The Life She Wants

by J. M. Hewitt

  Satisfied that she couldn’t get out of the window, I went back inside. As I closed the door, I saw Kevin in his front garden in the process of taking out the rubbish. One hand held the bin lid open and he stared up at my mother, his mouth a wide ‘O’ of shock.

  I closed the door and trudged back upstairs.

  ‘Are you drinking your water?’ I asked through the closed door.

  ‘My girl, my baby, please don’t hurt Mummy like this.’ Her voice had returned to normal, high-pitched and squeaky. ‘Mummy loves you so much. Just get her some of her stuff and we’ll never talk about this, I promise,’ she wheedled.

  I sat with my back to the door. That was the problem. We never talked about it. And after years of low-class drugs, she had slipped so easily into this. A smell, sweet and sickly, settled around me on the landing and I pulled my T-shirt up to cover my mouth and nose.

  ‘Use the bucket,’ I said.

  ‘YOU BITCH!’ she roared, the male voice back in full force. ‘You bloody cu—’ She broke off as she retched and vomited.

  Later, much later, she spoke again. ‘My bones are breaking,’ she whispered. ‘Please help me, someone… anyone…’

  * * *

  Late that night, when it was fully dark and the street was in blackness, Carl came to the house. He had one hand on his fly, already unzipping it as I opened the door.

  I stepped back to let him in, and jerked my head towards the stairs. For a second his eyes widened, hope and excitement reflected back at me as he misunderstood my meaning.

  As if on cue, she started again, thin screams now, her throat sounding raw. If he’d cared, he would have leapt up the stairs, taking them two at a time. Instead, he turned to face me, a question mark in his eyes. From behind my back I pulled out the knife I was clutching and held it loosely in my fist. My hands were not shaking, and for that I was grateful.

  He bit his lip. Wondering if he could take me, perhaps. But quickly he seemed to come to the conclusion that he wanted no part of this. Why would he? There was nothing special about my mother apart from the fact that she was an easy target. He could get his kicks and sell his wares elsewhere; this town wasn’t short of desperate, disadvantaged women.

  I followed him to the door. ‘Don’t come back, Carl,’ I said, and this time my voice sounded low and deep and filled with the promise of violence.

  He moved down the path, his head low, his shoulders hunched. I watched him until he had vanished into the black night.

  I didn’t go to school the next day, and nobody called or came round to see where I was.

  Nobody cared.

  I’d thought that someone might report the disturbance that she made, on and off, night and day. I watched from the window, saw a few people from the estate walking past and angling their heads upwards at the screams and curses. I held my breath when I heard sirens, or when official-looking cars drove past. But nobody came.

  Nobody cared.

  It never occurred to me that I could call the social services, or the police. What did I know about safeguarding at that age?

  On the third night, somebody finally came. It was almost midnight, and I hadn’t slept for two nights. When the knock sounded, my legs collapsed beneath me. I felt wetness on my face and I swiped at the tears as I pulled myself up and staggered to the door.

  Two men huddled in the porch, dressed in black, their faces, thick and plump and red, creased in frowns. Wordlessly, I looked at them, but the gratitude I wanted to convey wouldn’t come, so I stepped back and let them in.

  ‘She’s up there,’ I said, pointing to the stairs.

  In silence, they thudded up to the landing, giving me long, lingering looks on the way. I sat on the bottom step, wondered where I would go, and suddenly I was so, so tired that I could have slept right there. Would they let me stay in my own home just for tonight? I wondered. I thought of Rebecca and how she had been given to a family who loved and cared for her. My breath caught at the excitement of potential change.

  Upstairs, sounds were magnified. The bolt slid across; an intake of breath; short, sharp words from one of the men. My heart spun in my chest: was she dead? I turned and crawled up the stairs, holding onto the wall for support as I turned the corner. One of the men lurched past me, shoving me out of the way as he put his arm over his mouth.

  ‘I-I had to do this,’ I said to nobody.

