Junk - Melvin Burgess [80]
She didn’t have the heart, see. All I had to do was look disappointed. She liked me. And then… this is what I really liked about her… she’d finish me off, and then I’d give her what she wanted in the first place. And she’d laugh her head off. Like we were mates. I mean, that’s charming, innit? I like to think she liked me, but you don’t know. Maybe she was just good at her job. I always went away after a session with Nicky feeling like a million quid.
Yeah, she was great, Nicky. We used to talk about all sorts. The other girls did you off and then wanted you straight out so they could get the next payer in, but not her. She really gave herself. She’d share her opinions with you. We used to talk politics, but not too much because we differed rather radically on that. She had some odd views on being a whore, though. Apparently, if it wasn’t for people like Nicky, all the sad little blokes who didn’t get it off their wives, or who hadn’t got a woman or whatever, they’d get so frustrated and worked up that they’d be off committing sex crimes.
I said, ‘Are you trying to tell me that if I didn’t come round here once a month, I’d be out molesting little girls?’
‘Oh, no, not you, not you,’ she said.
I said, I should think not.
That put me off a bit, actually. She was being a bit too open there, because she let slip what she thought about the punters. I mean, I know none of the girls respects the customers. That’s the trouble with whoring as a profession. As a tobacconist, you can smoke and respect your fellow smokers. As a whore, you have sex, but for some reason, they all look down on the blokes who pay for it. Fair enough, I suppose, because the blokes who pay for it look down on the girls that sell it. Well, I knew that and she knew that, but she shouldn’t have let on.
She got a bit hard in the end. Some of them do. The ones that don’t care can stay fairly easy about it, but the ones what do care, the ones that shouldn’t be doing it, they’re the ones that get hard. She got on to drugs in the end. I saw the track marks on her arm. I told Gordon, that’s the owner at the parlour, I told him I didn’t want Nicky after that. You have to be careful. Aids, all that stuff. Sharing needles. They get a bit sloppy when they’re doing junk. Besides, I have my pride. I mean, I’m old and fat and out of breath and if I want anyone to sleep with me I have to pay for it, but I don’t have to do it with a junkie. I’m not that desperate. I’d rather try it on with the missis, to be frank.
I don’t know if she was still working at the parlour. I hadn’t seen her for a bit, but then I’d asked not to. She looked pretty ropy. It might have been the blue lights or what was happening to her, I dunno, but she looked about forty, and she used to reckon she was seventeen and I thought she was lying upwards at the time.
Then this funny thing happened. There was this pause while the coppers opened the car door. I was staring at Nicky and the skinny-looking bloke with her was watching me watching her… and he gave me this little nod. I thought it was for someone behind me at first; I looked over my shoulder but there was no one there, so it had to be me. I didn’t know him from Adam. I thought, What’s he nodding at me for? But I had seen him before, walking up and down the road. He was just one of those faces that walk past over the months and then disappear one day, and you never notice they’re gone any more than you noticed they were there.
I stared hard at him. Then it clicked.
It was only David. It was only that lad I’d given to Richard a few years before. I thought, Bugger me, you’ve come a long way and most of it’s been straight down. I remembered that time he turned down my fags and told me they turned your skin grey. I had a pack of Bensons in my pocket; if I’d had the nerve I’d have waved them at him and shouted, ‘I bet you wouldn’t say no now.’ But there were coppers everywhere. It’s not all that clever to catch the eye of the Bill