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He reels off a dizzying list and she forgets each word the instant she hears it.
‘Seagram’s?’ she says, and hopes that she has actually named a gin. At home, gin comes from the supermarket and is called London Dry.
He does a funny little silent bow. ‘Fever tree, or Indian?’
‘Indian,’ she’s getting bored now.
‘Lime, lemon or cucumber?’
Jesus. ‘Surprise me.’ She gives him a smile.
He whisks away. She positions herself by a fluted column and scans for the long-lost face. Don’t let Gemma be one of the chainmail girls. Please. If she’s here, let her be carrying a tray, or washing up, or checking gauzy cover-ups into that cavernous coat room … let her ‘party’ just be a teenage boast to impress her friends. The parties to which these people invite random seventeen-year-olds to are not the sorts of parties Nasreen and Harriet imagine.
The waiter comes back. He’s chosen lime, and she is relieved.
‘Would you like to start a tab, sinjora?’ he asks.
That card. No way.
‘I’m waiting for people,’ she says. ‘We’ll start one then.’
‘That’ll be twenty euros, then,’ he says. Nicely.
She’s ready for that. Throws a twenty on the tray and uses up one of her crumpled fives. Another little bow. He goes away.
She takes a sip. What she’d thought was a plastic straw is made of glass. It conducts the cold, and makes her lips hurt. I should have asked him, she thinks, if he’d seen her. They must all live somewhere, these lovely young things that serve the rich so decoratively. Probably in dormitories, or eight to a two-bed flat.
The music pauses and she hears the roar of the sea. Then Blondie fills the void; another Studio 54 special, ‘Atomic’. Half a dozen girls leap from their seats and pull their men by the hand towards the dance floor.
I can’t be handing out leaflets here. Those bouncers could bring down a bear. And these aren’t people you just strike up conversation with. Half of them have bodyguards. You only get to go to those tables if you’re invited. And nobody’s going to invite a middle-aged Englishwoman in Birkenstocks who ran out of hair conditioner two nights ago.
What was I thinking? What a stupid, stupid waste of money.
A bodyguard behind a banquette nods to his boss and walks past her to approach a young girl who sits alone on a couch, nursing a glass of champagne. She barely looks old enough to drink. Long and thin, a bleached Afro and honey-coloured skin, a Grecian-style dress in white chiffon that barely reaches her thighs, waisted with a gold belt. Like Gemma, she thinks, and her heart pops a string. How did she get here, so young? She’s clearly not a local. What happens, that brings these almost-schoolgirls into this game? Where are their parents?
She knows the answer to that. Doesn’t like it. Somewhere there’s another mother hopelessly scouring the internet, crying herself to sleep. Oh, hell, why did I come here?
This is awful. Robin feels profoundly demoralised. What a place. All the money in the world, and this is what you buy with it. She can see, now, that most of the architecture around her is faked. There probably was a temple here once, she thinks. But most of those pillars are plaster on an extruded base.
I’ll go to the loo, she thinks, and then I’ll go.
The loo. Of course.
She has Blu Tack in her bag for just this sort of opportunity.
The toilets are in a mini-temple all of their own, on the far side of the bar; a godlike young marble athlete twelve feet tall marking the gents’, a sexy nymph with an amphora on her shoulder the ladies’. Inside, the sound cuts off as though someone’s pulled the power. Lush pink carpet, a row of pouffes lined up in front of a wall full of mirrors.
She wonders how long they last, these girls. It’s not a long career, probably. They don’t have the look of mistress about them. Nobody’s going to be renting them flats or giving them diamond bracelets. A couple of years, maybe, while they still look as though they don’t know what’s coming, and then what?
She pushes open the first stall. Marble, though the toilet itself is mercifully white. It smells delicious: like a perfume shop, not a place where people defecate. That little woman outside must spend hours scrubbing to keep it this way. She’ll probably notice my flyer in minutes. Oh, well. Might as well try.
She gets one out, Blu Tacks it to the back of the door, where someone sitting on the throne will spot it and hopefully the attendant won’t. Looks at her handiwork for a moment and moves on.
In the fifth stall, she finds a girl. White-blonde hair, pixie-cut, silver chainmail dress, silver platform stilettos, ankle bracelet. Passed out, skirt up around her waist, a line of frothy drool adhering her to the floor and a neat little syringe hanging from the crook of her big and second toes. She stands and stares at her for several seconds. This is what happens to them, she thinks. They dull their emotions until they dull them to death.
I can’t. I can’t. I can’t be involved with this. Oh, God, let me find her. Let me find her.
She doesn’t put a flyer in that stall. Turns on her heel and walks out.
