Big T looked at each one of his mates, trying to see if any of them knew if she was right about the CCTV, about whether the police could trace anything back to them. They all shrugged at him, not sure if we were worth the risk.
I felt Big T’s hand on my shoulder and he shoved me off the sofa on to the floor. ‘Just fuck off out of here.’ He threw my jacket at me, and it half landed on my head. ‘Wouldn’t have wanted to do you anyway. You’re rancid. You’re both well rancid.’ I stumbled to my feet and started to leave. ‘I’d probably get knob rot if I went near you. Get out. Go on, fuck off out of it, you slags.’
We walked back to the bus stop in silence. I had tried to say sorry to her on the pavement outside the house, but she hadn’t hung around to listen, she’d just walked off.
‘I can’t do this any more,’ she told me when we stepped into the pool of light at the bus stop. I looked up, checked all around – no CCTV cameras. She’d bluffed Big T and his mates, probably saved us from getting killed or beaten up.
‘I’m sorry about that,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know that would happen. He seemed nice.’
‘NO HE DIDN’T!’ she shouted. ‘He seemed horrible. They all seem horrible. They are all horrible. Do you know how many times you’ve done this? How many men there have been? How many times I’ve had to watch or listen?’ She pointed to her head. ‘The sounds stay in my head, I can’t get them out. With everything else, it’s driving me insane.’ She stepped back and took deep breaths to calm down. ‘I can’t do this any more, Roni. I can’t. I’m going to the police about Mr Daneaux.’
‘What? No!’
‘He’s the reason you do what you do with all those men: being with horrible men is all you think you’re worth,’ she said to me. ‘And he’s the reason I can’t feel anything any more except disgust. I hate myself so much – my body, my hair, the way I look in the mirror. I hate everything about myself … I can’t take any more. I have to go to the police. I have to get it to stop. If I go to the police, my parents will have to believe me and they’ll make him stop.’
I didn’t know she hated herself. That she felt how I felt, because she didn’t do the things I did, she didn’t seem as broken as I was. I’d always thought she was strong, didn’t need anything or anyone to make her feel better.
‘You have to come with me, Roni. They’ll believe me if there’s two of us,’ she said.
Going to the police was the last thing I wanted to do. I wanted to pretend everything was OK. I knew it wasn’t, but if I didn’t think about it, then I wouldn’t have to deal with it or do as Nika wanted to do and go to the police. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll come with you.’
Nika
Brighton, 2016
The problem with not giving people your phone number but having them live in the same building as you is that they tend to turn up.
The knock-knock on my front door early Saturday evening pulls me away from sitting on the sofa, staring at the television. I wasn’t aware of what was on, I was staring at the screen, running my fingers through my hair and thinking about where to go next. Not physically, physically, I am signed up to live in this building for another eight months or so, but I am trying to work out if I need to get help. When I spent months and years going to Birmingham Library, I would read books about the reasons for my death wish. I would read and read and read, uncovering the theories, discovering the reasonings, identifying with the behaviours. Theory, though, has nothing on reality.
If I decide to get help, I will have to first work out if I want to crack open that little box that is my mind and delve inside. It may well be embracing my past so I can face my future, but whenever I think like that, another part of me sneers at me. I deride myself for even contemplating the idea. Why would I put myself through all that pain? Why would I dredge up everything when for the first time in a long time I am on an even keel? I am safe, I am warm, I do not need to worry about money, I have my own space.
I need to worry about Judge finding me, I need to worry about trying to fix my relationship with my parents. I do not need to make more problems for myself by thinking about unearthing my past.
I slip on my tortoiseshell glasses and open the door.
‘Hi,’ Marshall says with a smile.
Since the debacle with Eliza the other week, I have been very careful coming and going from the building so I can avoid the pair of them. That is a mess I do not need to step into then drag its entrails through my life. When I went over and told him that I was leaving but Eliza was sitting on the other side of the bar, he stared at me in surprise. He had been about to smile when he saw me, I think, but that was washed away on the realisation that he was being forced to spend a night out with Eliza.
