FIFTEEN

1995

A bookshop, a comic store, two boutiques, a small gallery, a lingerie store, a brasserie, and a cake shop all told Betty over the course of the next two days that they could not give her a job. One of the agencies she signed up with had offered her a three-day stint sewing on buttons in a tailor’s shop in Bloomsbury for £2.85 an hour, which she had accepted wearily. But within two minutes of entering the shop—a festering lint-filled tomb owned by three aging Portuguese brothers with skin like parchment and hair blackened with boot polish, who looked at her as though she had burst out of a birthday cake—she had made her excuses (something about sore fingers) and fled.

The other agency was waiting to hear from a zip factory in Islington about two days’ zip sorting, and there’d been talk of a few days in reception at a photographer’s studio in Kentish Town, but Betty didn’t hold out much hope for that, given her performance on the typing test. She feared there were a dozen pretty girls with winning smiles who could type faster than thirty words a minute.

Betty was nearing the end of her first week in Soho, and she still did not have a job. She felt a small wave of panic rise up through her. Then she did something that chilled her to her core, something that made her want to cry and be sick at the same time.

She rummaged through the clutter at the bottom of her shoulder bag until she found a biro. Then she rummaged through the clutter by the side of her bed until she found the application for Wendy’s. She filled it in slowly, wanting to delay as long as possible the moment when she would pass it into the oily, miserable hands of a person who claimed to be in a position to decide whether she was worthy of a place within the oily, miserable company. She deliberately misspelled some words, trying to diminish her chances before she even left the house. She did not apply lipstick or put a comb to her hair. She threw on a baggy zip-up cardigan and a pair of trainers, and she made herself look as unappealing as was humanly possible.

As she slouched down the road towards Shaftesbury Avenue, she took on the demeanor of a loser. She did not want this job. She did not want this life.

The manager at Wendy’s was a very small Spanish man by the name of Rodrigo. He had a mustache that was black and hair that was white and a pronounced lisp. He took the form from Betty and sighed when he saw the tea stain and the ink smudges. He glanced at her unhappily through thickly lashed eyes and looked so incredibly sad that Betty almost wanted to hug him.

“Thank you,” he said. “What nationality are you?”

“I’m British,” she said brightly, trying to atone for her dismally presented application.

He looked at her in surprise, glossy black eyebrows shooting towards his silver hairline. “British,” he repeated.

“Yes.”

“Oh,” he said, “how great!” His sadness seemed to turn to sheer joy, and Betty felt her heart fill with something good and pure. Finally, someone was pleased to see her. Finally, someone thought she was a good thing, by simple virtue of her existence, beyond anything she had said or done or said she would do or could do. She had stated her nationality, a pure accident of her birth, and this small man with a nice face had wanted her.

“I can have you in for an interview”—he consulted a huge chunky plastic watch on his hairy wrist—“well, now. Ith good for you? You have time?” He looked at her keenly through those soulful eyes, and she nodded quickly, before she could change her mind. She could not have said no. It would have broken his heart.

His office was a small cubicle at the end of a long breeze-blocked tunnel beneath the restaurant. The walls were painted gloss white and covered in motivational posters. Bits of paper covered every surface. Though he asked her some standard questions, it was clear from the outset that he would offer her the job.

“Could I have a trial run?” she suggested. “Just a few days. See if, you know, well . . .”

“Thee if you can bear it?” he asked with a broad smile.

“No, not that. Just, I’ve never worked in a restaurant before. I may not be very good at it.”

“Oh.” He smiled, his fur-covered hands gently holding the edge of his desk. “You will be good at it. I can promith you that. Thtart tomorrow? Nine A.M.? If you don’t hate it, we can fill in the paperwork and get you on board. Officially.” He beamed at her and offered her one of his furry hands. She squeezed it. It was soft and warm and reminiscent of a spaniel’s ear.

She beamed back at him and said, “Yeah. OK. Why not?”

Moments later, she was being led back down the long gray tunnel, staring at Rodrigo’s generous bottom squashed inside nylon trousers, and then she was shaking his hand again and wandering through the greasy mayhem of the restaurant, past the tables of junkies and drunks and back out onto the fresh, bright normality of Shaftesbury Avenue. She stood like a tree trunk in a rapid and let the crowds surge past her on both sides.

Then she slowly made her way back to the flat, her mind suffused and subsumed by total and utter weirdness.

• • •

“Wendy’s?” her mother cried in horror. “You mean the burger place?”

“Yes,” said Betty, “that’s right.”

“But–why?”

“Because it’s good money. And regular work. Because the boss is really nice. Because it’s free dinners and free lunches. Because the people are . . . interesting. Because it’s local and I can walk there. And because there’s a bloody recession, and no one else would give me a job.”

Her mother gave a sigh weighed down with unspoken I-did-warn-yous.

“It’s fine,” Betty interjected before her mother could say anything annoying. “It’s absolutely fine. It’ll do for now. Stop worrying.”

“I’m not worrying,” her mother said. “Like you said, you’re twenty-two. Why would I be worrying?”

“Because I’m your baby girl.”

“Obviously, you’re my baby girl. But I trust you. You lived virtually alone in that big house with that crazy woman—”

“She was not crazy.”

