‘She’s not even a nun any more,’ Gail tells him. ‘You’re not even a nun any more,’ she reminds me. I think it’s meant to reassure him, but it does the opposite. His eyes flash fear. Fear that I was once a nun, fear that I may actually know him and what his family situation is because his daughters go to a religious school or I’ve seen them all at church.
‘Here,’ Gail says stroppily and clasps his hand in hers. ‘Just swear.’ She pushes his hand towards my Bible. ‘It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t mean anything. Just swear and we can get out of here.’
He snatches his hand away and takes a step back. ‘Get off me,’ he spits. Suddenly he’s a lot less distinguished and attractive, now he’s far more obviously the pathetic, cowardly pervert he clearly is.
Gail frowns at him, her face a tumbling mass of confusion. Under the make-up, the dress, the coat falling off one shoulder, is a confused, naïve girl. She’s seen so much, she’s experienced so much, but there are still moments like this that will trip her, throw her back into the world of being a teenager, barely more than a young girl. ‘Why won’t you swear?’ she asks. ‘If you don’t have a daughter, why won’t you swear?’
‘Screw this,’ he says. To Gail he adds: ‘I bet you would have been crap, anyway, so screw you.’ The most venomous tone he reserves for me, all his contempt and hatred, bundled together and thrown at me with: ‘And screw you backwards.’
I’m surprised as well as relieved that he actually walks away. I’m even more surprised to find Gail has her face in her hands and is sobbing her heart out.
‘How did you know?’ Gail asks me. ‘How did you know he had a daughter and that he was lying?’
She has both hands around a cup of coffee, and has pulled her coat up properly on to her hunched shoulders and stares into the drink’s black depths as she speaks.
‘How did I know that a man who wanted to have sex with a fourteen-year-old girl was probably a lying toad? I don’t know, lucky guess?’
‘He thought I was older. I told him I was nineteen.’
‘Right, course you did, and you think he really believed that? He was mid-forties at least. And wearing a wedding ring. He has been around long enough to know you are not nineteen, no matter what he would have told everyone afterwards. He’s old enough and experienced enough to know that girls – and that’s what you are, sorry – always dress to look older. And if, by some miracle upon miracles, he was the one forty-something man in the world who didn’t know that you were probably lying about your age, then I’d wager in his mind he would be hoping you were younger than nineteen so he’d have got away with having sex with a girl the same age as his daughter.’
She purses her lips together before raising her gaze. ‘Are nuns even allowed to say “sex”?’ she asks.
‘I’m not a nun any more,’ I reply.
‘Yeah, right,’ she says.
The man behind the counter, with his balding head and clean white apron, approaches with two fresh cups of coffee. When we came back in, I noticed that he had positioned himself on the other side of the counter, right near the exit, where he would have been able to dart out of the door and step in should things have turned nasty with Just Some Guy. When we returned to the table where I’d been sitting, he seemed to conjure from nowhere Gail’s peanut butter and banana bagel, and coffee, gave me a nod of approval and murmured ‘Good work’ as he placed them in front of her. This time as he leaves our refills, he gives me a sad look – he’s obviously seen girls like Gail in his place many, many times. He’s probably glad that she isn’t back out there with Just Some Guy, having who knows what done to her.
‘How often do you go out like this, Gail?’ I ask her.
Gail rests her head on one hand and stares at the table, shrugs. ‘Dunno, once or twice?’
So that’ll be three or four times, I immediately think. ‘Do you get very drunk and take drugs every time?’ I ask.
I remember the drugs headline scandals involving Nika before she disappeared from the magazines and papers. Her footballer boyfriend had been pictured with the coke he’d confiscated from her and the whole thing had blown up. He was the clean-living sportsman who was being brought down by his drink-loving, drug-fuelled girlfriend. But he vowed to stand by her while she went to rehab and got herself help. I had known it wasn’t true. Nika, Nikky, whatever she was called, would never have taken drugs. Even after all these years, I knew Nika would rather suffer than give in to things like drugs.
