Jenny tried to enjoy the wedding, she really did. She’d survived the ceremony held at the registry office but was finding the reception at the Victory Services Club near Marble Arch a trial. Even with Matt as her date fending off most requirements to be sociable, she was dreading the moment when she’d have to stand up and do her ‘speech’.
‘Jenny?’ Matt whispered. ‘Are you OK?’
She shook her head. Would she never get away from this suffocation? Everywhere she looked things were being strangled: chairs under fabric covers and noosed with ribbons, tables swamped in fine linen. Even the flower arrangements had curls of raffia garrotting them, red blooms swooning from the vase.
‘Nervous?’
Her finger touched her neck: their private signal that it was the pain that was getting to her.
He looked around to check that they weren’t being overheard at their spot on the table in the centre of the dance floor. While the caterers changed the place settings for the toast, Kris and Louis were chatting with family members so had abandoned them for the moment. Kris’s best man, Ralph Shaftesbury, an old army colleague, was laughing with some military types at the bar. A big bear of a guy, he’d carried the wounded Kris out of the combat zone on his back. His slim, much botoxed wife with threaded eyebrows and an expression of permanent surprise had disappeared to the Ladies, though Jenny suspected she’d really gone outside for a fag. Kris had said Ralph was a shit to women and it looked like the wife agreed.
‘I thought this might happen,’ Matt murmured. ‘I got something a little stronger, just to help tide you over.’ He pressed a single foil wrapped tablet in her palm, clipped from a strip. ‘I was told we have to be really careful with this. It’s Fentanyl – a synthetic opioid so much stronger than what you’ve been taking.’
All Jenny heard was ‘much stronger’. She popped it from the foil and downed it with a swallow of champagne.
Matt tried to take the glass from her. ‘I don’t think that’s quite the idea.’
She attempted to keep it away from him.
‘Jenny, behave!’ Matt looked around, flustered by her reckless move. ‘I went to a lot of trouble to find something to help you and you repay me like this?’
His tone reminded her how well and truly under his thumb she had become. Her grip on the glass loosened.
‘Here, take my water. Drink that.’ He brushed his hand up and down her arm. Nausea curled in her stomach.
‘Everyone all right?’ Louis was beaming as he returned to the table. He liked to believe the fiction that Jenny was happy in her new relationship. So well matched, both musicians together, he said, as if repeating a mantra until he believed it.
Jenny gave him a weak smile.
Louis tapped a fork on a champagne flute. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, if I can have my husband back, we are about to cut the cake!’
This garnered great cheers from around the room. Jenny was reminded that a wedding audience was the most forgiving you could hope for and, besides, her presentation was already recorded. All she had to do was stand up and press the button.
The tablet had really kicked in by the time her moment arrived. Louis was about to pass over her but she held up her hand.
‘Oh? What’s this? Are you going to play us something, Jenny?’
She nodded and with a flourish produced a remote that brought a screen unfurling from the ceiling.
‘Uh-oh. That’s not what I meant. I was thinking the violin.’
She grinned and started the presentation. A montage of photos of Louis from a baby and up to date began to flicker across the screen. She’d chosen some of his best recordings to accompany it, including ‘My Funny Valentine’ when the pictures of him and Kris together began. That produced a roar of laughter. She finished with a photo Matt had uploaded for her at the beginning of the reception: Louis and Kris saying their vows a couple of hours ago. That got a cheer.
Louis was twinkly-eyed when she finished. ‘I’m speechless,’ he said.
Kris got up. ‘In that case, I have to say, that is the best best man’s speech I’ve ever heard.’ More laughter. ‘Louis and I just want to say a big thank you to everyone who has helped make today so special for us.’ He went on to give the usual round of appreciation to various people who had been involved before adding: ‘And we’d both like to say an extra special “thank you” to our friend Jenny, who always listens when we talk to her, and is always there for us.’
Jenny scribbled something on the back of the menu and passed it to him.
‘She says that we don’t give her much choice.’ He grinned then bent down and kissed her cheek. ‘You’re a gem, darling.’ He concluded his speech with a thank you to the two families in the room, all of whom had supported the wedding wholeheartedly. That got a big cheer too so he announced he was quitting while he was ahead and took his seat.
During this speech with all its focus on his girlfriend, Matt was playing with a lock of her hair, twisting it around his finger so that it tugged a little uncomfortably on her scalp. She brushed his hand away once attention moved on.
‘Careful,’ he murmured.
She went still. He often threatened to withdraw his help in getting what she needed if she rejected him. Their relationship was the definition of unhealthy, of course she knew that: her so dependent and him so possessive. It didn’t mean that she could see a way out of it. If she had more money, then she could seek out her own supply and cut him loose. That’s if he’d accept that. She’d got worried recently that he wouldn’t react well to her ending things.
