Born Bad: A gritty gangster thriller with a darkly funny heart. Marnie Riches

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       Chapter 5

       Irina

      Irina didn’t like the tall man who smelled of fish. She looked up at him and wrinkled her nose. She had heard tell of Jews back home, but had never seen a real one until coming to Manchester. Asaf, the beast was called. He looked like something out of the old stories she had been told as a child by her dear old Babicˇka. He even had the curly sidelocks she had described, though not the horns, it would seem.

      Instinctively, she held her bag close to her body, thinking of the photo of Mama and Babicˇka that she had hidden in a special zipped compartment. Bad enough that these bastards had taken her Slovakian passport away from her. She would never let them have that photo. It was all she had left of her old life. How she missed her Mama. How disappointed Mama would be if she knew that her lover Dominik had betrayed them both by getting her pregnant and then – as if knocking up his girlfriend’s teenaged daughter weren’t bad enough – arranging her transport to England with the promise of a hairdressing career that had turned out to be nothing more than unpaid prostitution.

      She patted her stomach. The baby wasn’t showing yet. She didn’t want a baby. This was not a world she wanted to bring a child into.

      Spitting on the floor, she tried to get the taste of the boss-man’s dick out of her mouth.

      Asaf looked down at her. ‘Hurry up,’ he said in her native tongue, grabbing her upper arm. ‘You’ve got an appointment.’

      ‘An appointment?’ Her heart fell. Another punter, no doubt. Perhaps some sweaty builder with dirt beneath his fingernails. Perhaps a businessman in one of the local offices. Clean hands, but the same stench of lust and lies evaporating from their pores, as they all cheated on their wives with some firm, forbidden flesh.

      The Fish Man pulled her towards a battered purple people carrier, parked outside a run-down warehouse, marked out from all the other run-down warehouses by a sign in the window – written in English in poorly cut-out dayglo letters, the meaning of which she didn’t understand. An ‘F’ hung askew at the start of two words – ‘ANCY GOODS’. Beneath it was scrawled in black on a giant, fluorescent green poster, ‘WHOLESALE ONLY’. A dark-skinned man was sitting behind the wheel of the vehicle. Into his scalp was shaven a lightning bolt. He glanced at her, looked her up and down, and looked away. Perhaps derision or disgust or furtive lust. It was hard to tell.

      ‘Are you taking me back to the house?’ Irina asked the Fish Man. Suddenly, she was buoyed by the hope of a hot drink, a shower and a chat with her own kind. The house was full of other teens on the game for these sons of bitches – all from Eastern Europe, give or take the odd African. The black ones mainly kept themselves to themselves.

      He opened the rear door to the people carrier and pushed her into the seat.

      ‘No. Not back to the house. Something else. Lev here will take us.’ He rummaged in a deep pocket sewn into his coat and frowned. ‘Stay put. I’ve got to go back and get something.’

      He engaged the child locks and slammed the rear door, leaving her trapped in a vacuum of awkwardness with the stranger in the driver’s seat.

      Clasping her hoody around her tightly, Irina stared at the back of the driver’s head. She recognised him as the man who came round to the house to collect money from those spotty-faced pimps that kept her and the other girls under lock and key, Tommo and Kai.

      ‘You doing alright?’ the driver asked.

      Irina jumped at the sound of his voice, struggling to understand his words spoken with a strong Mancunian accent. She inadvertently locked eyes with him via the rear view mirror and immediately looked down to her lap, heat burning in her cheeks. It was best not to engage with these animals. You never knew when they were going to pounce on you, expecting sex.