He looks pleased with this response and lets the woman go. ‘I’ll teach you a few tricks,’ he says, standing too close to me, his breath full of rotting meat. Such an ugly yoke with his soft middle and yellowing eyes. I don’t think I could, even for a thousand euros. I think I might puke, so I put my hand over my mouth.

‘You have my number,’ the woman says, looking at me.

‘Yeah, and I also know where to find you.’

The door slams and rattles in its frame.

The laughter that was threatening to explode has evaporated, leaving a flat, dead feeling in its place.

‘You ok?’ the woman says.

I nod and sit on the edge of the bed.

‘Time to call it a night,’ the woman says, getting up to take off her nightie and put on jeans and a sweatshirt. ‘I’m going to go home.’

What does she mean, ‘home’?

‘I don’t live here, love. I just rent the room for the night. And I’m going to give this place a wide berth for a while. You should too. That guy is gunning for trouble. He isn’t going to leave it there.’

I feel like that time with Brian, when I swallowed the worm at the bottom of the empty bottle of Tequila. Days of wriggling, niggling, black thoughts followed that one: memories of hands, tongues, blanked-out faces, sore spots, black spots, blank spots, and Brian looming large over the spectacle, directing it all.

‘You really better get out of here,’ she says, ‘that eejit downstairs will tell him your room number.’

‘Could I not work with you?’

The woman looks at me with something like pity. ‘Tonight didn’t exactly go well, did it? I don’t work for, or with, anyone any more.’

I ask her could I meet her again some time. She tells me she never meets anyone from these places, outside these places, ever. ‘Guys like that one are everywhere in this game … Actually, we got away lightly in there. He could’ve got really ugly and I think he will, once he’s regrouped.’

She has changed her clothes and her hair is pulled back in a ponytail. She seems tiny.

‘Do you have a husband?’

‘Just me and the kids. Believe me, I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t have to.’ She takes me by the shoulders and turns me to look at her straight in the eyes. ‘You wouldn’t get a job stacking shelves or something? This is no place for a girl like you to do her growing up.’

The wall whooshes tall and thick in an instant. I push her off me and say, ‘What the fuck do you know about a girl like me?’