Bad Girls (16 page)

‘He, she, it – I don’t care if the dog’s a fucking hermaphrodite! He can’t be here, OK?’ Jada snapped.

‘You don’t talk to me like that!’

Oksana bristled with menace. As usual, she was wearing so much foundation that her face looked like an orange mask. Her fur gilet, which bulked up her skinny frame, was the same colour as her white-blonde bleached hair and the tight white jeans tucked into cowboy boots. Huge diamanté hoops glittered in her ears. Oksana believed in dressing up for any occasion; she probably put on full makeup before she went to the toilet in the middle of the night. She was pointing a finger at Jada, its terrifyingly pointed acrylic nail shining with fake diamonds.

‘Hey,’ Skye said, feeling that she needed to wade in on this one. ‘Jada’s got a point here. You can’t make another girl sick—’

‘Sugar isn’t working tonight, I check it out,’ Oksana interrupted. ‘So Lev can be here! He gets lonely at home,’ she added, as Lev collapsed to the ground with a loud groan and started making stertorous noises.

‘He can’t be here at all – it’s the hair and the dander,’ Skye said, sighing. ‘You
know
that, Oksana.’

‘You shut the fuck up!’ Oksana hissed. ‘You two! Coke whores, both of you! I know you both fuck that bouncer for drugs! Why should I care what you say?’

‘Why, you nasty little—’ Jada strode across the room towards Oksana, over six feet of fury. Skye had to give Oksana credit; despite being much smaller than Jada, the Russian girl didn’t flinch. Instead, she clamped her hands on her hips and faced Jada down.

‘You hit me, you get sack!’ she said triumphantly. ‘You put one finger on me, you get sack! Go on!’

‘Jada, leave her alone,’ Skye cut in, seeing Jada’s hands clench into fists. ‘I mean, you can’t get mad at someone who can’t even speak the freaking language properly.’

As Skye had known it would, this snapped Oksana’s head round. Oksana was very sensitive about her command of English and her heavy Russian accent; it was her Achilles heel.

‘Fuck you, you stupid American whore!’ she yelled. ‘You don’t talk bad to me! All you think about is drugs and fucking!’ Looking around her frenziedly, she snatched up the brimming cup of coffee Maria had poured for Skye and threw the contents directly at Skye.

Maria screamed. Good reflexes meant Skye managed to jump partially out of the way, avoiding a mugful of hot coffee in the face, but enough of it landed on her bare torso and trousered legs to make her curse and wipe herself down frantically with both hands. Jada grabbed a bottle of water, uncapped it and threw it over Skye, cold after hot, making Skye yelp.

‘Trying to cool your skin down,’ Jada explained, ‘so you don’t get burned.’

‘What are you,
crazy
?’ Skye yelled at Oksana.

Her trousers were drenched, her boots – the lovely new suede ankle boots she’d barely worn – were ruined. Lev, who had been sniffing round Maria’s big handbag, suddenly reacted to his mistress’s anger and broke into a series of shrill, angry yaps. Coffee dripped down the wall, and the polystyrene cup rolled across the uneven floor, chased by a hysterical Lev.

‘I’m going to Paulie!’ Jada said in fury. ‘You’ll get canned for this!’

‘No!’ Oksana’s shrill voice rose above Jada’s. ‘
I
go to Paulie! I tell him you are fucking the bouncer for drugs, and he sacks
you
!’

Oksana turned on her heel and pushed at the dressing-room door so hard that it slammed against the opposite wall, her stilettos tapping furiously on the concrete as she stormed out.

‘Just for that,’ Skye said furiously to Maria, ‘I’m not stopping her little mutt from getting drunk and buzzed.’ She nodded to Lev, busy lapping up a pool of Kahlúa-laced coffee.

Maria flapped her hand. ‘Let him drink, honey. He’ll run round for a while and then pass out. Believe me, he’s much less trouble asleep than awake. And now he’s here, he’s staying the night. No way she’s gonna take him home.’

‘She could have really hurt you!’ Jada exclaimed to Skye. ‘You could have got your face burned! Should I go after her? Tell Paulie?’

Both girls looked at Maria, who had decades of experiences of stripper fights and rivalries, for advice.

She put her lips together and blew out her breath noisily. ‘Nah, honey, leave her. Paulie’ll let her run her mouth off, but he won’t do nothing. You’re his top girls, you three. He won’t want to lose any of you. You work the room hard tonight and he won’t say a word to you. Just keep it under wraps with DeVaughan, OK?’

‘God, I
hate
that bitch,’ Jada fumed.

