THIRTEEN

Before she went to bed that night, Betty returned to the fire escape for a final cigarette. It was nearly midnight, and the lights in Dom Jones’s house were dimmed. The clank of crockery and the clutter of cutlery were a familiar sound track to her moments out here. Comforting, almost. She lit her roll-up, and as she inhaled, something caught her eye, a movement across the yard. She looked up and saw a man in the window. He was pushing against the sash, trying to lift it, struggling with unyielding mechanisms, his face screwed up with the effort. Betty stopped breathing and stared in awe at the scene unfolding. She couldn’t tell if it was him. The view through the glass was obscured. As she watched, she heard the sash come free and the window loop open, and there he was. Without a shadow of doubt, it was Dom Jones, in a white vest, tattooed forearms, cupping his hands around a cigarette buried between his lips as he lit it with a Zippo. She watched his face contort in angry relief as the tobacco made its way down his throat, and then she saw his eyes moving slowly across the backyard, tired and vaguely furious, until they found Betty’s and froze.

Betty quickly looked away, horrified to have been caught staring. Then she looked back; pretending that she hadn’t been staring at him wasn’t going to fool anyone and would make her look even more stupid. He was looking at her with an expression of vague bemusement. He raised one hand to her, and she returned the gesture, her heart racing with excitement. She wondered if he would say anything, but the thrum of air-conditioning units, the clatter of the kitchen, the yelling of the kitchen staff below, would have required him to shout. He stared thoughtfully into the middle distance, sucking from his cigarette rhythmically before rubbing it out against the brickwork and letting it fall to the ground.

He threw Betty one more look before pulling himself back into his house. It was a strange look: half suspicion, half approval. Then he was gone, the sashes rattling back into place, his face a shadow behind the glass. Betty quickly finished her own cigarette and glanced at her watch. Ten past midnight. Too late to call Bella, the only person she knew who would care about what had happened. About the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her. She had no one to share it with.

• • •

Betty did not open her eyes until ten o’clock the following morning. When she did, she was painfully aware of the fact that from two-thirty to four-forty-five the previous night, she had lain wide awake, listening to the woman downstairs having sex. She had seen the woman downstairs only once or twice since she’d moved in: a small Asian woman who wore a lot of denim and looked rather pinched and anxious. She had neither smiled nor said hello as they’d passed on the stairs, and Betty had followed an instinct not to force a greeting. She had not looked like a person who would have sex for two and a half hours in the middle of the night. She had not looked the type to scream at the top of her voice or to experience several multiple orgasms in quick succession and to bang the walls with her fists every single time. Whomever she had been fucking (and there seemed to Betty to be no other word for it) had left the building around three minutes after the woman’s last orgasm, stamping noisily down the stairs and banging the front door loudly.

Shortly after this, the bin men had arrived.

Nobody had warned Betty about bin men before she decided to rent a flat in Soho. Nobody told her that in Soho, the bin men came every single morning. And they came early. They whistled and they hollered and they bantered in sonorous East End accents. They slammed doors and banged lids and threw entire pieces of furniture into the back end of their growling truck without a hint of restraint.

At five-thirty Betty had fallen asleep, only to be awakened an hour later by the first of the market traders arriving in vans. More banging of doors, more cockney hollering and inconsiderate moving about of furniture and crates.

She had considered getting up at this point, heading for the fire escape and an early-morning cigarette, starting the day, but had found her way back to sleep before a police car, pulling up with much screeching of siren and squealing of tires, had brought her abruptly back to awakeness. She pulled back her curtains and watched as two policemen left the car doors wide open and slowly sauntered around the corner into Peter Street, watched by a dozen pairs of curious eyes.

Betty threw on a cardigan and her trainers and dashed downstairs. John Brightly was talking to a hip-looking dude about a John Otway twelve-inch disc. He glanced up curiously as Betty appeared in the doorway, exuding urgency and vague panic. Betty forgot her usual tendency to play it cool and calm in front of John Brightly and looked at him desperately.

“What’s going on?” she asked, looking at the blue light flashing on and off on top of the empty police car.

John Brightly gazed at her with confusion. “What?” he said with a furrowed brow.

“There?” she said. “Dom Jones’s place. The police?”

John scratched the back of his neck. “No idea,” he said before turning back to his customer and addressing him in a compensatory way, as though saying: “I do apologize for the madwoman with the blond hair. Now, where were we?”

Betty sighed impatiently and headed around the corner, where she found the two policemen giving a member of the attendant paparazzi a warning. She listened for a while, keen to discover what had been happening, and she saw one of the policemen knock on the front door of Dom Jones’s house. She rooted herself to the spot. The intercom crackled to life. She heard the vague outline of a male voice and then the door buzzing open. The policeman pushed open the door, and she caught a tiny glimpse of Dom Jones, in jeans and a checked shirt. He looked anxious and tired. The policeman was pulled inside, and the door closed again.

Betty felt something strange happening to her. It was an ache. It started in her heart and ended in her stomach. It was an ache of pity and sadness, but more than that, it was an ache of longing and desire. He looked so beaten up. His marriage in shreds. His children in another house. Trapped in an empty house by a sentry of rabid photographers. His world burst open like a bag of garbage for everyone to see the sordid contents.

She wanted to take him home and care for him and make him smile. She wanted to make everything better.

She thought of the sleazy stills in the Mirror, the back of the girl’s head buried between his legs. But then she thought, God, he was married to Amy Metz. She’d been pregnant for about three years, nonstop. She had awful friends. She looked like a cow. And she had terrible, terrible taste in clothes.

No, thought Betty, absolutely not. She was a woman, and Amy Metz was a woman, and no woman should ever find an excuse for a man to have cheated. Ever.

She set her jaw as she thought this, cementing it into her psyche, and she headed home.