Chapter One
There’s a place further down the street where I work that I can’t figure out at all. From the outside, it looks like your standard Shoreditch warehouse converted into an ‘art space’, the Victorian brickwork decorated in multicoloured swirls and curls, but so many people come in and go out of its heavily fortified black entrance that I think there must be more to it than that.
And there seems to be some kind of door policy too. For every half-dozen people who are admitted, another four or five are turned away. From my desk at the ad agency, I watch the ebb and flow.
‘I reckon it’s a brothel,’ says Anton, breaking from Angry Birds for a moment to look out of the window with me.
‘But there are just as many women visiting as men.’
‘A bisexual brothel, then.’
‘I don’t think it’s a brothel,’ I say, but I’m not so sure he’s wrong. Although the visitors vary wildly in age, sex and appearance, rather a lot of them seem to be dressed to impress. I’ve seen a woman in full rubber body stocking and spike heels go in there with a man in a Savile Row suit. Another time, a man was actually carrying a bullwhip. One gorgeous young guy crawled along the pavement from the corner with a collar and leash attached to his neck. The woman ‘walking’ him looked like a retired librarian. It’s odd and fascinating. My money’s on a private sex club, but it seems to open all hours rather than late at night, and most of the people who enter look no different from the average collection of Joes on my morning commute.
Anton’s attention reverts to his smartphone. ‘Get in,’ he says. ‘Just got a text from Riley – she’s got free tickets to a secret DJ Mentallist gig at the Fish Bowl. You up for it?’
‘Ohhh.’ I half-rise from my seat and then plonk myself back down, glumness personified. ‘Can’t. Really got to finish this campaign. Looks like I’m going to be pulling a late one. Sorry.’
Anton shrugs. ‘No biggie, blood.’
He likes to try and sound like a mockney version of someone out of The Wire, but Anton is actually the privately educated son of a brigadier.
I wave at his retreating figure and gaze down at my chaotic notepad. If I don’t come up with a slogan for this bastard air freshener by the end of the evening, I’m sunk. Maybe ‘This will freshen your bastard air’. It’s better than the crap I’m coming up with at the moment, at least. ‘Give your nose a break’. Ugh.
I hunker down and try to clear my mind, not an easy task when your mental clutter could fill a mental landfill site.
Some time around eight, I happen to look up from the catchphrase nightmare and notice something different about the Building of Enigma.
I hurry over to the window and squint through the blinds. Running along the bottom of the wall, barely above pavement level, are a series of narrow barred windows, slim rectangles with their long sides parallel to the ground. I’ve often tried to peer into them in passing but found them blacked out and impenetrable.
Tonight, one of them glows with light.
Abandoning the bastard air freshener, I grab my bag and head for the lifts, my feet hardly touching the ground.
Outside, the darkened street is deserted – or so I think. Before I can cross to the object of my curiosity, a hand touches my shoulder and I swing around, irritated and slightly nervous. This isn’t the safest area of town, the classic price you pay for being edgy and hip.
‘Scuse me, you have a light?’
The voice is foreign, the speaker dressed in a way that places him somewhere between art student and gypsy, all leather bracelets and ripped jeans. The thing that really captures my attention, though, is his amazing moustache. You don’t see facial hair like that except in yellowed photographs of Victorian military men. I’m so struck by it that I forget to answer for a moment, until he makes a flourish with his hand, drawing my eye to his unlit cigarette.
‘No?’ he says.
‘Um, no, sorry,’ I say, wanting him to go away so I can spy in peace. I feel awkward going over to the building and blatantly rubbernecking in front of a stranger.
‘OK,’ he says. ‘You know where is a bar?’
‘God, there are hundreds round here. Just walk in any direction.’
I turn to cross the street, tense with the idea that somebody might put the blackout blind back down at any moment. Sod this random tourist. I’m going to get my answer to the mystery that has plagued me since I joined Cre8iv back in the spring.
‘Why you are unfriendly to me?’
Oh God, just go away! He is following me across the street, his voice plaintive, his belts jangling. How many does a man need anyway?
‘All English girls are like this?’
I reach my target and crouch on the pavement, getting myself into optimum peeking position.
‘Please stop harassing me,’ I snap, then I take a huge lungful of toxic London air and fail to find any more words until a heartfelt ‘Oh my God!’ escapes my lips.
‘You are OK?’
The tourist guy kneels down next to me. I try to flap him away with my shaking hand, but he is having none of it. He leans forwards, wanting to see what it is that has shocked me so.
‘Wow,’ he says, sounding impressed. ‘This is typical London bar?’ He chuckles. ‘The English vice, right?’
‘Uh-huh.’ I can’t speak, I’m too engrossed in what I’m witnessing.
We are looking down into a plain, cell-like basement room. The exposed brickwork is painted white and bare of decoration. A bank of four old-fashioned school desks take up the central space, while facing us at the end is a chalkboard with some Latin verb conjugations written on it. The verb of the day appears to be Flagello – to flagellate. Very apposite, given that the stern-looking middle-aged man standing beside the board is wielding a crook-handled cane of the type that was banned in schools when I was a wee girl.
At three of the four desks, their backs to us, sit two overgrown schoolboys and an overgrown schoolgirl. I had no idea you could get school uniforms in adult sizes but obviously there’s a niche market out there.
At the front, beside the ‘teacher’, a woman of about thirty, pigtailed and mini-kilted, stands on a chair with her hands on her head. She is trembling a little, her face is flushed, but it’s unclear whether fear or excitement predominates in her emotions. I suppose it must be excitement, given that the sight of her in her humiliating predicament is making my stomach squirm a little and my knickers dampen. I try to attune myself to what might be going through her mind and find myself surprisingly keen to experience it at firsthand.
I hold my breath, then let it out when the teacher lifts the hem of her skirt with the tip of his cane, revealing the kind of navy-blue gym knickers that went out in about 1975. She is made to hold the skirt up and turn around, giving the class an eyeful of her full, rounded bum.
The teacher says something, swishing his cane through the air, and she steps off the chair, carefully, hands still on head, then she bends and places her palms flat on the seat, sticking out that arse so that the gym knickers stretch and outline it in pitiless detail.
The teacher addresses his pupils, punctuating his words by smacking the hand that isn’t holding the cane down on the disgraced girl’s bottom repeatedly. Her flesh quivers but she keeps her position. How
painful is it? I wish I could hear through the heavy glazing. I want to know what that sounds like.
He stops and says something to the girl, who stands and then peels down her knickers to her knees. My breathing is ragged as the freshly spanked pink globes are revealed to shameful view. God, what must she be thinking and feeling? If she’s anything like me, she’ll be soaking wet around the crotch. I’ve had this kind of fantasy for years, but never expected to see it in action.