She gets off the bed and starts pacing the room. ‘Excuse me, you inspired me!’ She gets down on her hands and knees and straightens out her legs, pushing her body up and down by her arms. Her face goes ripe tomato-red. ‘Press-ups,’ she says, ‘exhilaration, followed by exhaustion.’

She pushes up and down, up and down until her eyes look like they might pop out of their sockets, then she rolls onto her back and makes circles in the air with her long legs. Her cheeks are purple now and sweat is covering her skin.

Suddenly, she stops, lies flat on her back, puffing for a few moments. ‘Rebooting!’ she says, before she climbs onto my bed. She offers me her hand and pulls me to standing. ‘Fuck, that felt good.’

I say the word. F-U-C-K. I do not know the direct translation, but it sounds hard and is good to say. Over and over the two of us shout the word, jumping on my mattress.

34. Sammy

34

Sammy

Where was that big thumper from? He wasn’t Irish, that’s for sure, but Taxi Joe is, and so was the boy that drove the girls today. I track back to the moment Hatchet handed me over, and wonder about her reasoning regarding how risky it would be to have a Dublin girl among the ranks here. She must have done her fact-checks. After three days of resting up and no big breaking news story, she took me for an unloved loser, and completely bought my sorry tale. It must have happened before. And anyway, as far as my lot back home are concerned, I have disappeared for days before, always with Brian, and always at weekends. I see Hatchet’s dry, lizard-like eyes, staring at me, appraising her new merchandise. Could that woman in the brothel – Sandra? – who gave me Hatchet’s number, have known what kind of an organisation she was involved with? Brian appears before me and my thoughts jumble and shatter. How much of this is about what happened with him? Naive is not a word I would have ever have attached to me, before now. My body blasts with heat.

How long have I been missing now? Almost a week. Only a week since I left the hospital. How can so much happen in one fecky week? They must all be looking for me by now. There are no newspapers or Irish TV channels here so I can’t know, but of course a fifteen-year-old Dublin girl doesn’t just vanish off the face of the earth, like these others. Or do they? There are unsolved cases. Is this where the Missing go?