Before she’d had even a moment to really absorb her surroundings a smiling man in a suit jacket was holding the door ajar for her and wishing her gently upon her way and there she was, once again, back on the pavement, surrounded by babbling cab drivers and Friday night hordes. Without a job.
That was half an hour ago.
Now Betty was home, tiptoeing quietly up the stairs, her wedges in her hand, her heart full of disappointment.
The flat was dark and silent when she let herself in.
For a moment she missed her big empty bedroom in the big empty house, the metres of corridors, the never-used rooms, all the space and the oxygen and the silence. But she breathed it back inside, the sense of loss and nostalgia, and reminded herself instead of all the nights in that big silent bedroom, in that huge sprawling house, wishing herself to be exactly here.
She changed into pyjamas, wiped off the grime of her disappointing Soho night with a baby wipe and then fell into bed with the sound of people outside having a much, much better time than she had, ringing in her ears.
There were three more paps outside the house on Peter Street on Monday morning. This time there was no mistaking them. They wore capacious jackets, multiple pockets bulging with packets of film and spare lens caps, paper coffee cups clutched in gloved
hands
, eyes slanted against the piquant morning light, grumbling to each other quietly like bystanders at a stranger’s funeral.
Betty stopped for a while to watch, but absolutely nothing appeared to be happening. She strolled back around the corner and waited for John Brightly to finish parking his van. He appeared a moment later, carrying a cardboard box with a coffee cup balanced on the top of it. He smiled grimly when he spotted Betty standing on his pitch.
‘Morning,’ he said.
‘Morning,’ replied Betty, taking the cup off the box and holding it for him while he found somewhere to rest the box. ‘How are you?’
‘Not bad,’ he said, ‘not bad at all.’
‘Met your sister on Friday,’ she continued. ‘She bought my coat.’
He raised one eyebrow at her and said, ‘Oh, yeah? Give you a good price for it?’
Betty nodded and passed him his coffee. ‘Not bad,’ she said. ‘Amazing place, she works.’
He shrugged, pulled some LPs from the box. ‘Yeah,’ he said, as though the appearance of his sister’s workplace had never before occurred to him. ‘It’s quite cool, I guess.’
‘And she’s really nice.’
‘You reckon?’
Betty paused, unsure how to take what he’d just said. He was either being negative or he was being facetious. She decided not to venture down that grenade-littered path and smiled blankly. ‘So, over there?’ she pointed towards Peter Street, ‘load of paparazzi hanging around outside someone’s house. Any idea who lives there?’
‘What, on Peter Street?’ He looked at her with a touch more interest now.
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s Dom Jones’s place.’
‘Dom Jones?’
‘Yeah, you know the singer with –’
‘Yes! I
know
. Of course I know. Wall. And that’s his house? Over there?’ Betty’s mind boggled with the gloriousness of this fact. Wall were not her favourite band. Dom Jones was not her favourite singer. But he was the biggest singer with the biggest band in the UK right now. And it was
his
chandelier and anarchic artwork she’d admired through the window on her first night in Soho. Dom Jones was
her neighbour
.
‘Yeah, that’s his place. He used to live there until a couple of years ago. Moved out, you know, when he married –’
‘Amy Metz. Yes, yes, of course.’ Remembered facts from crappy magazines swirled around her mind, nuggets of regurgitated gossip, half-baked facts, how Dom Jones had left Cheryl Glass, the much-loved, elfin-beautiful lead singer of girl band Blossom, for Amy Metz, the hard-nosed, scary-beautiful lead singer of girl band Mighty. Two years later they were married with three children under three and living in a massive pink house in Primrose Hill amid a constantly raging storm of rumours and scandal. And then it hit her, the reason why that front door had looked so familiar the other day. She must have seen it dozens of times in paparazzi shots of Dom Jones taken outside his house.
‘Yeah, he moved out then, but I don’t think he ever sold it. It’s just sat there. Empty.’ John threw a glance towards Peter Street and shrugged. ‘Maybe he’s moving back. Have you checked the headlines today?’
Betty wrinkled her nose and then went immediately to the newsagent across the road, where the very first headline to hit her from the front of the
Mirror
screamed: ‘DOM DUMPED’, illustrated by a blurred photograph of Dom Jones looking very rough around the edges and leaving the Groucho Club ‘in the early hours of last night’.
