She was sitting with her back to me, in a salmon-coloured negligée that exposed her thin arms. Her hair was cut like a blonde pageboy’s and there were dark roots showing at the parting on the scalp.
There was a bed, and a bathroom with a toilet bowl and bidet and a door that must have opened into another bedroom beyond.
Petra, I asked, and she said, yes, that’s my name and somehow I immediately knew it wasn’t.
I walked towards her and she lay back on the pink coverlet with the small fluffy pieces of cloth and I stupidly wondered what they called such a bedspread and the word candlewick came to me. So she lay back on the candlewick bedspread. Her face was waiting to be kissed and it was thin and there were lines around her lips and the soft dull bruising on her arms that the make-up couldn’t quite hide.
How old are you, Petra? I asked.
Nineteen, she said.
And how long have you been here?
Oh, she said, I come and go.
Her face was waiting for the kiss, and when she felt it wasn’t coming, she flipped over on the bed and began to fumble with my belt.
Don’t, I said.
You wanted Petra, she said.
But you’re not her.
How can you tell?
Because you’re not nineteen.
And the lines around her sweet mouth deepened.
Was nineteen once.
I’m sure.
Is Petra nineteen?
She would be in her early twenties.
What does it matter what my name is? You want Petra, I’ll be Petra.
It matters, I said, because a girl named Petra went missing many years ago.
Then you just pretend she was me. I went missing.
Do you live here?
No one lives here but Madame. This is a place for fuck. You want to fuck?
No, I said, but it’s important you tell me. How many girls are here?
They come and go, she said. Four or five. What are you, cop? I don’t want no trouble.
You won’t get it, I promise. Tell me their names.
You don’t want to fuck, you must be cop. There is no Petra, I promise. And if you don’t want to fuck, let me jerk you off at least.
Her hand reached once more for my belt and I grabbed it.
Anya, Anya, Anya, Anya. Anya’s my name. You promise you’re not cop?
I’m not, I said.
You just want to talk?
I just want to talk.
You mind then if I do my thing?
What thing?
My drug thing?
I shook my head, and touched the bruises on the inside of her arm.
While we talk. Talk for an hour, then you leave, tell Madame you had good time. You promise?
She opened the bedside-table drawer and took a pouch from it. She took a cigarette packet from the pouch.
You mind if I smoke?
I shook my head.
Bad for you, smoking. Not like fucking.
She took a spoon from the pouch, a needle, a rubber medical band.
She lit the cigarette and did the business while it dangled from her lip.
You leave now, you cause me trouble. Don’t want to fuck, I understand. Just don’t leave now.
She was as dexterous as a medic with her works, and I found the spectacle compulsive. Numbingly compulsive. She heated the spoon with the cigarette lighter while the ash fell from her mouth. She filled the needle from a tableside glass, squirted it clear into the air, then drew the liquid from the heated spoon. She wrapped the rubber round her arm and whacked her vein into action.
Hold this, she said, and gave me one end of the rubber tube.
I saw the needle penetrate the make-up over her vein. A small cloud of blood puffed into the syringe before she hit it home. Then she sighed, a long exhausted sigh, and her head fell backwards against the bedboard.
Petra, she said, and closed her eyes and there was a long silence.
After an age her eyelids opened. Two pinned black pupils stared at me.
Tell me about Petra.
And so I told her. I told her everything. Something about those tiny pupils made it necessary. About the psychic and the burning map. About the girl I had pulled from the water. About the Bach cello suites. About Jenny’s imaginary friends. About the lost Petra and the brothel in the twelfth.
Here, she said. The twelfth.
Yes, I said.
But, she said, there’s something you’re not telling me.
And there was. There was the cufflink, the hotel bill, the therapist, the half-saved marriage. So I told her all of that too.
You are lost, she said.
Yes, I told her, quite lost.
And Petra, she is lost too.
She smiled, softly.
And you, I said. You need help.
I wish I was her, she said. Because I am lost as well. But if I was her, at least I would have been found.
* * *
Windsor, said the madam as I walked back out.
Yes, I said. Sandringham.
Balmoral, she said. All the royal places.
Kensington Palace.
You liked Petra? she asked. And maybe she had tired of the British place names.
Yes, I said. Very much.
You come back, she said. A good client is rare.
I fly back to England tomorrow.
Ah, she said. Salford.
No, I said. London.
London, she said.