After You (22 page)

Lily

Peter is waiting again. Out of the window, she sees him standing against his car. He spots her, gestures up and mouths, ‘You owe me.’

Lily opens the window, glances across the road to where Samir is putting out a fresh box of oranges. ‘Leave me alone, Peter.’

‘You know what’ll happen …’

‘I’ve given you enough. Just leave me alone, okay?’

‘Bad move, Lily.’ He raises an eyebrow. He waits just long enough for her to feel uncomfortable. Lou will be home in half an hour. He hangs around so often she’s pretty sure he knows this. Eventually he climbs back into his car, and pulls out onto the main road without looking. As he drives off he holds his phone out of the driver’s window. A message:
Bad move, Lily.

Spin the bottle. Such an innocent-sounding game. It had been her and four girls from her school and they had come up to London on an exeat. They had stolen lipsticks from Boots and bought too-short skirts in Top Shop and got into nightclubs for free because they were young and cute and doormen didn’t ask too many questions if there were five of you and you were young and cute, and inside, over rum and Cokes, they had met Peter and his friends.

They had ended up in someone’s flat in Marylebone at
two a.m. She couldn’t entirely remember how they had got there. Everyone was sitting in a circle, smoking and drinking. She had said yes to everything that was offered her. Rihanna on the music system. A blue beanbag that smelt of Febreze. Nicole had been ill in the bathroom, the idiot. Time had slipped; two thirty, three seventeen, four … She lost track. Then someone had suggested Truth or Dare.

The bottle spun, careered into an ashtray, tipping butts and ash onto the carpet. Someone’s truth, the girl she didn’t know: on holiday the previous year she had engaged in phone sex with her ex-boyfriend while her grandmother slept in the twin bed beside her. The others reeled in fake horror. Lily had laughed.

‘Niche,’ said someone.

Peter had watched her the whole time. She had been flattered at first: he was the best-looking boy there by miles. A man, even. When he looked at her she refused to drop her eyes. She wasn’t going to be like the other girls.

‘Spin!’

She had shrugged when it pointed to her. ‘Dare,’ she had said. ‘Always dare.’

‘Lily never says no to anything,’ said Jemima. Now she wonders whether there was something in the way she had looked at Peter when she said it.

‘Okay. You know what that means.’

‘Seriously?’

‘You can’t do that!’ Pippa was holding her hands to her face in the way she did when she was being dramatic.

‘Truth, then.’

‘Nah. I hate truth.’ So what? She knew these boys would be chicken. She stood, nonchalantly. ‘Where. Here?’

‘Oh, my God, Lily.’

‘Spin the bottle,’ said one of the boys.

It hadn’t occurred to her to be nervous. She was a bit woozy and, anyway, she quite liked standing there, unbothered, while the other girls clapped and squealed and acted like idiots. They were such fakes. The same girls who would whack anyone on the hockey pitch and talk about politics and what careers in law and marine biology they were aiming for became stupid and giggly and girly in the presence of boys, flicking their hair and doing their lipstick, like they had spontaneously filleted out the interesting parts of themselves.

‘
Peter
…’

‘Oh, my God. Pete, mate. It’s you.’

The boys, all catcalling and crowing to hide their disappointment, or perhaps relief, that it wasn’t them. Peter, climbing to his feet, his narrow cat’s eyes meeting hers. Different from the others: his accent spoke of somewhere tougher.

‘Here?’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t mind.’

‘Next door.’ He gestured towards the bedroom.

She stepped neatly over the girls’ legs as they walked through to the next room. One of the girls grabbed at her ankle, telling her not to, and she shook her off. She walked with a faint swagger, feeling their eyes on her as she left.
Dare. Always dare.

Peter closed the door behind him and she glanced around her. The bed was rumpled, a horrid patterned duvet that you could tell from five yards hadn’t been washed in ages, and left a faint musty trace in the atmosphere. There was a pile of dirty laundry in the corner, a full ashtray by the bed. The room fell silent, the voices outside temporarily stilled.

She lifted her chin. Pushed her hair back from her face. ‘You really want to do this?’ she said.

He smiled then, a slow, mocking smile. ‘I knew you’d back out.’

‘Who says I’m backing out?’

