The building in front of us is on two storeys. Loud music is blaring inside; I can hear the thump of the bass. Upon closer inspection, the cars in the car park appear to be at the pricier end of the scale. There is no indication on the wall of this building that it’s a place where people buy and sell cars. And the cars don’t look as though they have been parked on the forecourt for months.
Lizard Man beckons me towards him. When we arrive at the door, he waves a hand. For a moment I wonder if he is greeting the door, but then I see a small camera set into the wall. A loud buzzer sounds, and the lock clicks. Lizard Man pulls the door open and gestures to me to follow him inside.
Right behind the door there are two sets of thick, heavy curtains. As I pull one of them back, the volume increases. When I pull the other one, the music resonates through my chest. I find myself standing in a tall room. A disco ball hanging from the ceiling sends thousands of sparkling lights hurtling around the room, and bright, colourful spotlights wash across the room at regular intervals. I can smell cigars and cigarettes, alcohol and perfume. And there’s something else too, something sweet and slightly stale. On the left there is a bar, on the right groups of sofas, armchairs and tables. The tables are covered in glasses and bottles, and the chairs are occupied with different-sized clusters of people, presumably the owners of the cars parked outside. I count around thirty people in the space. The lighting is so problematic that it’s hard to say anything about these people’s appearance.
Right in front of me is a raised platform where two women are dancing. Apart from skimpy underwear and high-heeled shoes, they are naked. I don’t have a very good sense of rhythm – this is one area of human behaviour to which I have never paid much attention – but I can tell that the women’s dancing fits the flow of the bass-heavy music very well indeed.
‘What are you drinking?’ Lizard Man shouts in my ear.
‘Can I go home?’ I ask.
‘No.’
AK remains standing next to me as Lizard Man heads to the bar. He soon returns, presses a bottle of foreign beer into my hand and nods at AK, who grabs me by the arm, squeezes painfully, then proceeds to lead me deeper into the dingy nightclub. At the far end of the room is another set of curtains, this time running the entire length of the wall. The curtains are open at the left-hand side, and we head towards that opening. Beyond the curtains is a more private version of the sofas and chairs in the main room. In the middle of the space is a low table, surrounded by a semi-circular sofa. The lighting is blood-red. AK shoves me in the back and indicates that I am expected to sit down. I sit on the sofa and place the bottle of beer on the table. I don’t want beer. AK stares at me for a moment, then pulls the curtains shut. He remains on the other side of the curtains, and I find myself sitting in the red booth alone.
The thick, black curtain efficiently muffles the noise of the music. I look around. In the corner of the room stands a mirror, and I catch sight of myself. There is also a shelf with a roll of toilet paper and a bowl that I can’t see inside. There is something profoundly odd about the space.
I am about to stand up and leave the building when the curtain is pulled back and one of the women I just saw dancing on the stage steps inside. Now she isn’t even wearing underwear though the high heels are still on her feet. She has long blonde hair, lots of make-up on her face and eyes that seem to look at me, past me or simply through me all at once.
‘Somebody ordered a blowjob,’ she says.
‘I beg your pardon? I never ordered anything of the sort. This is utter madness.’
The woman stops. But only for the blink of an eye.
Before I can add that this must be an unfortunate misunderstanding, the woman has sat herself down in my lap, facing towards me. Her lips find my own and glue themselves tight across my mouth like a magnet on metal. She tastes of lipstick and cigarettes. She grips my left hand and places it on her backside, and with her fingers on top of my fingers she squeezes her buttock. More precisely, I squeeze her buttock with her help. She removes her lips from my lips and presses her breast into my mouth. I try to turn my head, but it’s a big breast, it’s hard, and by now it is so far inside my mouth and she is pressing my head so tightly against her body that trying to let go hurts my cheeks.
The woman pulls my hair as though we are wrestling. I have to lean my head backwards and end up sliding onto my back. With my right hand, I try to prise her fingers out of my hair, but her fist is rock solid. Then she moves my hand, the one that was squeezing her backside, and slips it between her legs. I’m not entirely sure where our fingers, still conjoined, end up. By this point I am lying on the sofa on my back and hollering in pain as the woman continues to wrench my hair.
Everything happens so quickly, it only takes a few seconds, and it’s all so bewildering that I simply can’t function the way I want to: sensibly. Besides, I am half paralysed, taken completely by surprise. The woman’s every move feels adept and calculated. As though she has done this before, many times.
She bounces on top of me, yanks me by the hair even more forcefully than before, then with astonishing strength and agility, she slides a metre forwards and sits on my face as she would a chair. I’m not sure where my mouth is, but I can taste a mixture of sea salt and vanilla custard. She pulls my hair to the right, the left, back and forth, now with unprecedented power, as though she were scrubbing an old rag rug within an inch of its life. With my free hand – the one whose fingers the woman isn’t twisting with her exceptionally painful technique – I try to grip her buttocks in an attempt to remove them from my cheeks. Just as I get a good grip, she climbs off me as quickly as she flew on top of me. She backs up towards the curtains, pulls back the right-hand one and disappears. On her way back to the stage she passes a few centimetres in front of AK, but neither so much as glances at the other.
Finally I manage to clamber up from the sofa. It feels as though I’ve lost half my hair, my scalp is on fire. I stand up and feel my trousers sliding down to my ankles. The woman managed to open my fly and unbutton my trousers. I see the phone in AK’s hand as he snaps a picture of me.
Later on, I realise that the picture AK took was only for his own amusement. They didn’t need that photograph because they already had dozens of other ones. This I learned on the drive back to the city. For thirty seconds, I was able to flick through a selection of images on an iPad that AK thrust into my lap. The photos give the impression that I was engaged in some particularly heated activity with the naked woman. They give the impression that I did everything of my own free will, to feed my insatiable lust. They give the impression that I was a man bellowing with pleasure, a man with lecherous hands that I couldn’t keep to myself.
‘Now listen carefully, you fucking dimwit,’ Lizard Man says from the front seat. ‘The big man that you met – and whose money you’re using – doesn’t like his employees doing things like that. It shows they can’t be trusted. And you remember what he does to people that can’t be trusted. He strings them up. If he’s in a good mood. You, you fucking shit-for-brains robot, have been pissing me off from the very first time I had to listen to you and your smart-ass comments. I should have let AK break your neck. Now you’ve managed to hoodwink the boss with all that one-plus-one stuff, but believe me, that can all disappear. Fast. All I have to do is show him these pictures, and you’ll be hanging from the rafters in that barn. Capiche, moron?’
I say nothing. Lizard Man’s eyes flash in the mirror.