About Last Night - Chapter 1
Helena and Amy used to be best friends until that night at the festival twenty years ago... Today, they accidentally run into each other again.
September, 2017
I am doing the walk of shame on Brompton Road when I see Amy again. Actually, she sees me first. I’m too busy feeling shitty about last night to notice the redhead barreling towards me through the shopping crowd.
‘Helena? Helena? Over here!’
I squint, barely believing my eyes, as my heart drops through a hatch inside my chest.
‘My God, it is you,’ says Amy as she comes closer, pulling me into a forced embrace.
To say that it’s awkward, is an understatement.
She takes a step back to look at me. ‘How long has it been?’
‘I don’t know.’ I smile, painfully aware of my sorry state, though I know exactly how long it had been. Twenty years and eleven months since I climbed down the wisteria trellis, during my own mother’s funeral, never to be seen or heard of again, but who’s counting? Amy has been a closed door for decades, like all the other doors I’d locked and threw away the key, but now she breaks it open with that Goody Two-shoes smile of hers, and everything comes rushing back.
It’s not how I expected my day to turn.
That morning started off like many others: waking up in a bed that wasn’t mine, not remembering how I got there. The room impossibly hot, the light flooding in through the floor-to-ceiling windows assaulting my senses, my mouth dry. Managing to locate my skirt and my underwear bunched up in a corner, my silk blouse and my Louboutins nowhere to be found.
Last I remembered, I was in a strip club with my Swedish Style client, Sigfrid Bjorkquist, and he had just offered me a lap dance. But where was I now? Had I been sold to sex traffickers? And why in God’s name were my wrists so sore?
I put on the clothes I’d found thus far and opened the door, taking a peek in the hallway. I was in the gallery of what appeared to be a duplex apartment, looking down to an impressive middle atrium and an abundance of Chinese art. A red leather sofa sat in the middle, under a humongous chandelier. I tiptoed in search of the exit. If I could quietly locate an overcoat (preferably mine), I could sneak out of here before anybody noticed me - whomever they may be. I could make it out of here without my shoes and my blouse, but I still needed money to get home. At the very least, I needed my phone.
I found the staircase and descended as quietly as I could until I reached the landing. I heard noise from the kitchen, and the aroma of coffee pulled me by the nose. I was confronted with a dilemma: to sneak out unobserved or to make my presence known and ask for caffeine. I decided in a split second that my freedom was worth less than coffee.
‘Good morning,’ said Sigfrid, noticing me in the door frame. He passed me a Swedish Style branded mug. The logo was my team’s creation, meant to evoke the idea of affordable luxury. H&M meets Prada, was the client brief. The creative team protested that the two would never meet. Strategy explained that was not the point. I told them all to just get on with it so we can meet our revenue target for the month and the result stared me in the face.
‘Thanks,’ I said, taking the offering. I was relieved it was him and not some Eastern European trafficker, but I would have still rather have spent the night with my usual random stranger, instead of my most important client.
‘You may want this back,’ he said, handing me my blouse, while I inspected the kitchen. It was the size of my entire flat. It had an island in the middle that could probably be rebranded as a continent. A little too spartan for my taste – white angular surfaces and nothing on display except for a bowl of oranges – but it was impressive. I found the minimalism in the kitchen surprising, considering that the living area was covered in chinoiserie, from the red wallpaper to the cornucopia of vases and statues. I wondered if the Bjorkquists had bothered to redecorate after buying the place.
‘Are you always as wild as you were last night?’ said Sigfrid, lasering me with his freakishly blue eyes, as he took a considered sip of coffee.
‘I’m sorry, what?’ I said, fumbling to patch back together the few flashes I could conjure from last night and feeling my face turning red.
‘You were raising hell in the club, and security was about to kick you out,’ he said, amused.
‘Really?’ Panic began to spread through my body.
‘You seriously don’t remember?’ he said, narrowing his eyes at me.
‘You offered me a lap dance,’ I said, happy to remember something. Anything.
‘And what happened after?’
I raised my eyebrows. ‘Did I get a lap dance?’
‘You threatened to call the police,’ he said. ‘And demanded to free the girls from modern slavery.’
I’ve just burned my mouth with scalding coffee. ‘Yes, that sounds like me.’ I grimaced. ‘Glad to hear I can still make good decisions when I’m off my face.’
‘I put you in a taxi to take you home but you insisted to come to my place.And then…’ He rolled his eye in a manner that could only mean action of the perverted kind.
‘Let me guess. We watched Kung Fu movies and shared a bowl of popcorn?’ I said, feeling my insides revolting.
He shook his head and grinned. ‘You had some very naughty things in mind.’
I suppressed a retch. ‘Do you mean to say I tied myself up?’ I said, rubbing my wrists.
‘I am pretty sure we were both consenting adults,’ he said, with a casual tone that implied it was not his first rodeo.
