TWELVE

1995

Betty took her tobacco pouch and a glass of water out onto the fire escape. The evening was mild and muggy. It was spring but felt more like September. The air in the vacuum between the buildings was damp with condensation and rich with soupy odors rising from the kitchens below. She made herself a roll-up and smoked it thoughtfully, staring at the house across the way, at the black windows, at the faint glimmer of the chandelier twinkling beyond. The house was dark and empty. The men with the cameras must have been tourists. Strange tourists with a penchant for photographing unexceptional Soho architecture.

It was nearly eight o’clock.

It was Friday.

It was Betty’s third night in Soho.

She had two hundred and fifty pounds in her bag.

She heard the sounds of the Soho night starting up below, saw the sky darkening, the streetlights coming on, felt it all building inside her like a burst of energy.

She did not want to be in this tiny flat all alone, but she did not want to venture out by herself, sit alone in a bar like a character in a film noir, being offered drinks by morose men with broken hearts. She thought of Peter Lawler, the mysterious man kept tucked away in her grandmother’s coat pocket for years and years, and she thought of the potential length of a journey that appeared to have no starting point.

She pulled on her coat, picked up her door keys, and smiled grimly with resolve. She had no more idea of how to find a job than she had of how to find Clara Pickle, but she had to start somewhere, and she may as well start right now.

• • •

Betty got home three hours later.

Her feet were rubbed raw from the seams on the insides of her wedges. Her face was stiff from smiling. And her ego was the size of one of the greasy peanuts she’d stuffed down her throat at the bar of a restaurant on Greek Street, waiting to hear another stressed-out manager tell her there was no work available and then ask her for a CV. She’d planned to take some of her fur money and spend it in a nice restaurant on a bowl of pasta and a glass of beer, but with each establishment she walked away from without a hint of a job, she felt more and more attached to the cash and less and less disposed towards spending it.

She’d saved the Groucho for last.

The Groucho.

From magazines spread open across the kitchen table in the cold house on the cliff, it had sounded to her as mystical as Narnia, as gloriously unlikely as unicorns. She had looked at the photos, pored over the grizzled rock stars, the sozzled artists emerging into the early hours, startled as wild deer, chippy as football hooligans, and thought: Imagine being in there. Inside there. With all those people. Surely this was where the raw red heart of Soho beat its rhythm; surely this, more than the sex shops and the Chinese lanterns and the tattoo parlors, was what Soho boiled down to: a glowing hub of celebrity, excess, and notoriety, a magnet for people who created the color of the world in which we all lived. She had pushed open the door and stepped into the brown murkiness of the reception area and asked to speak to the manager and been told, in charming but no uncertain terms, that there was no manager available to speak to her, but yes, of course, please leave your CV and we’ll pass it on. Betty had barely been listening to the sweet, smiley girl, her gaze cast half at the heavy doors swinging back and forth, open and shut, people passing through, in and out, wondering if any of them might actually be somebody, somebody worth gazing upon.

Before she’d had a moment to 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 on the pavement, surrounded by babbling cabdrivers 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 meters 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 of all the nights in that big silent bedroom, in that huge sprawling house, wishing herself to be exactly here.

She changed into pajamas, wiped off the grime of her disappointing Soho night with a baby wipe, and then fell into bed with the sound ringing in her ears of people having a much, much better time than she had.

• • •

There were three more paparazzo 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 quietly like bystanders at a stranger’s funeral.

Betty stopped to watch, but nothing appeared to be happening. She strolled back around the corner and waited for John Brightly to finish parking his van. He appeared carrying a cardboard box with a coffee cup balanced on top. 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 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 being either negative or facetious. She decided not to venture down the 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.

“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 was not her favorite band. Dom Jones was not her favorite 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 neighbor.

“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, living in a massive pink house in Primrose Hill amid a constantly raging storm of rumors and scandal. 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, but I don’t think he ever sold it. It just sits there. Empty.” John threw a glance at Peter Street and shrugged. “Maybe he’s moving back. Have you checked the headlines today?”

Betty wrinkled her nose and then went 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 named 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 letter boxes 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 from the tape. And there it was, at the end of the article, a simple sentence that would mean 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-story 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 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 into the windows of Dom Jones’s house.

The light fell well at this time of day, not casting the glass impenetrably black but allowing a blurred glimpse of wall and furnishings. Her eyes roamed around the interior, searching for a sign of movement, and then there it was, after all these days of stillness and silence, a shadow moving up a wall. Too fast for Betty to fix on any defining characteristics, a person walked past the window, turned once, and 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 a hundred percent certainty that it was Dom Jones, but she was fairly certain. 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 on Dom Jones’s windows, but there was no more to be seen. She packed up her tobacco pouch and headed 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 nighttime 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. 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 between handfuls of chips. Another corner appeared to have been put aside for emaciated alcoholics and tattooed junkies, who 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 oversize baseball caps. Muzak played in the background; Betty thought it might be a synthesizer 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 smiled at her and said, “Hello! Welcome to Wendy’s! What can I get for you today?”

She ordered a crispy chicken sandwich, fries, and a Pepsi, and as she waited for the order, she glanced at a wall to her left.

“Wendy’s is recruiting now!” said a small poster. “Wendy’s is looking for enthusiastic people to work as customer service professionals. Free uniform + generous rates. Please ask for an application.”

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?”

The boy looked at her strangely and then smiled. “Sure,” he said.

She snatched the application from the 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, her precious girl, her beautiful girl, standing in a bleak burger shop in the middle of the afternoon, with an application for a job here. Arlette would snatch it from her and shred it into a hundred pieces without uttering a solitary word. Arlette would take her firmly by the hand and treat her to a plate of oysters in St. James’s. But Arlette had never been in Soho, young and penniless and desperate not to go home. If Arlette wanted her 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.