Before that, I’d never had anybody start crying inconsolably when I told them a sad story about myself, though. His tears made me feel very guilty and unworthy, and I even thought that perhaps there was something wrong with me because I don’t think I would have cried like that in his situation. I was expecting him to get angry about the Big Bastard, to be outraged, but I never expected him to weep. I told the same story to the Bob Dylan Upstairs, once, and he just strode around the room swearing, saying that he’d like to tear that man’s throat out, and cut his balls off and make him swallow them, and then eat the shit when he finally shat them out. It made me laugh because when I first knew him he told me he was a pacifist. But with Chris it ended up with me giving him hugs as if he were a little child, and sympathising with him for his sympathy with me. I even cried a bit myself.
He quietened down after a while and I made him a cup of tea, British-style for once, too strong, with milk and sugar in it. He drank the tea and felt a lot better, and I had to carry on giving him the story, with him looking at me all desolate, and me sitting there feeling like a criminal.
I told him that the Big Bastard and his friend had taken me back to Soho and turfed me out of the car at three in the morning. I couldn’t think what else to do but to go to the Pussycat Hostess Paradise Club. The place was winding down but there were some people still there, and when I went up the stairs the Gorilla looked at my face and said, “What the fuck happened to you?” It was the longest sentence he ever said to me, or to anyone else.
Bergonzi said, “Bloody ’ell, doll, what happened to you?” and Val said almost exactly the same thing. Anyway, they gave me a bowl of crisps and a glass of champagne, and I told them about the Big Bastard and his friend. Val was very sweet to me, and she said, “We was really worried about you, love.” Bergonzi said that sometimes you got people like that who preyed on girls from hostess clubs because they never went to the police afterwards. He said, “What did they look like, love?” and the odd thing was, I couldn’t really remember. Everyone tried to remember the Big Bastard from when he’d originally come to the Pussycat Paradise, but you got too many people to remember them for more than a day or two. The odd thing was that the Gorilla did remember, and he actually drew quite a good picture. Val said, “Bleedin’ ’eck, who would have thought it? Grill’s got talents. I ain’t never gonna see ’im the same way now.” Bergonzi photocopied it and said he was going to send the pictures round to the other clubs. I don’t know if anything came of it.
Chris said, “So what did you do? You didn’t stay at the club, did you?”
I said, “I stayed. Val and Bergonzi let me stay in their secret flat with them for a few days, and Val looked after me really nicely. Even Bergonzi brought me trays of food, but it was the kind of thing you’d expect from a man. You know, a bit of cheese, and a bit of cake, and a bit of tinned ham, and an apple with wrinkles.”
Chris said, “You wouldn’t normally think of nightclub owners being kind people,” and I said, “You don’t know any.”
Chris said, “But why did you stay at the club, after what happened to you?” and I said, “Because it was my family. I didn’t have anyone else. They were the only people I knew, and they liked me and I liked them. It was a little world all on its own, that wasn’t like any other world. I put on the pussycat suit, and smoked a lot, and drank champagne, and talked rubbish to men, and laughed with Val and the girls, and I could put off the world forever. You know, I washed myself a lot after that. I still can’t stand cigars. I used to wake up in the afternoon, and I was crying. I got bad dreams, over and over, always the same bad dreams. I got woken up, so I had a couple of cigarettes, and then I’d go back to sleep. I still wash too much, maybe. Anyway, some other bad things happened, and Val helped me.”
“Oh?” said Chris.
“Val took me to the VD clinic, and it wasn’t nice at all. It was a horrible place with tatty posters on the wall. Anyway, it was OK, I wasn’t infected, but it didn’t make me feel any better about it. Then it turned out I was pregnant.”
“You were pregnant? Shit.”
“Yes,” I said. “You know, rapists don’t bother with johnnies.”
Chris said, “So what did you do?” and I said, “Well, Val organised for me to get an abortion.”
Chris just said, “Oh God,” and I said, “You know, one day, I am going to have a baby with a nice father, and I’ll hope it’s the same baby come back again, but this time the father will be nice, because I always felt bad about that baby.”
