Charlie Had His Chance

by Ellis Major

  Charlie thought he might start to explain to Rowena how the club scene worked as to queues, but he wasn’t given time. The fearsome, towering blonde could hardly fail notice the arrival of Rowena, given that all heads were now facing in her direction, like a Bateman cartoon. The mistress of the door propelled her gruesomely thin and elongated limbs in Rowena’s direction and made a pretence of glancing at the clipboard.

  “I’m sure your name’s on the list,” she said. “Come in.” There was a distinct girl shortage that evening.

  “It can’t be,” Rowena told her. “We haven’t been invited and I don’t think you can book can you?”

  “It’s fine,” she was informed, languidly.

  Rowena was starting to get the picture. Fourteen men ahead of her, no girls. She smiled faintly.

  “But you haven’t asked my name,” she pointed out.

  “What’s your name then?”

  “Emily Davison. Went to the races today. Made a killing so I fancied making a night of it.”

  “Yes, here we are, Emily Davison. In you come.”

  Rowena sighed. “Sorry guys,” she announced the assembled men. “Seems I’m not allowed to take my turn. Come on Sweetie.”

  They all nodded in that resigned way that groups of men do when waiting outside clubs.

  Fearsome blonde eyed up Charlie. “Don’t think his name is on the list.”

  “If mine is then his must be – it’s all or nothing as far as I’m concerned. Look it up under K, Clerk Kent. He could have come in through an upstairs window but his outfit upsets the bouncers.”

  Admission gained, Rowena asked Charlie if their experience was typical. “If they know you,” he conceded, as they blundered into the wall of noise. “You’ll get in and anyone pretty always jumps the queue.”

  Charlie knew immediately that this was something Rowena would never enjoy and, he thought to himself, he must be getting old, because it had lost his charm for him. Having seen something of life in the raw, he could understand even more clearly Lance’s confusion and distaste at the sight of cavorting, drugged-up drunks.

  He touched Rowena’s arm. “Let’s go,” he shouted. “You hate it.”

  “Is there nowhere quieter?” she mouthed back at him, as a sweating, lank-haired woman danced in her general direction, seemingly intent on drawing Rowena onto the floor.

  Charlie ushered her away and up a flight of stairs. He knew that the VIP area was usually sufficiently distant from the racket that you could make yourself understood merely by raising your voice rather than screaming or shouting.

  Rowena glanced around as they climbed the stairs and wandered around. She had the air of someone committing scenes to memory. Rowena had been to clubs in Norwich. Some of the people here were better looking and more stylish but otherwise there was little difference. She’d hated it then and she hated it now. By the time Charlie stopped, she’d seen enough. “Yes,” she told him. “I’m not keen. I’m sorry, Charlie. Do you mind?”

  He shook his head. “Not at all. We can go back and annoy Lance. We both agreed we wouldn’t do anything if the other didn’t enjoy it.”

  Now she felt guilty. “We could have a couple of dances if you want, I mean, now we’re here.”

  He shook his head firmly. “No, Rowena. We’ll go. How could I stay here if I know you hate it?”

  They made to go back the way they’d come and found the way blocked by a colossal black wall. Sunglasses surmounted the wall

  “Hello,” Charlie said. “Who are you?”

  The wall flexed. “Flow blood, youse vexin’ me.”

  “What did he say?” Rowena thought she must be losing her hearing.

  “He wants me to go,” Charlie explained.

  “Well how can we? He’s in the way.” She examined the glasses. “You’re in the way.”

  The wall was unmoved. “Duddy Zee wants to hang wid you,” he told Rowena.

  “Who’s Duddy Zee?”

  Part of the wall now moved and nodded towards the VIP area.

  Rowena frowned. “You obviously understand me even though I don’t get the slang. Is Duddy Zee the one with half of the UK’s Gold Reserves around his neck and a dozen bottles of champagne on his table?”

  A nod indicated that Rowena’s deduction was correct.

