Our Kind of Cruelty(40)

She stood in front of me, her hand on a hip, so she jutted out at an unnatural angle. Her shoes were as high as all the others and her sparkling V was a bright pink. Her hair was jet black and fell in greasy waves around her face. Her make-up was smudged and she stank of sweat and coconut.

‘We get champagne.’ Her voice was heavily laden with an accent I took to be Eastern European.

‘OK.’

She ducked under the curtain again, but was back in a few seconds. Her breasts I noticed were small and empty and I saw the flicker of silvery stretch marks across her lower abdomen, the flesh puckered and grainy. She lit a cigarette as she stood over me, smoking it in short, angry bursts.

The curtain parted again and a man came in with a bottle that looked like the sort of sparkling wine Elaine might serve on special occasions, and two glasses on which I could see traces of finger marks. He was carrying a card machine which he thrust under my face. ‘One hundred and twenty-four pounds,’ he said.

I laughed. I could have laid waste to him with one punch but I guessed if I did it would be the woman’s fault, so I paid the absurd amount, my plastic skimming through the machine. The woman opened the bottle when he was gone, pouring out a glass which she handed to me.

‘Don’t you want one?’ I asked.

‘No, I don’t drink.’

I sipped at the liquid and it was as warm and sweet and disgusting as I’d known it would be. I put the glass back down.

‘What you want?’ she asked.

‘Nothing,’ I answered.

She glanced at the curtain. ‘I can dance, suck or fuck, or all three.’

‘No, really.’ I wasn’t sure I was ever going to find my way out of this place. It felt possible that life as I knew it had ended and there was no way back.

‘You have to pay whatever,’ she said.

‘That’s fine. What do you get most for?’

She looked at me like I was simple. ‘All three.’

‘How much?’

‘Five hundred pounds.’

I knew she was lying, but I didn’t care. ‘I don’t have any cash.’

She shrugged. ‘OK, three hundred.’

‘How much do you get of that?’

‘Fifty. And twenty for every bottle of champagne.’

I tried to hold her flickering gaze. ‘Get him back. Say we want another bottle of champagne and all three.’

She smiled at that and I saw her front teeth were chipped. She ducked out again but was back even more quickly. The man returned with another bottle and the machine. I swiped away ￡424 and wondered what Elaine could do with that sort of money.

‘Sit down,’ I said when he’d gone.

She shook her head. ‘I dance for you.’ I opened my mouth to tell her no, but she had already started, her body contorting and gyrating. She raised her hands above her head and I could see the shaving rash in her armpits and round her groin. She turned and the tops of her thighs were pitted and uneven, a large yellow bruise winking in the crease of her knee, another mid-way down her calf. Her hands were on her own body, kneading her non-existent breasts, her mouth pouted in an ‘O’. She came towards me and straddled me, dipping her face against mine, her mouth nipping against my ear. Her body felt slimy and I thought I would have to burn the clothes I was wearing.

And then I thought I was going to be sick; I felt the sensation rushing through my body, contorting my insides. Because I knew if V could see me now she would never forgive me.

‘Get off,’ I said. But the woman kept up her demented thrusting against me. ‘Get off me,’ I shouted, the need to stop what was happening now so imperative I wanted to scream.

I stood, perhaps more forcefully than I meant, because the woman shot backwards, her body landing against the wall of the booth, her head jerking. She whimpered and for a ghastly moment I thought her arm looked broken.

I went to help her up but she batted away my attempts, struggling to her feet on her own. We looked at each other in the flashing, smoky half-light.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I didn’t mean … I asked you to stop.’ I felt a strange desperation for her to understand that I wasn’t like the other men she had to deal with night after night.

But her lip curled as she walked past me and held the curtain to one side. ‘Your time is up,’ she said.



I felt surprisingly all right when I woke the next morning. I went on my run and my legs moved smoothly beneath me.

I thought of Stacey while I ran, a girl whom I’d been in the home with and who was brought back by the police one night for soliciting, a word she educated us in whilst the social workers discussed her with the uniformed men downstairs. She was fourteen and told us she’d already turned tricks; I fully believed her at the time, but wonder now if it was really bravado. She called it the family business and told us how her mother used to bring men back to the bedsit they shared and how she’d have to wait in the corridor. She’d ended up in care because one of the men had asked her mother how much Stacey cost and her mother had stabbed him. Stacey said she needed the money for the train fare as she wasn’t allowed to visit her mother in prison. I hadn’t thought of Stacey for years. She must be in her mid-thirties, too old probably to be a woman like I’d seen the night before, although I doubted life had turned out well for her.