فصل 19

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Lily

Peter is waiting again. Out of the window, she sees him standing against his car. He spots her, gestures up and mouths, ‘You owe me.’

Lily opens the window, glances across the road to where Samir is putting out a fresh box of oranges. ‘Leave me alone, Peter.’

‘You know what’ll happen …’

‘I’ve given you enough. Just leave me alone, okay?’

‘Bad move, Lily.’ He raises an eyebrow. He waits just long enough for her to feel uncomfortable. Lou will be home in half an hour. He hangs around so often she’s pretty sure he knows this. Eventually he climbs back into his car, and pulls out onto the main road without looking. As he drives off he holds his phone out of the driver’s window. A message: Bad move, Lily.

Spin the bottle. Such an innocent-sounding game. It had been her and four girls from her school and they had come up to London on an exeat. They had stolen lipsticks from Boots and bought too-short skirts in Top Shop and got into nightclubs for free because they were young and cute and doormen didn’t ask too many questions if there were five of you and you were young and cute, and inside, over rum and Cokes, they had met Peter and his friends.

They had ended up in someone’s flat in Marylebone at two a.m. She couldn’t entirely remember how they had got there. Everyone was sitting in a circle, smoking and drinking. She had said yes to everything that was offered her. Rihanna on the music system. A blue beanbag that smelt of Febreze. Nicole had been ill in the bathroom, the idiot. Time had slipped; two thirty, three seventeen, four … She lost track. Then someone had suggested Truth or Dare.

The bottle spun, careered into an ashtray, tipping butts and ash onto the carpet. Someone’s truth, the girl she didn’t know: on holiday the previous year she had engaged in phone sex with her ex-boyfriend while her grandmother slept in the twin bed beside her. The others reeled in fake horror. Lily had laughed.

‘Niche,’ said someone.

Peter had watched her the whole time. She had been flattered at first: he was the best-looking boy there by miles. A man, even. When he looked at her she refused to drop her eyes. She wasn’t going to be like the other girls.

‘Spin!’

She had shrugged when it pointed to her. ‘Dare,’ she had said. ‘Always dare.’

‘Lily never says no to anything,’ said Jemima. Now she wonders whether there was something in the way she had looked at Peter when she said it.

‘Okay. You know what that means.’

‘Seriously?’

‘You can’t do that!’ Pippa was holding her hands to her face in the way she did when she was being dramatic.

‘Truth, then.’

‘Nah. I hate truth.’ So what? She knew these boys would be chicken. She stood, nonchalantly. ‘Where. Here?’

‘Oh, my God, Lily.’

‘Spin the bottle,’ said one of the boys.

It hadn’t occurred to her to be nervous. She was a bit woozy and, anyway, she quite liked standing there, unbothered, while the other girls clapped and squealed and acted like idiots. They were such fakes. The same girls who would whack anyone on the hockey pitch and talk about politics and what careers in law and marine biology they were aiming for became stupid and giggly and girly in the presence of boys, flicking their hair and doing their lipstick, like they had spontaneously filleted out the interesting parts of themselves.

‘Peter …’

‘Oh, my God. Pete, mate. It’s you.’

The boys, all catcalling and crowing to hide their disappointment, or perhaps relief, that it wasn’t them. Peter, climbing to his feet, his narrow cat’s eyes meeting hers. Different from the others: his accent spoke of somewhere tougher.

‘Here?’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t mind.’

‘Next door.’ He gestured towards the bedroom.

She stepped neatly over the girls’ legs as they walked through to the next room. One of the girls grabbed at her ankle, telling her not to, and she shook her off. She walked with a faint swagger, feeling their eyes on her as she left. Dare. Always dare.

Peter closed the door behind him and she glanced around her. The bed was rumpled, a horrid patterned duvet that you could tell from five yards hadn’t been washed in ages, and left a faint musty trace in the atmosphere. There was a pile of dirty laundry in the corner, a full ashtray by the bed. The room fell silent, the voices outside temporarily stilled.

She lifted her chin. Pushed her hair back from her face. ‘You really want to do this?’ she said.

He smiled then, a slow, mocking smile. ‘I knew you’d back out.’

‘Who says I’m backing out?’

But she didn’t want to do it. She didn’t see his handsome features any more, just the cold glitter in his eyes, the unpleasant twist to his mouth. He put his hands on his zipper.

They stood there for a minute.

