The Less Dead

by Denise Mina

  The city is building luxury flats and restaurants and music venues over all of that, and over all of them. Susan is being buried and forgotten once again, without fanfare, just covered over with dirt as the city moves on.

  Margo pulls on her coat, takes her car keys and heads down to the Drag.

  36

  IT’S LIKE A DREAM, seeing her here, Susan back in this place. This stinking place, where so much happened, so many nights.

  It’s quiet now, they don’t come here like they used to. Some do, the desperate ones, the new bitches in town who don’t know where to go to sell it inside. A girl had to be clean to get indoor work then, presentable. They had to have it together enough to turn up and stay all night but not now.

  They’ll take anyone now but there’s still a few left stumbling about in the dark and the cold. Hopeless. Desperate. Beggars during the day, looking at the ground and accepting Costa coffees and sandwiches that don’t scratch their itch. What they need is cash, not another fucking latte. They need cash and, when they can’t beg it, they come down here in their anoraks and jeans, dirty fingers and missing teeth, and they’ll do anything for a tenner because they’re desperate not to feel the way they’re feeling. Just for a few hours off from how it feels to be them. They’ll fuck for a bed and a bag of chips. That’s how low they are. Worthless. Nothings.

  She smells stronger already, that smell: vinegar and ulcerated track marks. Something bad, nature’s signal that something is wrong. How can they stand themselves? This is where they belong, those girls, the Susans.

  Susan strides across the road, takes the steep hill and follows it down to the Drag.

  Worthless, lower than shit, lower than dog.

  Watching her walk down a dark street of shut-up offices, walking Susan’s walk, the sway and swagger, looking left and right, seeing who’s about and what’s happening the night.

  She’s going to try it down there and once they’re broken they never go back. She’ll never come back from this.

  37

  THE DARKNESS DOWN HERE feels sharp and brittle. It cowers in corners, slices suddenly across pavements, cutting the feet from her. The lanes where business is conducted are so dark that Margo feels she could be swallowed by it. There are women there, down in the dark, she can hear shuffling and see movement, but there are no faces, no voices, no life.

  She parked downhill and has been walking for forty minutes, up to Blythswood, around the old bus station. She’s walking back down on West Campbell Street, a steep hill running straight down to the river, full of dark-windowed office buildings with smart brass door plaques and impressive entrances. The office buildings are high and it’s this height that creates the deep darkness in the lanes intersecting them.

  She imagines Susan, nineteen, still tender from giving birth, walking here, being cold and standing in the dark lanes to get enough money to start her young life over again.

  The wind whips up from the river, making her shiver and hunch. For generations these have been the streets where the women came to do this. Where men came to buy this. She wonders what the men saw when they looked at these skinny women in dire need, standing in the cold, ready to do anything for money. How could they choose to fuck them and hurt them even more and then go back to their lives and their wives and their jobs the next day?

  She walks down to Waterloo Lane, steps into the dark, tries to imagine Susan standing against a damp wall but she can’t conjure her at all. Margo’s just standing in a stinking alley feeling sorry for herself. She needs to walk.

  By the time she gets to the Waterloo pub she feels as if she’s missed the Drag by a mile or a block, she doesn’t know where it went, but she crosses Argyle Street, bright and busy with traffic, the luminous glass over the Central Station bridge glowing white into the night, and realises that this is all that’s left of it: a small group of two or three women standing together in a dark lane, huddled around the light from a phone as if for warmth.

  Margo stares at the women. She doesn’t know how to start talking to them.

  One of the women looks up at her and catches her eye. She nods as if she recognises her and gives a polite little wave. Margo gives an uncertain wave back. The woman raises her eyebrows, asking Margo what she’s doing there. They can see that she doesn’t belong.

  She scurries to her car, gets in quickly and drives away.

  She’s waiting at the lights on George Street, a quiet office area, deserted because it’s ten o’clock at night.

