After the CEO and the HR director had left, I said to Sabine, “Wow. You made an impression.”

She shrugged and put some more duck leg in her mouth.

I said, “Working at Crazy Horse must have been quite something.”

She seemed to be studying me. She took a long, slow sip of water.

Then she said, “I never worked at Crazy Horse.”

“You didn’t?”

“No,” she said. “But now I get to heat my cuisse.”

Another day, Sabine was late with her meal. When I went into the kitchen, I noticed her shadow on the wall; it was slinky and elongated, like an Aubrey Beardsley sketch. She was wearing a peacock-patterned halterneck dress; all she needed were some feathers in her hair.

While she stirred a rich black ale, onion, and beef stew with a wooden spoon, I asked, “If you weren’t at Crazy Horse, where were you before here?”

She stuck a finger in the pot to test it. “Sunset Strip.”

Sunset Strip in Soho was known for being a more empowering strip joint. For having women-only nights too. I’d read about it in a London listings magazine. I could easily imagine Sabine there but I said, “You’re lying!”

She smiled.

“Seriously, what were you doing?”

“Baking bread.”

“You’re just saying that.”

“Why would I just say that? Baking bread is cool. You work through the night. You play loud music. You take drugs. You go for drinks in the morning—”

“So why did you stop?”

“The head baker was hassling me. It was a small town by the sea, the kind of place where you can’t get away from somebody. One morning I left and didn’t go back. In London, it’s easy to disappear.”

“Sure,” I said. “But, why media monitoring?”

She lowered the stove’s dial. “Why did you choose it?”

“I was staying with family friends in Telford. Doing a crap job—”

“Like this, then.”

“Crapper. For a company on an industrial estate that bashed out dents in cars. I answered the phones all day. Dent Mend and Paint Repair 01952 746—”

“You remember the number?”

“On my deathbed, it’ll still be going round my head.”

She laughed.

“Telford wasn’t for me,” I said. “I grew up in a parochial town.”

“Meaning?”

“Narrow, insular. Once, they had a beauty contest in a shopping mall. Anyone could go on the platform, enter themselves. The crowd booed or cheered. If they booed, you came down again. The audience was mostly black people but the winner was a ghostly blonde in a settler’s dress. And her prize was . . .”

“Yes . . .?”

“Two cartons of cigarettes!”

“No wonder you’re done with towns,” Sabine said. “But how did you end up here?”

“The people I was staying with knew someone in media monitoring. They thought it’d be better than temping. How about you?”