The worst part is, I feel sorry for Eliza. I feel sorry for Eliza – she could do with some help, with a friend, someone to gently guide her away from this path she has clearly been careening down for a long while. But I can’t do that. It wouldn’t be fair on her, because I would be doing it for me, to feed that part of me that is addicted to helping others. Reese said it made me a fucking liability. He was probably right.
‘Hello, Marshall,’ I say coolly.
‘I’ve been hoping to catch you this week, but you seem to have become expert at entering and exiting the building without being seen.’
‘It’s one of my superpowers.’
‘What are your other ones?’ he asks with a grin.
‘How can I help you, Marshall?’ I say. My frostiness isn’t strictly necessary, but I don’t want him to charm me into forgetting he has a mad friend who is targeting me because of him.
His grin fades and he lowers his head, abashed. ‘I’m sorry about Eliza. She can be a bit full on. She has this habit of rabidly trying to befriend any women she thinks I might be interested in.’
‘I don’t think she tries to befriend them if the other night was anything to go by. More like warn them off. Apparently you’re not in the right place for a relationship right now.’
‘Jeez.’ He rubs a hand over his eyes. ‘It’s hard to believe, I know, but she’s a good person. She’s got a heart of gold but she can be so intense. She does this sort of thing and it pisses me off, but when I get to the point of wanting to tell her to do one, I can’t. She seems too fragile.’
‘Fragile. Yeah.’
‘Anyway, the point of my visit was to apologise and also to ask if you fancied going to dinner one night?’
‘What about fragile Eliza?’ I ask. Probably unnecessarily mean, but talk about a man in denial.
‘What about her?’
‘Aren’t you worried about how she might react?’
‘No. Yes. I don’t know. Can we not talk about it?’
‘Fine. When do you want to go to dinner?’
‘What, you’re actually going to go out with me?’ he asks. He’s one of those men who doesn’t have a mirror, clearly. What is not to like about him? Tall, handsome, a moral compass that is directed towards the good side – expertly shown by him speaking up in the meeting. Admittedly, he has a Rottweiler friend who would savage anyone rather than let them near him, but that doesn’t negate most of the good things about him. ‘Most women who have had “the chat” with Eliza won’t even give me the time of day, let alone go out with me. I usually get the chance to apologise and then things are awkward between us until we both pretend that we weren’t interested in each other in the first place.’
‘I like to live dangerously. When are you free?’
‘Now?’ he says, hopefully.
‘I’m guessing you’re worried I’ll change my mind,’ I state.
‘Something like that.’
‘Now’s fine. Come in while I turn the telly off and stuff. It won’t take me long to get ready.’
He steps inside, his gaze immediately examining the place, searching for clues as to my personality, what I like, what I’ve got on display, where things are placed. He’ll be disappointed since I haven’t had the mental quiet yet to think of what I want a
nd where. I don’t have much, either. A sofa that is the flat owners’, TV, ditto, and coffee table, ditto. In fact, the only things in this place I own are my guitar, my clothes, my shoes and my toiletries. And my music player, of course. I’ve thought of buying a CD player or a laptop, but both seem to cost a lot of money, and both are things I would probably really miss if I lost them. My only real non-essential item I own is actually my guitar.
As he walks past it, Marshall strums his fingers across the neck of my guitar, propped up at the entrance to my living room area. ‘Do you play?’ he asks as the chord he’s played filters away.
‘A little,’ I say. ‘All self-taught so I’m still learning.’
A sudden coldness slips through my body: I’ve let him into my flat without thinking. I’ve simply invited him in without a second thought. He could be anybody, he is anybody, and I have just invited him in.
‘I’m always impressed by people who can play instruments.’ He holds up his hands. ‘The owner of two left hands, that’s me. Obviously ironic given my name and Spinal Tap, etc.’
I say nothing, but cross quickly to the television, switch it off. I was planning on changing, putting on jeans instead of these knee-length shorts, and another top instead of this double layer of vests, but since I’ve invited him in without thinking, it’s best I get him out again as soon as possible.
