she fell into a puddle of water, with at least thirty people watching. Sharon would have been puce with embarrassment. Nicole groaned good humouredly because the entire front of her skintight jeans were damp.
‘I’ll look like I wet myself,’ she said, ‘and we haven’t even had a drink yet!’
At five past six, having delayed for a few minutes because that way, it looked as if she was so engrossed in her work that she hadn’t noticed the time, Sharon gave her desk a cursory bit of tidying and rushed to the loos. Nicole was there, having a forbidden cigarette before she put on the minuscule amount of make-up she wore.
That was another reason to be jealous of her best friend, Sharon thought with a resigned sigh as she compared their reflections in the mirror. Nicole was so beautiful. Her café au lait skin glowed no matter how exhausted she was, and the tigerish amber eyes with their feline tilt at the outer edges dominated her triangular little face. Her concession to make-up was lots of glossy lipstick because her mouth, inherited from her mother instead of from her Indian father, was on the small side.
Her hair was her one vanity: she spent a fortune on conditioning treatments and shine products and it hung in a long, glossy curtain down her back. Even her body obeyed her. Tall, and slender as a reed, she had fantastic legs that looked scarily long in the black PVC mini-skirt she’d just changed into.
But Nicole was just about the best friend in the entire universe, which meant you couldn’t be jealous of her.
‘Want a fag?’ Nicole asked now in her husky voice.
Sharon took one, lit it and went into a cubicle to pee. They weren’t supposed to smoke in the loos but if Nicole could do it, so could she.
‘Are you up for karaoke tonight?’ Nicole said, pulling off her cream work jumper and wriggling into a small pink T-shirt with glittery stars emblazoned all over the front.
From behind the toilet door, Sharon groaned. ‘You know I can’t sing and I’m not making a fool of myself in front of all those guys at the stag night.’
‘Oh come on,’ Nicole begged. She needed someone to get up and sing with her or she’d feel stupid doing it. She hated show offs. Nicole adored singing and had been exercising her raw husky voice in private since she’d been a child. She often wrote her own songs but it was only for fun. Singing publicly was another matter. There was nothing worse than people who thought they were Kiri Te Kanawa getting up at family parties and sounding like a collection of drunken crows. Nicole couldn’t bear that. But since, at the age of fifteen, she’d sneaked into the local pub for an illegal drink and discovered karaoke, she’d loved it. While the other people she partied with thought that the sing-a-long part of an evening was just drunken fun, for Nicole, it was the best bit. She adored singing to Tina Turner and Whitney Houston tracks and loved having her pals waving their beer bottles up at her happily as they hummed along and cheered. But you had to get someone to get up there with you in the first place, Nicole felt. Otherwise you looked like a stupid show off.
‘Ready?’ she asked Sharon.
‘Just a minute,’ said Sharon, struggling with mascara that promised lashes like Cindy Crawford’s.
‘Right. I’ll phone my mum,’ Nicole replied. Using the office phone saved her from spending too much on the mobile.
She slipped back into the office where Ms Sinclair was still at her desk tidying up. Nicole immediately crouched down and crept along behind the desks until she reached her own. She took the phone down and wriggled into the space underneath where she’d be safe from detection. Sinclair would kill her for using the phone for personal purposes. At least during office hours, you could always pretend you were on a work call. It was annoying that Sinclair hated her so much. It wasn’t that Nicole didn’t work hard: she did. But Sinclair didn’t understand that Nicole could finish her work more quickly than most people in the department, and then she got bored. She couldn’t help the practical jokes, they helped pass the time.
Her mother answered on the first ring. ‘Hello love,’ she said to Nicole’s whispered hello.
‘Hi Mum,’ hissed Nicole.
‘I can’t hear you,’ said Sandra Turner in her soft, breathy voice. ‘Speak up love.’
‘I can’t,’ hissed Nicole. ‘I’m at work.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Sandra vaguely. There was a pause.
There were always pauses in conversations with Nicole’s mother.
‘I’m going out for a bit tonight, Mum. That’s OK, isn’t it. I know you’ve got Bingo but Gran’s coming over for a few hours, isn’t she?’
‘I suppose. She didn’t phone.’
Another pause.
‘Shall I check if she’s coming over, Mum?’ Nicole volunteered. ‘We can’t leave Pammy on her own and she hates bingo.’
‘OK. You do that. Oh, the doorbell. I’ll get it.’
Nicole heard the phone drop and then her grandmother’s voice with the strong accent that was a strange hybrid of Cockney and Irish even after fifty years in London. A few minutes passed before her mother picked up the phone again. ‘Your gran’s here so I’m going out. See you later.’
She hung up before Nicole even had a chance to speak to her grandmother to ask what time she was staying until. Slowly, Nicole put down the receiver. She was glad her grandmother was there: it gave her a chance to have a night out without worrying about Pammy. She needed someone looking after her and sometimes, even though Nicole hated to admit it, her mother wasn’t up to it.
She crept back the same route to the office door where Sharon was waiting for her, all done up now and reeking of Eternity.
‘Let’s hit the pub, babes,’ Nicole said brightly.
The Red Parrot in Camden was not Dickie Vernon’s idea of a nice venue. It was a young people’s pub for a start, full of computer games, with lots of different coloured condoms in the dispenser in the loos and very loud karaoke. But in his job as a talent scout, Dickie had been in lots of headache-inducing places. Not that he ever said he was a talent scout. No, he was a manager, or so he told people to impress them. It was a great pity that his greatest find, the golden-voiced Missy McLoughlin, hadn’t had the balls for the music business. She was something else that girl. If she’d made it, he’d have been home and dry for life. Fifteen per cent of millions, he’d been sure of it. No more sitting around horrible old clubs looking for the next Celine Dion. The independent record label had been so interested until he’d got greedy and asked for more money. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. When they backed off at his increasingly outrageous demands, Missy’s nerve had failed her and she was now the proud mother of a toddler, lived in an Aberdeen semi and sang at weddings and funerals.
Dickie was back to managing the Val Brothers, a barber shop quartet, and taking care of the affairs of a country and western girl singer whose only resemblance to the successful Nashville ladies was her big, blonde hair. Anyone listening to her murdering ‘Jolene’ would immediately start looking for cotton wool for their ears. Still, she looked the part and that was half the battle, wasn’t it?
His trip to the Red Parrot was to meet up with a small record shop owner who was going to introduce him to a teenage rock band who were all still at school. The record shop guy was late and Dickie, bored rigid now
