by Holly Archer
The fat man turned the key in the lock and flicked on the dim light. The room was basic, as I’d expected, but I consoled myself with the fact that it was at least cleaner than the upstairs of a takeaway, with its smell of stale curry, or the damp back bedroom in Kev’s second house. There was a double bed, with cheap-looking white sheets, and a table with a little lamp. In the corner of the room there was a door, which I assumed led to a bathroom but I didn’t venture to find out. I just wanted to get in and out as soon as I could.
‘Let me just go and wash my armpits,’ the man said, and I winced in horror as he popped into the bathroom and ran the tap for a few seconds.
He obviously hadn’t used any soap because he smelled really bad as he took off his dirty suit and rolled onto the bed, already breathless with the effort. The stench of old sweat was overpowering. I tried so hard to zone out but this time it just wasn’t possible. I lay down next to him and he tried to roll on top of me, but I couldn’t bear his weight. It just didn’t work, because he was so huge.
We tried a couple of different positions but the only thing that worked was me climbing on top of him. I’d never done that before, and I hated every second, but I had to do all the work, to really feel involved. Thankfully he didn’t take too long. As soon as I was finished I grabbed my clothes and got out as fast as I could, leaving him festering and wheezing in sick satisfaction on the hard bed.
As I climbed back into the car, Kev seemed to think it was all a huge laugh.
‘Ha!’ he said. ‘What a fucking fat bastard! Sad prick.’
I could still smell the man’s sweat on me as I got out of the car. Kev didn’t give me any money, not a single penny. Not even twenty-five quid for the morning-after pill.
I went to the clinic the next morning and paid for the pill from my own stash of notes. Again, there was a flash of recognition on the nurse’s face. After all, I’d only been there a few days earlier. I didn’t realise it was bad for you to keep taking the pill over and over again. I took it almost every week, sometimes twice. But no one in that clinic said a single word to me. No one pulled me to one side and asked if I was OK, did I need any advice about anything? No one suggested I get the implant, or go on the pill, or even sent me away with a big stash of condoms. They just took my money and gave me the tablets like they’d never seen me before in their lives.
A few weeks later, I was feeling tired and sluggish. I’d gone out in the car with Beaver but I’d swapped my leggings for jogging bottoms because they felt so tight. He drew up outside the pizza shop and I expected him to go in and get me a margherita with extra cheese. I hoped he would, because I was bloody starving.
Instead, he lowered his voice and said: ‘There are two guys who live up there – my friends. If you have sex with them, they’ll give you twenty pounds.’
I thought nothing could shock me anymore, but I was wrong. Beaver didn’t just want to have sex with me himself; he wanted to sell me to his mates. I threw open the door and jumped out in disgust. This time I was so angry I didn’t care about being alone in the dark.
‘How dare you?’ I said. ‘Is that all you think I’m worth, twenty quid?’
Beaver’s face fell. ‘You do it for Kev. Everyone knows you do.’
I couldn’t deny it but I was still fuming, so I slammed the door and started to walk. Beaver crawled along beside me for a mile and a half, grovelling and telling me he was so sorry, he didn’t mean to upset me, he was a stupid man, he thought I liked that kind of thing. Eventually I got tired of walking. I was always tired now, but I lived a pretty exhausting life. I climbed back into the car but I folded my arms and turned away to indicate to Beaver that I was still in a mood with him, and that I didn’t want to talk.
‘Why don’t we go and get Carly?’ he grinned, flashing his big teeth. ‘She’ll definitely do it.’
I’d just turned sixteen when we were given study leave from school, to prepare for our GCSEs. I hadn’t really done any revision, because I didn’t have a spare minute, but somehow I was still on course to pass everything, possibly because I never wanted to miss a day of school. My travel and tourism teacher told me I might even get an A because I’d done really well in my mock exam. School was still my safe haven, although I was slowly drifting apart from Jenny and the other girls. We didn’t fall out or anything, and they were still really nice to me when we were in class together. I just found it difficult to join in their conversations because I never hung around with them at the weekends and I didn’t really know what it was like to be a normal teenager and to do normal teenage things. I think they assumed I was just so caught up with having a boyfriend that I didn’t have time for my friends.
I guess, also, I found their conversations a bit boring. They always talked about kissing boys like it was some massive deal and they shrieked with excitement when Jayne started talking about some guy in the year above who’d touched her boobs while they were snogging. While they were all squealing and giggling, I was staring out of the window of the school canteen. I must have looked a bit bored.
‘How far have you gone with Omar?’ Jenny asked. Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Have you shagged him?’
Thankfully the bell rang, so we didn’t have to talk any more about it. I found my school friends’ innocence a little irritating. They all thought I was really grown-up and a bit of a rebel because I had a boyfriend from another school who they’d heard looked like Peter Andre.
‘You are so lucky,’ Jayne sighed, and I wanted to weep.
My next class was travel and tourism and I was really glad, as it meant a bit of an escape from the real world – or so I thought. I had just opened my books and taken out my pen when Jamal, one of the two Asian boys in the class, leaned forward and tapped me on the shoulder.
‘Psst, Holly,’ he said. ‘I saw you the other night.’
