I covered myself with a sheet while he dealt with the condom and got dressed.
‘Thank you,’ he said, and then walked out.
So that was that. That was sex.
That night, while my mum was at work, Ace came over, like he’d promised. He did things to me, and showed me how to do things to him – things I’d never known about before. Some of it was disgusting and made me sick. Ace laughed at that. ‘You funny little thing,’ he said, as he reached for the tissues and wiped up. ‘You funny little thing.’ But other things were OK – he touched me in a way that made strange noises come from my throat, without me even trying.
‘There,’ he said afterwards. ‘You loved it. You came. I knew you would, sweetheart. I knew you would.’
32
Annie
I tried to understand her, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t understand how she was still longing for her mother, even after all this.
‘If it were me,’ I said, ‘I’d be glad to have got her sent down. I’d want her to suffer and suffer for what she did to me. And I’d want her to miss me and make herself sick with remorse, and I would never have her back in my life. Never.’
She smiled wanly, her pale face even paler than usual. ‘It wasn’t her fault, though,’ she said.
‘Of course it was her fault. She knew what that man was like and what he’d want from you, and she still made sure he was part of your life.’
‘She had no other way of earning any money. We’d have starved if she hadn’t done that job.’
I said nothing.
‘What about your mother?’ she went on. ‘Don’t you want her to come back and for everything to be OK between you?’
‘No,’ I said honestly.
‘But if she were well again and knew how badly she’d treated you and was sorry and promised to be normal, like other mothers … then would you? Would you go and live with her again?’
That was the trouble with Hope. She knew how to do it. She knew how to ask the questions that cut straight to your core and made you feel as though you were standing naked in front of her, your whole life written on your skin.
I kept my voice casual. ‘Wouldn’t everyone do that?’ I said.
33
Hope
Jade had come as a surprise. For ages, I’d wanted a baby. I couldn’t have my own, obviously; I was too young – but my mother could have one. She always said it was impossible. ‘I can’t bring up another child on my own. No way. I’ve got more than I can handle with you.’
‘I’ll look after it,’ I said.
‘You’re twelve years old.’
‘So?’
‘You’re too young to look after a baby.’
‘You let me do loads of other stuff I’m too young for.’
‘I’m not having a baby, Hope.’
But four months later, I was thirteen and my mother was up the duff. That was how she put it: ‘Up the fucking duff again.’ She said she didn’t know whose it was. I suspected it was Ace’s. The men at work had to use condoms and the women would refuse if they didn’t.
The thought of her being pregnant with Ace’s child made me want to die.
At night, I dreamed of taking the baby and running off with it, and of Ace following me. The three of us would all live together, far away from here, far away from this shit heap of a flat and this shit heap of a woman. We’d be a family: Ace, me and the baby. There’d be enough money – Ace was loaded – and we could have a big house somewhere nice and I could stop working and bring up the children, and the children would go to school and have all the chances I’d never had, and then maybe, if one of them was a girl, she need never know about the men who liked to rent out the inside of female bodies, and instead she could have an easy, happy life with friends and sleepovers and dates at the cinema with boys who liked her.
That was all I wanted. To live with Ace and have a family.
But Ace had only made love to me – that was what he called it, and when he talked about it, his voice low, pulling my body towards him, I felt a sensation I couldn’t describe: like embarrassment, but sweeter, so much sweeter – eleven times; and now he’d stopped completely. I missed him. I lay in bed and moved my fingers between my legs, imagining him there, picturing myself doing those wonderful, disgusting, frightening things that sent him nearly crazy and made him say afterwards, ‘My absolute darling. You can never know how precious you are. My Hope, my jewel.’ I’d never felt so loved as when I was with him, and now, when I came on my own, I found myself murmuring his name. ‘Ace,’ I called into the darkness. ‘Ace,’ and the lack of him beside me made me weep.
I ran my hands over my flat belly and wished it was me, pregnant with his child.
My mother made it clear from the start that she didn’t want a boy. ‘I just want another little girl. A lovely girl like my Hope.’
She’d always been like that, my mother – always flitting from vile hatred to adoration, and I was never sure which was genuine.
I didn’t mind what sex the baby was. I didn’t mind at all. Babies were such a luxury, as far as I was concerned – their soft skin, chubby faces, and the pure, clean smell of the completely new. It would just be such a joy to have one. I didn’t care about Ace and my mother now. They could fuck themselves. I was going to take care of the baby. It would be mine. My mother wouldn’t be able to look after it properly. She’d be sending it to Ace’s from the moment it was born. It would grow up in a brothel, just as I had. It would grow up thinking this was its life, its destiny, that there was nothing else out there.
I’d known for a long time that my life wasn’t the one of a normal child, but recently that knowledge was becoming stronger. It wasn’t a life I wanted for this baby.
The baby was born at thirty-seven weeks. No one else could support my mother – Ace had gone to the Bahamas, unexpectedly – so I waited outside the delivery room, listening to her puffing and groaning and asking for drugs as the midwives cheered her on. Then finally, I heard a newborn cry, and a woman came out and asked if I’d like to go in.
