She is already wearing her wig, with the fringe brushed forward over her face so that her brows and eyes are partly covered. Squatting over her bag, she pulls off her fake Uggs and pulls on a pair of peep-toe mules – easy to kick off when the need arises. She sheds her denim jacket and pulls her knee-length dress over her head. Tucks it all away into the bag, but leaves it open, ready for action.
I hate him, she thinks, but I have no choice. I can’t go back to sleeping rough again. It nearly killed me, last winter, before I found him. I need this room. He knows I need it. And shoplifting’s all very well for your daily essentials, but you never get more than a tenner for anything. What am I meant to do?
She stands up in hot pants and tube top, and steps back out into the street. It’s all quiet, down here. You’d never know you were two hundred yards from streets of bars and restaurants, the Old Vic theatre and a busy tube station tipping tipsy office workers who’ve stayed too long at Happy Hour on to their suburban trains. London is such a city of contrasts: one of those places where you can turn a corner and drop off the edge of the world. Where the IMAX cinema now stands used to be a subway full of the homeless known as Cardboard City. Back then the South Bank trendies would take mile-long detours to stay above ground.
These Dickensian mazes are perfect for her purpose. Rows of heavily restored black-brick cottages that sell for close on a million pounds, whose inhabitants come in and out by cab after dark, to avoid the dripping shadows under the railway arch. It’s dinky in the day, all potters and delicatessens and artisan bread, but once the wooden shutters close, it echoes. A significant advantage for her, for someone giving chase in shoes will drown out the sound of someone fleeing barefoot.
Two corners away from her bag, someone from some council past has planted a bench by a stunted tree: a sad little gesture towards recreational facilities for the echoing maze of the Peabody Estate behind. Cher once tried sleeping there for a few nights, which is how she knows that these roads are a shortcut for drunken men staggering through to the Embankment from the bars of Waterloo. She sits down, arranges her long legs, lights a cigarette and waits.
It doesn’t take long. He’s old – must be nearly thirty – and sweating slightly in his unbuttoned pinstripe suit. The tail end of a tie sticks out from a pocket, and he walks as though he’s trying to avoid the cracks in the pavement. Cher shifts around so he catches a good look at the lean length of her thigh, then looks up at the streetlight as he stops and looks again.
He crosses the road and sits himself down at the other end of the bench. It’s not a very long bench. She can smell the beer on him from where she sits. It’s a smell she remembers well.
He stretches one arm along the seat back in a parody of the casual, like a sixth-former in the cinema, and digs the other fist into his trouser pocket. She hears him breathe through blocked-up nostrils and feels him looking clumsily from the side of his eye.
He takes in a big whoosh of air and turns jerkily towards her as though he has only just spotted her. ‘Nice night,’ he says.
Cher shrugs, sucks on her fag and turns to look at him. She tends to keep the talking to a minimum during these transactions. He looks straight at her tits, then down at the imagined treasure between her thighs. ‘You all alone, then?’
It’s the sort of voice that puts her teeth on edge. A fat voice, full of plums and promising that its owner will soon be having to trade his suit up for a larger size. A voice that’s never had to struggle, that’s only slept outdoors on Officer Training Corps weekends. Cher pouts her frosted pink lips and shrugs again.
‘Are you, er… looking for company?’
Would it make any difference if I wasn’t? she wonders. And replies: ‘Sure.’
He almost starts dribbling. Christ, men. Are there any out there that don’t drool at the prospect of a feel? That don’t want to be at you with their poky fingers, to hump at you like a bull terrier? None that Cher’s met, anyway. The ones that are meant to take care of you are the worst, though. At least there’s an honesty to a transaction of this sort. At least he’s not telling her he loves her and talking about Little Secrets.
‘Have you got a place?’
What do you think this is, Shepherd Market? ‘No,’ she says. Nods over at the path that runs up the side of a language school. ‘That over there turns a corner round the back. Into a yard. We can be private there.’
She sees him look at the signage, conclude that a private education establishment can’t possibly be a trap. He turns back, blearily.
‘How much?’