Chim - Sleeping With A Broken Heart

CHAPTER 4

It’s half one in the afternoon and I’m alone in the studio. I rest my wrists on the keyboard, my fingers hesitate above the keys. ‘@Kimmi_W’ I type, and then pause. I have no idea what I should say next, and I suddenly realise that whatever I do type, two million other people will read, comment on and analyse. I click onto my DMs, ignoring the 1,043 unread messages, and type her twitter name again. sh!t. She doesn’t even follow me. Two million people and the only one I really want to talk to doesn’t care enough to even follow me on twitter. She probably doesn’t care what I think. I lean back in my chair, my head in my hands, and try desperately to forget about her, to not care about her. But I can’t get her face out of my head, I can’t forget her dilated pupils, like those of a hunted small animal. I swear under my breath. 

I have to find her again. 

I have to go back to the club. 

Tonight.

Kimberley’s POV

It was cold outside, bitter cold. I was almost glad to get into the club, where it was already hot and sweaty and crowded. In the dressing room I adjusted my shoes which tonight were a cheap, plastic pair of shiny red heels. “Like Dorothy’s” Sacha had said when I bought them. “Dorothy in ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ She killed the wicked witch.”

“Two minutes.” John, the club manager had poked his head around the dressing room door, but now he was gone. Leaning close to the mirror I slicked on some red lipstick and adjusted my outfit, tonight I wore a gold bra with a see-through black vest top and a tiny pair of sequinned black hot pants. I self consciously looked at my stomach, which was almost perfectly flat again. Silently I wondered at how it had just sprung back, so quickly that when, a only week after she was born, I asked John for my job back, he seemed surprised that I had ever had a baby. ‘Like elastic’ I thought.

“Come on” John was back. I stood and followed the other girls out of the room. ‘Showtime’ I thought.

The music was loud. So loud that I couldn’t think, all I could do was dance. The lights dazed me, they flickered confusingly around the room. I could only see a few feet around my own, tiny stage, the figures around the bar a few feet away were distant, blurry silhouettes. The men in heavy leather armchairs around the stage smelt of sweat and cheap alcohol and even cheaper aftershave. I was glad to have the pole. “”It gives you something to hang onto when the freaks try and drag you outta there” my mum had once said. I knew what she meant now. 

As I danced I scanned the faces of the men seated around me. Two old men, three regulars, a group of rowdy teenage boys, a lesbian hen party. I wondered calmly which I would go to a scummy hotel room with tonight. 

At midnight we had a break, and I left through the back door, thinking vaguely that I wanted a cigarette. The night was, like so many in big cities, starless and endlessly deep. I took off my shoes and walked slowly through the dark alley, passing the bins and skips, enjoying the freezing air on my sweaty skin and the feeling of the rough concrete in between my toes. 

I leant against the brick wall, suddenly realising that I didn’t have any cigarettes with me. I sighed, wondering what Cheryl bloody Cole would think of me if she could see me now. I wondered how much she hated me. ‘A lot’ I thought, ‘she’ll despise you.’ I tried to work out how I felt about this. Sad, I thought, sad and ashamed. But she followed me. Why? Maybe she didn’t believe me, maybe she just wanted to see it for herself. Have a laugh at the scummy hooker. This idea sent shivers down my back, and I tried to imaging Cheryl laughing in a cold, mocking way like the girls at school used to. I couldn’t. All I could see was her pretty little face, perfectly made up, smiling for the cameras on last Saturday night’s X Factor. I closed my eyes. 

I didn’t know why it mattered so much to me. She had more right than anyone in this world to hate me. She should hate me. She should hate me even more than I hated myself. But I didn’t want her to.

Behind me I heard the back door of the club slam closed. ‘It’s one of the other girls, I can ask her for a cigarette’ I thought, but I didn’t open my eyes. I just listened to her footsteps, light, tapping on the concrete. I still didn’t open my eyes. I could feel her body heat close to me. I could smell her perfume, expensive, beautiful, like wood smoke and fire and roses all mixed together. But I didn’t open my eyes. ‘Stop being stupid, you’re imagining it’ I told myself. I opened my eyes.

“Hello Kimberley” Cheryl Cole said shyly.