The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber

describes them. ‘What a lot of trouble you go to,’ one of them once remarked, ‘for clothes that are stripped off in five minutes, for a man to tread on!’ But Sugar’s men stay in her room for a great deal longer than five minutes. Some of them stay for hours, and when Sugar emerges, she looks as though she hasn’t even been undressed. What does she do with them in there?
    ‘Talk,’ is her answer, if anyone is bold enough to ask. It’s a teasing answer, delivered with a grave smile, but it’s not the whole truth. Once she has chosen her man, she’ll submit to anything. If it’s her cunt they want, they can have it, although mouth and rectum are her preferred orifices: less mess, and more peace of mind afterwards. Her husky voice is the result of a knife-point being pressed to her throat just a little too hard when she was fifteen, by one of the few men she ever failed to satisfy.
    But it isn’t simple submission and depravity that Sugar provides. Submission and depravity come cheap. Any number of toothless hags will do whatever a man asks if they’re given a few pennies for gin. What makes Sugar a rarity is that she’ll do anything the most desperate alley-slut will do, but do it with a smile of child-like innocence. There is no rarer treasure in Sugar’s profession than a virginal-looking girl who can surrender to a deluge of ordure and rise up smelling like roses, her eyes friendly as a spaniel’s, her smile white as absolution. The men come back again and again, asking for her by name, convinced that her lust for their particular vice must equal their own; Sugar’s fellow prostitutes, seeing the men so taken in, can only shake their heads in grudging admiration.
    Those who are inclined to dislike her, Sugar strives to charm. In this, her freakish memory is useful: she’s able, it seems, to recall everything anybody has ever said to her. ‘So, how did your sister fare in Australia?’ she will, for example, ask an old acquaintance a year after they last met. ‘Did that O’Sullivan fellow in Brisbane marry her or not?’ And her eyes will be full of concern, or something so closely resembling concern that even the most sceptical tart is touched.
    Sugar’s acute memory is equally useful when dealing with her men. Music is reputed to soothe the savage breast, but Sugar has found a more effective way to pacify a brutish man: by remembering his opinions on trade unions or the indisputable merits of black snuff over brown. ‘Of course I remember you!’ she’ll say to the loathsome ape who, two years before, twisted her nipples so hard she almost fainted in pain. ‘You are the gentleman who believes that the Tooley Street fire was started by Tsarist Jews!’ A few more such regurgitations, and he’s ready to praise her to the skies.
    A pity, really, that Sugar’s brain was not born into a man’s head, and instead squirms, constricted and crammed, in the dainty skull of a girl. What a contribution she might have made to the British Empire!
    ‘Excu- hoose me, ladies!’
    Caroline and Sugar turn on their heels, and discover a man with a tripod and camera pursuing his hobby not far behind them in Trafalgar Square. He’s a fearsome-looking creature with dark brows, Trollopean beard and a tartan overcoat, and the women jump to the conclusion that he wants them out of the way of his tripod-mounted ogre eye.
    ‘Oh no no n-o-o , ladies!’ he protests when they move aside. ‘I would be honoured! Honoured to preserve your image for all time!’
    They look at each other and share a smile: here is another amateur photographer just like all the rest, as fervent as a spiritualist and as mad as a hatter. Here is a man sufficiently charismatic to charm the pigeons down into his chosen tableau – or if he isn’t, then sufficiently generous to buy lucky passers-by a halfpenny cone of birdseed. Even better when they provide their own!
    ‘I am truly grateful, ladies! If you could but dispose yourselves a little