It was summer, so life on the streets wasn’t quite so bad as in wintertime.You could sleep in doorways and the coppers didn’t bother you much if you kept out of their way. And Dolly saw there were others doing this too. She bought cakes with what little money she had, and bottles of pop. She washed in the ladies’ loos in the town centre. Kept herself nice, or tried to. But it felt awful, being without a home. It made her sick with anxiety. Still, when she thought of what she’d left behind, she could only be grateful not to be there any more.
When the money ran out, she started to make a living for herself giving hand and blow jobs to strangers down the alleys. All you had to do was keep your mind blank while this went on, and she was good at that. She’d had plenty of practice. She did it, took the money. Fed herself. Then sat on the pavement outside the shops during the day, watching the world go by, watching people, lucky people with homes to go to.
Men brushed past her, women clattered by on stiletto heels; one of them, in a sharp mustard-coloured skirt suit, holding a fancy cigarette holder in her hand, paused in front of her and then, to Dolly’s surprise, tossed a few coins into her lap. Dolly looked up. The woman’s button-black eyes were warm and twinkling; then she moved on.
Dolly had been on the streets for a couple of weeks when she was approached late one evening by a tall skinny man wearing eagle-tipped shoes. She looked up, up, up and saw there was a scar running down the length of his cheek. She’d seen him about before; he was flashily dressed and looked a nasty piece of work, she thought. Dolly had just been thinking of going back to her usual sleeping spot, but now here he was, planted on the pavement in front of her, looking her over.
‘What you doing out here?’ he asked, his voice faintly foreign.
Dolly didn’t answer. She stood up, gathered her things together. He grabbed her arm.
‘You on the game here? This is my patch, my girls work this street.’
‘I’m not on the game,’ said Dolly, who had a pretty good idea what he meant by that now. He meant the man-and-woman thing. So far, she’d avoided that, used her hands and mouth instead. She’d seen his ‘girls’ – most of them middle-aged and shivering the nights away on the streets with short skirts and high heels, poor cows. They’d given her looks – not friendly ones.
‘You better not be,’ he snapped. ‘I’m Gregor White, I own this patch, all right?’ And he walked away.
The woman with the posh fag holder and the twinkling eyes came by again a couple of times in the week after that. She never spoke, but always she tossed a couple of quid in Dolly’s lap and then walked on. Dolly watched her along the road until she turned the corner and was out of sight. Then she sighed and gathered up the notes. Money was getting very tight. Soon, she might have to go the whole hog, do the man-and-woman thing. She hated the thought, but at least while she was being poked she would be getting paid more, there was that to be thankful for.
Once or twice she got the bus and went and stood at the end of the road where the family home was. She stood there, half-hidden behind a garden wall, and watched her dad go to work with his jaunty bow-legged stride; saw formal, upright Nige and pale, skinny little Sand come out, saw mad Dick go barrelling out the gate all dirty and dishevelled with his satchel flying, on his way to school. Once she saw an ambulance pull up, saw Mum being wheeled out in a chair to go and get her brains unscrambled. But she couldn’t feel sorry for Mum any more. She could only hate her.
When the money got really short, she did it; one night a stranger walked by and paused and asked how much for full sex. She thought of a figure, doubled it, and then she went into the alley with him and did the thing. It didn’t hurt, not like when Dad had done it the first time, and the stranger was worried he’d catch something off her so he wore a Johnny, so no worries about pregnancy and little dead bastards.
It was easy, really. She just took her mind off somewhere else while it happened, that was all. Easy. Or at least it was – until Gregor White, the tall man with the scar and the fancy shoes, came back.
‘My girls been watching you, bitch,’ he said, nudging her with his toe. His shoes were clearly expensive, with fancy metal toecaps beaten into the shape of two eagles. He was very flashy in his dress, doing well out of what his girls brought in. Girls! Most of them were old enough to be grandmothers. Dolly felt sorry for them, being at the mercy not only of punters but also this creep. Men? They were all arseholes and she detested them.
‘So?’ asked Dolly.
‘So you shove off now,’ he said, leaning into her.
‘Or what?’ asked Dolly.
The first punch knocked out one of her teeth. The second sent her sprawling sideways on to the pavement and she lay there, winded, shocked beyond words, as the fancy shoes with their metal tips battered her legs. She curled into a ball to try to protect herself, but he was in a fury and he kept kicking at her calves and thighs until she felt herself blacking out with the pain. The world faded, and that was good; that was a mercy.