‘Oh, well,’ Irene puts her hand down on the ground, ‘I suppose …’
What she sees brings her immediately to her feet and bustling over to where her daughter hunches at the foot of the breakwater. Geraldine caught her thigh as she fell and has torn a hole four inches long in the skin, from which blood runs freely, soaking tutu, sandshoes, white socks. Her face and hair are covered in a sticky brown residue where she landed head-first in a patch of sea-tar-covered seaweed.
‘Ooh, ooh WAAAH!’ she howls. ‘Aah! Waah!’
Irene kneels beside her stricken daughter. ‘What have you been doing? Look at the state of you! What on earth …?’
‘Aargh!’ yells Geraldine, then says, through a gout of snot, ‘I was trying to get my foot up by my ear to show you, and I fell off.’
‘Well, really, Geraldine.’ Her mother produces an off-white handkerchief from her coat pocket, spits copiously on it and starts to rub at her daughter’s wounds. ‘I don’t know what possessed you. Now look at you. Haven’t I told you that you’d get into trouble with your showing off?’
Geraldine flinches at the touch of the handkerchief. It does hurt, for her mother’s impatient ministrations aren’t the gentlest, but there is element of the Maria Martens in the way she flings herself backward, hand over face, as she suffers her fate.
‘That’ll scar now, you silly thing.’ Irene puts her face up close to the cut, sees that, though ugly, it probably isn’t life-threatening. ‘And your tutu’s ruined. I hope you’ve learned your lesson, my girl.’
Geraldine sniffs, and a fat tear runs down her cheek. She has already mastered the art of storing up tears so that they roll individually, like glycerine drops, from her eyes, rather than massing in salty puddles round her nose. ‘Well, it’s all your fault,’ she announces.
‘And how do you come to that conclusion, young lady?’
Geraldine sits up straight, says imperiously, ‘Well, if you’d only looked at me when I wanted you to, it would never have happened.’
Chapter Six
Chelsea Ladies’ College
Roy is standing with his hand on his hip when we come in, and, from the twisted, Mr Punch grimace on his face, I get the feeling that the hand I can’t see is probably scratching his arse. ‘Girls,’ he says, and goes back to staring at the greenery in the window, which has turned once again to brownery.
We go, ‘Roy,’ and drop our bags and coats in the understairs cupboard behind the bar. Even though we haven’t seen a journalist since Nigel persuaded them all to scatter this morning, we couldn’t really risk leaving the tower in full uniform tonight. Harriet goes to the loo to put her hair in bunches and do her make-up: bright, childlike colours smeared over the eyelids (peacock blue), cheeks (round splodges of embarrassment pink) and lips (slut-red; we may be pretending to be schoolgirls but the punters like their schoolgirls tarty) and to change into stockings with her miniskirt. I don’t need to make so much effort. Where God blessed Harriet with one of those knowing, adult faces that convinced the nuns that she was up to no good when she was about six, he blessed me with the sort of face that gets carded by bouncers well into its thirties. School uniform looks perfectly normal on me, under a cover-all coat; I just look like I’m dressing my age.
I pick up a pile of clean napkins from the counter, make a start on laying them out on tables.
‘I don’t understand’ – Roy fondles the curled leaves of a weeping ficus, which crackle between his fingers – ‘what’s happened. Is it the light in the window, do you think?’
I shrug, place a napkin in the middle of a place setting made up of adult-sized red-plastic-handled training cutlery and those heavy Arcoroc beakers that bounce when you throw them. You need beakers that bounce in here; and you need sharp reflexes to dodge them. ‘No good asking me, Roy. I’m crap with plants.’
‘Oh, well,’ says Roy glumly, ‘maybe that’s it. I used to have a green finger until you two came along. This whole window used to be like a jungle. I had everything here. Banana plants, weeping figs, aloes, rubber plants, agaves, avocado, spider plants, yucca, swiss cheese, ferns, cacti: everything all in one window. You couldn’t see in, you couldn’t see out. It looked lovely. And now look at it. Either you’ve cursed them all, or you’ve got some virus.’
