by Sam Hayes
The setting sun was virtually hidden by clouds rumbling from the west. Robert sensed rain; he sensed a storm and snorted as he wiped his mouth after cleaning his teeth with a courtesy pack he had purchased at reception.
He didn’t particularly care what the weather did and wondered if Erin’s phone needed charging because it consistently diverted to voicemail without even ringing. He wasn’t sure he’d know what to say to her anyway. He splashed water on his face and slicked his damp hair back with his fingers. He gathered his car keys and room key and, after requesting a local map from the reception desk, left the hotel. Louisa, he assumed, would be asleep by now or at the very least immersed in the bath or a movie.
Twenty minutes later, Robert turned into Windsor Terrace, a narrow street of tiny red-brick properties, as if each one was a building block rather than a whole house. The single front windows gazed into the ones directly opposite and Robert noticed that most had net curtains hanging in them all except one. Instead of nets, the curtains were completely closed. A finale of orange sunlight tracked a runway down the deserted road.
All the parking spaces were occupied and Robert was forced to park at the far end of the street. He walked back towards the Varney household with a light patina of sweat glossing his face. The evening was muggy and he reckoned the temperature between the two rows of houses was a couple of degrees higher than in open space. Robert wondered just how much the residents knew about each other’s lives, living this close. He wondered if Cheryl’s neighbours knew about her years of misery.
Number 18 was small and neat but strangely devoid of character. Many of the other houses had baskets of summer flowers dangling over the pavement or window boxes crammed with geraniums. Music or the low chatter of television slipped from open front windows and, like in the Wystrachs’ street, Robert heard a baby wail, a toddler scream in anger. This time, the infant noise crashed into Robert’s heart. One house wouldn’t have any baby noise. One house would be filled with sadness.
Without knowing or thinking about repercussions or what he would say, or wouldn’t say, Robert went through the front gate of number 18, tucked between two identical houses, and knocked on the door. This was the house that had the front curtains closed so when there was no answer, he wasn’t able to peek inside to see if anyone was home. There wasn’t any visible way to the rear either, being mid-terrace. He knocked again, louder and more urgently. A middle-aged woman came out of next door, a dog yapping at her heels, and stared at Robert as if he had just knocked on her door.
‘She’ll be out late,’ she said briskly. ‘Give her a call and make an appointment.’
Robert turned and leaned on the low wall that separated the two tiny front gardens. When his feet sank, he realised he was standing on soil. ‘Do you know when she’ll be home?’
‘Late, like I said.’ The woman wiped soapy hands on a tea towel. ‘If it’s urgent, she’s at the Stag’s Head up on the road into town. You might get to see her if she’s not too busy.’ The woman grinned as if she knew something Robert didn’t and clicked the door shut.
The Stag’s Head was crowded and filled with the smoke of seared steak and cigarettes. One by one Robert studied each of the bar and waiting staff to see if any of them matched the image of the woman he held in his mind. Of course, he might not recognise her now. The photograph in the newspaper was thirteen years old and focused mostly on the baby. She would have suffered over a decade of misery and grief, which would have taken its toll on her looks. He didn’t think any of the staff at the Stag’s Head even vaguely resembled the woman in the picture. Robert edged towards the bar and ordered a pint.
‘Can you tell me where I can find Cheryl Varney?’ he asked, slipping a ten-pound note across the wet counter. The young girl, agitated by the number of waiting customers, gestured to the rear of the pub.
‘She’s in there. Do you want a ticket? There’s a long wait. Or you could see someone else.’ The barmaid hovered between the pumps and the till while Robert figured out what she was talking about. He noticed the coloured chalk writing on a blackboard above the bar. Psychic Night. Tarot, Runes, Clairvoyant . . .
‘I’ll take a ticket for her and wait,’ Robert replied as it dawned on him that Cheryl Varney was a psychic, although not psychic enough to find her own baby.