But she didn’t want to do it. She didn’t see his handsome features any more, just the cold glitter in his eyes, the unpleasant twist to his mouth. He put his hands on his zipper.

They stood there for a minute.

‘It’s fine if you don’t want to do it. We’ll go outside and say you’re chicken.’

‘I never said I wouldn’t do it.’

‘So what
are
you saying?’

She can’t think. A low buzzing has started up in the back of her head. She wishes she hadn’t come in here.

He stifles a theatrical yawn. ‘Getting bored, Lily.’

A frantic knocking on the door. Jemima’s voice. ‘Lily – you don’t have to do it. C’mon. We can go home now.’

‘You don’t
have
to do it, Lily.’ His voice is an imitation, mocking.

A calculation. What’s the worst that will happen – two minutes, at worst? Two minutes out of her life. She will not be a chicken. She will show him. She will show them all.

He is holding a bottle of Jack Daniel’s loosely in one hand. She takes it from him, opens it and swigs from it twice, her eyes locked on his. Then she hands it back and reaches for his belt.

Pictures or it didn’t happen.

She hears the boy’s catcalling voice through the thumping in her ears, through the pain in her scalp as he grips her hair too tight. It is too late, by then. Way too late.

She hears the camera-phone click just as she looks up.

One pair of earrings. Fifty pounds in cash. One hundred. Weeks later and the demands keep coming. He sends her texts:
I wonder what would happen if I put this on Facebook?

She wants to cry when she sees the picture. He sends it to
her again and again: her face, her eyes bloodshot, smudged with mascara. That thing in her mouth. When Louisa comes home she has to stuff the phone under the sofa cushions. It has become radioactive, a toxic thing she has to keep close.

I wonder what your friends would think.

The other girls don’t talk to her afterwards. They know what she did because Peter flashed the picture to everyone as soon as they walked back into the party, ostentatiously adjusting his zipper, long after he had to. She had to pretend she didn’t care. The girls stared at her and then looked away and she had known as soon as their eyes met hers that their tales of BJs and sex with unseen boyfriends had been fiction. They were fakes. They had lied about everything.

Nobody thought she was brave. Nobody admired her for not being chicken. She was just Lily, the slag, a girl with a cock in her mouth. It made her stomach go into knots even to think about it. She had swigged more Jack Daniel’s and told them all to go to hell.

Meet me at McDonald’s Tottenham Court Road.

By then her mother had changed the locks to her house. She couldn’t take money from her purse any more. They had blocked her access to her savings account.

I haven’t got anything else.

Do you think I’m a mug, Little Rich Girl?

Her mother had never liked the Mappin & Webb earrings. Lily had hoped she wouldn’t even notice they were gone. She had made fake cooing faces at Fuckface Francis when he gave them to her, but she had muttered afterwards that she really didn’t understand why he’d bought her heart-shaped diamonds when everybody knew they were common, and a pendant shape was far better against her bone structure.

Peter had looked at the glittering earrings as if she had handed him small change, then tucked them into his pocket.
He had been eating a Big Mac and there was mayonnaise in the corner of his mouth. She felt nauseous every time she saw him.

‘Want to come and meet my mates?’

‘No.’

‘Want a drink?’

She shook her head. ‘That’s it. That’s the last thing. Those earrings are worth thousands.’

He had pulled a face. ‘I want cash next time. Proper cash. I know where you live, Lily. I know you got it.’

She felt as if she would never be free of him. He texted her at odd hours, waking her up, keeping her from sleep. That picture, again and again. She saw it in negative, burned onto her retinas. She stopped going to school. She got drunk with strangers, went out clubbing long after she really wanted to. Anything not to be alone with her thoughts and the relentless
ping
of her phone. She had moved to where he couldn’t find her and he had found her, parking his car for hours outside Louisa’s flat, a silent message. She even thought, a few times, about telling Louisa. But what could Louisa do? Half the time she was like a one-woman disaster area herself. So Lily’s mouth would open and nothing would come out, then Louisa would start rattling on about meeting her grandmother or whether she had eaten something and she had realized she was on her own.

Sometimes Lily lay awake and thought about what it would have been like if her dad had been there. She could picture him in her head. He would have walked outside, grabbed Peter by his neck and told him never to come near his little girl again. He would have put his arms around her and told her it was all okay, that she was safe.

