ONE Tom, Harry, Forget about Dick
Ginny’s bedroom, the village of Farnham Hills, near Chipping Sodbury, Autumn 2007
‘So you mean, like, a penis embargo?’
‘Correct,’ replied Roxy. ‘I’m going to be an official willy-free zone. I’m on a twelve-step male-genital detox programme: Step number one, boyfriend is history. Step number two, I quit my job. Step number three, I recruit my best friend to help me get a new job. Er, Ginny, honey, that’s you.’
There was a pause so pregnant it could have applied to Social Services for free milk vouchers and child benefit.
Roxy waited for a reaction. None. Nada. Okay, so this wasn’t going to plan. Normally she could rely on Ginny to react in exactly the way she’d been reacting to everything Roxy said since they were sitting side by side in the playpen.
Act one: Rolling of eyes.
Act two: Loud tutting noise.
Act three: Adopts the approximate expression of someone who has just discovered that she is chewing a wasp.
Act four: Capitulates, offers sympathy, then digs friend out of big hole.
But no. Ginny was staring mournfully into space, as if she’d slipped into one of those cosmic, out-of-body trances that pass the time while you’re waiting in the bank queue or having a smear test.
‘Ginny?’ she probed, attempting to snap her friend’s focus back to the most important thing in life–herself.
‘What?’
‘Didn’t you hear me? I need help! Ginny, I’m single, I’m unemployed, I’m devastated…I’m desperate!’
From her cramp-inducing position on a tatty beanbag (circa 1990), Ginny looked over at her clapped-out single bed and the female reclining on it–probably the least desperate-looking woman she had ever set eyes on. Roxy’s jet-black hair hung in sleek, shiny slates from her middle parting to her shoulder bones. Her perfect, size twelve, über-toned frame was adorned in her standard uniform of black Prada boot-cut trousers, a black Nicole Farhi cashmere roll-neck and lethal four-inch stiletto Gina boots. Skin: flawless. Nails: perfectly plastic. Make-up: subtle. Breasts: pert. And Ginny just knew without looking that there were no hairs on Roxy’s legs, no hard skin on her feet, and her nethers had applied for permanent residence in Brazil.
There was no doubt about it: Roxy Galloway was channelling Angelina Jolie.
Ginny Wallis, meanwhile, was channelling the bag lady who sat outside Superdrug on an inner tube flogging jewellery she’d made out of string and discarded scratchcards.
She sighed wearily, so immune to Roxy’s perpetual melodramas that she’d slipped into a moment of reflection instead of enthusiastically participating in the panic. The contrast of her glam, glitzy, cutting-edge friend with the greyness of Ginny’s life somehow highlighted the fact that Ginny was twenty-seven and still living at home in a bedroom that hadn’t changed since the Nineties. The duvet was a tribute to the golden days when boy bands ruled the world. If the carpet ever revisited its former life it would have been baby pink and orange–now, ten years of spills and wear later, it was a delicate shade of road-kill. Even woodworm would shun the furniture. And the curtains were obviously designed by someone on LSD, bought by someone on crack and then hung by someone on two bottles of cider and a Lambert & Butler that Roxy had stolen from her mother’s handbag.
And they had paid for that wild, drunken, smoky, teenage night of fabric-hanging by being grounded for a month and having their Christmas Top Shop vouchers confiscated.
Urgh, it was depressing. Ginny pulled a bit of fluff off her hoodie, and pushed her riot of mousey-brown frizz back off her forehead.
‘Roxy, when did I become so old that I thought jogging bottoms and sweatshirts were acceptable as everyday outerwear?’
‘Honey, until four o’clock this afternoon when I resigned from my erstwhile employment, I worked with people who thought a crotch-baring French maid’s costume, nipple rings and five-inch Perspex platforms were acceptable everyday outerwear.’ Roxy’s bottom lip trembled. ‘Oh, I miss them,’ she wailed. ‘Have I made a mistake? I mean, it was a prestigious career in the hospitality industry…’
‘Roxy, you worked in a whorehouse,’ Ginny interjected, with a tut and a roll of the eyes.
Phew. Normal service was almost resumed. All they needed was the wasp-chewing face and they were back on track to Moral Support Central.
‘A classy, cosmopolitan, extremely upmarket entertainment club, if you don’t mind.’
Actually Ginny did mind. It wasn’t that she was a prude, it’s just that, well, she’d never understood Roxy’s career choice. Receptionist at the Seismic Lounge: guaranteed to make the earth move. Yep, whatever marketing genius had thought up that slogan was probably now enjoying a fulfilling career flipping burgers. Or making scratchcard jewellery next to the bag lady outside Superdrug.
Roxy had been ecstatic when she got the job. The club had opened the day after the government legalised brothels–definitely some insider information at work there–and it was on one of the most exclusive streets in Mayfair. Four hours of copulation cost the same as a second-hand Corsa, most of the girls spoke with accents that could crack windows, and the sex toys came gold-plated. It oozed class and made no apologies for targeting only the extremely wealthy. It even employed chauffeurs to collect the clients in blacked-out Range Rovers and bring them in through a private underground car park so that the paparazzi never got a recognisable shot. Actually, that wasn’t true–Stephen Knight, notorious B-list movie star, usually arrived in his open-top Aston Martin DB7 and parked it right outside the door. He was obviously channelling Charlie Sheen.
To Roxy, it was all so decadently glamorous. Short of becoming a fake-tan consultant or adopting a serial football-player-shagging habit, it seemed like the easiest way to hobnob with the rich and/or famous on a daily basis.
Glitz, high rollers, decadence and dosh–it was the life she’d always dreamt of (although, to be honest, she hadn’t exactly foreseen that the high life would carry a faint whiff of antibacterial cleaning spray and that she’d witness all the activity from behind a desk).
Roxy had always thought it was an aberration that she’d been born in Farnham Hills. She’d decided at an early age that the stork had obviously been on its way to a four-storey, three-million-pound townhouse in Belgravia when it was cruelly struck down by a shot from an armed robber’s rifle (yes, she had a very vivid imagination, even as a child) and forced to drop its precious bundle in an environment in which she clearly didn’t belong. When her classmates were splashing their pocket money on Just Seventeen, she was buying Vogue. When, at sixteen, they were fantasising about a fortnight in Faliraki, she was dreaming of a weekend in St Tropez. And when they were imagining their future husbands, children, and three-bedroom semis on the new housing estate on the edge of the village, she was imagining tunnelling to freedom and spending the rest of her life shagging an obscenely rich bloke, surrounded by walnut panelling in the master suite of his custom-built yacht.
And okay, so she wasn’t quite there yet, but when she was offered the job at the Seismic she instinctively knew that she had opened the door to the world she belonged in.
And the bonus was that, as receptionist, she only had to meet, greet and keep the customer records up to date. The money was great, the tips were outstanding and, unlike the rest of the girls, her pay packet didn’t come at the expense of cystitis.
She loved it–at least to start with. But over the last couple of months it had all seemed a little too repetitive. The same faces week after week, the endless stream of girls (who invariably