Among the drifting clusters a small handful were fancy-dressed: a droopy-looking chicken, some Playboy bunny-types and cavemen, groups on obligatory hen and stag nights determined to see out their last moments of unmarried freedom in tests of alcoholic endurance. As the two women left, they passed a girl dressed in a St Trinian’s school outfit sitting on the kerb, oblivious of the rain, trying to heave up the last of her fried chicken while her friends held her hair out of her face.
Sometimes Meera Mangeshkar studied her peers and regarded them as an alien race. She felt no connection to other women of her age. Meera had not marked her teenage birthdays by hiring a white stretch limo and driving around the West End screaming from the windows. A third-generation Asian Londoner, she often felt stranded between cultures, too sensible for England, too eccentric for India. She had agreed to come out with Sashi to prove that she could still have fun.
The Keys club hosted Friday night specials in a Victorian train shed at the rear of King’s Cross Station. Those who left it on foot were forced to walk back along the desolate S-bend of York Way to one of the termini, but the route had been further twisted by ongoing construction work, taking them onto a makeshift tarmac path that curved over a field of churned earth. On either side, yellow earthmovers stood beneath tall spotlights with rain sparkling on their steel canopies. A thin river of brown mud was creeping across the path as if trying to obscure it.
‘I can’t see where I’m going,’ said Sashi, staring down at her shoes. ‘My feet are soaked. Couldn’t we have got a minicab?’
‘This evening has already cost a bloody fortune,’ Meera replied. ‘I won’t be going back there in a hurry. Twenty quid entrance fee, just to have the bouncer run a light over my arse and joke about me with his mates.’
‘Did he do that?’ asked Sashi. ‘You should have told me; I’d have threatened him with harassment.’
‘I think that’s my job,’ said Meera. ‘I’ve still got the badge, if nothing else.’ The young detective constable had come clubbing with her old schoolfriend, but had hated every minute of the evening, which had mainly consisted of queuing for the entry stamp, the cloakroom, the toilets and the bar. She had forced herself to come out and be sociable, if only to prevent herself from thinking about the PCU and how it had screwed up her career. Her sister had called to suggest a part-time job in her coffee shop, but Meera had so rudely refused the offer that she had upset both of them. If things got bad she would have to sell her Kawasaki, but for now she was determined to hold onto the motorbike until something decent came along.
‘It’s only half past one,’ said Sashi. ‘They don’t shut until six a.m. Everyone else is still inside. Look, there’s no-one around now.’ She was right; the streets outside the club were suddenly deserted.
‘You could have stayed. You didn’t have to come with me.’ Meera sulkily stomped around a water-filled ditch. ‘I’m capable of seeing myself home.’ She suspected that Sashi had taken something earlier, because she hadn’t stopped talking for the past half hour. Meera enjoyed a few beers but drew the line at taking recreational drugs, which meant that she gained no pleasure from watching those around her jabber into each other’s ears while their limbs tightened and their pupils dilated. She knew Sashi thought she was no fun, but Meera cared too much about her career to risk it for so little.
She wanted to hate the PCU, but never thought she would miss it so much. She had spent the week hanging out with old friends with whom she now shared nothing in common. Watching Sashi cut loose on the dance floor tonight, flirting with guys who stared at her breasts as if they were fillet steaks, she felt like she had turned the clock back five years. She tried to understand how she had come to leave so much of her former life behind. Bryant and May had encouraged her to observe the world with a kind of detached amusement. In doing so, they had shown her another way of living. The unit had changed her; she had gone too far now to change back.
‘Damn, I’ve broken my heel. Hold on, I can’t see.’ Sashi raised her foot and examined it.
‘Don’t take your shoe off, there could be glass around.’ Practicality came naturally to Meera. She waited while the damage was assessed. Sashi hopped and squinted and complained. They were in the centre of the city, but could have been in the heart of the English countryside. The canal ran nearby, and a gaggle of ungainly Canadian geese shook themselves as they passed, making her start.
‘Come on, Sashi, I’m getting drenched here.’ She set off again, moving from the circle of dim light that fell across her path.