Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [2]
In herself, Lisa-Beth was not in any way an exotic. She was blonde, and she was petite: she made a habit of keeping her dress on for as long as possible, to stop people realising that despite her size most of her body was made up of muscle. Not enough to win an arm-wrestling contest at the Head, perhaps, but enough to give another demi-rep a good punch in the face if there was a territory dispute. More Importantly, her skin was pale, the hair pulled back behind her head to turn her face into a pretty white oval. She’d been told, more than once, that if her eyebrows weren’t formed into such a permanent scowl then her eyes would have been big and blue enough to make her look like a child, or at worst like a child prostitute. So: the last kind of person one would expect to indulge in black coffee, not like one of the popular negresses of London, not like one of the tanned women who inhabited the seraglios of Covent Garden and had spent the last summer dressing up in the style of the Arabian Nights.
But Lisa-Beth had an advantage. Lisa-Beth really had lived in the lands where the East India Company was King, and more importantly that was where she’d been trained, in the house of Mother Dutt herself. Men would see the little red diamond she’d painted in the middle of her forehead and be, as the French might say, Mesmerised. That diamond promised things. A little window into lands of unknown pleasures. A promise of temptations and techniques never before practised on the shores of England, the tantra and the Wheel of Kali. Everyone had heard of the mysterious Kama Sutra, for God’s sake, even if almost nobody had actually seen the text (let alone an illustrated version).
Ironically, Lisa-Beth had read the Kama Sutra, or at least browsed through it. But contrary to popular belief a lot of it had seemed to be about women teaching animals how to speak, and in Lisa-Beth’s line of work that wasn’t a great way to make a living.
By midnight the politician was lying prone on Lisa-Beth’s bed, with his pantaloons unbraced and an expectant look on his ruddy red face. Lisa-Beth felt confident that the scene was exotic enough for his tastes. The bitch downstairs had obviously been using the jar again, filling up Lisa-Beth’s space with the opium fumes, but that was all for the best: once Lisa-Beth had the lamps lit, the smoke gave the air a blurry, greasy feel that made your head swim and coloured everything yellow. If you squinted it was almost like being in an Indian ashram, the thick, sticky atmosphere turning the shadows into pools of velvet and making the brass bedpan gleam like gold. The room was small, but here and now it felt like an eastern boudoir rather than a London hovel. The mixture of oil and old wood made the house smell of exotic flowers burning on a funeral pyre, and all of a sudden the drapes around the bed – satin, but so worn at the edges that at times they reminded Lisa-Beth of an old bat whose wings had been shredded – looked dark and secretive, like cobwebs spun around a holy shrine.
The more practical part of Lisa-Beth’s mind, which was undoubtedly the larger part, deduced that the woman downstairs must have been filling the house with fumes for bloody hours.
‘Well,’ said the politician, as Lisa-Beth climbed on to the bed and straddled his waist. ‘Well. Well now. Where shall we begin, hmm?’
He doesn’t know, thought Lisa-Beth. He’s never had the nerve to pay for black coffee before.
Which means I can pretend anything’s a mystical experience.