Marnie Riches - The Girl Who Broke the Rules

‘Incorrigible arsehole!’ she said, as she cycled the length of Mill Road.

It felt like a five-mile hike. She would have liked a cigarette at the end of it with the fresh, ground coffee she had just bought. But she had sworn to both Ad and van den Bergen that she would stick with the e-cigarettes. They weren’t the same.

She turned into Devonshire Road. Opened the door to the terraced house she shared with another PhD called Lucy. Lucy was a tall, long-limbed rich girl who spent most of the time at her undergrad boyfriend’s place, four or five miles away, up in Girton College. Given the frequency with which George shuttled back and forth from London and Amsterdam, she and Lucy had met only a handful of times in a term. Probably just as well, since Lucy was a slovenly little shit, who didn’t know one end of a toilet cleaner bottle from another. Lucy had left a scum ring around the bath on three occasions, early on in the tenancy, rendering George apoplectic with rage. But Lucy had left a mess in the toilet only once. George smiled at the memory of threatening leggy, entitled Lucy with a beating, using the toilet brush as a weapon. No. Lucy didn’t come home very often, now. Though a note on the kitchen table said she planned to return tomorrow evening, and could George please leave the heating and hot water on? No. Fuck her. George didn’t have the money to subsidise Lucy’s preferred twenty-six degrees of tropical in winter. It wasn’t the Costa del Salcombe. She could put another sodding ten-ply cashmere jumper on.

Coffee on, and George picked up van den Bergen’s email on her laptop. Watched the video nasty, whilst chugging on her e-cigarette. Peered through her fingers as she reached the climax.

‘Jesus, man. That’s some fucked-up shit, right there,’ she told the screen.

The film was high resolution. Perhaps owing to the fact that the close-ups were all of body parts and implements, rather than focussing on her face, and that the lighting was sharply directional, George found she was struggling to place the actress. Certainly, despite having notched up some serious hours watching hardcore violent pornography until revulsion and outrage had turned to numb indifference, she did not even recognise the tasteless niche genre.

She captured the woman in a freeze-frame. Leaned in close. There was something about the woman’s eyes that seemed startlingly familiar, though she could not articulate why.

‘She looks like Katja with a wig on,’ she said aloud, swigging coffee from her special Amsterdam mug. ‘Is it Katja?’ Scroll back. Freeze. Scroll forward. Freeze. The woman flickered in slo-mo through her erotic cabaret. ‘Fucking looks like her, as well.’

How long ago had her erstwhile neighbour, Katja, gone into porn flicks – boosted from prostitution, where she had rented a humble room above the Cracked Pot Coffee Shop, directly beneath George’s attic bedsit, to the small screen? A step up the erotic career ladder, because giving a blow job to that prick the Firestarter had catapulted her from being a fifty-euro-a-trick nobody to being a sex-industry celebrity.

Sweat beaded instantaneously on George’s forehead. She pulled out her phone and dialled Katja.

Ringing. Ringing. Ringing. No answer. Then…

‘George, darling!’ Her voice was sluggish, as though George had woken her.

‘You alive?’ George asked, breathing deeply to slow her heartbeat.

‘Yes. Last time I looked, honey.’

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