As if pressure was released from his chest and his head when he showed this small witness to his failure who the boss of the house was. With the palm of his hand to her face. With fists to her face, with kicks when she stopped moving. With a hot plate that he pressed to her hands. When he began to break things over her, the eight-year-old prostitute took off. She moved into the cellar of a nearby building. Stole marmalade from nearby storage sheds until locks were installed all around the area. After that she slept in staircases and in those bays where rubbish bins are kept and which have no formal name. The eight-year-old prostitute wasn’t unhappy. She was a long way from being able to categorize her emotional world with stereotypical terminology. She didn’t think anything. She didn’t miss anything. She didn’t feel anything. She marveled at the world. She wandered around department stores. Rummaged in dumpsters behind restaurants. She then landed, through a series of connections that had to do with a Bentley, in the villa on Regent’s Park. And from there to the parlors of various old men. The villa on Regent’s Park was agreeable. Though she knew only the apartment within it that she shared with ten other children from families broken in various ways. Children don’t know what’s good or bad. You can turn them into murderers, thieves, or prostitutes, they don’t know what’s good or bad, they have feelings, they feel when something is disgusting. Old men are disgusting. But nothing you can’t get used to. Such a nice, warm flat where they now live, pressed against each other, thumbs in mouths, watching the lights of motorcars on the ceiling; in this warmth you can tolerate something disgusting now and then.

Who cares?

Jesus, mate! Watch it, thinks

THOME

Looking at his father, whose face is deep red. Thome’s father looks the way one pictures someone about to have a heart attack looking. Has the old guy already changed his will to benefit the little half-Russian in the fake blonde’s belly?

But