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Wei Wei cowered, her legs drawn under her, arms behind her back, ankles tied with flex. Her eyes were bright and damp. She said, ‘No, please, no,’ over and over again.

Black Fort pointed a camera phone at her and she slid back, propelling herself along the concrete floor with bare feet, until she was pressed against a brick wall.

‘No, please.’

Six Days grabbed a hank of hair and yanked her head back. He wore baggy black clothes, a scarf across his face, a woolly hat pulled down low over his forehead and wraparound plastic sunglasses over his eyes. A knife blade gleamed.

Her eyes widened. She thought to herself, this is it, I’m going to die, I’m going to die and there’s nothing I can do about it. He let go and hair flopped across her face.

‘No, please. No.’ A tear ran down her cheek. A mental voice screeched, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die. Six Days leaned over and down, and with a rapid underhand motion drove the knife a dozen or so times into her torso.

Wei Wei’s mouth opened and closed and a shudder passed across her. She slumped and blood pooled rapidly beneath her. She felt Black Fort’s warm breath on her cheek as he brought the camera right down to her face.

She thought, this is it, I’m going now, I’m dying.
Nothingness
seemed to close in. Her eyes unfocused. The blur that was Black Fort drew away and snapped the phone closed. It was over.

She sat up and said, ‘Cut!’ and the brisk syllable helped banish that grim persona. It was an uncomfortable place she had inhabited and she was disorientated as she came back into herself. She stretched and shook briskly like a cat
coming
out of water.

She untied her ankles and removed the tape holding the blood bag to her stomach. A fish hook snagged in the bag was attached by fishing line to her thumb. When, out of shot, she’d jerked her hand, the hook had ruptured the bag and fake blood had spurted in satisfactory, gory fashion.

That had been her idea, as had the extra lights and the two rehearsals – the gang had proved quite clueless in this regard. She’d bought the stage knife from a theatrical
supplies
website and made the blood with food colouring and corn syrup.

She dabbed fake blood off her chin with a tissue, and wiped off the smears of eye shadow that had made a
convincing
bruise.

Black Fort replayed the film. Its purpose was, she knew, a mean trick, but that was possible to overlook when the
challenge
of it seemed so delicious and fitting to her talents.

Watching herself expire, she felt pride in a thoroughly professional piece of work. Dying convincingly was a
difficult
trick. She clapped to show her approval and gasped at sudden pain. She had forgotten about the fish hook and it had slid into the flesh of her palm.

Black Fort teased it out, but the barb widened the wound and it was alarming how much she was bleeding. Six Days was sent to buy plasters.

She began to feel woozy and was aware that her face was turning pale. She felt annoyed with herself for this weakness – she wanted very much to be tough.

Black Fort said, ‘Hold your hand in the air. Sit down.’

She said, ‘Rub the blood on the phone.’

‘You’re a natural.’ He kissed her. ‘Come on, baby. Be brave. Don’t look at it. It’s okay. I’m here. It’s okay.’

For the deception to work, Wei Wei had to leave town. She was not sorry. Black Fort helped her move out when all her flatmates were at college. He drove her to Liverpool and put her up in a bedsit. It was smaller than she had been led to believe. He assured her that it was only temporary, and soon they would be living together in a mansion. They spent a torrid two weeks christening it, then, for three weeks, he didn’t visit once, and was evasive when she called. It was hardly satisfactory.

He’d bought her a new mobile – black, boysy, with a wealth of pointless functions. She rang her father.

‘How’s life?’ he asked.

‘Interesting.’

‘How’s your course?’

‘Okay, not bad.’

‘What sort of marks are you getting?’

‘Around sixty-five percent.’

‘Try for seventy. How is the weather?’

‘It’s warmer now and the sun is shining at last.’

‘What did you eat this week?’

‘Yesterday I had spaghetti.’

‘Was it good?’

‘It was okay. Sorry, Father. Someone else is calling. Hang on a moment.’ She put him on hold.

‘Hey, babe.’

‘I’m talking to my dad. In China. Are you coming round? I don’t see you at all these days.’

‘I’ll see if I can get away. I’m super-busy. What are you wearing?’

‘I’m not wearing anything. I’m lying in bed touching myself, and I’m not wearing anything. Are you coming round or not?’

‘Stay like that and for sure I’m coming round.’

‘I’m putting you on hold.’

‘I don’t hold. Later, babe.’

She returned to the first call, and to her native tongue.

‘Sorry, that was my classmate. She wanted some
homework
.’

‘Where are you now?’

