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  ‘This is where a punter can come in and have a drink and make his mind up which one of us he wants,’ said Mairead. ‘We charge twenty-five euros for a beer, thirty for a glass of wine, and fifty for spirits. Well, those are the basic prices. Usually, we charge as much as we can get away with.

  Mairead’s own bedroom was almost as large as the living room. It was furnished with a four-poster bed and a red plush chaise-longue and a white Regency-style dressing table with a marble-patterned top, although its edges were chipped. There was a built-in wardrobe opposite the bed, with mirrored doors.

  ‘That’s so the punters can watch themselves getting their money’s worth,’ said Mairead. ‘Mind you, they all want to take selfies these days, right in the middle of it, so they can show their mates afterwards. Michael’s thinking of charging them extra for that.’

  She showed Zakiyyah the bathroom on the opposite side of the corridor. This was gloomy and smelled of damp, and the grouting between the tiles had turned black. Underneath the frosted-glass window stood a narrow, old-fashioned bathtub with rust stains in it, and next to it a washbasin crowded with bottles of shampoo and conditioner. The ceiling was patchy with mould and looked as if it was about to collapse at any moment.

  Mairead said, ‘We’ll go out shopping for you tomorrow and get you everything you need, like toiletries and make-up and that, and something for you to wear, like – although, believe me, you won’t be wearing much for most of the time. Saves on the laundry, I can tell you!

  At that moment there was a chime from the doorbell downstairs. ‘That’ll be Elvira’s punter. And I expect Michael will be here before we know it. Why don’t you throw yourself down for a while, girl, and have a rest? You won’t be getting much of that from now on, I can tell you!’

  She lay on the purple bedcover, but she didn’t close her eyes. The velveteen smelled sour and musty, as if it hadn’t been cleaned in years, or ever, and from the angle at which she was lying she could see that there were shiny silvery splotches all over it. She heard the front door of the flat being opened, and a man’s gruff voice, and then Mairead saying something, and laughing, although she could only make out the word ‘darling’.

  After that, she heard the door to Elvira’s room close and the television in the living room being switched on. She couldn’t hear that distinctly, either, only Irish women arguing with each other, and then music. Sad, lilting pipe music – the kind of music the Irish play to make themselves cry. It seemed to go on and on, until her eyes began to close.

  She didn’t want to fall asleep, but she did. She might have dreamed, but if she did, she didn’t remember what her dreams were. All she knew was that she was abruptly woken up by a knock on her door, and a man saying, ‘Well, well, what do we have here? The sleeping beauty! The sleeping black beauty!’

  Immediately she opened her eyes and sat up, tugging down the hem of her slip to make sure that she was decent. She tried to primp up her hair as well, because she knew that all her glass beads had become tangled.

  A tall, broad-shouldered man was standing in the doorway, wearing a camel-coloured summer jacket, with a green silk handkerchief in the breast pocket. He had thick chestnut hair, combed back in a wave, and he was suntanned in that freckly way that fair-skinned people tan. He was green-eyed, with a wide, generous face, and a deep Celtic cleft in his chin. He was smiling, although one of his front teeth had caught on his lip, so Zakiyyah couldn’t be sure if he was smiling or snarling.

  Mairead was standing very close behind him, and she said, ‘Zakky, this is Mister Michael Gerrety. He’s come to take a look at you.’

  Michael Gerrety approached the side of the bed and stood between Zakiyyah and the window, so that she could see only his silhouette.

  ‘Well, now, Mister Dessie said you were a cutie, and he wasn’t wrong for once, was he, Mairead?’

  ‘Oh, they’ll be flocking in, Michael, once they see her on the interweb.’

  Zakiyyah didn’t know one Irish accent from another, but Michael Gerrety spoke very warmly and melodiously, and he sounded all the ends of his words with the tip of his tongue, like a trained actor.

  ‘I can’t say that I’ve ever been partial to black girls before now, but you are something very special, aren’t you? What did you say her name was, Mair? Zakky?’

  ‘Zakiyyah,’ Zakiyyah corrected him. ‘It means pure.’

  ‘Oh yes! I think Dessie was blethering about that. Well, that’s how we’ll advertise you. Zakiyyah, the Pure Black Beauty. How old are you, Zakiyyah?’

