My name's Karen Duthie. For the record – I know people are interested in this sort of thing – I'm 37 years old, five-feet-five tall, with short brown hair, hazel eyes, a reasonably pretty face, B-cup knockers, and a trim body thanks to 10 hours a week in the gym. I'm a staff trainer with a large company, based in London, but with offices in other major cities around Britain. I recently had to travel to Newcastle-upon-Tyne to train the staff there in a new IT software package we've installed. I expected the trip to be entirely routine, but it turned out to be anything but.
My colleague Julie was accompanying me on the trip. She's several years younger than me and, in my personal view, a bit of an airhead. We get on, but we're certainly not close friends. I had planned to fly to the North East, but Julie's terrified of flying, so we agreed to take a company car and share the driving for the 290 mile trip. Julie was to take the first half, then I'd take over. The first part of the plan went fine, except for my colleague's insistence on having the radio on. I'd have been happy with a news station, but she insisted on Radio One, a steady diet of inane pop music (accompanied by Julie's tuneless warbling) mixed with moronic prattling by DJs.
By the time we got to the motorway service station where we'd agreed to have lunch I was more than ready for a break. The meal was better than I'd have expected from one of those places, but that's where the trouble started. Having done her stint of the driving, Julie decided to have a couple of glasses of wine with her lunch. Then, when we got back to the car, I found she'd treated herself to a couple of bottles of alcopop – some sort of rum and cola mix I think – which she proceeded to swig for the rest of the journey. At least I got to switch the radio off, but then I had to put up with Julie's dull conversation about TV reality shows and God knows what else. Suffice to say, by the time we neared Newcastle Julie was fairly pissed, and I was thoroughly pissed off.
In a harassed moment I had stupidly agreed to let Julie book our accommodation, and the moment she told me we were heading for somewhere called the Jolly Welcome Inn my heart fell. You know how this works: if a housing estate is called Golden Meadows you just know it's going to look like a war zone two minutes after a major bombing offensive. We get a good financial allowance for hotels, but Julie's one of those people who likes to go as cheap as possible and pocket the difference.
Sure enough, the Jolly Welcome Inn was everything I expected. It was a few miles south of Newcastle, a squat grey motel apparently constructed entirely of concrete breeze blocks. The windows looked as if they hadn't been cleaned since the place was built – at least two had cracked panes – and from what I could see from the curtains, they hadn't seen a drop of water for considerably longer. The only other buildings as far as the eye could see were a grim industrial park, a massive power station, and an ugly red brick building which appeared to be some kind of pub. The huge motel car park contained only three other vehicles, one of which was a truck the size of an ocean liner.
For two pins I'd have insisted we go somewhere else, but it was late, I wanted to stretch my legs, my silk blouse and designer jeans were rumpled and sweaty, and I desperately needed a couple of gin and tonics and a long hot shower. We were checked in by a surly, unkempt middle-aged man, with three hairs plastered across his head to try and hide his baldness, who told us in a thick Geordie accent (the local dialect) that the 'inn' didn't have a bar. Just bloody brilliant, I thought. He also insisted on calling me 'pet', a local form of address for women which I found rather irritating.
Julie and I dragged our bags to our 'chalets' – I wasn't going to risk leaving anything of the slightest value in the car – then met up in the car park to walk across to the pub. I'd already had enough of her company for several years, but there was no way I was going to walk into a strange pub alone, especially not with my plummy Home Counties accent among a bunch of Geordie hicks.
I'd thought things couldn't get any worse until we opened the door of the bar. We were nearly blown backwards by the sheer volume of Black Sabbath screaming from the jukebox. I had expected to get ogled by dozens of beery men, but in fact the half dozen or so clients were all female. I found that comforting for about two seconds, until I noticed the predominance of greasy denims, leather and distinctly masculine hairstyles. There was one feminine looking girl, but she seemed to be in the process of having her face slowly eaten by a macho looking woman I took to be her girlfriend. Well, I thought, this is absolutely wonderful: not only had Julie managed to book us into the shittiest hotel in the North East of England, she'd apparently brilliantly found the only one with an en suite lesbian biker bar!
I grabbed Julie's arm and, competing with Ozzy Osbourne, screamed, "Christ Julie, let's go somewhere else, I'm not drinking in this dump." Unfortunately, the strains of Paranoid came to an abrupt end as I reached the words 'this dump'. In the deafening silence which followed I was suddenly the focus of attention for every eye in the room – except those of the lovers, who seemed intent on screwing each other right there in the bar.
As the relatively tranquil opening notes of Nazareth's Love Hurts filled the musical void, Julie, ignoring the hostile glares in my direction, sniggered and said, "There isn't anywhere else Kaz. Besides, I like this place; it's got, er, character."
Yeah, I thought, so's Hannibal Lecter, but I wouldn't accept a lunch invitation from him. She was right, though, there wasn't anywhere else and I needed that drink more by the moment. So I picked my way delicately across the sticky wooden floor of the bar and asked for a G and T. The barmaid, a stocky bottle blonde in her forties with a 1970s skinhead hairstyle and a ring through her nose, stared at me as if I'd asked for a Sloe Comfortable Harvey Zombie on the Beach, complete with parasol. After three seconds, realising I wasn't going to relent and order a sensible drink, she gave a heavy sigh, selected a glass, wiped it on her Southern Comfort T shirt, filled it as required, then placed it in front of me, saying, with heavy sarcasm, "There you go, princess." Julie, bowing to local custom, ordered a Newcastle Brown Ale.
We chose a table in a dark, isolated corner. Julie slumped on a velveteen bench and stared with open amusement at the denizens of the pub. I resisted the temptation to put a handkerchief of my grimy bar stool and sat with my back to them, carefully sipping my drink from the side of the glass without the pre-existing lipstick stain. Conversation was near impossible with the jukebox working its way through the entire history of heavy metal. After maybe five minutes I became aware of a dark shadow looming over me. Glancing up, I saw the most extraordinary woman standing staring down at us.