Maria shrugged. ‘Oksana’s good, you know? She works the guys. You know how it is, Skye. You’re good too. You get extra slack cut you if you know how to work the guys, right?’ She topped up her coffee with more Kahlúa. ‘Those Russian girls, you gotta respect them. They know men. They got cash machines for hearts, but they know men. Paulie ain’t gonna sack her. Not unless she cuts someone.’

Maria wasn’t speaking anything less than the truth. Skye knew that. No one in the Lounge was looking out for your welfare; no one cared about anything but the bottom line. She’d known that coming in. And yet a cold, hard ball of anger and resentment was forming inside her as she stood there, liquid dripping off her trouser hems and into the once-beautiful ankle boots for which she had paid hundreds of bucks not a fortnight ago, the shock of thinking she was about to get badly burned not yet dissipated from her body.

‘That’s it,’ she heard herself say.

‘What?’ Maria looked at her.

‘That’s it,’ Skye said, louder now.

She’d been so offended when the
National Investigator
guys thought they could pay her to seduce Joe Jeffreys. Well, she’d been an idiot. What did she do all her working hours but seduce guys who weren’t half as sexy as one of the world’s most famous movie stars? Hadn’t some dickhead put his finger up her last night and scratched her deliberately? Hadn’t she done something she couldn’t even remember with a
coke delivery boy
just last night?

What Skye knew most clearly at this moment was that she wasn’t going to stay around the Lounge to work with Oksana every day, to hear that bitch call her a coke whore, and feel, in her heart, that the words weren’t that far off the truth.

Lew had already left two messages on her cell in the time it had taken her to find a cab and make the cross-town drive. He wanted her to reconsider. He’d promised her a lot of money – some upfront, but plenty on the back end if she managed to catch Joe Jeffreys with his pants down, on film. Plus, of course, all travel expenses and the huge rehab fees.

I’ve never been to California, she thought. Lew says Cascabel’s got a great pool and better food than a five-star hotel. It’ll be like a spa holiday, he says. With one of the hottest movie stars on the planet.

She grabbed her sweater and pulled it on. Her feet squelched in the damp suede boots as she bent down to grab her clutch, but she didn’t care any more that they were ruined. Who needed boots in California?

‘I quit,’ she announced, seeing Maria’s jaw drop in shock, Jada’s eyes bug out. ‘And you can tell Paulie it’s all that slut Oksana’s fault, OK? Maybe
that
’ll get her the goddamn sack!’

P
etal had been asked to leave three schools. Not actually expelled, because her father was too famous for the schools to do that; but asked to leave, in interviews with various headmistresses attended by various nannies. She had always hated school and everything about it, but most of all she loathed the regimentation. You kept having to do what other people told you to do, not what you wanted. Lesson now; lunch now; assembly now, each new hell announced by a series of loud, incredibly annoying bells. On and on, the bells, ringing and ringing, not letting up until they made her do what they wanted her to do, like someone standing over her, ringing a huge hand-held bell, its clapper clanging against the metal, louder and louder and louder—

Not an alarm clock. Petal didn’t even own one. It was her phone, she realized gradually, blaring through her dreams, forcing her to wake up. Ugh. Her mouth was as dry and rough as a wooden board, and her eyelids were stuck together with something thick and gluey. She reached out, scrabbling with her hand, to find her phone and make it stop, trying not to open her eyes, as she knew from bitter experience that any more light would just make her head hurt even worse.

The rings were making some sort of pattern: five, stop, five, stop. Someone was calling her, hanging up whenever the phone went to voicemail, and promptly hitting Redial.

Petal’s hand was sweeping in big circles, but not finding anything. No phone, no nothing. Her face was pressed into something soft and fluffy, which she slowly began to realize was the Flokati rug beside her bed. Painfully, cursing, she levered herself up to her hands and knees, discovering that she was fully dressed. She lifted her head, squinting at the bedside table, but couldn’t see her phone. And she would definitely have seen it, because it was customized with hundreds of Swarovski gems, the whole point being that it was so shiny you could spot it anywhere.

‘What the
fuck
is that
fucking noise
?’ Dan mumbled, his voice muffled.

Turning her head, gulping in pain at the movement, Petal saw Dan, clad in his boxers and T-shirt from the night before, sprawled on her bed, the duvet kicked away at his feet, but every single one of her four pillows piled up on top of his head.

‘Make it
stop
,’ he moaned feebly as Petal clambered up on the bed to lie beside him, the sound of the phone seeming to follow her. She bumped one hip on the bedframe and screamed in agony, her protruding bone colliding with the wood so sharply that it felt like it was grating through her skin.