  “And to do the ‘hang wid’, would I have to cut my dress so short it’s above my crotch, take off my bra and slash what’s left of my dress to the waist. And would I have to be as bored as they are?”

  Mr Zee’s representative did not have an answer to this but he did have a suggestion, couched in comprehensible English. “He needs girls for promos.”

  “Surely eight must be enough and if he’s who I think he is, I don’t want to simulate sex on film. It’s demeaning and exploitative.”

  “Whao bitch, you got fat thighs?”

  Rowena smiled thinly. “I refer you to my previous answer. Now we’d like to leave please.”

  Unfortunately, the wall was showing no signs of moving. In fact there was a ponderous threat of coercion in the swelling of the colossal chest and a low growl. Charlie had some slang of his own handy. He’d noticed something well to the left of Mr Zee.

  “Quand je dis trois, allez vite pour la sortie de secours, en bas,” he said. “Un, deux, trois.”

  They were light on their feet and the wall was not. Some alarm went off as they burst through the exit doors, but they were on a back street and out of sight long before even the clipboard lady woke up.

  “Charlie and Rowena’s awfully big adventure,” Rowena laughed. “We do live life to the full don’t we? I’m sorry, Charlie, if I refuse ever to go to a club are you going to chuck me over for Duddy Zee and his bevy of bored babes.”

  Charlie snorted. “Ok, Rowena, clubs will not form part of our regular social life and, I’m being honest here, I don’t mind at all.”

  “Are we old before our time Charlie? Shouldn’t I be popping something, loving the noise and the buzz, losing myself in the mindless pap, sorry I mean music.”

  “From the lofty heights of my great age, I can say we’re mature beyond our years, Rowena, not old.”

  She laughed. “Yeah, I prefer that. Come on, we’re not far from the Embankment. It’s not too cold. We can walk down to the river. I can get that far in these shoes and we must be able to grab a cab back from there.”

  It was too early for pubs to be emptying out and it was too early for drunks to be wandering the streets, even though it was quite late. Most of the drunks were still working on becoming incapable. Those sleeping rough who noticed Charlie and Rowena thought twice about approaching them because they thought the cold had finally got to their brains and they were hallucinating. How else could a glittering angel have appeared on the chilly banks of the Thames?

  Charlie and Rowena walked arm in arm for several hundred yards, completely unmolested.

  “We’re doing ok, aren’t we,” Rowena asked him. “Are you still with the programme?”

  Charlie laughed. “Of course I am. I can’t tell you how great it feels to be walking along here even if I’m noticing nothing going on around us.”

  “Good,” she said, warmly. “Because you’re making me happy, Charlie. Am I making you happy?”

  “What a question,” he said.

  Chapter 7 – What am I to do, Can’t Help it (Year 2 – February...March…)

  But – and isn’t there always – there was a but.

  Charlie brought it up with Lance one night when Rowena was working. The image of her with another man was something he was able to put out of his mind but the thought was not. It always made him more melancholy company than normal.

  “She’s wonderful,” he told Lance, who nodded as if to say ‘Yeah, so tell me something I don’t already know’.

  “She’s funny, she’s clever, she’s lively and challenging. We get on so well.” Charlie sighed.

  Lance groaned. “Don’t say but to me Charlie, don’t you dare say but or I’ll kill you! I sw
ear to you, Charlie, I may be gay and know nothing about women, but as long as you live you’re never going to meet someone better than her. What’s the matter with you, sunshine? It’s the thought of her with another man, isn’t it?”

  Charlie grimaced. “It doesn’t help but I’m not a fool, Lance. I know that’s finite and I have to be big enough to get over something I suggested in the first place. If I make her happy then fantastic; I’m not going to walk away. But…”

  “Ok, now you’ve said it, Charlie, but I won’t kill you because I’m your friend. Instead I’m going to listen! So tell your uncle Lance what’s the problem. I’m sensitive and caring after all.”

  “It’s a spark, Lance that’s all.”