‘It’s fine if you don’t want to do it. We’ll go outside and say you’re chicken.’

‘I never said I wouldn’t do it.’

‘So what are you saying?’

She can’t think. A low buzzing has started up in the back of her head. She wishes she hadn’t come in here.

He stifles a theatrical yawn. ‘Getting bored, Lily.’

A frantic knocking on the door. Jemima’s voice. ‘Lily – you don’t have to do it. C’mon. We can go home now.’

‘You don’t have to do it, Lily.’ His voice is an imitation, mocking.

A calculation. What’s the worst that will happen – two minutes, at worst? Two minutes out of her life. She will not be a chicken. She will show him. She will show them all.

He is holding a bottle of Jack Daniel’s loosely in one hand. She takes it from him, opens it and swigs from it twice, her eyes locked on his. Then she hands it back and reaches for his belt.

Pictures or it didn’t happen.

She hears the boy’s catcalling voice through the thumping in her ears, through the pain in her scalp as he grips her hair too tight. It is too late, by then. Way too late.

She hears the camera-phone click just as she looks up.

One pair of earrings. Fifty pounds in cash. One hundred. Weeks later and the demands keep coming. He sends her texts: I wonder what would happen if I put this on Facebook?

She wants to cry when she sees the picture. He sends it to her again and again: her face, her eyes bloodshot, smudged with mascara. That thing in her mouth. When Louisa comes home she has to stuff the phone under the sofa cushions. It has become radioactive, a toxic thing she has to keep close.

I wonder what your friends would think.

The other girls don’t talk to her afterwards. They know what she did because Peter flashed the picture to everyone as soon as they walked back into the party, ostentatiously adjusting his zipper, long after he had to. She had to pretend she didn’t care. The girls stared at her and then looked away and she had known as soon as their eyes met hers that their tales of BJs and sex with unseen boyfriends had been fiction. They were fakes. They had lied about everything.

Nobody thought she was brave. Nobody admired her for not being chicken. She was just Lily, the slag, a girl with a cock in her mouth. It made her stomach go into knots even to think about it. She had swigged more Jack Daniel’s and told them all to go to hell.

Meet me at McDonald’s Tottenham Court Road.

By then her mother had changed the locks to her house. She couldn’t take money from her purse any more. They had blocked her access to her savings account.

I haven’t got anything else.

Do you think I’m a mug, Little Rich Girl?

Her mother had never liked the Mappin & Webb earrings. Lily had hoped she wouldn’t even notice they were gone. She had made fake cooing faces at Fuckface Francis when he gave them to her, but she had muttered afterwards that she really didn’t understand why he’d bought her heart-shaped diamonds when everybody knew they were common, and a pendant shape was far better against her bone structure.

Peter had looked at the glittering earrings as if she had handed him small change, then tucked them into his pocket. He had been eating a Big Mac and there was mayonnaise in the corner of his mouth. She felt nauseous every time she saw him.

‘Want to come and meet my mates?’

‘No.’

‘Want a drink?’

She shook her head. ‘That’s it. That’s the last thing. Those earrings are worth thousands.’

He had pulled a face. ‘I want cash next time. Proper cash. I know where you live, Lily. I know you got it.’

She felt as if she would never be free of him. He texted her at odd hours, waking her up, keeping her from sleep. That picture, again and again. She saw it in negative, burned onto her retinas. She stopped going to school. She got drunk with strangers, went out clubbing long after she really wanted to. Anything not to be alone with her thoughts and the relentless ping of her phone. She had moved to where he couldn’t find her and he had found her, parking his car for hours outside Louisa’s flat, a silent message. She even thought, a few times, about telling Louisa. But what could Louisa do? Half the time she was like a one-woman disaster area herself. So Lily’s mouth would open and nothing would come out, then Louisa would start rattling on about meeting her grandmother or whether she had eaten something and she had realized she was on her own.

Sometimes Lily lay awake and thought about what it would have been like if her dad had been there. She could picture him in her head. He would have walked outside, grabbed Peter by his neck and told him never to come near his little girl again. He would have put his arms around her and told her it was all okay, that she was safe.

Except he wouldn’t. Because he was just an angry quadriplegic who hadn’t even wanted to be alive. And he would have looked at the pictures and been disgusted.

She couldn’t blame him.