  A car is stopped on the cross street, fifteen feet away and around the corner. A woman gets out of the passenger side. It catches Margo’s attention because of the strange dynamic: the woman gets out quickly. Turned away, she slams the car door and doesn’t look back at the person inside to say goodbye.

  The driver’s eyes are hidden in the shadows but the bottom half of his face is clear in the street lights. It reminds her of the Honda driver and she can see that this man is young, that his teeth are good, that his mouth is slack, as if he’s just about to say something or smile. It turns her stomach, she finds that disgusting but doesn’t really know why. He’s in his mid-twenties, dressed in a grey hoodie. He could be anyone. As soon as the door shuts the car speeds away down the empty road.

  Left alone in the street, the woman reaches under her pink anorak to her waistband and pulls her jeans up. She’s dressed as if she’s going hill walking, in a waterproof jacket, a big lumpy jumper, jeans and dirty trainers.

  She slowly scans the street, sees nothing and then heads straight for Margo’s car, tripping on her tiptoes, leading with her face, a little unsteady. She’s on something and has to concentrate to walk.

  Margo reaches down to the door panel and locks all the doors. But the woman isn’t coming for her, she’s just crossing the road. She swims through the bright white headlights and looks in at Margo, making eye contact, slow blinking.

  It’s Susan. It’s Tanya Williams.

  She holds Margo’s eye as she trips past the bonnet, turning her head, connecting and then breaking away to look forward to where she’s going. Margo panics at the loss of contact. She presses a button and the woman hears the window coming down and turns. She stops. She comes over to the car.

  ‘Are ye, aye?’ she says, as if they’re in the middle of a conversation.

  Margo doesn’t know what to say.

  ‘Will I get in, aye?’

  Again, she doesn’t know what to say so she nods. The woman nods back.

  ‘’K.’ Then she nods again and puts her hand on the bonnet, feeling her way around to the passenger side. She tries the door but finds it locked. Margo, not sure why she’s doing this, unlocks it. The woman gets in and sits, staring forwards, as if this was somehow fated, as if they were always going to take this drive together.

  The car begins its warning song because her seat belt is not done up. She nods at the dashboard, ‘Aye, OK,’ and reaches over with chapped and swollen hands to pull it down and clip it on.

  The lights change and Margo drives on with a strange woman in her car.

  She has brought the cold of the night in with her. It halos around her, coming off in gusts when she moves in her noisy anorak. She sits upright, looking around the car, working out where she is and what could happen to her here. Margo realises that the woman has no idea who she is, where she’s taking her, or what she’s taking her to. It must be frightening. She must be desperate.

  ‘Ken prices, d’ye, aye?’

  They are climbing a very steep hill. Margo changes gear and says, ‘I’d like to talk to you, if that’s OK.’

  ‘Aye. Five quid.’

  ‘Twenty,’ says Margo, feeling bad that anyone would get into a stranger’s car for a fiver.

  She huffs a dismissive laugh. ‘’K.’ And then she thinks of a catch. ‘How? Where is it we’re going, like?’

  ‘Well, where d’you want to go? Have you got a flat?’

  ‘Naw. ’M in a hostel. I’m not going intae any fucking house anyway. I
’ve did that…’

  She’s staring at Margo, reading her for threats, not sure what’s going on, a bit scared of the possibilities. Margo can’t stand it any more. She draws the nose of the car into a space on Blythswood Square and pulls the handbrake on. ‘Is this OK?’

  Suspicious, the woman looks out to the street. ‘Aye.’

  ‘Or would you rather go somewhere for a cup of tea or something?’

  ‘Naw.’ She notices that there is an empty parking space next to them and jolts forward, seeing another one on the other side. ‘You got someb’dy coming?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m not–I dunno what you’re for.’

  Margo has scared her and doesn’t know how to fix it. ‘I just wanted to talk to you –’

  ‘MONEY,’ she barks and looks away out of the passenger window. Her nose is fine and long and she has scraped her hair back and up so tight that slices of her moon-white scalp are visible. It looks painful. She could be any age between eighteen and forty.

