Chapter 11
ELEVEN
MAY 2010
‘Ooooh!’ Rowan clutched the handrail, her ankle almost turning over as she stumbled down the stairs in her high heels, just making it safely on to the pavement outside the bar. ‘I think that last round of strawberry mojitos was a mistake.’
‘Strawberry mojitos are never a mistake,’ Kate scolded. ‘Strawberry mojitos are the bomb.’
‘Bet you won’t be saying that at seven a.m. tomorrow,’ pointed out Abbie, who’d been held up at work and was therefore the most sober of the five of us – not that that was saying much.
We all paused, blinking in the glare of an oncoming bus.
‘I need a fag.’ Zara fumbled in her handbag for her cigarettes, but the strap slipped off her shoulder and the bag crashed to the ground, sending its contents spilling out. ‘Oh, bollocks.’
I dropped to my knees to help her, but she dropped at the exact same time and our heads bumped together with an audible thud that made my eyes water. On all fours, I looked up at her and we both started giggling helplessly.
‘Come on, you two.’ Abbie scrabbled on the ground for Zara’s scattered belongings. ‘Is that the new Tom Ford lipstick? Cool. Get up now, or you’ll be on the front page of the Daily Mail illustrating an article about ladette culture.’
I scrambled to my feet. Rowan held out a hand to help Zara up, but she was like a baby giraffe taking its first steps, her legs in her patent slingback stilettos going in every direction except the one she wanted them to. Eventually, with Rowan holding one arm and Abbie the other, she made it up.
‘God, I love you guys so much,’ she slurred. ‘You’ll always have my back, won’t you? Won’t you?’
And then she started to cry.
‘Oh, babe.’ Kate found a tissue in her own bag and Zara’s cigarettes in hers, and lit one for her with the practised eagerness of an ex-smoker. ‘Come on, no need to get all emosh. We’ve got you.’
‘No one’s ever said that before,’ Zara sobbed. ‘I’ve always been alone until I found you guys. I don’t want to ever be alone again.’
I put my arm around her and she buried her face in my shoulder, the smell of perfume and smoke surrounding me. ‘Sssh, you’re not alone. We’re here. And what about Patch?’
‘Patch doesn’t love me.’ Zara’s voice was muffled the fabric of my coat. ‘He can’t possibly. I don’t deserve to be loved.’
‘Oh, darling. He does love you.’ I said it even though I had no way of knowing whether it was true. The number Patch had given me at New Year’s Eve was still saved on my phone, uncalled and unmessaged by me. I was glad of that now, because even a ‘hello’ would have made me feel horribly disloyal to Zara.
‘And so do we.’ Abbie moved in closer, enfolding both Zara and me in her arms.
‘We need to get her home.’ Rowan’s voice was full of concern.
‘She can’t get the Tube on her own,’ Kate agreed.
‘Where are you staying, Zee?’ I’d never used Patch’s nickname for Zara before, but it came quite naturally now.
‘Bloomsbury.’ She lifted her head from my shoulder and took the cigarette from Kate, inhaling deeply, then coughing.
‘I’m going north too,’ I said. ‘Why don’t we share a cab? I can drop you at your hotel and then go on home.’
The cost of a taxi all the way home would be prohibitive, but Zara didn’t need to know that. I’d see her safely back to her hotel and then get a bus, I decided.
‘No dodgy minicabs for you, mind,’ Rowan said.
‘Here we go.’ Kate flagged down a black taxi. ‘In you get. Message when you’re both safely home, okay?’
‘I haven’t finished my fag,’ Zara complained.
‘Come on.’ I took her arm and opened the car door. ‘One more drag and off we go.’
‘Can’t I finish in it in there? We’ll open the window for ven-ven-titilation.’
‘Not in my cab you won’t, love,’ barked the driver. ‘And if you throw up on my upholstery…’
‘She won’t,’ I promised, although I was far from certain. ‘What’s the hotel called, Zee?’