  I peered into the room. By the bed, the bucket had been overturned, and liquid waste pooled on the carpet. The bedclothes were pushed to one side, the sheets yellow and damp. My mother was slumped on the floor with her back against the bed. She was naked, angry red scratches criss-crossing up and down her arms. The remaining man leaned over her, his body blocking my view of what he was doing.

  ‘I’ll get you a dressing gown, Mum,’ I said, and hurrying to my room, I snatched my own off the back of the door. I sidled back into her room, trying to hold my breath as I edged towards her.

  I put the gown over her thin shoulders. The curve of her back was punctuated by bumps, and I could count every part of her spine. As I touched her, her skin rose in goosebumps and her eyes slid sideways to look at me. Here was a woman who was broken beyond repair, and yet a stone sat in my chest where my heart should have been.

  The man had a strap around her upper arm: blood pressure check, I thought at first, and then I smelled a familiar scent, tart, like burning vinegar. It was the second man, coming back upstairs, carrying a tin, a tea towel wrapped around it.

  Ignoring me, he set the tin down on the bedside table. From his pocket he withdrew a needle; swiftly he placed it in the tin and sucked up the fluid, passing the syringe to the man next to my mother.

  I heard the sharp intake of breath, belatedly realised it came from me. The veins on my mother’s arms stood to attention, erect and eager to receive, and I found my voice, found myself. Darting over to the man, I knocked the needle from his hands.

  It fell to the floor, landing in the puddle of shit. He grimaced, and with thumb and forefinger, picked it up. As he slid it into her arm, into the very vein that was shrieking for it, I put my hands over my face and sank to my knees.

  ‘Carl?’ I said. ‘Carl sent you?’

  They didn’t answer me, and my mother smiled and hissed out unintelligible words as she laid her head back against the bed.

  They removed the lock from the door. I watched as the paint flaked and drifted down to the floor. The first man slipped the lock into his pocket and moved past me.

  He paused, and leaned his face very close to mine.

  ‘Leave her alone,’ he said, the only words he had spoken to me.

  Leave her alone.

  As though she were the victim here, and this was how I should be expected to live. I slumped down into a crouch and put my head in my hands.

  I had to get out. I had to forge a life for myself that was as far away from here as possible. Because there was no fixing this; the situation wouldn’t get better, no matter what I did. Two more years, then I would be sixteen and I could legally leave. I could leave right now, I realised, but I wasn’t stupid. With no money and nobody to run to, I would end up on the streets. Eventually I would become the woman on the floor in front of me.

  Two more years…

  It was the early hours of the morning now, and I had to go to school today. I had to pick up my grades, work really, really hard so I had a chance of getting into a university. Uni life cost money, but scholarships didn’t. And if anyone needed a scholarship, it was me. If anyone deserved a scholarship, it was me.

  I washed my school uniform and draped it over a radiator. I checked the gas meter: it had fifty pence in it, which should be just enough to dry my clothes. In the meantime, I filled a bowl with bleach and water and returned to my mother’s bedroom.

  I scrubbed at the carpet, the pungent stench of faeces mixed with bleach making my eyes water. The chemicals turned the carpet white, but I didn’t care. I liked it: a single clean spot in an otherwise rotten environment.
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br />   The work became soothing, mechanical, and in my mind I dreamed of Cambridge, of Durham, Leeds or Oxford. I didn’t know what they looked like, or what subject I would study there, I just knew I needed to get to one of those places.

  She slumbered on, happy in her heroin dreams while I cleaned her shit from the carpet.

  I scoured and scrubbed, focused now, no longer trying to save her, no longer wasting my time trying to change her. I just needed to escape.

  It was all about me now, and the future I deserved.

  Chapter 17

  In the Expedition Suite, Paula paced back and forth, clutching the two condoms in her sweaty palms.

  He was intending to use them. They didn’t use them, she was on the pill. Well, she wasn’t, she remembered, a pang of guilt pulsing through her. She had flushed them down the toilet, hadn’t she? Determined to get a head start on the baby that he continuously stalled on.

