When Rawdon called and begged for her help, Becky was determined to let him stew in his own drug-addled juices. He’d promised not to gamble. He’d promised to keep his nose clean, literally, after the incident a few weeks ago when he’d had said nose broken after losing a fortune in a poker game and not having the funds to pay what he owed because he’d spent all his money on coke.
But he’d been lying. Again. Instead, he’d carried on doing just what he damn well pleased: cocaine and playing poker very badly, and now he owed even more money and was being held captive until he honoured his debts. Or rather, until Becky bailed him out.
‘They’re not messing around, Becks,’ he whispered. ‘They say they’re going to start with my fingers. I need my fingers.’
‘You can manage perfectly well without a couple of fingers. Might shock some sense into your thick, fucking head.’
She put the phone down on Rawdon’s inarticulate pleas. She wasn’t going to spend a second worrying about him. He was big enough and ugly enough to take care of himself.
But as she sat there, biting her nails and contemplating whether to have a hopefully relaxing bath in the huge claw-foot tub or not, she began to feel uneasy. Rawdon wasn’t ugly. He was pretty. Those soulful eyes, framed with dark, sooty lashes that Becky couldn’t hope to replicate, not even with the most expensive lash extensions. Perfect, pouty lips that had launched a thousand teen-girl crushes, cheekbones that could have been carved by Michelangelo himself and photographed so well. As did every other inch of Rawdon Crawley, which was why his face was his fortune. It was Becky’s fortune too and God knows what would become of her if the thugs that Rawdon had got involved with did irreparable damage to her meal ticket.
But really, this wasn’t her problem. This was Rawdon’s agent, Mike’s problem. After all, he took 15 per cent of everything Rawdon earned so he could damn well sort this out.
Mike begged to differ when Becky phoned him. Said it was Rawdon’s publicist, Knuckle’s problem. But when Becky finally managed to get in touch with Knuckles, he said that Rawdon hadn’t paid him in months but she could try the unit publicist for the film Rawdon was meant to be shooting when he wasn’t getting himself into all sorts of trouble.
Becky didn’t appreciate being given the runaround like she was some annoying problem that wouldn’t go away. It reminded her of the bad old days when she was passed around like an unwanted parcel between different case workers. By the time she’d been given the brush-off by the unit publicist, the producer and finally the producer’s second assistant, Spooney, she’d completely ruined her expensive manicure by chewing her nails down to the quick.
‘It’s not that I don’t care, Becky, my angel,’ Spooney shouted down the phone, while in the background it sounded like he was at a raucous party. ‘It’s just at this point, it would be cheaper to fire Rawdon and reshoot the movie with an actor who actually shows up on set each day at his allotted call time without any facial injuries.’
‘Spooney,’ Becky cooed, though her seductive tone of voice was wasted because Spooney shouted at her to speak up. ‘Come on, $50,000 is loose change. You could just write it off as expenses. I’d be ever so grateful.’
‘No can do. You and Rawdon have already blown through half our budget with your demands. And our liability insurance has already gone through the roof,’ Spooney bellowed cheerfully. ‘Afraid you’re on your own. Though if you need some ready cash, then I know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy. I’ll get someone to give you a call.’
It wasn’t at all what Becky wanted to hear but she had to pretend that she was grateful, though Spooney cut her gratitude off after five seconds.
‘Laters! And Rawdon better be on set at 7 a.m. or he’ll wish his new friends had killed him.’
Becky paced the floors of the €10,000-a-week apartment in the third arrondissement, waiting for the phone call. They owed €40,000 back rent because the production company had slashed costs. Said that they could stay in a crummy hotel out in Beaugrenelle like the rest of the cast and crew. Rawdon would have agreed to that but Becky had insisted that no one would treat him like a star if he didn’t act like a star, so they’d stayed put. They’d probably have to do a runner as soon as filming finished.
Then her phone rang. It was someone who spoke French with a guttural foreign accent and didn’t bother with any social niceties. Just issued a series of instructions and gave Becky an address. A part of her, quite a large part, was tempted to call it quits and leave Rawdon to his own grisly fate but the smaller, somewhat kinder, part of her won out. She packed a bag and ran down to the street to find a cab to take her to a little man who operated out of the back of a Turkish restaurant in a quiet corner of the Place D’Italie.
