Daddy's Little Earner (22 page)

He also had a miniature Yorkshire terrier called
Motorhead-Dick-the-Shit, or ‘Dick’ for short. Dick was
the tiniest dog with the biggest personality imaginable.
He was impossible to train and impossible to get cross
with, even when he chewed up my cigarettes on that first
morning of our acquaintance. I’m not sure who I fell
in love with first, Brian or Dick, but together they were
irresistible.

Even more irresistible, however, was one of the other
boys loafing about the flat. Since I had nowhere else to go
I just stayed until I was caught out on the street a few days
later and sent back to Bramerton once more, by which
time this lad was officially my new boyfriend – at least in
my mind. While we were together we spent all our time
drinking and taking drugs, which suited me fine, and the
moment we were parted I pined like any lovesick teenager.
I believed I had found someone who loved me and I
was high on having proved Dad wrong again.

Eager to get back to my new love I escaped from Bramerton
again as soon as I possibly could, but when I arrived
at the flat I discovered my wonderful new ‘boyfriend’ had
grown tired of waiting and was already going with another
girl, which left me devastated as usual, convinced yet
again that Dad had been right after all and that no man
would ever want me for anything except easy sex. In my
despair I turned to Brian for comfort and his gentle wisdom
and kindness overwhelmed me. I realized I had just
picked the wrong man. Brian, I decided, was the one for
me. He wasn’t much younger than Dad; maybe it was a
father figure I had been craving all along when I had tried
to get all those poor frustrated schoolboys to declare their
undying devotion.

As I got to know him better I found out more about
Brian’s history. He told me how his dad had beaten him
about when he was a kid and had ended up running off
with a prostitute, a blow Brian said that his devoutly
Catholic mother had never really recovered from. His
brother and sister had gone on to lead quite straight lives,
not like Brian. He had tried to be like them, he even built
up his own decorating business, got married and bought a
house, but one day he’d realized he didn’t want any of it,
that he craved instead to be a free spirit in the world, an
‘easy rider’. He became a bit of a rebel and gave everything
up to have an affair with another girl, which had
lasted for seven years. The girl kept having miscarriages, which had put a terrible strain on the relationship until
eventually they broke up and Brian started drinking
heavily. He still did drink, but he wasn’t a nasty drunk
like Dad, more like a benevolent one. Nothing seemed to
bother Brian much. He was just a lovely, gentle person,
easy to be with, philosophical about life’s ups and downs
and happy in his own skin. When you were with him
nothing was ever a problem or a rush.

By that time I had also discovered that two of the girls
who had been in the flat on the first day I arrived were on
the game too, so it didn’t come as a shock to Brian to find
out all about what I did for a living. I found I could talk to
him about anything, telling him all about Dad and why I
kept running away from Bramerton. He had problems of
his own, being an alcoholic, but he never let them get him
down and they seemed to make him more open and tolerant
of other people’s mistakes and shortcomings. He had
none of Dad’s bitterness or anger or need to manipulate
and control those around him. We took a lot of magic
mushrooms and speed together. Speed in particular made
me feel very happy and confident, but it was expensive
and meant that I had to stay on the game in order to have
the cash to buy it. I was soon taking up to a gram a day,
which is a pretty heavy habit for anyone, let alone a fifteen
year old.

Speed would keep me high for hours but the comedown
was always horrendous, making me immediately want more. For every hour that I felt great there were
three or four hours when I felt like shit. I guess it was just
luck that I didn’t end up becoming dependent on it like
so many of the other girls on the street. It also curbs your
appetite, which I thought would help me lose weight, but
at the same time it rots your gums and produces all sorts
of other horrible side effects. I’d seen all these symptoms
on other people but I didn’t care. I hated myself and my
body anyway, so why should I care if I was risking
destroying it? I used to take the speed in my drinks, or
wrap it in paper and swallow it. My dealer told me I
would save money by moving on to cocaine because then
I would get the same high with less powder, but I knew
that would be one step further on the slippery downward
slope and stuck with the drugs I knew. I guess I must
have had some sense of self-preservation deep down. In
fact, I found out later that he was lying because cocaine
would have ended up costing me much more. Thankfully
I never got into heroin, which was less freely available
and more expensive in those days than it is now.

