The meanest Flood

Marie found only production lines of dolls and parts of dolls.
    Deborah Innes, the managing director of Dreambabe, was a young thirty. Could have passed for twenty-seven, nineteen with a bag on her head. She had perfected a breathless way of speaking which made her sound constantly astounded, as though her three decades on the earth had yielded no accessible bank of experience.
    ‘We started small,’ she said, ‘but we double the turnover every few months. The market seems to have no limit.’
    And the costs are minimal, Marie thought, looking at the young Asian and East European women who made up the workforce. The operation was simple, trestle tables for benches with the workers standing around them. There were a few sewing machines and staple guns, adhesives and crimping and heat-welding equipment. At one end of the workshop the heads were connected to the torsos, and these were then moved on to the next bench where arms were added. Legs came next and then the additions and alterations to the Dreambabes became subtler. It was possible to walk through the workshop and see the whole process right through to the grinning peroxide tart in crimson suspenders just before she was packed into a cardboard container marked, Dreambabe No. 5 - Margarita the Mucky Slut.
    ‘It’s a new line,’ Deborah Innes said breathlessly. ‘Most of the girls are putting in a twelve-hour day and we’re still a month behind with deliveries. I’ve taken on ten more people and it hasn’t touched the waiting list.’
    ‘Why?’ Marie asked. ‘I don’t understand where the customers come from. Who are they? Do you have a target profile?’
    ‘Not really,’ the managing director said. ‘I can glean a few things from the spreadsheet but we haven’t done in-depth market research. We advertise in the right places, I’m sure of that, the sex magazines and the Internet. But we’re not attracting new customers.’
    ‘You just said...’
    ‘I know, we can’t keep up with demand. But it’s not because of a massive influx of new accounts. Most of it’s repeat orders. From established customers. They keep coming back for more.’
    ‘More? What does that mean? Do they use up the doll
    ‘Dreambabe.’
    ‘Do they use up the Dreambabe they’ve got at home and want a replacement or do they order different models?’
    ‘Both,’ Deborah said with a twinkle. ‘Each time we introduce a new model almost everyone on our books puts in an order. And we get reorders for the same model about once a year.’
    ‘Is that how long they last?’
    ‘Under normal use, yes. We have some punters who are heavier users than others. Some of them will reorder four or five times in a year. We call them the sadists. Not to their faces, of course, just among the staff.’
    ‘Of course,’ Marie said without a hint of a twinkle. They were at the workbench where the mucky slut’s hair was being stuck to her bare scalp. Marie reached over the shoulder of an anorexic Pakistani girl and picked up one of the hairpieces that had not yet been smeared with glue. It was synthetic, bearing as much resemblance to real hair as a politician does to honesty.
    She watched as another worker stuck two small patches of smooth white hair around the hole between the slut’s legs. There was little attempt at realism, the pubic hair was reminiscent of the pelt of a baby seal.
    ‘Do you ever use real hair?’ Marie asked. The anorexic girl laughed self-consciously.
    ‘No,’ Deborah said. ‘We tried it once with a Marilyn-babe but it put too much on the price and our customers didn’t appreciate it.’
    ‘Pubic hair?’
    ‘Goodness, no, we’ve never done that. I meant head hair. I think we sold about two hundred units and went back to synthetics.’
    ‘Do you know if there are companies who use real pubic hair?’
    ‘Not to my knowledge,’ Deborah said, turning up her lip in distaste. ‘What would be the point? And where would you get it?’
    Good question, Marie thought as she drove away from the workshop and headed south towards Huddersfield and the address of an upmarket doll manufacturer called Lady Friendz. But British capitalists had never been put off by a limited supply of raw materials. If there was a demand for pubic hair there’d be no shortage of entrepreneurs making the disadvantaged offers they couldn’t refuse. Extra beer money for students, more powdered milk for single parents, an additional fix for a squat of wide-eyed junkies. We’re not