Free Playing Around by Gilda O'Neill

could just about pass for a lemon slicer, and slapped it down – whack! – on the shiny wooden surface. ‘I don’t think I like your tone.’
    Mikey drained the rest of his drink. ‘Don’t be so fucking touchy.’
    Jeff raised the blade and touched it to Mikey’s pale, smooth throat. ‘Tell me, do you whiteys bleed the same colour as us
black bastards
?’
    ‘Jeff.’ Mikey put his hands up in surrender. ‘Don’t get aerated, mate. I’m upset, that’s all. Take no notice of me.’
    ‘No notice?’
    ‘I’m sorry. All right?’
    ‘You make me sick. Now clear off. If you’ve got any questions about the takings, you ask Mr Fuller.’
    Mikey stood up to leave.
    ‘Only I don’t think you will ask him, will you, Mikey boy? And let’s face it, you won’t exactly be going without, will you? Knowing your past form, you’ve got some rich old tart keeping you. Paying you for your services.’ Jeff stared at Mikey’s groin. ‘Ain’t there a name for blokes who do that?’
    Mikey shrugged down into his expensive tonic mohair jacket and sneered his derision. ‘You want to mind your own business, then perhaps you won’t get that nose of yours bashed in no more than it already is.’ He swaggered over to the door. ‘See you tonight.’ He turned and looked the other man up and down with slow contempt. ‘Jeffrey.’
    Angie felt like a star as she stepped out of the hairdresser’s with her glossy, conker-brown hair shaped into the very latest geometric cut.
    Dusty’s words were ringing in her ears. Her hair was a ‘perfect frame for her lovely green eyes’, and her ‘really pretty face’. Pretty!
    Jackie followed her out of the salon, with her shoulder-length fair wavy locks frosted to a pale, Nordic blonde and relaxed into a dead-straight, centre-parted style with a heavy fringe. Marcie’s colleague, Mojo, had achieved the look with the help of up-to-the-minute smoothing tongs and a styling brush, a bit different from the iron-and-brown-paper job that Jackie used at home.
    Mojo had insisted that it made her look just like Julie Christie.
    Marcie, the bemused junior stylist, had taken real care with Angie, and had made sure that Jackie was fitted in as well – as a favour to Terry – and kept insisting that everything was absolutely ‘no trouble at all’. Typical Terry, she had thought, as she had smilingly asked Mojo to help her out, he was always meeting these little girls and promising them the earth. She just wished he could actually carry out the promises himself sometimes. Mind you, she’d been a bit shocked at first, when she’d seen the state of the dark-haired one, but once she’d taken a closer look she realized the potential that Terry had seen in her. With a bit of know-how, she could be quite a stunner, far more attractive than her more obviously pretty friend. Terry had taste all right. But then that was probably why he owned a string of top salons around the world and why she was only a junior stylist.
    Jackie would never have admitted it to her friend, but she had been as terrified as Angie about going into the celebrated hairdresser’s. She had never met people called Dusty, or Mojo, or Marcie before, and they scared the life out of her. It was only because she had casually tossed the name Michaelton around in their conversation in the Wimpy, when she and Angie were planning her transformation, that she hadn’t been able to back out.
    She just hoped her nerve held out, now that they were going clothes shopping in Kensington Church Street, and that she would find the courage to actually go inside the trendy boutiques she had been frantically reading up about since she had rashly made all these promises to Angie.
    While Jackie took a deep breath, lifted her chin in the air, and prepared to hustle Angie into a terrifyingly trendy shop, with black-painted windows, a pulsating light show and throbbing music, Sonia was climbing into the taxi she had flagged down outside a boutique just a