I splutter. You’ve got to be kidding me. Others walk into the room: all men in suits, all important-seeming men with big, loud, booming voices. They sound posh, like they went to Oxford or Cambridge or Trinners. Some of them have strange clipped accents, maybe South African. I’d say the youngest is forty-five-ish. I can see the tabloid headline: ‘Poshies on Sex Safari in the Arse-Hole of Nowhere’ and I don’t want to imagine the rest of it. Why didn’t Irina send more of us? The men sprawl out in the big leather armchairs and gesture for us to sit on the arms. I empty out inside and allow myself to go floppy. Nico is stiff as a board.

29. Nico

29

Nico

My face is covered in make-up by Irina’s fingers; I’m disguised so I don’t look like myself and I am glad. I’m told to wear dark lace underclothes, and I think of Magda and the girl she put to sleep, and of Ana and the other girls in the room. Sammy is watching closely and I wish she wouldn’t. Being witnessed makes this more real. I try to imagine we are characters in a book, or on the screen – someone else is writing this life now.

We’re brought to a car by a fat man wearing a too-tight collar. In the back seat Sammy is laughing silently at his ugly rolls of squashed flesh, and elbows me in the ribs. It’s more disgusting than funny, but with this girl everything is funny. When she thinks I’m not looking, I can see her smirking at me, eyes shining, holding back the laughter that would like to burst out of her. I wonder why she held her arm out to steady me. Would she not have laughed at seeing me fall?

After some time, the car pulls up outside a huge house made of grey bricks, surrounded by flat, silent fields draped in cobwebs of misty rain. The driveway is lined with tall narrow trees I have never seen before; their green branches dense yet feathery. There are bright lights flooding the ground, making it seem like a lake. I try to steady myself on my heels, which catch on the slimy loose stones, and I imagine reeds wrapping around my ankles, trying to drag me down to the depths. The door is black and monstrous, as if from a tale Papa would have told. A bell rings out and a man wearing white gloves answers. He speaks to the driver, pretending he doesn’t see us. As I cross the threshold, I bless myself secretively, like Magda did, as if I’m brushing dust off my top.