Tony Parsons - One For My Baby

“You’ll see,” he laughs.

Our destination is a gabled town house in a quiet street lined with elm trees. Large houseboats are moored on the canal. The only sounds are the bells of distant bicycles. We are a long way from the noise and the girls in windows and the drunken crowds of the red-light district. But the two burly men in black tie outside the door of the town house suggest we are not so far away after all.

“Gentlemen,” they say, seeming to take it all in at once-our clothes, our degree of inebriation, our credit card limits. “Welcome.”

We pay 150 guilders just to get through the door. Around fifty quid. The place is enormous. This must have been a family home at one time. Now it is something else. Not a family home at all.

A smooth middle-aged man, also in black tie, gives us a little pep talk about what it will cost us to take one of the girls up to one of the rooms.

“Josh,” I say, tugging at his sleeve. “This isn’t a bar. It’s a knocking shop.”

“Oh, don’t be such a prude,” he tells me. “Don’t worry, Alfie. I’ll pay your way.”

“But I don’t want-”

“Just shut up and enjoy yourself, will you? For my sake if not your own. Give me a break, Alfie. I’m getting married next week. Be happy for me, will you? It’s the most important day of any young man’s life. My stag night.”

We go into what looks like a Victorian drawing room. Lots of chintz. Big drapes over the shuttered windows. Plenty of large, soft sofas where businessmen are talking to young women with extremely short dresses, lots of makeup and faces that look as though they have been carved out of granite.

What makes the room seem slightly less like a Victorian drawing room is that there is a bar at one end where a large black man with a shaven head regards us without emotion. During our pep talk at the door we were told that we were entitled to a few free drinks. The drinks are now lined up before us while the young women with faces carved out of granite smile at our little drunken group, casting their bait.

We grin back, sheepish and flattered, as if it’s our personal charm that has gotten us in with these young women, and soon they are all over us like a skin allergy, most of them bottle blond but with the occasional Indian or East Asian or black girl in with the mix. They all order champagne. It is overpriced and cold. Just like the women.

I see from the menu that a bottle of champagne and an hour upstairs with one of the girls is exactly the same price. Five hundred and fifty guilders. More than £200. The friends of Josh start waving around their credit cards.

There’s a tall young black woman sitting next to me, her long legs crossed, blowing cigarette smoke into my face and making labored small talk.

“What hotel you stay at?” she says, the whore’s equivalent of what’s your star sign?

I smile politely, and turn to Josh.

“I don’t want to spoil the party,” I say.

“Then don’t.”

“This is really not for me.”

“Forget about your pathetic teacher’s salary tonight, Alfie,” Josh says and sighs, lighting up a cigar, the stone-faced blonde on his arm staring blankly at me. “This one’s on me.” He leans across me, addresses my companion. “You’ll give my friend a good time tonight, won’t you, sweetheart?”

The black girl smiles without humor or warmth, as if she could eat Josh for breakfast, chopped up and sprinkled over her muesli. He doesn’t notice. Or he doesn’t care. He clamps his cigar between his teeth and wraps one arm around me and another round his tombstone-faced tart.

“How can you tell if your wife is dead, Alfie?”

“I don’t know.”

“The sex is the same but the dishes pile up. How’s Mrs. Mop?”

“You know what? You really are a funny guy.”

“Is she-you know-still spending a lot of time down on all fours? Getting her fingers dirty? Going where no normal woman dares go?”

“I wonder why you hate her so much.”

“I don’t hate her, old sport. I don’t even know her.” He puffs expansively on his cigar. “Can’t honestly say I want to. You’re not really bringing her to the wedding, are you?”

“But she’s just like you, Josh.”

“I don’t think so.”

“All she wants is to change her life. All she wants is to end up somewhere better than where she started out from.” I raise my beer in salute. “The same as you, old sport.”

Even under the dim lighting of the Victorian drawing room, his face seems to darken. “What do you mean, old fucking sport?”

“You changed your life, didn’t you? You put yourself through charm school. You put on airs and graces that you never had. You come on as though you’re Prince Charles. And not just another kid with no dad from some little suburb.”

He looks as though he could hit me or burst into tears. Or perhaps both.

“Why don’t you get out of my life, Alfie? I don’t even know why I invited you here. God knows, I knew I’d have to pay for you.”

“You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of, Josh. There’s nothing wrong with what you did.” And I really mean it. The thing I like most about Josh is the thing that he despises about himself. “You wanted to better yourself. To change your life. Just like Jackie.”

“You know I fucked her, don’t you?”

This makes me laugh out loud. “I don’t think so, Josh. When did that happen? When I went to the bathroom at your engagement party? I know you’re a bit quick, but this is ridiculous.”

He shakes his head impatiently. Our two hardened prostitutes are looking at each other, starting to get a little concerned.

“Not Jackie,” he says. “Rose.”

For a moment I can’t think. And the moment seems to drag on. I still can’t think. What is he telling me?

“My Rose?”

“Your Rose,” he snorts. “She wasn’t always your Rose, you fucking peasant.”

“Don’t joke about her. I mean it, Josh.”

“I’m not joking, old sport. I’m telling you that I fucked her. Quite a few times. Not that she was very good. Always a bit too keen on the hearts and moonlight, our Rose. Just before you came along with the fucking goo-goo eyes and bunches of flowers and romantic rides on the bloody Star Ferry.”

“You’re a liar.”

“I even fucked her on the day you met her. My flat. Mid-Levels. About six o’clock. Then we caught a cab down to Central for a few drinks at the Mandarin. You didn’t know that, did you? Never got around to telling you, did she?” He puffs away at his cigar, its tip flaring red in the gloaming of the knocking shop. “Yeah, we were having a little office fling until you arrived. Didn’t last long. A month or so. You did me a favor really, taking her off my hands.”

I am off my bar stool and have my hands wrapped around his throat before he can remove the cigar from his mouth.

Then I am shouting at him that he is a liar, even though I know that he is not, and his face is turning red, his eyes burning up at me like the end of his expensive cigar.

Then the large black guy from behind the bar wraps his arms around me and drags me away, expertly lifting me right off the ground, pulling me past the stunned faces of the friends of Josh and the granite-faced girls and the businessmen making small talk with women who have seen thousands exactly like them.

My feet don’t touch the ground until the large black guy dumps me back on the quiet cobbled street outside the tall town house.

I walk back to the hotel and check out, catching a cab to the deserted airport to wait for the first flight home in the morning, knowing that I will never see Josh again, and that he will always be wrong about me.

I don’t hate it that he slept with her.