Except he wouldn’t. Because he was just an angry quadriplegic who hadn’t even wanted to be alive. And he would have looked at the pictures and been disgusted.

She couldn’t blame him.

The last time, when she’d had nothing to bring him, he had shouted at her on a pavement behind Carnaby Street, calling her
worthless
,
a whore
,
a stupid little skank
. He had pulled up in his car and she had drunk two double whiskies because she was afraid to see him. When he’d started shouting at her and saying she was lying, she had started to cry.

‘Louisa’s chucked me out. My mum’s chucked me out. I don’t have anything.’

People hurried past, their eyes averted. Nobody stopped. Nobody said anything, because a man shouting at a drunk girl in Soho on a Friday night was nothing out of the ordinary. Peter swore, and turned on his heel, as if he was leaving, except she knew he wouldn’t. And then the big black car had stopped in the middle of the street and reversed, its white lights glowing. The electric window hummed its way down. ‘Lily?’

It took her a few seconds to recognize him. Mr Garside from her stepfather’s business. His boss? A partner? He looked at her, and then at Peter. ‘Are you all right?’

She glanced at Peter, then nodded.

He didn’t believe her. She could tell. He had pulled over to the side of the road, in front of Peter’s car, and walked across slowly in his dark suit. He had an air of authority, like nothing was going to faze him. She remembered, randomly, her mother talking about him having a helicopter. ‘Do you need a ride home, Lily?’

Peter lifted his hand with the phone in it, just an inch. Just so she knew. And she opened her mouth and it came out. ‘He has a bad picture of me on his phone and he’s threatening to show it to everyone and he wants money and I don’t have any left. I’ve given him what I can and I just don’t have anything left. Please help me.’

Peter’s eyes widened. He hadn’t expected that. But she didn’t care what happened. She just felt desperate, and tired, and she didn’t want to carry all this by herself any more.

Mr Garside regarded Peter for a moment. Peter stiffened his shoulders and straightened, as if he were considering whether to run for his car.

‘Is this true?’ Mr Garside said.

‘It’s not a crime to have pictures of girls on your phone.’ Peter smirked, an act of bravado.

‘I’m well aware of that. It is, however, a crime to use them to extort money.’ Mr Garside’s voice was low and calm, as if it were perfectly reasonable to be discussing someone’s naked pictures in the middle of the street. He moved his hand to his inside pocket. ‘So what will it take to make you go away?’

‘What?’

‘Your phone. How much do you want for it?’

Lily’s breath stopped in her throat. She looked from one man to the other. Peter was staring at him in disbelief.

‘I’m offering you cash for the phone. On the basis that this is the only copy of that photograph.’

‘I’m not selling my phone.’

‘Then I have to advise you, young man, that I’ll be contacting the police and identifying you through your car registration. And I have a lot of friends in the police force. Quite high-up friends.’ He smiled a smile that wasn’t really a smile at all.

Across the road a bunch of people spilled out of a restaurant, laughing. Peter looked at her and back at Mr Garside. He lifted his chin. ‘Five grand.’

Mr Garside reached into his inside pocket. He shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’ He pulled out his wallet and counted out a bundle of notes. ‘I think this will do. It sounds as though you’ve already been amply rewarded. The phone, please?’

It was as if Peter had been hypnotised. He hesitated for
just a moment, then handed Mr Garside his phone. Just like that. Mr Garside checked that the SIM card was in it, tucked it into his inside pocket, and opened the car door for Lily. ‘I think it’s time for you to leave, Lily.’

She climbed in, like an obedient child, hearing the solid
thunk
of the car door as it closed behind her. And then they were off, gliding smoothly down the narrow street, leaving Peter shell-shocked – she could see him in the wing mirror – as if he, too, couldn’t believe what had just happened.

‘Are you all right?’ Mr Garside didn’t look at her as he spoke.

‘Is … is that it?’

He glanced sideways, then back at the road. ‘I think so, yes.’

She couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t believe the thing that had hung over her for weeks could be fixed just like that. She turned to him, suddenly anxious. ‘Please don’t tell my mum and Francis.’