House of Straw
Page 14
Inside the flat there were small cracks in the walls, a grubby carpet that looked as if it had been there for more than thirty years and a cooker that was heavily lined with a film of thick grease. There was a terrible smell in the place too, a sort of musky stale smell that seemed to have an immunity to normal air fresheners. But it was a place to stay, a dry place to stay, a better option than living rough on the streets or in the confines of a prison. The flat was sixteen floors up in the air. The lift, when it wasn’t out of order, often bore the strong stench of cannabis, puke and fresh urine. By the time you arrived at the sixteenth floor you either felt physically sick or on the way to a happy place for the day. When the lift was out of use the girls would have to brave the stairway where they would often be confronted with an array of used condoms and syringes, abandoned by addicts from the estate. Yes, it was bleak and dirty, a ‘shithole in the sky’, but it was their ‘shithole in the sky’, and for a while it felt like a real home.
There were a thousand ways you could describe the effervescent Nikita Pearson. The girl was barely five feet in height, but the kooky pixie with glowing emerald green eyes and an enchanting smile stood out like a sore thumb wherever she went. She had long dark hair that was always wrapped in two messy buns on her head, a dozen tiny rings covering the lobes of each ear and a tattoo bearing the name of her son emblazoned on her neck. She was extremely hyper-active, an untamed fireball of unbridled energy, often talking at one hundred miles per hour. She had a head full of torrid stories from her past and strange one-liners about her views on life.
Nikita and Poppy had met at the Medway Young Offenders Centre shortly after Poppy’s release from the segregation unit following her altercation with Meghan Masters. Poppy had been something of a loner during her spell in Medway, but despite her notoriety, following the incident with Meghan, she had no time for the inmates queueing up to be her friend. Poppy trusted no one, not, that is, until she met Nikita. The other girls in the institution had taken an instant dislike to the pint-sized girl with the ‘Minnie Mouse’ hairstyle, seeing her as an easy target for their bullying. But Poppy liked the tiny waif with a look of mischievous craziness in her eyes and the two of them became instant friends. Any thoughts that the other inmates had of intimidating Nikita vanished the minute Poppy declared, ‘You mess with her, you mess with me!’
The two sixteen-year-old girls found that they had much in common, having been placed in some of the same foster homes in the Kent area and both having spent time at the infamous Bluebridge children’s home. Poppy soon discovered that she had not been the only target for the sexual predator Mr Donovan at Bluebridge. Her new friend had also endured his sexual harassment. Nikita had been sent to the young offenders centre for possession of a large quantity of cocaine, coupled with a string of offences for shoplifting. She had owned up to her robbing spree from more than twenty department stores, but felt she received rough justice when it came to the possession charges. Her boyfriend, a well-known dealer, had left her to face the police when they raided his hotel room in Thurrock. Unfortunately for Nikita, she had been high on mamba and was in the grip of some form of hallucination at the time of the raid. For some unknown reason she owned up to everything. The state she had been in at that time she would have probably claimed that she also killed John F. Kennedy and planned the Great Train Robbery. But Essex police were keen to make an example of her, and they succeeded, the district judge handing her a nine-month sentence for her misdemeanours. Her ‘so-called’ boyfriend was never caught, he was last seen hitchhiking on a motorway, somewhere near Manchester.
