Baby Love. Louisa Young

actually are under surveillance.’

      Alarm was just a tiny, vicious twist in my belly. Anger was swift to follow. I said nothing.

      ‘You’re not being watched and followed around. We haven’t got that kind of manpower,’ he said. ‘But your car, and your name, are significant in a situation that we are most certainly watching. Now I don’t know why it’s so important to you not to lose your licence, but I imagine the same reasons might hold if it came to being connected with Eddie Bates.’

      ‘Ben, I don’t know the man …’

      ‘So you said. That’s irrelevant. The point is that you are in a position to …’

      I rather feared I was.

      ‘… and if you were to I would consider it a great personal favour.’

      My heart sank. I had a horrible feeling I had no choice.

      ‘You’ve got no choice,’ he said.

       THREE

       Us Then

      What he wanted me to do was, as he put it, ‘chum up to Harry Makins’. He knew perfectly well the Pontiac was Harry’s. He was unimpressed when I told him I hadn’t seen Harry since the winter of 1988 and my last view of him was obscured by a chair he was throwing out the window at me. I was to chum up with Harry and chum up with Eddie Bates and await further instructions. That was it.

      Chum up with Harry. Chum up with Harry. Like, what, ring him? After eight years? Out of the blue? Hey, Harry!

      *

      I first met him in a bar, of course. Janie, a Cynthia Heimel fan, said that I’d never meet my dream man in a bar, because my dream man had better things to do than hang around drinking. This wasn’t that kind of bar, though – it was the kind where people hang around drinking on expenses and call it a meeting, a place in Soho full of Mexican beer, sharp, fleshy foliage and men with silly hair.

      I noticed Harry because he looked completely wrong. No Paul Smith suit, no pony tail, no eyes leaping to the door at every entrance. He was too naturally cool for such a posy place. He wore his leathers like only very long skinny people can: as if he had been born with one skin too few, and the leather was it, filling the body out to its right and harmonious proportions. Also, he looked very slightly dangerous. Very slightly.

      He came in with a bunch of Paul Smiths as I was sitting at the bar, and after some brief backchat wanted to know was that my bike outside – I was in leathers too – because if so he had some blue-dot rear-light covers one of which would probably do for it if I was interested in that kind of thing.

      As it happened that’s just the kind of thing I was interested in in those days, and as they are not usually available in this country and as (as I told him) I didn’t know you could even get them for a 1963 Dynaglide (same year as me – one reason I bought it) I said yes, and had taken his phone number before he leaned forward and whispered rather cosily, I thought, considering the brevity of our acquaintance, into my ear: ‘Just checking. You can’t get them for the Dynaglide. But I had to know you weren’t a git.’

      And then as I leaned back a little and turned round a little to look at him, he said, ‘Can I just kiss you now? It would save so much time …’

      Yee-hah! So I said, ‘You can kiss me now and then not again for a month.’ So he did, and we had this fantastic snog in the middle of the pretentious bar and when he let me go (yes he let me go) five minutes later my knees wobbled slightly as I leant back against my tall stool.

      ‘I’ve got to go and see a man about a Chevrolet,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you four weeks from Saturday at Gossips.’ And then before I could sneer at his cheek the barman said, ‘You Angeline? Mr Herbert’ll see you now,’ and I had to go because I too was there on business.

      ‘Mr Herbert?’ Harry said, laughing, as he turned away. ‘You a waitress, or what?’

      ‘No, I’m a belly dancer,’ I replied. The grin that split Harry’s face was something to see. ‘Belly dancer on a Harley?’ he said. ‘Oh, yes!’

      Gossips. Harry and I used to go there every week and dance in revoltingly sexual fashion to the slinky reggae. I’d do a camel walk to Gregory Isaacs. Harry loved that place. Perhaps he still goes there.

      *

      Saturday night I got Brigid in to look after Lily, and headed up west on the bus. I might need to drink.

      I leapt off at Oxford Circus just after closing time, into a crowd of disconsolate tourists with no clue what happens in London when the pubs are shut. I cut through Soho, passing one of the Greek restaurants where I used to dance all those years ago. The fairy lights were glittering round its steamed-up window, and I knew if I went in Andreas would be there, fatter than ever in his cummerbund, and he’d give me a big smelly hug and gaze at me with such sympathy in his fat brown eyes and say, ‘How is leg, my darling, how is leg?’ Well, I can leap off buses, and cart a three-year-old around, and camel-walk to make her laugh, but I’ll never wriggle for a living again and that is that. Nothing to say on the subject so I don’t pop in to be hugged by Andreas.

      You may wonder why I was a belly dancer. You probably think belly dancing is a joke. I really hate to explain things – especially myself – but I’ll try.

      When I was sixteen my Egyptian friend Zeinab and I absconded from home one night (hers was strict, mine wasn’t) to go out with some naughty cousins of hers who were eighteen and rather rich. They were fresh from Cairo and not used to girls who went out and drank. They took us to an expensive but deeply tacky Arab nightclub where we all got slaughtered among the smoked glass, much to the disapproval of the maitre d’ who had my companions down as the fallen generation, shaming their families and their country and their religion – in which he wasn’t far wrong. As for me, I was just a no-good Farangi bint, so what would you expect. He wasn’t in the least surprised when, after the floorshow – a belly dancer, of course – ended, I got up and imitated her. He was surprised that I wasn’t altogether atrocious. I was amazed – not that I was any good, because I wasn’t, and wouldn’t have known anyway, but by how completely lovely the movements felt. He said – with an eye to having a sixteen-year-old blonde working at the club – would I like to come back and audition. The boys thought it very funny. Zeinab said I could, but I would have to learn how to dance properly first, and she would have to come with me. So I became a cabaret-style belly dancer without knowing a thing about it.

      Not knowing is a situation I have never liked, so I found things out. Took classes, talked to the other girls, persuaded Zeinab to help me out on the cultural stuff. She taught me a few smart retorts in Arabic to remind the boys that though I was blonde, a foreigner and half-naked I still deserved a little respect. (My favourite is ‘Mafeesh’, ‘you’re not getting any’.) There were problems. Like the time I innocently expressed to the other girls my desire that a man in the audience would be so moved by my performance that he would empty a bottle of champagne over me, as I had seen happen to a girl at another club.

      ‘Habibti,’ said Aisha, who was at least forty and looked after the little ones, as she termed us. ‘He does that to show that he has bought her for the night.’

      Initially I just loved the movements and the music, the pause after the introduction before the takasim, the solo, would take off, the slow slow changes of mood. I loved the nay – the flute. The nay transported me. Still does. The moment before the player takes his breath, when my stillness would be perfect, and the moment of shifting … the music is visible. I’d learnt ballet – how to be stiff and fake and eternally fleshlessly prepubescent and unnatural – and had given it up because I’d grown tits. This was something else: it was something my newly female body felt at home in, not ridiculed by like ballet. And I loved the fact that I could make lots of money, and hell yes I loved the glamour, and the men