  Margo feels inside her pocket and peels a hundred quid.

  The woman takes the money and looks at Margo as if she’s seeing her for the first time. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘I was adopted,’ says Margo. ‘I just found out my real mum did this job. Can I ask you about it?’

  She looks at the money. She looks at Margo. ‘It’s not a job.’

  ‘What is it then?’

  ‘A way of getting money.’ She flaps the notes at Margo. ‘Different than a job.’

  Margo feels her reassessing the situation and realising that she isn’t a threat. Now she’s a bit scared of the woman because she can see how weak and needy Margo is. ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This. Doing this. What’s it like?’

  The woman laughs, loud and bitter, a rat-tat-tat bark, and gives her a hard stare. Then she laughs again, straight into Margo’s face. It’s a threat of a laugh. Margo wants to cry. She’s so stupid. What did she let this mental woman into her car for?

  The woman reaches forward, slowly putting her hand flat on the dashboard. Her fingers curl slowly into a fist and she pulls her hood up over her head with the other hand, looking away.

  Margo’s expecting the fist to swing around and hit her but then hears the woman whispering, ‘This life is no life. What you’re asking… This life. I take drugs tae no think that. What it’s like. What it does tae ye.’

  Margo can see now that she’s really young and frightened. She’s suddenly afraid the woman is going to go into details of sexual encounters, of brutal nights and sore days that she’ll never get out of her head. ‘Look, I don’t want to pry –’

  ‘NO!’ she shouts at her knees. Then she drops her voice. ‘I’ve got weans. In care, like. Mibbe one day they’ll come and ask somed’y.’

  Margo takes this to mean that she’s not going to rob or hit her but she’s sorry, because what she has asked is so intrusive. She asked her to think about the one thing she doesn’t want to think about, about what she’s doing and how she feels about it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, ‘I didn’t think, I’m so sorry.’

  The woman looks at Margo, her chin convulsing, and she whispers, ‘This is a dying life.’ Then she starts to cry.

  ‘Ah no,’ says Margo, suddenly crying too, ‘I am so sorry, I shouldn’t ask that.’

  The woman hides her face and wilts towards Margo, ashamed of the only thing she has left to be ashamed of, that she cares about what is happening to her.

  They hold each other and cry.

  They’re both afraid to let go of the stranger next to them so they just hang on tight, arms entangled, faces tucked tight into one another’s necks. Whenever she can manage to breathe in Margo smells her hair. It smells of coconut. Margo says she’s sorry over and over and the woman tells her no, nonono. No. No no no. No.

  The woman pulls away. Margo gives her an unopened packet of hankies from her handbag. She rips the plastic off and pulls the bundle of paper hankies out, using them to cover her face, pushing them into her eyes as if she’s trying to press the tears back in.

  ‘Fuck.’ She says it like a sigh.

  Margo would quite like one of the hankies to dry her own face but she’s scared of reaching over and taking one. She just wipes her face dry with her hand.

  ‘My mum and auntie did it,’ says Margo. ‘Just found out.’

  The woman nods. ‘Maybe goes way back. Who knows.’

  ‘Is that usual? For it to go down the generations?’

  ‘I don’t know. Didnae ken my ma. Did they get out of this?’

  Margo can’t tell her that Susan was murdered and then let her get out of the car. She thinks about Nikki. ‘Yes. They did. She’s been clean four years.’

  ‘Your ma?’

  ‘No, my auntie. I think my mum did this clean.’

  ‘Fucking hell. Tough bird. She’d have been fucking minted but. There is money but not many can stand to do it.’ She grins at her knees and nods up at Margo. Her teeth are rotten. ‘How’d she get clean?’

  ‘I don’t know. She just did.’

  ‘Well done, anyway.’

  ‘Do any of the other women have kids?’

  ‘We don’t really talk or nothin’.’

  ‘Aren’t the other women friendly?’

