Rita

In her own hours

Punctual without ever seeming brisk, Rita is at a door forty to sixty minutes after a booking is confirmed. She sets out from the Jordaan, Italian or English.

Her voice is low and even in both languages, used the way good front-of-house staff use one: enough to put you at ease, never enough to intrude. Method is the whole of it, hour after hour after hour, and the three-hour booking is the one regulars quietly keep to themselves. Canal-house stairs, a fourth-floor walk-up, a room with the lamps already low - none of it changes the way she arrives. Twenty-seven, and long enough at this that nothing in a building surprises her any more, including the buildings that ought to.

Rita decides which bookings she takes and may decline any of them; she sets the limits for what a session includes, says what they are, and may end a visit at any point, as the terms set out.