Mistress Pamela could do a job on you, John Robert thought, meaning Lisa, or Marianne, or even himself, or nobody at all. Thud and suck. Thud and suck. It was the sound of the waves going in and out on the New Hampshire shore.
There were crowds on the street now. John Robert was being pushed against the buildings and their windows, odd windows, not what he was used to. He looked at the people going by and thought they were no different from the people he saw in Boston, or Nashua. He inched along the pavement, looking at things that didn't interest him: newspapers, candy, small grocery items called garlic pickle and Marmite and mushy peas. He wished he knew where he was, in what part of the city. That way, he would know what to think of the women who were passing him. They didn't attract him. Most of them were too old. All of them were too hard. He could feel their hardness when they brushed against him, and they always did.
The bracelet was in the window of an antique shop when he saw it, and it stopped him dead. It had been years since he'd seen a charm bracelet. They were so out of style in the States, he never came across them anymore. This one was gold, not silver like the ones his foster sisters had owned before their mother died and he had been moved back to the children's shelter. Theirs had probably not really been silver, either - silver plate, maybe, if they were lucky - and they had worn them on their ankles instead of their wrists. His foster mother had worn no jewellery at all, but like his sisters she had always had her hair 'done', blonded to the point of surreality, teased high over the top of her head, as if she had to anchor a Vegas headdress and wanted to make sure there was enough to keep it from falling off. Mistress Pamela hadn't worn any jewellery that he'd recognized when he'd gone to see her the night before. She'd barely worn any clothes. It wasn't any good, the way these women went about it. It was much too obvious that they were playing a game. He'd had a picture of her stuck in his mind, stuck so firmly that he had been unable to erase the number from his memory even by burning it, but when he'd gone up to the flat at the top of that long narrow flight of stairs, she'd been nothing at all like he had pictured her.
'If you want to make sure to get what you want,' one of the other teachers at Meredith had said, 'go to New York. They have them every which way in New York. You can get them made to order.'
John Robert didn't want to get one made to order. He wasn't in the habit of visiting prostitutes. He wasn't in the habit of indulging himself in any way. If he wanted to indulge himself, he could always take up the offer Lisa Hardwick was making him. Maybe she'd be willing to make a party of it and invite in Marianne.
The bracelet had a lot of charms on it: a monkey, a tiger, a tiny key. There was even a miniature Fabergé egg. His foster sisters always chose charms for good luck, as if having a heart-shaped charm with their boyfriend's initials on it would call forth a proposal of marriage. There was a heart-shaped charm here, but he couldn't see initials on it. There was a pair of dice. They would have liked that one. He wondered what had happened to them after their mother died. Thud and suck. Thud and suck. He went into the shop and looked around.
Mistress Pamela had turned out to be a small woman trying to make up for her lack of stature by wearing very high heels. Her hair had been dyed red but very thin. Her voice had been high and stressed. The only truly impressive thing about her had been her fingernails, and he had told her how much he appreciated them: grown long and filed sharp, painted red with flecks of gold glitter in them, so that they winked in the light. It was about money, that was the problem. It was always about money, and he needed it to be about something else. She had had her instruments laid out on a table: a hairbrush, a tawse, a paddle, a cane. She'd had a cigarette going in a blue plastic ashtray on top of a heating grate. He could feel the whack and grate against the bare skin of his ass as the paddle came down, over and over again, the air whistling through its holes, the edges of her nails scratching him every time her hand made contact with his skin. He could feel the sting, still, under his clothes. All his muscles hurt. There were no women like his foster mother here in England, not that he had seen. Englishwomen did not seem to put on that kind of weight.
The woman at the counter in the back of the antique shop was not fat at all. She was compact and middle-aged, her grey hair pulled back tightly at the nape of her neck.
'Is there something I can do for you?' she said. 'Is there something you've come to sell?'
John Robert wondered who this woman was. Did she own the shop or just work here? Did antique shops in England always have saleswomen who could speak so precisely, as if delivering lines from a textbook exercise on educated speech? He looked back at the window.
'There's a charm bracelet,' he said.
'That's right.' She came around her counter and to the front. The back of the window was open, covered only with a cloth, which was supposed to provide a background for the things that were offered for sale. She reached through the slit in the cloth and came back with the bracelet.
'It really is gold, this one,' she said. 'You don't get that very often in a place like this. Antique, too, some of it.'
'Some of what?'
'Some of the charms,' she said. She held the bracelet out on the palm of her hand. 'That steam engine is old, I think. And the bear. Nineteenth century. You have to wonder who would have brought it here.'
'You don't remember who did?'
'I wasn't the one who took it in,' she said. 'It's well past its date for sale. People bring things here and leave them. I don't know why. I've always wondered if this one belonged to somebody's mother.'
'It could take a lot more charms,' John Robert said.
'I even have charms,' the woman said. 'Those we get, all the time. Little bits of gold. People think it's valuable, gold.'
'Isn't it?'
'Sometimes. But little bits are little bits. You're not going to get rich with a charm the size of a thumbnail. Do you mean to give that to your sweetheart? I have those other charms, if you want to put some on. I've got them right behind the counter.'
'I was thinking of a souvenir,' John Robert said. 'Something special to bring home from England. We're only here for a week.'
'From America,' the woman said.
'From America.'
'I've got an American charm, too,' the woman said. 'A dollar sign, in gold. But that wouldn't do as a souvenir from England, would it?'
They were at the counter now. John Robert couldn't remember how they had gotten there. He shouldn't try to operate on too little sleep. The woman reached under the counter and came up with a tray. It was full of gold, not only charms, but bangle bracelets, earrings, rings, studs that might have gone through someone's nose, or someone's penis. In Mistress Pamela's room the wallpaper had begun to peel in strips off the walls and the single window hadn't shut properly. Every time the cane came down on him, he had cried out. He knew when he began to bleed because he could feel the slickness dripping on to the tops of his thighs. He thought somebody would hear them. He imagined the street below them filled with undercover police, all of them holding tape recorders. His body began to buck and rise against the table she had forced him to bend over. His arms pulled against the wrist restraints. His legs strained against the ropes that secured him to the table legs, pulling him wide. The cane came down again and again, again and again, and he was shrieking long before he began to find release. He thought about Lisa and Marianne and his foster mother and his foster sisters and the long line of women down the years, old and young, young and old, it didn't matter. He was spurting out on to the carpet and the wall. Mistress Pamela was getting back to business.