Bad Friends

An arm grabbed mine and pulled me back. Charlie – Charlie was holding me up now, and I clutched him as the car roared past. With a screech of tyres it took off round the corner. I stared after it, Charlie’s signet ring biting into my naked arm. When he took his hand away, his fingerprints had stained my pale skin.

‘Bloody boy-racers,’ he swore. For once, his slicked-back grey hair was dishevelled, falling across his face. He pushed it back irritably as, dazed, I let him lead me to his silver Alfa. ‘Come on, I’ll take you home.’

‘I think – that car, it was driving straight at me.’

‘Don’t be so silly.’ He manoeuvred me down into the low seat. ‘You’re pissed. It was just some kid showing off.’

The lights of London slid by outside. Buckingham Palace was an oversized dolls’ house, the road around it a great red skating-rink, Big Ben as magical as ever beneath a silver moon. For a moment I imagined I was Peter Pan silhouetted against the clock-face, flying off into Neverland.

I heard my mobile ring in the depths of the bag at my feet, but by the time I’d hauled it out it had stopped and the screen just read ‘one missed call’.

And gradually, as my pounding heart slowed, I began to feel safe; like I was in a David Gray video, muffled from the cold, driving in a car so smooth it felt like floating in an armchair, anaesthetised from my own pain by alcohol – until suddenly I realised I was far from home. In Vauxhall, in fact – outside Charlie’s penthouse on the river.

‘I’ve had rather a lot to drink, darling, thinking about it.’ He smiled at me wolfishly and bleeped the security barrier with the control in one apparently steady hand. ‘I forgot you were staying out in the sticks. Come up for a snifter, and I’ll call you that cab.’

In the lift up to his penthouse, he moved a fraction nearer – or perhaps it was just the gentle bouncing of the shiny lift. I backed into the corner anyway, feigning interest in my appearance. My reflections in the many mirrors showed me rumpled and slitty-eyed from booze, and as the lift door pinged open I rubbed a fuchsia kiss-mark from my cheek. Charlie stayed close by me as we walked into his flat, as if he was worried I’d make a sudden break for it.

I gazed around, intrigued. All this time I’d known him, and yet I’d never seen his lair. It was so very masculine, such an archetypal bachelor pad, that I nearly laughed out loud. He put some music on, easy listening I think they call it, and dimmed the lights. Above the living fire, two naked women rolled on the stone-coloured wall, wrapped tightly round each other. I tilted my head, trying to focus on the print. Perhaps they weren’t rolling: perhaps they were fighting instead.