Charlotte Street (26 page)

‘Do you think Pamela will like your sense of humour? When she learns English, I mean, and memorises everything about videogames?’

Dev made a Dev face. I continued, with what I really wanted to talk about: ‘So what did you say to him? How did you start it?’

‘I went blank,’ said Dev. ‘So I got out my travelcard and I said, “Isn’t it weird it says ‘any route permitted’ on my train ticket? Does that mean I can go via the
moon
?” And he laughed.’

‘He laughed?’

‘He laughed. I followed that up with “Cocktail’s a weird name considering it contains neither”.’

‘Did he laugh again?’

‘No, he didn’t like that. I think he thought it was a little bawdy. But I was in.’

I had watched Dev talking to the man for a couple of minutes while he waited to get served (he’d ordered a tap water, and the barman hadn’t looked best pleased). I’d been nervous. I felt like at any second I was going to be rumbled or caught. As if the police were going to turn up and demand the immediate return of the photos or march me straight to Belmarsh. My stomach had flipped as Dev squeezed in between the two men, and tapped the beer pumps just as he’d seen the man do.

At one point, when it got too nerve-wracking, I started to come up with excuses I could make if somehow we were found out. I had got the disposable film mixed up with my own disposable film – that’s why we developed it. Or perhaps I could say that Dev was care in the community, and he’d done all this when I – his carer – had had my drink spiked by a jealous rival at the home. But as I looked over once more, I saw what everyone else in this room could see: just three men, standing at a bar, smiling and nodding and talking to each other.

And then – one of them had reached into his pocket and brought out a business card.

‘So who is he?’ I said. ‘And why did you ask for his business card?’

‘I asked them what line of business they were in.’

‘And?’

‘They’re restaurateurs. They even said it without the “n”. Or, at least, they’ve invested in one. So I said my dad owns restaurants on Brick Lane, and boom – one business card.’

He handed it to me. I read it. Just a name and a number, nothing more.

Dev had tried to convince me this was fate again. But again, I’d had to remind him that this was not fate: this was Charlotte Street. And people who work around Charlotte Street are likely to be found around Charlotte Street most days. Finding someone who works on Charlotte Street, still on Charlotte Street when their work on Charlotte Street has ended might be seen as lucky, but fate?

Fact was, I wasn’t that bothered by whatever it was. Luck, chance, circumstance, the name didn’t matter; what mattered was how it was making me feel.

I woke, the next morning, to hear Dev and his dad shouting at each other downstairs in Urdu. About once a month, recently, Dev’s dad had come round to shout at him in Urdu. Only recently had Dev started to shout back.

‘Family stuff,’ he’d tell me, sullenly, as he’d switch on
The Wright Stuff
, or make a coffee, and I’d let it slide, because that’s what you do when people say ‘family stuff’.

As I listened to them, I stared at the ceiling and tried to think of other things. There was Sarah, of course, but if there
was Sarah then there was also Gary, so I passed on that. And there was last night. The man. And his business card.

‘Tell ‘em, then!’ said Clem, delighted. ‘Tell ‘em!’

‘Clem was magnificent,’ I lied, and Zoe cocked her head, and smiled; an excellent move to show Clem her delight but me her disbelief.

‘There was a great moment,’ said Clem, spinning around in his office chair, trying to be casual, ‘where someone dropped their pint glass, and I thought, “Right, I’d better ad-lib here” …’

I nodded and smiled my way through the rest, wondering when a good time to turn back to my computer and hit Google might be. My hand was in my pocket, my fingers around one side of the business card.

I hadn’t noticed how down and dour Zoe was looking this morning. I didn’t notice until long after Clem stopped speaking – which wasn’t for a while – when Sam took me to one side, and said, ‘What’s going on? Have you heard anything?’

‘Nothing,’ I’d said. ‘Heard anything about what?’

Truth be told, I was finding it hard to look at Zoe at the moment. Since seeing Sarah again, it was tough. Because every time I looked at Zoe I was reminded of the kind of man I could be. I forced it all out of my mind again, and felt my pocket for the card again.

Damien Anders Laskin.

What would we find out about Damien Anders Laskin?

