Beneath the Blonde Read online

“Don’t panic. I know you’re looking for me. Some of them call me Geordie but my name’s Linda, if you care to use it.” She laughed at Saz, “Not every bloody Geordie talks like they do on the telly. I talk how I want when it suits me. When it’ll get me a quick fiver. Or not. Pie?” She held her hand out for the second apple pie, cooler and safer to the lips now, “You want to know about that mad flower woman, right?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  Biting into the pie, warm apple goo dripping on to her fingers, the girl nodded. “Yeah, well, let’s make it quick. I’ve got a very busy afternoon.”

  Saz quickly kicked Carrie before she could annoy the girl by asking just what she might be busy doing.

  Linda continued, “And it’ll cost you.”

  Saz reached for her wallet. “How much?”

  The girl shook her head, “Not money. I don’t need your bloody money.”

  She stood up and shouted down to the end of the park, “Tim! Tim!”, and the dark figure of the boy started to run towards them, head down and both fists clenched, ready to throw himself into whatever violent action was needed. Linda walked towards his flying figure, one hand out, oblivious of the scattered food cartons she was trailing in her wake. When he got to her, she grabbed his shoulders with both hands, pulled him round and whispered fiercely into his face. After a few interjections he finally nodded and then went to sit on the neighbouring bench, fifteen feet away, never taking his eyes off Linda. She came back and sat between Saz and Carrie, wiping the last crumbs from her mouth.

  “Ok. I want those.” She pointed to Carrie’s pink platform trainers. “And Tim, wants this.” She tugged on the sleeve of Saz’s pillar-box red suede jacket.

  Saz stood up and shook her head. “No way, kid, I’m sorry. In the first place, the most I was going to offer you would have been maybe fifty quid. Now, as my friend’s shoes are probably worth about thirty—”

  “Fifteen on sale, actually.” Carrie interrupted.

  “All right, fifteen on sale. But this jacket cost far more than that and, seeing as it was a present from my sister, would also cost me my most valuable family relationship to give it up. And even if I was prepared to make that sacrifice, I certainly wouldn’t be giving it to your vicious bloody boyfriend, given the fact that I’ve still got a hell of a lump from when he smacked me in the head with a can of lager yesterday afternoon.”

  The girl looked up at Saz and shrugged. “He’s my mate. He was looking out for me. But ok. Your friend can keep the shoes and I’ll just take the jacket.”

  “Seventy quid, and we all keep our own clothes.”

  “Keep your fucking money, I want the bloody jacket.”

  The wind had picked up, bringing with it a spattering of yesterday’s unseasonal sleety rain and Carrie, turning up the collar of her own fake zebra skin coat, hissed in Saz’s ear, “For God’s sake, Saz, give her the bloody jacket. It’s fucking freezing, the poor bitch has got hardly any clothes on and it’s not even winter yet. And Cassie’s never going to know.”

  Saz looked from Carrie’s angry face to the pinched, thin little thing trying not to look as if she was shivering as she sat on the bench. And then Saz reluctantly handed over her jacket. The sharp spits of rain pierced Saz’s thin cotton jumper, chilling her in five seconds flat, and she demanded that Carrie sit close beside her on the bench to keep her warm.

  The girl nodded in approval, running her small, scratched hands over the red-dyed animal skin. “This is bloody nice though. I’d not be happy to lose it either.”

  She hugged herself into the jacket and turned to face Saz. “Ok. Let’s be quick about it, Tim and me have a full agenda today. Your woman, right? What do you want her for?”

  “The recipient of the flowers doesn’t like roses.”

  “Fair enough. Ok, I don’t know her name but she’s been coming down here, down to Soho Square and a few other places on and off most of the summer.”

  “What time of day?”

  “Well, if she’s got a job, it isn’t in an office.”

  “Not the right sort of clothes?” Carrie asked.

  Linda looked pityingly at Carrie. “When was the last time you had an office job? They wear what they like these days. No, it’s the hours she keeps. Doesn’t just pop into the square for forty-five minutes at lunchtime.”

  Saz thought she’d better move things on before Linda annoyed Carrie any more, “When did you first meet her?”

