Next to the chemist is a Sainsbury’s supermarket. Three storeys above it in the space beneath the eaves is a room, one of many where migrant workers store their belongings and sleep off cheap vodka. Twenty-four-year-old John Gregg, a wiry Scot who works in the bookmaker’s next to the Cock sits on the floor with his eighteen-year-old colleague, Ruby Chan who he lusts after. Their shift over and his room only a short walk from the shop, Gregg invited her up for a coffee. And because he’s never come on to her like the other male staff – in fact he seems bored by her, Chan followed him in. There are no chairs, only the bed, and so Gregg and Chan sit on the carpet. While they talk, he moves a few strands of long, black hair away from her face without permission, and wonders what else he might do with her without asking. Ruby Chan who is engaged to Sammy and whose parents speak no English gets up to go to the toilet which Gregg shares with three Irish and four Poles, and which is blocked with so much wet tissue that the water rises almost to the rim when she flushes. She feels spiteful, the weight of expectation smothering her, wanting to take something pure and break it. When she returns to the room, Gregg is sitting on the bed and she places herself on the floor with her back to him as he continues his annexation. In a room that was once the servant’s quarters in a household run by James Wilberforce, an importer of Madeira wine and no relation to the abolitionist, and where A Fistful of Dollars plays silently on a small TV, John Gregg presses his thumbs into the flesh either side of Ruby Chan’s neck and her head bows involuntarily. He rubs between her shoulders, pressing his palms around her ribs, watching her back arch as he strokes down towards the rise of her buttocks, because he can. They have stopped talking and his fingers slip under her leotard, feeling warm skin, stroking the top of her arms and the front of her shoulders, her head now resting against him, heavy; John Gregg feeling her body give, his hands over her breasts, reaching for them inside the black Lycra, pulling it over her shoulders until she takes her arms out of the sleeves herself and climbs onto the bed next to him where, still fully clothed, he kisses her, Chan’s dark eyes wide open, staring at him. John Gregg lays her back on the bed and kisses the Sammy, the engagement and all the wedding plans out of her, wanting to know how much she will let him do before enough’s enough. Opportunistic John Gregg, kissing the small bone of Ruby Chan’s sternum but thinking about the call he has to make and if it can wait, but it can’t and he doesn’t want to rush this. Getting up, he covers Ruby Chan with the duvet, tells her not to go anywhere and to lock the door in case the others come in. Gregg runs down the stairs, out of the front door of the flats to the street and wishing he’d put a jumper on.