Page 39 of Going Solo (The Brent Boys #2)

Chapter Eighteen

I pushed open the door of Miss Timmy’s to be assaulted by the reassuringly homosexual stench of roasting coffee, protein farts, and freshly laundered Calvin Kleins. I was greeted with kisses, and a slight frown, by Sandy Crotch—Miss Timmy’s resident drag queen.

“Did you come straight from the urinal at Trough, dear?” she said, meaning the fetish club under the Vauxhall railway arches. “Or did you piss your knickers when you saw this cinch?” She turned so I could appreciate her waistline.

“Bit of an incident,” I said, holding up my grazed palms instead. “I don’t suppose you have some Dettol and wet wipes behind the bar?”

“It’s a gay bar, dear,” she said. “The council would shut us down if we didn’t carry industrial-strength antiseptic.”

When I reached the booth where Nick and his friends were sitting, I was greeted by silence and… more frowns.

“Hello, everybody,” I said. That seemed to break the spell that was holding them. Dav, his best mate Sunny, and Sunny’s boyfriend, Ludo, were all warm smiles and hellos. Then… back to frowns.

A waiter appeared. “What can I get you?”

“Two Essex Girl shots and a bottle of Krug, please,” I said. The waiter nodded, frowned, and disappeared—not batting an eyelid at the fact I’d ordered a bottle of obscenely expensive champagne and two shots of a sickly vodka, peach schnapps, and cranberry juice concoction that had probably claimed more virginities across Essex than a busload of Premier League footballers.

It was Nick who spoke first. “You fucking reek, pal. What have you done to yourself?”

“I was escaping the press,” I said, revealing my grazed palms to general gasps of horror.

“Via the sewers?” Dav asked. Sunny laughed.

“The fire alarm went off. I had to improvise. I spent twenty minutes hiding under a sleeping bag I found in the bins, pretending to be a rough sleeper. When the paparazzi finally cleared off, I had to pay Britain’s most mediocre busker a bribe for not ratting me out.”

Everyone was in fits of laughter—except for Ludo, who seemed distracted.

“The guy who only plays Bob Dylan?” Nick asked.

“His name’s John, and he only knows ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’.’ I had to listen to it four times. And he demanded twenty quid.”

“Good on him,” Sunny said, lifting his cocktail to toast the entrepreneurial busker.

“He made me take him to a cash machine to get it,” I said. “I had to make small chat with him all the way up to Cambridge Circus.”

“Are you seeing him again?” Nick asked.

I scowled.

“You got his number at least, though, right?” Dav said.

“You lot are meant to be cheering me up,” I said.

The waiter put my drinks down in front of me, and I knocked back one of the shots immediately, letting the alcohol heat my gullet and boil my stomach. As I lifted my champagne out of the ice bucket to pour myself a glass, Sandy appeared at the end of the table with antiseptic, wet wipes, and an airline-size bottle of Jean Paul Gaultier’s Le Male (which, by the state of it, had been rolling around at the bottom of her handbag for at least four Pride seasons).

“I thought you might need some of this,” she whispered softly into my ear. “Not being funny, love, but you smell like you’ve been fucked by a tramp.”

As Sandy swanned off, the boys laughed uproariously. All except for Ludo, who was looking past me, over my shoulder, with concern on his face. I felt a twinge of worry.

“Did you not try the phone trick?” Sunny said, jogging me from my thoughts.

I opened the wet wipes. “What’s that?”

“If you have no choice but to go through a scrum of reporters or photographers like that, put your phone to your ear and pretend to be on a call,” he said. “Or better yet, be on a call.”

“Sunny used to work for The Bulletin ,” Nick reminded me. How could I forget? Reporters from The Bulletin had been hounding me for a decade. So, when your best friend’s boyfriend’s best friend works for your tormentor, you tend to remember it. Not that Sunny had ever been on the hound-Toby-until-he-cracks beat. And he worked for the BBC now, anyway. As I reached for the antiseptic, I noticed Ludo typing a text into his phone.

“You can either pretend to be on an important call,” Sunny said, “and keep marching through, completely ignoring the press pack. Or, better yet, you can smile and be friendly and apologetic, in a sorry-I-have-to-take-this kind of way. But whatever you do, keep on walking until you get into your car or whatever. Then speed off.”

The antiseptic stung my palms. “They’re all on mopeds. They follow you.”

“Most of the time they just want their pics so they can make their money,” Sunny said. “Give them something to photograph and they’ll go away.”

“Like what?”

“I mean, if you’re a woman in a skirt, you might get into the car at a slightly risqué angle.”

“Helpful. Thanks.”

“Lift your T-shirt to scratch at your washboard stomach,” Sunny said. “You can do anything. Be inventive. It has to be something they can write up, which is why ‘accidentally sexy’ is always a good option. You want it to be proper gossip fodder but still spin positively, so you don’t hurt your brand. Worst-case scenario, go for relatable and goofy. Pretend to trip over your feet and laugh at your own clumsiness when you hit the deck. Something like that.”

Sandy appeared at the end of the table again with a face like thunder. She leaned over to Ludo. “Which one is it, my dear?”

Ludo pointed, discreetly, and I turned my head to try to see what he was pointing at. “Shaved head.”

“With the moustache and pink neck kerchief?”

Ludo nodded.

“Right you are, my darling.” Sandy was off again.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

Ludo put his elbows on the table and leaned forward. The four of us bent towards him like flowers towards the sun.

“The guy in the pink hanky was taking photographs.”

“Of us?” Dav said.

“Of me?” I asked.

“I’m pretty certain you were the target, yeah,” Ludo said.

There was a kerfuffle behind us as a group of drunk homosexuals was unceremoniously hauled from their table by a variety of staff members, including Sandy—who, it turned out, had a remarkably powerful full nelson.