The girls shared an experience at Medway which would create an unbreakable bond between the duo. It was a day that neither would ever forget. It was also an experience that brought home the stark reality of how tough life could be in those dark surroundings. The pair had skipped a workshop programme to share a cigarette behind the canteen building. The centre was short-staffed at the time, so it was unlikely that they would be missed by any of the warders. When the girls moved to the back of the building they noticed what they thought was a bundle of clothes hanging from one of the windows. They were amused at first, both agreeing that it was a crazy plan to escape from the place, when the makeshift ladder would only take the escapee into the prison courtyard. But when the pair moved closer to see the bundle swinging in the morning breeze, it revealed the dangling body of one of the girls from their wing. Even though her face was twisted and had turned a deep shade of mauve, they recognised the hanging figure instantly as Chloe Beaumont. She was swinging backwards and forwards above them, hanging by her neck from what looked to be a thick white wire. The girls had completely different reactions to the horrifying spectacle, Nikita heaving up the contents of her breakfast in shock, while Poppy simply stood there, studying the tormented look on the hanging girl’s face, seemingly fascinated by the tragic event. It was the first time that Poppy had ever seen a dead body close up, but even then, something told her it would not be the last. The girls raised the alarm, but the warders were unsuccessful in their attempts to revive poor Chloe. She was pronounced dead almost as soon as the paramedics arrived. The rumours began to circulate around Medway that Chloe had taken her own life because she had found out that her boyfriend had been cheating on her. Other inmates were sure that it had been the fact that her stepfather was responsible for impregnating her fourteen-year-old sister. The more astute girls at the institution worked out that her boyfriend and her stepfather were, in fact, the same person.
Chloe may, or may not, have been clever enough to work out the act of treachery for herself. She was, however, clever enough to convert an extension cable she had stolen for the television room into a makeshift noose, and she had done a bloody good job of it too! Medway received a barrage of negative press coverage following the incident. Staff shortages and a lack of psychiatric support at the centre were highlighted as the main reasons for the tragedy. It later transpired in a national newspaper exposé of the youth offenders centre that this was the third suicide in as many years at Medway. An independent inquiry was promised but there were no noticeable changes made to the place in the years that followed.
Poppy was released from Medway the month after Chloe’s suicide. She would not see Nikita again for more than two years. The circumstances of their reunion would hardly be described as ideal. Both girls had moved up a level or two in their search for a ‘happy’ place in their heads. Poppy had become a regular user of crack cocaine, while her impish friend was now injecting heroin. Poppy had found her friend sleeping rough beneath a viaduct in Thamesmead, on a bitter cold February evening. She would not have recognised Nikita had it not been for the messy buns, which were now coated with a thick film of grease and were scruffier than ever. The sparkle in those emerald eyes had been replaced with a look of despair, her gaunt, pallid face bore the blotchy marks of self-neglect. She had lost weight, not that she had had much weight to lose in the first place. The little pixie’s bright smile had been replaced with an array of yellowy rotting teeth. She resembled a walking corpse.
Poppy took her friend back to the hostel room she stayed in and did her best to support her. Nikita confessed to Poppy that she had recently turned to prostitution to find the money to feed her habit, but a couple of beatings from other street workers and a nasty dose of chlamydia had turned her off the idea. She had turned to begging as a final resort but barely raised enough money each day to pay for her fix. This was a deeply traumatic time for Poppy, watching someone she cared for ‘on the rattle’, unable to find any blankets of comfort to keep her safe from the demons inside her head. One morning Poppy woke to find that her friend had gone, simply vanished, as if she had never been there at all.
Poppy thought that she might never see Nikita again. She feared that she might have gone back to working the streets and simply become another sad victim of the lifestyle she had chosen. But she was wrong. Two years on from their brief reunion in Thamesmead they met up again. Po
ppy had just served her first term in an adult prison, a massive learning curve for the girl who couldn’t keep her temper under control. She had received a fifteen-month sentence for handing out a severe beating to a drunken youth and his girlfriend outside a takeaway restaurant. The argument had been over nothing more than queue-jumping, hardly a valid reason to lose your liberty. Try telling that to Poppy!
On her release from HMP New Hall in Leeds, Poppy returned to South London and stayed in a halfway house paid for by the government. Her new home, if that is what you could call it, was a dilapidated bed and breakfast hotel. It was just a stone’s throw away from ‘The Marfield’, the run-down council estate on the outskirts of Woolwich.
