Mantrapped Read Free Page B

cheap flights, and allocated where Western need most lay. The clever ones were whisked off into banks, the pretty ones landed in the sex industry, the careful ones became nannies, the kind ones carers, and the daft and docile ones, Mrs Kovac's speciality, became cleaners. Now she ran Kleene Machine she would trust the most dextrous to do mending and repair work: replace buttons, patch, take up hems, let out seams - there is a lot of such work to be done: these days, with exercise done or neglected, diets working or otherwise, people change their shape rapidly. Fat today, slim tomorrow: wide-muscled shoulders on Saturday night, soft and sloping a week hence. But good mending girls were in short supply: the art of careful, delicate and precise workmanship was dying in the East as it long since had in the West. 'Repairs' were a good little money earner if you got it right but finding the staff was an increasing problem.
    A few of Mrs Kovac's best girls had got away to good jobs in the fashion industry in Paris, where they commanded good wages. Now they had learned the route, too many others followed. Lately the bottom had fallen out of the Far East market: girls from Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand were earning their living at home, their national economies were better. Times were better. Eastern Europe and Russia was the new market for girls. Soon that too would dry up and she would be left with the British, who were too disdainful to exert themselves at such mundane and badly-paid tasks. Poles were hopeless at sewing but good cleaners. It was a Communist upbringing mixed up with Catholic guilt that did it, in Mrs Kovac's opinion. They scrubbed both to cleanse their sins and benefit the community. But she could see that someone like Trisha, who had let slip about her past in embroidery, and was clearly in reduced circumstances, might be persuaded to join the mending army.
    What Trisha had liked about the flat on her earlier brief inspection of it was that it had its own side entrance. You didn't have to go through the shop to get to it. It was private. She could make it nice. A few throws, some cushions and a scented candle or two and it would be just fine. She'd turn it into a little love nest. The area was marginally worrying. There was a Starbucks just around the corner, true - a sign that the district was going up in the world; but there was also a pile of broken syringes outside Kleene Machine waiting for a street-cleaner who never came to sweep them up in his little machine. Touch and go, Trisha thought, but she wouldn't be there for long. This was just a staging post between one good life and the next - with any luck. First, Mrs Kovac had to be persuaded.
    'Please, please,' said Trisha, 'I don't know what I'm going to do; I've got no one to be there for me, nowhere to live. I don't know how my life has come to this but it has.' And so forth.
    Mrs Kovac said she couldn't change her mind, she always kept her word, and besides, the new tenant was prepared to do bits and pieces of mending and sewing in part return for rent.
    'I can do that!' said Trisha. 'It's just up my street!' and indeed this was true. She had been to the London College of Embroidery for a term, between school and Drama College. She'd written this on the statutory form provided by the Rental Accommodation Office, which she'd given Mrs Kovac, and which gave the life details everyone seemed to want these days.
    'If it means all that to you,' said Mrs Kovac, grudgingly, 'I'll put the other person off.' So that was that, arranged. Fate took away with one hand and gave it back with the other, albeit finding the recipient a little more shop-soiled by age and experience each time it happened. Trisha didn't suppose her mending duties would be onerous, since Mrs Kovac was prepared to reduce the rent by only five pounds a week. She would meet that problem when she came to it.
    On her way to her new home, riding in the front of the van with the removal man and her