The last time, when she’d had nothing to bring him, he had shouted at her on a pavement behind Carnaby Street, calling her worthless, a whore, a stupid little skank. He had pulled up in his car and she had drunk two double whiskies because she was afraid to see him. When he’d started shouting at her and saying she was lying, she had started to cry.

‘Louisa’s chucked me out. My mum’s chucked me out. I don’t have anything.’

People hurried past, their eyes averted. Nobody stopped. Nobody said anything, because a man shouting at a drunk girl in Soho on a Friday night was nothing out of the ordinary. Peter swore, and turned on his heel, as if he was leaving, except she knew he wouldn’t. And then the big black car had stopped in the middle of the street and reversed, its white lights glowing. The electric window hummed its way down. ‘Lily?’

It took her a few seconds to recognize him. Mr Garside from her stepfather’s business. His boss? A partner? He looked at her, and then at Peter. ‘Are you all right?’

She glanced at Peter, then nodded.

He didn’t believe her. She could tell. He had pulled over to the side of the road, in front of Peter’s car, and walked across slowly in his dark suit. He had an air of authority, like nothing was going to faze him. She remembered, randomly, her mother talking about him having a helicopter. ‘Do you need a ride home, Lily?’

Peter lifted his hand with the phone in it, just an inch. Just so she knew. And she opened her mouth and it came out. ‘He has a bad picture of me on his phone and he’s threatening to show it to everyone and he wants money and I don’t have any left. I’ve given him what I can and I just don’t have anything left. Please help me.’

Peter’s eyes widened. He hadn’t expected that. But she didn’t care what happened. She just felt desperate, and tired, and she didn’t want to carry all this by herself any more.

Mr Garside regarded Peter for a moment. Peter stiffened his shoulders and straightened, as if he were considering whether to run for his car.

‘Is this true?’ Mr Garside said.

‘It’s not a crime to have pictures of girls on your phone.’ Peter smirked, an act of bravado.

‘I’m well aware of that. It is, however, a crime to use them to extort money.’ Mr Garside’s voice was low and calm, as if it were perfectly reasonable to be discussing someone’s naked pictures in the middle of the street. He moved his hand to his inside pocket. ‘So what will it take to make you go away?’

‘What?’

‘Your phone. How much do you want for it?’

Lily’s breath stopped in her throat. She looked from one man to the other. Peter was staring at him in disbelief.

‘I’m offering you cash for the phone. On the basis that this is the only copy of that photograph.’

‘I’m not selling my phone.’

‘Then I have to advise you, young man, that I’ll be contacting the police and identifying you through your car registration. And I have a lot of friends in the police force. Quite high-up friends.’ He smiled a smile that wasn’t really a smile at all.

Across the road a bunch of people spilled out of a restaurant, laughing. Peter looked at her and back at Mr Garside. He lifted his chin. ‘Five grand.’

Mr Garside reached into his inside pocket. He shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’ He pulled out his wallet and counted out a bundle of notes. ‘I think this will do. It sounds as though you’ve already been amply rewarded. The phone, please?’

It was as if Peter had been hypnotised. He hesitated for just a moment, then handed Mr Garside his phone. Just like that. Mr Garside checked that the SIM card was in it, tucked it into his inside pocket, and opened the car door for Lily. ‘I think it’s time for you to leave, Lily.’

She climbed in, like an obedient child, hearing the solid thunk of the car door as it closed behind her. And then they were off, gliding smoothly down the narrow street, leaving Peter shell-shocked – she could see him in the wing mirror – as if he, too, couldn’t believe what had just happened.

‘Are you all right?’ Mr Garside didn’t look at her as he spoke.

‘Is … is that it?’

He glanced sideways, then back at the road. ‘I think so, yes.’

She couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t believe the thing that had hung over her for weeks could be fixed just like that. She turned to him, suddenly anxious. ‘Please don’t tell my mum and Francis.’

He frowned slightly. ‘If that’s what you want.’

She let out a long, silent breath. ‘Thank you,’ she said quietly.

He patted her knee. ‘Nasty lad. You need to be careful with your friends, Lily.’ He moved his hand back onto the automatic gearstick before she had even registered its presence.

He hadn’t batted an eyelid when she had told him she had nowhere to stay. He had driven her to a hotel in Bayswater and spoken quietly to the receptionist, who had handed her a room key. She was relieved he hadn’t suggested taking her to his house: she didn’t want to explain herself to anyone else.