“Well, that sick old woman. You cared for her by yourself. I think you can cope with a bit of real life.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes”—her mother laughed—“I honestly do! As long as you’re happy, that’s all that matters. Have you made any friends?”

Betty shrugged. “Sort of,” she said. “There’s a guy at Wendy’s. A gay guy. Called Joe Joe.”

“Oh,” said her mother in delight. Her mother was nuts about gays, had gotten the ferry all the way to Portsmouth last year to see Julian Clary live at the New Royal. “What’s he like?”

Betty thought back to their conversation the previous day. “Hi,” he’d said, “I’m Joe Joe. Nice to meet you.” His accent put him somewhere in the southern reaches of the Americas.

Betty had smiled. “Likewise.”

“You are very pretty.”

“Oh. Thank you.”

“I like your hair.”

“Thank you!”

“And you have beautiful eyes. Like a cat. You know. Or a fish.”

“A fish?”

“Yeah. A beautiful fish.”

“Oh.”

“I love your accent.”

“Thank you.”

“I love the British accent.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I love your smile.”

“Thank you.”

“You have nice teeth.”

“Oh, thank you.”

“I’m from Argentina.”

“Oh, right. Buenos Aires?”

“Yes!” he’d cried with delight. “Yes! Buenos Aires! How did you know? You must be, like, psychic or something!”

She smiled at the memory and said, “Mad. He’s mad. But lovely.”

At these words, the front door opened and Betty found herself face-to-face with the Asian woman from downstairs. She averted her gaze in embarrassment and shuffled her bum across the step to allow the woman to pass. The woman glared at her through narrowed eyes. Betty looked at her askance and lost her thread.

“And I’ve been getting to know the guy outside, you know, the record-stall guy. So I’m getting there, you know . . .” She petered off as she became aware of the fact that her downstairs neighbor had stopped halfway up the stairs and was staring at her expectantly. “Erm, hold on, Mum, just a sec.” She put her hand over the receiver and looked at the woman. “Yes?” she asked pleasantly.

“You,” said the woman. “You live upstairs, yes?”

“Yes,” said Betty uncertainly.

“You smoke, yes?”

“Er, yes.”

“I smell it,” she chastised, wrinkling her face distastefully. “I smell it. It come through my window into my home.”

“Erm, sorry,” said Betty, her heart racing slightly with the stress of confrontation. “I can’t see . . . I mean, I smoke up there, right up there. On the fire escape. It’s not even on the same level as you.”

“No,” snapped the woman. “It come down. It come down the stairs. It come through my window. It come everywhere. I smell it. Everywhere on my clothes.” She plucked at her sweater and pulled it to her nose. “Hmm? And in my hair.” She held a lock aloft.

Betty gazed at her, nonplussed. “God, I, er, I don’t know what to say. I mean, it’s outside. I don’t really see where else you expect me to smoke.”

“You stop smoking! Yes! You stop! Then no more problem!” The woman smiled almost encouragingly. “Another thing,” she continued. “You in bed over my bed. Your bed squeak. Every time you turn over, I hear squeak squeak. Squeak squeak.”

Betty stared at the woman, trying and failing to find a response that wouldn’t end in a bitch fight. Eventually, she smiled and said, “Sorry. I had no idea. What would you like me to do about it?”

“You stop moving so much. You move all the time.”

Betty blinked at her. “So,” she said, “you want me to stop smoking. And stop moving in my sleep?”

“Yes!” She smiled again, as though delighted to find that she had somehow solved all of Betty’s problems in one fell swoop. “Yes! Thank you!” She turned to leave. Betty watched her disappear up the stairs and around the corner. She waited until she heard the woman’s front door click closed and then took her hand away from the receiver.

“What was that?” her mother asked curiously.

“Nothing.” Betty exhaled. “Nothing. Just a neighbor.”

“Oh,” said her mother in a tone of voice that suggested she liked the idea of a neighbor.

Betty brought the phone call to an end, her whole body so filled with rage and indignation that she could no longer form a proper thought.

As she walked into her flat, she felt the emptiness of it hit her for the first time since she’d moved in. She wished for a flatmate, for someone to cry out to: “Oh my God! I cannot believe what just happened! You know that woman? The one downstairs? The one who fucks so loud that it makes my ears bleed? She just told me that my cigarette smoke gets into her flat. And that my bed squeaks when I move. Can you believe it?”

Betty took a bottle of cider and her tobacco pouch out on the fire escape, where she deliberately blew her cigarette smoke through the gaps in the steps so that it would find its way into the woman’s flat. Afterwards she sat on the sofa, her head spinning with too much cider and too many cigarettes, her hair pungent with the scum of French-fry oil and Soho smog, the flat dark and empty around her.

The light faded beyond the windows, and the Soho engine started revving up for the night: streetlights warming up, pubs unlocking their doors, the market dismantling, and the drinkers arriving. Still Betty sat motionless, letting the solitude filter through her system. Her job at Wendy’s would pay two hundred pounds a week. Now that she had a job, she could focus on her search for Clara Pickle. She still had absolutely no idea where to begin.