The Marfield estate was a place full of crackheads, single mothers and rudderless teens with no direction in life, a purpose-built fortress of degradation and depravity for those at the bottom of the social ladder. It was there that she bumped into her favourite ‘little fireball of mischievous mayhem’ again. Poppy had gone to the estate hoping to team up with her old boyfriend Cameron but discovered that he had recently been incarcerated himself for assaulting two police officers and wouldn’t be back on his old stomping ground for many months. It was that crazy head of hair that caught her attention again. The vivacious little ‘pixie’ was back. Poppy saw her entering the tower block at the edge of the estate and screamed her name at the top of her voice. Within hours she had abandoned her bed at the sheltered housing address and moved her small bag of belongings into Nikita’s flat. This was a new beginning, a new start, on the sixteenth floor of Rutland Towers, in their very own ‘little shithole in the sky’.
Nikita had been through a turbulent couple of years – the death of her older brother, a victim of an unsolved knife crime, a four-month spell in a residential rehab centre and to top it all, childbirth! The tiny-framed girl now had a son. Zain was Nikita’s world. His arrival had brought back lots of the endearing qualities that Poppy had seen in her friend during their Medway days. Those sparkling green eyes had returned to their rightful place, her moments of mischief and madness and crazy ideas about the true meaning of life were there too. The real Nikita was back in the land of the living and her friend was over the moon. Poppy never found out who Zain’s father was, her tiny friend refused to talk about it. It might have been that Nikita never actually knew herself, but it didn’t seem to bother her at all. She told Poppy that her son had been a gift from a heavenly place and that her destiny was to love him, protect him and make him a better person than she had been in her troubled life.
The day after Poppy moved into her new abode she received a payment from the local council, money that was meant to help her buy new clothes for job interviews and for living expenses. She decided that those luxuries could be shelved for a few weeks, there were other priorities, much more pressing priorities. Half of the money was spent at a seedy tattoo parlour, where the girls had their nicknames for one another inked inside a purple heart-shaped tattoo on their right thighs. Both ‘Nixie Girl’ and ‘Popsy Girl’ were more than happy with the results, even if they did both suffer from the experience for several days after. The remainder of Poppy’s rehabilitation money was spent with a dealer she knew on the estate, mainly on skunk and some ‘Molly’ pills. It wasn’t what Poppy had hoped for, but it transpired that the supplier of crack cocaine was apparently having an ‘unexpected’ holiday at Her Majesty’s pleasure.
The friends would often share bubble baths together, not just to save on the gas bills, but because it was the place where the two of them could dare to dream. Their bath nights would usually start when Zain was tucked up in bed and the only noises that could be heard were the thumping reggae beats rising from the flat below. The girls would lie back, at opposite ends of the bathtub, sharing a large joint and a bottle of cheap vodka, as the world simply turned around them. Their conversations could sometimes become quite intense, when they would talk about their pasts and discuss their hopes and fears, not that Poppy held many fears. Nikita always had her own take on life. She had captured a million one-liners, many of them could have come straight out of a philosopher’s handbook. ‘All those people with money,’ she once said, during bath night, ‘the ones who look down their noses at us, they forget, they forget that we are all born equal. Two arms, two legs, a head and a heart, we all have those. Some may think that having money makes them a better person, but while we are asleep and when we die there is no difference between us, we are all equal.’
One night in their bathtub of bubbles and dreams, the girls created a list, a simple list of the names of all the people that had wronged them during their time in care. The bullies and the heavy-handed ones were marked at the bottom of the list, with the vile perverts and sexual predators nearer the top. Mr Donovan was very high up on both girls’ calculations, but Mr Houghton was at the top of the list, he would always be at the top of the list for Poppy. It started as a ‘Hate list’ but ended up being a ‘Kill list’, the girls adding different ways that they would murder each of their tormentors if they had the chance. It turned out that Poppy knew quite a few different methods that could be used to end a life.
She didn’t know why, but Poppy loved her little friend’s free spirit and her crazy outlook on a society that was often too quick to shun girls like them. Something that the little pixie often said would came back to Poppy in moments when she might be feeling low. ‘We will be famous one day, Popsy girl! Trust me, one day we will both be famous!’ Poppy never forgot those words. She would later spend many nights on a hard pillow inside Bronzefield prison, remembering Nikita’s prediction, and wishing that her friend had been wrong.