  ‘Seventeen. But I do not want to be hooker. I do not want to go with so many men.’

  ‘When’s your birthday, gorgeous?’

  ‘August the fifteenth.’

  ‘Then you’re only days away from being legal, and that suits me down to the ground. I’m not a pimp, Zakiyyah. I’m not a criminal. I’m a respectable man who happens to believe that sex should be sold openly and cleanly, like anything else that people want to buy and sell. There should be adequate protection for the young women who want to sell themselves, and both sympathy and understanding for the men who feel the need to buy them. It’s as straightforward as that.’

  ‘But I do not want to sell myself,’ said Zakiyyah. Her eyes filled with tears but she defiantly brushed them away with her fingertips. ‘I thought I came here to dance.’

  Michael Gerrety stepped back, away from the window, so that she could see him clearly again. ‘But you did come here to dance, Zakiyyah! And you will dance! I have scores of contacts in nightclubs all across Ireland, and in the dance companies, too! Me and Michael Flatley, we go golfing together almost every weekend! But unlike him, I’m not a millionaire, sweetheart! You came here all the way from Lagos, and do you know how much that cost me?’

  ‘Mister Dessie told me,’ said Zakiyyah. ‘But I will pay you back everything I owe you. I promise.’

  Michael Gerrety was still smiling but he shook his head. ‘What job? Stacking shelves at Dunne’s Stores? Washing dishes at McDonald’s? Changing beds at Jury’s Hotel? Do you know how little money those jobs pay? Because you’re not qualified to do any other kind of work, are you?’

  ‘I promise I will pay you back!’

  ‘I believe you, sweetheart, but the question is when? Jobs like that pay 8.65 euros an hour, while working here could earn you more than two thousand euros every single day. You would have to work more than eleven days at one of those minimum-wage jobs to make that sort of money. Not only that, where would you live? What would you eat? What clothes would you wear? You’d have to pay for those out of your wages, too, and that wouldn’t leave very much for me, would it, if anything at all?’

  ‘I would have clothes if you had not stolen my suitcase.’

  ‘Nobody’s stolen your suitcase, my darling. We have it in safe keeping as security, that’s all. You can have it returned to you when you’ve paid off everything you owe me.’

  ‘I do not believe you. I do not believe anything you say to me. I was supposed to come to Ireland to dance, not to be bagar.’

  ‘You don’t believe me?’ said Michael Gerrety. ‘Well, I thought you might say that, and I suppose I don’t blame you. Mair – Mair! Fetch me my briefcase, will you? It’s in the kitchen, on the chair.’

  Mairead appeared with a chequered Louis Vuitton briefcase and handed it to him. Michael Gerrety took out a brown manila folder and opened it up. Inside were six or seven photographs of varying sizes, some coloured and some black and white.

  ‘Those are my pictures!’ said Zakiyyah, sitting up straighter. ‘That is my family!’

  Michael Gerrety held up a photograph of a smiling woman wearing a huge green and yellow Nigerian gele, or head-tie.

  ‘That is my mother!’ Zakiyyah protested. ‘That is the only picture I have of her! Give it to me!’

  She jumped up from the bed and tried to snatch it, but Michael Gerrety held it up high, out of her reach, and passed the manila folder back to Mairead.

  ‘Give it to me! Giv
e it to me! It is mine! Please, give it to me!’

  With his left hand, Michael Gerrety pushed Zakiyyah back on to the bed. She tried to scramble up again, but he pushed her again, harder this time.

  ‘I’m telling you, sweetheart, you’re a very beautiful girl, and you and me are going to get along together like a dream – but only so long as you do what I ask you to do and behave yourself. You have no money, you have nowhere to stay, you have no friends at all. There’s something else you’re going to start feeling soon, and that’s the itch to have more of that vaccine we gave you to protect you against the rabies. If you don’t get that vaccine soon, you’re going to start getting sick, I tell you. Then you’ll be begging me to be a brasser. Begging on your black hands and knees.’

  ‘Please – that is my mother,’ said Zakiyyah. ‘Please give me her picture.’

