Ace said he knew things were bad when he came over one day and found her lying on the sofa, her eyes far away and cloudy.
‘You alright, love?’ he asked.
She looked straight at him but said nothing.
‘You alright, love?’ he asked again.
‘Yeah … cool…’ She dragged her words as she spoke, leaving long pauses between them. It was hard work, trying to talk to her in this state.
‘Where’s the kid?’
‘Asleep.’
The following week, he came over again, and while I slept the two of them watched TV together. My mother rested her head on his shoulder and he said, ‘Do you need a break from all this for a while, love, so you can get better? Looks to me like the job is getting to you.’
She shook her head. ‘It’s not because of the job. I like this work. There’s nowhere else in the world I can take home a grand a week. As long as I hide it well so the bastard police can’t bust in and confiscate it, I’m fine.’
‘But you’re out of it half the time, Bex. I’m worried about you, love. Really. You don’t want to get addicted to this shit. If it’s the work that’s driving you to it, you need to take a break.’
She looked at him with doleful eyes. ‘And then what? How will I live, Ace? I’m not ashamed of this work. I’m not. The biggest shame of my life was not being able to feed my child, but those days are gone now. Look at her. She’s beautiful. She has everything she needs. What would I do if I gave this up? Work in a shop on minimum wage, or clean toilets for sixty hours a week? And then what? Struggle to pay the rent, struggle to buy food. No way, Ace. I’m not going back to that.’
Ace stayed silent. It was that punter who’d got her into this, he reckoned – said he’d give a girl fifteen hundred quid if she’d take a date-rape drug and let him fuck her when she was unconscious. Like an idiot, my mother had agreed. She took the drug and woke up eight hours later with cash beside the bed. The only thing that had changed since she passed out was that when she came round again, she was wearing bright-red lipstick. She’d looked in the mirror and laughed. ‘Weirdo,’ she said. ‘God knows what he did to me.’
But Ace said that she’d started to prefer it, being out of it for punters. It made his job more difficult, though. There weren’t many blokes willing to pay for a girl who was barely there. He had to give her men like the one who’d got her in this state in the first place. It meant she was better paid for her work, but there was less of it – one, maybe two punters a week. She said she didn’t mind. She said it gave her more time at home with me, but as far as Ace could see, she was pretty well off her face for most of the day. There’d be social workers on her case again if she carried on like this, and she knew it.
I was nearly four by then. He said I was a pretty little thing: blonde, blue-eyed, a scattering of freckles over my nose. Still skinny, though. And they said over at Sure Start they didn’t think I talked enough. My mother had shrugged when she told him that. ‘What do you reckon, Ace?’ she asked. ‘Do you think she talks enough?’
‘Talks too fucking much, if you ask me.’ He told me that was a joke.
‘You hear that, Hope?’ my mother said. ‘You talk too much.’
I was sitting in an armchair, my feet dangling over the edge. I went on lifting crisps from the packet to my mouth and said nothing.
My mother said, ‘The health visitor asked if she can say more words than I keep track of.’
‘Does she?’
‘No. She says about thirty words.’
Ace said, ‘Don’t worry about it. She can get by on thirty words.’
My mother looked worried, then dissolved into one of her rants. ‘It’s hard, you know. Bringing her up by myself. I didn’t know it was going to be this hard. I feel like I’m in a war all the time, fighting and fighting, and never getting anywhere. But I’m only fighting a child. She’s two foot tall and weighs next to nothing, but she feels like a bloody army to me. She’s stronger than I am. She can wipe me out and I’ll be lying there, totally beaten. There’s nowhere to go. I can’t ever get away, so I just lie there with my hands over my ears to drown out the noise, but she’ll keep it up for hours longer, like she’s determined to have every last drop of my blood. She never lets me sleep, always bloody needs something. I don’t get a chance to sit down, Ace. Not ever. I’m knackered. So knackered, I can’t describe it. She’s going to kill me. I know she is.’
