'Right.'
'When you lent her the money. The fifty pounds you never got back.'
Doris mouthed an oath. Sharon reached for her cola and drank a little more. Doris lit another cigarette. Two lads walking past outside shouted something they could neither of them make out and one of the lads went into a swagger, cupping non-existent breasts. His mate laughed so much he nearly got clipped by a passing car.
'She wanted it for drugs, didn't she?' Sharon said.
Doris nodded.
'Crack.'
'How bad is she?'
It seemed a long time before Doris answered.
'Look, you know as well as what I do, there's girls out there, they don't keep high, they go crazy and once it gets like that, there's nothing they won't do to score. These dealers, they play 'em along, let 'em get in debt, serious now, hundreds I'm talking, easy. Once it's like that, they can do what they like with them. Sex shows, dyke stuff, animals. This one bloke, charged his mates a tenner each to wank off over this girl while his alsatian licked her out.' Doris shuddered and made a face.
'Marlene, though, she wasn't like that. She was bright, dead clever.
Older, too. Been around, but it didn't show. That's how come she could 200 work the hotels. Me, now, I walk in and they've got me walking right out again, regular revolving door. Not Marlene. That's why I was surprised when she started doing crack. Oh, we'd have the odd spliff once in a while, who doesn't? But crack. ' Doris shook her head.
'First, it was just weekends, fifteen, twenty quid a rock. You know, when we was busy. Never ends up like that, though, does it? Marlene, she could see what was happening to her. Kept trying to kick. Even went to that place, you know, down by the Square. What's it called?
Crack Awareness, something like that. Got worse anyway. Got so she hated what she was doing, couldn't stand being touched. Being with some bloke, any bloke, but, of course, that's what she had to do.
Keep earning, more and more, trying to stay ahead. '
In another part of the restaurant, twenty or so eight- and nine-year-olds were having a party, flicking Chicken McNuggets across the tables, wearing cardboard cutout hats.
'How much,' Sharon asked, 'had she got to hate it? '
'She used to say, next man who touches me, I'm going to kill him.'
'And you thought she was serious? You thought she meant it?'
'No, don't be bloody stupid, course I didn't! We say that all the time.'
'Then what?' Sharon said.
Doris took a long drag on her cigarette.
'Week or so back, the night that other bloke was done, you know, stabbed. It was in the paper, found him starkers in the road.'
Sharon waited, Doris taking her time.
'I ran into Marlene,' Doris said, 'she was leaning on this wall off Forest Road, looked like she'd just been throwing up. There was blood all down her front. Up her hand and arm. '
To an almighty roar from the children, one of the McDonalds staff jumped up on to the middle of their table dressed as Mr McChicken, and started napping his wings.
Sharon bided her time.
'Who did she cop from, Doris?'
Doris blinked at her across the smoke from her cigarette.
'Richie. I don't know… I don't know where, but yes, Richie that's the only one I ever heard her mention. That's who she said.'
Dorothy Birdwell's fingers fumbled with her water glass, almost sending it tumbling, and for once Marius was not poised to intervene and set everything to rights. Marius, in fact, was nowhere to be seen. It gave her a pinched feeling in the back of the throat, making it difficult to breathe. And as for talking. Dorothy steadied herself and, with almost exaggerated care, brought the glass to her lips. The forty or so people who had gathered to hear her thoughts on Christianity and the crime novel, with special attention to the work of Dorothy L. Sayers, watched and waited patiently. After all, she could sense them thinking, at her age you can't expect too much.
Well, expectations were strange things. She reached out towards the small table at her side and lifted her copy of Such a Strange Lady into her lap.
'As we can be only too aware,' she began, 'living as we do in these particular times, it is difficult not to see the art of biography and the wish of the individual for privacy as being incompatible. Think then only of a young woman, an only child, born at Christchurch Cathedral Choir School, a Christian scholar whose second book of poems was titled Catholic Tales and Christian Songs, and yet who nevertheless became pregnant out of wedlock and secretly gave birth to an illegimate son. How irreconc'l- able the gulf between the life that is apparent and expected and the life that is actually lived. '
She paused and caught her breath. If only she had not been forced to have words with Marius earlier that afternoon some of them, she would have had to agree, significantly less than Christian. If only Marius had not stalked off in such high dudgeon, no word of where he was going or when he might return.
Dorothy looked out at her audience and continued.
'In her religious play The Devil to Pay, Dorothy Sayers explicitly deals with Faustian themes, the extent to we are all of us prepared to go, the amount we will pay for happiness on this earth even though it might mean we risk damnation in the next…'
'How about a couple of drinks, honey?' Cathy Jordan said in a mock-seductive, mid-Western voice.
'One way or another, I reckon we've earned them.' She was leaning against the frame of the bathroom door, a towel wrapped around the middle of her body. A tumbler of tap water, with the aid of which she had just swallowed aspirin, was held lightly in her right hand, wrist resting on the swell of her hip.
'Go to hell, Cathy, why don't you?' Frank said, nipping over the pages of the magazine he was reading a copy of Premiere he'd picked up at the airport, everything you ever wanted to know about Demi Moore except what does she ever see in that asshole actor.
'What does she ever see in that asshole actor?' Frank asked.
'Which particular one did you have in mind?'
'Demi Moore. You know. The one with Demi Moore.'
'Oh, him.'
'Yes. him.'
'He was great in Pulp Fiction.'
'Didn't catch it.'
'Just terrific.'
I still don't see. '
She lifted the magazine from his hand and then dropped it back down.
'They're a partnership, that's what it is. That's why it works.' Playful, she nudged him with her bare toes.
'She works. He works. Simple. A partnership.' She threw him a face and headed back towards the bathroom door.
'We should try it some time.'
'What?'
'Nothing.'
'What the fuck was that about?'
He was on his feet now, close behind her, and Cathy turned to face him.
'Work it out for yourself.'
'Every cent you earned this last year, I earned as much.'
Cathy shrugged.
'I had a bad year.'
'Bitch!'
'Sure, Frank. Love you too.'
