Geoff Nicholson - Bleeding London

Next day he telephoned her. She knew the agency must have given him her home number, which was another indication that he was somebody very special indeed. She wanted to be angry that her number had been given out, but she couldn’t summon up the pretence. She was glad he’d called her and she didn’t bother to hide it.

He said, “Why the gloves?”

She was surprised and impressed. Nobody had ever questioned the gloves before. Nobody had ever seen them as anything more than part of a stripper’s paraphernalia.

“I spent all night wondering what goes on underneath those gloves,” he said. “I thought maybe it was ugly old tattoos, maybe an ex-lover’s name, but you look too clever to have done something like that. And then I thought maybe you were an old junkie and you were hiding needle tracks, but you don’t look like a junkie either. So then I wondered if it was deformity, burns or skin disease, or maybe you’re missing a finger or even a hand. So which is it?”

“You’ll have to find out for yourself,” she said. “You’ll have to take them off for me.”

Her words sounded too obvious, more salacious and silly than she’d intended, but she knew this man was going to be something in her life whether she liked it or not. What was the point of being evasive, and what was the point of resisting? He had been talking to her on a car phone and ten minutes later he arrived at her door. Ten minutes after that she was being unfaithful to Mick. McLennan peeled off her gloves, looked sympathetically at the scars on her wrists and forearms, and kissed them. She couldn’t stop herself submitting and she didn’t try. She could tell this wasn’t going to be just a one-off, not a case of him trying it on because he thought all strippers were slags. It was not going to be anything nearly so simple.

She never found out what he did for a living. He’d never tell her and she could never quite work it out, although over the next few months she pieced together a few tantalizing bits of information. From things he said it appeared he was involved with property and with gambling and with importing cars from Europe. This might have been legitimate for all she knew. Certainly he employed an accountant and a book keeper like any other business. But he also employed some dodgy-looking heavies, men without job titles, men who were not employed for their entrepreneurial skills.

Gabby knew better than to quiz him about what he did. They were both happy for him to remain mysterious. He travelled a lot, to Birmingham, to Manchester, even to Florida (where he topped up his already radiant tan). But whatever he did, he was obviously good at it and it was obviously extremely profitable. She sometimes thought his business must involve drugs too. He always had the very best dope, speed, cocaine, and he was free with it, at least where she was concerned. But maybe it wasn’t business. Maybe he had the best drugs because he had the best of everything; the best house, the best furnishings, the best cars, the best whisky and, as he repeatedly told her, the best women.

He seemed to take it for granted that she would have a boyfriend. It didn’t seem to bother him. He didn’t tell her to stop seeing him. In fact he was very interested in hearing all about Mick.

Gabby felt disloyal enough just sleeping with McLennan; telling him about Mick was even worse. But she did tell him. She couldn’t stop herself, and McLennan seemed to have no ulterior motive. He was interested in a disinterested way, only wanting to know something about Mick, he said, because he wanted to know everything about Gabby. She told him and she was disappointed how little there was to tell, what a nothing he seemed to her now, how she seemed not to need Mick any more, how easy she found it to lie to him.

If she could tell McLennan all about Mick, she knew that Mick must know nothing about McLennan, and so it was. He remained blissfully ignorant. Mick trusted Gabby and he was easy to deceive. She’d tell him she was seeing her sister, staying over at her mother’s, and Mick never questioned it. It wasn’t that she thought Mick would do anything terrible if he found out. She didn’t think he’d hit her the way some of them might. Mick could be a brute but he was never a brute to her. It was more that he’d have been disappointed in her, that he would have valued her at more than she was worth.

She liked having secrets. The drugs were a secret from Mick. Having an affair with McLennan was an even bigger one. She wondered if she needed secrets because her life as a stripper was so utterly revealing. She showed everything to her audience, more than just her body. Like any good performer she revealed herself, gave herself away. And before long she had given everything to McLennan. Their nights were long and sleepless; intense, relentless sessions fuelled by alcohol, lust and drugs.

They left her feeling worn, shaky, wrecked, but at least she knew she was alive.

Some addictions are instant, others take a slow, incremental hold. At first it was easy for her to juggle Mick and McLennan, to balance their opposing demands on her, but she knew that sooner or later she would be wholly McLennan’s. Even before he went to London, she knew that Mick was meaning less and less to her.

And when McLennan said, “You shouldn’t be a stripper. You’re far too good for that game,” well, it was nothing that she hadn’t heard before from other boyfriends, but this time it mattered. This time it meant something. It sounded convincing and true. It felt like the thing she’d always been waiting for, the magic words she’d always wanted to hear. Once McLennan had said that, she was his. She’d do anything for him.

Stuart was walking along Bernard Street, not far from Russell Square tube station, when he saw a small group of tourists gathering on the opposite side of the road. He could tell they were mostly Americans; it was something to do with the clothes they wore, something alien in the cut, the fabric, the specific tone of the colours.

They were an older crowd with several very tall but stooped white-haired men, some in baseball caps, one in a sort of straw stetson. The men looked bigger and healthier and stronger than their London equivalents, as though they were farming stock, big-framed, with some whiff of Scandinavia in their background. They had their bright, good-humoured wives with them, and in some cases their wives’ recently widowed friends.

And then, surprisingly, although Stuart had ceased to be surprised long ago, for some reason it was always this way, there were a couple of sulky, awkward, long-haired adolescent girls. Stuart never understood why they were there, why they hadn’t managed to slip away to McDonald’s or Camaby Street or Camden Market or some place where they wouldn’t have to listen to the spoutings of a tour guide and where they might take the first steps towards some sort of tentative holiday sexual liaison. What else was the point of adolescents coming to London? But they never did those things. In the event these two stayed, sulked and made bad listeners.

It took Stuart a surprisingly long time to realize that he was witnessing the start of a London Walker tour: one called The Bloomsbury Walk and Beyond. The guide was a very new, very raw recruit called Colin, a boy Stuart had been forced to interview recently at Anita’s insistence. These days the whole business of interviews was an irritating interruption to Stuart’s walking plans and after the most perfunctory chat he’d hastily decided that the boy would do. In more usual circumstances Colin wouldn’t have stood a chance, but turning him down would only have resulted in Stuart having to interview someone else and that would have been even more of a disruption, so he’d given Colin the job, given him an even more perfunctory training session and thrown him in at the deep end where he was currently both waving and drowning.