I froze in horror.
Without daring to turn round, I said, ‘Couldn’t have been me, must have been someone else.’
‘No, I did,’ he insisted. ‘You were getting into a car with this guy I know. His wife is my friend’s cousin.’
Jenny dropped her pen and looked from Jamal to me to Jamal again. ‘Oh my God, can Omar drive?’
The teacher was still writing something on the board with her scratchy white chalk. I longed for her to turn round and tell us all to shut up, to remind us how close our exams were, but she didn’t flinch.
‘No, not Omar,’ Jamal said. ‘This guy. I don’t know his name but he looks a bit like a rat or something.’
I shook my head vigorously and forced out a laugh. ‘What are you on about? What would I be doing getting into a car with a married man, you dickhead? It must have been someone else.’
As much as I liked Jamal, I felt weird being in the same class as him now. He knew too much, and I was actually glad when we had our last lesson, but I was caught between a rock and a hard place, as I was kind of dreading study leave. I’d be in the house alone all day while Mum and Phil were at work and the girls at school and nursery. Liam had gone off to university by now and Gemma had a flat of her own in the centre of town. I hoped that Kev and Mr Khan and the others didn’t find out I was home alone all day or my phone would never stop ringing.
Only a few weeks had passed since Beaver had first had sex with me, but he had now started to take me to this horrible dosshouse a few streets away from Kev’s houses. It belonged to an old Pakistani man who was disabled and couldn’t speak much English, so Beaver would get me to fill in his forms so he could get his benefits.
It was full of really, really dodgy characters – one tried to get me to give him my bank details, so he could use me as part of some big fraud. He promised me £2,000 if I’d let him transfer loads of money into my account temporarily, but I didn’t want any money. I was just scared of what would happen if I said no. Beaver got involved and told me not to do it or I’d go to prison, and then he and the man had a really ridiculous fight. It looked like the scene in Bridget Jones’s Diary when
Colin Firth and Hugh Grant are scrapping in the restaurant, except the characters were a lot seedier. It made me feel really confused again. If Beaver wasn’t my mate, why was he standing up for me like that? I didn’t know what to think.
Needless to say, the house was totally disgusting. The walls were stained yellow with nicotine because everyone just sat there and smoked all day long.
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Beaver asked one day, as I was trying to help translate a letter the old man had received about his disability allowance.
I visibly grimaced. The idea of eating or drinking anything in that house made me feel physically sick. None of the men looked like they’d washed a dish or bought a bottle of washing-up liquid in their life.
‘No, thanks,’ I replied. ‘Why do I have to keep looking at these forms? Can’t someone else do it? I’m not his secretary.’
Beaver sighed. ‘Oh, please, Holly, don’t be like that. If you don’t do it, his money might get stopped. And then he’ll have nothing. You wouldn’t want him to starve, would you?’
I exhaled slowly. ‘I guess not.’
Sometimes when we went to the house Beaver would take me upstairs and we’d have sex in a really minging, mouldy room on top of a bare, moth-eaten mattress. It was always quite quick. Sometimes he did it with a fag in his mouth and the ash wouldn’t even have dropped off by the time he’d finished.
Looking back, it’s sometimes hard to comprehend exactly how much can happen in the space of just a few weeks. It was during study leave that I became friends with a girl called Natalie. She was two years older than me and had a Pakistani boyfriend – one of the men who sometimes hung around in the old man’s house. Her boyfriend – well, at least she called him her boyfriend – was well over forty and really, really scary. He’d never said much to me. He just had this look about him which told you not to mess with him. Everyone called him Andy, but of course that wasn’t his real name; a bit like Kev wasn’t really called Kev. Andy’s son was friends with Omar, and that made me really wary of him. I just tried to keep out of his way.
Natalie was brash and loud and said what she was thinking all the time. She was a bit like Carly in that respect, except much, much cooler. When she swore, she didn’t sound like an idiot. She had bleached blonde hair and huge gold hooped earrings. She was always smoking.
‘I love being fucked up the arse by Andy,’ she said, blowing smoke into the air, as we stood outside the dosshouse one night. ‘Have you ever been fucked up the arse?’
Natalie was only eighteen but she seemed much more experienced than even I was. Plus, she insisted to anyone who’d listen that she loved every minute of it. If you listened to her for long enough, she’d have you believe that shagging loads of middle-aged men was the best fun a teenage girl could possibly have.
‘I love shagging Pakis,’ she went on, as she stubbed her fag out on the wall. ‘They’re great in bed. Got bigger dicks, too. Hey, you should come out with me for a drink sometime. Would be fun.’
With that, she disappeared. As I stood outside the house, I still felt a bit weird. My clothes were really tight and I was really bloated. My period was due the next day, so I put it down to that.
The next morning, I woke up with an odd, metallic taste in my mouth. I felt a little bit peaky, not like I was going to be sick, but just not quite right. I went to the bathroom and sat on the loo, expecting my period to have come, but there was nothing at all.
And that’s when it hit me: I was pregnant.
