Midnight Girls

by Lulu Taylor

  The waitress increased her pace, stroking him hard and tickling faster with her mouth. Mitch felt his orgasm begin; he looked down at her blonde head bobbing up and down on his cock and it gave him the push over the edge: he groaned as he felt himself spurt into her mouth. He throbbed three or four times, his face contorting with the sweet agony of coming, then the ejaculation subsided and he quickly pushed her away.

  ‘Did you like that, Mitch?’ the waitress asked, wiping her mouth.

  ‘Yeah, baby, thanks.’ He tucked his cock back into his pants as best he could with one hand, the other arm still occupied with the box of Romaine lettuces destined for that night’s Caesar salads. ‘Very nice, honey.’

  ‘Have you … Can I have …?’ Her high voice faded away and she blinked big, needy eyes at him.

  ‘You want the junk? OK, no problem.’ He pulled a small plastic bag of pale brown powder from his pocket. ‘Here. Have it.’

  Her eyes widened even further. ‘All of it?’

  ‘Sure.’ I’ll regret that, he thought. ‘Take it all. Just don’t fuck up on the job, OK? And you’d better show up for your shifts or I’ll fire your ass so fast you won’t know what happened. Smack is no excuse for not working, understand?’

  She nodded happily, evidently itching to get her hands on the treat he was holding out to her. ‘You got it.’

  ‘Good. Now, that was nice. Maybe we can do it again some time.’

  ‘Any time, Mitch, any time.’

  He watched as she went happily off down the alleyway, her little reward stuffed into the pocket of her denim jacket. She’d go back to some dive she shared with a boyfriend, probably a cook too, someone who lived in the same strange world of crazy hours, intense work, heat and pressure, someone who also experienced the mad high of the post-shift euphoria and who craved the same release that drugs brought.

  Was it really nearly a year since he’d come to New York? Mitch found it hard to remember that innocent young man who’d got off the bus at Port Authority then. That kid had never dreamt he’d get involved in this kind of world. He’d been a hard-working boy who wanted to make something of himself, clean-living, a young man whose only idea of a good time was downing a few beers and watching the baseball. His one vice was smoking – he was addicted to Camels. The only time he didn’t have one hanging from his mouth was when he was cooking. That was the crazy thing: he could go for eight hours straight without even thinking about a cigarette but, the minute he stepped out of the kitchen, he felt like he’d die if he didn’t have one of those babies within about ten seconds.

  He’d never experienced physical hardship like working in a New York kitchen in a proper fancy restaurant. Working in diners out West was nothing compared to this. He started at seven o’clock in the evening when the first covers came in – rich men and women who knew good food and expected it on their plates when they were paying top New York prices – and then did not stop until almost two in the morning: cooking, tasting, seasoning and plating up, producing the same dishes to the exact same standard of perfection over and over again, as the kitchen grew hotter and tenser and more and more like his idea of hell. He thrived on the atmosphere and the manic way time passed but, with his working hours flashing by, it was no surprise he began to feel the need to live intensely outside of work too. Half his life was being swallowed up by it. There had to be moments when he felt alive and engaged with the world beyond the kitchen.

  But there was nowhere else he’d rather be. He’d fallen in love with New York, and he’d fallen hard. Once he’d learnt how the place worked, once he’d found Herbie, the wild-eyed pastry chef from New Jersey who’d taken him under his wing … well, things became a lot easier for Mitch. He grew up fast. His first job was tricky, having to master making pasta from scratch in an hour, but Herbie had helped him. Then, just as he’d started to get the hang of it, the restaurant suddenly went bust, and shut. This came as no surprise to the other commis-chefs: they shrugged their shoulders and moved on, giving friends a call and finding a new position sometimes within hours. This was how it worked apparently: restaurants opened, a team was assembled to work there – usually friends and associates of whoever was hired as head chef – and then the great scam began. The cooking and waiting staff knew this world well. They knew it better than their fresh-faced, eager bosses, usually pleasant enough people who’d decided it would be fun to run a restaurant and had sunk all their money into it, that this world was a tough one.

