The Year of the Ladybird by Graham Joyce Page B

She’ll live with one complaint in a hundred.’
    ‘Well, it’s a small thing.’
    ‘It’s fucking stealing, is what it is,’ Nikki said sharply.
    ‘Okay, okay. You’re right.’
    But she was exercised now. ‘The whole camp is run like this. Who gets the kickback for letting these girls come in? Pinky and Perky, that’s who.’ Perky I discovered was her pet
name for the man in the blue blazer who’d interviewed me while feeding sparrows from his desk. ‘Every promo you see on this site. Look at the little ponce who runs the arcade machine.
He sponsors the Bathing Belle prize. You’ll see why this afternoon. And the bookie who comes on Donkey Derby day to fleece the campers. He pays to get his nose in the trough. Why
haven’t you got a uniform that fits? Cos they budget for the gear but pocket it rather than give Dot the money she needs to kit us out. Everyone here has an angle.’
    ‘I don’t have an angle.’
    ‘Yes, you do.’
    ‘What’s my angle, then?’
    I didn’t get an answer. She slipped on her sunglasses and looked away from me.
    ‘All right then,’ I asked her, ‘what’s your angle?’
    ‘My angle is figuring out everyone else’s angle.’
    I do believe that Nikki was good at that. I studied her as she stared moodily over at the No. 6 girls moving through the tables.
    I felt a stir amongst the people around me. It was Tony – or was it Abdul-Shazam – making his way between the tables, cracking jokes, shaking hands. Before my conversation with Nikki
I would have said he was just doing his job, being a fun guy, giving everyone a laugh; but now I could see how he seemed to swell and feed and fatten on the attention until he seemed taller and
broader and shinier than everyone else in the room. I thought that it might be possible to do both things effectively at the same time.
    He took a chair at our table. ‘All sorted?’ he asked me, loudly enough for everyone around us to hear. ‘Signed all those boys up for the Foreign Legion? And did you get a date
with the winner of the Bathing Belle?’
    Nikki saved me from having to think of a smart answer. ‘He done brilliant.’
    Tony smiled. ‘Well, you must be good because Nikki hands out compliments like a Yorkshireman parts with his money. But don’t let it go to your head because she’s impervious to
all offers.’ Nikki was about to object but Tony threw his arms wide and burst into song, some old music hall thing about waiting forever for the girl of your dreams. He got a ripple of
applause for it.
    Nikki looked like she’d heard it all before too many times. She drained her coffee and picked up her clipboard. ‘Okay I’ll see you lovely boys later this afternoon.’
    Tony watched her go. ‘Pretty girl isn’t she, that Nikki?’
    ‘I’ll say.’
    ‘You will say. If she could just relax and whiten up a bit she’d be the perfect woman.’ I wasn’t sure if he’d said ‘whiten’ or ‘lighten’.
Tony ordered a coffee and another for me from a passing waitress. ‘Mind you, I can’t blame her.’
    ‘Why do you say that?’
    ‘You know something, David? The boys and girls here have taken to you.’
    I felt my cheeks flame.
    ‘They like your easy way with things,’ he went on. He was over-focused on me, not breaking eye contact for a second and I felt uncomfortable. ‘They like your style.
You’re also smart and they like that.’
    ‘But Nikki is smart, and so are some of the others.’
    ‘
Some
,’ he said. He gave me a huge smile. I noticed again that an element of the near-orange suntan was actually residual stage make-up. ‘You represent what the smart
ones aspire to. College and all that. But there’s no side on you. They expect you to be stuck up but you’re not and they like that.’
    Partly to deflect Tony’s embarrassing focus on me, I launched into a notion that I had about ordinary people who didn’t get a chance to go to college. I said that I met lots of folk
who should get the chance but