“In the Middle Ages, swans signified sex,” Bastian says, not to anyone in particular. “Pictures of swans hung above the doorways of secret brothels.”
Rebecca looks at him. “Wasn’t everything a symbol of sex in the Middle Ages?”
Bastian keeps his gaze fixed to doors and bricks and signs and pedestrians that flash past the window of the cab.
“No,” he says simply. “Not everything.”
The cab stops just outside a club. Bastian takes out his wallet and gives the driver two twenty-pound notes and waves away the change. He doesn’t like to carry coins. They make his wallet bulge, which ruins the line of his jacket pocket. And tipping generously gives Bastian a pleasant feeling of his own largesse. Wealth, after all, is meant to trickle down.
Hot Bath
Precious allows Robert Kerr to kiss her goodbye. She is fond of the man, in a way, and sees no harm in indulging him.
“Until we meet again,” he says, in an affectation of a 1950s music-hall comedian. He laughs at his joke. Precious laughs too. She is good at her job. She sits on the bed, pulls the loose silk robe over her thighs and breasts and allows her patron to kiss her again before he lets himself out.
Tabitha enters from a door behind the bed. She carries a stack of fresh towels. She sets these down by a copper bath at one side of the room, turns the hot tap, and water gushes into the bath. The copper hums as it is struck, a softening musical note as the water pools and rises. The steam has a metallic scent, but as lavender oil is added this becomes the dominant aroma.
Tabitha has called herself Tabitha since she was in the trade.
As well as the women who work with their bodies, the building contains other personnel. Each woman has a maid, who is older and previously worked in the trade herself. The maids help with the women’s day-to-day life. They cook and clean and increase the safety of the work: they can hear from the next room if something is going badly wrong. When necessary, they phone downstairs for assistance from one of the security guards, like Karl. Many of these are ex-military, and are paid from a mutual fund. They come when they are called and, when required, they pull men out of the beds of women and throw them onto the street and make sure they never return. The mutual fund also pays Old Scarlet’s wages. Like the maids, she was once a sex worker herself. She sits at the front desk and manages the girls’ appointments.
Now Tabitha is a maid, and she takes good care of her charge. She tests the temperature of the water, then turns the cold tap until it is on full.
“No!” Precious insists. “Hot! I want it hot! Hot, hot, hot! None of your cold tap today!”
“It’ll scald you!”
“Nonsense,” Precious replies. She rises from the bed and lets her dressing gown slip to the floor. She lifts one leg up to the edge of the bath, points her toes like a small child pretending to be a ballerina, and holds them there with practiced poise. She looks at Tabitha and narrows her eyes. Tabitha holds her gaze and mirrors the expression. Then Precious plunges the pointed toes along with the foot and leg into the steaming water.
Precious doesn’t flinch. Tabitha recoils and shields her eyes, as if it is her own skin being boiled. Precious cackles and reaches out to pull the older woman towards the spectacle. She throws back her head and howls. It is not the meek, flirtatious laugh she performs for clients. This is a roar. She shifts her weight onto her bathing leg then drops her whole body into the lavender water.
“You’re horrible, you are,” Tabitha observes.
“Charming.”
Tabitha smiles despite herself and takes the smile with her into the kitchen. She comes back with two flutes of sparkling white wine.
“Prosecco?”
“Don’t mind if I do,” says Precious, taking the glass. Condensation has settled on its surface, pooling to droplets where it meets her warm fingers.
Tabitha returns to the kitchen to prepare dinner. She stoops as she walks. Her legs are bowed and her hips well worn.
Precious lies back in the bath with her wine-bearing hand quivering on a loose wrist over the rim. She relaxes all muscles she is conscious of and allows her body to bob on top of the cushion of compacted water. She aches. It has been a long day and hers is not an easy job.
Her legs come up through the surface of the water and jut over the end of the roll-top tub. Water pools and trickles to the floor, tapping on the mahogany-effect laminate.
Precious washes herself with a simple bar of soap, not the bottles of expensive bath and shower creams that sit in her cupboard. There is a nostalgia to the new block, wrapped in paper. She stands and strokes the bar across her skin: around the back of her neck, between her legs. She divests herself of grime, the thin film of soot that has accrued from the fumes of exhaust from the city outside; the fingerprints of five men; the semen and saliva and sweat of the same men, and the grease from her own pores. The soap eases these substances from her body into the steaming water. She lifts her body from the tub and reaches for one of the fresh towels. It feels cold and crisp. She rubs it over herself and gouges the remaining dirt and dead cells from her skin, then puts on another, more comfortable dressing gown.
Tabitha emerges from the kitchen carrying two plates of steak and kidney pudding.
“Have you made that meat and gravy spongy thing again?” Precious asks.
Tabitha lays the plates on the coffee table and returns to the kitchen for the peas and oven chips.
They eat together. Precious squashes