  “Three months ago must have been, it was hot then. She comes up to me, big bunch of flowers and seventy quid in her hand. Offers me the twenty to take the flowers and give the fifty to the cab man. He’s the one who told you to find me, yeah?”

  Saz nodded and Linda continued. “Ok, so I take the flowers, give him the cash and me and Tim get to go to the pictures that afternoon. Popcorn, hotdog, the lot. Just like the tourists. Easy. Then a couple more times the same thing. Twenty quid for me, fifty for the bike and a big bunch of yellow roses. One time I didn’t bother handing over the roses though. Tim and me went and stopped at this B&B in Kennington for a couple of nights. It was brilliant—we watched TV in bed for three days, had big fry-up breakfasts and then just used up all those little tea and coffee sachets in the daytime. Don’t know why they complain about living in B&Bs, those families.”

  Saz frowned, “Yeah, well, maybe it’s different when you’ve got four kids in the same room with you. Anything else? That’s not a huge amount of info for a bloody good jacket.”

  “That’s all I know. We don’t exactly go for a drink and a chat. She offers the money, I take it.”

  “She didn’t say anything else?”

  “Listen, I wasn’t doing it because I needed a new friend.”

  “When did you last see her?”

  “Last week, maybe the week before. Not so much since it’s turned cold. They go back indoors in the cold.”

  “They?”

  “Yeah, daytime homeless. Part-timers. Nutters, Tim reckons. Got homes of their own but don’t like being in them. So they stay out long as it’s warm. Makes them feel they know people, you know, got friends.”

  “Did she ever say anything about who the flowers were for?”

  “That singer, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I told you. Just here’s your money and here’s the cab money and here’s the flowers. The basics. Nothing else.”

  “No reason?”

  “What, like happy birthday or something?” Linda shook her head, “It’d be a hell of a lot of birthdays, wouldn’t it? She told me about the flowers though. Gets them from all over.”

  “Steals them?”

  “Nah. Bought they are. Like ten from one place and another ten from another place. Buys them all up separate, then gets them put into a bouquet at some other flower shop.”

  “You don’t know where?”

  Linda shook her head. “Look, she gave me the money, I took it. I didn’t ask where she buys the bloody flowers from. I don’t care.”

  “Any idea why she chose you?”

  “’Cos I’m so fucking cute?”

  Saz elicited as detailed a physical description as Linda could manage, pretty much tying in with Ben’s. Though where Ben had assumed late twenties, early thirties, Linda just damned Saz with, “Kind of middle-aged. Like you, I reckon. Your age.”

  But she concurred with Ben’s description of a tall slim woman, faded freckled skin contrasting with her dark hair. The description complete, Saz handed Linda twenty pounds anyway and her mobile number. The wind had turned and was driving the spitting rain into their faces along with the sour smell of train brakes from Hungerford Bridge. Linda took the money and called Tim over who came trotting up like a well-behaved puppy. They ran out of the gardens together, hand in hand like little children. Saz remarked to Carrie as they paced themselves against the wind back up to Soho, that was probably because they still were little children.

  Back in Old Compton Street, Saz asked Carrie to keep an eye on Linda, maybe visit her some
time in the next week and see if she had remembered anything more about the woman, ask if she’d seen her at all in the intervening period. She handed her mobile over, telling Carrie that both Ben and Linda had the number and that it was therefore to be used for incoming calls only. Carrie agreed, kissed her goodbye as they left American Retro and had already started dialling Blair before she hit Charing Cross Road. Saz met Molly long enough to pick up her bag from her, drink two very strong espressos and share a piece of sticky chocolate and carrot cake and several long and equally sticky goodbye kisses. Then leaving Molly, she shouldered her bag to walk down to Leicester Square tube. She was just trying to get herself and the bag through the unaccommodating ticket barrier when a familiar loud laugh made her turn. It was Linda and Tim, arms around each other, jumping over the barrier, and past the two overweight and under-motivated guards. Linda looked elated but still cold and thin in her big holey jumper, Tim looked fantastic in Saz’s red suede jacket.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Once, when Gaelene was fourteen, she came back to the area with her parents for the May holidays. It was cold already, the wind saline sharp off the sea, slamming the car doors for them as they got out. After tea and chat Gaelene left her parents talking to the friends who had moved into their house and wandered outside in her old front garden, walked down the wide, even streets, turning corners without thinking until, just a short distance later (though it had once been a long walk for the thin legs of a six-year-old) she was standing outside Shona’s house. At the back door she just managed to stop herself from walking right in, unannounced, no informing knock, just like in the old days. Shona’s mother let her in with a smile and a hug. Remarried and remothered, she was playing housewife for the day, and a plate of hot fresh scones were sitting on the table waiting for Shona to come back from her Saturday job at the dairy. In fact, Shona’s mum said, Shona was already half an hour late. Maybe Gaelene should just pop down to the dairy to find her?