  Michael Gerrety held up the photograph in front of her and then tore it in half. He tore it in half again, and then again, and then again, and tossed the pieces around the room.

  ‘Every time you give me trouble, I’m going to come in here and I’m going to do the same to another one of your family pictures. Do you understand what I’m saying to you? And when I’ve run out of pictures, I’ll have to think of something else to make you behave yourself … like tear up your passport, for starters, and report you to immigration. You know what they do to illegal woman immigrants in Cork? They lock them up in Limerick Prison, and compared to the women’s wing of Limerick Prison this place here is heaven on earth.’

  Zakiyyah miserably picked up two torn fragments of her mother’s photograph and tried to match them together, but Michael Gerrety had ripped them up too small and scattered them all around the room. All this time, Mairead was standing in the doorway, with her arms folded over her bosom, but the look in her eyes was just as far away as it had been before.

  ‘You’re clean, are you?’ asked Michael Gerrety.

  ‘I have not washed yet,’ said Zakiyyah. ‘Now I am here, I will wash.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that kind of clean. I mean you don’t have any STDs?’

  ‘Diseases,’ Mairead explained. She pointed to her crotch and said, ‘Diseases down below. Like the clap, like.’

  Zakiyyah said, ‘I only go with one man. My boss, Mister Bankole. Nobody else. Mister Bankole was very clean man.’

  ‘Well, that’s no guarantee at all,’ said Michael Gerrety. ‘But the doctor will be calling by later to have a look at you and take a blood sample, just to make sure you don’t have the HIV. We don’t want anybody accusing the Green Light of spreading STDs.’

  Zakiyyah didn’t know what to say to that. She felt angry at Michael Gerrety, and intimidated by him, but in a strange way she found him reassuring. Whatever he expected of her, he was going to make sure that she had somewhere to sleep, and that she was going to be fed, and that she wouldn’t be locked up in prison. She had disliked what Mr Bankole had done to her, his sweating and his panting and the harsh dry feeling of his skin, but it had all been over in minutes, and he had thanked her, after all, and given her a thousand naira in cash. By the time she had taken a long hot shower she had felt physically as if nothing had happened to her, although she was sure that her friends could read in her eyes that she was no longer a virgin.

  Maybe Lotus Blossom was right. Maybe it wasn’t so bad, being a hooker. Maybe you could simply wash it off, at the end of every day, as if it had never happened.

  Michael Gerrety checked his heavy gold Rolex. ‘Right, then, I have to go now. Let’s take a look at you.’

  Zakiyyah frowned at Mairead. What did he mean by that? He was looking at her.

  Muichael Gerrety caught the frown and said, ‘The slip,’ making a lifting-off gesture with his arms. ‘I need to see you in the nip.’

  Zakiyyah hesitated, but Mairead said, ‘Go on, girl, he only wants to see what your figure’s like, for your advertisement.’

  Very hesitantly, Zakiyyah climbed off the bed and stood in front of Michael Gerrety, looking directly into those sea-green eyes. ‘Ya zama jarumi,’ her mother had always told her. ‘You must always be brave.’

  She lifted off her slip and stood naked in front of him. Her skin was very dark and the sunlight gave a slight sheen to it. Her breasts were small but very firm and her waist was slim, although her hips flared out and she had a high, rounded bottom. Michael Gerrety didn’t touch her. He looked her up and down and the only clue to what he was thinking was the way he pursed his lips, more like an accountant looking through a set of figures than a pimp. After a while he twirled his finger to indicate that he wanted her to turn around, which she did.

  ‘Plenty to grab hold of there,’ said Mairead, from the doorway, lighting a cigarette and blowing two tusks of smoke out of her nostrils.

  ‘All right,’ said Michael Gerrety, ‘I’ll have Dessie take a few pictures tomorrow and then I think we’re in business. You can get dressed again now, young lady. You’re a beautiful girl and I believe you’re going to do us proud.’

  How can he say that to me? thought Zakiyyah. How can he tear up my only picture of my mother right in front of my face, and then tell me that I’m beautiful? No man had ever confused her so much in her life.

  ‘Just one more thing,’ said Michael Gerrety, as he turned to leave the room. ‘Ask Mairead here to lend you her razor, until you get one of your own. Don’t want to be advertising a safari in the African bush, do we?’

