Fabulous. Lucy Hughes-Hallett
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confidences I betrayed, the mean little niggling ways in which I tried to tell her that it was her hand I wanted fondling my ears and rubbing my tummy when I’d pleased her, that it would be her voice I obeyed when it told me to go fetch.
She said that Rokesmith had found a buyer for the penthouse. ‘Thanks to Eliza,’ she said. ‘Yes, she’s back in Sales. She’ll be heading up the team from next week.’ We got the picture.
Acton didn’t come in on Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday, but Friday he was there again. ‘There’ll be one last party,’ said Diana. ‘In the penthouse. Before completion. Tomorrow in fact.’ When Rokesmith wanted something done, the lawyers got a move on.
Diana wasn’t there herself. She didn’t work weekends. Saturdays, she was in Richmond Park with her other hounds. She didn’t need to be present in person. She’d trained and instructed and starved us, and she’d showed us the lure with Acton’s scent on it.
It began with teasing. Acton was very smartly turned out. He wore one of those tight-buttoned shortish jackets that set off the amplitude of a man’s backside. All the better to sink your teeth into.
We all knew that one of the kids had been found dead in the gasworks. Overdose. You could have seen it coming. No one’s fault but her own, but still … We made jokes about gas masks and gaslight and gas chambers. They weren’t funny jokes. They weren’t meant to be. Acton laughed anyway. He was full of bonhomie. He could always turn it on.
He was onto the third caipirinha when he sensed the shift. He said something disparaging about a client, one we’d all had to deal with, one of those time-wasters whose idea of Saturday-morning fun is to go sightseeing around property way out of their price range. We didn’t laugh. It wasn’t that we liked the woman – she treated us all like she’d learnt at her mother’s knee that all estate agents are dishonest spivs whose vocabulary is risibly limited to words like ‘comprising’ and ‘utility room’. It wasn’t because we’d never jeered at her ourselves that we denied him his laugh. We kept quiet because we were all pointing, every sinew tight, each right-side forefoot lifted ready and each muzzle trained on the chosen prey.
Acton put his drink down and his eyes swivelled a bit. He struggled on with his anecdote. He mentioned a shower attachment. He uttered the words en suite. It was as though it was a code word, a command like Attaboy or Rats. Beneath our summer-weight jackets our hackles rose. We crowded him. We barged and jostled. We made a half-circle with Acton as Piggy-in-the-Middle, hemmed in, with the glass panels behind him, and behind them nothing but the purple air.
Mr Rokesmith seemed to rather relish the media coverage of Acton’s plummet, and of the party preceding it. An orgy, they called it, which was absurd. It’s not as though anyone’s clothes were off. ‘No harm done,’ said Rokesmith, ‘apart from the demise of your young friend. Sorry about that. Smart fellow.’
The sale went ahead. Contracts had been exchanged, after all. People who want to live on that stretch of river like to be reminded of the East End of their imagination, of opium dens and mutilated prostitutes and Ronnie Kray saying, ‘Have a word with the gentleman outside, would you, Reg?’ If you want Kensington, you know where to find it. But Wapping, well, it’s got a bit of a frisson, hasn’t it? Even if rowdiness at an estate agents’ office party doesn’t quite cut it in the glamour-of-evil stakes.
Diana assured the police we were all exemplary beings – docile, obedient, team-spirited. We weren’t charged with anything. We were good boys. We got our bonuses.
She still calls us her pack. We are still let out for exercise at lunchtime. We run together along the Embankment. Our muscles work fluidly beneath our elastic skins. We keep our heads low and our weight well forward. The little gizmos slung around our necks allow her to find us swiftly should we stray.
Our eyes switch sideways to check each other’s proximity – we don’t like to be isolated. We know the hindermost and the leader are both easy prey. Acton was our leader once. Look what happened to him.
There was once a young woman whom no one wanted to touch. It’s not that she was ugly. No. The problem was that she was too beautiful by far.
Her skin was as smooth and matt as crêpe de Chine. You wouldn’t want to stroke her cheek for fear of rumpling it. Her hair was as lustrous as falling water and as black as squid ink. If you ran your fingers through it – or so the young men thought as they watched her walking to the library – you’d be afraid they’d come away coated in darkness or cut as by a million tiny wires.
She walked always with her shoulders back. Her hips swayed around the invisible plumb line which dropped from the crown of her head. Her centre of gravity was high, but securely poised. You couldn’t really picture yourself tumbling onto a mattress, giggling, with a girl like that.
You couldn’t see yourself kissing her, either, or blowing raspberries on her naked belly, or sucking her toes.
She was called Psyche.
Her parents were proud of her, but not as pleased as they supposed they ought to be. Their friends said, ‘You know what they’re like. I never know how many I’m cooking for.’ They said, ‘I haven’t seen him for days, hardly. He’s always in his room with that creepy friend of his. I’ve no idea what they do up there.’ They said, ‘She’s dyslexic.’ ‘He’s dyspraxic.’ ‘She’s anorexic.’ ‘We’ve tried counselling.’ They said, ‘I think they should do their own washing, don’t you? But you know. Sometimes, the smell …’ They said, ‘You’ve got to let them do it their own way, haven’t you?’
Psyche’s parents kept quiet. They really had nothing to complain about. Sometimes, at night, though, one of them would say, ‘Do you think Psyche’s all right? I mean, really?’ and the other would look out of the window, or pick a towel up off the floor, or neatly square off a pile of books, and then say, ‘Well, we’ve no reason to suppose that she isn’t, have we?’
They hadn’t. No reason at all. There was nothing wrong with Psyche. She was no trouble. It was just a bit funny the way that she had no friends.
The boys of the town were offended. They didn’t like a young woman to be so negligent of them. They swaggered about, these boys, their hair falling forward over their eyes, their tight trousers puckering around their ankles. Their boots were scuffed. Silver studs gleamed in their nostrils and gold hoops in their ears. They looked like desperadoes, but they were very easily upset.
The war memorial was their place. In the mornings they’d stand around it. They turned their collars up and smoked. Or they sat on the steps and ate bacon sandwiches, holding them carefully with both hands so that the brown sauce wouldn’t run out. They’d talk chorically, each one addressing all the others, each one adding a detail to the story they were telling themselves, mumbling, catching no one’s eye, with occasional barks of laughter. Then they’d scatter, to do whatever they each did by day, and when it was nearly dark they’d be back, waiting for the story to progress, waiting for the night’s episode to unfold.
Psyche saw them when she came out of the library. She said hello, pleasantly, to the ones she’d known at school, and walked on by.
The other young women passed in pairs or gaggles. They went noisily away up the side streets to shop for lip-balm or tights, or they settled in flocks around the tin tables outside the bar. They sat on each other’s laps when the chairs were all taken, and shared each other’s drinks – three, four, five straws converging in tall glasses full of ice-cubes and sliced fruit. They looked at the boys. The boys kept talking, and fiddled with their cigarette lighters. After a while one – the one whose leather jacket looked old and soft, its blackness whitened by scars – walked over to two girls coming back into the square with carrier bags, and he put his arm across the tall one’s shoulders, and her friend took her carrier bags without being asked, and the tall girl and the boy went away towards the river. That was the beginning of the