  Gaelene set off, scone in hand, dripping warm butter and raspberry jam down the front of her fourth form school jersey. The one she was supposed to keep for school. Clean for the winter term. The one she’d put on this morning, late, to leave muggy Auckland, grabbing whatever she could as her mum yelled from the front door that the weather was cooler down the line and her dad honked the car horn, anxious to get away, get their duty done. Get it over with, impatient to get home again two days later.

  Gaelene took the short cut through the school to the dairy. Past the sandpit where she and Shona had played as best-friend five-and six-year-olds, past the monkey bars where Shona spun around faster and faster, one leg knee-clamped to the bar, the other straight out behind her, two short pigtails hoping the Olga Korbut image would make the physical impossibility a reality. She finished her scone and started to climb the wooden log stairs up to the play fort in the Standard’s play area where as “big kids” they had made homes and wars and battleships, when she heard scuffling on the floor above and two voices in low, stifled moaning.

  Gaelene was fourteen and though she had no experience to tell her so, she knew that the sound, so easily mistaken for pain or trouble, was not the sound of distress. Or at least not the sort of pain you were meant to complain about. Gaelene did not know what she was hearing, but she knew enough to move more quietly, to hold her own breath tight, to creep up to put her eye close to the knot in the wood that would allow her access to the source of the sound. Up close, the sap smell of untreated pine stabbing her nostrils, she watched John and Shona fucking. Fucking on the top floor of the play fort, open sky cold above them, shielded from the empty school grounds by a four-foot wall. She stood there for three or four minutes, fascinated and moved. And disturbed. Then she crept away as quietly as she had come. As quietly as John came noisily. As quietly as Shona, fourteen-year-old girl fucking the sixteen-year-old visiting cousin she had asked to enlighten her, did not come at all.

  The day turned and Gaelene did not find Shona at the dairy and when they met the next day they had little to say to each other and Gaelene went home to the city, glad deep in her heart that she now lived in a place where she had no history and the by-product of this gladness was that she had even less reason to talk to Shona. And the following year when John came visiting his cousins, back from boarding school, he, unlike Gaelene, was revelling and blossoming in the uncovering of his own history and now he was Hone and now he did not have much to say to Shona either.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Saz arrived at Heathrow via a crowded, tunnel-stopping tube journey in time to join Greg and Siobhan at the checkin. She managed to get a few minutes alone with them while they queued; Dan and Steve, who’d arrived far earlier, were having another “quick half” in the bar. It took little time to give them the basics of her latest information. Siobhan scoffed at the possibility of Kevin being involved, though Saz noticed that Greg seemed to take it more seriously and was relieved she had contacted the police about him. When she told them about meeting Linda, omitting the details of lager cans and the suede jacket, Siobhan seemed genuinely puzzled that her stalker should be a woman and insisted that Greg write down every one of the few physical details in his notebook. She fretted for a few minutes more, scanning the hall for tall, dark-haired women and then, seeing Steve and Dan round the corner from the bar, she went straight into dippy blonde mode. She picked up her bags, planted soft full kisses on both Saz’s and Greg’s mouths, sending Saz’s stomach on a Ferris wheel turn and flounced up to the now free counter where she demanded a window seat, non-smoking, extra legroom upgrade from Business Class to First for herself and Greg. She got it too. Saz of course, would have to slum it back in company-paid Business with the boys.