  But as far as he knew, she was on the pill, which was laughable anyway, considering they hadn’t so much as had a cuddle on this goddam holiday.

  She needed to confront him, but she was terrified. What if he said it was over?

  On the table, the bottle of vodka caught her eye. Unmoved and untouched since that night. She reached for it now, spinning off the cap, putting the bottle to her lips and swallowing down mouthful after mouthful until her throat burned and her eyes stung.

  She slammed the bottle down, gasping and shivering despite the warmth of the room.

  ‘Can you be on your own?’ she asked her reflection in the mirror.

  The woman who stared back shook her head.

  No, you’re not cut out for it. You worked too damn hard for this life that you now lead. You can’t do without it.

  ‘Maybe I can,’ she whispered, with all the defiance she could muster.

  The woman in the mirror laughed at her, long and hard. Paula turned blindly to reach for the bottle.

  * * *

  The drink was flowing in the casino, cocktails on tap, the waiter summoned by Anna as soon as Tommy’s glass was empty. One by one his friends dropped out and wandered off in drunken, penniless stupors until only he remained.

  Anna was winning as much as she was losing, she noted, which was good because she had used a massive chunk of William’s money for today’s task, and the pile was rapidly diminishing. She flung two more five-hundred-euro chips on the table, covering black with one, red with the other. Tommy was too drunk to notice the futility of this. All he saw was the masses of money that she was literally throwing away.

  ‘Wish me luck,’ she said softly, lowering her eyes as she leaned into him.

  He lurched off his stool to stand behind her. Suddenly, without warning, he pressed his body against her, the whole length of him pushing into her so hard she felt her pubic bones jut painfully against the roulette table. She experienced a strange mixture of disgust and pride. And then something else, a sensation that she very rarely – if ever – felt with a man. The slow, unfamiliar dawning of desire.

  His arms came around her sides to lean on the table. Subtly, she moved back against him. He breathed satisfyingly heavily in her ear. Maybe, she thought, just maybe, once she had his home and Paula’s life and everything in it, she might keep him around for a while.

  He murmured something unintelligible, and she turned her head slightly.

  ‘Are you sending me lucky vibes?’ she asked huskily.

  He responded by grinding against her harder. She didn’t watch where the ball landed – black, red, it was all the same to her. But across the room she saw movement, a woman standing by the slot machines, in almost exactly the same place that Tommy had been when Anna had first started playing.

  She wore an oversized coat, a man’s coat, Anna saw, as though she had picked up the nearest garment and thrown it on without looking. Her face was red, blotchy, streaked with tears that even now were falling down her cheeks as she watched the scene unfold before her.

  Her jaw was slack, her eyes bleak. She looked like she had lost everything.

  Anna smiled and bit her bottom lip.

  ‘Tommy,’ she said quietly, without taking her eyes off Paula. ‘Your wife is watching you.’

  * * *

  Paula watched in disbelief as Tommy pressed himself up against the woman in front of him. Her breath came in jerky gasps, and in her pocket she fingered the sharp edges of the condom packets. She wanted to stalk over there, spinning her arms around and punching out at the pair of them, all the while screaming expletives. In her mind, she said them, the worst words she could dredge from her vocabulary. Words that nice, classy married women didn’t use.

  Words that Paula herself never said.

  She wanted to do all this, but her legs were leaden.

  ‘’Scuse me, I’m on this machine.’ The voice was that of an elderly lady, nudging her way in, scared that Paula was going to take all the money out of the machine she’d spent so many hours feeding.

  Fuck you, Paula wanted to shout at the innocent woman, and in her pockets her hands curled into fists. Instead, she allowed herself to be carefully prodded aside. Her legs started to move of their own accord, taking her towards them, her traitorous husband and the vicious slag in front of him. And all of a sudden, the words came in a torrent, and the intonation was pure, bitter fury.

  ‘You fucking bastard,’ she said as she reached them, and she was glad her voice didn’t betray her; it was low and guttural and rather quiet. Only the croupier caught her words, and he looked at her side-on, just a single quick warning glance.