‘Bollocks,’ says Harriet, emerging from the loo with her woolly stockings rolled down over rubber bands to hold them at just-over-knee-height. ‘People don’t carry plant viruses. You’re imagining things again. Just keep feeding them that fertiliser I gave you and you’ll see what happens.’ She takes a wad of napkins from me and starts folding them, yawning widely, gets halfway down the table, then looks up, says, ‘So what treats have you got in store for us tonight, then, Roy?’
Roy has a look at the reservations book. ‘Two stag parties, a birthday party and three corporates. Biggest table fourteen, smallest seven. Birthday starts at seven, corporates seven thirty, eight, eight thirty, stags are staggered at nine thirty and ten. Specials are Welsh rarebit, bacon roly-poly, tapioca and jam but second two corporates are on the set menu as they’ve got Japanese with them.’
‘Oh shit.’ Harriet slaps her napkins down on the table, throws herself into a chair. ‘You didn’t tell me there were going to be Japanese tonight.’
‘Of course I didn’t. I knew you’d find some excuse not to come in if I did.’
‘Too bloody right,’ says Harriet, lights a cigarette. Jiggling her foot in her five-inch tranny-shop stiletto, black kohl pencil smeared beneath her eyes, she looks exactly like a petulant twelve-year-old who’s tarted up her uniform in preparation for the trip on the school bus. Which, of course, is exactly what the job requires. Roy couldn’t believe his luck when the two us walked in here in search of a job. At the time, we couldn’t believe what Shahin had told us about the tips. We do now, though. But I don’t think either of us realised how hard we’d have to work for them.
‘Presumably they’ll be wanting the Sapporo, then,’ I interrupt. I can’t face a fight today. I think we need to keep on Roy’s good side at the moment. I know we’re his best waitresses, but he’s not the most kindly of employers, and I have a feeling that there might be some unscheduled absences coming up in our part of the rota. Fortunately, even Roy recognises that this job is a tough call, so he has six waitresses, and none of us works more than three nights a week. You won’t believe it, but the tips really are good enough to survive on that.
‘There you go, there’s the spirit.’ Roy points at me as I dig out the keys to the cellar. ‘That’s the sort of attitude we need, milady: not your shan’t do this, shan’t do that. Why can’t you be more like your friend here? She doesn’t mind what …’
His voice fades as I go past the fusebox down the basement stairs, into a jumble of exchangeable table tops, broken chairs, blackboards, tablecloths, the washing machine and tumble dryer, metal drums of rice, baked beans, semolina, tapioca, flour, raisins, the desk and computer, the toolbox, cardboard boxes full of receipts mouldering in wait of the bookkeeper and enough bottled beer to refloat the Titanic. From the corner, a couple of hundred spiders watch silently as I edge my way past the maypoles left over from Roy’s 4th of June (a free flower-edged boater with every jug of Pimms!) and the giant mortar boards from the graduation promotion (degree certificate with every bottle of champagne!). I reach gingerly down behind the walk-in freezer and nab the vodka bottle. Take a large gulp from the top, sneeze, gag, take another one. Harriet has her mother’s theatrical background to fall back on when we’re out there performing; I need a bit of help from time to time. I’d burst out laughing, otherwise. Or crying. If I’ve got two lots of corporates and a stag party, I need to be half cut. I mean, don’t get me wrong. Most of the time I enjoy my job; it’s just that even I can see that it’s a weird way to make a living, and it can get to you sometimes.
Behind the Tsing Tao, I locate the case of Sapporo. Bring an armful up the stairs; if Roy wants the whole case carrying, he can bloody well do it himself.
> Just as I reach the top of the stairs, there’s a shriek from the kitchen and the swing door bursts open in a pall of smoke. Shahin must have put the bangers on to cook, then. I can hear him cussing out of the back door. The whole neighbourhood can hear him cussing out of the back door. ‘Crazy motherfuckin’ hangdog sonofabitch forget you!’ he cries. Shahin’s colloquial English has the old-fashioned elegance of a language gleaned from American shows watched on a secreted satellite dish in downtown Tehran. He’s one of the weirdest shags I’ve ever had: all ‘Ooh, baby baby give eet to me,’ and ‘You like that, baby?’ Not scary, you understand, just a bizarre combination of Starsky and Hutch and Dick Dastardly. Very clean, though: fingernails scrubbed to porcelain, and he’s never held it against me that I didn’t go back for more. Didn’t just not hold it against me: turned out to be a total sweetie, actually. Set me and Harriet up with Roy when things went pear-shaped at the Bean-Bag Bar. Shahin loves it here. Thinks it’s hilarious. ‘Best job I ever freakin’ had,’ he says. ‘But I don’t understand this spotted deek. Are all this airheads crazy, or what?’
