Perfect Day

ironic reversal of their progress earlier. He wants to help her but he dares not touch her now. They pick their way over cobblestones that look as if they have just been laid. The area is in the process of being turned into a historical theme park and Kate is its first satisfied customer.
    ‘Oh look, this was a dungeon,’ she exclaims delightedly.
    A museum of wine has opened in one of the old warehouses.
    ‘ Vinopolis ,’ Kate reads. ‘ D’you think that’s Roman?’
    The steps up to London Bridge have a notice saying that this is the place where Nancy was killed in Oliver Twist. Alexander is surprised that they have not painted on her blood to make it more authentic. Back on the bridge, he feels as if he’s been delivered back to his life.
    He hails a cab.
    ‘I’ll get a bus,’ Kate tells him.
    ‘No, you won’t. I’ll pay,’ he says. ‘Now, where to?’
    She says the name of a street in Soho then sits back and tries to put her seatbelt on. From the way she watches everything out of the window, he thinks it might be the first time she’s travelled in a London taxi.
    ‘Where do you live, then?’ she asks him as they stop at lights on Cambridge Circus.
    ‘In Kent ,’ he says.
    ‘Oh. That’s a long way,’ she says, leaving the sentence open for him to fill in more information.
    ‘Not really,’ he says, unwilling to give it.
    The cab drops them at the end of her street.
    She walks down an alleyway he wouldn’t have noticed and stops at a door with several bells.
    ‘Well, this is it, then,’ she says. ‘ D’you want to come up for a coffee?’
    ‘Is this where you live?’
    All his assumptions about her flip over, as his eyes scan the names on the bells. Model Mandy, Big Susie, Betty Bonds, Joy.
    ‘It’s not what you think,’ she says. ‘Well, it is. It’s my sister’s place. I just sleep here. She doesn’t use it much now. Mostly she stays with her boyfriend in Romford.’
    ‘Which one is your sister?’ He points to the bells.
    ‘Joy. As in stick. As in ride. Her real name’s Marie. Sorry,’ she says, ‘it was a bit of a shock to me when I arrived. She told us she was a supermodel.’
    She says it so seriously it makes him laugh, and then she’s laughing too, and before he knows it, he’s walking up the stairs to the top floor behind her.
    He tells himself it’s just curiosity. He’s never been inside a brothel before. In Tokyo his flat was in Shinjuku. He liked the seediness of the area, but never sampled any of the experiences on offer there, except once when he was with a group of teachers who’d been drinking all Friday evening and dared each other to go to a peep-show. When the two prostitutes who were supposed to be engaging in lesbian sex for the entertainment of men saw that there was a woman with them, they started shouting abuse. Afterwards nobody could work out how they knew unless there were two-way mirrors or hidden cameras, which had made them feel even more sordid.
    Inside, he’s half expecting a tunnel of love with pink marabou or fake leopardskin or even leather, but it’s more like a shabby bedsit with a worn patterned carpet and a smell of air-freshener that doesn’t quite mask the underlying notes of cooking and damp.
    Joy’s bedsit is on the top floor. It has four different locks. The room is L shaped. There’s a battered black leather sofa as you walk in with nothing in front of it, like a waiting room. In the far corner there’s a double bed tented with lengths of shiny, silky material in magenta, orange and purple. The room is painted very dark blue. Including the windows.
    ‘Look at this!’
    Kate flicks the light off. He’s momentarily nervous. What is she going to do to him? And then he sees dozens of fluorescent stars glowing on the ceiling.
    ‘They’re always falling off,’ Kate says, switching the light back on.
    He follows her round the corner of the room, staying as far away from the bed as he can. As she swishes back a black curtain, he draws his breath in, anticipating some sort of bondage gear, but there’s just a pink bath that is so out of place it doesn’t look plumbed in, and next to it, a cooker and a fridge.
    ‘Everything but the kitchen sink ,’ Kate says, matter-of-factly. ‘She got Des to take it out and put the bath in instead. We’ve got a plastic bowl for the washing up,’ she says, in case he was thinking that they took it into the bath with them. ‘Coffee?’
    ‘ Er , I won’t, thanks,’ he