35 | Mercedes
‘Just do as you’re told. Go on.’
Mercedes freezes in the stairwell. This job. This life. I can’t bear it. I can’t bear it.
The sound of palm on skin. Unlikely to be her face, not at that volume. And they don’t like leaving marks; it’s probably disrespectful to the next taker.
Not much longer, Mercedes. Not much longer. In a few days you will bring them all down.
‘Go on, you little bitch. Get down. That’s right.’
Why can’t he close the window? For God’s sake, he must know people can hear.
Yes, that’s why he doesn’t.
An aaah of triumphant masculine satisfaction.
These lovely girls. They should be at school. Exploring. Feeling their way to their hearts. Such pain they must have had, that these are their choices. That the shiny baubles Tatiana offers are worth the crushing death of their capacity to love.
‘That’s it,’ booms the voice. Mercedes has never watched pornography, but she is certain the delivery is derived straight from its scripting. ‘Ahh, yes, you dirty little … ’ the sound of another slap ‘ … yes, all the way. All the fucking … ahh.’
She closes her ears. She can hear no more. Hurries on down the stairs with the clean towels for the kitchen.
Hanne sits on the prince’s knee, playing with his ear. He and the rest of the party carry on drawling round their brandy and cigars, and pay her no heed. Tatiana caresses the back of Jason Pettit’s hand with her pale pink fingernails as he laughs obsequiously at the prince’s jokes. Wei-Cheng and Sara, unwanted for now, have retired to the edge of the pool and kick the water, skirts pulled up to the tops of their thighs, their faces blank, as though they’ve powered down.
And there, in his double-wide armchair, sits Matthew Meade, gloating like the toad that got the flies. Age has not wearied him nor reduced his bulk; it has merely made it slide with the pull of gravity. He walks with a stick now, for his weight throws him off balance and he is easily tipped over. Once he’s down, he’s like a beetle on its back and it takes two strong men to pull him upright. And still, he keeps a silver box filled with blue pills by his bed, for a man of Matthew’s appetites will never be deprived.
Mercedes puts her tray down and distributes tiny Turkish coffees one by one. I am invisible, she thinks again. The invisible woman. Even Tatiana doesn’t really notice me. It would only be if I went away that she’d remember I was ever here.
All to the good.
‘ … never have won that Oscar if he hadn’t been sucking the committees’ cocks,’ says Jason Pettit as she lays his coffee down. It hasn’t taken him long to revert to sourpuss. No one, she thinks, can keep their true self hidden forever.
‘Wasn’t Bruce on the committee that year?’ asks Tatiana, and they all laugh and glance up at the balcony above.
‘Well,’ says Matthew, ‘I think he’d be the first to agree he doesn’t really mind who’s sucking his cock as long as they do it enthusiastically,’ and they all laugh again.
It’s all they talk about, one way or another. Money and sex, sex and money. If the audience for those glossy magazines only knew, she thinks, what these people are like. And she looks through her lashes at the prince and wonders if the long-since ravished royal courts of Europe were the same.
He looks so pleased with himself. As though he deserves this beautiful nymphet on his knee, as though it’s his personal magnetism that has drawn her there. It’s almost tempting to walk away, to leave them to get on with it, just to feel the satisfaction of letting him fall into the Meades’ trap.
But there’s a girl here who has no idea how far it will all go. And I can’t let that happen. Now I know, it would be no different from killing her myself.
The room upstairs has gone quiet. She collects the prince’s used glass, replaces his ashtray and moves on. Matthew Meade turns laboriously in his seat and contemplates the girls in the pool, eyes narrowed. Choosing, she thinks. They must both know that one of them is his tonight. She wonders how they feel inside as they smile so sweetly. Dread? Or dead inside?
The drawing-room door slides back and Bruce Fanshawe emerges, ostentatiously tucking his shirt into his trousers.
‘Aha!’ says Tatiana. ‘The warrior returns!’
He walks across the patio like an ape. He has already made use of the gym building overlooking the ocean, and his overpumped body – the thighs that strain his trouser legs, the breasts that bulge through his shirt, the baobab neck – suggest that that is a daily occurrence.
‘Had fun?’ asks Tatiana, as though he’s been for a pizza.
He waggles his hand horizontally in the air. ‘She’s a crier,’ he says. ‘Get me a whisky, sweetheart. Scotch. Single malt, Plenty of ice.’
‘Certainly, sir,’ she says. As she goes into the house she hears him from the rattan couch where he’s hurled himself. ‘Boo hoo!’ he cries. ‘Boo hoo!’
And she hears them all laugh.