Girl Seven Read Free Page B

the club for my interview, picking at my fingernails and hunched over.
    I’d been sitting there for twenty minutes too long and the barmaid kept reassuring me, ‘He’ll be down in a min­ute,’ but I was starting to feel insolent.
    It’s not as if I needed a job right now anyway.
    I almost left before my interview, never to come back.
    Sometimes I tried to imagine how everything might have turned out if I had.
    Even if I was underwhelmed, the club was nicer than I’d expected: not as gaudy and overblown. It was about as tasteful as an erotic club could be. Now, at three in the after­noon, you could almost mistake it for a jazz place in the right light, without all the naked women.
    A few men in suits were drinking and talking amongst them­selves at tables, while the barmaid appeared to run the place. Some low indie rock was playing from her iTunes behind the bar and the lighting was bright but tinted purple.
    There was exposed copper piping hanging from the ceiling.
    The man I was waiting for, Noel Braben, was upstairs in his office.
    I was to find out that the Underground did in fact have an owner, a woman called Ms Edie Franco, but I was only to see her twice in the time I worked there. Noel and Ronnie O’Connell, his long-time business partner, spoke of her work­ing ‘up north’ with her other clubs. The two of them had more invested in the day-to-day management of the Underground than she seemed to.
    When the door to the stairwell on my left opened it wasn’t Noel Braben who walked out of it. It was a woman with dark red hair, metallic and glossy. She had high cheek­bones and wide eyes that looked me up and down and full lips that tightened at the sight of me as she looked over her shoulder on her way out.
    I watched her go, thinking that she was gorgeous but an obvious bitch and that she probably worked here...
    A man wearing jeans and a suit jacket appeared in the doorway after the woman had left, looking pissed off and eager to abdicate from this day. Tired blue eyes searched for me from under a mop of hair that made him look like a member of the Beatles, and he frowned.
    ‘You’re... Seven?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘Seven,’ he repeated.
    ‘Yes.’ I raised my eyebrows this time and he smiled.
    ‘OK then, come on.’
    It wasn’t exactly lust at first sight. But it became appar­ent very quickly that something about me amused him, and something about him fascinated me.
    I wasn’t used to finding men interesting. Women had more intricacies; they were harder to please in every sense, harder to read, and the women I had loved I could live my entire life learning how to please and how to read.
    But I liked Noel Braben.
    I swivelled left and right on the spinning chair as he observed me and asked things like, ‘You always lived in London? You don’t look English, exactly.’
    ‘I’m half Japanese but my parents moved back and forth a lot so my accent is pretty much English.’
    ‘It’s a bit American.’
    ‘Well, that’s how we speak English. We watch a lot of American TV.’
    ‘Do you still live with your parents?’
    ‘No, they’re dead.’
    ‘Ooh.’ A grimace. ‘I’m sorry. Was it recent?’
    ‘They were murdered a few years ago, with my sister.’
    I think I’d wanted to shock him, or myself. It was the only explanation for why I’d stated it with such bravado.
    But he wasn’t shocked.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, with the blank tone of a guy who con­sidered murder no different from any other form of death. ‘Did they ever find the... guy?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘And you survived?’
    ‘I was out.’
    Another frown. He looked down at his desk, his only hint at a reaction, then back up at me with a smile. ‘Can you dance?’
    I was surprised he had changed the subject. He didn’t bring it up again until we were in bed, three weeks later.
    ‘Um, a bit,’ I replied. ‘I can dance but not like... dance. I’ve done Ninpo and some martial arts though so I can pick stuff up quickly.’
    He