in the window proclaimed WE SELL POPPERS. A grotesque mannequin with chipped skin like a horrific burns victim sported a leather basque and brandished a whip in arthritic fingers. Unfeasible dildos stood side by side on a shelf, like suspects in a police line-up.

  ‘Here?’ asked Ralph, his voice betraying a little middle-class disapproval. ‘What for?’

  ‘Just for the hell of it, of course, I’ve never been in a sex shop before.’ She was excited, a bit nervous. ‘Come on,’ she urged.

  They entered the shop together, trying to look blasé, as if they often browsed around Soho sex shops on a Friday night. An Amazonian woman with backcombed black nylon hair down to her thighs, wearing more black eyeliner than the average woman would apply in a lifetime and a tight leather dress that must have required the removal of at least a couple of ribs glanced up at them with a look of practised disinterest and then continued to read the vintage comic she had spread open on the counter in front of her. Her skin was a dead, matt white which appeared to have been sprayed on with an aerosol can. She looked like she might have fangs.

  A large black guy in a T-shirt and jeans stood silently by the door, his hands clasped in front of him, his legs a couple of feet apart. Security. At the far end of the shop an unlikely couple browsed through a rail of French-maid outfits and Miss Whiplash leather ensembles. She was tall, young, perfectly blonde, expensively dressed; she would have looked fantastic on a large black horse in a pair of jodhpurs and a hairnet. He was small, old, powerfully bald, expensively dressed; he would have looked intimidating at the head of a huge corporate boardroom table. Maybe not such an unlikely couple. They’d done this before. There was no humour between them as they quietly discussed the preposterous pieces of shoddy nylon and ΡVC which hung like oversized dolls’ clothes from cheap plastic hangers – this was a business transaction. What were they? Boss and secretary, client and high-class whore, husband and second wife? Maybe she was his daughter’s best friend at boarding school? Another couple stood and examined the video racks. He was fat and unkempt. So was she. Again no humour. They might have been browsing through the reference section of the local library.

  The shop was silent, there was no music, no television, just the reverent, businesslike hum of muted embarrassment. This was not what Jem had expected.

  She wandered towards the video display and the fat couple moved a little to the left to give her some space. She picked up a box. A shocked-looking peroxide blonde with a mouth like a vagina squeezed her dome-like breasts together while a faceless, torsoless, armless man pinned beneath her penetrated her anally and another man who appeared to have only a two-foot penis and a fabulous head of hair impaled her from the front. No wonder she looked shocked. Jem put the box down. She surveyed the display of extraordinary leather and chrome bondage accessories that hung from the ceiling like carcasses in a butcher’s window. Masks, hoods, cuffs, straps, whips and chains, implements for hanging someone from the ceiling, tying them to the bed, gagging them, constraining them, contorting them, whipping them. An all-in-one, head-to-toe ΡVC bodysuit with a barely sufficient mouth-slit straddled the wall. It looked uncomfortable, sweaty.

  Jem walked towards Ralph, who was flicking through a magazine filled with badly photographed images of men and women looking uncomfortable and sweaty in similar erotic garb.

  ‘I’m going to buy a vibrator,’ she whispered to him, cupping his ear with her hand.

  ‘What?!’ he exclaimed, almost silently.

  The vibrators were located in the glass-fronted cabinet which served as a counter to the vampire woman with the comic. Jem felt a little uncomfortable as she eyed the selection, trying to look expert, trying not to look self-conscious under the stagnant aura of the bizarre shop assistant. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. Did she want a sixteen-inch shiny black one or a discreet, cream, handbag-sized model? She beckoned to Ralph, who put back his copy of House of Correction monthly and crouched down next to her in front of the cabinet.

  ‘What d’you think?’ she whispered.

  Ralph shrugged. He felt like the unwilling boyfriend in a clothes shop on a Saturday afternoon. This was girl’s stuff – how was he supposed to know? He was feeling awkward. He’d been inside a sex shop before, of course he had. With his mates, when he was younger, for a laugh, to buy poppers, leer over dirty magazines. But this was different, very different. Now his head was full of images – Jem on her unmade bed, lying on her Chinese-dragon dressing-gown, her knickers around her ankles, her skirt hitched up, knees apart, applying her new vibrator to herself. Oh, God, it was fantastic. But he didn’t want to think those things about her; as erotic and exciting as the image was, he didn’t want it in his head. He wanted the hug in Pete’s bedroom in his head. He wanted the subtly erotic image of Jem’s bare toes smeared with mustard in his head, the barely there glimpse of her soft white bottom. He wanted her face, open, smiling, bright and joyful. He wanted to imagine them together, in the future, in love, laughing, making love, taking their dog for a walk.

  He looked down at her smiling face, the tip of her nose pink and pinched, her eyes looking brightly and fondly at him, and the unwanted image disappeared. This was Jem, gorgeous, lovely, wonderful, angelic Jem. He didn’t want to be like Smith. He didn’t want to be a fusty old stickin-the-mud. She was asking him to be open-minded, to go with the flow. He smiled and turned to eye the display.

  ‘I mean, I don’t suppose it really matters how big it is, as long as it vibrates – unless you want to stick it inside you, of course,’ he offered helpfully.

  That’s true,’ whispered Jem thoughtfully. ‘I don’t think I want a black one, or one with veins. They’re a bit vulgar,
aren’t they?’

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Ralph. ‘I think you should just go for a cheapo one. There’s no point in spending a lot of money.’

  ‘Hmm. What about attachments?’ she asked, gesturing to the pop-up tongues, cactus-like probosces, alien plastic fingers and fierce nodulated rubber balls.

  ‘Nah,’ said Ralph, warming to the subject now that he was no longer embarrassed, ‘just gimmicks, waste of money. That’s a good one,’ he said, pointing to an innocuous slim cream model with no veins, helmet, tongue, balls or inadequate pulsing movement, ‘and it’s only £7.99. I’d go for that one.’

  ‘OΚ,’ said Jem, getting to her feet, wishing suddenly that they were available in boxes on shelves, like in a supermarket, so she wouldn’t have to ask the frightening androidal creature above her to get her one. She took a deep breath and forced herself to be brave. This was like having a smear test. Unpleasant for the recipient but all in a day’s work for the administerer. Old Morticia must have seen all sorts – a nice middle-class girl buying an inoffensive vibrator on a Friday night would be nothing to her. The girl looked like she’d had a frontal lobotomy anyway.

  ‘Can I have one of those, please?’ she asked, as confidently as she could in such a low voice.

  Morticia leant down to see where Jem was pointing, unlocked a cabinet behind her, took out a box, opened it, showed the contents to Jem, waited for her to nod approval, put it back in the box, put the box in a white plastic bag, took the ten-pound note from Jem’s hand, handed her two pounds and a penny and a receipt and carried on reading her comic. The whole transaction took place in deathly silence.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ said Jem, reeling as she heard her nice home counties voice and good manners resonate inappropriately around the hushed shop.