Maxie’s Demon by Michael Scott Rohan

move fast. With her in, they’d be overflowing any minute.
    I sidled through the reek of powder and perfume and nicotine and armpits, dodging stray garments and wondering what the hell the punters got out of gawking at Ellie’s assortment of bones, sticking out of her skin at odd knobbly angles. Sam, the other girl, breezed in,kissed me on the cheek, said, ‘Dahling!’ in her idea of a posh accent – she’d got me to coach her – and flicked Ellie’s tights off my shoulder where they’d somehow settled.
    They liked me, the girls, in a sort of mild, detached way. Some of them even went out with me, when I had any cash and very occasionally when they had. They said I knew how to treat them, which compared to their average boyfriendswasn’t too great a compliment. They weren’t all tarts, professional or amateur. Some were, including one or two who were bringing up kids, but a couple even came from fairly stable backgrounds. Most of them seemed to drift out of a kind of fearful stratum of low income, low expectations and low-grade council estates, with low IQs and domestic violence practically programmed in. Almost inevitably,unless something got them first, they’d drift back into it again.
    Now my realbackground …
    I could keep that secret from men, but the girls sussed it out at once – or a bit of it, they probably wouldn’t have believed the whole of it. They never could understand how anyone with the kind of start I’d had could have sunk so low. Drink or drugs or gambling, maybe; but though in years past I’d hada pretty good bash at all three, sometimes at once, I wasn’t an obvious slave to any of them. Not even to cars, really.
    I told the girls I was always asking myself that same question, but that wasn’t true. I’d given up asking long since. I was just trying to find my natural level, and maybe I hadn’t found it yet.
    Sam was holdingforth on the latest TV part she hoped to get – two hours’ extrawork on a cop show – when I heard the door slam with real force. I jumped, but Chaddy hadn’t made a sound. So when the dressing room door flew open just as explosively I wasn’t prepared, and just stood staring at Ahwaz as he filled the frame.
    Of course that bastard Chaddy hadn’t sung out, or meant to. He’d phoned Ahwaz the moment I got in, as no doubt he’d been told to. And no doubt he was sittingout there, giggling to himself and hoping Ahwaz wouldn’t break the furniture with me, at least not beyond the powers of his tube of glue. I didn’t hold out much hope of that, as a meaty fist closed on my jacket and hoisted me on to my toes with straining seams, and the girls ran out squealing. A bandaged fist.
    ‘
Take
– take it easy, Ahw—’
    ‘Why should I? Are you looking at me, you bloody littlesnot rag? Do you know what you have bloody well gone and done?’
    ‘I couldn’t help the car – I’ve got you others, haven’t I? I’ll get you more – it was that cutout switch—’
    ‘I am not talking about the frigging Ferrari! Look at me!’
    I had been, but I was trying not to, because it made me want to double up with laughter. Instead of his long black tresses, expensively swept back, oiled and curled,he had what was practically a jail-crop crew cut. Yet even that couldn’t conceal the fact that the hair along the right side of his head was brownish and frazzled, and his ear and cheeks had a sooty, stained look about them, with little patches of angry red like sunburn. Even his gold earring looked scorched and dull. He looked like a slightly blowtorched phrenologist’s dummy.
    ‘Look whatyouhave done! And a hundred-and-fifty-quid shirt
and
a genuine Armani suit
and
a silk tie my brother brought back from Milan! All an absolute fucking ruin! And first I am going to—’
    ‘Wha’ happened? It wasn’t me, I didn’t do anything –
ech!
’ That was because his grip kept tightening.
    ‘My bloody dog an’ bone exploded, is what has happened! Right there in my own