  ‘No one can make money out of restaurants,’ Herbie told him. He looked even crazier than most chefs, with his mad curly hair and a criss-cross of burn scars up and down his arms and all over his hands. ‘Except for the lucky few. They’re the ones who give all the others the impression that this is somehow a sure-fire way to make bucks. But you know what? It’s a sure-fire way to lose your house, and that’s about it.’

  While the new restaurant was still afloat, the staff were quick to make as much out of it as they could: over-ordering food and selling it on; walking out with hundreds of dollars worth of prime seafood or top-notch fillet steak concealed under their coats. They drank themselves stupid at the bar and stole bottles of wine, cutlery, linen, and anything else that wasn’t nailed down. They worked hard, too, but often while drunk or stoned.

  ‘These guys are going to go bust,’ Mitch said to Herbie disbelievingly.

  ‘Uh-huh. Then we’ll all move on. I already heard about a new joint opening up in the Village, if you’re interested.’

  ‘But shouldn’t we try and help them?’

  Herbie made a face and said, ‘Nah. They were stupid enough to open a French bistro when everyone’s crazy for Italian, and to paint it this shade of puke green, and to have a menu that gives me the shits just reading it. They deserve it.’ He saw the expression on Mitch’s face. ‘Aw, c’mon, man. Don’t feel sorry for ’em. That’s just the way it is. We gotta feed the beast. This place has gotta die so others might live. It’s harsh, but there we are.’

  It was Herbie who got Mitch a place in the next restaurant as soon as the one they were working in went down, just as he’d predicted. He also got Mitch a bed in the apartment he was renting, though it meant sleeping on a futon affair in the tiny sitting room and folding it away every day before heading off to the restaurant. It was Herbie who brought him into the underground world of the chefs, kitchen staff and waiters, who worked and partied together in the small hours when the city’s respectable citizens were all asleep.

  It was Herbie who introduced him to heroin.

  By the time Mitch had been working in New York six months, he was on the brink of a nervous breakdown. He was frying steaks, broiling chops and roasting Beef Wellington at his meat station in the restaurant, and then doing it all over again in his sleep. It felt like there wasn’t an hour of the day when he wasn’t sweating over a roasting hot grill, or slicing bloody meat, or crisping off fat.

  ‘You need to calm down, man,’ Herbie had announced, looking at Mitch’s red, tired eyes and trembling hands. ‘Here, try some of this.’ He’d tossed a small bag of brown powder towards him.

  ‘Uh-uh.’ Mitch shook his head. ‘I’m not going there.’ He had a healthy disregard for drugs: only the losers in his town had taken stuff like that. He may have left small towns behind him, but he still had their attitudes.

  Herbie laughed. ‘Don’t worry, kid. Don’t like injections, huh?’

  Mitch shook his head again. He’d seen some of the other guys shooting up – even stumbled across one of the kitchen porters in the alley outside the kitchen, pulling a bit of tubing tight round his arm, holding one end with his teeth so he could stab a syringe into a vein with his free hand. It had looked sick, and so did the porter, with his grey face and desperate eyes.

  ‘You don’t have to slam it. You smoke it. It’s not addictive that way – well, not much. And it sure helps to calm you down. It’s like stepping into Nirvana for a little while. Everyone does it, honest. I’m tellin’ ya, man, it’s amazing, and you
won’t get hooked. Ever heard of junkies who don’t inject?’

  He never had. Smoking didn’t sound too bad. Mitch loved to smoke, after all. He’d been at it since he was fourteen and hiding under the bleachers from the football coach.

  ‘Here,’ said Herbie. ‘Lemme show you. Once ain’t going to hurt.’

  He had fetched a good-sized piece of aluminium foil and given Mitch a toilet roll tube to hold over the little pile of powder.

  ‘I’m gonna heat the dope till it turns into vapour, OK? You inhale it through the tube. Nod your head when you’ve had enough and I’ll stop burning. It’ll smoke for another couple of seconds after that, so don’t waste it.’