I think I was in shock because I was surprisingly calm as I pulled on my clothes and walked down to the local chemist to pick up a test. It made perfect sense. I felt tired, bloated and generally off colour and now my period – which by that point ran like clockwork, every twenty-eight days – was late.
It was almost like I didn’t have to even take the test. I already knew. Some girls in my position might have gone through a period of denial, but I didn’t have any of that. As I got back to the bathroom, unwrapped the test and peed on the little stick, I didn’t even feel nervous as the two blue lines popped up. I just thought: how quickly can I get rid of this?
I know an abortion is not something you should do willy-nilly, but I think I’d become so numb and empty that I wasn’t capable of feeling anything for the life growing inside me. It was just a problem, and it needed to be dealt with. If I was being truly honest with myself, I was just surprised it hadn’t happened before now.
Now it amazes me how practical I was. Immediately as I held the little stick in my hand, all I could think of was how I needed to act, and fast. There were just two hurdles in my way: how would I tell Mum, and how would I tell Omar?
Of course, I knew the baby probably wasn’t Omar’s, but it suited me to pretend it was. In reality, the father could have been any one of about fifteen or twenty men. Omar was an outside bet. It was more likely to be Beaver’s, or Mr Khan’s. Or was it the Chinese man I saw every week, or the fat man from the hotel? The possibilities were numerous. The idea of going into labour without even knowing what race my baby would come out as didn’t bear thinking about. I wasn’t willing to take a chance.
In the end, I blurted it out to Mum, just like that, when she came in from work that night. I braced myself for her to scream and cry and break down but I was surprised by how reasonable she was. She gave me a hug and asked me what I wanted to do.
‘We’ll support you whatever decision you make,’ she promised.
I told her my mind was already made up. There would be no baby. I was so determined to deal with it as quickly as possible, and get back to pretending it had never happened, that I didn’t even tell Carly. I told Omar that I planned to have an abortion in the same breath that I told him I was pregnant, and I saw shock and relief written all over his face at the same time. It was unthinkable that he could go to his parents and tell them I was his girlfriend, let alone that I was pregnant. I think, deep down, he also knew there was a chance it wasn’t his, though he never said as much.
We made an appointment with the doctor and I was sent to Birmingham for a scan. Mum came with me on the train and the lady who scanned me said I was seven weeks and two days gone and did I want to go away and think about my options?
But I had already thought about it and I knew exactly what I was going to do. Even when she gave me the timescale, it didn’t narrow things down. I was so numb to everything that I couldn’t even think back to the week the baby was supposed to have been conceived. I didn’t even attempt to figure out who I’d slept with that week. I just went straight back the next day and told them I was sure I wanted to go ahead with the termination.
They told me it might feel really uncomfortable, but I was surprised by how easy it was. It wasn’t painful and I didn’t bleed much; I just had a few light spots.
Not that I had time to dwell on it. It wasn’t long before my phone was ringing, with another call from Kev.
16
The Worst Night
Kev drove me to the takeaway where I’d slept with the Bangladeshi man who’d taken Viagra. Despite saying he’d never go back there, because of the row they’d had over money, we’d been going there a lot recently. Sometimes it was that man, and sometimes it was others.
I didn’t tell Kev I’d had an abortion. What would have been the point? He’d have only told me he didn’t care and that I was to get on with it. Instead, I told him I was on my period, so he gave me some of his sponges to soak up the blood.
I had no idea how dangerous it was to have sex so soon after what I’d been through, let alone to shove one of those ridiculous sponges into my body. I just shut off, as usual, and got on with it, as yet another nameless man climbed on top of me and did what he’d paid to do.
It’s incredible to think that a few days later, I started my exams. Somehow, God knows how, I managed to actually concentrate on them. I didn’t do much revision but I knew enough to get by.
I think I’d done two exams when Natalie texted to ask if I wanted to go
to the pub with her for a drink. It was the day before bank holiday Monday. She said she knew some guys who would buy us drinks and it sounded like a laugh. I was in a bit of a mood because I’d been meant to meet Omar but his parents had dragged him off to a family thing at the last minute and he’d cancelled. So I said yes.
Despite the fact that Natalie swore all the time, and bragged about who she’d shagged, it was really laid-back at first. We played some pool and had a bit of a laugh. Some older Asian men came and joined us, but they seemed harmless. Natalie was drinking vodka, but I stuck to orange juice because I knew I had another exam in a few days’ time.
We went on from there to another pub and one of the men persuaded me to have a real drink; just one wouldn’t hurt me, would it? I can’t even remember how old he was, or what he looked like, but I let him buy me an alcopop, a vodka and orange drink called Reef, which came in a little glass bottle.
For all I’d been through, I was still really naive in some respects, so when I needed the loo, I thought nothing of leaving my bottle of Reef on the table beside Natalie. I thought the worst someone could do to your drink was spit in it.
How wrong I was.
The room started to spin almost as soon as I took another sip. I didn’t feel drunk; the sensation was different. My body felt limp, like a rag doll’s. I could feel myself sliding slowly down the side of the table, losing control of my limbs and spilling the remains of my Reef on the floor. I tried to cry out, to tell Natalie that I thought something was wrong, really wrong, but no words would come out. I couldn’t speak.