No, wait. How could it be
grating
? She slid a hand down to the area and hissed in triumph as she felt her phone, shoved into her jeans pocket, its crystals digging into her fingers as she extracted it and turned off the call.

‘Yesss!’ she muttered as she managed it.

‘Who the fuck keeps ringing this early?’ Dan groaned, reaching out one arm to pull Petal close to him, his T-shirt reeking of sweat and smoke. ‘You got the debt collectors after you, or what?’

‘
Oh
,’ Petal said in a tiny voice as she checked the phone screen to see who’d been calling her.

‘Come to bed, pet,’ he mumbled, reaching for the duvet.

‘I can’t,’ Petal said, her voice still infinitesimal. ‘It’s my dad.’

‘Your
dad
?’ Dan shot up to a sitting position as if he’d been galvanized, pillows flying off to all sides.

‘Yes,’ Petal said, still staring at the phone, which was ringing again, but silently now. ‘And he never rings me. But now, he is. At nine thirty in the morning. That’s
not
good.’

Dan opened his mouth, saw the expression on her face, and shut it again. They looked at each other like two scared children caught out doing something very naughty indeed.

‘You’d better answer it, pet,’ he said finally, nodding at the phone, swallowing nervously at the mere thought of Gold. ‘He’s been ringing for ages. It’ll just get worse the longer you wait.’

Petal silently thumbed the Answer button, nicking on the speakerphone too so that Dan could hear; at least she didn’t have to face this alone.

‘Hello?’ she said faintly.

‘Petal! At last!’ a woman responded sharply: Jinhee, Gold’s girlfriend. ‘Hold on. Your father wants to talk to you.’

Dan’s hand wrapped around Petal’s, squeezing it hard, his eyes widening as he heard one of the world’s most famous voices, the husky tenor drawl of Gold. Many journalists had tried to describe it; Petal knew the ones her father liked the most were warm honey over river rocks (
Rolling Stone
) and brown sugar and Jack Daniel’s (the
New York Times
). Gold’s voice could seduce and enchant, break and mend hearts, croon a lullaby, bring tears to your eyes, raise the hairs on the back of your neck; his song ‘Now Is the Time’ had been played at more weddings in the last decade than any other.

‘Petal,’ her father said softly, and every muscle in his daughter’s body tensed. ‘I’ve seen the papers this morning. Get over here right now.’

The line clicked off.

‘Fuck,’ Dan whispered. ‘I never knew he could sound that scary.’

But Petal was already jumping off the bed and racing to the bathroom for the Solpadeine.

*

Gold had bought Petal the canal-side flat in Camden Town not just because it was a fashionable area, perfect for a young trendy girl about town, and therefore a good investment: Gold’s canniness about finances was one of the reasons he had become a megastar. No, the clinching reason for choosing Petal’s location was that it shared the same postcode as his own.

Gold had scarcely been what even the most generous person would call a hands-on parent. After Linda, Petal’s mother, left for LA in an attempt to become an actress, Petal was brought up by a series of nannies in the basement flat below the house where Gold lived with a series of girlfriends; she’d seen her father only by appointment when she was younger. From about fourteen onwards, she slipped into the house whenever a party was going on, which was pretty much all the time; what she experienced there was a much more comprehensive education than she received at any of the smart schools that, one by one, had asked her to leave.

But, despite his lack of oversight of his daughter’s formative years, Gold still liked to be able to summon her swiftly if he needed to. One phone call, a sharp tug on the strings, and Petal was frantically brushing dry shampoo through her hair, pulling on a fresh T-shirt, spraying herself with deodorant and half a bottle of Boss Orange, running down filthy, bustling Camden Road. Across the five-pronged intersection at the tube station, where bikes and mopeds darted across illegal turns, and aged drunks – already, at ten in the morning – propped on the metal safety railings, drinking Tennent’s Super and swearing at passers-by.

Past Camden High Street’s boot shops and mobile phone shacks, and into Parkway, signs of gentrification immediately obvious, like a trail that led to the richer and richer areas beyond, a golden fountain of money that had welled up from the centre of Primrose Hill, and washed down as far as here, where pubs that had once been scrappy local boozers with stained red carpets and tatty upholstery had now gone gastro, painted charcoal-black, with stripped floorboards and rocket salads. Past the organic delicatessen and the shiny new estate agents, past the marble tile shop with its chic subtle palette of beiges and chocolates and greys and creams.