On Saturday, Shelley roused mid-afternoon. She didn’t remember driving back from Camden, so it was a relief to find herself in her own flat on Willoughby Road and not in some strange bed or worse, in her working flat. That flat in Belsize Park wasn’t meant for sleeping in but after a binge, sometimes she’d wake there and find money she couldn’t account for, meaning she’d had clients that she didn’t remember seeing. Other times, she’d find a junky she must’ve brought back from the streets. Though often in need of a wash, a smackhead stranger was more welcome than inexplicable earnings.
From her handbag, she took the white envelope. She recounted her pay from The Lanesborough job and bound the crisp fifties in pairs – one note flat with the Queen’s head upright, the other folded over it with the Queen’s head on its side.
She hid the cash in the cold bank – a Black Forest gateau box kept in the freezer. For disguise, it was resealed every time it was reopened and stashed amid a plethora of frozen food.
In the bedroom, she wrapped herself in an old duvet. Still in her pyjamas and barefoot, she waddled on the oak floorboards through to the lounge. She switched on the satellite box and her recently acquired Bang & Olufsen television.
Nestled on the claret, velvet sofa, she shot some junk to counter the aching in her bones. The demon inside that drove and controlled her faded, and she settled into the reprieve she’d created.
She did not have a husband of nine years who secretly fathered a child with his cousin. She did not have a pimp who forced her to work in downtown LA and took all her money. She was not begging her woman-beating boyfriend to come back and take care of her and their five children.
No.
The warm blanket of heroin had slackened and in her half-sleep, she’d mistaken the arguments on television for her own. The Jerry Springer show was rubbish, but even armed with this knowledge, she sat up to concentrate. Occasionally, there was an American trailer park resident who made her feel less pathetic about her own life.
***
By the time Shelley changed into jeans and a jumper, the effects of her medicine had dissipated. Back in reality, she knew that if she was going to call The Lanesborough, it would have to be done when she went out tonight. If not, it would most likely be too late, and if it wasn‘t already, it wasn‘t right for a dead body to be alone in that hotel room.
Her internal board of directors marked the onset of agitation, issuing a shrill warning with their trumpeting. Within seconds, they charged to the front of her mind with fear: she hadn’t wiped her fingerprints from the taps in the bathroom.
What else had she forgotten? DNA. Only the other week there was a television programme about it. Why hadn’t she thought of it at the time? Would her DNA be in the suite at The Lanesborough? If it was, could it be used to track her down? How would they know it was hers?
Her brain performed a spin cycle and produced the notion that hospitals kept DNA records. They took samples from every person when they took blood for whatever reason. The Royal Free Hospital DNA database would share their records with the police – and that would be how they’d find her.
Another hit was what she needed but she couldn’t take one. Shooting more gear wasn’t an option so close to seeing family. This evening she was expected for dinner at her Aunt Elsie’s house and after last night, she was praying she could keep up the pretence of normality.
To deflect the board’s fear-ridden stampede, she busied her mind with a different occupation – vacuuming. Her flat was immaculately clean, having been scrubbed, polished and vacuumed two days ago, but there was always dirt lurking somewhere. Once she’d finished with the Dyson, she rearranged her bookshelf. Currently kept in an unorthodox height system, she switched the books into a conventional alphabetical order. Accomplished, and with still another twenty minutes left before she had to leave her flat, she progressed to her videos. Already stored alphabetically, she reorganised them by genre.
She’d barely made a start on the video shelf when she heard the phone. She knew who it was. Clients calling direct used her mobile, as did the madams she worked for and the girls she worked with. Only the escort agencies had her landline from when she first started working, but they’d long since been eliminated in favour of the higher paying madams. She had fewer friends than she dared count and they rarely phoned. At quarter to seven, it had to be her mother. And if her mother was calling her now, she wouldn’t be at Aunt Elsie’s tonight.
“I’m sorry, dear.” Rita’s voice was so quiet that Shelley could barely hear her.
“That’s okay.” Shelley tried to raise her tone to conceal her disappointment. “Will you make yourself dinner?”
“I’ll be fine. I’m not hungry.”
“You have to eat, Mum.” There was silence as she waited for the distant voice to reply.
“I’ll have something later. You needn’t worry about me.”
But Shelley was worried. She was always worried about her mother.
***
After an aggressive brushing, her hair was eventually untangled. She put on the Tiffany necklace she’d bought herself last week. Then she lifted her jean jacket from the hook behind the bedroom door and went over to the window to ensure it was locked.
Shelley never left her flat without checking it was safe to be left. Once she’d checked the windows in her bedroom, she did the same in the second bedroom, lounge, kitchen and bathroom. Each window handle was pushed in rhythmically in time to her counting aloud. Not believing her eyes, she needed to feel and hear each window was locked. And she needed to feel it and hear it at least twenty times.
The taps were next: a twisting ritual performed in the bathroom and kitchen. Taps, like windows and doors, were counted in four sets of five, but after last night, she kept losing count. Every time that happened, she had to start over from the first set of five.