  Lance laughed out loud. “Listen you daft numpty! She takes your arm when you walk around, you kiss each other like a parent kisses a child and that’s it so far. You expect a spark! I may not know anything about girls but you need to be patient. You two are doing fine from what I see. You have a laugh, you have a lot you like in common, you both love music and you can sing and play for hours together. You don’t have any awkward silences. You’ll see the sparks fly as soon as she gives up that fucking Academy. Ow, sorry. I’ll lose my reputation for sensitivity.”

  ~~~

  Lance had been dismissive of Charlie’s minor worry when he was talking to Charlie, but he didn’t ignore it, and ruminated on the issue in his idle moments.

  Rowena and Lance often talked but seldom the two of them alone. After all, if Rowena came round to the flat it was to see Charlie and so it was logical that Charlie should invariably be there for her arrival.

  A few days after Charlie had his exchange with Lance on the subject of but, a rare opportunity for a one-to-one between Lance and Rowena arose. Charlie had gone to the dentist and had been delayed even longer than he’d expected – an emergency requiring the replacement of a famous model’s crown had pushed him down the queue and he’d even had to surrender his seat to one of her eight assorted attendants (the assistant nutritionist whose principal responsibility was to wash lettuce in spring water freighted in from the Alps).

  Rowena was friends with Lance. They never ran short of topics to discuss, given they both had a lively interest in current affairs amongst other things.

  They started off laughing over some eccentric remark of Babs and then Lance casually wondered how much longer she thought she’d need to continue with the Academy.

  “A month, six weeks,” she said, suddenly watching him carefully. “Why?”

  “Oh nothing,” he told her nonchalantly. “I was wondering if you’d miss it, not the punters, of course but you girls all get on.”

  “I’ll be keeping in touch. If it all works and I come and live here then they’re only round the corner. Lance, tell me, no bullshit, do you think he’s getting impatient.”

  She half laughed. “I sort of hope he is, because I am.”

  He smiled.

  “God, what do I sound like,” she said.

  “Ginny.”

  “We’re almost there, Lance. It all feels right to me. I suppose it’s love I’m feeling.”

  Lance smiled, wistfully. “Rowena, I think you could be right. From where I’m sitting it sure as hell looks like it. I’d better start flat hunting.”

  She stared at him in surprise. “But why?”

  He laughed. “You obviously don’t want me around, Rowena.”

  “Why not, we’re all friends right, or don’t you like me? Say so Lance, so I know.”

  “Don’t be silly. But you don’t want me cluttering up the place, do you, once you start living together properly.”

  “Has Charlie said that?”

  “No. I don’t expect it’s even occurred to him.”

  “Then stay Lance, for crying out loud. It’s not like you’re jealous, is it.”

  “We’ll see,” he said.

  She waved her finger at him. “I think Charlie would actually be upset if you moved out and I don’t want him blaming me. Give it a go, at least. This is a big flat. We don’t need to get under each other’s feet.”

  He didn’t reply at once but swallowed hard. “Do you think he would be upset?” he asked, after a moment.

  “Lance, I wouldn’t say it otherwise.”

  Lance stared at her. “Has he told you why he took me in?”

  Rowena shook her head. “He doesn’t talk about that stuff, Lance. He talks about what you’re up to now, but not about the past.”

  “There are a couple of things you should know,” he told her slowly. “About Charlie. You know him well enough by now, but even so, there’s more.”

  Rowena leaned forward and picked up her mug. “Anything you want to tell me, Lance, I’ll listen. I want to know all about him.”

  “I was raving on Victoria station,” Lance told her. “He bumped into me, purely by chance, and took me back to his flat because of one little thing I had done for him at school.”

  “One thing?”

  Lance nodded. “He was being tortured by a nasty little bunch out on the playing fields. I chased them off and told them to leave him alone. That was it, no more than that. He’s done all this, had me living here all this time more or less for free, listened to me when I was going on and on about what I’d been through. All for what I did in a few seconds, something I would have done for anyone in the school.”

  “It’s like Mary said, Lance, he’s a good man. When he came and made that offer to me, I can see now he meant well. It was a strange thing to do but, bizarrely, it seems to have worked out.”

  Lance shrugged. “I can’t argue with that, as you wouldn’t take any money from him. But you don’t know what he did immediately after we left you that first time, within a few minutes. He was so upset, less about what you’d said to him than the way you were living.”

  Rowena sat bolt upright in surprise. “He’s never said anything. What was it he did?”

  Lance glanced at Rowena for a piercing second or two before dropping his gaze. “You must swear never to tell him, ok, because he wanted you never to know. It was a different time and he knew how prickly you were about accepting anything.”

  “Yes, yes, I swear, Lance, so please tell me. He didn’t give me anything, though, not until he came back with you and Babs.”

  “We parked the car out of sight, he went to the Vicarage and got the Vicar to organise that rota of volunteers, only none of them were volunteers. The Vicar got a fat contribution to church funds, of course, and the ‘volunteers’ got paid.”

  Rowena was silent.

  Lance lifted his head. He’d been talking to his coffee mug. “Oh shit,” he said. “Now what have I done. He’ll arrive and wonder what’s going on.”

  “It’s ok,” she sniffed, wiping her eyes. “It was the surprise, that’s all. I’m fine now and I don’t have makeup to repair even.”

  “Very handy.”

  Rowena’s voice trembled a little. “I don’t want to lose him, Lance. I think I’m in way too deep.”

  “You won’t, Rowena. But get yourself out of that place as soon as you can. Don’t be too proud about the money ok, and the sooner you do give it up, the happier you’ll both be.”

