Glam - Part One

'Nice, ain't she?'

I looked away from the object of my distraction to find an older gent, in his sixties perhaps, long hair greasy and greying twinkling his fat rheumy eye directly into mine. His baseball cap, the stitching proclaiming an overly jubilant '-Yes!', was so frayed about the peak I suspected he may have found it in the street. 'Would you like to meet her?'

'I, um...What? ..I beg your...'

'Erin-!' He called the name gutterally like a spade across a gravestone, causing the beautiful girl on the corner turn her head in our direction. The man beckoned furiously without unbending his arm much and she stepped off the kerb and began jerking towards us on impractically high platform sandals.

'Really, sir, I was only sitting here waiting on my bus...'

'Sshhh,' he cooed, dark and conspiratory. 'You only find the good stuff when you're waiting on something else.' The young woman had reached us now and stood staring at us both with a blank yet pleasant face, expectant. 'Erin, I've a boy for you here. He'd like a chat.'

Panicking now at this weird invasion into my world occasioned no doubt in part by my wistful glance across the street I half-stood and gestured to the vacated seat. 'Please, I was, er, just leaving anyway. Well, I mean, my bus will be here any moment and I see you two know one another and I...' The girl smiled.

'Alright, Jack, no need to spray your knickers. I was only coming over coz I's friendly. Siddown.'

I saddown.

'Now, My name's Erin, woz yours?' I turned to stare once more at the filthy smelly arsehole who'd dumped me in this, to upbraid him, to chew him out. He was gone. He was nowhere in sight. There was just me and the girl I'd admired, from a distance, in what I had thought a moment of private reverie.

'Marcus, as it happens. Erm, pleasure to meet you I'm sure. How d'ye do?' She stood over me, lightly licking her frosted gloss lips and appraising me through her mascara. Despite these painted additions I could see that beneath this facade there was someone more beautiful than all of Nature. I am ashamed to admit it but I sometimes wonder whether phrenology hasn't something to say for itself when I look into the eyes of strangers and see goodness or cruelty. The man who had just brought this vision to me had oozed malevolence from his voice, his look, his odour. The girl that towered above me looked like an angel forced into human form, her outward appearance shouting vulnerability whilst her soul radiated supreme power beyond my human ken. She knelt forward as a worshipper dips for absolution.

'Gorra light, Marcus?'

I reached into my duffel pocket and brought the flaming zippo up towards her chin. She slid a slender menthol out of its case and rested it between her delicate lips, sucking gently to bring a smoulder to the tip. 'Would you like a seat... Erin?'

'Thanks, love, but I'm at work you see. I've got to stand on that corner until someone invites me inside.'

'But it's freezing...'

'...And I ain't hardly wearin' nothing?' She laughed in a glassy tinkling that surprised me. 'Lawks, luvvie, ain't you just the cutest. Listen,' She turned to hover one cheek on the wood beside me, 'I don't s'ppose you'd like to invite me in would you? It is frickin' baltic out here tonight.'

I explained that I was getting a coach to a nearby major city and that if circumstances were different I would be delighted to do such a thing. I was by now of course ninety-nine percent sure she was a working girl and that has never been my game, not even for an instant, but she had some quality I would have forgotten all my moral attributes for in a blink. And, so it happens, she made it easier for me.

'I live that way meself. Buy me a bus fare and I'll come kip at yours tonight.' Bald, bold, I abandoned all sense and paid for two.

On the bus she kissed my lower jaw as way of thanks, snuggled into my arm and was asleep by the time we were in gear. I allowed myself to sniff her hair gently as we turned out of town and realised we had turned off the motorway and into our destination city before I'd finished my inhalation. We pulled into the bus station and I kissed her centre parting as she awoke and stretched. 'Far?'

'No, not too bad,' I assured her and we set off down the street. I told her – she was quizzing me and seemed to genuinely want to know – what I did for a living and she 'ooohed' and 'aaahed' at each appropriate juncture. Till in no time we were outside my flat. I grew nervous here as all of a sudden, key penetrating lock, I looked in at my own situation and realised how much like a set-up this all seemed. A 'Honey Trap' I've heard it called.

'Marcus?' She asked, looking me in the eye and squeezing the hand she held for warmth.

'I just...' She put her other hand behind my head and pulled me down for the longest, warmest kiss of my life. It awoke a pendulum within that had been dormant these past two years and before I knew it we were in bed. Oh how that night continued, in too many ways for it to be noted in human tongue. Too many emotions rolled through me from thighs to face and full of force we threw ourselves to eternity and rolled into one another like two primaeval storms deciding the course of pre history.

When morning broke, I found her bra hanging in the kitchen from the light fitting, a small notebook rested in the lower descending cup, sealed with a pale frosted kiss. In it she had written co-ordinates that a quick online search revealed to lead me back to the bench whereupon we had met. Whether through lust or through star-crossed love, I called in sick to work and took my sister's motorbike.

I parked-up beside the bus-station and she was not there. I waited there all day - a kiosk by the entrance fed my disappointment sufficient enough. Six o'clock, the time of our yester-meeting came and went and I had just straddled the Ninja when I remembered the clocks had changed just that night I had found her. So I waited some more. What had been six came around again and I was ready to leave with nothing but the dream of her when I saw him sitting on the bench once more.

'Evenin' squire,' he leered. 'Good night, was it?' He spat disgustingly upon his fingers and removed his cap but briefly to slick back his matted fringe. I sprang at him.

'Where is she? What have you done!?'

He laughed in my face, his peggy teeth rattling with the sound. 'Come along with me, Markey boy, I've a present for you.' Grotesquely he held out his hand as were I a little boy and he my father. In a dwam I accepted and he led me down the lane beside the church to meet some fate I knew not what. At the end, dim and stinking with days old piss, was a squat red door, bolted shut like a liftworks and cracked below with years of neglect.

He brought out his keys, rattled the lock and in we went.