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Illuminated by a single Tiffany lamp, the receptionist, a defiantly resplendent transvestite on the wrong side of forty with a face like a veil of sorrow, looked up as the bell above the door rang. “Oh, evenin’ Mr. Jenkins, “fraid your usual ain’t in, got sick with the flu. But we got a new girl working who is very much to your taste. Does it all, bells and whistles, cocks and thistles,” she concluded in a flat monotone that excluded the possibility of irony. Suddenly animated, she tidied a lock of fuzzy red hair that had somehow escaped her tortured coiffure. “You interested, then?”
“You know me . . .” Eddy shrugged.
“I do indeed,” she replied without guile, “just give me a minute.” She picked up the telephone and turned her back to him. “I have a gentleman downstairs, partial to brunettes,” she said into the phone. “. . . Will do, dear.” She finished the conversation, then swung back to Eddy. “Room twenty-one, she’s available now, same price.”
Eddy handed over his credit card and began making his way to the staircase at the back of the narrow reception room. At the foot of the stairs he turned.
“Has she got a name, then?”
The receptionist glanced down at her narrow black tome. “Goes by the working name of Jezebel. Nice gal, no nonsense,” the receptionist added. “Real polite.”
The girl was sitting with her back to him on the clean single bed with the canopy of cheap Indian silk slung above it. Her long black hair reached halfway down her narrow back, which was encased in a black rubber corset, her hips curving out beneath it. She had that pale English skin he was partial to, and looked to be full-bodied. Eddy was old-fashioned in that way. He liked his women curvy, breasts and arse, something to bury yourself in. Secretly, he had never found Cynthia’s fashionably bony physique sexy, as beautiful as she was. He stepped toward the girl; already he was hard with anticipation and his throat was dry. He was looking forward to the thumping violence of sex, to shaking off the restraint he’d maintained all that evening, through the humiliating dinner, through all the probing and questions, through the hee-haw of his own fake accent.
She swung around and he immediately lost his erection. They stared at each other. He froze, knowing she hadn’t recognized him yet, while he would have known her anywhere, even in a black wig, rubber corset, and G-string, after all those years. And, my God, was she still beautiful, he noted ruefully.
“Eddy? Eddy Jenkins?” The voice was the same, maybe an octave lower but then it had been a good ten years since he’d seen her and she would have only been sixteen then.
“Janey. Janey Lewis,” he said, his accent reverting to its natural cockney. “A bit of a comedown, ain’t it?” He gestured vaguely around the room and then regretted it as, to his surprise, a deep blush swept across her porcelain skin.
“You’re not bloody wrong. Times are a little tight but you’ve got to make good wiv wot God gave yer, right?” She pulled the wig off and her naturally blond hair cascaded down her back. “They said you liked brunettes. . . .”
“I lied.” He grinned back, catching her awkwardness.
She pulled a black chiffon wrap over her shoulders. “But you look good. You good?”
“Good? I’m wicked.” He tried smiling again but now found he was too nervous. And besides, he didn’t know whether to stay standing or sit; there was only space to sit beside her on the bed and that would be a commitment. He stay
ed standing.
“Got a fag?” she asked, nervous herself.
Eddy reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack that he only kept for emergencies. This was an emergency, he decided; in fact the whole evening was shaping up to be one of those nights where the unexpected transforms itself into the epic whether one wants it to or not, and an old survivor like him had no choice but to enjoy the ride. Fate. It was a bloody joker but he still didn’t know whether to sit down beside her.
To his relief Janey took the cigarette and then patted the bed. He sank down beside her, painfully aware of the scent of her skin, the depth of her cleavage, the warmth emanating from her thigh brushing up against his own, and he was instantly reminded of the back of the school playground; the smell of hot tarmac and wood, fake tanning lotion and cheap cigarette smoke, the muggy London days when they huddled together for an illicit fag between classes. Memories rushed in—Janey aged fourteen dancing to his stereo, laughing, her school shirt clinging to her breasts; Janey applying lipstick to help them get into an X-rated movie at the Marble Arch Odeon; Janey waiting for him at the school gate after he was held in detention.
It had been unrequited love from the ages of twelve to sixteen, one of those crushingly tormented obsessions that, as a teenager, had kept him wrestling the night for far longer than he’d ever admitted to anyone. In fact, he concluded silently, not having Janey had made him the man he was today. He knew that now, but then who was that man, that ingratiating idiot, who’d just had dinner with Lord fucking Harwood? It certainly wasn’t Eddy the ambitious teenager who’d once boasted to Janey that he would never ever be ashamed of his background, no matter how successful he became.
He glanced over; she’d never known how much he’d wanted her all those years ago. Why not? Why hadn’t he ever told her? he wondered, marveling at the turn of fate that now placed him as the rich client and her—the indisputable and ruling queen of all his teenage wet dreams—as the whore.
“I don’t know who to be more embarrassed for: you the sucker for paying for it or me the scrubber putting out.”
“I don’t ’ave to pay for it, you know.” He couldn’t help sounding defensive. She smiled and placed her hand on his knee.
“Oh I know that, Eddy, ’andsome bastard like you. I should be paying you.”
At which they both burst into laughter and, for the first time in months, Eddy relaxed into his own skin.
“Eh, do you remember that time we played truant to go and see that reggae band play?” she asked him.
“And you almost started a race riot by flirting wiv the lead singer?”
“Yeah, well, Sean was a right jealous bastard.”
Sean had been Janey’s official boyfriend, a big oaf of a seventeen-year-old, but what he lacked in intelligence he made up for in blinding loyalty. Irish and inclined to violence, he was extremely possessive, although in truth Janey did what she wanted with whom she wanted, with the long-suffering Sean in tow. “Perhaps that was why I never declared myself,” Eddy thought as he furtively scanned Janey’s chiseled profile, the long thick eyelashes batting her cheeks, the round green eyes and disproportionally full mouth that, set against her heart-shaped face, looked as if it had been stolen from another, larger-faced woman. He knew it had been fear of rejection that had stopped him from declaring his infatuation, for to be rejected by Janey would have meant being rejected by all that he aspired to at sixteen, and, at the time, he could not afford the humiliation or the disillusionment. “So maybe my reticence has paid off,” he rationalized silently. “After all, I might have married Janey and be slumming it in a council flat with three kids by now.”
Nevertheless, now that he was here, in a position to be able to pay for her affections, it was not the same. If he paid he would never know if she really wanted him or just his money. And as he looked at her—those green eyes that were always a curious mixture of intelligence and tentativeness, the unspoken life of poverty they’d shared, those narrow pale shoulders crying out to be defended—he was filled with an overwhelming yearning to have her and, more than that, to be wanted by her; that night-wrestling, sweat-drenched obsessive love had never entirely disappeared, it had just lain dormant all these years, like some bloody great hidden iceberg waiting to smash into his life. Now frightened of betraying his emotions, he tried to sound casual.
