Telling Lies to Alice Read Online Free PDF

and there was a poster for one of those smutty comedies she does—I can’t remember what it was called, Knickers Must Fall or something stupid like that, but anyway, Jack’s name was on it! I couldn’t believe my eyes. I know he hasn’t been on TV recently, but honestly . . . he’d never have been doing that if Lenny was still around, I’m sure of it. If they’d stayed together, that is, because Lenny did most of the writing—they did use other people from time to time, but mainly it was the two of them, they’d spend hours in Lenny’s flat just talking, bouncing things off each other, tape-recording it all, and then Jack would go home to Val, and Lenny would sit down at the typewriter and spend all night bashing out a script, and that would be the basis of the act or the series or whatever it happened to be. It really was like Don Findlater said, together they were greater than the sum of their parts—just . . . brilliant . That’s why I was so astonished to see Jack doing rubbish like that.
    The only other girl whose full name I knew was Bunny Kitty. Her real name was Gail McClintock. Everyone at the club thought she’d just jacked it in without telling anybody, because quite a lot of girls did that, but we found out later that she’d never picked up her cards or anything. I did hear something about her flatmate coming home one day and finding some of Kitty’s stuff gone, but it could have been a burglary because there wasn’t a note or anything—and that was it, really. Well, so far as I know.
    I didn’t know much about Kitty’s background—or any of the other bunnies, come to that, because nobody really talked about their families. I mean, most of them probably went home for the odd Sunday and ate roast beef and tinned peaches and drank orangeade like I did with Grandma and Granddad. . . . What I mean is, once you were in the club you could leave all that behind and be a new person, and wearing the costume gave you this great feeling of confidence. Power, even. Mind you, those costumes, if they nipped you in a certain place, down the side, you’d get the most terrible stitch, and your feet . . . Of course, you had to be the right type to start with, I mean, you couldn’t take just any girl and make her into a bunny—there were masses of them who didn’t make it through the training.
    But the point is, we were all into what was happening in the here and now, not talking about the past. There were one or two quite posh girls when I was there, but I never felt looked down on—from what I could make out, they were doing it to get up their family’s noses anyway—but they did know more what the drinks were and things like that. I mean, I’d never tasted champagne or gin or scotch before I went to work at the club, and I remember the first time I walked in there, I couldn’t imagine there was anything more sophisticated in the world. And then I met Blanche, the Bunny Mother, and she was a vision of perfection and glamour, and I thought, she probably lives in a place like this. God, when I think of it now . . . I was so naive. But all I knew was my mum’s caravan and my grandparents’ semi in Horsham, because all my friends at school had the same. Not so much the caravan, because my mum—well, let’s just say she wasn’t quite like the other mothers. I didn’t have a dad, for a start. I wasn’t aware of that at first, but then I heard a few remarks and the kids in my class would talk about, oh, my dad did this or that, and I’d think, well, where’s my dad? I asked her—I suppose I was about seven—and all she said was, “Oh, you can forget about him, he’s dead.” I don’t know if that was true but it could have been, because I was a war baby. I think a lot of kids like me were given up for adoption, and I don’t really know why I wasn’t, but it might explain why I often had a feeling of being on probation, if you know what I mean. I remember once my grandma told me about shopping