She found a job dishwashing in a dirty roach-infested diner, and worked there, keeping her head down, not making friends, trusting no one. Her hands grew red-raw from hot water and detergent, and her guts churned constantly. She was beginning to think that coming here had been a horrible mistake. She was miserable in this vast, sprawling, noisy, dirty city, when all she had ever known was country stillness and fresh air, the free Romany way of life she’d loved so much.

Before too long she decided that she’d get a better job in a nicer place. Make more money. The cash was starting to run low.

On her last day at the diner she left without a single soul saying goodbye to her. She came home to her little apartment, pulled the tallboy over the door, and sat down on the thin mattress of her bed and thought of Josh, so far away, gone from her forever. Her life, like her dreams, had become a nightmare; she was tired, lost and utterly alone.

Josh, she thought, and lay down and let the tears come. Oh, Josh.

34

34

On one of her rare days off from her new glistening career washing pots in a not-much-better establishment, Claire left Brooklyn for Manhattan. She window-shopped wistfully in Bloomingdale’s then peered in upscale restaurant windows, looking for staff vacancy signs. She found a couple of possibles.

She went into Central Park with the paper and her lunch, sat down on a bench and flicked through the news as she ate, seeing that Cuban-backed forces were winning in Angola. Halfway through the sandwich, she felt sick. This was normal for her, lately. And even though she wasn’t keeping food down, she was gaining weight; her clothes felt uncomfortably tight around her middle. She was ill and she knew it; those horrible bastards had infected her during the rape, they’d given her some terrible disease. But she had no one else to depend on except herself; she had to struggle on, find a better-paying job, and fast.

Flicking to the jobs section, she trawled through endless ads, but nothing caught her eye until she came across one for ‘hostesses’ at a club called Sylvester’s. Claire squinted at the ad suspiciously. There was a checklist. You had to be over eighteen but under twenty-five. Whether you were married or single, childless or with kids, it didn’t matter. You had to have charm, be cheerful, attractive, intelligent, with common sense and a good speaking voice.

Claire thought about it and found that she just about fitted the bill. The ad went further, detailing an eight-hour day and a five-day week, but what really stunned her was the wages. The figure quoted sounded way too good to be true. Still . . . her money was nearly gone, and if she saw another pile of dirty dishes she felt like she might run off screaming.