Кейт Уотерхаус - Soho or Alex in Wonderland

Meanwhile, it was beginning to sound like thank you and good night, Selby. So what now? The idea of the night coach to Leeds no longer appealed. What would it cost, anyway? What Alex had a need for was to get rat-arsed. Find this Gerry’s Club, go back on the piss with James Flood, get monumentally arseholed, kip down somewhere, grabber bitter breakfast, then back to South Higginshaw in Dave’s rhubarb truck.

That was if it ever stopped raining. It had never occurred to him to bring a raincoat at the beginning of May, in fact he never wore one. If it rained in Leeds you got pissed on, and that was that.

Possessive, eh? So what was wrong with being possessive? Better than treating them like shite. Though summer them seemed to go for it. Might be an idea to change his approach, trying it out on Vicky.

As he brooded on along these lines, and the downpour continued, one of Soho’s cycle rickshaws splashed to the kerb and an attractive young woman climbed out and hurried into the doorway, vigorously shaking a stream of water from her umbrella. Familiar face. It was her, wasn’t it? The lass in green. Christine, as she was called. Except that she wasn’t wearing green now, she was dolled up to the nines in a backless electric blue satin number and ear-rings you could have started a hoop-la stall with.

“Nice weather for ducks,” said Alex pleasantly, but, in keeping with his new treat-’em-mean policy, unsmilingly.

“It’s your original turn of phrase I like,” said Christine in a bantering way. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

“Yeh yeh, I grabbed your elbow in the street this evening. Mistook you for a friender mine.”

“So you did. You said you thought I was someone else, and I said, ‘Yes, I am,’ but you didn’t get it.”

“Still don’t,” confessed Alex. They could be talking Hindustani half the time down here, for all the sense you could get out of them. “I’ll tell you what, though. It’s blurry wet out here — if that’s a club down there, any chance of getting in?”

“Be my guest,” said Christine in her intriguingly deep voice.

Pressing the buzzer she spoke in response to the crackle from the other end: “Christine, my love. I have someone with me, is that all right? No, he’s straight. Or I think he is.”

What was that supposed to mean, then? There was something odd about this club. Worth having a dekko at, though. Good story for the lads, could be.

As they were buzzed through the stout door, Christine treated Alex to a winning smile. “When I say be my guest, I should explain that there’s a twenty-pound entry fee. But for that you get your first drink free.”

“Oh, well, that’s all right, then, most reasonable.” But Alex’s heavy sarcasm was lost on Christine. Fuming at having fallen for the trick like a mug tourist, he followed her down to a small lobby where he learned from the muscular woman guarding the door that by twenty pounds, Christine meant twenty pounds each, and that he was expected as a gentleman to pay her share. Another forty soddin quid down the drain. But too late to turn back now, Alex lad, without looking a complete wankah. As he paid up he saw with alarm that apart from loose change and a couple of fivers he was down to his last two twenty-pound notes.

Back on the beero, then. If Christine thought he was about to be pouring shampoo down her throat all night, she had another think coming. Christ, the money he’d got through, you would believe he had holes in his pockets. And if he happened to bump into Stephan Dance while he was getting through the rest of it, tough titty. What could he do? Alex swallowed hard. Chop his bollox off, that’s what.

Blanking the thought out of his mind he tagged after Christine as she shimmied into what seemed to be a miniature dance hall, its once-varnished floor ringed by gilt-painted cane chairs obviously brought in by the van-load from some defunct palais de danse . Kinder stuff you saw in summer the crappier clubs of Leeds. Behind them the wallpaper was of the red flock variety still to be found in the Indian restaurants within chucking-up distance of the Metro.

But what intrigued Alex more than the decor was the clientele. Apart from a couple of bejeaned, bomber-jacketed blokes with gayish-looking droopy moustaches, and a likewise bejeaned and T-shirted young girl with a battered beer tray who was waitressing for at a guess two pounds an hour, and looked to Alex a right little goer, the dozen or so inhabitants of the room were all flashily dressed women in their thirties to fifties. Two of them were dancing with each other to a tape of some twenties or thirties wah-wah stuff foreign to Alex. He recognised the one in the metallic sheath dress who had come down ahead of Christine, and he thought he knew the other one too from somewhere but couldn’t place her. Tarty-looking brass-blonde, middle-aged, long grey flannel skirt, white frilly blouse.

And cross eyes.

Christ on crutches, it couldn’t be. Oh, let it be, please. Even if it wasn’t he would tell the lads it was, it was so priceless. And it was. The unembarrassed, cross-dressing squint-eyed waiter leered at Alex — or it could have been at Christine, it was difficult to say — as he foxtrotted by.

Odd how waiters were so difficult to place when you saw them out of uniform, he mused. Hey, that was funny! When he came to recount his adventures to the lads, he’d work it in.

Time to chat Christine up a bit, remembering to play it surly, not sound so eager. “So is this a regular haunt of yours, then?”

“Only once a week. It gets expensive otherwise.”

Cheeky cat. It wasn’t her forty quid he’d had to fork out. As for the free drink, the plastic tumblers the girl was taking round he could see contained the pissiest catpiss so far, and he hadn’t even tasted his yet.

“You can say that again,” he said ruefully.

Christine touched his hand. “Never mind, love, we’ll see if we can make it worthwhile. Would you like to dance?”

He would, yes. Would like to feel her soft bod pressing up against his. But he couldn’t do the foxtrot or the quickstep or the fookin rumba or whatever it was — the kinder dancing Alex did when he went clubbing, you made it up as you went along.

“Sorry, not my style,” he said gruffly.

“Is smiling your style?” asked Christine, smiling herself.

“What’s that?” prompted Alex, who had been making rather a point of not smiling. Glad she’d noticed.

“I say you don’t smile much, do you?”

“Not a lot, no.”

“Why — have you got bad teeth?”

She’d find that out soon as he got his tongue down her throat, he reckoned. He was wondering whether it was too early yet to verbalise this thought when one of the two or three young men in jeans and bomber jackets sashayed over. “Good evening, Christine, and how’s Christine? Haven’t seen you in Madame Jo-Jo’s lately.”

“That’s because no one’s invited me,” pouted Christine.

The man half bowed to Alex. “Do you mind if I ask Christine to dance? We’re old friends.”

“Go ahead,” said Alex grudgingly. Actually he did mind, but since the bloke seemed to be gay he supposed no harm would come of it.

As the pair waltzed off around the tiny floor, if waltzing was what they were doing, he sipped cautiously from his plastic tumbler and took further stock of his surroundings.

On the other side of the dance floor, a youngish woman with long jet-black hair and, for this place, dressed rather quietly in a short corduroy skirt and white polo-necked jumper, was discreetly edging her way round towards the exit. Not so much edging, it seemed to Alex, as sidling. She stopped to clutch an errant ear-ring that was coming loose from its moorings, whereupon her eyes met, and locked with, Alex’s.