An Unchoreographed Life

Chapter Two

When she woke, it was to darkness (or Worlds End’s version of what passed for darkness). The curtains were fringed with orange streetlight. Female voices - her mother’s and another’s - vibrated up through her bedroom floor. Their spiralling rise and fall lured Belinda out onto the small and usually musty-smelling landing - something Mr Oo’s sweet-and-sour pork and her mother’s experimentation with sprays and candles had failed to get rid of. Now a smoky smell that flavoured the inside of her mouth was masking it nicely. Fire! Her heart began to race. The man on the radio said that more people died of house fires than any other cause. Why hadn’t the smoke alarm gone off? Belinda was always reminding her mother to check the batteries, but now she couldn’t remember when they had last tested them. She needed to warn her! Navigating the geography of the woodchip wallpaper, counting as she went, Belinda padded down the steep stairs.

            “What about beards?” Mummy was asking, her voice unusually lazy, like a smouldering summer’s day.

            There was one of those uncontrolled pig-like snorts that some ladies make instead of laughing.

            “The only man a beard suits,” the unfamiliar voice said, “is George Clooney.”

     “The others end up looking like Jesus,” Mummy continued in her new joined-up voice (except that when she said it, it sounded like Cheesus.)

      “Or the Joy of Sex man!”

            Breath caught in Belinda’s throat: an Adult Word, one you could only get away with if you were Justin Timberlake. All thoughts of the flat burning down with everything they owned inside it forgotten, she didn’t mean to eavesdrop, she really didn’t. But was it her fault if they were talking loudly enough for her to hear?

            “It’s probably before your time.”

            “Everybody’s heard of him.”

            “In that case… stop me if I’ve told you before...”

            “What?”

     “My one claim to fame. I modelled for him, you know.”

     “For the Joy of Sex Man?”

     “For his book.”

     On the staircase, Belinda shivered in her thin cotton jim-jams, the legs of which hovered two inches above the sticky-out bones of her ankles. What strange conversations grown-ups had.

     “That’s not supposed to be you in the pictures, is it?”

     “No! I was sacked, would you believe?”

     “Sacked?”

     “There were a few of us models, all from Soho and around. I told him - Charles, his name was - I’ll want danger money for some of those positions.”

            “And?”

            “He said, On yer bike. Or words to that effect. The pictures he used in the end? They’re of him and his wife.”

     “If you want a job done properly...”

     “Matter of opinion.”

     More laughter. Strange, too, the things grown-ups thought were funny. They didn’t tell jokes, not proper ones like Belinda would. Doctor, doctor, I swallowed a bone. Are you choking? No, really… 

            “The closest I’ve come to doing anything like that is auditioning for the opening credits of a Bond film.”

            “Now, that sounds glamorous.”