“You’d be a good mother,” said Chris. “The father would be lucky.”
I was very touched, and I held his hand for a moment. He said, “I don’t usually agree with abortion, but then you hear stories like these.”
I said, “Nobody wants to grow up a rapist’s child. It would be a curse. And what if it’s in his blood? Anyway, I was ill for ages afterwards.”
“It wasn’t a backstreet abortion, was it?”
“Oh no, Val organised a proper clinic and everything. They were nice to me and it was a clean place, and there were lots of girls there, all feeling sorry. But one day I started bleeding in the street. There was blood everywhere, all down my legs. That’s why I like black people, because it was a black man who went to a phone box and called an ambulance.”
Chris looked at me a little incredulously and said, “You can’t like a whole race just because one of them was nice to you.”
I said, “Well, I hate Bosnians because one of them was horrible to me,” and he said, “I think you should take bigger samples.” I knew he was right, but that’s the way I am. I said, “Don’t you like black people?” and he said, “I hardly know any. I only know Asians, because a lot of them become doctors, and they buy in pharmaceuticals.”
“Anyway,” I said, “I got better after a while, and I was back at the club again, and then I started getting this idea that I wanted to kill the Big Bastard and the other man. I just couldn’t get it out of my head. It was a big obsession.”
“I can understand that,” said Chris. “Do you really have it in you to be a murderer, though?”
I said, “Come on, you know what I am,” and he laughed and said, “OK, you’re a partisan’s daughter.”
I looked at him and said, “I’m serious. I wanted to kill them. I got some shoes that were too big, and long gloves up to my elbow, and a black dress, and I went to the market and I got a perfect knife.”
“A perfect knife?”
I bent down and picked up my handbag. I took the knife out and showed it to him. I said, “Watch out, because it’s the sharpest knife. I got it sharpened by this Cypriot cook that I got to know once. I never told you about him. Anyway, I said it was for meat.” It was a filleting knife, one of those nice Sabatier knives with the black handles and the rivets. Chris held it in his hand and looked at it, and I said, “It’s supposed to be sharp enough to shave with.” He tried it on the hairs on the back of his hand, and said, “Christ, Roza, you really go everywhere with that? And you even made it a little sheath.” When he gave it back he said, “I must remember to stay on the right side of you. I don’t suppose you ever used it?”
I hesitated. I was very tempted to say yes. I mean, what fun it would be if I told Chris I was a murderer. But I said, “He never came back to the club. I thought maybe if he came back I could get him drunk and take him to some place like under an arch at King’s Cross, or maybe an empty warehouse in Deptford or something. I was going to say that we were going to my place, and I was going to make him scream with pleasure, and things like that. Anyway, my father said you should never stick a knife through someone’s ribs because the ribs are like springs, and you can’t pull the knife out again. I was going to get him under the ribs, and stick it up through his heart, like this.” I showed him how I was going to swing it up from underneath.
“Do you still want to kill him?”
“It’s just a little dream,” I said. “I expect somebody else has killed him by now.”<
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“I’m very sorry about what happened to you,” Chris said, and I could see that his eyes were wet again.
“You know what?” I said. “When I got back to the Pussycat Paradise after all that, and I looked in my handbag, I found that the Big Bastard had put lots of money in it.”
Chris looked puzzled. “What an odd thing to do.”
I said, “It’s not odd. It’s how you buy innocence. You pretend you’re paying wages for a service.”
“Well, I wouldn’t have thought of it,” he said, and I said, “Well, I used some of it to buy the knife.”
He clasped his hands together, leaned forward in his chair, and repeated, “I’m very sorry about what happened to you.”
I thought, “Oh Chris, you’re so sweet. What am I doing to you?”
I said to him, “Haven’t you noticed anything? These last two visits? Something different?”
He looked mystified, and at last I said, “Come on, Chris! I stopped smoking, because you said you hated it.” I was feeling triumphant.
