Seven
The door next to our home is open and I enter it without knocking or calling out. The air is full of the smell of bacon cooking. A big woman wearing a faded apron in the kitchen shouts out to me.
‘Morning, Jane,’ I greet and take the blue stairs two at a time. Billie has been my best friend since we were in primary school, and I have been taking these stairs all my life. I don’t knock on Billie’s bedroom door, but enter and shut it behind me.
Billie’s room has exactly the same view and dimensions as mine but it has been done up in myriad colors and is perpetually messy. When it is clean, it reminds me of a piece of modern art. I hang the orange coat on a hook behind the door, open a cupboard, put the shoes inside and close it. Then, I carefully sidestep over a mess of clothes and a pizza takeaway box to sit at the edge of the single bed.
Billie has her head buried under a pillow. She was born nondescript with pale eyes and mousy brown hair and given the equally nondescript name Jane, but when she was eleven years old she reinvented herself. She turned up in school one day, her hair bleached white and turned into an Afro.
‘Why have you done that to your hair?’ the bad, white boys taunted.
‘Because I like it,’ she said so coolly and with such confidence that their opinion no longer mattered. She became a law unto herself and changed her name to Billie knowing that it would be shortened to Bill. Then she found a tattooist in Kilburn High Street, who agreed to tattoo a spider on her left shoulder.
‘Wouldn’t a butterfly have been better? Spiders are so creepy,’ her mother worried. But more and more spiders crawled onto her back, down her thin left arm, and eventually a few small but intrepid ones began to climb up her neck. Now Bill Black has given up the Afro, but her hair is still dead white and her lips perpetually crimson.
‘Wake up, Bill,’ I say.
Billie mutters something. It sounds very much like fuck off, but I know to be persistent.
‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ I say, and shake her shoulder firmly.
‘What time is it?’
‘Nearly ten.’
Billie extracts her crown of white hair from under the pillow. ‘This better be good,’ she grumbles and hangs her head off the side of the bed with her eyes still shut.
‘Come on, Bill. I’ve only got thirty minutes.’
‘Pass me a fag,’ she mumbles, and makes a silent snarl with her lips. I take a cigarette out of a box I find by the bedside, light it and put it into the curve of her snarl. She inhales lustily.
I stay silent until Billie has sat up, propped up some pillows behind her, and is leaning back against them. ‘OK,’ she says, ‘did you do it?’
I nod.
Billie’s eyes pop open. ‘Whoa…. You did….? And you got the money?’
I grin.
Billie almost chokes on her cigarette. ‘I don’t believe it! The fat bastard agreed to cough up fifty grand?’
‘Actually, it wasn’t him.’
Billie holds a palm up. ‘Back up, back up. What?’
‘OK, I did ask him, but he turned out to be a total perv; you won’t believe what his idea of a good time is. Fortunately, someone else cut in and offered double what I had asked him.’
‘Bloody hell!’ screams Billie.
‘Keep your voice down,’ I whisper. ‘Your mother’s in the kitchen.’
‘Double, as in a hundred thousand pounds?’
I nod a lot.
‘So who is this guy then?’
‘Have you heard of the Barringtons?’
‘Who?’
I walk to the laptop sitting on Billie’s messy desk and, flip it open. When the familiar Google emblem pops up on the screen I type in Blake Barrington. As the page starts to load I carry the laptop over and hold it out to Billie. Billie grinds out her cigarette in an overflowing ashtray and takes it wordlessly.
She whistles low and long and looks up at me with shining eyes. ‘Oh! Mr. Bombastic, call me fantastic. I thought all the best-looking males were gay?’
I blush. ‘Pick the Wikipedia entry,’ I advise.
Billie hits the Wikipedia link and proceeds to read aloud from the screen.
‘The Barrington banking dynasty, also referred to as the House of Barrington is one of the world’s oldest existing banking dynasties with a history spanning over four hundred years. The family is descended from Lord John James Barrington.
‘Unlike the courtiers of earlier centuries, who financed and managed European noble houses, but often lost their wealth through violence or expropriation, the new international bank created by the Barringtons was impervious to local attacks.
‘Their strategy for success was to keep control of their banks in family hands through carefully arranged marriages to first or second cousins. Similar to royal intermarriages, it allowed them to maintain full secrecy about the size of their fortunes. By the late nineteenth century, however, almost all of the Barringtons had started to marry outside the family into other great, old families.
‘The family is renowned for its vast art collections, palaces, wine properties, yacht racing, luxury hotels, grand houses, as well as for its philanthropy. By the end of the century, the family was unparalleled in wealth and luxury even by the richest royal families.
‘The Barringtons are elusive. There is no book about them that is both revealing and accurate. Libraries of nonsense have been written about them. An author who planned to write a book entitled Lies About The Barringtons abandoned it, saying, “It was relatively easy to spot the lies, but proved impossible to find the truth.”
Billie pauses and lets her eyes skim down the screen. ‘Well, the rest seems to be stuff about their international investment banking activities, the mergers they have been involved in, and is as interesting as a man in a wet T-shirt. Yup, and more shite here about them being one of the oldest institutions operating in the London Money Market.’
Billie yawns hugely.
‘It just goes on and on about their…hedging services…worldwide assets… Boring, boring… Holding companies…Swiss registered. Boring, boring, primarily a financial entity but…largest shareholders in the DeBeers…a virtual monopoly of quick silver mines. Ah! Here is something a little more meaty. In 2008 the group had one hundred billion in assets! God! Can you imagine having that kind of money? No wonder the great, great grandson is spending it like water.