‘The Regency.’ Reluctantly, Zara dropped her cigarette and allowed herself to be bundled into the back seat.
I followed her, sliding across and pulling Zara’s rucked-up skirt down over her thighs as best I could. Her legs were as limp and floppy as a rag doll’s.
‘Regency? Never heard of it, love.’
‘It’s just behind the Brish Mushum,’ Zara slurred.
‘Just behind the British Museum,’ I translated.
I was surprised. I knew that when Zara visited from Paris, where she was now living, to see Patch, they tended to stay at his parents’ place, or went away to some romantic hideaway together. But when she came to London alone to join us for the Girlfriends’ Club on Wednesday evenings, which she didn’t manage every month but did at least several times a year, I’d assumed her work put her up somewhere properly posh, which any cab driver would have known how to find instantly. I didn’t have time to analyse that, though – my priority was keeping Zara awake until we reached our destination.
‘When are you heading back?’ I asked her. ‘Hope you’re not getting the Eurostar early tomorrow. You’ll have the hangover from hell.’
‘Never get hangovers,’ Zara insisted, her head flopping against the seat back. ‘Too much practice. Patch says I’ve got a liver of steel.’
I laughed. ‘Your liver and his abs. You’re quite the pair.’
Zara laughed, hiccupped, then started to cry again.
‘Oh God, I’m so sorry.’ I knew from experience that anything could have set her off at that point, but I still felt awful. ‘What did I say?’
‘I don’t deserve him,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have… I should never…’
‘Sssh.’ I stroked her shoulder. ‘Don’t worry. Everything’s okay.’
She lifted her face and looked at me, her eyes bright with tears but her mascara still, impossibly, in place. ‘You don’t know what it’s like. If you haven’t been through what I’ve been through, you can’t understand how it feels not to be able to trust anyone.’
I’d seen this side of Zara before, when she’d had too much to drink – a dark, paranoid, melodramatic side. I remembered her telling me about her childhood in the care system, and there’d been something else, too, once – about a boyfriend who’d sexually assaulted her. I’d been drunk too, when she’d whispered the story to me in the pub toilet with a broken lock, and we’d had to stand guard while the other one had a wee, so my memory of it the next morning had been so hazy I’d wondered if she’d actually said it or it had only been a dream.
‘You can trust me,’ I soothed. ‘Don’t worry.’
‘Can I, Naomi? Can I really?’ The question didn’t sound hopeful or needy – it sounded deeply cynical – almost angry.
‘The Regency,’ the cab driver announced, swinging over to the kerb and then muttering under his breath, ‘And not a moment too soon.’
Hastily, I thrust a ten-pound note and two one-pound coins through the slot, thanked him and opened the door. There was no question of leaving Zara to make her way in alone. Possibly if it had been the sort of hotel I’d imagined, with a smiling, uniformed porter waiting outside a brightly lit lobby where tourists were nursing post-theatre drinks, I would have – but not here.
The place was on a side street. From the outside it looked like just another of the terraced Georgian houses that surrounded it, mostly converted to offices, their stucco fronts pristine and their windows dark and shuttered. But I could see lights on in several upstairs rooms here, dim as if cast by single filament bulbs or flickering televisions, and the lights revealed ragged, grubby lace curtains half shrouding the windows. On a faded board in a downstairs window, I could see the words ‘Bed and breakfast’ with two red stars below them.
I wonder how long that’s been there , my logical brain registered cynically. When was the last time the AA inspected this place – 1998?
I hurried round the back of the cab and opened Zara’s door. She was slumped down in the seat, her chin on her chest.
I gave her shoulder a gentle shake. ‘Up you get, we’re here. Do you have your keys?’
‘Home sweet home,’ she said, swinging her legs out of the cab and clutching my arm for support as she stood up. ‘The good old Regency.’
Old, maybe , I thought.
