Calendar Girl Read online

  For three months this went on. On the Friday nights that she’d “go to her parents” I would spend hours at the gym, sometimes not even working out, just waiting by the pay phone, trying to get up the courage to call her parents and ask if she was there. I didn’t need courage to speak to her mother or father, I needed it to cope with what I might hear.

  I never called them.

  I’ve always sympathised most with the Lion in The Wizard of Oz. And not just because he has the best costume. A brain and a heart are all very well, but what are they worth if you don’t have the courage to use them? And I hate the way Dorothy’s pigtails turn into a mane of glossy auburn locks once she’s in Oz. I’d have liked her better if she’d stayed the same.

  I hate change.

  So I couldn’t call her parents. I didn’t have the courage. I still haven’t. Not even now.

  But she knew something was wrong. I’m a good comedian, I’m not a good actor. And besides, she might have been lying to me, but she wasn’t blind. Liars are probably the least blind people in the world, they have to watch all the time. Make sure, make ready, make believe.

  I was shape changing. Building muscles and building hate.

  It had to explode eventually.

  One night she came home just as I was about to go out to the gym.

  “Hi honey – I’m home!”

  I used to love to hear those words, our life a parody of the happy all-American sitcom home. Now they just made me run faster.

  “Hi babe. Look I’ve got to go, want to get to the pool before it closes. I might go to the gym too – I’ll see you later.”

  “Oh not again Maggie. Couldn’t you stay in with me just one night – please? It’s been months since we just stayed in and did nothing together.”

  “I’m busy.”

  “You seem to be busy all the time these days sweetheart, what’s going on – got another lover?”

  “How dare you! You’re …”

  “Oh come on Mag, I’m only joking.”

  “Don’t call me Mag.”

  “Give me a break! Can we talk please? Could you just tell me what all this is about?”

  “I think you’re the one who should be telling me don’t you?”

  “For God’s sake babe, I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  “Liar!”

  “What?”

  “You heard. Liar! You’re a fucking liar!”

  I was crying now, twisting my gym shoes in my hands and crying. Big hot angry tears rolling down my face.

  “Please Maggie, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “My birthday. I’m talking about my bloody birthday.”

  “I don’t …”

  “You weren’t there. I wanted to talk to you and you weren’t there.”

  She knew she’d been caught. She looked like a rabbit in car headlights, like an employee with his hand in the till. She looked like anyone who knew they’d been found out. She looked scared.

  “You called my parents?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well … did you speak to my dad? You must have spoken to my dad, you know what he’s like. He was probably lying. He probably knew it was you and didn’t want you to speak to me.”

  I felt sick. I’d got her and she was lying even more. I answered her flatly.

  “I didn’t speak to him. Keith did. I got Keith to call so they wouldn’t know it was me. So they couldn’t lie.”

  “Oh.”

  “Your father told Keith you hadn’t been there for a couple of weeks – which means you hadn’t been there the Friday before either.”

  “No. I wasn’t.”

  She guided me inside and shut the door. She took the shoe away from me.

  I was crying even more now. Not just anger, now it was sorrow too. I felt deserted. She sat me down on the couch and stroked my hair. I wanted to pull away but I couldn’t. I was too numb.

  “Darling, I wish you’d have asked me about this ages ago.”

  And in a soothing voice she stroked my pain and put my worries away. She told me about the fight she’d had with her parents two weeks before my birthday. How she’d told them she couldn’t be with them that night. It was the anniversary of her grandmother’s death – they didn’t understand that she could want to be anywhere else, that she could prefer to be with me. They didn’t understand. And neither did I, none of us understood how torn she was, how she felt so ripped through her centre whenever the problems with her family and me flared up.

  I curled up in her arms and listened as she spun a tale that wiped away my anger, as she told a story that calmed my heart. She told me about those Friday nights, how she’d spent the evenings in her car. On my birthday night she’d waited in the car until it was time to come to Dolores’ party. Unable to be with me or give her family the satisfaction of giving in, she’d hidden, driven dark streets and thought of how much she loved me.

  I listened as she placed a warm blanket over me and sent me to sleep. I listened as she pulled a warm blanket of wool over my eyes. I listened as she crooned me to sleep.

  “Oh my darling, I’m so sorry, you must have been so worried … it was only that night, well, those two … I didn’t know what else to do, I couldn’t make a decision about you or them, I had to run away … I’m sorry you’ve been so unhappy …”

  She led me down a blind alley and I willingly followed. I was so desperately unhappy, so eager to be rid of my anger – so tired of going to the gym – that I let her twist me and tie me up.

  I let her feed me fables.

  She came to me quiet that night. I was nearly asleep, worn out by all the emoting. Or maybe I was asleep but she stroked my shoulder and I turned to face her.

  “No, don’t move. Stay there. Lie there. Take off your shirt.”