  Am I really gonna try this stuff? he wondered, as Herbie assembled the gear. But he looked up to the other chef, who knew so much more about how the world worked. Herbie was too smart to fuck up, wasn’t he? If he said it was OK, then it must be. And Mitch would love to feel good again, and shake this bone-crushing tiredness, just for a while. Maybe once … it can’t hurt, not just the once. So I can see what all the fuss is about.

  He had watched while Herbie clicked his cigarette lighter under the piece of foil, heard the crackle as it heated and the heroin glowed. He sucked in the smoke, held it deep within while it worked its magic, and then released it.

  The minute he did, he knew that his pal had been lying to him. There was no way this was not addictive: the feeling of utter bliss and warmth that filled him to the top of his skull was the most beautiful sensation Mitch had ever had, and he wanted it again as quickly as possible.

  ‘Nice, huh?’

  Mitch nodded.

  ‘See? What did I tell you?’ Herbie grinned. ‘Don’t say I never do nothing for ya, man.’

  Oh, wow. That hits the spot. It really hits the spot.

  Chapter 9

  Westfield Boarding School for Girls

  Spring 2001

  IMOGEN AND ALLEGRA were in Allegra’s room, putting off finishing their evening prep and painting their toe nails instead. Life in the sixth form was much better than lower down in the school – they were finally in Warwick House, where they were treated more like adults and had their own private study bedrooms.

  When they’d returned to Westfield the previous September, armed with their respectable GCSE results, they all seemed to have grown up over the holidays, as though the months away from school had allowed them to digest and accept what had happened the previous term. It had changed them, there was no doubt about that. They were quieter than before, and their group of three became more and more insular, trusting only each other.

  The teachers understood that Sophie Harcourt’s death had affected some of their pupils more deeply than they could know – after all, Martha Young had never returned to Westfield after the holidays – but even so, they were surprised that their most rebellious characters had mysteriously settled down and begun to apply themselves to their books.

  ‘Imogen Heath has always been a good girl at heart,’ they said to each other in the staff room, ‘but who would have expected that vain little package Romily de Lisle to start caring about something other than lipstick and fashion? And what about Allegra McCorquodale? We always knew she had a brain, but no one guessed she’d ever start using it …’

  Gradually, as the girls began to recover from the shock of what had happened to Sophie, they looked towards their own futures. Allegra even had a boyfriend, Freddie, who was at Radley. They wrote each other chirpy, unromantic letters and met in pubs off Sloane Square during holidays and exeats, usually ending up at someone’s house where they could kiss and grope each other. She kept the other two endlessly entertained with stories of how far she and Freddie were getting. Imogen was working hard and, urged by the English teacher to apply to Oxford, had decided she would try for Christ Church, one of the largest and grandest colleges. Allegra followed suit, although without quite as much encouragement as Imogen received, and said she planned to apply to Lincoln. ‘It’s where my family always goes,’ she explained vaguely when asked. ‘Xander’s going there in the autumn.’

  Imogen had had no idea that you could have a family college, where you would expect to follow in your relatives’ footsteps, but apparently you could. Knowing that Xander was going to be at Oxford gave Imogen a tingling, excited feeling in her stomach. Ever since the wedding in London, she’d nurtured a secret crush on him, wondering when she would see him again, but he’d proved much more elusive than he used to. Not so long ago, she and Allegra had spent their time planning how they could get away from her irritating brother – now all she could think about was how their paths might cross; but Xander was always off staying with friends or travelling abroad on some adventure. She had caught a tantalising glimpse of him at Foughton over the Christmas holidays and he’d looked more handsome and grown up than ever, but she’d barely been able to exchange more than a few stammering words with him. Now she dreamed of seeing him at Oxford, and it sent her back to her studies, determined to win her place.

  ‘Do you like this colour red?’ Allegra said, showing her toe nails to Imogen as they sat on the bed.

  ‘Très chic,’ Imogen remarked. ‘But this grey blue is sooo trendy … I totally love it. I’d wear it on my fingernails if I could get away with it, but someone’s bound to notice and make me take it off.’

  ‘You could pretend you trapped all your fingers in a door,’ suggested Allegra.