  ‘Naw.’

  ‘You’re just out here on your own?’

  ‘Aye.’ She blows her nose. ‘On your own.’

  ‘Not safe, getting in and out of cars, is it?’

  ‘Well,’ she brightens, ‘if I feel unsafe, what I do is –’ she pulls at her hair–‘I pull out a wee bit and tuck it –’ she puts the imagined hairs under her seat and looks quite pleased. ‘Then if you go missing there’s… you know. They can find ye.’

  It’s so bleak that Margo doesn’t know what to say. ‘Have you got other family? A partner, or…?’

  ‘Nah, some of them’ve got men at home, like.’

  ‘What do they do, those men?’ Margo wonders. ‘Just sit at home? Are they pimps?’

  ‘Naw, they get together wi’ ye. Support ye one way, you support them another, ye know…’

  ‘I don’t really. How does it work? I’m asking because I wonder if she had a man sitting at home while she was out here, you know?’

  ‘Ask her, like.’

  Margo forgot she’d resurrected Susan. ‘I’m embarrassed to.’

  ‘Aye. Yeah. Guys, they just stay home and the lassie gaes them the money and buys gear for both of them. Doesn’t always start out like that, but it’s a lonely life. Be nice, coming in to somebody, know? But they’ll arrest the partner for taking money. Say they’re pimping. It’s fucking lonely.’

  Margo doesn’t know what else she can ask without upsetting her again. She reaches into her pocket and lifts out the rest of Lilah’s brick of cash. She gives it to her, glad to be rid of it. She’s expecting gratitude or surprise or delight but the woman doesn’t react at all. She just takes it and her eyebrows rise as she slips the money into her inside pocket. Then she zips her anorak up and looks away. She thinks Margo made a mistake, gave her the wrong money and she’s expecting her to ask for it back.

  When Margo doesn’t, she glances at her, wondering, perhaps, if she’s got any more.

  ‘Aye. Is that it?’

  Margo says it is because she can’t think what else to ask. She doesn’t want it to be the end though because she is overcome with a need to help, to save this woman, whoever she is. Get her somewhere safe and off the streets, out of this life. Realistically that would mean denying her the right to make terrible choices. Realistically that would mean taking her hostage.

  ‘I’m sorry I made you cry.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Do you get any support out there?’

  ‘City Mission. Gae ye tea and biscuits and that.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Down there.’ She thumbs over her shoulder. ‘Crimea Street.’

  ‘Can I drop you somewhere?�
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  ‘Crimea Street.’

  Margo pulls out.

  The woman is still afraid, unsure if she’s going to be asked to do something for the money or to give it back.

  ‘Look,’ says Margo, ‘I know that’s a lot of money but I want you to have it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I just want you to have it. For my mum’s sake.’

  ‘Aye,’ she says, but she’s shaken by Margo’s gesture. She can’t even look at her now. She pulls the peak of her hood further over her face, titters, and crosses her arms over the bump of cash and sniffs and laughs.

  Then she starts talking.

  She came here from Dundee to get away from something or someone, it’s not clear. She was in a flat up there, maybe, with a person or people. Her storytelling is confusing because she’s not using any nouns. She’s substituting ‘hingmy’ for a lot of other words and using fillers, ‘like that’ and ‘like know’. Margo stops interrupting or asking her to clarify and just lets her talk and somehow the story becomes clearer that way.

  She was doing this in Dundee but it is very small. A’bdy kens a’bdy. She has a drug problem and it is difficult to pay for. She came to Glasgow to try to address these issues but slipped back into street sex work. A girl in the hostel was always bringing in McDonald’s takeout and coming in at strange hours and she just knew that she was working the streets. She asked her and the girl took her out and now she’s here again. She has two children in care, they’re back in Dundee, she thinks.

  Margo says care isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a child and her companion says yeah it could be a lot worse. They’re getting fed, got their own space and they get to school and everything. Margo says and they’re warm and care is a lot better than it used to be.