Here is what I thought I’d find out about Damien Anders Laskin:

I thought I’d find out he was very, very rich.

I thought I’d find out much of this money came from his father, a wealthy aristo-industrialist, a man who’d turn out still to be around and who continued to push poor Damien further into the family business, which was probably called Laskin’s, and had something to do with vineyards and went back hundreds of years and had probably changed its name once or twice to hide its early involvement with slavery.

I thought I’d find out he went to Eton, clearly, and that he’d probably met some crown prince of an African country there, who was now only to pleased to grant him various weapons contracts, which he’d pursued in an effort to overshadow his father’s comparatively paltry wine-based ambitions, but had faltered when a military coup had somehow toppled his friend.

I thought I’d find out he had been married, once, to an Eastern European model he’d met while setting up Laskin’s of Prague, a mission given to him by his father but which would ultimately fail because Damien’s heart just wasn’t in Laskin’s Wines & Spirits and never would be, but they’d never had a child, because she was too worried about her figure and the contract she was hoping to renew with Clinique and it’s just so hard when you hit thirty and your husband only cares about his business and his mistress.

I thought he was probably good at tennis, having trained personally with Pat Cash or Ivan Lendl, whom he would’ve met on a celebrity golfing weekend in Maine, which Laskin’s had started in the name of charity, but probably only for tax purposes and
OK
magazine kudos. I thought he could handle a sports car, and would say things like ‘I handle my sports cars like I handle my women’ and then finish by saying something witty that I couldn’t quite come up with just now, but which would’ve made Clarkson spit out his roast hog and clap his hands together at a bloated Cotswolds banquet.

And here’s what I thought about Damien Anders Laskin: I thought that wherever he went, people laughed with grace and volume at the things he said whether they were worth it or not, and when he walked into a room they would cut off their conversations just to nod at him in the hope he
might
nod back, and women wished he’d marry them, and men wished he’d piss off so the women they were with would stop wishing he would marry them, and that whatever hand life dealt him, he would always be okay, because Damien Anders Laskin had hope handed to him on a plate.

It all seemed so much. So different, and so much to contend with, so much to battle against. If, ultimately, I wasn’t enough for Sarah, if things had been ‘stale’ even when I’d …

‘Well?’ said Clem, interrupting.

And we’re back in the room.

Blank stares. Raised eyebrows. I had been asked for my opinion. But on what?

‘Well … I agree,’ I said, authoritatively, and with a flourish.

There was a hush.

‘Unless,’ I said, ‘you were talking about the man who shouted “You’re appalling” halfway through your set last night.’

Clem turned his back on me. Turns out they were.

It takes a man of enormous confidence simply to have a business card with his name and number on.

Dev’s business card took things even further, of course, and just had his name on, but that was because he knew the girls he gave them to would never call him, and that takes a man of very little confidence indeed.

Who, though, now, can escape the Internet? Who can stave off Google? A mention on a social networking site, a brief whisper on an industry news sheet, a vox pop in a local paper about bike racks or planning consent.

Sure enough, Damien Anders Laskin yielded results.

Plenty of them.

Which you’d expect, seeing as he was in PR.

There was a lengthy profile on him in
Marketing Week
. A few
Telegraph
Diary entries, where he’d been spotted eating canapés at product launches with sparkling, glossy women called Camilla or Claudetta or Collette. A mention in the
Observer Food Monthly
about his restaurant investments. The
Guardian
called him ‘former PR wunderkind, now
wunderdult
Damien Laskin’.

He was self-made: working-class roots; won a scholarship to university. Taken on by a fledgling publicity firm in Bradford in the early 90s; four years later he opened their Dean Street offices. Four years after that, Avenue of the Americas. Then he went solo. Now he was the CEO or MD or VP of Forest Laskin PR. It was all very impressive. I could find little reason to dislike him.

And then I read:

‘The word “forest”,’ opines Laskin, 42, ‘implies natural growth, and natural growth is what we shoot for, quarter on quarter, year on year, and what ultimately we have achieved since day dot.’

It’s not day dot. It’s day one. And who ‘opines’? Sounds like something yodellers do.

