Read Online Access Restricted by Alice Severin - Free Book Online Page B

on this one. Fuck them, fuck all of them. I wasn’t dead yet.
    I sat on the edge of the bed, crossed one leg over the other, and stared towards the street through the gap left by the curtains. The usual street clatter, another day already heading past its apogee. A few black cabs went by. I punched in the number and pressed the button with the green phone receiver on it. Ringing. What to expect. Answerphone. Light, breathy voice. Cultured accent, but not too much. Sounded a bit tired. “You’ve reached Poppy. You know what to say.” Do I now, I thought. I left a brief message with my phone number. We were due to meet around five, where she lived in Notting Hill. I wondered if she was money Notting Hill, or holdover Notting Hill, from when it was street, and Reggae and Rasta and Rock and Roll, so different from now. Another mystery. I wondered if she was pretty.
    Tossing aside that thought, I marched into the bathroom, rinsed out my mouth, put on some fresh lipstick and touched up the eyeliner. I looked rough, but a kind of sexy, dirty around the edges rough. Perfect. I came out, zipped my suitcase up and put it on the rack next to the oak wardrobe, and zipped a tiny bit of toilet paper into it, by the corner. A little James Bond, but better safe than sorry. I’d like to know if someone was sniffing around. Laptop back in case, planner back in case, and I was ready to go, the recorder was already in there, all charged.
    I picked it all up, and looked around the room one last time. Fine. But empty. And for a minute, the loneliness of London hotel rooms swept over me, a vast parade of people who didn’t care catering to other people who didn’t care. The sunshine was already past the point where it could come through the windows into the room, a sort of eternal afternoon shadow falling over the plush pink carpet. Empty. Waiting. Alone. And possibly forever, moving on from floor to grave.
    Thinking like that, thinking of what could go wrong, the isolation of sitting in some perpetual shade, made me want a drink. Lots of them. Well, the idiocy of the band I was about to interview would probably put me off, along with the dirty glasses at the pub. What I needed to do was keep it together, not fall into bad old ways, partying it up with a collection of strangers.
    I shut the door a lot harder than was necessary, and went to have the doorman get me a taxi. Hooray for expense accounts. No fucking Tube. And moments later, as I sat back in the taxi, being driven around for the second time that day, but not so memorably, I thought, I looked out the window at the London I used to vaguely inhabit. I almost believed we would turn a corner, and I’d see myself, coming out of a pub, or a charity shop, or my latest tutoring job, looking wistfully at the taxi, before setting off to walk home. I’d always hated the Tube. It made me claustrophobic, and slightly paranoid. And of course it was a well-known fact that when you blew your nose after taking the Northern Line, you would see the residue from the smoky, soot encrusted air you breathed in while waiting on the platform. They don’t show that in the TV shows. So, back in the day, I’d done a lot of walking, and a lot of thinking.
    And now I was in my own black cab, paid for by Dave, and thinking about the band. I could complain, but I wasn’t going to. And there was Tristan. I closed my eyes when I thought back to just…this morning? Now it seemed a hundred years ago. I wondered what he was up to. I didn’t even want to think about him too much. I couldn’t afford to get all dreamy and misty eyed now. It was enough to feel the ache between my legs, and smile at how it got there. A united front, he’d said. God, I hoped so.
    Right now, I needed to be hard. Or else these people would tear me apart, and I’d wind up letting them, too bemused and lovesick to do anything else. No. I’d make him proud of me. Hell, I’d make me proud of me. It had been a long fucking road, after