It was the smoker’s cough that woke her, a ghastly rib-rattling hack that repeated itself for the first hour of every morning. Stephanie was glad that it wasn’t hers. Then she remembered that it belonged to Steve Mitchell, Anne’s husband, and this reminded her of where she was. On their sofa, in their cramped sitting room.
Headswim brought on a wave of nausea. She swallowed. Her throat was dry, her skull ached, her nose was blocked. Anne and Steve were arguing in their bedroom, shouting between the coughs. The radio was on, loud enough to compete with them. Stephanie tried to ignore the noise and the smell of burned toast. How many consecutive hangovers was this? How long was it since Keith Proctor had bought her coffee? Four days? Five?
She struggled to her feet and tiptoed to the window. The Denton Estate in Chalk Farm, on the corner of Prince of Wales Road and Malden Crescent, had one high-rise building with several smaller buildings crawling around its ankles. It was a cheerless place, an ugly marriage of vertical and horizontal construction, in possession of one saving grace. The high-rise, where Steve and Anne Mitchell had their small eighth-floor flat, was a grim tower of red brick, but the view to the south was spectacular, worthy of any Park Lane penthouse. Stephanie absorbed it slowly, panning over Primrose Hill, Regent’s Park, Telecom Tower and the city beyond.
She went to the bathroom and locked herself in. She sat on the edge of the avocado bath, clutching the sink, wondering whether she was going to throw up. Last night, there had been gin, then some hideous fluid that passed for wine – possibly Turkish – before other drinks, the quantities and identities of which were now a mystery. She had no recollection of returning to Chalk Farm. But she did remember the foreign businessmen at the hotel in King’s Cross and how they had plied her with alcohol and yapped at her in a language that made no sense. With their droopy moustaches, their hairy backs, their potbellies, their gold medallions and their cheap polyester suits, they offered no surprises. Stephanie was regrettably familiar with the type.
At least it had only been alcohol. On the night after her second encounter with Proctor, she’d gone to see Barry Green and traded Proctor’s money for heroin. She’d asked Green to inject it into her – a service he sometimes provided for his regular customers – but he’d refused.
‘No punter likes to shag a slag with puncture points in her arm.’
‘What do you care?’
‘Plenty, as it happens. I don’t want to have to explain to Dean West why I put one of his girls out of action.’
‘I don’t belong to Dean West. I don’t belong to anybody.’
Green always found it hard to deny those who waved cash at him and so Stephanie got her heroin, smoking it instead of injecting it. As she had anticipated – indeed, as she secretly demanded – it was too much for her system; she threw up and passed out. When she came round, she was on a stained, damp mattress in a dimly lit store-room on the premises adjacent to Green’s ticketing agency. She was surrounded by cans of chopped tomatoes, bags of rice, drums of vegetable oil. She smelt the vomit on her jacket and the stench made her retch.
Green was standing over her. ‘That’s the last time, Steph, you got that? Any more and you’re gonna develop a habit. Are you listening to me?’ He bent down and slapped her face three times before wiping her saliva off the palm of his hand on to her leg. ‘You already do enough damage to yourself. You don’t need this.’
‘You’re right,’ she’d croaked. ‘I don’t need any of this.’
Anne Mitchell made Stephanie another cup of coffee. There was barely room for both of them in the kitchen. They sat at the small table, a tower of dirty plates between them; on the top one, tomato sauce had hardened to a crust. The gas boiler on the wall grumbled intermittently.
‘Steph, we need to talk.’
Stephanie had sensed this moment coming since Steve had gone to work. He was a plumber, which seemed unfortunately ironic considering his numerous infidelities. Whether Anne was fully aware of the extent to which he was unfaithful was unclear to Stephanie, but she knew he cheated on her and that she tolerated it because it was better than the alternative. Anne had been a prostitute when Stephanie first came to London and believed, for no good reason, that without Steve she was destined to become one again. He was still ignorant of her history and, in her mind, Anne had convinced herself that his infidelity was the price she should pay for concealing her past from him.
‘It’s Steve,’ she said, staring into her mug.
‘That’s what it sounded like.’
‘I’m sorry. Did you hear?’
‘Just the volume. Not the content.’
Anne had been pretty once; fine-featured with strawberry-blonde hair and freckles on her cheeks. Ten years ago, her regular clients had taken her away for weekends and bought her gifts. But when Stephanie had first met her, just two years ago, and shortly before she met Steve, she was selling herself cheaply and indiscriminately, and still not making enough. Now, she just looked exhausted, fifteen years older than she really was, suffering from too little sleep and too much worry.
‘You said a night, maybe two. It’s almost a week now and –’
‘It’s okay.’
Anne scratched a sore on her forearm. ‘If it was up to me, you could stay as long as you like. But you know how he is.’
Stephanie knew exactly how he was. Steve might not have known she was a prostitute but he regarded her as one, or as something equally deserving of his contempt. He never overlooked an opportunity to grope Stephanie, or to press himself against her. On one occasion, when she’d been in the bathroom, he’d barged in and locked the door behind him. Anne had been asleep on the other side of the flimsy partition wall, which was why he’d whispered his instruction to Stephanie, as he dropped his trousers: ‘On your knees.’
Similarly, she’d whispered her reply. ‘You put that anywhere near my mouth and you’re going to end up with a dick so short you’ll need a bionic eye to find it. Now put it away and get out.’
Since that incident, Steve had been increasingly hostile towards Stephanie. Consequently, her visits to Chalk Farm had become less frequent. Stephanie never stayed anywhere for long. It was nine months since she’d paid rent for a room of her own, in a flat for five that was home to eleven. Since then, she had rotated from one sofa to the next, stretching the charity of her ever-decreasing number of friends on each occasion.
‘How long have I got?’
‘You can stay tonight.’
Anne’s expression suggested that it would be better for her if Stephanie didn’t.
Stephanie sat in the last carriage, where a bored guard amused himself by hanging his head out of the door every time the train pulled away from the platform, reeling it in just before the tunnel. The Northern Line was running slow. It took half an hour to get to Leicester Square from Chalk Farm.
Stephanie preferred Soho in the morning, when it was quieter, when street-cleaners and dustmen were the ones who congested the pavements, not tourists and drunks. She stopped for a cup of coffee in a café and recognized three prostitutes at a table. None of them appeared to recognize her. She sat at the counter with her back to them. In her experience, friendships and solidarity were scarce among prostitutes. In a world mostly populated by transients, one hooker’s client was another’s missed opportunity, so there was little room for sentiment.
She overheard their conversation. They were talking about a Swedish hooker who had been gang-raped after stripping at a drunken stag night. Stephanie had recognized one of the girls at the table in particular. She called herself Claire. She was a seventeen-year-old from Chester, or Hereford, or Carlisle, or any one of a hundred other English towns that offered total disenchantment to the teenagers who grew