  ‘Ho-ho.’ Imogen frowned at her favourite colour. ‘Do you really think it looks like bruises?’

  The door was flung open then and they both glanced up, startled, as Romily came in, tears streaming down her face.

  ‘What is it, Rom?’ Allegra asked, jumping off the bed, not caring that her scarlet nails were still wet. She rushed over and put her arms round the other girl, who started crying hard.

  Romily raised her face, leaving a damp patch on Allegra’s top. ‘I’ve just been talking to my mother. She says she and my father have decided that I’ve got to leave Westfield.’

  ‘What?’ Imogen gasped, and jumped up as well.

  Romily nodded, sniffing, her brown eyes full of tears. Her mascara left inky trails down her cheeks but she wiped them away with the cuff of her exquisite white shirt.

  ‘But why?’ demanded Allegra.

  ‘They’ve just heard about …’ Romily looked reluctant to say the words ‘… about you know what.’

  They all swapped glances. They knew what she was referring to.

  ‘But all the parents got a letter, didn’t they?’ Allegra said. She sat down on the chair by her desk. ‘And it was in the news, all over the papers, we all saw it … Christ, everyone saw it. Remember how we had the press outside the gates for weeks? How Miss Steele forbade us all to talk to them? How could your parents not have known?’

  Romily turned her eyes up to heaven and said, ‘Because they’re not like other people! They live in their own little bubble, you know that. They’re hardly ever in London. Maybe they were at the château, or on Chrypkos, or in New York or Switzerland – I don’t know. They don’t really care about things like this – they know what’s going on in high society, or politics, or fashion, or art. They don’t give a stuff about what happens at a girls’ school out in the middle of nowhere.’

  ‘Not even if you’re there?’ Imogen asked tentatively. She’d seen Romily’s parents only once, when they attended a speech day. Usually nannies and personal assistants escorted her to and from school, along with the mandatory bodyguard. The de Lisles had been stunningly glamorous, like creatures from another world. They’d seemed more highly coloured and textured than the people around them, as glossy and polished as fine porcelain. Their clothes, their hair, everything about them had screamed money: not just a bit, but oodles and oodles of it. It had made the other Westfield parents – the bankers, stockbrockers, lawyers and businessmen – look a little bit dowdy by comparison. Even the richest British ones, even the most aristocratic, couldn’t compete with the sheen of French sophistication and
the utter glamour of their haute-European lifestyle. At least, that was how it had seemed to Imogen. ‘And didn’t they get the letter from Miss Steele?’

  Romily shrugged. Suddenly, she looked very young and lonely. ‘I shouldn’t think they ever saw it. All correspondence goes to the office. The secretaries would have opened it. They read all of it – they even précis my reports into one paragraph so my parents don’t have to waste too much time over them. They probably didn’t think it was worth bothering them over something so minor. Or they put it in a file for someone’s attention and it’s only now that it’s been noticed.’

  ‘But why should they care now?’ asked Allegra.

  ‘Oh.’ Romily shrugged. ‘My mother has decided that the school is obviously a den of vice and the wrong sort of people go here. So I’m leaving at the end of term.’ Her lip trembled. ‘She wanted me out immediately! I said no, I wouldn’t walk out. So we’ve compromised. I can stay till the end of term.’

  ‘Oh, Romily!’ They stared at each other, hardly able to believe that their little triumvirate was about to be irreparably shattered. ‘But what are you going to do? Where will you go?’

  Tears flowed down her cheeks. ‘I don’t know. Mama has suggested some other schools – French and Swiss, mostly. Or a kind of finishing school where I would learn cookery and that kind of thing. She doesn’t seem to think I need to go to school at all. She said that education is often vulgarising, and that she knows plenty of intellectuals – a few hours of conversation a week with them and some reading is all I need, apparently. She’s already asked her friend Professor Levy-Lande of the Sorbonne to make a list of everything I should read by the age of twenty-one – all the classics.’

  ‘Shakespeare? Shelley? Keats? Dickens? That kind of thing?’ asked Imogen, interested.

  Romily frowned. ‘Well … more like Racine, Molière, Proust, Voltaire … you know, the classics.’