I was always aware that the feelings the drugs gave me
were false, that if I couldn’t be happy just because the sun
was shining and because I was who I was then there was
something more fundamentally wrong with me than any
drugs could ever hope to put right, but I had no idea what
I should do about it or who I should turn to for help apart
from Brian. It was all about escaping from who I was and how I felt, at least for those short periods when I was
high. At one stage I even tried sniffing amyl nitrate,
which is a deeply scary drug that makes your heart race
seconds after you take it, but I didn’t rate the effect of that
very highly.

I didn’t want to be a prostitute then any more than I
had done the first night that Dad held me down for Pete
to have his way, but I had grown used to the whole routine
of it by then, particularly the easy money, and I could
n’t work out how to survive financially without it. What
sort of job could I have done that would have given me
anything like enough money to buy the drink and drugs I
needed to keep me from thinking about the reality of my
life and from wanting to kill myself? I wonder if there is
anything in life that you can’t grow accustomed to eventually.
I knew it was dangerous to be climbing into cars
with strange men and that I was risking my life every
time I did it but I didn’t care. When you have no love
or respect for yourself the thought that you might die
doesn’t worry you. Just as every time I dropped a tab of
acid I knew that it might be the one to kill me, I would
just shrug the dangers off, thinking that an accidental
death might save me having to go to the effort of killing
myself in any more gruesome way.

I got on really well with the other two girls in Brian’s
house and some days we would go up to the block to
work together. One afternoon one of them was walking with me when a guy approached us, telling us how beautiful
we were and how we should do some modelling.
Given how fat and ugly I always believed I was, his words
easily worked their magic. It sounded like a laugh so
we went to the address he gave us and had some pictures
taken, behaving like two silly, vain teenage girls. He
asked if we would be willing to do some shots just in our
underwear and because he was being very sweet and
flattering we agreed.

‘Wow, you could make a fortune,’ he enthused as he
kept snapping away, encouraging us to touch one another
in a fairly innocent sort of way.

‘That’s as far as we go,’ we told him once we’d had
enough.

‘I’ve just got to show these to my man,’ he said as
we were leaving, ‘and maybe I can sell them. Come back
tomorrow and perhaps we can do some more pictures
and draw up a contract.’

Flattered and excited and eager to believe that we had
found an easy path to fame and fortune, we went back the
next day and he said he needed to take a few more pictures.

‘What about all this money you were talking about?’
we wanted to know. ‘And the contract?’

‘We need to see a few more photos,’ he said. ‘Just slip
your bras off.’

That was when we came to our senses and realized we
were ‘giving it away for free’ just like Dad was always saying. Deciding it had gone far enough we ignored his
protestations and left; he suddenly seemed like any other
punter who didn’t want to pay for his kicks.

I often wonder what happened to those pictures and
whether they’ll turn up on the internet one day. Despite
our youth we were both experienced prostitutes, used to
dealing with scumbags like Dad, so I would imagine that
millions of more innocent young girls must fall for that
sort of scam every day and end up being talked into doing
things they don’t really want to do and later regret. The
world is full of predators eager to exploit the inexperience
of people who are still children really, even if they look
like adults.

I loved being with Brian, absolutely loved it. He was my
first real boyfriend and he introduced me to a whole new
world. There was the music of people like Bruce Springsteen,
Meatloaf and Bob Seger to start with. He used to
play Springsteen’s ‘Hungry Heart’ over and over again
on the pub jukebox, just as Dad used to play Charlie Rich.
It seemed the most beautiful song in the world to me, and
lines like ‘Took a wrong turn and just kept going’ and
‘Ain’t nobody wants to be alone’ seemed so apt for the
lives we were living. Good rock music, like drink and
drugs, allows dreamers like Brian to escape just a little
from the mundane realities of their lives and imagine
they are the free spirits they always wanted to be.

