Lady Bag by Liza Cody

How nice do you want me to be? Do you really want to go to work for him in Kensington?’
    ‘My leg hurts. I want to rest. I want you to protect me. You can’t help me when you’re smashed.’
    ‘I need a little drink to help me cope… ’
    ‘Then have a little drink but don’t get absolutely stonkers. You’re useless when you… ’
    Smister said, ‘Who you talking to?’
    ‘My dog. Her leg’s hurting and it’s pouring with rain. She shouldn’t go out again today. You shouldn’t either.’
    ‘It’s alright for you. You’ve got credit cards. You can go out and buy a bottle of this and that. You’ve got fancy doctor’s prescriptions. What about me? How’m I going to get by?’
    ‘Same way you always did before you met me,’ I said, because that’s what I was going to do once he’d blown out of my life—an occurrence I was looking forward to if he didn’t stop whinging about Natalie’s credit cards.
    ‘I need an operation,’ he said, staring at me with naked want in his eyes.
    ‘I thought you said you needed a ticket.’ I turned away from him and his eyes.
    ‘I do—to Brazil. It’s where they do the operation. Or Casablanca. I haven’t decided yet. How come you remember the ticket but you’re blank about your PIN numbers? Don’t say “Brain damage,” I’m so fed up of you saying that.’
    He could be my little boy… with a serious need to self-mutilate. My eye ached and I poured boiling water into brown stained mugs. Electra moved closer so I made her some milky tea too. Dog experts say you shouldn’t, but they don’t know her.
    I met Gram at a swanky hotel where my bank was having its annual awards dinner. He was working with the hotel hospitality team. He was wearing a snow white shirt with a black bow tie and looked unbearably young among the bankers, bank managers, wives and husbands. It’s an important bank and we’d snagged a minor royal as guest of honour. Everyone was dressed to the nines and over-excited.
    I don’t know what Gram had done wrong but he was receiving a bollocking from a banker. He was blushing and utterly humiliated. I took the banker a fresh glass of champagne and pointed out that the guest of honour had arrived, thus saving Gram’s pride from more pummelling. He said I was the only decent human being he’d met since starting work at the hotel. He told me he’d been in his third year at the London School of Economics when his parents died in an air accident. He’d had to give up his degree to find paid work until the insurance claim was sorted out. He was brave and uncomplaining.
    I wanted to help. I did help. Look what happens when young men want my help. Just look. And learn.
    I gave Smister his mug of tea. He said, ‘Why are you crying?’
    ‘My eye hurts.’
    He looked carefully at the stitches round my eye and touched the swelling with his thumb. His touch was like a hovering butterfly. My eye abruptly stopped hurting but the tears continued to pour out. I had not been touched unprofessionally by man, woman or child for nearly four years. Unless of course you count a kicking.
    ‘Maybe you should get your dog to lick your eye. They say a dog’s tongue heals.’
    Electra was slurping tea from a cereal bowl. She looked up, surprised. I could feel exactly the same expression on my own face. Smister started to laugh.

Chapter 13
    Money, Violence And A New Flatmate
     
     
    W e all slept till evening. Buzz-cut Kev did not come back. At eleven we went out to find a cash point. Smister wore a cerise waterproof poncho with a matching umbrella. He wound a fresh checked scarf around my bedraggled silk turban. Electra wore a polythene bag with holes cut out for her head and legs. It was still dumping buckets out of the sky.
    All this reminded me of the surveillance cameras that protect cash machines. I didn’t want to say anything in case it tipped Smister off about my lack of identity. I had the credit cards which I wouldn’t let him touch and he