When he was handed ticket number thirty-two, a female voice, barely audible, sang out from the rear of the pub, ‘Number twenty-five, please.’ A young woman held up her ticket as if she’d won a raffle and made her way to a room leading off the bar.
Robert shouldered his way between clusters of patrons of all ages and finally stood at the far end of the bar, near the doorway to the room hosting the psychic readings, and watched as the client seated herself at a table spread with a purple cloth. A crystal ball sat in the middle of the table and, behind it, with her dark hair hanging in swathes around her alabaster neck, was Cheryl Varney. Unmistakably.
Robert drank his pint without tasting it. With his eyes fixed on Cheryl, he drew out a packet of cigarettes from his top pocket and took out the last one. He remembered he didn’t smoke. Someone bumped against him, sloshed an inch of his pint down his shirt, apologised and then offered Robert a light when he asked.
Robert drew in a lengthy breath and blew out, squinting through the smoke at Cheryl – the woman who had lost her baby thirteen years ago. The woman whose baby he had found. The woman he just wanted to meet, to perhaps pass on a secret message that her daughter was safe and well and beautiful. The woman who believed her baby was gone forever.
Robert waited his turn and drank his beer and smoked his cigarette. He would wait all night if he had to. He wondered if Cheryl really was psychic. He didn’t believe in stuff like that although he could understand why she did. He watched her working.
Curiously, she had her own hands spread out on the table, palms upturned, studying them intently. Then she suddenly glanced up at Robert as if she sensed he was staring. For a moment, he couldn’t hear anything, as if the pub had emptied and they were completely alone, just him and Ruby’s mother.
TWENTY-FOUR
It took me three years to save up eleven thousand pounds. I tried to resist spending most of my regular earnings on clothes and toys for Ruby but the promise of her returning to me soon sent me to the shops for gifts.
After six months working at what I soon realised was nothing more than a brothel, Freda put me in a room with Maggie. A reward for being her best girls.We decorated it with curtains and cushions and pictures from the market and bought a rug for the floor so Ruby had somewhere soft to crawl when she was better and came back to me.
It wasn’t that I was stupid or gullible or didn’t know what they were doing to me. I understood that I was selling my body and giving most of the money to Becco and as time went by and the weeks turned into months and eventually years, I also realised that it wasn’t being spent on Ruby’s medical bills. There were no medical bills although I didn’t look that one in the eye until much later. I continued on my course, set firmly in the belief that as soon as Ruby was better she would one day be snuggled next to me when I finished work.
I can’t remember the date, the hour, the minute when it hit me that I would never see my baby again. I can’t remember what I was wearing or who my clients were that night. In my situation, it was a little like losing a milk tooth: you wobble it and it falls out. Thing is, with a baby tooth, you know another one’s right behind it.
Like I said, my weekly pay packet was often spent as soon as I earned it so I saved up a little stash by creaming a few quid off the top of my clients’ fees or offering extra services for more cash – stuff the other girls wouldn’t do. I wouldn’t have had to steal from Becco and Freda if I’d been more careful with my money but I needed something to whitewash the pain, a little luxury here and there to help me forget that ten different men would be heaving their hairy bodies over me in any one night. Besides, Maggie was getting fired up about going to California and I desperately wanted t
o go with her. I had to get money for that and for Ruby’s future when she got better.
Then Becco started stalking me more than usual. I kept thinking, it’s only because he wants a bit of me for himself that he’s so interested. In fact, I once offered but he slapped my face – the only time he ever hit me – and since then his beady eyes didn’t so much watch me as become a part of me. He was even in my dreams.
He watched the other girls, the foreign ones, but not in the same way. He kept them on a visual cord that if snapped, if stretched beyond the walls of this house, would most likely have resulted in Becco disposing of them some place only he knew.
Again, I’m not stupid or anything, but it took me a while to figure out that the girls who couldn’t speak much English, the ones from Albania and Serbia and anywhere Becco could score a decent-looking harvest, were kept against their will. Or maybe it was that they just didn’t have a will to do anything else. Then, after that, I realised that Maggie and I were the decoys, the maids, the tolerated link to the outside world.