  I took my T-shirt off and she lay on top of me, her breasts pressing into my shoulder blades, my almost sleeping body waking faster than my brain, warming to her lying on me. My body is a light sleeper. She pulled my arms out to the sides, gently turned my head so she could kiss me, slowly started to grind her pelvis, just below the small of my back, equal pressure, equal movements – her to me, me to the bed. She slipped her hands under me – one to my breast, one to my cunt. She kept up a steady rythym. My body was wide awake now. I was wide awake now – dragged back from sleep my body and myself were one, her body and myself seeming one. Both of us maintaining the rhythm, I started to cry out, her hand flew from my breast to my mouth.

  “No sound.”

  “I can’t not.”

  “Bite. Bite down.”

  Three of her fingers crammed in my mouth. I didn’t bite. Couldn’t bite the long delicate fingers that fed me. Sucked instead, warm and sweaty fingers in my mouth, in me. Rhythm still going, both of us in time, sweat in the small of my back sticking to her stomach. One backed beast we came together and fast. She slid beside me, grabbed handfuls of my hair and held me close.

  “See? We couldn’t do that if we didn’t belong together. It wouldn’t happen. You’re mine and I’m yours.”

  Possession is nine tenths of the law.

  But I believed her. Because it was easier to believe her. Because I had to believe her. Because if I couldn’t believe in her, what was left for me to trust?

  Nothing.

  There is nothing left.

  I have no faith anymore.

  The nuns used to say that despair is the greatest sin. Judas was condemned not because he betrayed Jesus, but because, having betrayed, he despaired. Apparently God can forgive anything but despair. Clever God.

  But I wasn’t thinking about Judas then, the cock crowed thrice and I chose to believe. I made that leap of faith, I watched as she turned water into wine. I put all my eggs into the one basket and handed them over to her.

  She makes a mean omelette.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Stepford races

  Saz had already sold her ninth bottle of champagne by the time Mr James came in on Friday n
ight – no mean feat for three hours of work with bottles of champagne selling for a minimum $200 a bottle. It was her second night and the first time that Mr James had come to check up on her. He’d employed her almost at once – apparently believing her story that she was a traveller who needed a bit of extra money before moving on again in a couple of weeks’ time. He seemed to have no trouble believing that the woman from Ohio would have given Saz his address – said he often found his employees that way. Best of all he didn’t seem to recognise her from Monday afternoon at all – though the fact that Saz’s blue black bob was now pure peroxide probably had something to do with it. He said he liked her English accent, he loosened his soft silk tie, he didn’t mind taking girls on for “holiday work”, he asked her what she’d like to drink and told her that if she was any good at it he’d be happy to have her back next time she was in New York. Saz said she never drank at work, then he told her a few basic rules and left her to get on with it. It was simple. So far.

  The other girls had shown her the ropes. How to talk to the New York businessmen like an intelligent bimbo – that is, always understanding what they were talking about, but never knowing more about it than them. How to spot the ones who wanted more than just champagne and cards – and how to fend them off politely. Finally and most importantly, though the least lucrative – how to deal with the ones who actually brought their wives or mistresses with them – act like a waitress.

  Saz, well practised in lying and quick witted, took to it like a debutante to champagne. She’d been relieved when James had told her that he positively demanded a “friendly but celibate interaction between members and staff”. And when she checked it out with the other staff she’d found that he actually meant it – a girl had been fired in the summer for having an affair with one of the members – and no, she didn’t have an English accent. The rates of pay weren’t great – a mere $90 for a six day week, or just $12 a day if you couldn’t make all six – but then the tips were outrageous – one man had given her a $100 note for directing him to the bathroom, another gave her $50 for helping him on with his coat, and there was also a $20 commission to be made on each bottle of champagne sold. In two nights Saz had made over $600, what with that and the money owing from John Clark, she’d be able to afford half a dozen answerphones.

  She was just starting to get into the swing of things, playing the gamblers off against each other, laughing at their unwillingness to buy more drinks when Mr James called her from the door,

  “September, can I have a word?”

  She’d frozen a little when he first said he thought she should be called September – she’d told him her name was Mary but he didn’t want to check it out. He wasn’t interested in references or the fake ID Saz had spent Wednesday arranging. “September” seemed a little too close for comfort, but then she remembered it was only she who’d called the missing woman September, Charlie had called her June and of the five other girls she’d met, only one remembered an Englishwoman and she had called her April, “because she was English and England always makes me think of spring – you know, like the Romantic poets?”

  Saz chose not to tell her about T.S. Eliot and the dead land lilacs.

  Actually, the other girls had been extraordinarily unhelpful. Not because they didn’t want to talk, gossip was their mainstay, but because it seemed like hardly anyone worked every one of their six nights per week, and anyway, most of them hadn’t been at Calendar Girls longer than six months. The turnover was fast, most of the girls were doing the work because it could pay well – cash in hand and no question of needing a green card – and, as Saz was finding out, it wasn’t even too difficult. Most of them seemed to keep a friendly distance from Mr James, either because they were scared of him or he was just disinterested – Saz had yet to find out. What did seem to be well known was that he was singularly uninterested in American women, and that if he ever did date any of the girls it was always those from “elsewhere” – Europe, England, Asia – definitely not those just arrived in town from the West Coast. True, most of the women admitted that he was attractive, but then most of the women were also in the work solely for the money and very glad to get out the door as soon as their shifts ended.

