On a Sunday morning, Helen found it common enough for a dog tired Nikki to slip into her bed in the early hours in the morning and to sleep in late from her turn at a Saturday night at the club. She knew not to disturb her and that Nikki only became human after a painful period of resurrection to become her normal self. This time, her tousled hair emerged from under the duvet but her expression was grim as Helen handed her a steaming hot mug of coffee. There was also an ugly purple bruise round her eye.
"Jesus, Nikki, whatever happened to you? You should have woken me up," Helen exclaimed in shock.
"Well, I won't spin you the usual line that I walked into a door," Came the reply with her patented understated graveyard humour. "I got something from the medicine cupboard, as I didn't want to disturb you. It isn't as painful as it looks. Really."
"You're sure?" Helen looked doubtfully but not wanting to make too much fuss.
"This cup of coffee is fine and I could do with a cigarette. I need something like this after last night's drama."
Helen was beginning to sense that there was a lot more to it than a black eye and that Nikki's emotions were full to the brim and wanted to talk. She knew that the right thing to do was to be all ears and wait for Nikki to spill the beans.
"Did you get that from a rough night at the club?"
"You can say that again." Nikki winced at the memory and took a swig from the coffee mug while her thoughts spewed out. "It's not easy keeping your eyes open while the party's going and the place is packed out on a Saturday night. The money's good and the place is doing better than ever. The only problem is the gang of kids that have started to come around in recent months. Sure everyone's out for a good time on a Saturday night as I know way back when. It's different these days……."
Helen resisted the temptation to make light of it and joke about Nikki getting old. Sure, the years were passing for all of them but Nikki was Nikki and remained as open minded as she had always been and yet sticking rigidly to a set of beliefs which she would not compromise for love nor money. She had grown up mature for her age without the need to keep up with superficial trends.
"How different?"
Nikki was grateful for the way that Helen reacted very quickly to every minor shift of her moods and could read her mind. That was how they first connected.
"A lot of the old customers were friends who I grew up with. The place was more like a big family. More and more of them move away or just stop coming and those that replace them are kids that just want to get out of it as quickly as possible. They've read too many bloody celebrity magazines so they want to use alcohol to knock away any trace of civilised behaviour to become argumentative, and let all that nasty side of them to come out ….."
All Nikki's anger and contempt boiled over at this point to Helen's horror. Nikki had always tended to minimise any sense of her own personal danger and this was new to her.
"…..They behave like the Peckham Boot Gang only they wear up to the minute designer dresses with lots of money to throw away. You watch current affairs programmes of that sort of thing happening outside straight clubs and it's creeping in at mine also and I don't like it."
"So you're saying that the world's changing for the worse and away from the standards that you believe in."
Nikki smiled gratefully at Helen for the understanding, The last thing she wanted to sound like was a Disgusted of Tonbridge Wells coming out with a load of reactionary dogma, the sort of beliefs that she had spent her life fighting against in various forms. Now she looked back on it, everything blended into one, running up against the authority figures at her boarding school when she and her first girlfriend were found out and standing up against the vicious homophobic remarks that Bodybag and Fenner used to come out with. She never hated the prison system on principle, only the sort of petty minded people that worked in it who were no different to the sort of people you might bump into on the street. Yet she saw these young kids and she started feeling sympathy for their mothers. That was a turn up for the book, she thought bitterly, to feel that way for the ultimate authority symbol who had been instrumental in casting her aside when she was young.
"It was late last night that it all blew up. I saw a bunch of them start to pick an argument with one of the barmaids and quietly and politely asked them to leave it out. I got some cheek from one of them but I thought no more about it as they backed off. It happens from time to time and I didn't expect any more trouble. It was only when I was closing the doors and three of them came from nowhere and started getting really mouthy and it started getting dangerous. I pushed a couple of them out of the club and one of them took a swing at me and I didn't move back quickly enough. That started off a right tussle when round the corner came a couple of policemen. I shouted at them to come over when they pretended not to notice what was going on."
"Why the hell was that? You are an ordinary law abiding citizen who is entitled to have police protection?" Helen stormed with anger.
Nikki smiled fondly at Helen. It was so like her to be more than ordinarily defensive of her rights and expected her to be treated as equal as anyone in the land, queen or commoner. It was a pity life didn't work out like that.
"Police have long memories, Helen. They remembered that I killed one of them. It doesn't matter to them that I finally had the slate wiped clean. Take a line through the way the likes of Fenner and Bodybag will be only too ready to hand out their type of justice. Remember that time you sent me down the block and I ended up in strips."
Those words sunk in. Helen remembered and understood only too well.
"So what happened."