‘I’ll pick you up tomorrow when you’re sober,’ he said, tucking his wallet into his jacket pocket.

She had walked heavily up to Room 311, lain down on the bed fully clothed and slept for fourteen hours.

He called to say he would meet her for breakfast. She showered, took some clothes out of her rucksack and ran an iron over them in the hope that she looked a little more presentable. She was not good at ironing – Lena had done that sort of thing.

When she came downstairs to the restaurant he was already sitting there, reading a paper, a half-drunk cup of coffee in front of him. He was older than she remembered, his hair thinning on top, a faint crêpiness to the skin of his neck; the last time she had seen him had been at a company event at the races where Francis had drunk too much and her mother had hissed at him furiously whenever nobody else was about, and Mr Garside, catching it, had raised his eyebrows at Lily, as if to say, ‘Parents, eh?’

She slid into the chair opposite him and he lowered his newspaper. ‘Aha. How are you today?’

She felt embarrassed, as if last night she had been overly histrionic. As if it had all been a fuss over nothing. ‘Much better, thank you.’

‘Did you sleep well?’

‘Very well, thank you.’

He had studied her for a minute over his glasses. ‘Very formal.’

She smiled. She didn’t know what else to do. It was too weird, being there with her stepdad’s work colleague. The waitress offered her coffee and she drank it. She eyed the breakfast buffet, wondering if she was expected to pay. He seemed to sense her discomfort. ‘Eat something. Don’t worry. It’s paid for.’ He turned back to his paper.

She wondered whether he would tell her parents. She wondered what he had done with Peter’s phone. She hoped he had slowed his big black car on the Thames embankment, lowered his window and hurled it into the swirling currents below. She wanted never to see that picture again. She rose and fetched a croissant with some fruit from the buffet. She was starving.

He sat reading as she ate. She wondered how they looked from outside – like any father and daughter probably. She wondered whether he had children.

‘Don’t you have to be at work?’

He smiled, accepted more coffee from the waitress. ‘I told them I had an important meeting.’ He folded his newspaper neatly and put it down.

She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. ‘I need to get a job.’

‘A job.’ He sat back. ‘Well. What kind of job?’

‘I don’t know. I kind of messed up my exams.’

‘And what do your parents think?’

‘They don’t … I can’t … They’re not very happy with me right now. I’ve been staying with friends.’

‘You can’t go back there?’

‘Not right now. My friend isn’t very happy with me either.’

‘Oh, Lily,’ he said, and sighed. He looked out of the window, considering something for a minute, then glanced at his expensive watch. He thought for another moment, then called his office and told someone he was going to be late back from his meeting.

She waited to hear what he had to say next.

‘You finished?’ He put his newspaper into his briefcase, and stood up. ‘Let’s go and make a plan.’

She had not been expecting him to come to the room and was embarrassed by the state of it: the damp towels left on the floor, the television blaring trashy daytime programmes. She dumped the worst of it in the bathroom and shoved what was left of her belongings hastily into her rucksack. He pretended not to notice, just gazed out of the window, then turned back when she sat on the chair, as if he had only just seen the room.

‘It’s not a bad hotel, this,’ he said. ‘I used to stay here when I couldn’t face the drive to Winchester.’

‘Is that where you live?’

‘It’s where my wife lives, yes. My children are long grown-up.’ He put his briefcase on the floor and sat on the edge of the bed. She got up and fetched the complimentary notepad from the bedside table, in case she needed to take notes. Her phone let out a chime and she glanced down. Lily just call me. Louisa x

She shoved it into her back pocket and sat down, the notepad on her lap.

‘So what do you think?’

‘That you’re in a tricky position, Lily. You’re a bit young to be getting a job, to be frank. I’m not sure who would hire you.’

‘I’m good at stuff, though. I’m a hard worker. I can garden.’

‘Garden! Well, perhaps you could get work gardening. Whether that’s going to bring in enough for you to support yourself is another matter. Have you got any references? Any holiday jobs?’

‘No. My parents always gave me an allowance.’

‘Mm.’ He tapped his hands on his knees. ‘You’ve had a difficult relationship with your father, haven’t you?’

‘Francis isn’t my real father.’

‘Yes. I’m aware of that. I know you left home some weeks ago. It all seems like a very sad situation. Very sad. You must feel rather isolated.’