‘Oh look. Some pictures. Wow! Get an eyeful of how the rich live.’
She turns the laptop around so I can look at the images as she scrolls down.
‘Just some of their chateaus, palaces, castles, garden-mansions and city houses. Wow! Look at this one in St James’ Park.’
There is silence for a while as we gaze in wonder at the photos.
‘Do you think you will get to visit any of these places?’
‘Definitely not. I have to sign a confidentiality agreement.’
‘Still, it’s an unbelievably exciting prospect, isn’t it? Just don’t fall for him.’
‘I won’t,’ I say confidently.
‘Let’s skip back to Google and go to about…page three…and see what the conspiracy theories have to say about this august family. Oh dear…blood-sucking crew.
“If my sons did not want war, there would be none.” His grandmother said that. Very nice.”
Billie shuts the laptop. ‘OK, quite enough of this. Let’s not spoil a good thing. Let’s celebrate your total brilliance, instead.’
I open my mouth to protest. I know exactly what Billie means by celebrate.
‘Aaa-aaa… Don’t say another word,’ she says, reaching under the bed to pull out a bottle of vodka. She opens the drawer of her tiny bedside table and rummages around until she finds two dirty shot glasses. She puts the two glasses on her bedside table, which is marked with leftover circles from other vodka full glasses. These glasses will make new moons that overlap the other moons.
She fills them to the brim and holds one out to me.
I laugh. ‘So early in the morning?’
‘Are you kidding? This is an un-fucking-believable turnaround. You go out of here in borrowed plumes to snare a fat bastard and you come back with not just the most eligible bachelor on either side of the Atlantic, but the son of the richest family on earth. You’ve pulled off the deal of the century, girl. We have to celebrate,’ she says firmly.
‘I haven’t pulled him, Bill. He wants to have sex with me in exchange for money.’
‘So? Would you rather be having sex with the hunk or the perv?’
I say nothing.
‘Look, I know you are into that deluded saving yourself for the special guy nonsense, but honestly, love, you really are getting too old to be playing virgin. Every puss needs a good pair of boots otherwise it shrivels up and dies.’
I smile. ‘You don’t have one.’
‘Ah, but I have Mr. Rabbit. Nothing dies while he is around.’ She opens the second drawer of her bedside cabinet to expose her huge and colorful dildo.
I gasp. ‘With your mum in the next room?’
She shrugs. ‘I use it when she’s at the supermarket.’
I take the proffered glass, still shaking my head at her total lack of inhibitions. We clink glasses.
‘Here’s to…’ Billie grins wickedly. ‘Hot sex with anyone.’
We down the vodka and Billie thumps her chest. So early in the morning the alcohol has an immediate effect on me. Heat spreads quickly through my veins and makes me feel light-headed. The future seems exciting suddenly.
Billie’s mother yells, ‘Breakfast is ready,’ from downstairs.
Billie lets her head hit the pillow behind her in disgust. ‘God, she does my head in. If only she wouldn’t do that. Every fucking morning she goes on about breakfast. You’d have thought after nineteen years she’d know I don’t eat that shit.’ She twists her body and reaches out to the little cupboard under the drawers of her bedside cabinet and takes out a jar of strawberry jam and a spoon. She unscrews the lid and feeds herself a spoonful of jam.
I open my mouth.
‘Don’t say it,’ Billie warns.
‘I won’t, but really, Billie, your mum’s right. How can you eat jam for breakfast?’
‘For the one thousandth time because it’s delicious.’ She spoons another mouthful in, and commands, ‘Now, tell me every inappropriate thing that happened last night. Don’t leave a single thing out.’
I tell her everything except for the kiss, which I myself cannot quite make sense of yet and cannot bring myself to talk about. Billie’s eyes alight on the orange coat and she smiles smugly. ‘I told you the dress and coat were lucky. This is what you wanted, right?’
‘Yeah, it’s what I wanted. More than anything else in the world. You’re still OK to travel with my mum, aren’t you?’
‘Of course. I love her too, you know.’
‘Thanks, Bill.’ My voice breaks.
‘Don’t thank me. I’m going on an all expenses paid trip to America! Yee…haa…’
‘I don’t know what I’d do without you and Jack.’
‘Talking about Jack, what and when are you going to tell him?’
I sigh. ‘Everything, this weekend.’
‘He won’t be happy.’
‘I know, but he’ll understand. I’ve got no choice, Bill.’
‘I know, babe.’
‘Bill, thanks again for agreeing to accompany my mum. I really don’t know what I’d do without you.’
‘There’s a big, black car parked outside,’ Jane hollers.
Billie leap-frogs to the end of her bed and, standing on her bed with her palms resting on the windowsill, cranes her neck to look out into the street below. ‘Jesus, Lana, that’s a Bentley with a driver in a peaked cap.’
I look at the clock face. ‘That’ll be my ride. Got to go. Call you later.’
Billie sits on the windowsill, exhales and, through the smoke says, ‘Say hello to banker boy for me, won’t you?’
I run down the stairs and find Jane standing at the bottom of them. Her round, red face looks quite animated. ‘Is that car here for you?’
‘Looks like it,’ I say as I disappear into my own home. I pick up my rucksack, make sure my ID is in it, kiss mum goodbye, and run out towards the waiting Bentley.