The elaborate jangle of the mobile phone and flashing screen of Trisha's mobile made the elegantly dressed woman reach over onto her dressing table. Surprisingly, it was Nikki.Unless it was business or a dire emergency, Nikki never went out of her way to contact her these days. To her mind, that last row with Nikki was her being stupidly nostalgic about the old times and had only increased the tension between the two of them. Her best course of action was to let Nikki stew on it before she bowed to the inevitable and joined the twenty first century. Nikki had always been pig headed and belonged to the era when women metaphorically chained themselves to the railings for gay rights. There was no point in confronting her as it would only antagonise her further. Her point of view was so passé, these days, she sighed as she reached for the phone.
"Trisha, it's Nikki," She clarified unnecessarily. "I thought I'd come in tonight."
"Well, this is a surprise. It isn't your night in case you are forgetting." Her cool tone of voice verged on the patronising. Lately, it seemed to her that in her laid back ladylike fashion, she was providing most of the input into running the club.
"This is special. I've got one or two things I wanted to talk over with you."
A warning note sounded in Trisha's mind at Nikki's deliberately flat, expressionless voice. She knew Nikki of old and there was more in this than met the eye. Presumably, this was going to end up as another ding-dong row. She only hoped that it wasn't going to detract from her work tonight in running the club and that the bar staff weren't going to find more to gossip about. She liked soap operas so long as they did not actually enter her life.
She agreed and hung up. Then she reached for her nail varnish and ran her eye over her extensive wardrobe to choose her outfit for the night. It was important to make a proper appearance.
Nikki walked down the sidestreet in exactly the same path she had trodden for years, broken of course by her life changing three years in Larkhall. It was funny to think but a whisper in her mind was beginning to add the three words "first time around." She walked through the doors of the club and hesitated in the foyer and looked upwards at the way the staircase swept upwards to the office where she and Trisha worked. This was, after all, what she had slaved to set up working all days and nights for a period in her life to put together some of the capital to buy the club. Some of the furnishings were according to what she and Trisha had lovingly decided between them. She shivered. That was another person in another time that did all that, not Nikki as she was now. She was saying her final mental farewells with no time or reason for regrets for what she must do.
"Ah, Nikki, did you have any luck in finding a replacement for Rhiannon. I can't think why she decided to leave overnight. You didn't say anything to her to put her off so that she left. You can come down a bit harsh on some of the new girls."
Nikki knew. An old friend of hers had secured a job for her in the local "Starbucks" several hundred yards down the main street. It meant seeing the hours of daylight even if the pay wasn't much. At least serving at tables and pouring their many brands of coffee meant that the strongest drug around was caffeine. She shrugged her shoulders in mute answer to Trisha's grand dame manner. This was the last time she would be able to behave that way as she took a seat in her favourite chair, sitting opposite Trisha.
"Still looking," Nikki said laconically. "I phoned round all the employment agencies the other day but no luck."
"This isn't like you, Nikki not to find a new barmaid by now. This is, after all, London, where there are loads of hard up students who need some extra money."
Nikki tensed up inside. Trisha's form of aversion therapy was making it more and more easy for her to say her goodbyes.
"Must be the National Union of Students to blame."
Trisha started to get on edge from the cold tone that was creeping more and more into Nikki's voice.
"I don't understand."
"You know. I've told you that this place is becoming a Mecca for drugs. Perhaps word has got about and they're passing word round for none of them to touch this place with a bargepole. You start to wonder when, as you said, I could get hold of a new barmaid easily enough."
Nikki's lips were firmly compressed together and Trisha, in her cool way, was starting to get annoyed.
"Still, that's not what I wanted to talk to you about, Trisha. Remember?"
The other woman's eyes started to glaze over in incomprehension and only Nikki's acid prompt made her remember the earlier conversation. She had so much to do these days that it was easy to forget odd conversations, so she reasoned to herself. That flicker in her eyes told Nikki everything, how she rated in Trisha's scale of importance. They had long since ceased to be lovers but Nikki thought resentfully that Trisha ought to have a better memory than this. She was owed that much. Just before she spoke again, she had the uncanny feeling as if she were finally pressing hard on the plunger that set off the explosion.
"I wanted to tell you, Trisha, that I'm not going to carry on working the club with you anymore. I've come to the end of the line and I'm moving on."
The quiet words seemed to paralyse Trisha and made her feel that a jolt of electricity had just run through her. It all seemed unreal to her that Nikki had said this. It was only a minute or two later that she at last found her voice."
"So you want your P45, Nikki?"
"That just about says everything. You're the boss and I'm just the hired hand except for old times sake and my share in the club."
"Why didn't you say this before, Nikki? We could have talked."