‘I’m in college. I have a lecture in a minute.’

‘Study hard and success is assured.’

Quoting the Chairman at her again, though maybe the phrases were so ingrained he never even noticed he was doing it. She said, ‘I’d better say goodbye.’

‘Goodbye.’

‘Same time next week.’

She discovered she’d been twisting the sheets and smoothed them down. Really, she should have got up before ringing her dad – it was weird to talk to him in her night dress. She didn’t like lying to him, and told herself, as she did every time, that it was just until she found her feet. She hoped it would not colour her day, and promised herself that, no, today would be a phoenix day.

Breakfast was instant coffee and a Marlboro Light. What a funny word ‘bedsit’ was – but not inappropriate, as the only chair was covered in clothes and she did, indeed, sit on the bed. More clothes hung on hangers on the cupboard door and windowsill. Dirty laundry was on the floor, and that was the extent of her housework system.

She supposed she should clean up and wash clothes, but they weren’t phoenix-day things. No, she would take a bus
into town and explore. Chancing down alleyways, she’d discover hidden gardens and quaint locals sitting out in
traditional
dress.

But Liverpool city centre looked just like Leeds. She felt nostalgic for the excitement of her first few months away, when everything was new and interesting. She tried
wandering
down an alleyway but it smelled of piss, and a beggar leered at her. The people of Liverpool exhibited no distinctive customs beyond speaking at high volume in a harsh vernacular.

She went home to prepare for her man’s arrival, and tried to invoke him by thinking seriously about his body, the way, she imagined, a Buddhist meditates on a crystal.
Tattoo
, birthmark, hairless chest, a match in a lopsided smile. She built him in her mind, but as soon as the figure was
perfect
it evaporated, so she snuffled in the pillow for the scent of his hair gel. She wrote him an email on her laptop – just ‘Hello, thinking of you’ – and in a final act of extravagant devotion that only she would ever know, changed her Hotmail password to ‘blackfort’.

The tingle of expectation made it impossible to settle, so she flipped through her magazines. These had taught her many new words, such as ‘culottes’, ‘orgasm’, ‘anorexia’ and ‘gigolo’, and now she looked up ‘compatibility’ and ‘nit-pick’. But by midnight there was still no sign of him. It was very exasperating. She rolled a joint and lay down as the buzz took her. She liked being stoned, that feeling of peace and light on a high plateau, but, increasingly these days,
getting
there was a bumpy ride through paranoia foothills.

In the abstract, her situation was interesting, glamorous – the bad boy, the exotic foreign land, love in a dangerous world – but in reality this sitting around ‘twiddling her thumbs’ was completely unacceptable. It didn’t help that
the flat he’d put her up in was so mean, she could hardly get from bed to shower without banging her shin.

Thoughts sparked, spiralled and fizzled out, and
underlying
all was a sour note of loneliness and loss. ‘
Kitchenette
’, what a funny word. So the tiny washroom should be a ‘bathroomette’ and she, right now, felt like a ‘girlette’ living a ‘lifette’. This was no phoenix day. It had curdled into yet another dog day.

Her thoughts drifted to her father. He had a mistress parked in a flat, just like this. She’d seen the girl in the
passenger
seat of a squad car, a country lass with stubby fingers and a guileless smile, and when she’d asked about her, he’d said yes, she was his girl and he looked after her. Perhaps she, too, killed time all day. Of course that had been years ago – he’d probably finished with her by now, taken up with another one. Or two, maybe. Perhaps he had them in flats all over town, one for every occasion.

She sat up so fast it made her dizzy. Now it made sense. Why her man was absent, evasive, distracted. Tremors of alarm spread from her stomach. She laughed at herself for being too dumb to have noticed what was right in front of her. He had another woman.

She looked up an article – ‘Love emergency! What to do when your man cheats’. She should confront him, apparently, and give him a hard time about it. She certainly should not ask herself, ‘Where did I go wrong?’

She asked herself where she went wrong. Was she too assertive, too docile, too simple, too complicated? Was she, when it came down to it, just too naïve and
unsophisticated
? The need to know more, to be certain, gnawed.

The entry system trilled. She was totally unprepared, stoned and confused, no make-up on and the place a mess. She was desperate to please him, hating and loving him, and
not really wanting to see him. Worried it would all show on her face, she buzzed him in, then began making a pile of her dirty laundry.

Black Fort kissed her cheek, barged past, fell on the bed, lit a cigarette and started taking off his clothes. He’d been drinking.

