‘I thought you said she knew her arse from a hole in the ground?’ Lice demanded of Richard. ‘“Have you talked to the police about this,”’ he mimicked cruelly. The last time I felt that mimsy I was nine years old and forced to wear my cousin’s cast-off party frock in lemon nylon with blue roses, complete with crackling petticoat, to my best friend’s birthday party. ‘For fuck’s sake, look at us. If we walked into the local nick, they’d arrest us. If we told them we were being harassed, they’d piss themselves laughing. I don’t think that’s the answer, missus.’
Dan picked up the last salt and pepper rib and stood up. ‘Come on, Lice,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to embarrass the woman. Richard, I know you meant well, but hey, your missus obviously isnae up to it. You know what they’re like, women today. They cannae bring themselves to admit there are things that are way beyond them.’
That did it. Through clenched teeth, I said, ‘I am nobody’s missus and I am more than capable of sorting out any of the assorted scumbags that have doubtless got their own very good reasons for having it in for Dan Druff and the Scabby Heided Bairns. You want this sorting, I’ll sort it. No messing.’
When I saw the smile of complicity that flashed between Richard and Dan, I nearly decked the pair of them with the flying sweep kick I’d been perfecting down the Thai boxing gym. But there’s no point in petulance once you’ve been well and truly had over. ‘I think that little routine makes us quits,’ I told Richard. He grinned. ‘I’m going to need a lot more details.’
Dan sat down again. ‘It all started with the flyposting,’ he said, stretching his long legs out in front of him. I had the feeling it was going to be a long story.
It was just after midnight when Dan and Lice left Richard and me staring across the coffee table at each other. It had taken a while to get the whole story, what with Lice’s digressions into the relationship between rock music and politics, with particular reference to right-wing racists and the oppression of the Scots. The one clear thread in their story that seemed impossible to deny was that someone was definitely out to get them. Any single incident in the Scabby Heided Bairns’s catalogue of disaster could have been explained away, but not the accumulation of cockups that had characterized the last few weeks in the band’s career.
They’d moved down to Manchester, supposedly the alternative music capital of the UK, from their native Glasgow in a bid to climb on to the next rung of the ladder that would lead them to becoming the Bay City Rollers of the nineties. Now, the boys were days away from throwing in the towel and heading north again. Bewildered that they could have made so serious an enemy so quickly, they wanted me to find out who was behind the campaign. Then, I suspected, it would be a matter of summoning their friends and having the Tartan Army march on some poor unsuspecting Manchester villain. I wasn’t entirely sure whose side I was on here.
‘You are going to sort it out for them?’ Richard asked.
I shrugged. ‘If they’ve got the money, I’ve got the time.’
‘This isn’t just about money. You owe me, Brannigan, and these lads are kicking. They deserve a break.’
‘So give them a good write-up in all those magazines you contribute to,’ I told him.
‘They need more than that. They need word of mouth, a following. Without that, they’re not exactly an attractive proposition to a record company.’
‘It would take more fans than Elvis to make Dan Druff and his team attractive to me,’ I muttered. ‘And besides, I don’t owe you. It was you and your merry men who screwed up my job earlier tonight, if you remember.’
Richard looked astonished, his big tortoiseshell glasses slipping down his nose faster than Eddie the Eagle on a ski jump. ‘And what about this place?’ he wailed, waving his arm at the neat and tidy room.
‘Out of the goodness of my heart, I’m not going to demand the ten quid an hour that good industrial cleaners get,’ I said sweetly, getting up and tossing the empty tinfoil containers into plastic bags.
‘What about killing me off?’ he demanded, his voice rising like a Bee Gee. ‘How do you think I felt, coming home to find my partner sitting discussing my gravestone with a complete stranger? And while we’re on the subject, I hope you weren’t going to settle for some cheap crap,’ he added indignantly.
I finished what I was doing and moved across to the sofa. ‘Richard, behave,’ I said, slipping my legs over his, straddling him.
‘It’s not very nice, being dead,’ he muttered as my mouth descended on his.
Eventually, I moved my lips along his jaw, tongue flickering against the angle of the bone. ‘Maybe not,’ I said softly, tickling his ear. ‘But isn’t resurrection fun?’
Richard barely stirred when I left his bed next morning just after seven. I scribbled, ‘Gone 2 work, C U 2night?’ on a Post-It note and stuck it on the forearm that was flung out across the pillow. I used to write messages straight on to his arm with a felt-tip pen until he complained it ruined his street cred to have ‘Buy milk’ stencilled indelibly across his wrist. Nothing if not sensitive to people’s needs, I switched to Post-Its.
Back in my own home, I stood under the shower, taking my first opportunity to consider Alexis’s ballistic missile. I knew that having a baby had climbed to the top of her and Chris’s partnership agenda now that they had put the finishing touches to their house on the edge of the Pennines, but somehow I hadn’t realized parenthood was quite so imminent a project. I’d had this mental picture of it being something that would rumble on for ages before anything actually happened, given that it’s such a complicated business for lesbian couples to arrange.
First they’ve got to decide whether they want an anonymous donor, in which case their baby could end up having the same father as half the children of lesbians in the Greater Manchester area, with all the potential horrors that lines up for the future.
But if they decide to go for a donor they know, they’ve got to be careful that everyone agrees in advance what his relationship to the child is going to be. Then they’ve got to wait while he has two AIDS tests with a gap of at least six months in between. Finally, they’ve got to juggle things so that sperm and womb are in the same place at the optimum moment. According to Alexis, it’s not like a straight couple where the woman can take her temperature every five minutes till the time is right then seize her bloke by the appropriate body part and demand sex. So I’d been banking on a breathing space to get used to the idea of Chris and Alexis as parents.
I’ve never been smitten with the maternal urge, which means I always feel a bit bemused when my friends get sandbagged by their hormones and turn from perfectly normal women into monomaniacs desperate to pass their genes on to a waiting world. Maybe it’s because my biological clock has still got a way to go before anything in my universe starts turning pumpkin-shaped. Or maybe, as Richard suggests when he’s in sentimental father mode, it’s because I’m a cold-hearted bastard with all the emotional warmth of Robocop. Either way, I didn’t want a child and I never knew if I was saying the right thing to those who did.
Selfishly, my first thought was for the difference it was going to make to my life. Alexis is my best friend. We go shopping for clothes together. We play seriously competitive and acrimonious Scrabble games together. When Chris and Richard aren’t there to complain about the results, we concoct exotic and bizarre snacks (oatcakes with French mayonnaise and strawberry jam; green banana, coconut and chicken curry …) and wash them down with copious amounts of good vodka. We pick each other’s brains and exploit each other’s contacts. Most of all, we’re there for each other when it counts.
As the hot water cascaded over me, I felt like I was already in mourning for the friendship. Nothing was ever going to be the same again. Alexis would have responsibilities. When Chris’s commitments