as I am wondering whether this is a compliment or not – nothing about me being a gorgeous babe, I notice – he pipes up, ‘Hey, I’ve got some Charlie back in my apartment – just along the front here. Do you fancy coming back for a line?’
Without missing a beat, I say, ‘Sure,’ wondering how much weirder the night can get. I get off the bar stool and watch as he swings his little legs round and leaps down to the floor. Quite a lot weirder, it transpires, as I take his hand. It’s like walking along with a toddler.
‘Bye Joe!’ ‘Adios José!’ ‘Ciao Giacomo!’ Everyone calls out their goodbyes. My diminutive friend is popular in these parts, it seems.
It’s totally light now and the cafés are setting their tables with gingham cloths and laminated menus, in time for the breakfast rush. Surprised, I ask Joe the time.
‘Blimey, it’s eight thirty,’ he says, looking at his watch. ‘Time does fly when you’re having fun.’ He winks. We’ve been talking for three and a half hours? Bloody hell, I think, as I follow him up the narrow staircase to his flat.
On the first floor of a slightly dilapidated nineteenth-century building, right on the seafront, it is in a fab location. I tell him as much, as I look out to sea over his wrought-iron balcony.
‘Being a Manumission dwarf must pay well,’ I joke, and he nods seriously.
‘It’s the best job in the world. I mean, let’s face it, being born a dwarf could be a serious bummer, but in my line of work I meet all these gorgeous babes …’ He’s off again, I think. ‘… I mean, I should spread the word to all dwarfs – move to Ibiza – but then I might be doing myself out of a job.’
As he can’t reach the table, he racks a couple of lines out on the wooden floorboards and we both sniff greedily. Then he gets out a photo album and starts showing me pictures of all the ‘babes’ he’s had over the years. ‘She was my girlfriend,’ he says, pointing out an improbably pneumatic blonde. ‘And her,’ gesturing towards a leggy brunette. And on and on and on.
By now I am wondering what to make of it all. He is clearly trying to pull me, I think. Could I go through with it? On the one hand, it would be a great story to tell the grandchildren. On the other … hmmm. In my defence, it’s been a very long night.
I’m still trying to make up my mind when he excuses himself to go to the loo. I’m idly wondering if he has a special WC, half a foot off the ground, so he can reach it (or is his cock ENORMOUS? – surely nature compensates in some way?), when something catches my eye. Hanging over a chair that until now was partially obscured from my vision is a very familiar-looking dress. My white dress.
I pick it up and scrutinize it just to be sure. Yes, it’s definitely mine. Same neckline, same crochet, same red wine stain on the hem. Little bugger. It must have been him filching it from the next-door cubicle. More in his eye line, I suppose. He comes back from the loo.
Slightly disappointed I’ll never find out about his cock, I hold up the dress and ask, ‘What’s this?’
‘Oh some tart left it on the toilet floor, so I grabbed it,’ he chortles. ‘Sometimes we do cross-dressing dwarf weddings and I thought it would make me a beautiful bride.’
I start to laugh immoderately. The idea that my minidress could be floor-length on him is enough of a turn-off to bring me to my senses.
‘Tee hee hee … hee hee … heee hee hee hee heeeee … sorry Joe, but I’ve got to go. See ya!’
Seeing the disappointment on his weirdly handsome face, I relent.
‘I’m the silly tart whose dress it was, you see.’
He laughs too, then asks, a tad desperately, ‘Go on gorgeous, what d’ya say – a quick shag, just for a laugh?’
‘I can’t,’ I say, ‘but thanks for the offer.’
‘No hard feelings?’
‘No hard feelings,’ I say, as I bend down to take his hand.
I am still giggling as I walk down the harbour, clutching my crochet dress to my breast like the blue blanket Max used as a comforter when he was a toddler. And then something makes me laugh even more.
Mark, still in his horrible ‘sit on my face’ T-shirt, his lower flanks only in very tight briefs, is running down the seafront, a look of abject panic on his face.
We stare at each other.
‘Well?’ I ask.
‘Their bloody father came back,’ he pants, and I laugh some more.
‘What happened to you?’ he asks eventually. I tell him and soon we are both laughing so much that it feels as if we’ll be mates forever.
‘Let’s go back to the villa,’ says Mark. ‘I’ve got a bottle of Scotch.’
‘OK,’ I say. ‘But no shagging. You’re a fucking slag.’
‘Takes one to know one,’ he says companionably, and we walk back, arm-in-arm, in search of a cab.
Chapter 4
I’m standing in the printing room, binding twenty long and extremely tedious presentations. This is the downside of being me. I’ve wanted to be an artist ever since I was tiny, and have sold a fair amount of my work over the years, but not nearly enough to keep me in the manner to which I’d like to become accustomed. My miserable time at art college coincided with the new-found notoriety of Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, and a whole host of my contemporaries attempted to emulate their success with substandard parodies, sold to a gullible public as avant-garde brilliance. My less zeitgeisty approach to art (drawing and painting things I find visually appealing) sadly failed to grab the same media attention, as a result of which I am still that oh-so-romantic figure, the struggling artist. That is, skint.
In order to buy myself time to paint, have fun and pay the mortgage, I take on temping contracts – anything from a few days to a few weeks, depending how desperate I am. I started off temping in media companies, which I thought would be fun. And in the beginning they were: post-production houses in Soho, advertising agencies and PR firms around Charlotte Street, breathtakingly pretentious record labels in Clerkenwell where all the fonts were lower case. I liked going to work in jeans and trainers and hanging out with wisecracking movers and shakers who thought they were cool. Occasionally even the temps were treated to very long lunches that turned into druggy nights. But after a while I noticed everyone was getting younger than me, and there’s something desperately sad about making coffee for twenty-something record execs when you’re pushing thirty.
So fortuitously I discovered I could do a new type of temping: desk-top publishing. DTP, as it’s known in the trade, involves making presentations look pretty, using computer graphics packages like Photoshop and Quark. It appeals to the artist in me. It certainly beats filing or co-ordinating people’s diaries (one of my pet hates – I mean, how much more servile can you get? Besides, I’m crap at efficiency). And it pays substantially more than bog-standard secretarial temping. But – and it’s a big BUT – most companies that use DTP operators, as we are glamorously called, are financial ones. Yes, even now, as the reviled institutions desperately try to claw back business with hideously written dossiers, brimming with management speak and graphs.
And, as far as atmosphere goes, financial companies suck. They’ve always been life-sappingly corporate. That’s a given. From the horrible suits everyone wears, to the icy air conditioning that makes you wish you were wearing one, to the macho trading-floor filth that masquerades as witty banter, everything about them has always conspired to destroy the soul. Now, the added frisson of grim fear and shoulder-sagging desolation really make them the last place on earth any sane person would choose to hang out.
And binding is about as dismal as it gets. At least if you’re hiding behind your computer you can waste half the day pissing about on the internet. As it happens,