Daughter of Riches

by Janet Tanner

  All she wanted now was for it to be over so she could crawl away, wash herself in the rust stained bath, clean her teeth, get rid of the smell and the taste and the feel of him, but he was slow this morning, too much beer the previous night stunting the performance his lust demanded. On and on it went, disgusting, interminable. And then, quite suddenly, there was a voice screaming above the roaring in her head – her mother’s voice.

  ‘What the fucking hell are you doing?’

  Barry jerked away from her so abruptly Debbie fell forward on to her hands. She looked up, terrified, to see her mother in the doorway, still wearing the off-white nylon slip she had slept in, her face raddled, hair mussed. Her eyes, dark-smudged from mascara, were ablaze with fury, her scarlet-stained mouth screamed abuse. Debbie hardly knew what she was saying; she was too dazed, too shocked and afraid. She tried to get to her feet, pulling her robe around her with trembling hands.

  ‘Mum – I didn’t – it wasn’t my fault …’

  Her mother’s hand lashed out, catching her in the mouth. Debbie fell back jarring her shoulder against the cupboard. Something inside fell from the shelf with a clatter.

  ‘You filthy little slut!’ She lashed out at Debbie again but this time Debbie managed to avoid the blow, slipping past her to the doorway.

  ‘I couldn’t help it! I couldn’t! He makes me!’

  ‘You love it – you know you do!’ That was Barry.

  ‘I don’t! I hate it! I hate you …’

  ‘You can’t get enough of it!’

  ‘I hate it!’

  ‘Always parading about with nothing on! She asks for it – bloody begs!’

  ‘I don’t! It’s not true! You make me! He makes me!’

  ‘Liar!’

  ‘Shut up! Shut up,’ her mother screamed. ‘You filthy two-timing bastard! And you …’ She swung round on Debbie again, ‘get out of my sight! Go on – get out – get out!’

  Debbie backed away. When she was in the hall she turned and ran up the stairs, her bare feet rasping against the worn-out stair carpet. She half fell into her room and slammed the door. She was shaking violently, her breath coming in harsh dry sobs, and when the tears began they ran down her cheeks in scalding rivers. She could still hear the raised voices downstairs but they sounded a long way off.

  It wasn’t fair – it wasn’t fair! She had never done anything to encourage that lout – as if she would! But her mother wouldn’t believe her. She worshipped the ground the bastard walked on.

  Debbie fell back on her bed, sobbing bitterly, curled up with her wrap pulled tightly around her and the pillow over her head to shut out the angry voices downstairs, and when the spasms eventually passed she knew what she was going to do. She would not stay here under the same roof with them a day longer. She’d leave – go to London as she had always promised herself – and she would go now.

  She got up and dressed in a mini skirt and cotton polo-neck, slung a few chains around her neck and clipped on her big dangly ear-rings. Then she yanked her old school hold-all down from the top of the wardrobe and began throwing things into it. She didn’t own much, a few items of cheap clothing, some tinny jewellery from Salisburys, her make-up – Miners and Outdoor Girl – her hot brush, and a couple of tapes of the Partridge Family and the Carpenters. She searched through her odds-and-ends drawer for the old sunglasses case that she used to hide her savings – her mother was not above robbing her if she was skint and desperate for a drink or a packet of cigarettes – took out enough money to cover her train fare to London, and tucked the sunglasses case into the hold-all beneath her clothes and her favourite white plastic boots. One much loved soft toy went on top – a furry koala bear she had had since she was a little girl – and a well-thumbed paperback copy of The Dragon Book of Verse which she had managed to avoid handing back in at school because she loved the poems in it. Then Debbie zipped up the hold-all, slipped on her imitation leather jacket and picked up her handbag.

  She opened the bedroom door and crept out on to the landing, listening. The raised voices were silent now but she could hear certain unmistakeable sounds coming from her mother’s bedroom. Her mother and Barry were making up. Bile rose in Debbie’s throat at the thought of it. She went swiftly and quietly past the bedroom door and down the stairs, half expecting to hear her mother’s sharp voice asking where she thought she was going, though she knew they were far too busy to take notice of a creaking board.

