11:59 Read online

  Please come to our party. Fun guaranteed.

  29 Warkworth Street.

  I don’t have much time to think about it. There’s a red mini-cab parked near the exit to the precinct and while I’m still yards away the driver winds his window down to shout in some brand of foreign accent, “Looking for taxi, boss?”

  On impulse I open his back door and say, as I stumble inside, “D’you know the way to Warkworth Street?”

  VII

  Eight minutes away from the city centre and ten quid lighter in the wallet I’m skulking down Warkworth Street, looking for number twenty-nine. The street is quiet, ordinary. They are large old semi-detached houses, not unlike the one I shared with half-a-dozen other students when I was at university, but these look better-kept on the whole, and quite private, with gates, little rectangles of front lawn, walls in between the adjoining houses about the same height as the gates. Some have trellis fencing and climbing plants or hedges that reach above the garden wall to give more privacy. They won’t come cheap, these properties. Suburbia.

  I have to work out which is twenty-nine from the numbers on the neighbouring houses because there’s no indication on the gate, and the front of the house is too dark to make out anything on the door or the wall next to it. One of the reasons this house is so dark is the height and thickness of the hedge surrounding the property, especially nearest the door where it must be seven feet high. I’m surprised their neighbour hasn’t complained. The hedge that runs along the side of the pathway to the front door is so thick I have to walk with one foot on the front lawn to stop the wet leaves brushing my shoulder.

  The other reason number twenty-nine is so dark I don’t figure out properly until I’m nearly at the front door step. Most of the other houses in this street have lights on behind one or more of their curtains, in the bay window downstairs, in the bedrooms, or both. At first I’m thinking that there must be nobody in twenty-nine, or maybe they’re having an early night, party over. But when I’m closer to the window I can see that there are some little chinks of light here and there. They’ve obviously got really heavy curtains or blinds. In fact they look like shutters. And when I’m right up to them I can see that the windows have little vertical bars, not on the outside but on the inside of the glass, like you sometimes see in commercial premises, especially in rough areas. What am I doing here? Didn’t I have enough the other night, being scared shitless by Bullet Head?

  At that moment the area where I’m standing is flooded with harsh white light, shock treatment for drunkenness. I’ve set off the security sensor above the front door. I’m every trapped animal in that instant before the kill – the rabbit in the headlights, the fox facing the pack, the mouse under the cat’s paw. Any second now the door will fling open for a guard dog to hurl itself at me. I stand transfixed. Nothing happens.

  Until it does. High in the corner where the bay window returns to the front of the house a CCTV camera moves and trains on me. The speaker of an entry phone mounted to the right of the front door crackles into life.

  “Who is it? What do you want?”

  Flight is not an option. The guard dog or a bullet would have me long before I reached the gate. I climb to the doorstep and put my mouth next to the grille of the phone, hesitant, unsure whether you have to push the button before you speak, or as you speak, or just say something to the voice (gatekeeper) that already knows you’re there. I turn to clear my throat like I’m used to in the studio but it’s still a croak when I speak at the grille. “’S Oliver. ‘Mmanuel asked me to come.”

  “Manuel? Who’s Manuel?” And a laugh. Distinctly. Is there a Fawlty Towers fan in the house? I relax a smidge.

  “E-mmanuel. Emmanuel. He invited me to the party. I have his card.” And I show it, accidentally at first to the speaker grille, then up for the camera to see, as if I’m half-surrendering.

  There’s an electronic buzz at the door jamb. I wait until the voice comes back on the phone, “Come in, Oliver” and I push at the door, which opens into a tiny porch, the kind of place you’d put your wet brolly. The inner door has decorative frosted glass, and I can see a figure behind. He reaches and turns the handle before I do, opening the door a fraction at first to check me out, then wider, beckoning me in to an ordinary passage at the foot of some stairs. What’s out of place is there’s a CCTV monitor on top of a table where you’d normally see a house plant or a family photo.

  I’d assumed the doorman would be black, like Emmanuel, but he’s sallow and skinny, wearing one of those ill-fitting grey suits that suggest either Primark or East European, and loose enough to whip a gun out easy.

  “Come through, welcome,” he says, smiling the way if a ferret could smile that’s how he’d do it. His accent confirms what I surmised from the suit. Allowing plenty of margin for error, definitely former Soviet Union. “Your first time here, yes?”

  “Yeah, but really I don’t…”

  My new Slavic friend opens a door to his right, saying “Please” in a manner that implies changing my mind would not be acceptable at this stage. I walk through into a low-lit front room that looks as if it really has been cleared for a party, a square of carpet in the middle and all the furniture round the sides. The chairs and sofas here, like the TV monitor in the hall, betray the difference between this and your average house. They all have that second-hand office reception look. Sitting as a group on three of them, nursing drinks, are some white guys, I guess in their forties, the kind of blokes you might see manning a stand at an engineering trade show. They glance at me briefly before they carry on with their slightly forced banter as Katie Melua fills in the pauses from a couple of speakers mounted on the fireplace wall.

