How to Be Bad Read Online Free

hip, but he used words like “tart,” words that even your parents would consider old-fashioned.
    â€œShe was a teenager,” I reminded him. “Of course she was going to be flattered when her favorite teacher took a shine to her. She’s twenty-three now. People do grow up, Andy—present company fucking well excepted.”
    He sulked for a while, then tried to get his own back. “I’ll tell you something about Caro, shall I? Something you didn’t know. She used to take the piss out of you behind your back.”
    â€œNo, she didn’t. Other kids might have done. Bastards like you. Not Caro.”
    â€œMadden, I’m telling you. Even when you were seeing her, she found you rather amusing. And I don’t mean in a nice way. She used to call you Madeline.”
    â€œBullshit.”
    For a few seconds, Wallace looked at me the way comrades-in-arms look at each other in old war movies, just before they go over the top and get shot to fuck. “Mark?” he said.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œPromise me you won’t call her.”
    â€œWhy? What’s it to you?”
    â€œJust promise.”
    â€œAll right, all right. I promise.”
    As soon as I got home, I called her.

CHAPTER 2
    ABOUT A GIRL
    T HE VERY next night, just before eight, I drove to Caro’s address on Kew Road. She lived in a first-floor flat overlooking Kew Gardens. A black BMW Sportster was parked in the drive, next to which my Fiat Uno looked like a car for cautious old ladies. Feeling scared and excited, I rang the bell. Caro, now minus her plaster cast, came down to open the door. She placed her hands lightly on my shoulders and greeted me with those fake kisses so beloved of middle-class women.
    We walked to the restaurant on foot, close but not touching. It was a mild but windy night in early February. Litter and dead leaves spun around our feet as we walked. I complimented her on the BMW. “You must be doing all right for yourself, to drive a car like that.”
    Caro laughed rudely.
    The restaurant was that French one at the shitty end of Kew Road. Our table was in the window, giving passersby an excellent view of my appalling table manners. The people around us were all rich and well groomed. In my slightly idiotic best clothes, I blended in rather well. “Have you been here before?” I asked her.
    â€œNo. Have you?”
    â€œA few times. It’s the second-best restaurant in Richmond. The first is an Indian place called the New Manzil. You know it?”
    â€œIs that the place where they give you free wine?”
    â€œYeah. And those cute little matchboxes with elephants on them.”
    I suddenly became aware of the Muzak softly playing in the background. “Listen,” I said. “They’re playing our song.”
    To our amusement and distaste, it was a Mantovani arrangement of “Fuck Me but Don’t Fuck With Me” by Sol Horror. The song that had been playing at that first party when Caro had puked all over me. The song that brought us together.
    â€œIt’s an omen,” I joked.
    â€œI doubt it,” said Caro.
    The neighboring table was occupied by a leering white-haired man and a woman who was young enough to be his daughter but nowhere near ugly enough.
    â€œLook at that,” said Caro in a loud voice. “Beauty and the beast. She’s got her whole life ahead of her, but so what? She’s broke. He’s promised to leave his wife for her, and with her body, it might just be worth it. At the moment, his money is the only aphrodisiac she needs. But I wonder how sexy he’ll seem when she’s forty and he’s seventy-five and peeing his pajamas.”
    Caro may have looked like a more beautiful version of her former self, but the feeling she gave off was very different. At seventeen, despite her pretensions to cool, she had been as appalled and bewildered by the world as me. Now, unless it was an act, she gave