Brian never had to work at being the centre of attention
when he was in a pub, as Dad did; people just automatically
gravitated towards him because he was a good,
kind, laid-back man who treated everyone the same.
I convinced myself I was deeply in love and even though
I was still only fifteen I managed to persuade a tattoo
parlour to engrave ‘Property of Brian’ on my upper arm,
above Dad’s name. I was eager to truly belong to someone,
especially someone like Brian who would love me
and be kind to me and protect me, rather than someone
like Dad who just wanted to use and exploit me.

Sometimes I would bump into Dad on the street when
I was waiting for punters on the block and it always
freaked me out. He was utterly furious that I was working
independently of him and that I had switched my loyalties
from him to Brian, and I was scared of what he
might do to me. When I was feeling brave I told myself
there wasn’t much he could do unless he was willing to
beat me up on the street in front of everyone, or drag me
back home with him, which wouldn’t have been too good
for his image as the caring single father struggling to
do the best for his broken family.

As he saw it he’d invested time in me, waiting for me to
be old enough to provide a return and now I wasn’t paying
my dues to him. He’d planned for me to provide him with
a free meal ticket for years, just as he had with Mum, and
I guess he thought I had let him down exactly like she had.

Knowing I had Brian to go back to made me brave
enough to stand up to Dad a bit. As long as he couldn’t
get me home on my own I felt I was reasonably safe, but
you never knew with him. I was always aware there was a
danger that he might come lurching out of the pub one
night all liquored up and looking for a fight. Brian knew
all about him and what he had done to me and I knew he
would stand up for me if I asked him to, but I was constantly
aware that Dad could pounce at any time when I
was on my own. I had known him beat up enough people
in my life, including me, to be sure that he was capable
of anything when his pride, reputation and financial
interests were threatened.

Funnily enough, although there’s no question that he
hated Brian, Dad never tried to attack him physically.
Probably he wasn’t confident that he would have come
off best.

Although he was twenty years older than me I don’t
doubt for a minute that Brian loved me. He always wanted
to protect and look after me and we had a wonderful
time together. There was a pub we used to go to all the
time where the landlady knew all about us. She was
aware how young I was but was still willing to serve
me as much vodka as I could drink. On the day that
Brian and I bought a silver ring down the market and
announced we were getting engaged, she and everyone
else in the bar were delighted. I was ecstatic, of course. I thought I was getting the one thing I’d always wanted:
a proper family, someone who loved me, who I could
rely on.

I’d spend some time with Brian and then I’d get
caught and taken back to Bramerton, but I’d always try
to escape again as soon as I could and return to him. I was
still only fifteen so social services decided that Bramerton
wasn’t able to hold me and I should be sent to a secure
unit in Peterborough called Salter’s Lodge. They couldn’t
put me in prison because I hadn’t actually committed any
crimes but they had to do something to show they were
protecting me from myself and from those around me
who they saw as dangerous predators. I was terrified,
having been told all sorts of stories about secure units by
other kids and how they would put me in a straitjacket
if I caused any trouble.

When I arrived at Salter’s Lodge on a Friday the staff
told me they didn’t have a bed ready in the secure unit
until the Monday so they were going to have to put me in
another section, which was a sort of halfway house a bit
like Bramerton, until they were ready to transfer me.
What that meant was that I had a weekend in which to
get away or I would be effectively trapped behind bars for
as long as they wanted to keep me there. I could see the
main building from where I was housed and to my eyes
it looked exactly like an adult prison. I enjoyed my life
with Brian too much to be willing to be locked away in there without a fight but I said nothing, just watching and
waiting for my chance.