I scanned his list of clients. Hopefully it’d be all bingo halls and chutney.

Mercedes-Benz spring/summer campaign
.

Oh.

D&G Pop-up shop initiatives, Soho/Deansgate/The Lanes
.

Swarowski
.

Grey Goose
.

Breitling
.

The watch. His watch was a Breitling.

Bang & Olufsen
.

Lexus
.

I’ve been hearing some very good things about Lexus lately.

And something inside me snapped.

I Googled Forest Laskin Publicity.

Found an address.

Called Dev.

It’s funny how finding a challenger can focus a man.

Of
course
Forest Laskin was on Charlotte Street.

There they were, yards from Saatchi & Saatchi, pretty much opposite Café Roma, where I’d unwittingly had my picture taken by The Girl that night.

Dev and I sat in the Nissan Cherry, our feet covered by a blanket of Walkers packets and Calippo tubes, on a single yellow line not far away.

It was after 6.30. Parking attendants all over London were already on the tube home. And people on Charlotte Street were knocking off for the night. Dev was engrossed in a months-old-copy of
GamePro
. I found XFM and stared out the window.

It’s a pretty street, Charlotte Street, I now realised. At this end, though, it was a little more corporate, a little less quirky. Huge trees reached above us, branches arching over the road where they’d mingle with others and wave away the sun or rain or sleet.

It’s a street that people feel they’re part of, too; a street people want to put their name to.

There’s Jamie’s Bar, where I imagine Damien Anders Laskin would sink a midnight whisky waiting for Tokyo or Sydney to get back to him each night.

There’s Elena’s, timeless and named after the legendary Elena herself, scuttling about, putting people at ease, the ninety-year-old French woman as comfortable making a post-junket De
Niro as welcome with a
coq au vin
as she was the bloke who used to sell the
Standard
by the station.

There’s Andrea’s, which is really called Andreas, but which everyone calls Andrea’s, because it seems to fit in more.

There’s Josephine’s, too, the Filipino Restaurant, and Siam Central, Palms of Goa, Niko Niko, Curryleaf, that Greek dancing place …

‘All the world’s on Charlotte Street,’ said Dev, stealing my thoughts. ‘So what’s the plan?’

‘We follow him.’

‘We follow him?’

‘We follow him. Why not? Let’s follow him.’

‘And then what?’

‘Then we’ll see.’

‘We’ll see what?’

‘What we do. If he’s with The Girl, or he leads us to her, well … then I guess it’s over. Because he’s with her.’

I patted my jacket pocket. Dev shot me a quiet glance.

‘I have the photos with me,’ I said, not wanting to meet his eye. ‘And I’ll post them through the door of wherever they are and we’ll leg it.’

Dev turned to me.

‘Just like that? I thought this was your big move.’

‘This is the closest we’ve come. What was I going to do, just keep finding places she’d been and taking my own photos there? Invent less and less popular features to slot into
London Now
? It wasn’t working.’

‘But don’t you want to talk to her?’ he said. ‘You know – closure?’

I’d thought about it. And I’d decided that, no, I didn’t. Because, again, sometimes it’s better not to know. I mean, what if she was perfect? What if all that stuff in my head was true?
The girl I wanted to know, with her shabby chic furniture and her healthy glow and her undying optimism? Imagine if I’d never written that letter to Emily Pye at school. Yeah, I wouldn’t have closure, but at least the closure I did get wouldn’t have been so brutal. I think you can trace most of my failures with women back to Emily Pye and the day I posted that letter and took that chance.

So no. Better not to know on this one. Maybe better to think it could’ve happened, than find out it absolutely wouldn’t. Better that she’d remain just a girl in a photo, than a girl I’d met and felt I knew.

Of course, I didn’t know if Damien Anders Laskin would lead us to her. I didn’t know for sure they were even together. But even though I was playing it straight and grown-up with Dev, that was kind of what made it so exciting. A bit of blind poker with a whole bunch of new emotions for a heart that had felt deadened and battered and bruised. What is it self-harmers say? That they self-harm just to feel? Well, I wasn’t that bad. But once in a while it felt enlivening just to take a risk. To use that moment.