Norris died. He’d become one of my regular clients as well as my first client that night in the hotel with Maggie. Both Becco and Freda knew that he was a meagre payer but they let him get away with it because he was regular and nice to us girls. But when I found out he’d died, I didn’t tell them. I let them think I was still visiting him and collecting his measly hundred and fifty when really I was visiting a lawyer in his swanky apartment who paid me twice as much. If I hadn’t got the ’flu, if Maggie hadn’t had to step in at the last minute to visit the long-dead Norris, I would have got away with it.
So then there was a row. The night hung heavy with the scent of hurried or desperate or violent or silent sex, like the stinking pile of laundry that built up in the foreign girls’ bathroom. Everywhere reeked of dirty men layered upon dirty men layered upon skinny girls.
‘You done a stupid thing, silly Milly.’ Maggie slapped my face and showed me her bruised and bloody thighs. ‘Turns out Norris is dead so I took a punt on the street and ended up with seven kinds of fury jammed between my legs.’
We fought and she slapped me and spat in my face and I bit her and then cried as she dragged me across the floor. Panting and hair everywhere, we’d smashed the only telly in the house before Becco separated us and pulled Maggie out of the room, making me believe I’d won. Making me believe that Becco liked me better. Making me believe I was special. Making me believe, later, when I was pacing around the house in the early hours, that Maggie wasn’t really dead when I found her folded into the stone-floored pantry. Making me believe that the gash across her temple was residue from between her legs, that she hadn’t been knocked out cold and thrown into the small room. Maggie wasn’t breathing and wouldn’t talk to me and I tried and tried to locate the tick-tick of a pulse on her lifeless body.
It went like this. As soon as Becco had hauled Maggie out of my hair, I went to bed. I was ill. I knew she’d simmer down. I woke at five, the first tendrils of light were weaving into my room, and I saw that Maggie hadn’t come to bed. I needed some water and a pill to stop the aches. Freda kept paracetamol somewhere in the kitchen, which is how I came to find Maggie in the pantry. In a state of shock, I was walking back through the hall on my way to alert Freda – she would know what to do – when a ferocious yelling and pounding began at the front door like all hell had broken loose.
In a second, in pure fear, I ducked through a door that led to the cellar. In another second, whoever was smashing the door in was inside the house.
It was the police. A raid. I heard them spreading through the three floors with a trail of warnings followed by terrified screams as the foreign girls were woken. When they finally got to searching the basement, I was already hidden. I had discovered by accident, by falling into it, a water-filled pit at the back of the unlit cellar. As two policemen flashed torches around the vaulted cave, I held my breath, curled into a ball and disappeared underwater.
I saw the beam of light zigzag over the surface like a fish might see the moon. I said a silent prayer that they wouldn’t notice bubbles as my lungs squeezed for life. Using all the self-control I had learnt during the last three years – when a punter’s picking his way over every second of my skin, when he’s close up examining every hole in my body and deciding what to shove where – I stuck my nose up so that my nostrils gently broke the surface of whatever kind of water I was in. Another prayer that it wasn’t from the toilet. Even with liquid in my ears, I heard the murmurings of the police voices, their urgent raid-speak as they co-ordinated their blitz on our house.
When their lights were gone, when after hours and hours the house creaked only from its own weight, I slithered out of the pit and dragged my waterlogged body back up the steps into the hall. There wasn’t a sound. It was the strangest thing. No foreign babble of sparring girls, no crack of the whip from Becco, no buzzer sounding from the other end of the house where the other girls worked and their customers called. Maggie and I were used to the orchestra of sounds, just your everyday brothel, but we were never allowed into that part of the house. Aside from mealtimes, we were kept completely separate.
I stretched out but couldn’t straighten properly because my spine had fused in the cold water. I left the lights off and stalked the house. I went into Becco’s office first and, by the orange spray of street lighting, I could see that most of it was missing. It was like everyone had moved out and forgotten to tell me.