  A confirmed US-ophile, Saz had always loved the flight into any American city—the descent into the vast country, alternately terrifyingly empty and then crammed full of people, the knowledge that she was about to step foot, not just on a land, but a whole continent. She adored New York; the pace and adrenalin of Manhattan fitted her rhythms almost as well as the tight-fitting black leather dress she’d bought in Greenwich Village last time they were there. Molly had taken her away for a little post-operative rest and relaxation following an extended period of surgery. The new method of grafts had left her considerably happier with the look and use of her legs but rather more depressed about the prospect of several more years of treatment until her doctors would consider her “well”. Molly diagnosed basic depression in her girlfriend and suggested R&R in New York as the cure. The Rest she’d managed while sleeping on the plane there, the Relaxation she had collapsing on the way back, the three days in between had been pure acceleration. Ideal for London blues. Saz also loved San Francisco—the roaring, polluted Pacific, the dirty rainbow flags of the Castro, she even quite liked the pretentious coffee bars and the timelapsed hippies still mooching their way around Haight. She’d visited Boston, Seattle, Chicago and Detroit and found something moving or charming in every city. For work she’d crisscrossed Northern California, Nevada and even ventured into parts of Idaho. At gatherings of friends and acquaintances in London, she was used to finding herself the only guest standing up for America, always the one to find some piece of real gold under the tackiness. Saz still believed in the Statue of Liberty, four trips out to the Island hadn’t dented her enthusiasm for the sight of her stained copper green, though each time she was disappointed to be reminded again that Liberty isn’t quite as big in real life as she looks spread across a cinema screen in glowing technicolour. To Saz, America was still a land of excitement and adventure. Until, that is, she went to LA.

  In LA, Saz realized what people were talking about when they said they hated America. Only somehow what she felt was worse than hate. She didn’t hate LA because she couldn’t summon up enough feeling about LA to actually emote enough to hate it. She just didn’t get it. She couldn’t see the point. With Siobhan and Greg locked up in meetings all day, she had no choice but to sit by the pool alone or, on their free day, play with Dan and Stev
e in their over-large hire car as they tried to understand the plastic tinsel of the city. They were as perplexed as Saz. For people who had just lost one of their best friends (and in Dan’s case, not long after losing his lover) the guys weren’t too bad company. Every now and then one of them would point out a shop or restaurant that Alex might have liked—or have liked kicking shit out of—but in general they concentrated all their efforts in trying to enjoy what they could of this, their one day off in the angel city. Well-meaning people at the record offices had told them the things to do. They went to look at the Hollywood sign and there it was, shrouded in hazy smog. They followed directions and drove through Beverly Hills and up past the big fancy houses in the canyon, they went to Rodeo Drive, they looked at the Beverly Hills Hotel, but as Steve pointed out to Saz when they retrieved the car from yet another $5.00 a day vacant lot carpark, “If I’d wanted to reconfirm my view that rich people have no taste and shouldn’t be allowed to spend all that money so badly, I could walk down Bishop’s Avenue at home. I didn’t have to come all the way here to find that out—and as for Rodeo Drive, it’s so bloody short!”

  Dan added that it may have been short, but he’d spotted at least three hair-implanted queens trotting up and down the street which was taken by Steve as a sign to turn the car around and get his own bald pate out of there as fast as he could.

  After lunch by the hotel pool they walked down to Venice Beach and Steve wondered aloud why anyone would choose to put Camden Market next to the Pacific Ocean, thereby spoiling both. Saz tried not to be grumpy, Dan tried to have a fun time and Steve tried not to mind that the bronzed, blonded barbie-doll people were obviously shocked by his looks. But both boys had been seriously thrown by Alex’s murder and it hung at the back of every strained and sarcastic comment they made. Sitting on a bench looking out at the Pacific, Dan finally said, “I’m sorry, kids, this isn’t going to work. I can’t talk about Alex and I can’t not talk about him and it just feels so fucking wrong to be here without him.”