Then she was in the back of another cab trying really hard not to cry. The fat-fingered bastard had ripped her off and there was nothing she could do but take the three bundles of US dollars that were all he would give her. Everything that she’d worked so hard for was gone now. All the jewellery from Jemima Pinkerton, which hardly compensated for all the bedpans and incontinence pants and wiping the ailing woman’s arse. The items she’d got from the Sedleys, who had suffered her presence with gritted teeth, treated her like a charity case, then threw her out because she wasn’t good enough for their precious Jos. The art deco brooch, which had belonged to Rawdon’s mother, given to her by Sir Pitt because he hoped it would prise her legs open. The gold hip flask, cigarette case and compact from Matilda Crawley, which had been her reward for nursing that ungrateful woman back from the brink of death.
She asked the driver to stop at an ATM and then – she was properly crying by now – she withdrew pretty much everything she had in the bank. All the money she’d earned from endorsing products that she didn’t need or want. Cosying up to agents and publicists and all those businessmen in their suits and aftershave. Smiling, smiling, smiling every time their hands lingered in places that they shouldn’t have been touching in the first place. Smiling again when they made lewd remarks and improper suggestions.
Becky Sharp had started with absolutely nothing. Everything she’d acquired had been hard won, hard fought for, and yet it all fitted into one of the leather bags she’d been given for letting a happily married man twice her age stick his hand up her dress. She wasn’t crying because she was sad or even because she couldn’t bear to part with the sum total of her life’s work, but because she was so angry that she wanted to break the cab’s windows with her fists and scream her rage into the night.
She did neither of those things, though, but held herself very still and didn’t even argue with the driver when they got to Saint-Denis and he pulled into the kerb and said that he wouldn’t go any further.
‘Then I’m not going to pay you a single euro,’ she said and there was something in her voice, in the grim, set expression on her face that the man didn’t argue with, though he called her a bitch when she got out of the car.
There was a man called Raoul waiting for her on the corner, though he couldn’t have been more than fourteen. He escorted her through the back alleys of a Paris far away from the pretty Haussmann boulevards or the twinkling lights that reflected on the inky-black water of the Seine. Here it was all boarded-up windows and doors, daubed with gang tags and racist epithets. Hard-faced girls worked each corner and further into the shadows, there were mounds of skin and bones sleeping on sodden cardboard, shaking for a fix or a drink or because their demons wouldn’t let go.
Becky held her breath. She was better than this, she’d done everything she could to escape this and yet, here she was again.
Eventually, they came to what looked like another derelict doorway. Her escort banged on the corrugated iron, a door opened and Becky stood her ground and spoke in the expletive-laden French she’d learnt at her mother’s knee. No, she wasn’t going inside. What was going to happen was that they’d bring Rawdon to her and she’d give them the money. No Rawdon, no cash. And no, she didn’t care if they did break one of his fingers for each minute she wasted, she was staying right here.
It took three minutes for Rawdon to appear in the doorway, all his fingers sadly intact, accompanied by three heavies that could have found more honest work as extras on his film. ‘I’m all right,’ he said, like Becky even cared. ‘I think I might have a broken rib, though.’
‘Good thing broken ribs don’t show up on camera then, isn’t it?’
Becky handed over the cash and for one heart-stopping, gut-clenching moment, the fat man with a bullet tattooed on his forehead, his tracksuit stretched grotesquely over his elephantine limbs, said it wasn’t enough.
‘Soixante,’ he said and he spat on the ground, phlegm landing on the toe of one of Becky’s limited-edition Prada sneakers. No point in wearing heels if you might have to run for it.
‘We agreed fifty, you fat fuck.’ Then she spat back because Rawdon was just a poor little rich boy, a slum tourist, dipping a toe in the filth and the fury of the back alleys, knowing that it would wash off.
But Becky knew these streets. Knew that some things would never wash off even if you scrubbed yourself red raw trying.
‘Cinquante,’ she said again. ‘Not one cent more.’
The three men talked among themselves about whether they should take the money and break Rawdon’s fingers, maybe kneecap him too, while they made Becky watch. Becky’s hand didn’t even shake as she brought it to her mouth to cover her yawn.
‘I haven’t got all night,’ she snapped. ‘And I’ve got a driver two streets away who’s going to call some people if I’m not back in five minutes. Says his brother knows a guy called Ali, maybe you know him too?’