  They would throw her out of the casino if she made a scene. And Paula wasn’t the sort to make a show of herself. Years of preening and priming herself into the woman she was had ingrained that in her.

  ‘Uh…’ Tommy said as he swallowed and pulled away from Anna, stumbling into the table. ‘Just having some fun. Anna’s winning.’ He smiled lopsidedly, more drunk than she had ever known him. He didn’t even look ashamed, or embarrassed to have been caught in the act.

  Paula switched her attention to Anna. The scarlet woman met her glare head-on, unflinching, uncaring.

  ‘You…’ She leaned in, really close to the pair of them now, not wanting to shout the word that she never, ever uttered but that right now was the only word that would do. ‘You pair of… of cunts.’

  It seemed to sober Tommy, and his hand snapped out, grabbed her wrist. ‘Hey,’ he said sharply.

  She pulled her arm free, a gasp emerging from her, incredulous that she had actually said the word. She was too far gone now, there was no turning back. She dug in the pocket of the coat of his that she was wearing and flung the condoms onto the roulette table. The croupier glanced at them, nestled on the green felt, before performing a sleight of hand and scooping them up before any other onlookers saw.

  ‘Leave, please,’ he said in a quiet but firm tone.

  Paula nodded at him, her jaw set, clenching down on it, because she didn’t want to cry in front of him, in front of any of them. Not in front of her, especially.

  ‘Cunt,’ she said, louder this time, directed at Anna, because there was nothing left to lose and she quite liked the feel of the word on her tongue. She turned on her heel and staggered back through the casino the way she had come.

  * * *

  ‘Nothing was happening, nothing happened or was going to happen.’ Tommy’s voice was a whine, long and scratchy, like a mosquito buzzing, or a broken record. Loud too, now they were alone in their suite.

  She turned to the doors and put her sleeve in her mouth, biting down on the material to stop the word coming out of her. That awful word that she had never spoken, in all these years, and now she just wanted to spit it at him again and again.

  ‘And what was with the condoms, for God’s sake?’ he hissed, self-righteous now, a true narcissist, putting it all on her because she was the one who had called him a bastard and a cunt in public, and shown him up by throwing the condoms on the table in the packed casino.

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nbsp; The croupier had asked her to leave.

  Paula closed her eyes in shame.

  ‘Where did you even get them from,’ he shouted, ‘and more to the point, why?’

  She turned to face him. ‘They’re yours!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘What the hell do I want condoms for?’ He threw his hands up in a gesture of disbelief.

  ‘To screw her,’ Paula shouted back. Had she ever even raised her voice to him before? If she had, she couldn’t remember. ‘You need them to fuck that awful wretched woman.’ An unplanned sob escaped and she tried to swallow it down. ‘I should be grateful you thought of that; who knows what you might have caught?’

  ‘Fucking hell, Paula,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Well, they’re not for us, are they?’ she cried, tears flowing now, a river of hurt. ‘We don’t use condoms, do we? I’m on the pill.’

  A grin broke out on his face, so out of keeping with the current conversation that she blinked in confusion. He clapped his hands together slowly, and carried on smiling as he walked towards her.

  ‘But you’re not, are you, darling?’ he said. His voice was vicious, cruel. ‘You threw them away, didn’t you?’

  Paula swallowed. How did he know?

  ‘What… how… h-how…?’

  He came up close to her, and she backed away slightly. ‘How do I know?’ he hissed. ‘Because you usually take the damn things every night, make a big bloody show of it, trying to make me feel bad. You’ve done it since we got married.’ His finger came up to touch her chin. It felt like a red-hot poker on her skin. ‘Not recently, though. Right?’ He looked triumphant, lips pinched, eyebrows raised in a question that he already knew the answer to.

  He flicked his finger, the rough skin around his nail scraping her face. It was a gesture so spiteful that she flushed red. ‘I-I don’t…’ She trailed off, not knowing where she was going, what she could say. Embarrassment mingled with guilt at lying to him. ‘I’m sorry.’ Finally, she pushed the words out.