Can We Still Be Friends (10 page)

When they were together, Jackson was utter in his adoration. He would do loving things like remember a song they had heard when it cropped up again. Whenever Heaven 17’s ‘Temptation’ was played she would look at him and see him smile at her. It had been playing when they had left the dance floor at the Embassy one night and rushed out to the alleyway behind and had sex, quickly, pressed against the brick wall, so that afterwards her back had a sore patch. He had introduced her to the habit of putting a twist of lemon rind in her white-wine kir – ‘It cuts the sweetness’ – and bought her a bottle of Chanel’s Cristalle on the flight home after a day’s shoot in Paris. He had also taught her precisely how he liked her mouth to wrap around his cock, moving up and down as he held the back of her head.

Jackson had taken her to a party at the ICA where she had struck up a conversation with a performance artist who painted himself and members of the audience with blood. He was a startling redhead, with a generous mouth and extraordinarily dark lashes and brows. As he was intensely describing to Annie his concept for the show he was performing at the start of December, Jackson had come up and put his arm around her proprietorially, joining the conversation in a desultory way for a few minutes, obviously keen to remove her.

‘We’re great fans of the ICA, aren’t we, babe?’ he had concluded. ‘Count us in for the show.’ He steered Annie away to a corner of the room and kissed her passionately, his hands moving through her hair, uncaring who might see. Annie was thrilled. Was he jealous? And December? That was months away. Maybe he really was serious about her.

The water in the plastic bucket kept splashing over the sides as Kendra pulled it across the floor of the Chapel. She had found a
mop in the cupboard, but it was inefficient and, although Gioia had told her to give the lino a clean before the concert that night, she was finding it hard to keep the water from pooling.

Kendra had never been any good at housework. At home, Laila would arrive by eight and would keep the large house in order with her arsenal of cleaning products. Until she went to university, Kendra had rarely made her own bed. On the weekends when Laila wasn’t working, the sheets would remain crumpled, the bedspread lying in a heap on the floor, where it would stay until Laila next appeared.

‘Kendra – what you going to do when you get the husband? Who is going to make his bed?’ Laila would fondly say, gathering up a pile of dirty clothes.

Following behind Kendra and her mopping was a phalanx of teenagers putting out plastic-seated chairs in rows, deliberately banging the legs into each other with a noisy crash.

‘Gerass, I owe you,’ Gioia shouted across the room at a stocky, dark-haired young man carrying the chairs in from a van outside. Gioia’s younger brother Gerassimos could be relied upon to obtain almost anything that was needed. It never did to enquire the source of the alcohol, tinned foods, vans, bicycles, car radios he produced, but Gioia relied upon him – often. She calculated that the good she was doing probably outweighed the dodgy deals he was involved with and that, at the end of the day, the scales of justice balanced out evenly.

At the far end of the large hall a couple of teenagers were fixing the bulky black PA system, every few minutes letting loose a burst of noisy feedback. Despite the fact that it was a chilly October afternoon and the Chapel was heated only by ranks of Dimplex heaters, everyone was working up a sweat. Kendra was aware of Gioia’s escalating tension. The evening had taken weeks of preparation and string-pulling. Despite the seemingly haphazard aura of the Chapel and Gioia’s unconventional appearance, Kendra had learnt that the world she had constructed was tightly controlled. Nothing was left to chance. Her darkly leonine appearance
belied an ordered intensity that never let up. Or not that Kendra had ever seen.

‘Come on, you guys – we’ve only got a couple of hours, and we haven’t even started on the bar yet.’ The Chapel didn’t have an alcohol permit, but Gerassimos had figured out a way that you could skirt around this inconvenience by selling drink from a temporary bar outside at the back. Due to his contacts in catering, they could make a nice profit on the bottles of Italian beer and plastic glasses of cheap Italian wine. He had a friend who gave him a good deal on Frascati.

As Kendra placed the bright-yellow paper programme she had photocopied on each chair, she was surprised by how apprehensive she felt about the evening. She knew it was important for Gioia.