“This is beautiful to watch,” Dav said.

“Absolutely,” Sunny added. “Drag queens doing what nature intended, keeping the gays in line.”

“Isn’t nature spectacular?”

“Notice how the female impersonator drags the sad little piece of shit towards the exit,” Sunny said, mimicking David Attenborough’s hushed, authoritative tones. “She is confident. She is strong. She is in six-inch bloody heels. He is powerless against her.”

Dav joined in. “When she has finished playing with him, she will eat him. Then shit him out. And so, the circle of life is complete.”

The boys laughed at themselves, and as the bell on Miss Timmy’s door tinkled, announcing the eviction of my pursuer and his friends, the entire restaurant erupted into whoops of applause. Sandy reappeared at the end of the table, barely a sequin out of place.

“Sorry about that, boys,” she said. “He took a few pictures, but they weren’t much chop, and he hadn’t posted them anywhere. I made him delete them, and he and his mates have all been barred for six months.” She waved a perfectly manicured hand over the table. “And it’s all on us today, OK? Order anything you like. But don’t overdo it, because my OnlyFans is tanking, and if this place closes down, I’m all out of options.”

She winked, and before I could thank her, she’d spun on her heel and was gone. I turned to Ludo. “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.”

As I brought my champagne glass to my lips, I realised my hands were shaking.

“It’s occurred to me,” Nick said, “that there was an obvious problem with our escape plan.”

“No kidding, babes.”

“Not the fire alarm. Although I didn’t know that even worked. Nothing else does in that building. No, I mean I had to go around the back of the building to get into the cab on Charing Cross Road in any case. You could have dashed straight out of the fire escape, into the waiting cab, and driven up here with me.”

We sat there, blinking at each other. What a pair of absolute melts. I knocked back my second Essex Girl shot. The restaurant echoed with the sound of plastic fingernails tapping against a microphone. It was Sandy, taking her spot on the stage by the bar.

“When you fuckers came out for dinner and a floor show, I bet you didn’t expect to see a drag queen wrestling a sad, faded twink, did you?” she said. “That wasn’t on your bingo card for today, was it? Don’t underestimate your Aunty Sandy, my dears. Not only am I an MDMA champion, I’m an MMA champion.” Titters from the crowd. “While you lot spend your Saturday mornings getting fisted by drunk, closeted Australian backpackers under a railway arch, I’m down the dojo, fighting all comers, looking fabulous, as the UK’s only fully sequined black belt. All so I can protect you lot of ungrateful mincing fuckers.”

Applause, cheers, a wolf whistle.

“So, listen up, kiddies. This is a safe space. For all of us. Including celebrity members of our community, who have every right to come here and enjoy a glass of warm, heavily marked up Tesco Finest Pinot Grigio—and my glutes in this frock—all without being accosted.”

The crowd cheered. Nick reached over and touched my arm.

“Are you OK, pal?”

I wasn’t. Not really. I had no idea when I would feel safe out in public again. The chaos Cole Kennedy caused me usually lasted anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. But at least I felt supported in this moment. I nodded, grateful for Nick’s concern.

“And that includes,” Sandy continued, “taking photos of our famous guests to post on social media, to show your friends, or to sell to the fucking newspapers. Do I make myself clear?”

A murmur of laughter.

“I said, do I make myself clear ? Everybody say ‘Yes, Sandy.’”

A chorus of “Yes, Sandy” went up around the restaurant.

“Good girls. Now buckle up, because I’ve got a ten-minute Cher medley coming up, and my pill’s just hit. Which will come first, ‘The Shoop Shoop Song’ or me shitting my knickers onstage? Let’s find out. Place your bets, ladies.”

* * *

Thanks to Sandy’s generosity, we were on the table’s third bottle of Krug, and the drinks were starting to make themselves known in both the conversation and the number of trips to the bathroom. Dav stood and announced he was going for a leak. Loosened by the booze, I was finally ready to vent about Denzil’s stitch-up.

“So, why exactly are you doing this to yourself?” Sunny asked.

“Because a million pounds is a lot of money.”

“Is it?” Ludo said.

I blinked at him.

“Ignore him,” Sunny said. “Ludo has no concept of money. His family owns a media empire. His grandmother has an honest-to-God butler and lives in something his father legit calls a dower house.”

“I have a jolly good concept of money, thank you,” Ludo protested. “It’s precisely because my family owns a media empire that I know a million pounds is a very small drop in a very leaky bucket.”

“It’s a lot to my network. And it might be enough to stop us being sold off to a hedge fund and losing our jobs.”

“Is PureFM up for sale?” Ludo asked, eyebrows raised.

Nick and I exchanged glances. This definitely wasn’t public information.

“Not officially, I don’t think,” Nick said carefully. “But the board has no appetite to fix what needs fixing, and it’s been made clear they would offload us if they could.”

Ludo nodded and plucked his phone off the table. Sunny asked his boyfriend what he was doing.

“Sending Father a message,” he said. “The Sentinel Group is in acquisition mode. They might be looking to pick up an asset like Pure. I don’t know.”

“Um, the outcome we want is the company not being sold,” Sunny said.

“Only because they think they’ll lose their jobs. What if someone buys it and they get to keep their jobs?”

Nick and I looked at each other again. Nick shrugged.

“Does this mean I don’t have to go on the road with Cole Kennedy?” I asked.

Ludo shook his head. “It’s only a text. I’m not promising anything. Acquisitions can take years, and you could still get bought by the Nazi Party.”

“Damn.”

Dav came back from the toilet, wiping his wet hands on his jeans. “What did I miss?”

“Ludo’s buying a radio station,” Sunny said.

Dav nodded. “Sounds about right. Are we getting another round in?”