“Switch your nose off. Breathe with your mouth.” She brings over a cappuccino. “And someone had to clean every toilet you’ve ever used. If your dad had run a pub instead of a bank, like mine did, it might’ve been you. Thought for the Day.”
I take out an almond croissant and slide the other bags to Holly. “Why don’t you do the cleaning the night before?”
Holly unravels the edge of an apricot pastry. “Gьnter’s regulars don’t piss off till three in the morning, if I’m lucky. Youtry facing the cleaning at that time after nine hours’ worth of serving drinks.”
I concede the point. “Well, the bar’s looking battle-ready now.”
“Sort of. I’ll clean the taps later, then restock.”
“There was I, thinking bars just ran themselves.”
She lights a cigarette. “I’d be out of a job if they did.”
“Do you see yourself in, uh, hospitality long-term?”
Holly’s frown is a warning. “What’s it to you?”
“I just … Dunno. You seem capable of doing anything.”
Her frown is both wary and weary. She taps ash from her cigarette. “The schools the lower orders go to don’t exactly encourage you to think that way. Hairdressing courses or garage apprenticeships were more the thing.”
“You can’t blame a crap school forever, though.”
She taps her cigarette. “You’re clever, obviously. But there are some areas where you really don’t know shit, Mr. Lamb.”
I nod and sip my coffee. “Your French teacher was brilliant.”
“My French teacher was nonexistent. I picked it up on the job. Survival. Fending off Frenchmen.”
I dig a bit of almond from my teeth. “So where’s the pub?”
“What pub?”
“The one your dad works in.”
“Owns. Co-owns, in fact, with my mam. It’s the Captain Marlow, by the Thames at Gravesend.”
“Sounds picturesque. Is that where you grew up?”
“ ‘Gravesend’ and ‘picturesque’ don’t exactly waltz around arm in arm. It’s a lot of closed-down factories, paper mills, Blue Circle cement works, council estates, pawn shops, and bookies.”
“It can’t all be misery and postindustrial decay.”
She searches the bottom of her cup. “The older streets are nice, I s’pose. The Thames is always the Thames, and the Captain Marlow’s three centuries old—apparently there’s a letter by Charles Dickens that proves he used to drink there. How ’bout that, Poshboy? A literary reference.”
My blood’s zinging with coffee. “Is your mum Irish?”
“What leads you to that deduction, Sherlock?”
“You said ‘with my mam,’ not ‘with my mum.’ ”
Holly exhales a fat loop of smoke. “Yeah, she’s from Cork. Don’t your friends get annoyed when you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Sifting what they say for clues instead of listening.”
“I’m a detail nerd, that’s all. Have you started the clock on my twenty minutes, by the way?”
“You’re down to”—she checks—“sixteen.”
“Then I’d like to spend the remainder playing bar football.”
Holly scrunches her face. “Bad idea.”
I never know if she’s serious. “How come?”
“ ’Cause I’ll scalp your arse, Poshboy.”
· · ·
THE TOWN SQUARE is patchy with melting snow and busy with shoppers, and a red-cheeked brass band’s playing carols. I buy a fund-raising calendar from some school kids and their teacher at a stall by the statue of St. Agnиs, and get a chorus of “Merci, Monsieur!” and “Happy New Year,” because my accent tells them I’m English. Holly Sykes did indeed scalp my arse at bar football; she scored rebound goals off the sides, she can lob, and her left-handed goalie’s a lethal weapon. She didn’t smile but I think she enjoyed her victory. We made no plans, but I said I’d drop by the bar tonight, and instead of answering Eeyore-ishly or sarcastically, she just said I’d know where to find her. Stunning progress, and I almost fail to recognize Olly Quinn in the phone box by the bank. He’s looking agitated. If he’s using a phone box instead of Chetwynd-Pitt’s phone, he doesn’t want to be overheard. Would I be fully human if curiosity didn’t get the better of me occasionally? I hide behind the solid wall of the booth where Olly can’t see me. Thanks to a bad line and his angst, Olly’s voice is loud and every punched-out sentence is pretty clear. “You did, Ness. You did! You said you loved me too! You said—”
Oh dear. Despair is as attractive as cold sores.