‘This whole place is like a house of cards,’ her boss had explained. ‘You build one thing on the next and, if you fuck it up, the whole thing comes tumbling down. The reason I’ve got these guys performing tonight is because Chrissie Hynde did a number here last year. Bless. Long story. But it meant that word went out this was an OK gig for them. That’s how I got Ricky tonight.’ Ricky was on the verge of signing a deal with Island Records – they’d loved his demo tape. He’d been at school with Gioia in Glasgow, she said, and it had been ten years, but now she was calling in an old favour.

Kendra leant on the mop and looked at the hall. The part usually taken up by the office area had been transformed into a makeshift backstage area, the part where the kids would play volleyball turned into the auditorium, and a clumsy, irregular lighting rig established to override the fluorescent strips that normally lit the room with their ugly glow. For a moment, she saw it through the eyes of Annie and Sal. She had thought she wanted them there, to be a part of this new world of hers, but now she was not so sure.

As the eastern docks of London were colonized by the new corporate city being built, their old warehouses and inlets replaced with architecturally unremarkable office blocks and wine bars, the western end of the Thames remained comparatively unchanged. Large houseboats
with their ramshackle decks and bohemian aura remained moored just off the King’s Road, and the storage spaces of Lots Road had kept their original facades even if, inside, they were filled with fabric wholesalers and television production companies.

It was a major achievement, as the Tania Torrington PR press release stressed, for Chelsea Bridge to be the first restaurant in this part of central London with a waterside terrace: ‘
With this unique location, Chelsea Bridge is the perfect place to unwind with an after-work cocktail as you sit on the terrace looking out westwards towards the sunset. Alternatively, it is the ideal dining venue as you feast on Martin Black’s inspired new eating concept. This sensational bar and restaurant is destined to become a leading London landmark
.’

By seven o’clock, the cavernous room had begun to fill. The terrace was illuminated, but unfortunately it was too cold at this time of year to do justice to the Lloyd Loom furniture the restaurant’s designer had considered would lend a raffish colonial air to the space, in neat contrast to the harder edged main room. There, exposed steel girders had been installed in the roof and giant industrial metal lampshades hung from them, swinging their pools of light on to wooden tables. Precarious steel stools lined the leather bar, which was decorated by perforations, as if somebody had taken a hole-punch at random to it.

‘Don’t ask, just do,’ Tania hissed at Lee, who scurried off to provide whiskey for one of the town’s leading restaurant reviewers, despite Tania having announced earlier that there was to be
absolutely no
ordering off menu. What they saw was what they were getting – champagne cocktails, Slow Comfortable Screws and Gin Slings – or Perrier. The owners had talked about bringing in another brand of bottled water but Tania had told them that
nobody
would offer anything other than Perrier nowadays if they wanted to be taken seriously. That was, after all, the point of hiring her. She knew what was what. It was those little extras that made all the difference.

Sal pushed into the crowded room, flanked by Ollie and Robert from the
Herald
’s diary pages. Among the expensive tailored
jackets of the social crowd and the jazzy ties of the restaurant fraternity, the boys’ cheap grey suits and pasty faces made them stand out as hacks. It was a mark of respect among journalists not to care how you dressed, the insignificance of appearance a badge of honour.

‘Let’s get something to drink.’ Sal headed to the bar at the far side of the room, where she leapt on to a vacant stool and grabbed a cocktail. She drank most of it in one gulp. Ollie and Robert positioned themselves either side of her, leaning on the bar as they would in a pub, looking out at the crowd.

‘So, who’s here?’ Ollie took a deep drag on his cigarette.

‘They said Jennifer Beals was tipping up. She’s over here for
Flashdance
,’ Robert replied, narrowing his eyes to scour the room for the sight of a recognizable face that might offer them a paragraph for the page. ‘Let’s have a couple of drinks then head over to Kremlin. It’s just down the road. They’ve got Bryan Ferry coming by. Fitz called himself to tell me.’

Sal was watching Annie, now standing near the front door, some feet behind Tania, like a lady-in-waiting. She wasn’t carrying Tania’s handbag, was she? Her friend looked different, dressed in a pair of high-waisted black trousers and a white shirt with a lace collar, her hair scraped back in a ponytail which emphasized her straight nose and full lips. She looked much more professional than usual. Maybe it was the trousers. Sal knew Annie didn’t like to wear black, but it had been Tania’s orders that black and white should be the uniform of the night, in keeping with the industrial feel of the building. Tania’s long black Yohji Yamamoto coat had cost her a small fortune, but she had learnt it was well worth shelling out to look the part and, for an evening like this, that meant either Yohji or Comme.