So instead she smiled apologetically and gestured that she was going to the Ladies.
‘OK. See you in a minute, beautiful.’
She hurried away, only able to breathe more freely when she got to the cloakroom area. Finding a sofa there, a man’s jacket discarded on one end, she sank down. There was no one around. Thank God. Her shoulders slumped and she collapsed against the arm. She no longer had to pretend. The satin bodice of her orange dress dug in under her bust. She couldn’t wait to get out of it later. If only she could manage that so she was alone when she did.
Shifting, she felt a lump in the jacket digging into her side. A wallet. Over the past few months she’d taken to stealing just a little, here and there, in the hopes of getting enough money together for her own drug supply. Bags at the café, untended backpacks in rehearsals … Could she? Most people didn’t notice if twenty pounds vanished. They’d just think they’d spent it and not realised. If anyone saw her, she could claim she had found it on the floor and was looking for a name on a credit card to find the owner. That was plausible.
Before she had really made up her mind, her fingers were already unfolding the wallet and checking the cash pocket. Over a hundred. The owner wouldn’t know. She slid out forty and tucked it in her bodice.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ It was the other best man, Ralph the bear; he had just come out the gents and caught her. ‘That’s my wallet, you fucking slut!’
She pressed it into his hands, panicking. ‘Sorry, sorry!’ she signed.
Of course, he didn’t know signing. He grabbed her by the wrist, looked over to the reception where the dancing was just getting underway, clearly contemplating dragging her before Kris and Louis. She tugged, but he was ex-army and it was about as equal a struggle as a bear with a salmon hooked in its claws. She tried a new tack. Putting her free hand flat on his chest, she met his eyes. Please. At least that was what she hoped he would read in her expression.
His gaze dropped down to the notes tucked in her bodice. ‘Come with me.’ He pulled her to a stairwell and they went up a flight to an empty landing. She was getting a very bad feeling about where this was going. He pushed her up against a wall. ‘You can’t tell me why you took that, can you? But we both know it’s not yours. That’s my money.’
She fished in her cleavage to retrieve the notes.
‘Ah-ah. Too late. I don’t want that back now.’ His eyes turned hard. She could well believe the stories Kris had told about him. He’d come through Iraq without a scratch. ‘How about you earn what you took, then I won’t say anything to anyone?’ His hands slid under her skirt and hooked his thumbs in the waistband at top of her tights. ‘Fair exchange?’
She swallowed and did nothing as he pulled all layers of clothing down.
‘Nod if you agree – or I’ll take you back down there and tell the whole room what I caught you doing.’
She nodded.
When he left her, Jenny stared for a while at the white wall opposite. He’d told her she’d been a good girl. He liked women who didn’t talk back so she was his perfect lay. If she wanted to do it again, she could message him. Forty pounds was selling herself cheap. He’d even pay more if she acted like she enjoyed it next time. He’d then stuffed his business card where she’d shoved the money. She could feel the edges digging in but couldn’t move to get rid of it.
On the wall opposite, there was a little map and instructions what to do in the event of fire. She imagined lighting a match and setting fire to a curtain, sitting here as she watched smoke fill the stairwell. She could go to sleep and not wake up ever again.
‘Jenny?’ That was Matt, calling for her. Oh God. If he found her like this, he’d know what had happened and then he’d freak out. She picked herself off the floor, hauling up her knickers and tights, and hurried along the corridor, trying doors. She opened one that hadn’t been shut properly and slipped inside. A suitcase lay open on the bed. From the dress suit hanger on the wall it had to belong to one of the guests who had come here to get ready. If she was lucky, they’d stay downstairs long enough for her to hide in here and clean herself up. She went into the en suite and inspected her appearance in the mirror. Her neck was reddened where Ralph had bitten her. God, why did some men thinking playing vampire was sexy? She pressed against it with a dampened face cloth. She was never going to be able to explain that away to Matt.
Perhaps that was why Ralph had done it? His revenge? She sensed he never did anything without calculating all the angles first.
A large-size men’s toiletry holder lay unfolded on the counter top, different compartments neatly arranged for shaving equipment, toothbrush and toothpaste, a few first aid items. Spotting a pack of plasters, she unzipped it and took one out. Could she claim she’d been stung by something? It would have to do. She ripped the packet open and stuck the pale plaster over the mark. Stupid racist plaster manufacturers: it lit up like a neon sign against her darker skin. Matt was never going to excuse this. He’d still want to know where the marks came from. She stuffed the plaster box back inside the wash bag and something rattled.
Kris’s tub of pills. She was in the bridal suite. How perfectly fucking perfect.
In a second, she untwisted the lid and tapped two out onto her palm. She met her eyes in the mirror. She hated herself.
And then a second pair of eyes met hers. Kris was standing in the doorway.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’