Betty grabbed the paper and started to read. Apparently Dom had been caught in a backstage toilet after a gig being gifted a
blow
job by a nineteen-year-old called Carly Ann. The only reason why this sordid yet unsurprising interlude had made it to the attention of Amy Metz was that Carly Ann’s boyfriend had secretly filmed the encounter and then attempted to blackmail Dom Jones with it. Dom had failed to take the threat seriously and a copy of the tape had then been posted through the letterboxes of both Dom and Amy’s distinctive pink house and the
Mirror
’s head office in Canary Wharf.
Beneath the article were three blurred stills taken from the tape. And there it was, at the very end of the article, a simple sentence that would mean very little to most people but sent shivers of excitement down Betty’s spine:
Dom Jones is now believed to be returning to his bachelor pad, a three-storey town house in London’s Soho, where the singer previously lived with former lover, Cheryl Glass.
Betty paid for the paper, suppressing an ecstatic smile. While those hapless men with cameras stood about pathetically hoping for a glimpse of their prey, Betty had a front-row view all to herself. She tucked the paper under her arm and dashed back to the flat, flashing the headline at John Brightly as she passed him. His response was just to raise one heavy eyebrow as if to say, ‘Fairly interesting, I suppose.’
Betty bundled up the stairs, two at a time, to the fire escape at the top of the house where she made a roll-up with fluttering fingers. She lit it and looked across and into the windows of Dom Jones’s house.
The light fell well at this time of day, not casting the glass impenetrable black but allowing a blurred glimpse of wall and furnishings. Her eyes roamed around the interior, searching for a sign of movement, and then suddenly, there it was, after all these days of stillness and silence, a shadow moving up a wall
and
then, too fast for Betty to really fix on any defining characteristics, a person walked past the window, turned, once, and then ascended the next flight. It was a man, of that she was certain, a smallish man with a lightweight build and narrow hips. She would not be able to say with one hundred per cent certainty that it was definitely Dom Jones, but she was fairly certain that it was. Another shiver ran through her. She was sitting here, at the very heart of a front-page controversy. Right here. In Soho. Watching Dom Jones walk up his stairs.
She rolled and smoked another three cigarettes, her gaze fixed upon Dom Jones’s windows, but there was no more to be seen. She packed up her tobacco pouch and headed back indoors. She had wasted enough of her new life staring at the back of a stranger’s house. She had more important things to worry about. If the bars and restaurants and clubs of night-time Soho didn’t have a job for her, maybe the shops and galleries of daytime Soho would.
The interior of the fast-food restaurant was shockingly bright after the dimness of the street outside. It was filled with tourists and losers, and smelled cloyingly of congealed meat and stale oil. In the smoking section half a dozen single men pulled nervously on cigarettes in between handfuls of chips. Another corner appeared to have been put aside for emaciated alcoholics and tattooed junkies, who all sat snarling to themselves under their breath, nursing single cups of cold coffee. On the other side of the restaurant a group of high-octane language students shouted at each other with much hilarity in broken English.
Betty queued up behind a small group of bemused Japanese, true to stereotype, with large expensive cameras and oversized baseball caps. Muzak played in the background, Betty thought it might be a synthesiser version of ‘Copacabana’ by Barry Manilow, but it was hard to be sure.
She got to the front of the queue and an awkward boy with a
hairnet
on smiled at her and said, ‘Hello! Welcome to Wendy’s! What can I get for you today?’
She ordered herself a Crispy Chicken Sandwich, a portion of fries and a Pepsi, and as she waited for her order to be prepared, she glanced at a wall to her left.
‘Wendy’s are recruiting now!’ said a small poster. ‘Wendy’s are looking for enthusiastic people to work as customer service professionals. Free uniform + generous rates …’ blah blah blah … ‘Please ask for an application form.’
Betty twitched.
A voice in her head said,
Get one. Get a form
.
Another voice said,
Don’t be ridiculous. I can’t work
here.
The first voice said,
Why not? It’s local. It’s well paid. It’s something to put on your CV. It’s money in the bank. It’s the
rent paid.