I stepped into the room and saw it: a tiny, grey baby held aloft while a midwife cut the cord.
I was aware of myself sobbing. They placed the baby on my mother’s chest, but she was out of it and scarcely looked at it, so the midwife took it back and wrapped it in a towel. ‘Would you like to hold the baby?’ she asked me.
I sniffed, then smiled and nodded, and sat down in the chair by the window. The midwife passed me the sticky bundle, still white and waxy from the womb. ‘Hello, baby,’ I said. Then I looked up and asked, ‘What is it?’
The midwife smiled. ‘Why don’t you see for yourself?’
‘Am I allowed?’
‘Of course,’ the midwife said, and peeled back the edge of the towel.
A girl.
My mother would be delighted, but I was afraid.
34
Annie
We walked down to Meddleswater. It was August now and around us, the valley lay scorched and brown, and the lake had sunk so low we could barely see the grey gleam of it through the trees.
‘I’m boiling,’ Hope said, as we reached the shore. She sat on a rock, took her sandals off and dipped her feet in the water. Even now, in the merciless heat of the afternoon, she wore a long black skirt and black lace top. She lifted the skirt to her knees and the sight of her pale white skin made me draw breath. I wanted us to lay down together right here, to love one another on the shore of the lake, but there was nowhere to hide, no spot secluded enough.
Behind us stood the smallest church I’d ever seen, no bigger than a barn. There was no stained glass, only arched lattice windows, and four ancient graves on the patch of grass by the door. Time had worn them. They no longer stood upright, but leaned back against the grey stonework of the church, weary with the duty of remembrance.
Hope said, ‘We should get married here.’
‘Really?’
‘Definitely. It’s gorgeous. We won’t invite an
yone. It’ll just be us two. You can be the groom and wait for me at the altar. I’ll be your gothic bride, sweeping up the aisle in black taffeta. We can have black roses everywhere, and afterwards, when it’s all over, we’ll fill our pockets with stones and wade out into the lake until the water covers us and takes us to a world of eternal love.’
‘Stop it, Hope,’ I said.
‘Why?’ She looked at me sideways for a while, then said, ‘You can’t stay here anymore than I can. You know that. You’re too full of guilt. It’ll destroy you.’
‘What guilt?’
She took my hand in hers and held it for a long time. ‘I know what you did to your mother, Annie,’ she said.
35
Hope
Mum went back to working for Ace when Jade was three months old. Shortly after that, she was on drugs again. She’d been on and off them for as long as I could remember. Coke, smack, acid – whatever she could lay her hands on. ‘Work’s easier if you’re out of it,’ she said, by way of explanation, when I confronted her about it. ‘I’m sorry, lovey. It won’t be for long.’
But it was for long. It was for ages. Months. Whenever she came home from work, she’d be glassy-eyed and vacant, her voice slow and drawn, and she’d spend the day lying on the sofa, lost in a world that was barred to me, and which I had no desire to enter.
I worried about leaving Jade alone with her. I tried not to, but I still had to work, still had to make sure there was money to buy Jade’s formula and nappies, and whatever else she needed. My mother wasn’t on top of any of that. I arranged my shifts at Ace’s around her. Once a week, when my mother had a night off, I would work. I’d cut my hours right back since Jade’s birth. I didn’t want the baby hanging around at Ace’s. I wanted her to be looked after properly, by someone who loved her, far away from that world.
Jade was six months old when Ace phoned at eleven one night and told me there was a bloke in reception who only wanted me. He wanted me, he said, right now, and was willing to pay.
‘How much?’ I asked.
‘Five hundred.’
Five hundred pounds. It was a lot of money, quickly made. Recently, I couldn’t stop thinking about taking Jade and getting away from here, but I’d need money if we were ever to do that, and five hundred pounds was too much to turn down.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll be twenty minutes.’
I left Jade with my mother, both of them in bed. It would be OK, I told myself. Jade mostly slept through the night now and probably wouldn’t wake before five. I thought of leaving my mother a note and putting it beside her bed: Gone out. If Jade wakes up, you need to go to her. But she was so used to me doing all the night waking, she’d probably just bury her head under the pillow and fail to even turn the light on. And then Jade would be left, crying and crying…
I tried not to think about it and just caught a taxi to Ace’s, where I survived the job for an hour and came home again. It was one o’clock in the morning. My mother was up, pacing the flat, talking into her phone in a voice filled with panic.
‘Just send someone out. Please. There’s a baby here. It’s not mine. I don’t know how it got here…’
I stepped forwards, ‘Mum,’ I said.
My mother gasped and dropped the phone. A terrified expression appeared on her face. She stared at me and cowered. ‘Who are you?’ she asked.
‘Hope. For fuck’s sake, Mum, are you off your fucking head?’
I grabbed the phone. ‘Who is this?’
A calm, female voice said, ‘It’s the police.’
‘My mother is fine. Please ignore this call. She’s fine.’
I hung up. My mother looked at me and slowly returned. She slumped against the living-room wall. ‘Sorry,’ she said breathlessly. ‘Sorry.’
