Blood Diamonds

Chapter 1

Leila

There is a surreal quality in how the city transforms from blinding day to balding night; the warm smell of humid flesh and active bone; scores of busy people bustling down scorching pavements all dissipate and evaporate to a reflective dark beautifully mirroring the blank spaces of my inner mind with pixie street lights. Carnival City— my magical desertion; my wonderland of skyscrapers.

I am a "child of the sixties" born in the eighties. Even in this new era of mesmerising videos and instant communication, my mind is the progeny of a more exciting period during which the idea of a colourful world free of condemnation for who you are and what you represent was still fresh in the world's thought; still forming, albeit rapidly. My deceased mother planted these first seeds, reciting stories to me from an early age of how she participated in the wars for expressive freedom.

Do not weep for her death. My mother was a whore and an addict of anything she could get her desperate hands on but could not hold eternally, including my father. She was the same heroin addict who sold her only daughter's innocence to the grimy hands of sleazy drug dealers to get a quick fix, and all this I recount from that tender age while listening to her babble on, high and dazed, in the old, dingy family home handed down to her. My memories of that time were all yellow— yellow couches, yellow walls, the yellow teeth of unkept strangers who passed through the house daily— but those tales of the free-thinking sixties, God those tales (even if fanciful), kept my head full of colour and wonder at what could be; dreams of what I could become. "Let your freak flag fly" as the youth of today would say. Today the freak flags fly beyond our wildest imaginings, higher than we can reach and I doubt we could ever return from this chaos.

The carnival I wandered in was particularly alive that night as I scouted out the rich "bachelors" (most of them old with one foot in the grave) in my famous rouge lipstick and tight, red dress that slid invitingly up my thick thighs. My heels were nine-inch beauties that complemented my equally beautiful face and brunette hair that hung charmingly loose in soft waves over my busty breasts. I am no egotist. I know what I know, and I learn from the painful experiences of my life, but I liken my image to a goddess; I am a sexual Aphrodite, if Aphrodite fell from the heavens of Mount Olympus and sold her beauty to survive the tragedies of the inner city.

The screaming laughter of carnival-goers and young teenagers enjoying the romance of bright lights or first loves sickened me that night, while the joyous melody of carnival music disturbed my auricular senses. How could they be so happy when I walked so miserably? Nevertheless, I smiled, pouring out as much charm as I could muster to snag a wealthy bastard.

Usually my services lasted only a night, two nights at most at the infamous Wayward Son Hotel, but I knew my youth was fading and at the age of thirty I sought out something a little more concrete. After all, the competition was tough there, with the girls getting younger and spritier by the night. Maybe it was all in my head. I had the charm and experience and definitely knew what men (and women) desired in the flesh and bedroom. Still, I would soon have been no competition for the Lolitas that roamed the place. So, I endured the laughing, screaming, sickening cheers of youth and people with no care on earth until I could hopefully find a permanent pocket of riches on which I could lay my desperate head, praying that he was at least a handsome older gentleman (not that any proper gentlemen ever sought me out there).

I passed through a less crowded and shadowy area where a young man in dirty, casual jeans sucked on the neck of his teenage prey like a starving vampire against the boundary fence. I could swear she was dead, staring at me with blank, unblinking eyes. She may very well have been dead inside if not physically. The City, the modern carnival. It was a place where dreams came true in the glint of a shiny coin and turned to nightmare just as quickly.