'It'll do.' The fare had become all business again … Obviously I wasn't quite chummy enough for him.
'Seven-eighty, guv.' The fare handed over a tenner, and there was a moment during which Dave's long face looked at him, a graven image before which it was customary to lay quantifiable offerings. Then at last: 'Keep the change, cabbie.'
Michelle hadn't even noticed the doormen on her way in, borne as she was on hot draughts of desire. Now that she was clammy and unpleasantly weak at the knees they loomed in the plate glass, stripping her of her Hilton get-up, exposing the naked girl from Streatham. One of them was going to click his fingers, say, 'Weren't you the girl in that ad' or worse 'What you been up to, girl, no slappers allowed in 'ere, I'm gonna call the old Bill. Steve, grab this one!' Instead the doorman only opened the door with a white-gloved hand and said, 'Do you require a cab, miss?'
Dave had been scanning the Standard on the rank outside the Hilton for about five minutes before the waver-upper in the gold-frogged frockcoat did his bit. What'll it be, some Yank div wanting a diesel trot along Rotten Row? But it was a young woman perhaps a year or two younger than himself, a beautiful young woman if you like the freckled Irish type and I can't say I do. She wore a tan suede dress, tight at the breast, flared from the thigh. She carried a linen jacket slung over one arm and a handbag that matched the dress. Her flaming hair crackled on her bare shoulders. She isn't wearing a bra. The waver-upper had the door of the cab open, and she shoved herself inside. Dave took in her pale face, her vacant eyes, her bit-upon lip. She's 'ad a blow. When he asked her, 'Where to?' she didn't reply for several seconds, and he had to say it again and louder. 'Where to, luv?'
'Soho,' she replied, sounding desperate. Dave fingered the meter and drove — which was what he did best.
Michelle sat stiffly on the sweaty yet dusty upholstery. The insides of black cabs had a peculiar ambience of extreme enclosure. This — they seemed to say — is the real interior of London; your sick office buildings, stuffy houses — even your deep-bore tube tunnels — are mere lean-tos, open to the elements. It's only when you're in one of us that you're utterly contained. The cab's thumping engine pounded the shocked Michelle deep inside herself to where her mother, Cath, betrayed for the twentieth time by feckless, freckled Dermot Brodie, sobbed and sorted through the tokens of her girlhood, yellowing communion cards and postcards from Lourdes. Cath Brodie keened and plucked at her British Home Stores cardigan, as if intent on exposing her own wounded heart, so as to let it fall, beating, on to the leatherette pouffe where the lost trick of her innocence was fanned out.
No matter that somehow she got over it and, when Dermot was finally gone, made a life for herself complete with boyfriends like Ron, Cath still hugged her betrayal, loving it more than anything or anyone else. To be Cath's only child was to be her closest ally, her Siamese fucking-twin. They were tied to the same stake, consumed by the same fiery male lust. The only way to escape this awful complicity was for Michelle to practise … secrecy … that's what I called it … They were only little lies … white ones. I'm going out with Janey — when it was Avril; I'm staying at Paula's — when it was Sharon. All kids lie to their parents at that age — but I lied more. But if I hadn't've lied I wouldn't've had any life of my own at all! She'd've dragged me down with her. I had to … I had to. But if she knew I'd been seeing a married man she wouldn't know what to do first — kill me or kill herself. Michelle's fabricators went to work in the cab and speedily erected a plausible mockup of the flat on Streatham High Road, its sharp-cornered rooms and stippled walls, its fussy matriarch presiding from the suite over the TV, the coffee table, the cabinet full of dolls in national dress — all of which stank of ammonia. Dolly daughters who couldn't do wrong if they tried. . whose knickers can't be removed because they're sewn on.
Dave sensed the bruised silence at the back of his neck, but he drove on, feeding the wheel through his large hands as they orbited Berkeley Square. He glanced in the rearview a couple of times, but the fare wasn't actually crying. If she'd been crying, he would have reached for a tissue from the box he kept underneath the dash and offered it to her, saying lightheartedly all part of the service. Yet she didn't cry, only sat, white-faced and desperate.
The traffic was easing as the curtains went up at the Lyric on Shaftesbury Avenue, the Comedy Theatre on Panton Street and the Garrick on Charing Cross Road, where provincial audiences began merrily to consider … when did you last see your trousers? Dave dropped the fare outside Gossips in Dean Street and said, 'A little early for dancing, isn't it, luv?' Luv was on a par with guv, both tip-getters, both evoking a happier age of honest amity and sturdy deference; yet for once he meant it, the fare looked so luvlorn.
'I'm meeting some mates in the wine bar,' she mumbled, as if giving an alibi along with her fiver. 'Keep the change.'
'You sure?'
'Sure.' She teetered on the heel of her sandal, recovered herself and was gone into the glass-fronted wine box, which welcomed her with a gush of chatter. Dave didn't put the 'For Hire' sign on. I'll eat now, then work when the theatre's out. He drove over to the little yard behind Gerrard Street — a tarmac cranny that only those with the Knowledge knew was there at all — parked up and strolled round to the Celestial Empire, his change bag banging his thigh with a 'cash-cash' sound.
Three glasses of house white and Michelle was tipsy enough to tell her friends what had happened; four glasses and she felt drunk enough to regret having done so. All of them judged her in their different ways, all of them lapped up her shame and misery like a catholicon that cured them of their own. Not that any of them said anything mean — they soothed, patted and combed the victim's hair with their sympathetic bicker, while from concealed speakers George Michael politely implored, 'I want your sex …'
Sandra, who filed her nails to a point out of boredom and sensibly wore brown skirts that camouflaged her wide hips against the null terrain of London. Bubbly, blonde Betty, whose electric-blue chenille top hid red, self-inflicted wounds. Pale and interesting Jane, who stood in Shepherd's Bush, propping up a domestic fantasy: the pretence that her husband Rick went out to work, when he stole her purse and went out to score. Sandra judged Michelle with the prerogative of a first officer, for whom her captain's decisions are always foolhardy. Betty felt that her follies were permitted by reason of her vulnerability, whereas Michelle — who was tough and self-reliant — should know better. Jane was quite straightforwardly contemptuous: her husband might be a lying abuser, faithful only because he was impotent, but he was a husband and, importantly, he was hers.
They really care, Michelle thought, looking from Sandra's spaniel waves to Betty's poodle curls. However, her belly gurgled the opposite: there was justice in their poorly concealed schadenfreude, for, while all vain, pretty young women require at least one who is less so, to offset their own allure, she'd greedily insisted on three.