"Somehow even though my eye was hurting like hell, I called out to them very politely and told them that if they let those three go down the street and attack some other innocent passer by, then it will be on their head. I took a leaf out of your book and I lectured them very nicely in my best imitation Wing Governor's style of their public duties and responsibilities. It's interesting that if you pitch it right, even the thickest and most pig headed copper will get the message and jump to it. They slipped the handcuffs on the three of them and bundled them into the nearest police van. I thanked them very graciously, being very understanding of how they must be really stretched on Saturday nights."
Helen grinned broadly at Nikki's account in the way she shifted her approach around showed how versatile and resourceful she was in an emergency. She knew very well that force of personality and semi-official status, which she could assume as a prisoner. Having spent the last few years out of prison and having daily responsibility for the running of her own place only sharpened up her skills.
"This goes further than just a bad night at the club, doesn't it Nikki."
A huge feeling of relief that ran through Nikki gave her the strength to push on with what most troubled her, deep down.
"I'm looking at what I'm doing and I can't see myself running a club for the rest of my life. In fact, I need a change of job as soon as I can get one, a regular nine to five job where I get the recognition I deserve for what I can do. I did Open University at Larkhall and I ought to make proper use of my degree."
The precisely formulated words fell out of Nikki's brain, fully formed. Helen realised that this was a pivotal moment in their lives.
"What do you want out of life, Nikki."
"Well, for a start, having all the time in the world to grow old with you, Helen and spend more nights sleeping with you than we get the chance to with the insane hours of my job."
Nikki's wide smile revealed the unashamed romantic that she had always been and Helen gently stroked her perfectly formed hands.
"That sounds like paradise to me, Nikki." Her soft Scottish accent caressed Nikki gently without the need for the touch of her fingers.
" I would like enough money to pay my share of the bills, enough for clothes, the odd holidays and more books that I haven't read and music that I haven't heard though I don't get as much time as I would like to read or listen….." Nikki started slowly on a more serious note starting with the more trivial and inconsequential as a way of leading her way into what was deepest on her mind.
"What I don't want is living the luxury life that Trisha wants to lead. I'm not really into money like she is. She was honest about it when we talked business yesterday. She wants to use the club to make money and sod the social consequences. That's when I decided that we don't even have anything in common professionally any more."
"I want to be able to have a job where I can do some good in this world, like yours," Nikki added after a long pause.
Helen smiled. Those were her own very favourite words even before she ever joined the prison service. Nikki wasn't copying her but speaking from her own independently worked out ideas. It was simply that their thoughts and their love which had come together.
"I envy you, Helen. Every day, you can go to work and you are directly involved in trying to make individual's lives better. All I'm asked to do is to act as bouncer and talk about theme nights which I really don't give a toss about."
Helen's smile faded. Nikki had a romantic view of her day to day job which, out of professional discretion, she couldn't talk about. She felt as if she were in a losing battle with her most difficult patient. Nikki's battle was a desperate encounter, alone on a late night darkened alley with three vicious women and a couple of policemen who were prepared to turn a blind eye to their duty. Hers was her desperate attempt to fix her certain eyes with his wavering will, at sixes and sevens with himself. Each time he came in, he greeted her with the shrug of indifference, that air of going to see her only to be sure of his prescription which she knew he would sell for the vilest quality of street heroin which he injected into himself. His story was one that he grew up with a mother who may have given him what he wanted materially for him but one who was never there for him when he needed her. He complained that his mother was hard, unsympathetic and demanded the best out of him, more than he could deliver. She could never recognise when he was scared though Helen suspected that at times like that, he came over as a truculent, aggressive adolescent who appeared to shrug off his mother. There was a childish element to him who would never accept responsibility for what mistakes he had made in his life. He was well enough educated to know better but Helen's bitter experience was that this was no guarantee of anything. He had gone to university but had dropped out and had got into that hopeless spiral in his lack of self worth, having too much time on his hands and the friends whom he sought approval on pulling him into the drug scene. She had tried all sorts of approaches and they were obviously failing. Every time she saw him, he looked rougher and more neglected than the time before. All the same, Helen knew that she had that recognised authority which Nikki had not really got. Running a gay club gave her responsibility but Helen knew that Nikki wanted to move on in her work and be closer to her. For months there had been hints from Nikki that she was half aware of, that her heart wasn't really in her job, only her determined commitment to carry on what she had started and her pride in contributing her honest half share of money to their union.
"While you started the club , you did it to fight a cause, didn't you. The money was helpful but incidental. You want a different cause to take on, don't you."
Nikki nodded, tears of gratitude running down her face at this extraordinary woman who was that soul mate she had spent her life searching for. Her arms reached out to clasp this beautiful woman to her though she gingerly avoided Helen's cheek to come too close to her eye, which was still tender.
"That's exactly it, Helen," She whispered into Helen's ear while her hair brushed her face. "That's what I want out of life."
Somehow, everything made sense. The only thing she needed to do was to find this job.