  In the kitchen she wrapped the bread-and-marmalade sandwich she had been making for her breakfast in a piece of cling film and stuffed it into her handbag. At the moment she did not feel she ever wanted to eat again but common sense told her she would be hungry before long. Then she let herself out of the back door and closed it after her.

  It was chilly outside but the fresh air tasted good and when Debbie shivered it was more from nervous excitement than from the cold. She glanced back once at the house, curtains still drawn at the windows though it was almost midday, and felt an exhilarating tingle of freedom. She turned into the street, hurrying as fast as her high-heeled sandals would let her and she did not look back again.

  She was leaving, she was going to London to be somebody and she was never coming back. Never!

  Only that had been this morning. Now, hours later, as she hunched into the bucket seat on Paddington Station, cold, hungry and a little afraid. Debbie almost wished for a moment that she was back home where at least she would be warm and could make herself a hot drink without wondering if she could afford it. It wasn’t too late to change her mind. She had her train fare back to Plymouth. Her mother would scream at her, ask her where the hell she thought she’d been, but in a day or two it would be forgotten and everything would be as it had been before.

  Everything. As she thought of it Debbie’s resolve hardened. She couldn’t go back to being trapped in that life with her mother resenting her and blaming her for everything, including having grown up into a beautiful young woman whilst she herself was fast becoming a haggard old has been. She couldn’t go back to Barry and his disgusting demands. He’d start on her again before long she knew, just as soon as her mother’s back was turned. She couldn’t go back – she wouldn’t. She had made the break now. All she had to do was stick it out.

  ‘Hello there, darlin’, all by yourself then?’

  Debbie looked up, startled.

  ‘Are you talking to me?’

  ‘Well I don’t see anybody else around, do you?’

  The man was youngish with a thin weasely face and shoulder-length hair tied back in a bunch at the nape of his neck. He was wearing flared jeans, platform soled shoes and a great deal of jewellery.

  ‘There’s no need to look so scared!’ He laughed, pulled out a packet of cigarettes and thrust them towards her. ‘Want one?’

  Debbie shook her head.

  He lit a cigarette himself and flicked the spent match away.

  ‘Just got here, have you?’

  Debbie nodded.

  ‘Left home and got nowhere to go. I know – it’s the old story. D’you want a bed for the night?’

  A bed. He might have been offering her heaven. For a moment Debbie hesitated – but only for a moment. She knew what he was, she’d heard about men like him – a pimp, touring the stations and streets to look for new girls, runaways to London with nowhere to go. If she went with him now it would be just the beginning of a new sort of degradation. She hadn’t escaped from Barry to end up working the streets. She clutched her bag tightly and looked away from the weasely face.

  ‘No thank you.’

  ‘It’s a decent room, not a squat. Come on, darlin’.’

  ‘I said no.’

  His lip curled and she experienced a flash of fear realising just how vulnerable she was, how alone. Then he shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’

  She watched him walk away then she got up, making for the station entrance. She had to get out, get away. There might be others like him, scouting the platforms, or the police might come
around and start asking questions. They might send her home or, worse, take her into care. Debbie had been in care once, a long time ago, but she had never forgotten how she had hated it. The smell of that children’s home, disinfectant mingled with cooking cabbage and steamed fish, and the urine smells of the children who wet their beds, had pervaded her nightmares for long afterwards. She was fifteen now but she knew she was still not too old to be taken into care if the authorities decided she should be.

  She walked along the street until she came to an alley. In the alley was a doorway stacked high with black plastic rubbish bags. They made an effective barrier. Debbie crawled into the doorway behind them and sat down on her hold all.

  This would have to do for tonight. Tomorrow she would find a job and somewhere to stay. Tomorrow she would begin a new life. Tomorrow everything would be different.

  When dawn broke Debbie moved on. She was stiff and cold but when she had drunk two cups of coffee and eaten a burger in the station buffet she began to feel better. The attendants there were all different – they did not spare her a second glance though she knew she must look dreadful. The most important thing was to have a wash and brush-up – no-one would consider giving a job to a girl who had so obviously been sleeping rough.