As if she’d recovered the homing instinct of the drunk person, Zara found her keys quite easily, and I followed her up the three steps to the front door. The mosaic tiles in front of it were chipped and dirty. Zara fitted a key into the lock and turned it, and as the door swung open a dim light clicked automatically on.
Inside, the air was cold and sour smelling – a hint of industrial cleaning products not quite masking whatever grime was lurking. The hall light switched off and another above us came on, revealing a carpet that had once been dark green but had worn away to reveal its brownish-grey underlay in the centre of every step.
It wasn’t just the shabbiness of the place that unsettled me; I’d lived in more than my share of sketchy student houses and my current flatshare certainly wouldn’t be appearing as the ‘after’ picture in a bleach commercial any time soon. There was something else – an air of seediness, almost of despair, that seemed to seep from the walls as clearly as the unpleasant smell.
Zara didn’t seem to notice. Purposeful now, she climbed the stairs swiftly, past the first floor and on to the second. On cue, the stairwell light went out and a fluorescent strip illuminated the corridor.
Dimly, I could hear a woman’s voice moaning wordlessly.
Zara stopped three doors along, raised her key and fitted it into the lock at her second attempt.
Then she turned to me, smiling. ‘I’m all good now. Thanks, Naomi.’
I looked at her, appalled. Before, all my energy had been focused on getting her back to base – but now I’d seen what base was, the idea of leaving her here was unthinkable. As she turned the key and edged the door ajar, I could see it was barely thicker than plywood.
‘You can’t stay here on your own.’ I took a step towards her. Through the crack in the doorway, I could smell damp, overlaid with a blast of her perfume. ‘It doesn’t feel safe.’
She laughed. ‘Of course it’s safe! I’ve been staying here for years. All the models use this place as a base for fashion week – it’s dirt cheap and obviously dirt everything else as well, and the breakfast’s inedible so they all stay lovely and thin.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Seriously.’ She seemed to have sobered up a bit, recovering some of her usual poise.
I still wasn’t sure. I was far from sober myself, and the shock of finding myself here made me feel kind of distant from reality, as if I’d fallen into a weird drunken dream and I’d wake up any minute to find myself standing in a warm, fragrant corridor at the Dorchester.
Zara moved swiftly, as if to take advantage of my confusion. ‘Nighty night, Nome. Thanks for looking after me. You can tell the girls Cinderella’s safely back from the ball.’
She leaned in and pecked me on both cheeks, then opened the door and darted through it. I glimpsed the interior of the room for only a second, but afterwards I was almost certain of what I saw: a person in the bed, silhouetted in the light from the street lamp shining through the curtains. And I was equally sure that, over the hum of traffic from outside, I heard a man’s snore.
Then the door clicked shut behind Zara and I heard the key grind in the lock.
There was nothing more I could do there. I wanted nothing more than the comfort of a crowded night bus and the familiarity of my own bed. My mind made up, I turned and hurried away, the lights snapping on and off and on and off as I made my way out into the street. All the way home, the details replayed in my mind: the shape under the bedclothes, the rasps of a sleeping breath. Thinking about it, I was almost sure I had smelled something, too – a masculine fragrance like juniper, entirely different from Zara’s perfume.
I tried to convince myself that I was wrong. Zara didn’t keep secrets – if anything, she over-shared, freely spilling out details about her life and feelings. If she’d been there with someone – a man – surely she would have told us. But then, perhaps she wouldn’t – because of Patch, who was our friend too.
However much I tried to convince myself that my mind – helped along a bit by the strawberry mojitos – had been playing tricks on me, I couldn’t quite do it. I thought, when I messaged Rowan to tell her that Zara had got back safely, about mentioning what I’d seen to her, but I couldn’t bring myself to. It would have felt like a betrayal of Zara, who I’d promised to take care of.
Unlocking my own front door half an hour later, I realised something that had never occurred to me before. I thought of Zara as one of my best friends – but, really, I knew almost nothing about her.