“You stopped smoking? Just like that? It took me ten years. Congratulations! I’m incredibly impressed…and I’m sorry I didn’t notice. You must have been dying to tell me.”
“Well,” I said, “maybe I wasn’t as addicted as I thought. Anyway, I could see how much you didn’t like it. I got bored with it. You know, I was sitting around too much, drinking all that coffee and getting funny feelings in my chest. I got bored with myself. I got too much of my own company, with all that coffee and smoking. Now I’ll just get fat.”
“I’d like you fat, anyway,” said Chris.
When he left for his appointment with Dr. Singh, we hugged for a long time on the doorstep, and I could feel all the sympathy coming out of him. I thought what a lovely man he was. I went back inside and sat down by the fire and daydreamed about him.
TWENTY-FIVE
Hostess
Just like everyone else, always waiting for miracles.
I came back just after Wimbledon fortnight. I remember feeling a bit sorry because Chris Evert had just been beaten by Martina Navratilova. It was only because Chris Evert was quite pretty. I wouldn’t have cared otherwise. I’ve known for a long time that I’m quite shallow, but I’m reconciled to it. I get consolation from the thought that everyone probably is.
It was a Monday. You wouldn’t think I’d remember that after all these years, but I do, because my daughter had been fiddling again with the settings on the radio in the car, and it was on a pop station, and some man was singing “Tell me why I don’t like Mondays,” and I was thinking, “Because everyone hates bloody Mondays, that’s why.” I expect that gentlemen of leisure don’t like Mondays. Probably even the Queen doesn’t.
It was a reasonably good Monday for me, though, because I was going to drop in on Roza, with a big bunch of chrysanthemums.
The Bob Dylan Upstairs opened the door as usual. He had the pretty little blonde with him, and I thought, “Lucky bastard.” This was the blonde called Sarah who was two-timing the drunken Dutchman, and the Bob Dylan was actually finding it all very difficult. I still thought, “Lucky bastard,” however.
Roza chose this occasion to tell me how she’d got involved in selling herself. I often wonder how people end up doing what they do. How do you become a sweet-shop proprietor, or a tax inspector? How do you become a medical salesman, for that matter? Well, the first thing is that you put your dreams on hold. And the second thing is that you then unintentionally give up your dreams entirely, and you while away your life until death comes to collect you, and then you get that last opportunity to look back and see nothing but emptiness behind you.
Roza put the flowers in a vase, and made some coffee. She said, “You know, it took me a long time before I slept with anyone again. It’s even more complicated when you’ve been raped lots of times. I got memories that suddenly came back even when I was enjoying it.
“My first man was an oilman from America, called Joe. He was nice. He came to the club just to see me, and he was always good to me. He said his marriage was like the Arizona desert. The same old story, I heard it so many times. He was lonely and not very happy, and I didn’t sleep with him for the money. It was consolation. It wasn’t for the sex either. It was just nice to have someone to be close to, and be wrapped up with in bed afterwards. He gave me lots of money, though. He said, ‘Listen, princess, this isn’t payment, it’s gratitude, and anyway, I love you. If it wasn’t for the kids I’d carry you off anywhere you want to go.’ Then he got sent to Saudi Arabia, and he gave me a bracelet made of Indian gold, and he said he would come back and see me every time he came through London. He cried the last time I saw him to say goodbye, and then I never saw him again. I think that maybe something must have happened to him, because he wasn’t the kind of man to disappear. He was a good man, I could just tell.
“After that, you know, I didn’t sleep with any old body. I took the ones I liked. It wasn’t like being out in the street, having to go with everyone who stops in a car. You know, I liked it when all these rich men wanted me so much, and a lot of them said, ‘Let me take you away from all this,’ just like in the movies, but I didn’t want to leave the club. Val and Bergonzi, they were like my mother and father, and it was like my home after a while, and anyway, I never loved any of those men enough to go away with them for good, and by then I needed the champagne. It wasn’t like being with Alex, or even Francis and Joe.”
I said, “But weren’t you ever frightened?” and Roza replied, “I always had the knife in my bag. I would’ve stuck it in anyone who got rough. It gave me the confidence.”
