The woman begins to protest, in a whiny desperate voice. I push open the door.
I remember this. There’s a rest area, gently lit in pinkish tones, with several easy chairs and a sofa, in lime-green bamboo-shoot print, with a wall clock above it in a gold filigree frame. Here they haven’t removed the mirror, there’s a long one opposite the sofa. You need to know, here, what you look like. Through an archway beyond there’s the row of toilet cubicles, also pink, and wash basins and more mirrors.
Several women are sitting in the chairs and on the sofa, with their shoes off, smoking. They stare at me as I come in. There’s perfume in the air and stale smoke, and the scent of working flesh.
“You new?” one of them says.
“Yes,” I say, looking around for Moira, who is nowhere in sight.
The women don’t smile. They return to their smoking as if it’s serious business. In the room beyond, a woman in a cat suit with a tail made of orange fake fur is re-doing her makeup. This is like backstage: greasepaint, smoke, the materials of illusion.
I stand hesitant, not knowing what to do. I don’t want to ask about Moira, I don’t know whether it’s safe. Then a toilet flushes and Moira comes out of a pink cubicle. She teeters towards me; I wait for a sign.
“It’s all right,” she says, to me and to the other women. “I know her.” The others smile now, and Moira hugs me. My arms go around her, the wires propping up her breasts dig into my chest. We kiss each other, on one cheek, then the other. Then we stand back.
“Godawful,” she says. She grins at me. “You look like the Whore of Babylon.”
“Isn’t that what I’m supposed to look like?” I say. “You look like something the cat dragged in.”
“Yes,” she says, pulling up her front, “not my style and this thing is about to fall to shreds. I wish they’d dredge up someone who still knows how to make them. Then I could get something halfway decent.”
“You pick that out?” I say. I wonder if maybe she’s chosen it, out of the others, because it was less garish. At least it’s only black and white.
“Hell no,” she says. “Government issue. I guess they thought it was me.”
I still can’t believe it’s her. I touch her arm again. Then I begin to cry.
“Don’t do that,” she says. “Your eyes’ll run. Anyway there isn’t time. Shove over.” This she says to the two women on the sofa, her usual peremptory rough-cut slapdash manner, and as usual she gets away with it.
“My break’s up anyway,” says one woman, who’s wearing a baby-blue laced-up Merry Widow and white stockings. She stands up, shakes my hand. “Welcome,” she says.
The other woman obligingly moves over, and Moira and I sit down. The first thing we do is take off our shoes.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Moira says then. “Not that it isn’t great to see you. But it’s not so great for you. What’d you do wrong? Laugh at his dick?”
I look up at the ceiling. “Is it bugged?” I say. I wipe around my eyes, gingerly, with my fingertips. Black comes off.
“Probably,” says Moira. “You want a cig?”
“I’d love one,” I say.
“Here,” she says to the woman next to her. “Lend me one, will you?”
The woman hands over, ungrudging. Moira is still a skilful borrower. I smile at that.
“On the other hand, it might not be,” says Moira. “I can’t imagine they’d care about anything we have to say. They’ve already heard most of it, and anyway nobody gets out of here except in a black van. But you must know that, if you’re here.”
I pull her head over so I can whisper in her ear. “I’m temporary,” I tell her. “It’s just tonight. I’m not supposed to be here at all. He smuggled me in.”
“Who?” she whispers back. “That shit you’re with? I’ve had him, he’s the pits.”
“He’s my Commander,” I say.
She nods. “Some of them do that, they get a kick out of it. It’s like screwing on the altar or something: your gang are supposed to be such chaste vessels. They like to see you all painted up. Just another crummy power trip.”
This interpretation hasn’t occurred to me. I apply it to the Commander, but it seems too simple for him, too crude. Surely his motivations are more delicate than that. But it may only be vanity that prompts me to think so.
“We don’t have much time left,” I say. “Tell me everything.”
Moira shrugs. “What’s the point?” she says. But she knows there is a point, so she does.