Heartbreak Hotel Read Free Page A

fine in jeans and trainers but she had a fragile sense of self – she was working on this with her therapist – and felt bolstered in a suit. That sense of authority, so dearly won, would be sapped by denim. So they considered her an old fogey. Tough.
    Acme Motivation ran corporate events – banquets, awaydays, bonding weekends at Cotswold hotels where bankers romped like puppies and got drunk as skunks. Monica and her assistant Rupert were organising a dinner at the Kensington Hilton for Bond Trader of the Year. Rupert, an amiable, chubby young Etonian, was speaking on the phone to their client. He wore a T-shirt saying
This isn’t a Beer Gut, it’s a Fuel Tank for a Sex Machine
. Of course their client couldn’t see this, he was on the phone, but surely clothes affected how one behaved – why else was there a fashion industry? She herself gazed at men differently when she was wearing her Janet Reger knickers.
    Monica thought: Underneath this power suit
I’m
still a sex machine. The trouble was that men no longer wanted to discover this. She was sixty-four – a fact she kept quiet about in the office – but she had always taken care of herself and today her forehead was stiff from a Botox session; so stiff, in fact, that she couldn’t raise her eyebrows at Rupert’s T-shirt, at its hilarious inappropriateness where he was concerned.
    The trouble was, the older she grew, the longer it took to assemble herself for public scrutiny and the shakier the results. In an instant, a gust of wind could transform her from smart businesswoman to bedraggled crone, barely recognisable even to herself. In a sense this didn’t matter as she had become totally invisible anyway. This was both dispiriting, of course, and a kind of freedom. Men no longer glanced at her, even briefly, in the street. Sometimes she felt as if she didn’t exist at all. Monica sat at her desk, sorting out the menu requirements – no vegetarian options for City boys, they liked tearing at animals. She thought: Will I ever have sex again? Was that last time the very last time?
    It was the end of the day. Monica walked down Threadneedle Street. Outside the pubs, drinkers spilled onto the pavement. Though partial to a drink herself, Monica found it astonishing, the amount that kids knocked back. Who would believe they were in the depths of a recession? The collapse of the economy had left no mark on their shiny pink faces – nor, it seemed, on the level of their bonuses. Only a smudge remained on the wall of HSBC, where somebody had sprayed
SPAWN OF SATAN
. The banking world seemed untouched by the chaos it had caused – luckily for her, or she would be out of a job. And at her age, would she ever get another?
    That was selfish, she knew. But it was a tough world out there; she had struggled hard to get where she was. Sometimes, when she was feeling shaky, it took every ounce of concentration just to keep her balance. She felt paper-thin, held together by the flimsiest of staples.
    O why do you walk through the field in gloves, fat white woman whom nobody loves?
    Tomorrow she would indeed end up in a field, in an undignified manner, but tonight she was strap-hanging on the Northern Line. She inspected the liverspots on her hands. They seemed to have appeared overnight, as mysteriously as mushrooms. She pictured her arthritic old claws fiddling with the sheet as she lay on her deathbed, a scene from countless black and white films. Who would discover her body? She no longer even had a cat to pad up and down the bed, miaowing for food and rubbing its face against her icy cheek.
    She got out at Clapham South. It had been a beautiful sunny day; she only realised it now. Somewhere a blackbird sang, the notes pouring out, rinsing the world clean. On the way home she stopped at Marks & Spencer’s, a shop indeed as chilly as the grave. Her friend Rachel had once picked up a man in the Serves One section. ‘Friday night’s the best,’ Rachel said. ‘If