  Debbie was on her way to the station cloakroom when she noticed the entrance leading to the Great Western Hotel. It looked wonderfully plush – just the sort of place she hoped to be frequenting soon. Well – why not begin now? Debbie gave her hair a quick comb, licked her finger and removed any smudged eye make-up, then walked boldly up the steps and in through the impressive doorway, past an entrance leading to a restaurant with a foreign-sounding name. On her right was the hotel reception, on her left a broad staircase. Trying to look for all the world as if she had every right to be there she turned up the stairs, following the sign marked ‘Bathrooms’. At every moment she expected someone to call out and ask where she thought she was going but no one did. The Ladies’ Bathroom at the top of the stairs was very big, very grand, and deserted-Debbie washed in a huge china basin – big enough to bath a baby in, she thought – and made up in front of the mirror. She changed her cotton polo for a black halter top and her sandals for the high white plastic boots. Then, head held high, she went back down the stairs and on to the station. Again no one challenged her.

  At a news stand she bought a London paper and sat down to scan the small ads, circling in biro one or two accommodation addresses. But there was no point flat-hunting until she had a job to pay the rent. Filled with a sense of purpose Debbie flicked through the pages to find the situations vacant, and one leaped out at her almost at once – a club advertising for hostesses.

  Debbie circled that too in biro and looked in her purse for small change for the telephone. Then she changed her mind; she wouldn’t telephone – she’d leave it until nearer lunchtime and then just go there. What was more, she would arrive in style. A taxi fare would use quite a bit of her precious store of money, but so what? She wanted to impress. Start as you mean to go on, Debbie told herself.

  She waited a couple of hours, watching the trains come and go, while excitement built up inside her. Then she crossed to the line of taxis waiting for fares and went boldly up to the one at the front of the queue.

  ‘Benny’s Club, please,’ she said.

  Afterwards, when she knew a great deal more about London and its clubland, Debbie came to realise just how fortunate she had been to pick on Benny’s Club.

  Benny’s was prestigious – the rich, the famous and the titled came here as well as the lonely far-from-home businessman. It was also respectable and Benny himself was a charming aristocratic man who reminded Debbie of a Scottish laird – certainly not in the least what she had expected in a nightclub owner. He interviewed her with perfect courtesy, his shrewd eyes looking beyond the waif-like appearance and the cheap clothes and seeing a classically beautiful young face half hidden by a cloud of bleached and backcombed hair, and a figure that was lissom and shapely beneath the inelegant halter top and psychedelic mini skirt. He was also impressed by her demeanour, calm and apparently confident, though not brassy like some he saw, in spite of her youth.

  ‘How old are you?’ he asked.

  Debbie had expected this question and was ready for it.

  ‘I’m eighteen,’ she lied. ‘I shall be nineteen in the spring.’

  Benny nodded. He was not sure whether he believed her or not. It was difficult to tell when girls were made-up whether they were adding a year or two to their ages. But certainly this one would pass for nineteen – especially by the time he had finished with her.

  Benny made his decision and hired her on the spot.

  ‘You’ll have to have new clothes,’ he told her. ‘And do something about your hair. It looks as though you have been dragged through a bush backwards. Now – where do you live?’

  ‘I don’t have anywhere to stay yet. I only arrived …’ (she just managed to stop herself saying ‘ yesterday’) ‘today.’

  ‘Right. I am going to place you in Grace’s hands. Grace is one of my dancers. She has been here a good while and knows the ropes. She will tell you how to behave, give you advice about your appearance and help you find a room. Do as Grace says and I think you’ll do very nicely. Now, I’d better give you something in advance of your wages so that you can get yourself kitted out, hadn’t I? It’s a small flat rate wage, the rest you make up in commission and tips, but you understand that I expect.’

  ‘Yes,’ Debbie lied. She did not have the faintest idea what he was talking about.