She was crying then. Ace put his arm round her shoulders and offered the only solution he could think of. ‘You ever considered putting her up for adoption?’
My mother stared at him. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Never. She’s my baby, Ace. I couldn’t live without her. She’s my world.’
She always did this – went on for ages about how dreadful I was, then said she loved me. It meant there was no escape. When I was older, I used to wait for her to finish one of her attacks by telling me to leave but she never did. She always said she loved me, despite everything, and there was nowhere I could go.
Not long after that, Ace said she went AWOL. He didn’t hear from her and she didn’t turn up to work for five days. When he called her mobile, it just rang and rang, and she didn’t reply to his messages. He knew the social had been on her case, threatening to take me away, and he wondered if that was why she’d disappeared. He wasn’t convinced she’d have taken me with her. She’d probably gone to get off her face.
If one of those social workers went round and found my mother gone and me on my own in the flat, they’d remove me straight away, like they’d done with Elliot before me. And then what? Investigations, maybe. He wasn’t sure. It was alright for them to nose into my mother’s mad life, but if they started prowling round the edges of it, finding out how she made her money, then Ace’s head would be on the block as well. He didn’t need that sort of shit, not when he was finally making good money. He’d worked years to get where he was now.
In his kitchen drawer was a key to our flat. My mother had given it to him ages ago, when they were semi-together, and never asked for it back. Later, when he’d finished his stint on the front desk, he decided he’d have to let himself in and find out what was going on.
It was just as he’d expected. Everything was a mess. Squalid. Unwashed plates, mugs and overflowing ashtrays on every surface. The coffee table in the living room was piled high with empty take-away containers, joint ends and abandoned syringes. Dirty clothes had been flung on the hall floor and left there. No one had been here for days, and there was a smell of shit coming from somewhere.
He let himself into my room. There I was, lying in my cot – my mother couldn’t afford a bed for me, even though I was nearly four – eyes wide open, my body motionless. He said I looked at him with a pleading, bewildered stare, and as he moved towards me, he felt something inside him break. He was a strong man. He’d seen some scenes in his time, but he knew he was going to be haunted for the rest of his life by the look on my face – the fear, the pain, the grief, the total absence of all that was good.
He reached into the cot and picked me up. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get you out of here.’
When he told me about this, he made himself out to be a hero, the only person who really cared when my mother had lost her way. This was true, of course, but his reasons for caring were selfish, and he was slick. He expected me to be grateful and, in time, to repay him.
30
Annie
Always, she was waiting to hear from her mum, even though she pretended not to be, even though she pretended she didn’t care. Every day, as soon as she heard the clink of the letterbox and the flight of envelopes to the mat, she raced to the front door and flicked through every item of post, desperate for something in her mother’s untidy scrawl. It never came. The silence became a rock she kept bashing her head against, and the pain of it was killing her.
‘I didn’t mean to turn her in,’ she told me. She was lying on my bed, eating prawn cocktail Pringles. ‘And now she hates me and ther
e’s nothing I can do.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ I said.
‘Whatever,’ she said, and turned away from me towards the window, where the sky was going through its late-evening psychedelics above the tarn.
I knew what this guilt felt like, and I knew the deep emptiness of abandonment. I could see it in her as she lay on my bed, there in all her jagged edges that no one else wanted to touch, or even go near.
But I wanted to touch them, I realised now. She was right beside me and I missed her. I missed her because she wasn’t close enough. I longed suddenly to reach out my hand and touch her, not just her hair or her face, but all of her.
I didn’t, though. I waited until I was on my own in bed that night and let my mind drift, and I thought, I love her.
Her.
It shocked me.
And then I thought, I wonder if she feels it, too.
One morning, her mind was on Lara.
‘I bet I can make her speak,’ she said. ‘I bet if I go in there and talk to her and tell her about Jade and my mother … I bet she’ll realise there’s someone who understands and she’ll talk to me.’
