CORDELIA

I made the call to Flick from a phone box just off Tottenham Court Road. I can still see it if I close one eye. There were little business cards and postcards showing off women in red suspenders and big hair, offering their services to anybody looking for a good time. It stunk of ammonia and petrol and somebody had pushed half a Scotch egg into the little slot where the coins were supposed to be returned if nobody answered the call. I remember looking into the brown eyes of an exotic beauty in some kind of mesh leotard and pink eyeshadow. She was bending down and looking back at the viewer from between her legs; red-nailed fingers splayed around her flexed calves. She was willing, according to the card, to be pissed on for an extra five pounds per hour. Good on you, I thought, bitterly, as I pushed open the door and stepped into the cold, blue-black air of London. At least one of us was making a living out of being treated like a pub urinal.

The traffic was all hisses and groans behind me and I barely heard the ringing from the neighbouring phone box. I pulled open the door and cursed the rain, worming my head into my collar and nipping past the puddles to the next big red box. London was reflecting back from the dirty water – fragments of neon and shimmering silhouettes; the images disrupted by footfall and bicycle tyres, pecking pigeons and little waves of water splashing over from the road. I was out of breath by the time I was inside, sucking in a lungful of the same pissy air I’d just left.

‘He said no,’ pronounced Walt, that little laugh in his voice that suggested that everything I was about to tell him was already old news. ‘Suggested that the best thing you could do was clip-clop away in your kitten heels and leave it to the grown-ups, yes?’

I’d met with Talbot at two thirty p.m. The thinking was that after lunch he might be more amenable, or at least less likely to turn purple and tear his hair out over what I had to tell him. It had cost me a couple of hard-won favours to get myself a slot in his diary. His secretary was one of those particularly outdoorsy women who look as though they spend their spare time drowning puppies in sacks and putting arthritic Fell ponies out of their discomfort by hitting them with a spade. She wore these god-awful ruffle-fronted blouses with tweed jackets. Big messy pile of dyed brown curls and hairpins. Always a cigarette between paper-cut lips. If you were drawing a caricature you’d start with a bullock and work out from there. But she’d fitted me in, if only for the pleasure of seeing me beg.