‘What’s it to you? Why do you care what I do?’ Gail asks.
‘It’s nothing to me, I suppose,’ I tell her. ‘But I care what you do because, well, you remind me of someone. And even if you didn’t remind me of her, you’re an interesting person, Gail. Despite the way you constantly have a go at me, I really like you.’
Her gaze flickers up at me for a moment, trying to gauge, probably, how serious I am. ‘You think I’m interesting?’ she mumbles.
‘Yes. I genuinely find you interesting, and I truly believe you’re important. Not like the men like Just Some Guy, who pretend to be interested in you so they can have s—’ I’m not a nun any more, but having her question whether nuns can say ‘sex’ makes me falter on the word. Of course we can say it. Sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex. We can say it as many times as we want. I’m self-conscious now she’s brought it up. ‘So they can have their way with you.’ Now I sound like a prude, which a lot of people think nuns are but we’re not. Not that I’m a nun any more.
Gail’s lips turn upwards in a small smile. ‘You’re really weird,’ she says.
‘Wow, thank you, that’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me all night.’
‘Well, you are. I mean,’ she looks around us, ‘look where you’re sitting at, like, three of the a.m. That’s weird shit.’
‘Where does your mother think you are?’ I ask her. She isn’t going to answer the drugs question, so I’ll try another line of questioning.
‘Dunno. At home, probably.’
‘Does she work nights?’ I ask.
‘No, she goes out at night.’
‘Where?’
‘Dunno. She doesn’t tell me. It’s like, she’s free to do what she wants now cos I’m old enough to be left alone and when I wasn’t old enough she got herself a built-in babysitter.’
‘I don’t understand, sorry.’
‘My stepdad.’
‘Right. He stays in rather than go out with your mum?’
‘He used to, but now they go out together sometimes, too.’
I know what she is telling me, even if she doesn’t realise that’s what she is saying. ‘Do you get on with your stepfather?’ I ask. I watch her answer. She doesn’t reply straight away: she thinks about it, watches the still surface of her drink.
‘Dunno,’ she replies. ‘Suppose.’ A pause. ‘Not like anything would change if I didn’t get on with him, is it? So I make the best of it.’
‘What do you mean?’ I have teased information out of people before, but that was when they thought the way I dressed made me similar to a priest and everything I said was confidential until the day I die.
‘He’s a good bloke,’ she says. ‘Everyone says so. My real father, he’s not around at all and that’s cos he was a real bastard to my mum. Used to hit her and stuff, was really controlling and wouldn’t let her go out, shouted at me and my brothers all the time. Then my mum met my stepdad and, you know, with his support she found the courage to leave. And everyone says how much of a good guy he is. He’s got a good job so we can live in a really posh house, and he doesn’t hit my mum, he lets her go out whenever she wants, gives her loads of money. Everyone says it all the time: “You’ve landed on your feet with him, Cecile. He’s one of the good ones.”’
‘And what do you think?’
She shrugs at me, continues to stare into her drink, removed from what she is saying, set apart from who she is saying it to.
‘Do your brothers like him?’ I ask.
‘I dunno, do I
? I hardly ever see them.’
‘So it’s you and your stepfather alone in the house most of the time?’ I ask. Is that a prod too far? Is she ready to admit anything?
Her gaze travels up from her cup, over my body until it hits my face. Her eyes are slightly narrowed, her lips a little twisted with scorn. ‘If you’ve got something to ask me, just ask it,’ she says. Right now, right this second, gone is the vulnerable girl who was going to drink some more and probably take drugs and let herself get screwed by a pervert, while pretending it was all her idea. In that girl’s place is a defensive fourteen-year-old who has ‘bitch’ written all over her face.
‘The thing is, Gail, I know that if I ask you, you’re very likely to shout at me, or call me sick and twisted, and you’re more than likely to leave. And then you’ll have no one to talk to or – worse – you’ll leave here and go find someone else to finish what you started with Just Some Guy earlier. So, no, I don’t think I will ask you that question, actually.’