‘She hasn’t spoken for years, Hope,’ I said, because I didn’t want her going in and befriending Lara. I wanted her here, with me.
‘I’m going to make it my project,’ she said. ‘Project Lara. Before I die, I’m going to get her speaking.’
‘Will you stop it?’ I said, more sharply than I’d intended.
‘What?’
‘All this fucking talk of death. I can’t bear it.’
‘Annie,’ she said. ‘Annie, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. I thought you understood…’
‘I don’t understand,’ I told her. ‘I don’t.’
She sighed and fell silent.
When she turned to me again, she spoke in a low voice and said, ‘Have you ever kissed a girl?’
I shook my head, and she leaned towards me slowly, and for the first time, our lips met.
31
Hope
My earliest memories involved raiding other people’s skips with my mother. We used to find loads of stuff to take home with us: toys, furniture, old clothes. Most of it was grubby and weatherbeaten but came up fine after a rub down with soapy water, and I could remember spending whole afternoons in my room, happy among the treasure of someone else’s junk. But then my mother started working more and more, and my memories were of things bought new from shopping centres, of days out, and of Ace.
Ace had always been there. He positioned himself as the peaceful anchor of our lives. When my mother had her mad nights, crying and screaming about the impossible hand she’d been dealt in life, he’d be there to look after her. I would lie in bed and hear him soothing her as if she were a child. ‘There, there,’ he’d say. ‘It will all be alright. You’ll be fine, Bex. You’ll be fine.’ And the next day, she always was.
Sometimes, he spent the night and slept in her bed. Other times, my mother would be working and we’d all stay at his place. Staying over at Ace’s was a treat for me. He downloaded films on his huge TV and we’d sit together on the sofa and watch them with bowls full of popcorn and sweets. Now and then, I would feel the intensity of his gaze on my face and I’d look up, and he’d lean over and lightly touch my hair and say, ‘You’re going to be so beautiful, Hope.’
‘Am I?’ I always asked.
‘Oh, yes,’ he always answered, and then, when I was eleven, for the first time he leaned over and rested his lips lightly on mine. ‘So beautiful,’ he said again.
I flushed with pleasure and discomfort.
In the room at the front of his house, the room where the men would sit and wait till their women were ready for them – the room that, if this were a doctor’s surgery, or a dentist’s or a school, would be called ‘reception’ – in that room, Ace kept folders of photos for men to look at.
The photos were of his girls, naked except for jewellery and make-up. He took them himself, because he said he knew each girl and how to capture her on film, how to show her beauty and what he called her ‘soul’ – the furthest reaches of her that no man was interested in, but which Ace said showed in her face and made her unique and attractive.
I was twelve the first time I modelled for Ace. I had tiny buds of breasts by then and the first strands of hair between my legs. Ace stood back with his camera while I stripped behind a screen in his living room and draped myself in a white chiffon scarf. As he snapped the images, he gave gentle instructions: ‘Just let the scarf fall an inch or so … That’s it … Beautiful.’
He didn’t touch me, not at all, not once, but I could feel myself the object of his desire – his eyes on me, his deep appreciation of my maturing body, his love and his longing.
‘Now let the scarf fall all the way to the floor.’
I did as he asked and kept my eyes fixed on the wall ahead of me while his camera went on clicking. I was aware of his strong breathing and of my own power, and an expanding wetness at the tops of my thighs.
It wasn’t me, doing all this. It was as though I had left the unclothed body that was currently lying, legs wide apart, over Ace’s leather sofa, and I was watching from above, so that when he told me where to put my hands and how to adjust my hips, and to throw my head right back and give a little half-smile, I was able to do it easily and well, just as he wanted, just as he was asking.
‘Oh, good girl,’ he said afterwards. ‘My good little girl.’ And then he came over and kissed the wet space between my legs, looked up at me and said, ‘Oh, my darling. You enjoyed it. I knew you would.’