I looked at Roza smiling at me, and wondered if she really would. At first I almost couldn’t imagine her sticking a knife in someone, partisan’s daughter or not, but if I thought about it a little longer, it started to seem all too likely.
Roza said, “You know, in the end, I realised I was corrupted. I was looking at men to see how much money they’d give me, and I wasn’t even bothering to think if I liked them any more. Some men, they’re very strange, because they get these weird ideas. They want you to piss on them or they want you to beat them, or they want you to dress up like a policewoman, or they want to be treated like a little dog on a lead. My life was getting more and more peculiar, and I had this trunk, and it was just filling up with so much money, I couldn’t believe it. It’s the trunk under my bed, the black metal one with the red writing on top.”
I said, “Please stop telling me that. You shouldn’t. You shouldn’t tell anyone at all.”
“But why shouldn’t I tell you?”
I said, “Because I don’t want the temptation. I don’t want even the thought of it. You shouldn’t be so stupid as to tell anyone whatsoever.”
“I told the Bob Dylan Upstairs,” said Roza, “but that’s all.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have,” I said. “You ought to know better.”
“I didn’t buy anything except a television,” said Roza, as if she wanted to change the subject. “I could buy practically anything, but I just bought a telly, to smoke in front of.”
“Did you sleep with anyone famous?” I asked. I was curious, even though I felt a weight like lead in my stomach. Feeling sick was the price I paid for my curiosity.
“I expect so,” she replied, “but I didn’t know who was famous or not. A lot of men don’t tell you who they are. Maybe I had politicians and aristocrats. I don’t know. Anyway, you don’t remember them after a while. I never had Mick Jagger or Prince Charles. I would have remembered that, maybe. Anyway, all these men had crap wives. I carried on because of the money. I charged more than the other girls. It made me feel good, charging more. I liked the compliments. ‘You’re so beautiful, you’re so interesting, you’re so intelligent, if I give you ten thousand pounds will you sleep only with me for the next year? I love you, you’re such a wonderful lover,’ and always, ‘You’re so beautiful.’ It’s good to hear those things when you’ve had maybe too much champagne, an
d he’s got a wallet with five hundred in it, and you’re thinking, ‘Well, why not?’ ”
“So why did you stop?”
“I’d had enough, that’s all. It got so I couldn’t remember anything. I was in a very dull dream, where nothing was happening and nothing would ever happen again. You know, the time went by and went by, and it was all just fog. I was going to bed at five in the morning and getting up at five in the evening. If it was winter I never saw the light. I couldn’t remember what things looked like. I had to rack my brain to remember a river. I was eating sandwiches and smoking and drinking coffee until it was time to go to Bergonzi’s. I only knew it was spring when we had daffodils in the vases. I had another abortion once; there were people who gave me twice as much if I didn’t use a johnny, and that gave me some problems, and I had to go off with Val to get it sorted out. After the second abortion I couldn’t bear to see a little child. It made me hurt inside, like when someone punches you in the stomach. I know about that because sometimes the alcohol makes men get rough, and it was my job to get them full of champagne.
“I don’t know if my life went too fast or too slow. Sometimes it was slow like going to funerals, but the time just disappeared. I didn’t have any ideals any more, and I stopped learning anything. I became disappointed in myself.
“Then one day I woke up early, maybe three in the afternoon, and I saw the sunlight shining on the little bits of dust in the air in my room. It was just one ray of light, but it was very beautiful. It made me want to see sunflowers, and the snowstorms you get when the cherry blossom blows off the trees. I thought about Tasha and Fatima, and wondered what they were doing, and my poor father.
“I went and looked in the mirror with the curtain open, just to see what I was, and I looked very hard at that Roza. I was all thin and white like one of those girls at the club who did it for heroin. I touched my face and it was like paper, and I had one or two grey hairs just beginning. I had these thin lines on my mouth and eyes, and they didn’t go when I stopped smiling. I remembered how beautiful and healthy I was at the end of the voyage with Francis.