  While I’m taking this in, another of the Russian mafia emerges from what I suppose would be the dining room if it was a family home, but here seems to be functioning as a bar, or at least the place where they keep the bottles and glasses. Drugs too, very likely. This new guy is in his shirt sleeves, and I’m relieved to see he doesn’t appear to be wearing a holster.

  “What can I get for you, sir, while you are waiting?” he says very politely, rubbing his hands in anticipation.

  “Er, vodka martini,” I say, surprising myself. I never drink vodka martini.

  Still wearing my outdoor coat I perch on the edge of a chrome-framed chair as far away from the trade show group and Katie Melua as I can, almost instinctively looking around for old copies of National Geographic Magazine, when both hirelings come back into the room through opposite doors, one bringing my drink, the other to say, “Gentlemen, we have some ladies free. Would you like to meet them?”

  Without pausing for an answer he pulls the door further open and makes an impatient gesture, ordering some laggard in from the hallway. Laggards plural, actually - five women in all, on absurdly high stilettos, entering the parade ring like reluctant show-horses, looking far from in party mood as he roughly lines them up near the window wall for our inspection. It’s no pyjama party either, despite the fact that every one of the women is wearing a flimsy, cheap-looking dressing gown; my hunch is they’re not wearing pyjamas or anything very much else on underneath. As if he could read my mind, Mr Primark Suit steps back, nods once at the girls and says, curtly, “Take off.”

  A jolt goes through me, rattling the ice cubes in my drink, as the dressing gowns fall to the floor more or less simultaneously, revealing the girls in their full nakedness. Another stab just under the heart as I recognise the girl on the extreme left of the line as my runaway from the lorry park. She is smaller and paler than the rest, though all but one would be categorised as racially white, none over twenty-five, and something about each of them (a cheekbone here, the curve of a bare shoulder there) that tells me no-one in the line is British. I‘m being very polite and English, looking and not looking, so it takes me a full minute to notice that the one black woman has shaved off her pubic hair, or has had somebody shave it on her behalf.

  The barman appears from behind me to take on the
role of huckster. “Please make your choice, gentlemen. More than one if you wish, but you understand that costs a little more.”

  Among the three blokes on the other side of the room, the ginger one with the single earring stirs and whispers to his mate, who laughs as he looks sideways at the girls. I can see freckly blotches on the hand the whisperer is using to cover his mouth.

  “Sir?” says the barman, as if he’s been asked a question. Ginger fires one at him, shocking me but I couldn’t speak for the rest of the room.

  “Which one has the tightest cunt?”

  He gets an oily smile in reply, and the answer he might have been looking for. “Please. Free to test.”

  I don’t know if I’m more astonished by the crude audacity of ginger bloke - who swaggers up to the line and starts working his way right to left, jamming one hand between each girl’s legs and clamping on her buttock with the other – or the indifference (encouragement, I should say) of the brothel-keepers to this manhandling of their goods, or the lack of complaint from any of the women, who stand there mutely, just the odd twitch of a facial muscle giving any clue to how they’re feeling while he carries out his examination on them.

  As he reaches the second-last girl in the line, I jump up and rush towards him. It’s my intention to drag the guy away and smack him in the mouth, but to be honest I get spooked by Mr Primark, who again seems to be reading my mind and moves from his place near the doorway as if to cut me off. I hold my hand up to placate the bodyguard, then drop it to brush against the hand of little miss runaway on the end of the row. It’s the lightest of touches, but she shivers as if someone’s walked over her grave. I try to reassure her with my eyes before I turn to the pimp and call out, a little too earnestly:

  “I’ve made my choice. Could I… meet this young lady, please?”

  It sounds such a ridiculously quaint thing to say in the context of what’s just gone on, as if David Copperfield has wandered onto the set of a hardcore movie, and it provokes a rasping “Fuck me” from ginger bloke, who’s at my shoulder now, but I’ve managed to keep his paws off my woman, first objective, and now at last I’ve a chance to find out who the hell she is.

  The girl picks up her dressing gown and robes herself modestly while the Slav in the suit opens the door to the staircase. As we pass he places a hand on my chest and I freeze, expecting to be frisked or thrown out, but instead he relieves me of my coat, hanging it up alongside a row of others in the passage. He bends his head to hiss into my ear, “Fifteen minutes only. Do what you will.”

  At the foot of the stairs the girl pauses to peel off her stilettos (don’t run away) before she leads me quietly up, carrying the shoes in one hand and holding the banister with the other as if, like a small child, she is not fully confident climbing the stairs.

  We go past the first floor, where there seem to be more doors than there can possibly be rooms, and follow a narrower flight to the top of the house. The doors and frames are unpainted, and again the arrangement seems odd – two doors side by side on a wall that looks as if it fronts just one room, and both with bolts on the outside, more what you would expect to see on a storage shed than an entrance to a bedroom. My girl turns the handle of the door on the right, and solves one of these mysteries for me. Her room is tiny, just the smallest of single beds and a low wooden cabinet that doubles as a bedside table, fitting pretty much exactly between the bed and what is obviously a stud partition wall that has made the original larger bedroom into two. The same must have been done to the rooms further down, with the same end in mind – double the fucking-cells.