But that night, he went to bed with my mother.
There were other men after that, ones who came to look at the photos of me. Ace didn’t keep them in a folder on the shelf for anyone waiting to browse, like he did with the images of the women. They were kept loose in a locked box on his desk, and he charged the men who wanted to see them. I didn’t know how much.
‘You’re precious, Hope,’ Ace said. ‘We need to keep you that way.’
I thought then that he meant I should stay a virgin, but he didn’t. He just meant that anyone who wanted access to the young treasure of me would have to pay for it. ‘All you have to do for the next couple of years is be nice to lonely men. You’ll make a lot of money from it.’
I did. I made a small fortune. All I had to do most of the time was pose the way I’d done for Ace and his photos, and one man at a time would come into the room, sit and simply look at me. They weren’t allowed to touch, not for a long time.
Ace was thrilled. ‘You jewel,’ he said. ‘You little jewel. I always knew you would be.’
He started buying me beautiful dresses and taking me out to restaurants where I tried oysters (disgusting), and where wild mushrooms (slimy) came served with a poached egg on the top of them. The puddings were always good, though: soft black-currant meringues with some kind of alcohol drizzled over them; or crème brûlée, with a hard caramel crust you had to smash with a tiny hammer to get to the smooth vanilla cream beneath.
I liked it, being treated this way by Ace. He would look at me over his glass of red wine and tell me how beautiful I was. ‘He’ll be a lucky man, the one who gets you,’ he said. ‘A very, very lucky man.’
I wished he would kiss me, but he never did.
‘What’s going on with you and Ace?’ my mother demanded.
‘What do you mean? Nothing.’
‘My fucking arse. Are you sleeping with him?’
I was shocked. ‘No.’
‘Look at me and say that.’
I stared my mother square in the face. ‘No,’ I said again.
‘You’d better not be, young lady. You’d better not be. If I find out you’ve been anywhere near him, I will break your little legs so badly they won’t open for anyone again.’
‘I’m not…’
‘Oh, don’t give me that,’ my mother spat. ‘All these dresses he buys you, these dinners he takes you out for … He’
s never done that for me. Not ever.’
I shrugged. ‘He must just like me more,’ I said, and knew it would hurt.
My mother’s hand was sharp on my face. ‘You little whore,’ she said. ‘You filthy, disgusting little whore.’
I lay a hand against my slapped cheek. I wasn’t a whore. I was twelve years old, still a virgin.
It was the day of my thirteenth birthday when Ace first allowed a client to have sex with me, and he charged a premium for it. I wasn’t yet fully developed – I’d only started menstruating two months previously – and it would cost the man who wanted to take my virginity fifteen hundred pounds. I would keep five hundred for myself and Ace would take the rest.
‘It’ll be someone decent,’ Ace said, reassuringly. ‘One of the men who’s already been in and seen you, someone who knows you well.’
I took a deep breath. ‘OK,’ I said.
‘You don’t have to. If you’re not ready, we can wait. Six months, a year. Whatever.’ He ran the tips of his fingers over my cheek.
I cast my eyes away and remembered how it felt when I was modelling for him, how it felt when he looked at me over dinner and told me how beautiful I was, and how he loved me. I remembered that fleeting brush of his lips between my legs and how I longed to feel it again.
He leaned over and whispered promises in my ear.
‘I’m ready,’ I said.
It was OK, the first time. Not too painful. Ace had said I wouldn’t need to do anything except lie on my back and look up, and that was pretty much what I did. The bloke adjusted my legs, then there was some fumbling as he slowly – very slowly; he was definitely considerate, I gave him that – pushed his hard, fat knob into me. He jerked about for a few minutes while I kept my gaze on a tiny spider making its way over the ceiling. By the time it got to the wall and began its treacherous journey to the floor, the man had let out a few grunts and it was all over.
The Home Page 10