I grab my cardigan from the sofa, slip it on, then make for the hallway, my heart pounding in my ears. I’m not scared of him – there is nothing about him that has set my radar going – but I am scared of myself. I am scared that I am still doing things that put me in danger without thinking. I push my feet into my battered white Converse shoes and pull on my jacket.
‘See, ready in no time,’ I say.
‘That is seriously impressive,’ he says with a laugh. He has a nice laugh, warm and genuine, just like him. He seems lovely, but still I leave a gap between us as he leaves to give myself enough room to slam the door shut if I decide to change my mind. I don’t need to, of course, he’s a perfectly pleasant person, we are off out for a perfectly pleasant early dinner. I don’t need to worry about him. It’s me I need to worry about. I really can be a liability sometimes.
Gloucester, 2006
‘Are you sure you don’t need anything, Ace?’ Judge asked. ‘It really will make things easier.’
I shook my head. Slowly I opened the clutch bag that Judge had given me money to buy, along with the gold cocktail dress I was wearing, and pulled out my music player. I unwound the headphones from around its black body, ready to shove each earpiece into its corresponding ear.
‘Are you sure now?’ Judge coaxed. The three other women sitting with us in the expensive, almost brand-new people carrier, who, like me, were all dressed up in clothes he’d bought and ready to attend one of his parties, were listening to him speak to me. When I attended these parties, he talked to me much more than them on the journey out to whichever country house he had hired, because they knew him, he knew them, they did as they were told because he was their supplier of money and drugs. I was just along for the ride, to make up numbers, and I was sure he saw me as a challenge. The conversation was always the same: ‘I can sub you, if that’s the problem?’ he said. His voice was silky smooth, used to finding a way to lull you, calm you, make you so at ease you would always do what he wanted. I noticed sometimes, when I always gave the same answer – ‘No, thank you, but no’ – a little pink would creep up his neck, his fingers would knit themselves together and his expression would briefly betray his desire to have me closer: I was a challenge in that in the six months I’d been doing this, I had never once taken him up on his offer of ‘something to make things easier’.
I sat on one of the backward-facing seats. Judge sat in the middle of the back seat, his legs wide open so the blonde to his left had to sit with her legs pressed tightly together, and the redhead to his right had squashed herself against the side of the car, her face almost flattened against the window. The brunette beside me sat very still, watching me from the corner of her eye. She was too scared to move her head to look at me in case Judge made eye contact with her and she wasn’t immediately looking at him to respond.
‘I wish you’d let me give you a pager or even a mobile phone,’ he said to me. His navy-blue gaze stared directly at me when he spoke. He knew how to unnerve people. He was expert at it. ‘It’d be so much easier for me to contact you when I knew one of my parties was coming up. I don’t like leaving messages with Bernie – what if you miss one and miss out? Let me get you a pager at least.’
‘It’s OK, I’m fine as I am,’ I said. Since he’d sat down opposite me that night at Bernie’s, I had been entangled with him, but I was careful not to owe him anything. When he gave me money for dresses and shoes, I would always take their cost off the amount he paid me at the end of the night. I always refused his offer of drugs, mobiles, pagers, and even a place to sleep. I knew that owing Judge anything was a dangerous position to be in.
When we had first talked, he’d told me about his parties. Rich men paid a lot of money to come to Judge’s parties, to be introduced to women, to spend the evening chatting to them – ‘socially networking’, Judge liked to call it. He was holding real-life dating parties, he’d explain to anyone who thought he was sailing a bit too close to the legal edge. He was paid to make introductions, to see if the people at the parties were compatible. If some of them sloped off upstairs to get better acquainted, that wasn’t his fault since they were adults; if some of them decided they weren’t that compatible even after becoming better acquainted, that wasn’t his problem, either. He simply set up the parties, just like the legitimate dating agencies did, and he couldn’t control what people did. He’d asked me if I was interested in coming to his parties, possibly earning some cash, and I had said I wasn’t into that. Because I didn’t owe him, he couldn’t insist.