‘And I see you girls are back in trouble again,’ Roy’s voice drones on. He’s obviously not drawn breath since I went downstairs. Maybe I should have stayed down there.
‘Not in trouble. It’s nothing we’ve done,’ Harriet says wearily, finishing with the ashtrays and rolling her eyes in my direction. It’s pretty clear that this isn’t going to be a good night. I’m exhausted already. I love her, but a night up with Harriet is the equivalent of an Airtours flight to the Caribbean. Well, not as boring, perhaps, and posher, and usually the plumbing holds out for the entire night, but apart from that, it’s close-on the same. That familiar not-quite-there feeling hovers over my cotton wool-wrapped brain and each limb feels like it’s got an exercise weight strapped to it. Jet lag. Why did I have to get a friend who gives me jet lag?
‘Yeah, but your mum’s back in the limelight again.’ Roy isn’t giving up. I really wish Shahin had never let on about our backgrounds.
‘Don’t start,’ says Harriet.
But he does anyway. ‘What beats me,’ he starts, ‘is how someone with your background, all your advantages, has ended up where you have.’
‘I said,’ says Harriet, ‘don’t start, Roy.’
The phone rings. Harriet plunges onto it. ‘Good evening, Chelsea Ladies’ College?’ She listens. ‘Yes, of course. You’re the nine-thirty party, yes? Name of Michael? Sure. Has he been a very naughty boy? How naughty? Well, obviously I can give him a good whacking, but for very naughty boys there’s the blancmange option as well. Only ten pounds. Of course. What time would you like it? Well, I’d suggest we do it pretty soon after you arrive. It’ll break the ice.’
Roy hurries out to the back to tell Shahin that he needs to put a blancmange on.
‘No,’ says Harriet. ‘I’m afraid we’d have trouble with our licence if the serving staff stripped. It’s to do with the fact that we’re all dressed as schoolgirls. But I’ll tell you what we can do. We have an arrangement with an agency. We can get a schoolmistress to come in and do that for you if you like …’
I look at my watch. Forty-five minutes before curtain up.
Chapter Seven
Education, Education, Education
There’s always a bit of a lull on the food front around ten o’clock; we like to let them polish off their sausages and mash before we put on the show, and try to hold back the puds until afterward. It cuts down on food fights. Shahin, in the kitchen overseeing a vat of sultana-studded semolina, peruses the pictures of Godiva’s purple-rinse fans gathered at the gates of Belhaven in the Sparkle and says, ‘Jesus H. Christ. You grow up in this house?’
Harriet, polishing the dishwasher stains off the Arcoroc, nods nonchalantly. ‘Holy sheet,’ says Shahin. ‘What’s it like living somewhere like that? You been there?’ he adds to me.
‘Yes.’ I used to go down and stay there during the vacations after my grades dropped at university and Grace started sending the heavies round to give me talkings-to.
‘So what’s it like?’ he asks again. Like most of the Persians I’ve met, he’s fascinated by the details of other people’s wealth.
‘Not that great. Mostly ghosts and dodging sightseers, and interminable stand-up drinks with the local hunt. And spending thousands of pounds on microfibre longjohns.’
Shahin stirs the semolina, has a taste. I can feel him wishing for rosewater. ‘Longjohns? What is longjohns?’
‘Those long thin trousers you wear under your trousers.’
‘Oh. So was cold, then?’
‘Yes.’ I finish separating eggs for the next batch of the two gallons of custard the restaurant gets through each evening, and glance guiltily at Harriet. Slagging Belhaven off is her birthright, after all, not mine. ‘And damp. It’s below sea level, you know. The kind of cold that gets right through your skin into your bones.’
She gives me a smile of consent under her eyelashes. ‘Godiva wouldn’t go there at all in the winter,’ says Harriet. ‘And I spent my entire childhood dodging from radiator to Aga. The minute you aren’t actually sitting on a radiator, clothes start to rot on your body and your fingers start to drop off.’