Where papers had been piled, there was empty desk. Where boxes had been stacked, there was now blank carpet that looked cleaner and plusher than the rest. I went behind the desk and sat down in Becco’s chair, the place where he’d counted out my money. I opened a drawer. Nothing apart from an elastic band and a biro cap. I stretched my legs, which caught on a carrier bag that had been left under the desk. When I stood up, the bag came with me and when I unhooked it from my ankle, something fell out. A little maroon book. Someone’s passport. Something the police had overlooked.
I kept hold of it and went back into the hall, leaving a trail of water as my sodden dressing gown dripped. I was freezing. Then I heard a whimper. A brittle mouse-like cry with a sniff behind it. I followed my ears and ended up in the attic room on the foreign girls’ side of the house, although I wasn’t sure whose side it was any more. In fact, I wasn’t sure about anything except that unless I wanted to be hauled away by the police, I’d better get my stuff and bugger off quick.
I found her in the wardrobe and laughed and cried at the same time, my emotions as curdled as sour milk and as separate as oil and water. She was as folded up as Maggie had been in the pantry but this little thing was alive, snivelling pathetically and calling for her mummy, for me.
‘Naughty Freda’s been hiding you here all along,’ I said to her, crouching and grinning and tickling her knee. She had a red crescent around her mouth as if she’d drunk fizzy pop and there was food matted in her hair. She wore a nappy although she seemed too old for such a thing, and the tops of her naked thighs were bubbled with blisters. ‘And naughty Freda said that you weren’t very well and I couldn’t have you back yet.’
I scooped the little girl up and wedged her on my hip. She smelled of wee and stale milk. I loved her instantly and I knew she loved me back, even though she didn’t understand a word I said.
‘Nënë, nënë, nënë,’ she wailed a thousand times, which I later discovered meant mummy in Albanian.
For the second time in my life I escaped by jumping out of a window. I had forty-eight pounds in my jeans pocket, the passport that I’d found in Becco’s office and little Ruby attached to my front as we legged it, just like I’d done several years before.
When I’d gone to fetch my saved-up money from the cash box hidden under my mattress, it was jimmied open and empty. The police had got to it and I doubt very much they bagged it up as evidence. I stuffed the empty tin into a small bag and grappled my daughter into some clothes that I discovered at the back of the wardrobe she was hiding in. We l
eft through the kitchen window as the police entered again through the boarded-up front door. We headed for the station, took a train to anywhere and ended up in Brighton. On the journey, I leafed through the passport to discover who I was.
We flashed into a tunnel and as we emerged into the daylight, I became Erin Lucas, born 29 June 1972. I was four years older.
It was easy at first, with the tourists eager to spend, and many of the locals soon came to know me. They made a point of finding me on the corner by the antique shop to buy their flowers. I was the cheapest in town.
It was summer and sleeping behind a beach hut or dodging through the hostels got me by. I never nicked from the same shop twice in one day. In fact, I don’t think many of the shops even realised that some of their street displays had mysteriously vanished. The trail of water from the stems on the hot pavement soon evaporated.
I rearranged the blooms into splendid fragrant bouquets and sold them easily. I earned twenty pounds in one day, my best ever although a far cry from my London earnings. But I was glad to be out of all that and gradually Ruby’s troubled behaviour began to change.
She learned English and soon forgave me for leaving her in the hospital for so long. Spending all that time with Mummy was good for her and when I wasn’t stealing from shops or posh, flower-filled gardens or selling my wares on the street, we would pick through the pebbles on the beach as if they were washed-up sweets or hunt for shells and tide-smoothed glass from across the world. The sun shone and we were happy.
By the end of September, when the hotels emptied of their bustling summer trade and the wind kicked up and chucked weed and froth onto the beach, when the litter formed swirling flurries down the narrow lanes, a hand reached out and saved me. As I removed three cellophane-wrapped bunches of some exotic flowers I didn’t even know the name of, a plump hand wrapped around my wrist and stopped me in my tracks.