‘You alright?’ Harry asks.
‘Cold.’ The woman’s voice is quiet. ‘Hungry.’
Harry looks up and down the street at life carrying on all around them, her heart kicking. ‘How much you need for a hostel?’
‘Twelve quid.’ She shields her eyes from the rain. ‘Spare me a fag, please?’ the girl asks, nodding at the butt smoking in Harry’s fingertips.
Harry gives her a cigarette and pushes a couple of £20 notes into her hand. ‘Look, don’t spend it on smack, alright?’ The girl flinches a little. ‘Get into a hostel for a night or two. Get some food. Will you do that?’ Harry says desperately. The girl doesn’t answer, just looks at the notes in her hand, and after a couple of heartbeats, Harry walks off, dizzy. Guilt unfurling inside her. Shaken by sadness. If I could do more, I would.
Her feet land lightly as she sways like a boxer down the road. Full of the swagger of knowing there’s work to be done. The city’s not going to get her like it got the others. She knows it. She nods at the thought. Ducking and weaving, she passes through the teeming crowds. She runs across the road, through the traffic, the rain falls against her face, music blares from bars and people shout to be heard as they walk side by side. She steps over puked-up kebab meat and dropped chips and bops on, invisible.
Harry enters a bar she’s not been to before. She surveys the room, watches the people forcing a good time out of their tired, broken hearts. She feels someone looking at her, turns and sees Leon in the crowd, walking up some stairs at the back.
Leon is her best friend and her business partner. He watches everything; he can see the move before it’s made, bristling in secret corners. The agreement is that Harry handles sales, Leon handles everything else. They never work apart. It’s a good system. Both partners know their roles and respect each other’s talents. For the most part, they love their jobs.
All these fucking people, doing all this fucking Charlie just to feign interest in what other people say.
A man roars in exaggerated jubilation. Harry flinches. She thinks about Reggie, standing out there on the street selling balloons to sixteen-year-olds. That homeless girl sitting on plastic bags in the rain.
She takes her coat off, a sharp navy trench coat, waterproof and well cut. A designer brand but creased and wrinkled, slicked with rain. She hands it to the smiling man in the cloakroom, along with her suit jacket. He gives her a ticket, she reads it: 111. Of course, she thinks. Although the number holds no relevance for her whatsoever.
She heads to the bathroom. As she walks in she is greeted by the usual double takes as the women washing their hands wonder whether she is male or female. It only lasts a moment, but it happens all the time. Harry is a boyish woman who swaggers when she walks. Her body is angular and she wears men’s clothes. Her face is soft, a woman’s face, but she sets it in a scowl when she’s working. She smiles at the women; they look down at their hands or concentrate on their eyelashes in the mirror. Harry checks her clothes, stares at her face. Her pupils retract in the brightness of the bathroom light. I don’t answer to no one. All the violence that she’s seen whips her in the chest and throws her against the cubicle doors. That night when Reggie got his scar. The night Tony fell off the roof of that party and died in the street, all broken. The blood on her clothes after Leon had finished with the man who followed her out of the club. The violence is smashing its hands across her face. Her head is stuffed in the gap between the toilet and the cubicle wall and the violence is standing above her, drawing its hand back. You’re doing it, she tells herself. You’re doing it, Harry. She adjusts her collar, does up the top button. Smart as a tack.
A low heat draws them closer, it surges under the floorboards. It maps a route and pulls their feet across the party.
Becky, Aisha and the agent are heading to the corner of the room; the curtains are trimmed with gold. The lampshades are antique. The carpet is dark red. People paw the floor like bulls. Becky looks carefully into each face, remembering to smile. She is kissed on upturned cheeks by men she doesn’t recognise.
‘Hiya,’ she says, flashing her teeth. ‘How’s things?’
Harry scans the floor for her clients; the affable fun-seekers who like to have more than they need. One big shot and three lesser specimens have requested her presence this evening. Plus, the aristocratic twins who dress in rags and take more drugs than customs. So it should be an earner. Seeing no one she knows, she walks the perimeter and lingers with a group of people who are standing in a circle around a talking man. She is handed a cocktail she doesn’t understand, made with spirits she’s never heard of, poured into a glass she’s not sure how to hold, and she begins drinking it quickly, the ice hitting her teeth with each fast swig.
Becky keeps looking back over her shoulder at Glenda to nod and smile and then she stops, victorious, next to a group assembled breathlessly around a man dressed head to toe in yellow velour.
‘Marshall Law,’ Becky whispers proudly into Glenda’s ear. Glenda eats her own body in ravenous chomps, vomits herself all over the floor at Marshall’s feet and gazes up at the underside of his chin.
‘Oh of course. I mean, of course.’ Marshall nods deeply at no one in particular. ‘I mean, I was in Indonesia and I saw him, just pulling a fishing boat up from the sea, bare feet, wet shorts, you know, very Mowgli, and I just thought wow, what beauty. Because he is, isn’t he? I mean, it’s not the photographs, is it? In this case at least, it’s him that’s so captivating. You know? So real!’
Becky’s heart punches itself out of her chest and runs screaming through the room, smearing blood all over the walls. She looks down, bemused and studies the new hole in her chest. For years she has been smiling in all the right parties and standing neutral in audition rooms, listening attentively to directors like this one. She is sick of it. Her throat is sore and dry and there is a burrowing mole clawing soil in her head.
She looks around the group at the others in the circle. And her eyes jar on a woman opposite, caught like a socked foot on an upturned nail. Snagged. She looks away but finds that she is being drawn back to the woman. Some ancient thing that tugs and hurts and pleases Becky. She can’t get her eyes back. They’re staying put. The woman’s sweet, and tough-looking. Dignified and scruffy, distant. Becky nurtures an endless soft spot for awkward queer women like this one. She notices her crooked teeth. Her springy hair. Her furrowed brow. All the parts are singing, separate lines that soar together, cheekbones high and delicate, hawky little nose, small bright eyes, set deep in her face, powerful. Something about her. Composed and definite like she knows herself. Her brow is creased in confusion. She’s squinting like her vision’s bad at Marshall.
Harry feels the prickle of attention, looks over, sees a woman she doesn’t recognise watching her. Even just a glimpse is blinding. The woman shines so hard in Harry’s eyes. She explodes out of herself like a fireball. Brighter and brighter. Electric and surging, her outline ripping the party like lightning, forking and searing and flashing, shining like sunlight on water reflecting back on itself and becoming heat. A fierceness about her. Shining so golden and yellow-hot, black fire, burning blue in her middle. A new sun blistering bright. Harry blinks, gathers her body parts up from the corners of the room and pieces them back together again. She raises her eyebrows in the direction of Marshall, heaving a pantomime sigh. Becky laughs behind her hand and doesn’t look away. Harry’s movements become rigid and strange. She looks at the floor for as long as she can, and then back up to see that the woman is still looking. She is standing there, tough and unimpressed. Dark complexion, rich soft skin. Harry sees it all, like sudden wounds opening in her chest. Burned entirely. She lifts her head and watches her out of the corners of her eyes and, as they look one another over, the low heat that brought them closer passes between them. Harry feels herself standing taller on her legs, her ears ringing, her eyes burning from the sudden brightness.