The man who’d bought her jewels for a tenth of what they were worth had told her that the neighbourhood was controlled by two gangs. This bunch of hoodlums in hoodies from the Côte d’Ivoire were deadly rivals of a Muslim faction run by an old guy from Algiers who had a glass eye, one ball and went by the name of Ali.
‘Fuck you then,’ the fat guy hissed and he snatched the bag out of Becky’s hold, ripping one of her nails as he did so, then Rawdon was thrust towards her.
‘What did he say?’ Rawdon asked, as thank God, the door was slammed in their faces. His knowledge of French was only sufficient to order a round of drinks. ‘What did you say?’
Becky said nothing but started walking, trying to remember the way out of the maze of tiny streets. Rawdon hobbled after her, hissing slightly, hampered by unseen injuries sustained during his abduction.
‘Becky?’ he bleated. ‘I’m sorry. Don’t be mad at me. I hate it when you’re angry at me. Come on! Say you forgive your little Rawdy.’
She turned another corner and they were out of the darkness and on to a main road. It was still the worst neighbourhood in Paris, but there were streetlights that worked, cafes and bars, shops selling everything from exotic produce to wigs. It was safety of a sort, though everyone turned to look at Becky and Rawdon as if they were from another planet. In Saint-Denis, the third arrondissement was another planet.
‘Becky! You have to speak to me sooner or later. It’s OK. I’m good. We’re good. No bones broken, apart from maybe a rib. Did I mention that they took away my phone but …’
‘SHUT THE FUCK UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP! I WISH THEY’D BROKEN EVERY FUCKING BONE IN YOUR USELESS BODY!’ She was shouting, hitting Rawdon, raining her fists down on whatever part of him she could reach. Not his face, but everywhere else including his suspected broken rib, and she was glad when he cried out.
People stopped looking at them, because here fights were nothing special, nothing remarkable.
‘Becky! Stop it! I’m sorry,’ Rawdon cried and he managed to grab her wrist as she kept pounding on him with her other hand closed into a fist. ‘I’m sorry!’
One last blow to the side of his head, enough to make his ear ring, and Becky stopped, wrenched herself free from Rawdon’s grip. She let her arms hang down, tried to slow her ragged breaths even as she stared up at him with a savage expression that would be the last thing Rawdon Crawley would remember, many years later, when he was on his deathbed.
‘You promised to look after me, then you promised that at least you’d look after yourself, and you can’t even do that,’ she reminded him in a voice that was murderous and low. ‘You’re a dirty, lying bastard. It makes me sick how weak you are.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Rawdon repeated. If he could say it enough times, maybe it would wipe out everything: his debts, his weakness, his betrayal.
‘I should leave you,’ Becky threatened even though she currently had nowhere else to go. That face of his, healing up nicely, just one fresh cut above his eyebrow, was the only liquid asset she still had. ‘Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t.’
‘Because … because I love you!’ Rawdon said with the air of a man pulling a rabbit out of a hat on his third attempt.
‘You’re going to have to do better than that,’ Becky said and she turned away, started walking again, slower this time, all energy spent.
Rawdon sighed as if she were being unreasonable, impossible, then in a few quick strides, caught up with her. ‘I’m not going to do it any more,’ he promised yet again. ‘Not any of it. The drugs, the poker games.’ He dared to nudge her arm so when she glanced across at him, he was smiling in that way that he thought she found irresistible because she was a much, much better actor than he would ever be. ‘You do still love your Rawdy, don’t you?’
That dark, viscous rage boiled in her veins again. ‘If my lousy father taught me one lousy thing it’s that you only gamble when you have nothing to lose. You had everything and now it’s all gone.’
‘But we still have each other, right?’ He actually dared to bat his eyelashes at her, so Becky felt justified in elbowing him in his suspected broken rib again.
‘Did you hear me? We have nothing. No money, nothing to fall back on, no plan B, and this is all on you. You’ve spoilt it all.’
‘I’ll unspoil it. I’ll make it better,’ Rawdon said and he stepped in front of his wife, blocked her path so he could put his hands on her shoulders, lean his forehead against hers. ‘Look, I’ll get in touch with Mattie. Make things up with her and we’ll all be friends again. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’
Rage gave way to the faintest flicker of hope. ‘Do you think she’ll listen? She’s still very angry with you,’ Becky reminded Rawdon.
‘Yeah, but unlike you, she can’t stay mad at me for long.’