‘Where’s Jade?’
‘In her cot.’
‘You fucking idiot, Mum. You fucking idiot.’
I strode into Jade’s room. She was lying on her back beneath her blanket, arms out over the mattress, sleeping soundly, so far untouched by the chaos around her.
36
Annie
She said she was psychic, and that was how she knew.
‘I thought psychics told the future, not the past.’
‘We can tell everything,’ she said.
‘Bollocks. You can’t just dress in black, carry a pack of cards around and know everything that’s ever happened in the world.’
‘I can,’ she said, ‘when I feel a deep connection to someone.’
‘Have you always been like this?’ I asked.
She shrugged. ‘Probably. Then when they sent me to secure, I decided I needed to get interested in something – you end up with a lot of time on your hands in secure. So I ordered these cards and a book, and taught myself how to do it.’
‘Did they mind? You know, all that fucking about with the occult?’
‘It was a secure unit, Annie, not a church.’
‘My mother would hate you,’ I said.
She raised her eyebrows. ‘Really? Even though I’ve uncovered the truth about her wicked daughter?’
‘Especially because of that,’ I said. ‘My mother knew the devil’s work when she saw it.’
I’d tried to keep light about it, but the memories now kept on surfacing. That night, I dreamed she’d come back to punish me. She said I was the devil’s child and needed to do penance, and whipped me until my back was covered in bright-red welts.
I woke up, sweating and breathless. All I could see in the darkness was her mad, angry face, spitting with vitriol as it always did when the rage gripped hold of her. She was always like that, and often, I admit, I wanted her to die.
37
Hope
The day I was to pinpoint as the moment everything changed came a few weeks before the catastrophe. I’d been working all morning with one of my more decent regulars. He was only about twenty-two and he was shy. What he really wanted, I knew, was a girlfriend, but he didn’t know how to talk to women. He became sweaty and nervous in their company, and couldn’t look at them. When I first met him, he was twenty-one, desperate to shake off the shameful burden of virginity. Now, he was more confident and today had told me that he worked part-time at B&Q, on top of doing his degree, just so he could come and see me every week.
‘I like you,’ he said, and I was aware of a gentle warmth expanding in my chest. It was a strange feeling I didn’t quite know what to do with, so I said, ‘No, you don’t,’ quite sharply, and he left soon after that.
As I walked home, I kept recalling the look on his face – shocked, hurt, taken aback – and hoped I hadn’t driven him away. He was the only client I liked. I wondered if one day he might ask me to meet him outside of work, go on a proper date to the cinema or something, like a proper boyfriend. We weren’t supposed to do things like that, but Ace would never know if I didn’t tell him.
It was a cold morning. October. The sky was as grey as the pavement beneath my feet and the blocks of flats ahead of me. I sometimes had the sense that I lived my whole life in monochrome, and everything inside me was fading to match my surroundings. I imagined my brain, dull and flabby in its skull case, greying with lack of use; and my heart just a stone beneath my skin.
At least I had Jade. Things hadn’t gone well for me since they’d kicked me out of my last school, but Jade’s birth had set me going again, as if I’d just been a stopped clock in need of winding up. School wasn’t for me. I couldn’t see the point of it, and anyway, it was all so difficult and boring. But looking after Jade was worthwhile. I could see a point in that. When she first came home from hospital and my mother had been so tired all the time, I would feed her all her bottles and then sit with her on the sofa and watch TV while she slept on my chest. She had brown hair, silky beneath my fingers, and her shoulders were covered in down, like a peach. I understood then why people said they could eat babies. It seemed to me that swallowing her whole would be the only way to keep my sister safe.
I wond
ered what state my mother would be in when I got home. I had assumed I’d set off for work that morning before she was up, but it crossed my mind now that maybe it had been before she’d even come home, and perhaps that made me guilty of leaving Jade alone in the flat. I shuddered at the thought of it. Before I left, I’d been in and checked on her, sleeping soundly in her cot, but I hadn’t bothered to check my mother’s room, to make sure she was there. I never went into my mother’s room if I could help it. I never knew who or what I might find.
As I approached our building, I saw it straight away: the mound lying on the grassy patch beside the path that led to the front door. It was completely still, no movement at all except for the occasional lift of a few strands of hair in the breeze. Even though more than 300 people lived in this block, I barely had to look to know it was my mother, passed out on booze or drugs, possibly dead, but more likely just languishing in her escape.
My first thought was for Jade. Where was she? I barely glanced at my mother as I let myself into the block and hurried up the stairs to the second floor, where our flat was. I could hear her before I even got the door open. Inside, everything was a mess of Diet Coke cans, unwashed plates and Jade’s toys all over the floor. I stepped over it all to the door that opened to my sister’s room and found her standing in the cot, holding on to the bar, howling with rage and what looked to me like heartbreak. Her face was bright red, flooded with tears, and snot had run down and soaked her pyjama top. Her breath had to be gasped between sobs.
When she saw me, she held out her arms and went on crying. I picked her up and lifted her out of the cot. ‘It’s alright,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry, Jade. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to leave you.’
The Home Page 11