And you have spent the whole day looking for jobs in nice places and nobody wanted you
.
‘Can I have one?’ she asked bluntly, pointing at the poster. ‘An application form?’
The boy looked at her strangely and then smiled. ‘Sure,’ he said.
She snatched the application form from the young boy’s hands and shoved it into her shoulder bag, her cheeks hot with embarrassment and shame. She thought of Arlette, imagined what she would say if she could see Betty now, her precious girl, her beautiful girl standing in a bleak burger shop in the middle of the afternoon, with an application form for a job here in her handbag. Arlette would snatch it from her and shred it into a hundred pieces without uttering so much as a solitary word. Arlette would take her from here, firmly by the hand, and treat her to a plate of oysters in St James’s. But then, Arlette had never been in Soho, young and penniless and desperate not to have to go home. If Arlette wanted Betty to find Clara Pickle – and Betty knew she did – then Betty would have to earn some money, because here, in the city, a thousand pounds was not going to go very far.
13
BEFORE SHE WENT
to bed that night, Betty returned to the fire escape for a final cigarette. It was nearly midnight and the lights in Dom Jones’s house were dimmed. The clank of crockery and the clutter of cutlery was a familiar soundtrack now to her moments out here. Comforting, almost. She lit her roll-up and as she inhaled something caught her eye, a movement across the yard. She looked up and saw a man in the window. He was pushing against the sash, trying to lift it open, struggling with unyielding mechanisms, his face screwed up with the effort. Betty stopped breathing and stared in awe at the scene unfolding. She couldn’t tell if it was
him
. The view through the glass was obscured. As she watched she heard the sash come free and the window loop open and then there he was. Without a shadow of doubt it was him, Dom Jones, in a white vest, tattooed forearms, cupping his hands around a cigarette buried between his lips as he lit it with a Zippo. She watched his face contort with angry relief as the tobacco made its way down his throat and then she saw his eyes moving slowly across the backyard, tired and vaguely furious until they found Betty’s gaze and froze.
Betty quickly looked away, horrified to have been caught
staring
. Then she looked back, feeling that pretending that she hadn’t been staring at him wasn’t going to fool anyone and would make her look even more stupid. He was still looking at her, with an expression of vague bemusement. He raised one hand to her and she returned the gesture, her heart racing with excitement. She wondered if he would say anything to her, but the thrum of air-conditioning units, the clatter of the kitchen, the yelling of the kitchen staff below, would have meant he’d have to shout to be heard. Instead he stared thoughtfully into the middle distance, sucking from his cigarette rhythmically before rubbing it out against the brickwork and letting it fall to the ground.
He threw Betty one more look before pulling himself back into his house. It was a strange look: half suspicion, half approval. Then he was gone, the sashes rattling back into place, his face a mere shadow behind the glass again. Betty quickly finished her own cigarette and then glanced at her watch. Ten past midnight. Too late to call Bella, the only person she knew who would care about what had just happened. About the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her in her life. But she had no one to share it with.
Betty did not open her eyes until ten o’clock the following morning. When she did she was painfully aware of the fact that from two thirty to four forty-five the previous night she had lain wide awake listening to the woman downstairs having sex. She had seen the woman downstairs only once or twice since she’d moved in, a small Asian woman who wore a lot of denim and looked rather pinched and anxious. She had not smiled or said hello as they’d passed on the stairs, and Betty had followed her instincts not to force a greeting upon her. She had not looked like a person who would have sex for two and a half hours in the middle of the night. She had not looked the type to scream at the top of her voice or to experience several multiple orgasms in
quick
succession and to bang the walls with her fists every single time she did so. Whoever she had been fucking (and there really seemed to Betty to be no other word for it) had left the building around three minutes after the woman’s last orgasm, stamping noisily down the stairs and banging the front door very loudly in their wake.
Shortly after this the bin men had arrived.
Nobody had warned Betty about bin men before she’d decided to rent a flat in Soho. Nobody told her that in Soho the bin men came every single morning. And that they came early. That they whistled and they hollered and they bantered with each other in sonorous East End accents. That they slammed doors and banged lids and threw entire pieces of furniture into the back end of their growling truck without even a hint of restraint.