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for going along to this stag-video show, but you can also tell that she’s desperate to ask me about it.
    — Hi, Dianne! Sorry, I had to go out, I tell her.
    Dianne doesn’t seem to mind. She’s a very cool, pretty woman, who must be ages with me; she has thick, luxuriant, black shoulder-length hair, in which she wears a blue band. Her eyes are busy and full of life and she has quite thin, rather sly lips which pull open to expose large, white teeth, completely changing her expression. She’s wearing a blue sweatshirt, blue jeans and trainers. — Anywhere fun? she asks in a local accent.
    — I went to a stag-video show in a pub, I tell her.
    I watch Lauren redden with embarrassment, and when she says, — That’s a little more information than we needed, Nikki, it sounds pathetic, like an adolescent trying to be grown up but only making herself seem more childlike in the process.
    — Any good? Dianne asks, and to Lauren’s horror, totally unfazed.
    — Not bad. It was Lauren’s friend I went along with, I tell her.
    — No he’s not! He’s your friend as well! she says too loudly, then realising this, trails off. — It’s just a guy on the course.
    — That’s very interesting, Dianne says, — because I’m doing research for my MPhil in psychology on workers in the sex industry. You know, prostitutes, lap dancers, strippers, call-centre operators, massage-parlour people, escort girls, all that stuff.
    — How’s it going?
    — It’s hard to find people who want to talk about it, she tells me.
    I smile at her. — I just might be able to help you there.
    — Brilliant, she says and we make an arrangement to have a natter about my work in the sauna, the next shift of which starts tomorrow evening. I go to my room, half drunk, and try to read my essay for McClymont on the word processor. After a couple of pages my eyes nip and I laugh at the stupid sentence: ‘It is impossible to escape the contention that migratory Scots enriched every society they came into contact with.’ This is for McClymont’s benefit. Of course, I won’t mention their role in slavery, racism or the formation of the Ku Klux Klan. After a while my eyes grow heavy and I feel myself drifting back onto my bed and easing slowly into a hot, nomadic trek and then I’m somewhere else . . .
    . . . he’s holding onto me . . . that smell . . . and her face in the background, her twisted and eager smiles as he bends me round the bar like I’m made of rubber . . . that voice, commanding, urging . . . and I see the faces of Mum and Dad and my brother Will in the crowd and I’m trying to shout . . . please stop this . . . please . . . but it’s like they can’t see me and I’m being groped and tickled . . .
    It was a bruising, unsatisfactory, alcoholic sleep. I sit up and my head pounds, and an urge to vomit grips me, then passes, leaving me with a thumping heart and a toxic sweat on my face and under my armpits.
    The computer was left on dozing, and as I brush the mouse, the power surge kicks McClymont’s essay back onto the screen, like it was issuing a challenge. I have to get it in. Noting that Dianne and Lauren have gone, I make a quick coffee, then read the essay, tinker a bit, check the word count, put it through the spell check and click ‘Print’. I need to get this essay in at the uni by noon; as it raps out the three thousand required words I head to the bathroom and shower away yesterday’s alcohol, sweat and grimy cigarette smoke, giving my hair a good wash.
    I apply moisturiser to my face, a little make-up, and throw on my clothes, taking the stuff for my shift at the sauna out with me in a holdall. I’m heading across the Meadows at speed, only occasionally aware of the cold, stiff wind as it bends back the essay paper I’m trying to read. I realise that the American word-processing-package spell check has corrected in American English: ‘z’s’ everywhere and ‘u’s’ thrown away,