  ~~~

  Rowena had weighed Lance’s words carefully and was planning on broaching the subject with Babs. She hesitated for a reason she couldn’t name – was it a momentary lack of confidence or a feeling that she couldn’t quite bring herself to forego the money she was expecting to make?

  No matter, because Fate decided to involve himself again. This time he’d decided that he might have some influence if he had a go at being nice.

  There was a small matter of personal grooming. Rowena mentioned that she hated paying for a manicurist but she was never able to cut the nails on her right hand properly. It was the sort of comment one passes when someone breaks a nail on their right hand, as Charlie had done.

  To Rowena’s surprise, Charlie suggested that he should do all her nails and proposed she had a bath to
soften them up. Charlie was only too happy to volunteer – Rowena had dainty feet with a high arches. Rowena agreed readily enough, although when she came out of the bathroom, all pink and becoming, and wrapped up in a fluffy bathrobe, Charlie could tell immediately from her expression that she was having second thoughts. Toenail trimming is not the most romantic of tasks to have someone perform for you if you think about it for any length of time. Kissing your toes is one thing, taking nail clippers to them quite another.

  He smiled. “Come on, lie down,” he told her. “Too late for second thoughts now. I won’t think any the less of you and your nails will never have looked better.”

  Until Charlie touched the underneath of her foot, it was much the same as it had been with the singing. Rowena had no more idea she was ticklish than she’d had that she could sing. She began to giggle, then to squirm. Without a second’s thought, Charlie pinned her legs and tickled whilst she screamed and laughed and thrashed around, slapping at his back when she could find the strength.

  Lance got as far as outside the door, recognised fun when he heard it and made himself scarce.

  Charlie got his timing about right. He stopped the moment he heard the word ‘please’ panted between shrieks of laughter.

  The robe was all but off, although Rowena remained decent(ish) in her bra and panties. Her hair was everywhere, her eyes were sparkling and she laughed that deep, throaty laugh as she flopped back onto the bed against the pillows. Charlie grinned at her and she grinned right back. “Charlie Tiptree,” she told him hoarsely. “You are a naughty, naughty boy.”

  After a moment, she sat up, then slowly and deliberately allowed the robe to fall from her shoulders. With her outstretched arm and index finger she pushed him gently over until he was lying on his back. As gracefully as a cat she straddled him and then stared down, gleaming exquisitely in the dim light. Her lips were half-parted and her chest was still rising and falling as she got her breath back.