She sits back in her seat, shakes her head at me. ‘Wouldn’t God tell you to be brave and ask me anyway, no matter what the consequences are?’ Gail has a real way about her, a way to make snarky things sound even snider, nastier. She is wrapped in a layer of so many prickles it would be impossible to get close to her without being hurt in many, many ways. She really is the younger version of me.
‘No, God wouldn’t tell me to do that or to do anything at all,’ I tell her calmly. ‘God doesn’t actually speak to me directly. I thought you knew that? And even if He did actually speak to me directly, I have free will so I could do whatever I wanted no matter what He told me. We all have free will.’
Gail’s hard face hasn’t slackened at all.
‘I mean, you have free will, Gail. You could choose to tell me what question you thought I was going to ask and you could answer it. That would be your choice.’ I want to look away, to concede to the challenge her look is throwing at me, but that would lose her. She would think I am weak and can’t handle it. That another person has entered her life, offered her something only to not deliver. ‘I sense choice is important to you, Gail. And you can choose to tell me or you can choose not to tell me. That would be up to you. And if you do choose to tell me, I will believe you.’
We sit in silence for a few minutes. Neither of us is going to give in at this juncture, we both have too much face to lose.
‘If I told you something,’ she eventually says, still with ‘the face’ on her, ‘you’d have to keep it a secret, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t be allowed to tell anyone, would you?’
‘I would, actually, because I’m not a nun any more. And even when I was a nun, I wasn’t authorised to administer the sacrament of confession so whatever was said to me wouldn’t have the sanctity of the confessional booth. But even though I could tell, I never did. I never would. If someone tells me something in confidence, I keep it. Always.’ I am excellent at keeping secrets. Shamefully, I realise I have taken pride in that. Pride is a deadly sin.
‘All right, I’ll tell you,’ she says. She drops ‘the face’ and stares at the table, gulping quickly but silently, obviously building herself up. Her eyes fly up to my face. ‘And you won’t tell anyone? You promise you’ll keep it a secret for the rest of your life?’
‘I promise.’
‘This is really hard for me to say, you know?’ she says, her face pensive and her hands knitted together as she plays with her thumbnails.
‘I know,’ I say gently.
Gail’s large, brown, well-made-up eyes fill with tears as she continues to gather her courage.
I almost reach across the table to take her hand and reassure her, but decide against it. Any sudden movements may scare her, put her off.
After two more gulps, she looks directly at me, and I can see the agony and burden in every line of her features. She looks so much older and so much younger at the same time. ‘When I was about nine or ten,’ she says in a tone so low I have to lean forwards to hear her properly, ‘I-I said “fuck” in church and I wasn’t even sorry.’
Her grin is beatific, her brief ‘got ya’ eyebrow raise precisely delivered. Slowly I sit back in my seat and allow her to revel in getting one over on me. This is what is known as the fall after a moment of pride.
Nika
Brighton, 2016
Of course I didn’t see my parents.
Who was I trying to kid with that thought process? I was high on the fact I’d faced Todd and hadn’t crumbled, so I thought I could do anything, take on anyone. I got right up to their door then reality came pouring into my head. These were the people who had let their seventeen-year-old daughter walk out instead of just considering if, for one moment, what she’d told them years ago and had kept telling them ever since was true – that there was a trusted person hurting her and she wanted them to make it stop.
The Todds of the world I could take on after ten years on the streets, but my parents? The people I’d always instinctively love no matter how badly they hurt me? No. Just no. I’d never be brave enough to do that. I almost ran back to the bus stop so I could get a Tube to Victoria and then a train back to Brighton. Now here I sit in the dark with my guitar on my lap, lightly running my fingers over the strings, touching them so gently they barely make a sound. I stare at the mantelpiece and decide to buy myself a small CD player to go just there so I can listen to music in the flat.
