Free One of Us by Iain Rowan Page A

Daniel to be pulling out my underwear. But he paid for the wash, and then he wandered over to the battered coffee machine in the corner, studied it for a moment and then made a disgusted face.
    “No way,” he said. “Come on. I’ll buy you a proper coffee. I know a place around the corner.”
    “But—” I said, and waved a hand at the washing machine.
    “Don’t worry,” Daniel said. “No one’s going to nick it, are they, or take it out and dump it on the floor.”
    I didn’t say anything, just looked at him.
    He rolled his eyes and muttered, “Different world, different world.” He walked over to the old woman who sat in the corner with a pile of magazines about celebrities. The pile seemed to get bigger every week I was there, and I worried that if she did not read faster then one day she would be walled in. Daniel pulled a bank note from his jeans pocket and handed it to her. “Machine number five,” he said. “Be a love, eh. Keep an eye on it, do anything that needs doing, I dunno, whatever. Drying, or spinning, or whatever. And make sure no pervs have a rummage through, eh? You’re a darling. Ta.”
    We sat in a cosy café a few streets away, over a coffee that cost more than my laundry did. The café served coffee twenty different ways and you could sit on fat red sofas and read newspapers like it was somebody’s house. It was different from sitting at scratched plastic tables with bowls of sugar clotted around a wet spoon. I was conscious that my coat was scruffy, but I did not take it off because underneath my jumper was scruffier. I had only planned on a trip to wash clothes, not coffee with a man trying to charm me in this place with its fat sofas and thin waitresses.
    Daniel did most of the talking, and most of the talking was about himself. I was happy, though, to sit somewhere that was warm and expensive and different from what was now my life. I was amused by Daniel’s confidence, how sure he was that no matter what I said, he could win me around in the end. It amused me, it annoyed me, and just a little bit, I liked it.
    “Did you really think I’d have promised you all that, if I knew Corgan wasn’t going to deliver?” he asked.
    I shrugged. “I don’t know. It is your world, not mine. You are Corgan’s man.”
    Daniel laughed, and made a face as if he had just tasted something that was sour. “I am when it suits him. And then when it doesn’t...” He made an extravagant hand gesture. “Stupid thing is, Anna, I could do so much for him. You should see some of the blokes he surrounds himself with. They’re all muscle, no brains.”
    “At least they have one of the two,” I said.
    He stuck his tongue out at me. “Muscle’s cheap,” he said. “And I’m strong enough. Being smart though, that’s a talent. And I know I could do so much for Corgan, but he never lets me in. Fucks me right off, sometimes, treats me like I’m his servant boy. Fetch this Danny, carry that Danny, find out this Danny, now piss off Danny, we’ll call you if we need you.”
    “So why do you bother?”
    He looked past me. I was sat with my back to the wall, but Daniel was seeing something far beyond that.
    “Because I don’t want to spend my life hustling crappy forged documents to desperate immigrants—no offence, sweetheart.”
    “Some people do proper work. Work that is not a crime, or that involves working for people like that man.”
    “Ease up,” he said, and gave me a glance and then looked to see if anyone near us had heard me. “You’re sounding like my mum and that’s just not right, not at all. You think I want to be a sucker, sweating in a suit and tie while some other bastard makes all the money? Fuck no. Anyway, I’m providing a service, me. Working with refugees and the like. It’s a social service, I’m not like Corgan, I don’t do what he does, I don’t work for him. What I do is small time and I am going to be big time, just you believe it. And to get there, I need