The room was so full it seemed impossible that any more people could fit into it. Along the walls, single figures stood, some nursing a glass and staring with interest at the crowd, others disguising their solitary state by reading a menu or jotting something in a notebook. They clung to the sides of the room, unwilling to leave the
protection of the exposed brickwork and fling themselves into the centre, the jungle of the real party.

There, Jackson sat at a table with three girls. From the bar, Sal could see him engrossed in their company, his hands drawing pictures to accompany an anecdote, the girls smiling and involved. She thought they looked foreign – Italian, Spanish, something like that – with their thick dark hair and tanned faces. Sal could also see Annie watching the scene unhappily and then being summoned by Tania, who deftly passed on a very thin blonde woman and man in a jacket with huge shoulders – was it Simon Le Bon? – for Annie to escort.

One of Tania’s strengths was her address book, which spanned film and music, minor royalty and socialites. She could beat Fitz on home numbers any day. Although there was no demarcated VIP area, the back right-hand corner of the restaurant had been designated an inner sanctum and, under Tania’s experienced handling, the more celebrated of the guests were ushered in that direction, where they would find other well-known faces and be sheltered from the general mass.

Rob had just seen Trevor Eve make his way there and was about to leave the security of the bar in an attempt to crash the privileged nexus. ‘Do you think your friend Annie could give me an intro to Trev over there?’ he asked Sal.

‘Don’t know. I’ll ask her.’ Sal was pleased to have an excuse to interrupt Annie and walked over to where her friend had deposited her last consignment of celebrity.

‘You look great. Is it hell?’

‘It’s a bit full-on right now,’ Annie replied.

‘What time do you think you can get away?’

‘God knows. Not before 8.30. But Jackson’s here, and he wants me to do something with him afterwards.’

‘Well, you’ve got to go to the Chapel with me.’ Sal’s voice clearly indicated there was to be no discussion. ‘Jackson can come with you. Come on. You’re always doing what he wants. We owe it to Kendra.’

‘Yes … I know … But it’s difficult … look at those girls he’s
with.’ Sal started to walk quickly over to Jackson’s table. ‘Sal. Don’t’ – but Annie’s words were lost, and she knew that, even if Sal had heard, she would most likely have continued undaunted. Jackson looked up as she approached. In their brief acquaintance, Sal had already decided that he was far too pleased with himself and, personally, she didn’t get his looks. The way he swaggered into a room as if he owned the place drove her nuts. And she wasn’t wild about the way he always called Annie at the last minute either. But she knew it was pointless to make her feelings known. It wouldn’t make any difference.

‘Sal. Good to see you.’ Jackson stood up and kissed her hello. ‘Cruz, Gaby, Simone – meet Sal.’ There was something about their languor and ease that made her feel gauche.

‘I just thought I’d tell you, because Annie’s so tied up here now, that we’re all going together, at about 8.30.’ She spoke quickly.

‘All going where?’

‘You know, to Kendra’s gig.’

‘News to me.’ Jackson smiled at the girls around him.

‘Well, it’s not news to Annie, and it’s important to her. She must have forgotten to tell you, and she’s sort of busy so I thought I’d organize it.’ Sal was determined not to let him off the hook, and to make it clear to Cruz (stupid name) and whoever the others were, sitting there with their silver jewellery and eye make-up, that Jackson was already spoken for.

Annie could witness the conversation and was close enough to see that Jackson was annoyed. He was scratching his head the way he did when he was irritated by something. She would have to go over.

‘Hi.’ She smiled brightly at the group.

‘Sal here was telling me about some plans of yours …’

‘Yes. I know. It’s this gig, at that place of Kendra’s. We don’t have to go there for long but … I’d really like to show up. If you don’t mind?’ The words tumbled out, lamely. It would be so much easier to say to Jackson that it was fine, they wouldn’t go, they’d do whatever he wanted – anything to stop him going off with those girls
tonight. After all, the gig was miles away and it wasn’t as if he even knew Kendra. But Sal was standing there watching her, her eyes narrowed as they were in moments of conflict, her mouth tense, a pocket-sized dragon empress.