Anne Billson - Stiff Lips

'Why don't you ask him?' she blurted, shooting me one last venomous look before stumbling out of the bar. I saw her dabbing her eyes as she went.

The waiter brought our drinks, and I finished them both.

That encounter with Sophie left me troubled. Why don't you ask him? What had she meant by that? I needed company, and I needed it now. I walked fast down Portobello Road, knowing Dirk and Lemmy would be in the Boar's Head, an unreconstructed saloon bar sandwiched between a tattoo parlour and a betting shop, because Dirk had mentioned earlier they'd be meeting someone there.

The place was packed. Most of the drinkers were bellowing at a boxing match on the giant television screen in the corner. Dirk and Lemmy had found a small space by the fruit machine.

'Where's your friend?' I asked.

'Nutella,' said Lemmy. I took this to be confirmation he had not yet arrived.

I bought drinks, and we started talking about cinema, which was one of Dirk's favourite subjects. For about the billionth time, he told me how Performance had been filmed just around the corner in Powis Square, and how Mick had been in it, and did I know that John Reginald Christie had once been a projectionist at the Electric Cinema, and that Sarah Bernhardt had stomped one-legged across the stage of the Coronet, back in the days when it was a theatre?

And then my heart did a bungee jump without elastic, because over Lemmy's shoulder I saw Charlotte and Grenville walk into the bar. I had no idea what they were doing there together, without their respective other halves, and I didn't care. But this was not their sort of hang-out at all.

Charlotte's eyes locked on to mine and she smiled in recognition and raised her arm, jiggling it like someone hailing a taxi. I glanced behind me, thinking that perhaps she was greeting someone else in the vicinity, that this couldn't possibly be Charlotte acting in an outgoing friendly manner towards me, but a rapid scan established that I was the only plausible object of her attentions. Everyone knew Charlotte had taken up with a lot of unsuitable men in her time, but I doubted whether any of them had had greased ponytails, armfuls of tattoos or pierced nipples poking through the holes in their grubby string vests.

The reason for their friendly approach was obvious, if I'd only had time to think about it. Charlotte and Grenville were out of their element. They would rather have died than admit it, but they were feeling ill at ease. Charlotte, sensing instantly that I was more at home in this atmosphere than either she or Grenville, had decided I might come in useful as their own personal guide to society's festering underbelly.

They accordingly made a beeline for me. They didn't have to push. The crowd sensed members of the social elite in its midst and parted like the Red Sea under orders from Moses.

And I started to panic. Charlotte and Grenville were from one compartment of my life, Dirk and Lemmy from another. The last thing I wanted was for elements from the different compartments to start getting mixed up together. I didn't want Charlotte and Grenville finding out what sort of a person I really was, or what kind of people I normally hung out with. I didn't want them finding out I was a fake.

I must have looked like someone who'd been having an eyeball-to-eyeball with the Medusa, because Dirk asked if I was feeling OK.

'Sure,' I said, not daring to take my eyes off Charlotte.

'Rostropovich,' said Lemmy. 'Gastarbeit king wenceslas.'

'Uh-huh,' agreed Dirk. 'Beam me up, Scotty.'

'Hang on a sec,' I said to Dirk and Lemmy. 'Back in a tick,' and, leaving them standing there, I wove through the crowd to head Charlotte and Grenville off at the pass. They greeted me with taut little air-kisses and muted chirrups of pleasure.

'This place!' said Grenville, looking round. 'Did you ever see anything like it?'

I wished he would keep his voice down. 'As a matter of fact I did,' I said. 'There are a lot of places like this.'

'Who were they?' asked Charlotte.

'Who were who?' I asked.

'Those fabulous lowlifes you were talking to.'

'The long-haired hippy with the moustache,' said Grenville. 'And the gorilla. You know who they remind me of? Asterix and Obelix.'

Charlotte chuckled. 'Typical examples of traditional Notting Hillbilly.'

'Just some guys,' I said.

'Amazing,' said Grenville, still gazing enraptured at Lemmy and Dirk. 'You can always tell, can't you, when people have been too long on the dole.'

Charlotte clutched my arm. 'Oh my God,' she gasped. 'Don't look now, Clare, but King Kong's coming over.'

I looked up with dread in my heart. Dirk was wading through the crowd with an expectant grin on his face, like a channel swimmer who had just felt shingle beneath his feet. I could just see it. He was bound to make some stupid remark about the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, or Buster Gonad and his Unfeasibly Large Testicles. I knew I had to get out of there right that second or I would die.

'Excuse me,' I said. 'I have to go and powder my nose.'

'Hang on,' began Charlotte, but the slimmest of instants before Dirk reached us, I plunged back into the milling crowd and dog-paddled towards the Ladies. I made it just in time. The door swung shut, but not before I'd glimpsed Dirk staring after me, his face crumpling into an expression of childlike bewilderment.

I locked myself into one of those foul-smelling cubicles for a full five minutes, then spent a further five staring into the mirror, fiddling uselessly with lipstick and mascara, and aching all over, as though I were about to collapse with flu. There was nothing for it. I would have to swallow my pride and introduce everyone. Maybe they'd all get along with each other after all. But by the time I'd scraped together the strength to go back into the bar, it was too late. Charlotte and Grenville were nowhere to be seen.

Dirk and Lemmy had vanished too.

I went straight back to the flat and lay on my mattress with my head pounding, feeling like a heel of the first magnitude and trying desperately to think of ways of justifying what my mind had now blown up into a perfidious act of betrayal.

It wasn't my fault. I couldn't help being bad at straddling social boundaries. Dirk and Lemmy belonged to one part of my life, Charlotte and Grenville to another. Mix them together, and there could be an explosion. But what kind of explosion were we talking about here? Wouldn't it be simply an explosion of social embarrassment — a minor fart at the most? And wasn't I the only one in danger of being embarrassed?

It didn't matter what I told myself. I still felt like the lowest form of pond life. I couldn't sleep. I could hear Sophie in the flat below, and I knew she hadn't brought anyone home with her, but she was whimpering and groaning and squealing with what sounded like nonstop orgasmic pleasure.

Ker-chunk ker-chunk ker-chunk

She was really partying on down. I didn't know where she'd got the tape from, but she had the Drunken Boats on loud.

And I realized at last that it didn't matter much whether her lover was real, or a ghost, or a figment of her fevered imagination. At least she had company. At least she was having fun. Not like me, stewing here alone in my misery.

Maybe Sophie had the right idea after all.

Maybe the only good man was a dead one.

From the outside, the basement flat looked more than a trifle shabby. Despite the bars on the windows, there was an air of dilapidation, as though whoever owned it couldn't possibly possess anything worth stealing. At the same time, it didn't appear to be a flat that was regularly left unoccupied for months on end. But if passing squatters, winos or drug dealers had tried to break in, they would have found themselves stumped by a formidable security system. The rickety-looking front door turned out to be made of steel and fitted with every type of deadlock known to man.