Mother Eve had heard a voice saying: One day there’ll be a place for the women to live freely. And now she’s getting hundreds of thousands of hits from that new country where women had, until recently, been chained in basements on dirty mattresses. They’re setting up new churches in her name, without her having had to send a single missionary or envoy. Her name means something in Bessapara; an email from her means even more.
And Roxy’s dad knows people on the Moldovan border, he’s been doing business with them for years. Not in flesh, that’s a dirty trade. But cars, cigarettes, booze, guns, even a bit of art. Leaky border’s a leaky border. With all the disruption recently, it’s got leakier than ever.
Roxy says to her dad, ‘Send me to this new country. Bessapara. Send me there and I can get something going. I’ve got an idea.’
‘Listen,’ says Shanti. ‘You wanna try something new?’
There are eight of them, four women, four men, all mid-twenties, in the basement flat in Primrose Hill. Bankers. One of the men already has his hand up one of the women’s skirt, which Shanti could fucking do without.
She knows her audience, though. ‘Something new’ is their rallying cry, their mating call, their 6 a.m. wake-up call with newspaper and organic pomegranate juice, because orange is so 1980s high glycaemic load. They love ‘something new’ more than they love collateralized debt obligations.
‘Free sample?’ says one of the men, counting out the pills they’ve already bought. Checking he hasn’t been cheated. Cunt.
‘Uh-uh,’ says Shanti. ‘Not for you. This is strictly for the ladies.’
There’s a crowing, whistling cheer at that. She shows them a little dime bag of powder; it’s white with a purplish sheen to it. Like snow, like frost, like the tops of mountains in some fancy fucking ski resort where these guys go on the weekends to drop ￡25 on a mug of hot chocolate and bang each other on endangered fur rugs in front of fires carefully constructed at 5 a.m. by underpaid chalet workers.
‘Glitter,’ she says.
She licks the top of her index finger, dips it into the bag and picks up a few shining crystals. Opens her mouth and lifts her tongue to show them what she’s doing. Rubs the powder into one of the thick blue veins at the base of the tongue. Offers the bag to the ladies.
The ladies dip in eagerly, scooping up great fingerfuls of whatever-it-is that Shanti’s offering and rubbing it round their mouths. Shanti waits for them to feel it.
‘Oh, wow!’ says a systems analyst with a blunt bob – Lucy? Charlotte? They all have roughly the same name. ‘Oh, wow, oh God, I think I’m going to …’ And she starts to crackle at the end of her fingertips. It’s not enough to get her hurting anyone, but she’s lost control a bit.
Usually, when you’re drunk or stoned or high on most things, the power is damped down. A drunk woman might get off a jolt or two, but nothing you couldn’t dodge if you weren’t drunk too. This is different. This is calibrated. This is designed to enhance the experience. There’s some coke cut in with it – that’s already known to make the power more pronounced – and a couple of different kinds of uppers, along with the thing that gives it the purple glint, which Shanti’s only ever seen post-cut. Something coming out of Moldova, she’s heard. Or Romania. Or Bessapara. Or Ukraine. One of those. Shanti’s got a bloke she deals with in a lock-up garage out towards the coast in Essex, and when this stuff started coming in she knew she could move it.
The women start laughing. They’re loose-limbed and excited, leaning back, making high, low-powered arcs from one hand to another, or up to the ceiling. It’d feel nice to have them do one of those arcs on you. Shanti’s got her girlfriend to take some and do it to her. Not painful, but fizzing, tickling at the nerve endings, like taking a shower in San Pellegrino. Which these fuckers probably do, anyway.
One of the men pays her in cash for four more bags. She charges them double – eight crisp fifties, don’t get those from a hole in the wall – because they’re dickheads. No one offers to walk her down to her car. When she lets herself out, two of them are already fucking, giggling, letting off starbursts with every thrust and jerk.
Steve’s nervous, cos there’s been a change in the security guards’ rota. And it could be nothing, right, it could be some fucker’s had a baby, some other fucker’s got the shits. Then it all looks different from the outside even when it’s entirely OK, and you’ll be able to walk in just like normal and get your fucking hourglasses just like fucking normal.
The problem is, there’s been a story in the paper. Not a big story, not page one. But page five in the Mirror and the Express and the Daily Fucking Mail, about this ‘new death drug’ that’s killing ‘young men with their whole lives ahead of them’. It’s in the paper, but there’s no fucking law against it yet, not unless it’s cut with something else. Which this stuff in the fucking hourglasses is. So fuck it. What’s he going to do? Stand out here like a lemon, waiting to see if PC Plod is waiting by the docks? To see if those guards he hasn’t ever had a chat or a drink with, see if one of those is a copper?
He pulls his cap down low over his eyes. He drives the van up to the gate.
‘Yeah,’ he goes. ‘I’ve got boxes to pick up from container’ – he stops to look up the number, even though he knows it like it’s tattooed inside his fucking eyelids – ‘A-G-21-FE7-13859D?’ There’s a crackle on the intercom. ‘Bloody hell,’ says Steve, trying to sound conversational, ‘these bloody numbers get longer every week, I tell you.’
There’s a long pause. If it was Chris or Marky or that bell-end Jeff in the gatehouse, they’d know him and let him in.
‘Can you come up to the window, driver,’ says a woman’s voice through the intercom. ‘We need to see your ID and pick-up forms.’
Fuck.