Shahin looks up from the bain-marie. ‘Sitting on radiators? Isn’t that meant to be bad for you?’
Harriet clucks. ‘Of course it is. Why do you think they call them stately piles?’
Shahin pours a gallon canister of milk into a cannibal-sized saucepan, turns on the heat beneath it. ‘So, tell me. If you grown up somewhere like that, why you need to be working here?’
‘Oh, darling,’ she replies, ‘it doesn’t work like that. People like me never have any money. It’s all tied up in land, which you’re not allowed to sell because you’re supposed to be a guardian for the next generation or some bollocks like that.’
He chucks five vanilla pods into the warming milk. Shahin can never quite get his head around the less-is-more philosophy. ‘No,’ he declares. ‘I doane bliv you. English peoples always saying “I got no money, I got no money,” but is not true. Is cultural thing, like when taxi driver in Egypt say “as you like” so he can see how much money you got and double it. You must have money.’
Shahin has a directness that’s difficult to resist. Harriet never can. ‘Of course I’ve got money, doughbag,’ she replies. ‘It’s just that it’s tied up in a trust and I don’t get my hands on any of it until I’m thirty, and that’s only if the trustees approve. It’s quite a common thing, that. No one in Britain thinks their children are capable of handling money before they’re thirty.’
He’s ripping the top of a huge bag of sugar open with a knife better suited to chopping up recalcitrant children. ‘Is no way you can get before?’
‘No,’ she replies. Then, ‘Well, I could get married.’
Then we all laugh.
‘Maybe,’ says Shahin, ‘you need to like men a bit before you get married.’
‘I don’t not like men,’ she protests, ‘it’s just that I’ve never met a man who wasn’t an arsehole.’
Shahin turns and throws her one of his specialist ‘my eyes are velvet cushions, rest on them’ soppy looks, says, ‘You are saying you doan like your Shahi’?’
‘Well, I’m not bloody marrying you,’ she replies, and he gives her a flash of gold-capped horse-teeth, laughs.
‘Crazy chicky,’ he says, which is about the highest compliment in his vocabulary, after sonoffabeetch.
Roy puts his head round the swing door, clears his nose. ‘Oi! Any chance of someone doing some work around here?’
We turn. ‘What?’
‘Table eight are ready for their spanking,’ he barks, disappears.
Harriet unpeels herself from the oven doors where she still naturally comes to rest despite ten years away from Belhaven, picks up her cane and her table-tennis bat and stalks towards the ‘Out’ door on her dominatrix’s heels. ‘You ready?’
I nod, collect the blancmanges on their pape
r plates from the counter and fall into line ahead of her. I always go first; coming up to Harriet’s shoulder, I would never be noticed at all if I went last. We wiggle to work ourselves up to maximum velocity in our Wonderbras, check each other for inappropriate hairs, say our grace. ‘Spanking builds character,’ I tell her.
The response comes, ‘It never did me any harm.’
I turn as Roy drops the volume on the sound system and hits the dimmer switch, I kick the door open, and, clomping forward on my big black Caterpillar boots, shout, ‘Right! Is there a Roger Herriot in the house?’
Harriet raises herself up and inhales until the buttons on her blouse groan under the stress.
‘Have you been a very naughty boy?’ she asks.
‘Yes.’ Roger, her victim, bent over the table, confesses.
‘How naughty?’
‘Very naughty.’
‘What have you been doing, you evil boy? Have you been sneaking off and watching Matron undress with your little binoculars again?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes what?’
‘Yes, madam!’ He cries, and his friends snigger with joy: Urk, Urk, he called the waitress madam, Urk.
‘And what else have you been doing? I suppose you’ve been naughty in the showers again, haven’t you?’
‘Yes, madam!’
‘You have?’
This is my cue to step forward. I come round to stand at her side, prime myself with a blancmange in each hand. I always have to avoid Harriet’s eye at all costs at this point in the proceedings, because if there was one moment of communication between us, we would probably both lose it, collapse in hysterical laughter and have to stagger off to the kitchen to recover. It happened once, and Roy docked our wages. But it’s amazing: even after three months of doing it, I still find the prospect of flanning someone irresistibly funny.
‘You’re a dirty, dirty little boy!’ storms Harriet. ‘And you know what we do to dirty little boys around here, don’t you?’
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