‘It’s late.’ She wanted to express her dissatisfaction but could not bring herself to confront him. It was on the tip of her tongue – Is there someone else? You can tell me. But she said, ‘You haven’t been round for so long.’

‘Work is insane.’

‘Why?’

He never talked about work and she’d been happy not to ask. Now, when she needed to know everything, it was too late, the rules were set.

‘Don’t worry your pretty head. I don’t want you getting frown lines.’

‘You are the most secretive man I ever met.’

‘It’s for your own protection.’

‘That is such an old line.’

He started pawing at her clothes.

‘Really, what have you been doing?’

‘I robbed a bank and killed a policeman. Then, in the afternoon…’

‘Please.’

‘I run the club. I make sure people get paid on time. I make sure other people pay me on time. Today I did accounts.’

He had described his gambling club so well, he imagined that she knew it. The metal door, then the smoky room with the fantail table. A croupier made a pile of counters, then swiped them away in groups of four, and punters bet on how many would remain at the end – none, one, two or three. And that was all there was to it – an arid, male environment.

Again, she wanted to ask, Is there someone else? but what she said was, ‘I think I should get a job. I’m tired of doing nothing.’

‘No girl of mine needs to work.’ No girl of mine? Implying she was one of several? ‘Very soon, I’ll move you into a nicer place. I promise.’ He stroked her neck. ‘You talked to your dad today, huh? That always puts you in a bad mood.’

‘That’s true.’

‘He kill any bad guys lately?’

‘He shuffles paper and goes to banquets.’

‘Could I take him in a fight? If he came over to defend your honour?’ He tickled her.

‘Leave him out of it. Tomorrow is four months from when we first met. So what I would like is for us to go out and have a…’ – her eyes went up to the tatty lampshade as she recalled the English phrase – ‘slap up do.’

‘Not tomorrow. I’m taking my uncle to the races. We’ll celebrate the week after, okay? The four months anniversary of when we first… you know…’

The uncle again. She had never met him, or any of Black Fort’s family, about whom he would give no details, and wondered now if they were nothing more than a collection of knee-jerk excuses.

He started kissing her belly. She would have liked a little more getting to know you, but the feel of his face on her was reassurance that he was still, at least, interested.

She ran a finger along his dragon tattoo, from the
bewhiskered
, boggle-eyed head on his shoulder to the scaly tail at his hip. He practised wing chun and his torso was toned and taut. How hard and soft his body was. It was the perennial fascination of men.

‘Why don’t you get a tattoo? Just here on your thigh. A dragon to match mine. A dragon for a dragon queen.’

‘I’m a princess, not a queen. And it’s a phoenix for a girl.’

There was a great deal to like about him. His birthmark, for example. He flinched when she touched it. The fact that he was sensitive about it – she liked that, too. He was a whole other country, she an excited tourist.

Her breathing settled. If only it could be like this all the time, to be the absolute focus of attention. When she was with him she felt whole and protected, but she had to have him all to herself.

Later, while he slept, she took his clothes into the
bathroom
, where the light was better. Squatting in the shower stall she went over them minutely, all the time telling
herself
how silly she was being. Under his shirt cuff she found a long yellow hair, black at the root. There was a smudge of lipstick on his boxer shorts.

She felt a moment’s relief – she was not going nuts, her ‘female intuition’ was ‘spot on’. She stared hard at the hair, trying to picture its owner, and a sense of grief came, black and overwhelming.

His wallet was on the bedside table. Riffling through it she found, as well as a few hundred quid in notes, a couple of one Euro coins. In the back pocket of his jeans she
discovered
the stub of a boarding pass – a flight from Rotterdam, dated today. So he had lied to her – easily, naturally. What had he been doing in Europe?

He moaned and rolled over and his arm flopped onto her
pillow
. Curse him for lying and for being in her head so much. A mania had descended that could only be satisfied with more evidence. She went back through everything, worried that her rapid breathing would wake him but unable to stop.

Tucked behind his debit card was a business card for his gambling club – lips, cocktail glass, characters. Written on the back in a girlish scrawl, in capitals, was an address:
Hope Farm, near a place called South Creake. And under that a time, 4pm, and a date – tomorrow – when he had said he was going out with his uncle. And at the bottom were the words, ‘DON’T BE LATE! K.’

Some uncle. She imagined her rival, Miss K – a fresh-faced country girl in a headscarf, singing as she scattered chicken feed. She decided she was damn well going to find out what was going on and put a stop to it. She took a picture of the address on her phone, wincing as it clicked. He rolled over but didn’t wake.