It is raining.
Not the perpetual, numbing drizzle that is so often associated with London, but a veritable downpour; lashings of weighted water, sheets of grey — sometimes silver, depending on the fluctuating direction of the wind — falling in pellets, bursting on contact, stuttering like some liquid gunfire.
And yet through it all the city sleeps, suspended in the soft, muted state of tranquillity that accompanies the early hours of the morning.
A car passes through the streets, driving slowly, its wheels tearing the thin layer of water collecting on the road surface. The dampened rubber rips through the reflection of a woman on the rain-slicked tarmac, shattering it, leaving the image oddly splintered; a rippling mouth, the fragments of an arm, the distorted lines of bare legs, glossed with rain.
She stands on the pavement, watching the vehicle until it turns the corner, her arms wrapped around the thin slip of soaked material serving as a dress. It clings to every ridge, every curve, every indecent aspect of the limited lingerie underneath, and she hates it.
The woman rolls the stub of a cigarette between her fingers, catching the edge of her nails — her cheap, plastic nails, painted red to match the lipstick smudged across her chin — on the glowing tip.
The woman in red, they call her.
It is a street name — whistled, cat-called, but never spoken. She loathes that too. It is a fitting title, however, for she is always red; red with humiliation, as she climbs out of cars, her dress roughly unzipped and illicit money in hand, red with their lust, but not hers.
Red with fury, because she is angry, angry all the time, at the world, at her situation, at the people who put her there.
Her shoes are heeled, capped with scuffed scarlet, and her dress is torn, ripped by countless overly-rough removals. It is short — too short to be considered socially acceptable — but she knows it has to be. They won't stop at her corner, otherwise.
She looks around. One more night, she thinks. A few more clients. She can pay him then. He loses his last few shreds of humanity when they don't pay him, and she can't make him angry, not again. She thinks back to her first night, remembering the girl with the emerald eyes and cracked leather skirt who didn't pay her lot. She remembers the glaze in those same green eyes, when he'd finished with her, and the way in which her head lolled, unthinking, unseeing, as she was carried to the grubby alleyway behind the brothel, where they all go, when they expire.
He'd liked his crimson woman at first.
She had seen red, when another girl — this one attired entirely in pink — wouldn't stop asking questions; an inquisition that very nearly lost her her life. She stopped asking those questions when the red woman's hands tightened around her trachea, her nails, those carmine nails, dug deep into dark skin, drawing little red pinheads from the flesh. She recalls being dragged away by panicking prostitutes, screaming and kicking and struggling, away from the pink lady, before she too joined green-eyes behind the rubbish crates.
He'd sat there with his rings and his fat cigar watching it all, laughing at her temper, calling her his firecracker.
But he'd turned, when the money didn't come in.
She was new to this dark world of sex and scandal, and she wouldn't stop fighting; fighting the clients, fighting the rules, fighting herself.
She became his liability.
It was on a Saturday, after the clubs had shut and the scum of London filtered out onto the streets, did she finally cross the line. A car pulled up, the door was shut behind her, they drove to a secluded parking lot, out of view. She didn't think much of it. It was another client; another means to an end. She'd just say the right words and do the right things and it would stop, eventually — she'd get her cash, he'd drive away satisfied.
Only he wouldn't stop. He wouldn't let her go, after she'd fulfilled her filthy promise.
The car shook on that night, and not as the result of carnal activities. She painted the windows red from the inside and left him there, with his cracked spine and battered skull pressed up against the steering wheel.
He was furious, when he found out. Of course, with her client dead, she'd come back empty-handed, and he had to arrange for a body disposal to prevent unwanted investigation.
She reaches up and traces the week-old welts beneath the powder on her face. The bruises still ache, when she touches them. She didn't fight back, when he hit her — she simply could not afford to. She needs the money more than she needs her integrity.
It is her last chance.
She is jolted from her thoughts by the glare of car headlights. She blinks and squints against the white, waiting for it to dim and the window to be wound down.
One more night, she repeats to herself. A few more clients.
That is her mantra, now.
A few more clients and she'll be paid; he'll have his money, and she will have her drink.
She focuses on the drink, on the burn of something potent at the back of her throat, on the sweet stupor that will wrap itself around her broken mind and lull her into sleep. She pictures it in her head, as she leans down to the window.
"How much for the night?"
She names her price; a label tied around her neck, stamped across her forehead, a barcode tattooed into her skin.
A human product.
The door is opened.
She pauses before she enters the vehicle, just for a fraction of a moment; a second of reflection and contemplation before she tries to forget who she is and what she is doing. It is their fault, she reiterates internally. It's their fault I'm here.
The sadness that crippled her shifted, softening to an inevitable desperation. That desperation — after weeks spent sleeping on a brothel floor, drinking herself to near blindness and selling to anyone who was willing to buy her sinful goods — spiralled into an intense, white-hot fury.
What she wouldn't give to watch them burn.
The smile is back. She tugs at the band holding back her hair, letting it fall loose in a mess of helical ringlets, licking her lips and adjusting the strap of her dress.
She climbs into his car, and the cycle starts again.