Anne Billson - Suckers

That glimpse of Christine had shaken me up more than it should have done. I tried to blot out the memory with lamebrained television, and then, somewhere between the end of a documentary about drug abuse on council estates in South London and the beginning of a new sitcom about Vietnam veterans trying to fit back into small-town American society, I noticed someone showing lots of cleavage. I didn't twig at first; I just saw this figure, dressed in black, stalking down a neon-lit street in ridiculously high heels. The other pedestrians, all male, were going ape-shit. The first gulped down a lethal dose of strychnine — you knew it was strychnine because it said so on the bottle. The second threw himself under the wheels of a Ferrari. The third plunged a knife into his belly, and the fourth was so traumatized that his head exploded. Then Lulu (for it was she) turned to the camera, an enigmatic smile playing on and around her lips, and a disembodied voice whispered, 'Kuroi . They'll die for the woman who's wearing it.' Then Lulu's face faded into an elegant orchid-shaped chunk of black glass, and the voice whispered, 'Kuroi. By Murasaki.'

It was a grand excuse to phone Duncan. 'Lu's on telly,' I said. He wanted to know which channel. I heard him switch his set on, but it was too late; all he got were bursts of canned laughter and the gatta-gatta of automatic gunfire. 'Maybe it'll come up in the next break,' he said. 'What was it for? Bellini? '

'Perfume. By Murasaki . Multiglom strikes again. They didn't waste any time, did they?'

'Who?'

'The admen. When do you reckon they filmed it? Two days ago?'

I could sense him considering this at the other end of the line. 'Less than a week, you're right. They must know something we don't know.' He paused, then asked if I wanted to go round and see him that evening. He offered to drive over and pick me up, which suited me fine, because it wasn't just Violet I had to worry about now — it was Grauman, Patricia Rice, and the rest of the crew as well.

Duncan did the cooking again, but I could tell the novelty of it was already wearing off for him. He served linguini with a ready-made tomato and basil sauce from the delicatessen down the road, and then he fried up some bread to boost the meal's cholesterol-packing potential. We ate in silence, trying and failing to stick to mineral water and staring at the television in case Lulu's ad should come on again. It didn't. The news was full of the takeover of three British companies by a single foreign consortium which already owned four national newspapers and a satellite channel. Questions had been raised in the Commons by Her Majesty's Opposition, and the Monopolies Commission was preparing a report, but the consensus was that there wasn't a damn thing anyone could do about it. It was all very dull.

Shortly after we'd finished eating the phone rang. Duncan snatched the receiver up excitedly, but I could see, by the disappointment on his face that it wasn't Lulu. He listened uninterestedly for a while, saying 'yes' and 'no' and 'OK, yeah', but then he heard something which made him sit up straight. He talked a bit more animatedly after that, said 'cheerio' and hung up.

'Weinstein,' he said. 'She's having a party tomorrow.'

Ruth's party had completely slipped my mind. 'Just what the world needs right now,' I said. 'One of Ruthie's shindigs.'

Duncan said, 'I'm going.'

'You are? ' I was taken aback. Duncan disliked Ruth, everyone knew that. He despised her dilettantism and the way she always protested she had no money, even though she was probably the wealthiest person we knew. Her father had bought her the house where she and Charlie now lived, and then he had also bought her an art gallery in Westbourne Park under the pretext of it being a birthday present, though it was more likely some sort of tax dodge. I usually tried to avoid walking past it in case Ruth was there and spotted me, even though she treated the business like a hobby and left most of the day-to-day running of the place to badly paid underlings.

Duncan said, 'Lulu's going to be there.'

'Lulu?' Impossible, I thought. 'You don't know that.'

'Ruth saw her the other day, at Gnashers.'

Ruth had such a bloody big nose. For the love of Jesus, why couldn't she keep it out of other people's business? I wanted to ask Duncan why he wanted to see Lulu so badly, since she obviously wasn't in a tearing rush to come back and see him, but I didn't. Instead, I said, 'Maybe I will come along after all.'

'OK.' And with that, he wrapped himself in his own thoughts and hardly said another word to me. We had a few more drinks, and pretended to watch a late-night film, but all the sparkle had gone out of the evening. He stared at the screen and didn't seem to hear when I asked him questions. A barrier had gone up between us. I felt like an idiot, perched on the sofa in my jingling silver trinkets while Duncan acted as though I was invisible. I felt my recent joie de vivre giving way to gloom. The prospect of seeing Lulu again had brought home to me how much, how very much, I'd been enjoying her absence.

Saturday morning got off to a bad start when I suggested to Duncan that we meet up somewhere before going on to Ruth's party together. He started making excuses. He had to work all afternoon. He had no idea what time he'd be finished. I cottoned on fast. 'You don't want Lulu to see us together, is that it? Hell, you don't want anyone to see us together.'

'I thought you realized, Dora. Our affair could never be anything other than clandestine.'

'Clandestine? Clandestine? What's that supposed to mean?'

'We must keep it secret. No one must know.'

'I know what it means,' I snarled. 'It means I've served my purpose and now you're going to put me back in the cupboard.'

'It's not like that at all…'

'Like what? Like this, you mean?' I had scarcely touched my egg and bacon, which were swimming in even greater quantities of grease than usual. I picked up the plate and upended it over his lap. The bacon dropped immediately. For a few tantalizing seconds the egg clung on by vacuum suction, then slowly peeled off under its own weight. Duncan opened his mouth to say something, then changed his mind and shut it again. He was wearing his resigned look. I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking it was that time of the month again. Jesus Christ, it always seemed to be that time of the month.

There was a large dark stain around his groin. Grease dripped glutinously on to the floor. 'See you later, scumbag,' I said, and stalked off.

The name of Multiglom figured prominently in the day's newspapers, but only in the business pages, not a breath of scandal. Later, while I was flicking through the arts section of The Times , I found myself face to face with Lulu, the last person I'd ever expected to see in a quality broadsheet. It was a full-page black and white photo; she had that carefully-made-up-to-look-like-no-make-up look, and there was a roguish glint in her eye that had never been there before; I wondered whether it had been airbrushed in. She looked good, almost not like Lulu at all.

The picture was accompanied by a message in tiny, tiny print — a public plea to shareholders, urging them not to block some takeover or other and outlining why they should be voting so-and-so on to the board of directors. It listed all the advantages a newer, more powerful Multiglom could bring to the economy in general, and to shareholders' pockets in particular. It even outlined the ways in which the corporation's waste products were environmentally sound, neither polluting the rivers into which they were poured, nor threatening the ozone layer and admitting harmful ultraviolet rays, I couldn't see Lulu's relevance; she was simply a means of catching the attention of jaded eyes as they scanned pages of dry, bimbo-free print in a fruitless search for titbits. I searched, and searched, and I found pictures of Lulu in some of the other papers too. She was definitely flavour of the month.