The Make

‘Well . . .’

‘Oh come on. Let’s do it. Okay?’

Harry started to smile.

‘Okay,’ said Harry, and they high-fived. Harry was con fident that George would forget all about this conversation by the morning. He was drunk as a skunk. They both were.

But George didn’t. Morning rolled around and George was still talking about his escorting idea. He was on a roll.

By the end of that week, their website was no longer a drunken dream in George’s head: it was fact. And before long they had booked their first client, and then, in quick succession, came their second, their third, their fourth . . .

‘Christ!’ laughed George, his eyes dancing as he playfully waltzed his younger brother around the room. Their tenth client had just booked. ‘Look at this, boy. We’re going to be minted!’

Chapter 4

‘We got another bite. And she’s a cougar,’ said George. He was excitedly tapping keys and gazing at their brand-spanking-new website on the computer screen up in his bedroom.

‘She’s a what?’ asked Harry.

George was very proud of this website. He’d drafted in one of their nerdier mates, Gaz, to do it, and it had cost them heavy, but it was done in double-quick time and it was good. Lots of red to excite the punters, but enough black and gold to convince them that this was a classy and efficient operation.

There were some good pics of George on there, but the best were of the wildly photogenic Harry. They’d purchased a dinner jacket and a dicky bow from one of the grunge shops, and in the first photo he wore that with a white shirt, a la James Bond, his thick, dark-red hair swept back, his soulful dark grey eyes smouldering into the camera lens.

‘The chicks are gonna love you, boy,’ promised George.

Harry had a relaxed, cat-like indolence about him, a sweetness of nature that earned him many friends, and bucket-loads of lethal charm.

The second shot of Harry showed him, torso only, oiled, muscled and brooding; the third showed him dressed smart/ casual in a tweedy jacket and open-necked shirt, giving it his best Sandhurst-officer-material swagger.

‘So, explain. What the fuck is a cougar? Really?’ asked Harry, sprawling back on the bed and watching his brother tap-tap-tapping on the keys. He felt just about shagged out, to be honest. All these women! And all of them so pitifully desperate to date men who were not old, boring, smelly or downright mean. Harry hadn’t worked this hard in . . . well, actually, he had never worked this hard.

‘You know so little,’ sighed George, not looking round. ‘Cougar’s an older woman with a thing for younger men.’

‘Ew,’ said Harry.

‘Not “ew” at all. Some of these older ladies are hot.’

‘How old we talking here?’

‘Forty,’ said George promptly. Jackie Sullivan, their prospective client, was an interior designer in her fifties, but he didn’t want Harry to completely freak out.

‘That’s fifteen years older than me. That’s gross.’

‘Keep your eye on the ball, grasshopper,’ said George, pressing send. ‘It’s a hundred quid, that’s fifty each, and all you’ve got to do is escort her to a black-tie do and home again.’

‘Listen, sensei, you keep your eye on the frigging ball. I’m going to be beating off an old lady stoked up on HRT and looking for sexy extras. And why me? You looked good in the pics too.’

George sighed and swivelled his chair to look at his younger brother.

‘You know the deal. It’s your trembling young body she wants. You got the beauty, boy, I got the brains.’

‘No, you got the gob.’

George considered this. ‘All right, that much is true.’ It was their sister Gracie who had all the brains, but George could blag with the best of them; that was his talent. That and working in his ex-brother-in-law’s casino flipping cards for over-eager punters; and he was bored to death with that.

‘And I got some looks too, I think you’ll agree,’ said George.

Harry didn’t agree. George was chunky as a barn door and brutish-looking with a squashed-in nose, and his dark red hair was shorn into an unflattering crew cut, but he did have laughing dark-brown eyes and the roguish mouthy charm of a market trader, and some women responded to that. Harry was the quiet, gentle-mannered one. Looking as he did, he didn’t have to say a word to get the girls to fall at his feet.

But . . . oh shit . . . a forty-year-old?

‘What if . . . I mean, look, what if I have a – a problem?’ asked Harry.

‘Problem?’ George looked at him blankly. ‘You got the gear, we got the etiquette book.’ The etiquette book was another one of their grunge-shop purchases; they had already learned a lot from that: don’t drink from the finger-bowls, don’t hold your knife like a pencil, twist the bottle – not the cork – when you open champagne. They studied the thing, quizzed each other over it like the Highway Code. They had it all off perfect. ‘What problem can you possibly have?’

‘Oh come on, George. I mean what if she wants . . . extras?’

‘What, you mean bedroom-type extras?’

‘What the hell else would I mean? And what if I can’t – you know – perform?’

‘Ah, you’ll be fine. And think of it, boy. One hundred big ones,’ said George with a grin. He gave Harry’s foot a hopeful kick. ‘What ya say?’

Harry lay back with a groan. ‘Oh, all right then. I’m in.’

Jackie Sullivan didn’t actually look much of a cougar. More of a mouse, Harry thought when she opened the door to him at her place in Notting Hill. A pretty, nervous mouse wearing a halter-necked floor-length black jersey dress that she looked distinctly uncomfortable in. Her hair was thin, but expensively styled in a blonde bob. Her eyes were huge and a washed-out denim-blue, and there were blotches of bright colour on her cheeks. She wasn’t sure about this, not at all. He could see it writ large in every jittery movement her skinny body made.

Well, neither was he. He’d been bricking it all day, dreading tonight. But her twittering, anxious demeanour made him relax. This was no man-eater. This was a nice little lady who needed reassurance.

‘Hi,’ he said with a smile. ‘I’m Harry.’

She stuck out a pale, narrow hand. ‘Jackie,’ she said.

They shook hands. Hers was icy cold.

‘Cab’s waiting,’ he said. ‘Hope you’ve got a coat, it’s freezing out there.’

‘Yes . . . well, you’d better come in for a moment . . .’

She went off upstairs, leaving him standing in the hall. Harry looked around him. Some place. The whole of his and George’s messy little rented flat could fit into this hallway. Expensive-looking antique pieces were everywhere – side tables, chairs, blue and white vases – all lined up along the canary-yellow walls. Harry went over to one of the tables and looked at the array of pictures, all set out in silver frames. Jackie looking younger, with dark hair. Jackie older, with a laughing grey-haired man by her side.

He heard her coming back down the stairs, and turned to look at her with a smile. She was pulling on a big fake-fur wrap, and clutching a black sequinned evening bag. ‘Who’s this?’ he asked, gesturing at the photo.

Her face tightened. ‘That’s my husband,’ she said.

Then why isn’t he escorting you? wondered Harry.

‘He died,’ said Jackie, as if reading his thoughts. Suddenly the blue eyes were swimming with tears. ‘Two years ago. This is the first time I’ve been to a social occasion on my own since then.’

Poor little mare, thought Harry. ‘Well,’ he said after a moment’s hesitation. ‘You’re