Laurie read the name on the card. EMILY CLARKE.
She noticed Hot Dog had kind eyes. In fact, he had eyes with so much personality, they could blaze out of a hot dog costume. They focused on her intently. You didn’t see that every day. You didn’t expect to get sex looks from a foam sausage.
‘Thank you, really,’ Hot Dog said. Can I get in touch with you? Find out if she’s OK?’
Even though his concern was supposedly for Drunk Girl, Laurie knew it wasn’t her he was chiefly interested in.
Laurie found a lip liner pencil in her bag and wrote her room number and halls on Hot Dog’s proffered hand. Swapping mobile numbers would’ve made more sense, but they were away from home, playing roles in a realm where normal rules didn’t apply. Laurie was almost self-consciously acting a filmic moment, to be quirky, to be a manic Pixies-liking black girl. And Dan later admitted: ‘Can I have your phone number?’ was too obviously hitting on her.
It was so easy, that was what Laurie remembered. This funny, cute Welsh lad with a slight lisp and a dry wit was everything she didn’t know she wanted until that moment. They couldn’t stop smiling at each other because it was so right, and they both knew it.
Over the next month, Laurie lost her virginity, discovering sex wasn’t that big a deal when you found someone you wanted to do it with; who liked you as much as you liked them, who was exhilarated and terrified about passing that milestone as you were.
And she’d made a fast friend in Emily, the drunken wraith she’d rescued.
It was all good things turning up at once, and Laurie felt her life had finally taken off.
One day, lolling on her bed in the Amsterdam-window red light cast by the thick orange curtains in her halls room, a lovestruck Dan was discussing infidelity. They both recoiled from the idea, that they would ever break the sacred covenant between them. It was unthinkable. They were Romeo and Juliet without the balcony, the warring dynasties or the suicide misunderstanding. They’d had whispered conversations in the dark about the future, they both knew this was it.
‘Let’s promise each other, here and now,’ Dan said, putting out his hand for Laurie to shake. ‘Let’s pledge that if either of us even thinks about being unfaithful, we tell the other one, before it can start. That way neither of us ever have to worry. Complete and total honesty.’
The improbability they were ever going to do it made the sweetness of explicitly pledging all the greater. Laurie shook his hand, and they kissed.
She felt like laughing, remembering that now. The way life was so simple to kids in love. Find the right person, promise not to cheat on them. It’s not difficult! They were never going to make the strange, tawdry messes their parents’ generation had. The idea their parents had once felt the way they did, hadn’t occurred to them. Eugh.
Dan stalking Jamie’s online presence: it was a tiny glimmer of being wanted by him again, and Laurie craved it like a drug.
22
‘How can you think it’s real when you’re not a toothless crone in the Middle Ages? I’m reading from Wikipedia here it has no scientific validity or explanatory power,’ Bharat said.
‘See, they can’t explain it!’ Di said.
‘No you div, it means astrology can’t explain anything.’
‘Then how do you explain star signs describing people perfectly? My sister is a completely typical Pisces, dreamy and creative. I am a classic Virgo.’
‘Credulous?’
They were doing an old favourite, running through a Bharat and Di greatest hit. In its familiarity, Laurie was finding it as relaxing as pan pipes in a birthing suite, although perhaps the analogy was unwise and a bout of unmedicated searing pain was also on the way.
The mood on Monday at Salter & Rowson Towers was decidedly different, Laurie noticed. Lots of lines of sight resting upon her, more frantic whispering, conversations that happened to end as she neared them. There was a noticeable tension, like the hush of expectation when you walk into a room prior to public speaking.
Jamie was correct: if the Ivy photo had set everyone wondering, the Hawksmoor shot had convinced them. Now the gossip wasn’t if she and Jamie were sleeping together, it was that they were.
As Laurie grabbed some paperwork from the criminal office, Michael intercepted her.
‘Can I have a quick word?’ he said, briskly leading Laurie to a store cupboard which was known colloquially as Churchill’s War Rooms, given it was solely used for hatching plots, strategic planning, and arguments too vicious or sensitive for the shop floor. And storage. It smelled of cardboard, and a newly fitted carpet.
After the door clicked shut, Michael turned to her. ‘You’re hanging out with Jamie Carter, I hear?’ putting an emphasis on hanging out that made it sound impossibly obscene.
‘Yes …?’
He exhaled in disbelief and disgust at the confirmation, hands on hips, shaking his head. Laurie got the feeling he had to get himself steady before he could speak.
‘This is a very poor judgement call, and the last thing I expected from you. I know Dan has hurt you, but this is …’ Michael trailed off. ‘Jesus, really? Him?’
Laurie shrugged. ‘It’s only a casual thing.’
‘I would’ve asked you for a drink if I thought you were ready. I’m sure a lot of guys here would’ve. But it was what, first come first served?’
Laurie’s eyes widened and she took a sharp breath at this insult: the entitlement, the sense of ownership. The idea she had no right to have sex with someone else, when Michael had been on the waiting list longer.
‘You what?’
‘I’m struggling to see why else you’d choose Carter.’
‘Er … Because he’s fit?’
‘He’s fit? Are you seventeen? And without moral compass? C’mon, Loz! Who body-swapped you?’
Laurie snorted.
If Michael was in All Bar One, if this was a fair fight, she’d give him verbals that would stop short of a knee in the crotch. But this wasn’t quite so easy. Michael was tacitly wielding the only power over Laurie that he had – the threat of becoming an enemy who would do her unspecified harms within Salter & Rowson. As with Kerry, she had to tread carefully, swallowing down the urge to tell him to fuck off.
‘I wasn’t aware I needed your sign-off before I could start seeing someone,’ Laurie said, calmly.
‘This isn’t someone, Lozza, this is Jamie fucking Carter. He’s a rattlesnake. He’s ricin. He’s the kind of enemy you only get rid of by pushing him over the Reichenbach Falls. Do you know what the lads are saying? They’re saying they don’t want to discuss cases with you in case it turns into pillow talk. You know everyone’s always liked you and trusted you, but that’s going to change if you don’t wise up. Fast.’
Laurie folded her arms and looked at the floor. Some part of her had known this was coming. She’d always been aware Salter & Rowson was a toxically sexist environment. She only needed to hear the way the men in the criminal department discussed the people they represented, or look at the gender of who answered phones and made coffee, and who got the bonuses and departmental headships.
Laurie had been protected. The counterpart to a senior man; A Nice Girl. But as a single woman, she was fair game for the rough and tumble of such politics. She was – apparently – daring to have carnal relations with a male the testosterone club didn’t like, and that had to be punished.