This wasn’t the first time I had no recollection of the previous night’s events either. I’d learned to live with my blackouts, to brush them aside like you do with a bad dream, but it was the first time I (allegedly) went down the S&M route with an impossibly hot client and I had absolutely no memory of it. What a waste.
‘I should go.’
Sigfrid took my cup and washed it out. ‘Yes, you definitely should,’ he said. ‘My parents will be here any minute.’
‘Your parents,’ I repeated, not sure what else to say. Of course, Ludvig was flying in from Stockholm for the presentation. I pinched the bridge of my nose, but it gave me zero relief. Could this get any worse?
‘I’ll call you,’ he said.
Talking of calling. ‘Have you seen my phone?’
‘No idea,’ he said, just as I noticed my purse on the floor. And the Louboutins. Praise the Lord, I was still paying for those.
I turned towards Sigfrid. To say what? Thanks for a weird night I mostly don’t remember?
‘Listen, I don’t want to rush you out. But my parents are about to burst through that door. And I promised them, no hoo…,’ he stopped, just before he actually offended me.
‘Hoovers? Hooligans? Hooks?’ I offered.
‘I promised I’d behave.’
‘Right,’ I said, looking up at the candelabra, forcing unexpected tears back into my eyes. I turned around to face him. ‘Can you tell a girl how to get the hell out of this fortress?’
‘Best to take the service elevator,’ he said and waved towards a side hallway
As if on cue, a well-dressed woman and two elderly men came in through the doors. I barely managed to slip on my blouse and hide behind a column, as the group came into the atrium, chatting with Scandinavian accents and another one, English, extremely familiar. Could it be? His skin was tanned and covered in age spots, and his hair was thin and gelled back, but his eyes were the same piercing blue eyes I vividly remembered from the silver screen. No doubt about it, it was Roger Moore.
A needle inserted itself into my heart. Roger Moore was mother’s favourite actor. She used to say I have his eyes. The memory of my mother hit me hard, but this was not the time nor the place to break down and cry. I reversed as quietly as I could, and made it to the service elevator. On the ground floor, I bumped into a uniformed doorman who gave me a disapproving look. To be fair, I had a chance to see myself in the lift mirror and what I saw deserved the look.
‘Pardon me, sir,’ I said in the poshest accent I could conjure. ‘May I trouble you for the direction of the nearest Underground station?’ I coughed a little into my fist.
The doorman recovered his professional composure. ‘Certainly. Take the first right, and then follow the road, past Harrods, to Knightsbridge station.’
I shuffled towards Knightsbridge station with the single-minded plan to slump on the sofa for the rest of the day, when I heard Amy shouting my name. Turned out Roger Moore was not the last person I expected to see today.
‘I’ve been searching for you all over the Internet, but you’re impossible to find,’ says Amy, her green eyes scrutinising me.
‘You didn’t try hard enough,’ I deflect.
‘You’re a little pale. Are you ill?’ she says, as if we’d seen each other only yesterday.
‘No, I’m fine,’ I say, running my fingers under my eyes, failing to remove whatever smudged make-up I still have.
Amy puts a hand on my forehead and I push it away – her gesture too familiar, too close.
‘Sorry’, she says meekly.
A woman in a burkha, wrapped in a cloud of perfume and buried in shopping bags, walks past. The fragrance makes me gag. I take a deep breath before I can speak again.
‘What are you, a doctor?’ I say, managing a crooked smile.
‘No,’ she says, shaking her head and then stopping, as if she has changed her mind. ‘Actually, yes, I am a doctor. But not a doctor of medicine. I have a PhD in microbiology.’
I scrunch my face. ‘I thought you wanted to become a writer. To follow in the steps of the Brontë sisters.’ Someone shoves into me.
‘I didn’t fancy dying young,’ says Amy. ‘What about you?’
‘Me?’ I say, smoothing down my coat. ‘I did fancy dying young, remember?’
‘That’s not I meant,’ she says, in a hurry to brush over this particular subject. ‘I mean what do you do?’
I knew, of course I knew what she meant. But I have a sharp tongue, as well as a surname. ‘I work in advertising,’ I say.
‘That sounds glamorous,’ she says, dodging out of someone’s way.
I don’t have the heart to tell her that it isn’t glamorous at all, but life-draining and totally unrewarding. That after two years of blood, sweat and tears spent launching and establishing the Swedish Style brand in the UK, I am, yet again, asked to pitch for the business. That after doing God-Knows-What with the CMO, coincidentally, the son of the CEO, I could lose either the client or my credibility, or, let’s face it, both.
I reach for the reassuring presence of Ma’s necklace around my neck, but I can’t find it. I must have lost it at some point last night. Something else to cry over later. I tug at my coat belt instead.
‘I’d love to hear all about it,’ she says, her eyes scanning my face. ‘Let’s get a coffee soon.’ She takes my hands into hers and looks at me with that unbearable amount of love and pity I have seen before. She should know by now I am impossible to love and I hate being pitied.
‘Sure,’ I hear myself say. Although I would much rather run down the street and throw myself in front of a moving car.
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