So, he allowed me to do what women like me, who weren’t indebted to him, did – be part of the cover story. We mingled, we talked to people, we never went upstairs so if the police asked questions, we could honestly say we had never been paid to let anyone have sex on us, we weren’t part of the people who helped Judge make money from immoral sources.
‘Have you ever tried taking something to smooth out the edges?’ he asked me. I had been about to scroll through the music player, to search for something that really would take the edge off, pour a soothing elixir through my mind and sensibilities, but I had to talk to him. He put up with a certain amount of disengagement from me, but he had his limits, I knew that.
‘No,’ I said to him. ‘Never had any need or inclination.’
‘You should try it,’ he said. ‘You might like it.’
‘I might,’ I admitted.
He liked that, and I was rewarded with a grin, with a flash of his ruby-embedded tooth. The atmosphere in the car jumped up a few notches: the other women were willing me from behind their extravagant make-up and overstyled hair not to do it, not to get myself to where they were. I’d agreed to go to his parties because I got paid. They got paid, but they also had a debt to him, the interest on which they could never hope to pay off.
‘You know, a lot of the men who come to my get-togethers often ask if you’re available for dates, Ace,’ Judge said.
Cold sickness swept through my stomach. I knew where this was going. I should have seen it coming. ‘Do they,’ I stated flatly.
‘Yes. Thinking about it, maybe we should give Gina here a night off the dating circuit.’ He slapped his hand on the thigh of the redheaded woman, squeezed so hard I could see the agony in her eyes. ‘Maybe you should give it a try.’
I said nothing, kept my gaze on the floor of the car. His feet were huge; his shoes were polished to a high shine, the laces perfectly tied.
‘I know you said you weren’t into that, but you might like it. You won’t know how much until you try it. In fact, I insist you try it, tonight. You might find the world of dating fun.’
Th
e brunette beside me, whose legs seemed to go on for ever, who injected between her toes – I’d seen her doing it at the last party – tensed. She was probably curling her toes inside her very high shoes and trying to forget what it was like the first time.
‘I might,’ I said to him, still with my gaze kept down.
‘And you know, Ace, if you need a little something to help you through, just let me know, I’ll help you out,’ he said. ‘Gladly. I’ll even sub you it.’
I’d been stupid to think I could deal with Judge, that I could manage someone like him, get what I needed and come away. Men like him didn’t get played or managed by women like me. All this time, he’d been humouring me, prodding around to find out my weak spot to see what could be exploited. If I had to do this, then I might need the other stuff from him and I would be hooked into him further. That’s why I couldn’t take any money for tonight. If I did, he’d say I owed him. I knew he paid the others more, so tonight, I could be going away with triple what I usually earned, but if I took a penny, I would owe him – he would tell me that I hadn’t been good enough, I would have to earn again to pay him back for the refunds he’d had to give. (I’d heard him say that before.)
I thought I’d only have to do three or four more parties and then I’d have enough to self-finance a room at a homeless hostel for two years when my name got to the top of their waiting list. Self-financing meant I didn’t have to sign on, claim benefits, answer any awkward questions about the name I’d left behind. I would have a permanentish address, access to an indoor phone, and I would hopefully be able to find a job.
I pushed play on the music player. ‘Teardrops’ by Womack and Womack began to play in my head and like I’d taken a drug, my body relaxed as the melody moved from the player into me. Roni always jumped into my memory when I heard this song. The song, explaining about the tune, the words, the music not sounding the same without that person in your life, all conjured her up in my mind. We’d been fourteen, bound together by something other than the same name and a love of ballet, and we’d gone to a club in central London together. This was one of the songs they’d played. I remembered it because we had gone outside for a few minutes, and this was the song blaring out from the open doorway as we’d begged and begged the large skinhead bouncer to let us back in to get our coats. We’d only been outside ten minutes, but in those ten minutes I’d found out what the other Veronica did when she needed to escape.