The girls celebrated Nikita’s twenty-first birthday with a shoplifting spree which earned the little pixie some smart designer babywear for the favourite little man in her life and Poppy a green bomber jacket with air force badges emblazoned on the sleeves. Zain soon grew out of the babygrows and brightly coloured romper suits he had been gifted, but Poppy never let go of her prized jacket, the one she wore every day, the one that always reminded her of a better time in her life, however short that time was!
The water in her bath was cold now. Poppy’s sidetrack through the foggy corridors of her past life had left her with strange thoughts in her head. She looked down into the bath water and touched the tattoo on her thigh, running her fingers across the tiny lettering which spelled out her affectionate nickname for her absent friend. It had been more than five years since those crazy days and nights in the high-rise, more than five years since she had felt the warmth of Nikita’s arms around her in the double bed they shared in the flat. More than five years since someone truly cared about her. Poppy so wished that her kooky friend was there with her in that bath, sitting opposite her, foamy bubbles sitting proudly on top of that crazy head of hair, her sparkling eyes shining brightly like beautiful diamonds. She would be telling her crazy stories and reassuring her, as she always did, that everything was alright. But she knew that she would never see her friend again or hear her infectious laughter. The ‘little pixie’ had, like everyone else in her life, gone, left her alone.
Poppy felt very sad at that moment.
Suddenly, her memory of that distant dark place was disturbed by three loud knocks on her front door, followed by four more. They were not the knocks of a friendly visitor. Poppy grabbed a towel and wiped herself down as the banging on the door continued. An immediate thought came into her head as she pulled on one of Cameron’s T-shirts which was lying on the carpet in the hall. Dealers, she thought, I bet it is fucking dealers, I bet that bastard Cameron owes the bagman! Poppy knelt down and crawled along the floor into the bedroom, hoping that she would not be seen. The first thing she looked for was some trousers or jeans to put on, the second, something sharp or heavy to defend herself with. The knocking continued and was now accompanied by a voice. She felt slightly more at ease, it was a voice she recognised, it was Mr Rahwaz, the landlord. She no longer needed a weapon.
He was still there, ten minutes later, her angry landlord, outside her front door, but now the knocking and the shouting had stopped. Poppy was sitting on the floor of the bedroom applying some makeup. She was less bothered by her visitor now, more concerned about getting to the restaurant in time for her shift. Her thoughts turned back to the previous night and how she would face Matt. She decided that she would make it clear to him that day that their sexual encounter, however good it was, was a one-off, a mistake that they should bury and never mention again.
An envelope was pushed through the letterbox of the tatty brown front door to her flat and landed on the grubby carpet in the hall. When she was happy that Rahwaz was no longer outside, Poppy picked up the letter and opened it. The text messages she received from him never brought good news, so she wasn’t expecting this to be any different. She was right. The letter was an eviction notice. It stated that unless the tenants paid £520 of rent arrears by the tenth of August they would be evicted.
Chapter Eleven
He was late again. Krista wondered sometimes if Dean did it just to see how far he could push her. She had been waiting outside Reigate train station for three quarters of an hour. Why say eight o’clock, she thought, when you know damn well that you will not be here until nine? She tried his mobile again. It went straight to voicemail. She was not happy, in fact she was livid. She would tell him tonight, she would tell him to stop taking her for granted.
But she didn’t, he was forgiven, the minute she saw his smile and felt his face next to hers. ‘Sorry, Nylund,’ Dean said, hugging her tightly. ‘I had to sort out some things for a big meeting tomorrow. I have got that new sales director on my back.’
Krista wanted to berate him for his poor time-keeping but instead found herself lying. ‘I only just got here myself,’ she said, before the two shared a long and lingering kiss. Anyone passing would probably have guessed that these two adults must surely be having an affair. People of that age don’t usually behave like teenagers in the street, touchy-feely and slobbering all over one another. Neither of them would have cared, though, what any of the people passing them were thinking. They had not seen one another for nearly two weeks. Krista had been feeling the strain.