I wonder what Reese is doing, right now. Is he high? Is he still needing regular medical treatment? Is he clean after his stint in hospital? Is he having to take more beatings from Judge because he doesn’t know where I am?
I think about Lori. Is she safe after everything that happened, after what I had to force her to do to get away from Judge?
I wonder about Mama Meachen, who came on to the streets five years ago and who cried and cried for her children. If I saw her, I would buy her coffee at Bernie’s and would sit with her while she cried and told me her story as many times as I was willing to listen. She’d had no money, she hadn’t wanted to be a benefits scrounger, she’d seen how people looked down on them. She’d only taken on that extra cleaning job but hadn’t declared it to make ends meet and then she was being taken in for questioning, then the police were involved, then she was doing a little stretch of time. But during that ‘time’, her children had been taken into care, and she’d had a breakdown and she’d lost her flat. And now no one would listen to her, no one would help. She was only allowed to write to her children, and her world was so small and everything so bleak. She cried and talked and constantly retold her story because, I knew, she hoped that when she got to the end of that particular retelling everything would be different and she would be explaining how she was with her children again.
I think about Crazy Doug, who’d called himself that since university when he was at the top of his game. He said he used to work in the City, doing deals that would make your eyes water, until he’d started hearing voices one day and couldn’t shut them out with the booze any more. He had started missing time at work, trying to shut out the voices. Everyone else had started to call him Crazy Doug, in mean, nasty ways, until he’d woken up one day and hadn’t known which voice wasn’t real and which was his own, and nothing had been the same since. I liked the stories Doug used to tell about the high-flying people he worked with and how utterly irredeemable they all seemed.
I wonder about Melvin, the wannabe street hustler who tried to act like Huggy Bear from Starksy and Hutch, but couldn’t seem to get rid of his posh Etonian accent.
I think of Aimee, two e’s no y, who would tell a different story to everyone she met about the life she’d had before the streets, and you could be sure each new tale was more plausible than the last.
I think of Tessa, who had fled an abusive relationship and had been diagnosed with anxiety and depression – diseases no one could see. She’d tried to keep going but it had all got too much, the tablets hadn’t worked fast enough, the waiting list for therapy had been so long a
nd when she hadn’t been able to work, her landlord, unable to see her condition, how devastating it was to her life, had moved her on. Out on to the streets, out of his sight, out of his mind.
I think of how I used to be one of them. I used to fit right into that world. I loved it when they called me Ace, when they talked to me because I was their friend. When we’d sit and plot about taking over the world, or what we would do if the ‘normals’ recognised us as people.
I think of all those people I met over the years, who lived on the streets, who lived in the shelters, who would seem to appear one day and not be around the next, who were all part of that world where we would step through that divide that made us invisible. I think of them and I want to be back with them. I fitted there. I belonged there. I still feel sometimes that I’m playing at all this, that tomorrow I’m going to wake up and I’ll be back in my room at the hostel, or I’ll be round the back of the supermarket, and needing to go to the library for a wash and a wee.
That policeman had asked me if that was the life I was meant to live and I had thought no, I had thought that this – sleeping in a bed, eating in a small kitchen, having my days mapped out by the hours and rules of working life – was the life I was meant to live. What if it isn’t like that after all? What if the life I am meant to live is not here, but out there, being Grace ‘Ace’ Carter with all those people I know, and all the people whose lives I heard about and can relate to? What if my life is meant to be lived as an invisible?
I reach over my guitar and pick up my mobile. I have two numbers programmed into it – Sasha’s and the hotel. Maybe part of the problem of feeling like this life isn’t my real life is that I have no connections, no real links to anyone. Maybe part of the problem is that Nika Harper needs to reach out and make as many connections as she can.
Hi Marshall. Do you fancy trying that kissing thing again? Nika
I press send before I change my mind, before I start to convince myself that I’d really like to live my life as Grace Carter again, forgetting all the people who’ll be in danger if I go back to that life.
When I Was Invisible Page 25