  Grace was an elegant ebony-skinned beauty, nearly six feet tall and lissom. At first she was a little impatient of having to take the new girl under her wing but after they had visited a hairdressing salon, where Debbie’s bleached frizz was turned into a tumble of blonde curls, and shopped for clothes together they had established a rapport, and Grace was even suggesting Debbie should move into her flat rather than looking for a room elsewhere.

  ‘I could do with someone to help me pay the rent but I wouldn’t ask any of those other bitches at the club. Most of them have it in for me because I’m a dancer.’

  Debbie looked puzzled and Grace explained – the hierarchy at Benny’s was quite explicit – dancers were definitely ‘ top of the heap’ as she put it, on the next rung down were the showgirls who posed, scantily clad, in the cabaret, beneath them came the hostesses. Dancers and showgirls earned a good deal more than hostesses and their earnings were also supplemented by the same perks because invariably a patron would request that the dancer or showgirl who had taken his fancy should join him at his table between performances. There was a good commission on any drink a girl could persuade her benefactor to buy for her, understandably so, since the girls were forbidden to order anything other than champagne or Bucks Fizz.

  ‘I always seem to be short of money though,’ Grace wailed. ‘ It runs through my fingers like water. Are you any good at keeping a check on bills and things? I’m hopeless. I’ve had the electricity and telephone cut off more times than I care to mention. I just forget to pay the damned things and when I do remember I’m skint. Will you help me keep an eye on that sort of thing?’

  Debbie nodded. Personally she hated not knowing exactly how she stood financially and she was not naturally extravagant. The taxi had been more of an investment than a luxury – and it seemed to have paid off!

  ‘We might even be able to turn a trick or two together,’ Grace added speculatively, watching Debbie strip off to try on a white halter-necked evening gown. ‘We’d make a good pair – you small and fair, me big and black. Men like variety in bed.’

  Debbie was shocked. ‘But I thought …’

  ‘That we weren’t supposed to do things like that?’

  ‘Yes.’ Benny had been quite explicit in his instructions. No encouraging amorous advances from the clientele and definitely no selling sexual favours or she would find herself out of a job – fast.

  Grace laughed. ‘Look,
sweetie, what Benny doesn’t know won’t harm him. A girl has to make a living for God’s sake! Besides, he soon enough turns a blind eye if one of his best customers takes a fancy to a girl. Just don’t make it too obvious and you’ll be all right. My gentlemen are ‘‘friends” not clients – get it?’

  Debbie did. But she was determined not to ‘ turn any tricks’ if she could avoid it. What Grace was suggesting might be a vast improvement on what the pimp on Paddington station had had to offer but it wasn’t the way she saw her future. She had come to London to make something of herself – and call girl, high class or not, was definitely not on the agenda!

  Six weeks later and Debbie had still managed to avoid becoming part of one of Grace’s ‘threesomes’ though sometimes, she had to admit, the temptation to earn a little extra money was very strong. There had been an Arab prince, very handsome and very rich, who had taken a fancy to her and who had had a fine fit of pique when she declined his advances, and a well-known TV personality who had suggested she visit him at his Maidenhead home when his wife was away, but Debbie had resisted him too. Grace had called her all kinds of fool and asked what was wrong about having a good time and getting paid for it – in kind if not in cash – but Debbie remained stubborn. She could not explain to Grace the revulsion she felt at the thought of going to bed with a man, particularly one she scarcely knew. She did not want to talk about the disgusting Barry and the things he had made her do, she wanted to forget them and she thought that if she never had to let a man lay a finger on her again she would be happy. Besides, she was fairly sure Grace would not understand. Grace loved sex and everything about it, she loved men, she loved ‘getting laid’. If there were also financial inducements and expensive presents they were just the icing on the cake. Grace was, Debbie thought, the most sensual woman imaginable, proud of her beautiful black body and the response it could excite in men, gloriously voluptuously uninhibited about her own enjoyment. But the pleasures of the sexual romps which she recounted in graphic detail, licking her full red lips and running her hands over her own shapely body as the memory excited her, only made Debbie feel slightly sick, though she managed to hide her reaction from Grace. Sometime, she supposed, she would have to succumb. But not yet … not yet! For the moment her plans were working out very nicely – and they required every bit of her energies.