She felt the lump swell in her throat and thought for a moment that he was reaching for a handkerchief, but it was then that he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a phone. Peter’s phone. He tapped it, once, twice, and she saw a flash of her own image. Her breathing stalled in her chest.

He clicked on it, making it bigger. Her cheeks flooded with colour. He stared at the photograph for what felt like several years. ‘You really have been quite a bad girl, haven’t you?’

Lily’s fingers closed in a fist around the hotel bedspread. She looked up at Mr Garside, her cheeks burning. His eyes didn’t leave the picture.

‘A very bad girl.’ Eventually he looked up at her, his gaze even, his voice soft. ‘I suppose the first thing we need to do is work out how you can repay me for the phone and the hotel room.’

‘But,’ she began, ‘you didn’t say –’

‘Oh, come on, Lily. A live-wire like you? You must know that nothing comes for free.’ He looked down at the image. ‘You must have worked that out a while ago … You’re obviously good at it.’

Lily’s breakfast rose into her throat.

‘You see, I could be very helpful to you. Give you somewhere to stay until you’re back on your feet, a little leg up the career ladder. You wouldn’t need to do very much in return. Quid pro quo – you know that phrase? You did Latin at your school, didn’t you?’

She stood abruptly and reached for her rucksack. His hand shot out and took hold of her arm. With his free hand he tucked the phone slowly back into his pocket. ‘Let’s not be hasty about this, Lily. We wouldn’t want me to have to show this little picture to your parents, would we? Goodness knows what they would think about what you’ve been up to.’

Her words stuck in her throat.

He patted the bedspread beside him. ‘I would think very carefully about your next move. Now. Why don’t we –’

Lily’s arm flew back, shaking him off. And then she was wrenching the hotel-room door open and she was gone, feet pumping, racing down the hotel corridor, her bag flying out behind her.

London teemed with life into the small hours. She walked while cars nudged night buses impatiently along main roads, minicabs wove in and out of traffic, men in suits made their way home or sat in glowing office cubicles halfway to the sky, ignoring the cleaners who worked silently around them. She walked with her head low and her rucksack on her shoulder, and when she ate in late-night burger restaurants, she made sure her hood was up and that she had a free newspaper to pretend to read: there was always someone who would sit down at your table and try to get you to talk. Come on, darling, I’m only being friendly.

All the while she replayed that morning’s events in her head. What had she done? What signal had she sent? Was there something about her that meant everyone assumed she was a whore? The words he had used made her want to cry. She felt herself shrink into her hood, hating him. Hating herself.

She used her student card and rode on underground trains until the atmosphere became drunk and febrile. Then it felt safer to stay above ground. The rest of the time she walked – through the glittering neon lights of Piccadilly, down the lead-dusted length of Marylebone Road, around the pulsing late-night bars of Camden, her stride long, pretending she had somewhere to be, only slowing when her feet began to ache from the unforgiving pavement.

When she got too tired she begged favours. She spent one night at her friend Nina’s, but Nina asked too many questions and the sound of her chatting downstairs to her parents while Lily lay, soaking the grime out of her hair in the bath, made her feel like the loneliest person on earth. She left after breakfast, even though Nina’s mum said she was welcome to stay another night, gazing at her with concerned maternal eyes. She spent two nights on the sofa of a girl she had met while clubbing, but there were three men sharing the flat, and she didn’t feel relaxed enough to sleep and sat fully clothed, hugging her knees, watching television with the sound turned off until dawn. She spent one night at a Salvation Army hostel, listening to two girls argue in the next-door cubicle, her bag clutched to her chest under the blanket. They said she could have a shower, but she didn’t like to leave her bag in the lockers while she got wet. She drank the free soup and left. But mostly she walked, spending the last of her cash on cheap coffee and Egg McMuffins and growing more and more tired and hungry until it was hard to think straight, hard to react quickly when the men in doorways said disgusting things or the staff in the café told her she’d made that one cup of tea last long enough, young lady, and it was time to move on.

And all the while she wondered what her parents were saying at that moment, and what Mr Garside would say about her when he showed them the pictures. She could see her mother’s shocked face, Francis’s slow shake of the head, as if this new Lily was of no surprise to him whatsoever.

She had been so stupid.

She should have stolen the phone.

She should have stamped on it.

She should have stamped on him.

She shouldn’t have gone to that boy’s stupid flat and behaved like a stupid idiot and broken her own stupid life, and that was usually the point at which she would start crying again and pull her hood further up around her face and –