  There’s a very small high window, almost a skylight, which has been halved by the partition so that only one narrow pane is available this side of the wall, and you would have to kneel up onto the tatty furniture to see out. Like the others I’ve seen in the house, this window is barred, and there’s no obvious way of opening it to let air in or out. I notice this because of the staleness that has me gagging slightly as I close the door behind us – a soup of male sweat, lingering alcoholic farts and whatever chemical odour is seeping from the inadequate room-freshener that’s sitting on top of the cabinet.

  I’m looking down on the shabby blanket thrown roughly across the bed, wondering what (whose) spots and stains might be hiding underneath, when the girl reaches into the pocket of her dressing gown, turns to hand over what she’s taken out, and speaks to me for the first time. Another East European accent.

  “You wear, please. Please.”

  The second please is plaintive, and she slightly squeezes my wrist as she says it. I can still feel the thrill of her touch after she has moved away to position herself demurely on the bed, her bare feet half-tucked under the top of the blanket as if she is feeling the cold. She is unknowingly, achingly seductive. It’s only the clinical functionality of the condom sachet she has placed in my hand that keeps me grounded and keeps her (here’s ironic) safe from my lust. That and the hollow anxiety in her eyes. I sit at the foot of the bed.

  “Don’t worry… Listen, I’m not going to do anything to you.”

  If I thought that would relax her I couldn’t be more mistaken. She is immediately agitated, leaning forward, almost begging. “No, no, you must make sex with me, please. I have to do it with you.”

  “You don’t have to do anything…”

  “Yes, yes. I’m sorry you don’t like me, but please, please I’ll be good. I’m not so ugly…”

  “You’re lovely, beautiful, honestly…”

  “Is it that thing? You don’t have to wear, jo. No johnny is OK. Please don’t tell them I said you had to wear. Just if you want I say. Anything is OK, please.”

  She opens her dressing gown and lies back on the bed, eyes closing, submissive, her buds inviting. I’m throbbing, straining against the temptation to fling myself on her. Do what you will, the man downstairs had said. I have permission. She has given me permission, she’s begging me to fuck her. But her lower lip is trembling and her hands, stretching the gown open to give me access to her naked body, are gripped tight on the material.

  I lean across the bed and place my hands over hers, gently drawing them together until the folds of the robe close over her again. She lies there motionless, her eyes shut as I study her face, drink it in rather. Her mouth has stopped trembling now and she looks even paler than before. If it wasn’t for the slight tension at the corners of her eyelids she could be asleep, or dead. Die young, stay pretty Debbie Harry sang. I’m still watching, turning the words of the song over in my head, when a tear escapes from one closed eyelid and trickles over the slight mound of her cheekbone. I put a forefinger on her cheek to arrest it, and she opens her eyes to look at me.

  “They’ll punish me if I don’t make sex with you,” she says.

  “Who’s going to tell them? Not me.”

  Her pretty face crumples and she’s sobbing real tears now, but quietly, afraid of the spying house, her breast bone vibrating with the effort of keeping her grief in. I move further on to the bed, lying with her, and risk terrifying her as I bring her close to me, tucking her head into my shoulder, smoothing her narrow back with my free hand. She doesn’t panic though, even responds in a child-like way by nestling into my embrace and letting the tears gradually subside. The waft of cheap scent around her triggers a long-buried memory of my younger sister (was she seven or eight?) experimenting with rose water, dabbing it behind her ears and on her neck.

  We lie like this without speaking for several minutes until we’re disturbed by noises from the other side of the partition. That red-haired bastard probably, or one of his cronies, having his way with his selection from the line. At one point they bump heavily against the stud wall and my girl winces. I find her hand and squeeze it. “Don’t worry.”

  She opens her eyes and looks at me miserably. I stroke her hair and whisper near her ear. “Let’s talk a little. Then we don’t have to listen. To them, I mean,” and she smiles, understanding the correction.

  “My name is
Marc,” I say softly. “That’s my real name. The men downstairs think I’m called Oliver, it doesn’t matter why.”

  “Secret identity,” she whispers in return and I can’t help chuckling at that, her accent being so perfect for an old James Bond film.

  “Marc,” she repeats to herself, to get it right or, I’m hoping, to remember it. “I am Edona.” I want to fall in love with her just for her name.

  “Edona, I came here to find you.”

  She looks at me quizzically, and even as I say it that other me inside me is scornful. Oh, yeah? Is that the reason you asked the cabbie to bring you to Warkworth Street? Not because the girl in the pub got you feeling randy? Not for the promise on the card? Just for this girl? And why? She’s special because…? What do you want from her? What do you expect to give?

  “I saw you,” I tell her. “Last week.” (Was it only last week?) “You were climbing out of a lorry.” Edona looks puzzled. “A lorry. A truck.”

  “Ah, kamion. Truck. Too many trucks. It’s my story.”

  “You tried to run away. Emmanuel caught you.”

  The hand at my chest stiffens. She looks up at me, startled. “You know Emmanuel? Don’t send him to me. Please don’t send.”

  “Relax. I don’t know him. I just met him one time. He’s not a friend, I don’t know any of them. I’m here to be your friend, that’s all.”