  Mairead laughed her cracked-bell laugh. Michael Gerrety looked back at Zakiyyah over his shoulder and gave her a mocking smile that made her shudder. She sat down on the bed with her slip in her lap and felt as empty as if she had just sold her soul to the devil.

  Fifteen

  Bula-Bulan Yaro shouldered his way out of Burger King on Patrick Street and immediately took the Whopper he had bought out of its box and started to eat it as he walked along, sniffing and wiping his nose with the back of his hand in between bites.

  Mister Dessie had given him the afternoon off and he intended to spend it playing snooker at the Quay Side Club, but he had been moving beds all morning from one of Michael Gerrety’s houses to another and he was so hungry he could have eaten a horse between two bread vans.

  An elderly nun in rimless spectacles came hurrying after him and tapped him on the back.

  ‘You forgot your box, young man,’ she said, pointing to the cardboard takeout carton that he had tossed on to the pavement.

  Bula turned around and stared at it as if he had never seen it before. ‘I didn’t forget it, sister. I didn’t want it, that’s all. See? I’m eating this burger. There’s no way I’m going to be eating the box that it came in.’

  ‘You could have dropped the box into a bin.’

  ‘I could of, yeah. But I didn’t. And if you’re so worried about it, why don’t you drop it into a bin? Then we’ll both be happy.’

  ‘I’ll pray for you tonight,’ said the nun. ‘I’ll pray that God shows you how sinful it is, to drop your rubbish in a beautiful city like this.’

  Bula looked around. ‘Sister,’ he said. ‘If you think this city is beautiful, you need new glasses, urgent-like. There, see – it probably looks a little fuzzy to you, but there’s a Boots Opticians right across the street.’

  With that, he carried on walking, taking another huge bite from his Whopper.

  He hadn’t even reached the end of the block, though, before a woman’s voice alarmingly close behind him said, ‘Bula! Take the next right, Bula! Can you hear me, Bula? Take the next right down the lane there!’

  Bula spun around, hopping on one foot, so that he nearly lost his balance. A young black woman was standing less than three feet away from him. She was dressed all in black, except for a necklace that looked as if it was made of triangular pieces of ivory, and she had a topknot of black snake-like curls. She was staring at him with such wide-eyed ferocity that he thought somebody must be setting him up for a practical joke. He looked all around him, still chewing, but he couldn’t see any of his d
rinking acquaintances anywhere and none of the passing shoppers were taking any notice of him at all.

  His mouth was so full that he could only mumble in protest and shrug his shoulders. But the black woman stepped towards him and prodded him in the chest. ‘You heard me, Fat Man! Down the lane there, now! And keep going until I tell you!’

  Bula swallowed, and coughed, but before he could manage to cough out any words the woman leaned closer to him and said, quietly but clearly, in a strong Nigerian accent, ‘I know who you are, Bula, and I know who you work for, and I have a gun in my pocket, and I will not for one second hesitate to shoot you, even out here, in the middle of the street.’

  Bula took two or three defensive steps back, his tongue chasing half-chewed burger around his mouth, and then swallowing, and swallowing, and swallowing yet again. He was trying to work out how this skinny young woman in nothing but jeans and a T-shirt and a sleeveless waistcoat could be carrying a gun, even though her right hand was pushed deeply into her waistcoat pocket.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, warily. ‘Suppose I tell you to go and take a running jump.’

  By now they were standing right in the middle of the narrow entrance to Mutton Lane, which runs from Patrick Street into the covered English Market, so that other people had to push past them. Bula wasn’t at all sure if he ought to take this woman seriously or not. This must be a joke. But if it was a joke, what was funny about it, from anybody’s point of view?

  The woman said, ‘I want to talk to you, Bula, that’s all.’

  ‘So how do you know my name? Who the feck are you? What do you want to talk about, anyway?’

  ‘You’ll never find out if you make me shoot you.’

  ‘Oh, get away out of here. You don’t have a gun.’

  ‘That’s what Mânios Dumitrescu said to me. Almost those exact same words.’

  ‘Mânios? You mean Manny? Manny Dumb-arse? That septic little Romanian shite?’