“Seven times. The first was in bed. I remember … Maybe it was six, maybe eight, who cares, Ness, I … So what’s that about, Ness? Was it one big lie? … Then was it some—some mind-fucking experiment?”
Too late to slam on the brakes now; we’re over the edge.
“No no no, I’m notgetting hysterical, I just … No, I’m not, I don’t get what happened, so … What? What was that last bit? This line’s shit … No, not what yousaid—I said the phoneline’s shit … What’s that? You thoughtyou meant it?”
Olly punches the glass of the phone box, hard. “How can you thinkyou love someone? … No, Ness, no, no—don’t hang up. Look. Just … I want things back to how we were, Ness!… But if you’d explain, if you’d talk, if you’d … I amcalm. I’m calm. No, Ness! No no no—”
A phony peace, then an explosive “ Fuckit!”
Quinn hammers his fist on the glass a few times. This attracts attention, so I slip back into the stream of shoppers and loop back around the way I came, sideways as I pass, for long enough to see my lovesick classmate folded over, hiding his face in his hands. Crying—in public! The unedifying sight sobers me a tad with regard to Holly. Remember: What Cupid gives, Cupid takes away.
THE AUSTRIAN-ETHIOPIAN DJ is silent and hooded, won’t take requests, and, in the last hour alone, has loped through remixes of the KLF’s “3 A.M. Eternal,” Phuture’s “Your Only Friend,” and the Norfolklorists’ “Ping Pong Apocalypse.” Club Walpurgis is housed in the basement annex of the vast and elderly Hфtel Le Sud, a six-floor, hundred-room angular labyrinth converted in the 1950s from a sanatorium for the tubercular and very wealthy. A recent refit has stripped Club Walpurgis down to a bare-brick Bowie-in-Berlin look, and expanded the dance floor to the size of a tennis court. Submarine lights are strobing and a decent percentage of the two to three hundred dancing skeletons clad in young flesh and high-end apparel is young and female. A snort or two of devil’s dandruff has reerected the Mighty Quinn from his emotional crash earlier, so all four of us have come clubbing. Unusually, I’m the only one who isn’t in the act of pulling; my three fellow Humberites are sitting on a horseshoe-shaped sofa, each nursing a young, attractive black girl. No doubt Chetwynd-Pitt is playing his nineteenth-in-line-to-the-throne card—the drunker he gets, the bluer his blood—Fitzsimmons is flashing his francs, and presumably Quinn’s squeeze just finds him cute and fluffy. Fair play to them all. Any other night I’d go fishing too, and I won’t pretend my Alpine glow, Rupert Everett sultriness, charcoal Harry Enna shirt, and Makoto Grelsch jeans wrapping my rower’s torso aren’t drawing long-lashed attention, but this New Year’s Eve I’d rather get blown by a dance track. Could I be on to a Temptation of Christ deal whereby an act of continence at Club Walpurgis tonight earns me credit in the Bank of Karma to be redeemed by a certain girl from Gravesend? Only Dr. Coke has the answer, and after this archangelic remix of “Walking on Thin Ice” by somebody or other, I’ll go and consult with the good medicine man …
THE CUBICLES IN the Gents are as commodious as Le Bog du Croc is not, and seemingly designed for the insufflation of cocaine: frequently cleaned, spacious, and sans that incriminating gap between the top of the door and the ceiling so common in British clubs. I seat myself upon the throne and produce my compact mirror—borrowed from an elfin Filipina who was angling for a spouse’s visa—and Foo Foo Dust, won from Chetwynd-Pitt at blackjack this very night and stored in a little plastic wrapper inside a bag of menthol Fisherman’s Friends to confuse any canine investigators in the unlikely event … My tooter is a straw made from coarse paper and Sellotape. With superb precision I deposit the last of my coke in a swirl on the mirror and—kids, don’t try this at home, don’t try it anywhere, Drugs Are Bad—toke it up my left nostril in a powerful snort. For five seconds it stings like a nettle being threaded down my throat via my nose, until …