  She pocketed her receipt for another sale of champagne and made two mental notes – one, now that she knew September might have been faking her appearance, she’d have to go back and check all the other women she’d eliminated because of wrong hair or eye colour – another forty at least, and two, if September could earn so much doing this four times a year why had she needed John Clark’s money? The thought of the first September broke her daydream and Saz crossed the room to where James was waiting.

  “I just thought I’d check how you’re getting on, come in to my office and we’ll have a chat.”

  Saz followed him into the room. It was pretty much the blueprint office of any successful businessman – padded leather couch, polished mahogany table, full drinks cabinet, a few tasteful prints and very little that actually looked like it could function in a working office other than the imposing desk where Mr James now took a seat. The kind of desk Saz just wished that the over-officious Colleen from the Enterprise Allowance office could see her sitting behind. He motioned her to sit down opposite him.

  “Well, September, you seem to be doing very well indeed.”

  Saz put on her friendly, slightly stupid face.

  “Yeah, thanks Mr James. To tell the truth I’m enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would.”

  “You thought you wouldn’t like it?”

  “No, not that, I just didn’t know if I’d be any good at it, but it’s quite fun really.”

  “Have you given any thought to how long you’ll be staying with us then?”

  “Oh, well, as I told you, I do plan to move on in a week or so …”

  “Once you’ve got what you came for?”

  Saz was startled out of her dippy persona.

  “Sorry?”

  “What you came for – building up the bank balance. Adding to the travel fund?”

  Her pulse slowly descended to its usual rate.

  “Oh, yes. Building up the bank balance. Right.”

  James got up and went over to the drinks cabinet.

  “English. Now let me see – gin and tonic?”

  “Um, oh all right, yes, I’ll make an exception this one time – please.”

  “Never did know an English girl to refuse a gin!” He smarmed and handed her the glass.

  “Have you been travelling long?”

  “A few months.”

  “I guess your funds must be pretty low then huh?”

  “Well, yes, but this seems to be doing the trick.”

  “You’re very good at the job you know September, you could stay on longer if you wanted. Or come back maybe, in a few months.”

  “Well, yes, I suppose I could.”

  She took another gamble, thinking of what Charlie had told her about the other September’s work habits.

  “I mean, I love New York. It would be wonderful to be able to come back three or four times a year.”

  “Become one of my regulars, you mean?”

  James was smiling now, looking more relaxed.

  “Yes, I suppose I do.”

  Saz smiled back at him, trusting this tall, extremely good-looking man less and less with every sip of her too-strong gin.

  “Well, we’ll see what we can do, yeah September? Time you got back to work now. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “And that’s all he said?” Caroline muttered, valiantly trying to stay awake while Saz changed and told her the story of her evening’s work.

  “That’s it. I’ve got three theories now. Wanna hear them?”

  “Do I have any choice? You might as well tell me, you’re only going to keep me awake all night trying to work it out in your head if you don’t say them out loud.”

  “OK. Theory Number One – he’s running a drugs ring and is going to ask me to take a �
�� a CD of Neil Sedaka’s ‘Calendar Girl’ back to London for a friend, but actually it’s really a cleverly disguised stash of cocaine.”

  “Some drugs ring. The amount of coke he’d fit into a CD is hardly going to make him Mr Big of the Underworld!”

  “Well, we’ll know when the time comes for him to give me my going away present won’t we? Stop interrupting. Theory Number Two – he’s a member of the mafia …”

  “With a name like Simon James? Shouldn’t he be called Riccardo or Giorgio?”

  “Right, he’d really name himself after a perfume! James is just a pseudonym. And the gambling tables are a cleverly disguised way of laundering stolen funds.”

  “Marginally more possible. But unlikely given just how drunk you’ve told me the gamblers get. However if it is the case then I think you’d better leave New York now and never come back! You may be my ex-lover, but an ex-lover with a concrete overcoat, I don’t need!”

  “Don’t you mean concrete boots?”

  “Not once you’ve spent the winter in New York you don’t. Theory Number Three?”

  “I’m not sure, I don’t have it clear in my head yet, but I think it’s something else. Something to do with the wigs and the pretence and the falsity. I think maybe September enjoyed the game of it.”

  “Oh please! She’d come all this way just for the fantasy? Hell, she could get that in Streatham for a tube fare.”

  “Not any more she couldn’t. Anyway, I do.”

  “Do what?”

  “Enjoy the role playing. I quite like it. New hair, new name. It’s exciting.”

  “Yeah, but lying’s part of what you do for a living.”

  “Thanks, you put it so nicely. Well, maybe she was a frustrated actress. Maybe that’s the only reason she did it.”

  “Right. That and the money.”