"Christ, don't you remember? I yelled at you for long enough but there's more to it than that."
"What do you mean?"
Nikki closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Now she had an alternative job, all the resentments that she had bottled up threatened to splurge out on one stream but what would that achieve? What could she say to this stranger with who she had once shared her life and love and for whom she had killed a policeman who was on the point of raping her? This woman was more elegant, closed in and with whom she had nothing in common except a shared past.
"You're looking at the new wing governor of g Wing at Larkhall Prison. I start my training course this Monday."
Trisha burst out laughing. This was the woman who she remembered had badmouthed all the screws and had been public enemy number one. She remembered when Nikki had reeled out of the dock and she had flung her arms round her. She couldn't wait to get out of the court and say good riddance to two of the screws. What on earth had she taken it into her head to volunteer to go back there, on the wrong side of the fence as well? She couldn't see Nikki carrying a bunch of keys, doing a ridiculous nine to five job, answerable to bosses when she had spent a lifetime being her own woman, living alongside women who liked only women. Why bother leaving the party just when it was really getting going and earning them real money. Business was getting better than ever.
"I mean it, Trisha. I've had the interview when they've known exactly everything there is to know about me and they've accepted me. Tonight is my last night and that's why I've come to work here one last time."
"So you plan to walk out of here and sit back, claiming your 50 of everything I earn while I work my butt off every night?" Trisha spat out spitefully. It was dawning on her that Nikki really had got the job that she said. She didn't need the club and, inexorably, the argument was shifting to arguing on her severance package. "If I do all the work, you don't get the money, darling."
"I wouldn't expect to drain you for the rest of your life, Trisha," Nikki urged patiently. "I simply want you to buy my share off me and everything you earn is yours. I'm not about to take you for a ride. I simply want what's mine."
"Huh. That won't come cheap," Trisha glared.
"It won't matter in the long run. In the end, you'll have all the profits to yourself instead of splitting them with me. You'll be all right."
Trisha fell silent as the implications of this started to whizz through her mind. A little voice started to tell her that her position wasn't as impossible as she first thought. She started to ask herself how and why Nikki had made this totally mad decision. In a flash, she thought she had the answer.
"It's Helen, isn't it. I could swear blind that she's never been keen on you working here with me and this is her way to finally detach us from anything in common."
"Don't be stupid, Trish," Came the contemptuous reply. "I have been asked to go for this job and when I told Helen, she freaked out at the idea. I had to talk her into the idea, as she was scared for my sake and hers. You can forget your adolescent ideas."
"I still can't see you, of all people, locking up women for a living," Trisha snapped with equal contempt.
"You know, I'll probably lock up women who've got into drugs from going to this place. They'll get themselves a nice big habit and a nice little record to go with it."
There was real anger and contempt looking out of Nikki's eyes and it started to make Trisha feel uncomfortable.
"Well, I'll have to think this over and you'll do what you have to do. You know I can't agree to buying you out just like that."
"Those have been the first sensible words I've heard you say tonight."
" I suppose this really is the parting of the ways."
"I guess it is," Nikki answered, as Trisha seemed curiously enough to be ahead of her emotionally.She glanced round this room, her eyes picking out the things that were definitely hers. She would have to come in on Sunday and take the emblems of her past life with her. "I'm not going to kid myself that this place won't fall apart with me gone. When I was inside, you ran the business without my help. What you did once, you'll manage to do again. As you say, times have changed and it isn't special to me anymore, only for what it once meant to me."
"Even I remember them when I have the time to think about them." For the first time, Trisha's voice was unsteady. It crossed her mind that Trisha had been secretly holding onto the thought that eventually Nikki would come back to her.
"You know, the one unselfish act in your life was when we were in the club that night I was released and Helen came over to talk to me and lost her nerve. I'll be forever grateful to you that you pushed me away in her direction. Without that, I might never have ended up with her despite everything."
Nikki looked at this woman who was a little more lost in her lifestyle than she ever cared to admit. At last, she felt a little sorry for her. She had chosen what she would do with her life while Trisha floated along, rudderless, giving herself over to the tides of commercialism and the insidious infiltration of the drug barons into her club.
"Do you know how many times I wish I hadn't. Come on, we've got a club to run. It's your last night and we must make it a party to remember."
Suddenly, the booming, thumping bass notes started up of the dance music that Nikki would never get out of her head. It was like her heartbeat. The lights clicked on and pervaded the club with that aura for everyone that tonight would be the night of excitement and endless possibilities. It seemed that way to Nikki when she was so much younger and she went to her very first gay club and was tantalised by the sight of all the women on the dance floor. Now she was older and the party was done, she thought to herself as her steps took her down the wide staircase. She might as well pretend to herself and to others just one more time.