Finally, she moved on to the six-knob oven. For this, she didn’t keep to the four-sets-of-five pattern. Counting to five twenty-four times unbroken – no mind-wandering allowed – was impossible. The oven needed special treatment. Each of the six knobs was patted, as if in congratulations, five times. She worked from the first on the left through to the last on the right. Most days, even with distractions, the six sets of five took no more than a couple of minutes. But today was not most days. For twenty minutes, her feet were fixed on the black and white floor tiles as the waxwork face stared up at her from the glass in the oven door.
***
Shelley entered the terraced house on Queens Grove using her own key. Stopping off at a payphone to call The Lanesborough had added to her pre-existing condition of persistently abysmal timekeeping.
“Come on through.” Aunt Elsie’s dulcet voice drifted out to greet her, as did the safe smell of musty, old house.
Shelley made her way down the long hall to the kitchen. Her aunt stood by the stove, stirring the contents of a pot chugging away on the back hob. It sounded like a train expelling the same two words on a loop that Shelley heard every time she was a passenger: damaged goods.
Her aunt rested the wooden spoon against the side of the pot, removed her vine and grape patterned apron, and then drew Shelley in for a hug. On releasing her grip, she raised a forkful of fish pie to Shelley’s mouth.
Aunt Elsie made the best fish pie with salmon, cod, eggs, potatoes and Shelley wasn’t sure what else, but whatever was in it, she loved it. The taste usually evoked happy memories from her childhood. And as those good few were the oldest, they were the rarest recollections.
After three mouthfuls, nothing was recalled. The pot’s incessant chanting at her, and her fear of being arrested, prohibited that happening.
“Is something wrong?” Aunt Elsie asked, reinstating the apron as protection over her dusty rose twinset.
Before replying, Shelley ran her tongue over her teeth to remove the particles of fish pie she could feel stuck to them. “No. I’m fine, thanks.”
“But that spasm’s back on your lip again.”
“No, it’s not from— I woke up like this. I think I got stung in my sleep.”
“Oh, thank goodness. You had me worried.” Aunt Elsie clasped her hands together. “You should get an allergy test done. Go to the doctors to be on the safe side.”
“I don’t know if my surgery does that.”
“Well, you can afford to go private.” Using her wrist, Elsie swept back the long, red strands of fringe falling over her eyes. “I’m sorry about Mum. We’ll have another dinner, the three of us, before you start. I promise.”
The family dinner was meant to be celebrating Shelley’s offer of a place at university. She’d had a fleeting idea the year earlier to become a mature student. Before the idea fleeted – as all her others had over recent years – she’d acted on it and applied to a number of London universities.
Until the post arrived yesterday, she didn’t know if she’d actually be going. She hadn’t yet received an offer, and with unspectacular A-level grades and limited spaces for mature students, she wasn’t sure she would. The offer from University College London was the one she’d least expected. Failing to get clean in advance of their interview and assessment day, she was sure being high impaired her ability to carry out the reasoning and numerical tests. And even if it didn’t, staff from the psychology division would be the most likely to pick up on pinned pupils. That’s what she’d thought.
***
After dinner, they took tea in the swirly-patterned lounge. Shelley felt sick as she sat next to her aunt on the brown, velour sofa. It wasn’t that the wallpaper, carpet and curtains looked like living, breathing entities – though they did – it was the fish pie.
Apart from croissants and ice cream, Shelley seldom ate. However, she found that most of the time, if she left a few hours from her last fix, she could eat a child-size portion of most food. But tonight, not being like most, the meal wasn’t either. She’d had to force down every mouthful so as not to upset her aunt.
Like her living-breathing living room, and every other room in the house, Aunt Elsie was trapped in the seventies. In the three decades she’d lived there, nothing had changed, except once in 1985. The year Elsie’s husband left her and the house for a younger woman and a country cottage.
The five-bedroom house was Elsie’s compensation. She didn’t get any money. She’d been scrimping to save for years with what she earned as a school secretary, and still couldn’t afford to redecorate. She could barely afford to heat a couple of rooms during winter. Shelley wanted to give her the money and she’d offered a few times, but her aunt wouldn’t accept it.
“I’m so proud of you.” Aunt Elsie beamed at Shelley. “Soon I’ll have to call you Doctor Hansard.”
Shelley looked down at the trip-inducing carpet. “I don’t know if my savings will stretch to a PhD.”
“If that’s what you want, we’ll make it happen. You can live here and I’ll take in lodgers. I’m not having anything spoil this for you.”
“Let’s see what happens,” Shelley replied, with no intention of allowing her aunt to rent rooms in her house, not after the last time. “I don’t know how I’ll get on. It’s scary. I’m going to be so much older than everyone else.”
“What are you talking about? You’re practically the same age as the kids going straight from A-levels. Don’t worry about that. You’ll be brilliant.”
Starting university at twenty-two years of age wasn’t what worried her, but she couldn’t tell her aunt what was really on her mind. That last night she was at The Lanesborough, smoking crack and sucking on some old guy’s cock when he died in her mouth mid-fellatio, wasn’t confiding-in-Aunt-Elsie information.
“Have you told Foxtons you’re leaving yet?”
“Not yet.” As the lie left Shelley’s lips, guilt rose from her gut. It wasn’t vomit she could taste in her mouth. She couldn’t swallow it back down, but she tried.