Limehouse, 1962
Time passed and Dolly grew up. Once past sixteen, Celia asked if she’d like to earn some more wedge, become a working girl like the others here; Celia would hire a cleaner to take over Dolly’s duties, what did she think?
‘What – do the man-and-woman thing?’ asked Dolly, shocked.
‘Fuck the punters, yes.’
‘Oh no. I don’t think so.’
‘Your decision. Up to a hundred sovs a night, though.’
‘How much?’
‘You heard me. The money’s damned good,’ said Celia. ‘Not to be sniffed at. Maybe set yourself up, do something with your life, something different one of these days with money like that behind you. What do you think of that?’
Dolly looked blank. The money sounded great. But to start all that again . . .
‘Think it over,’ said Celia.
Dolly did, long and hard. She went and sat on Darren’s bed and asked him what he thought of the idea. Darren was nice and he had style, and Dolly – who didn’t – admired that.
She did try. Sometimes she got the home dye out and coloured her straight mouse-brown hair – but she ended up with a yellowy blonde mop that looked hellish with her pink-toned skin. Thinking to improve it, she then permed it, and she had nice curls for a little while before her tortured barnet rebelled and took on the dull brittle texture of horse hair.
Ah yes, she tried. Didn’t see the point, really, but she did. She let her roots show on occasion, bit her nails. Truth to tell, she knew she looked a bit of a mess most of the time. Yeah, Darren had style all right. And so did Celia. Dolly thought sometimes that she’d give a lot to be as polished as them, but she was realistic enough to see that it just wasn’t going to happen.
‘I wondered when she was going to get round to asking you, with Cindy and Tabs moving on. I should bite her bloody arm off,’ Darren told Dolly, squinting his large blue eyes as he primped his glossy blond hair in the mirror, then carefully adjusted the peach chiffon scarf around his neck.
Grinning, he blew a kiss at his reflection and turned to Dolly. ‘Wake up, Doll. This is a nice place. I’ve never worked in better. Madam down there looks after us all, she don’t work us to death either. Gives us breaks, makes sure we’re kept safe, insists on the clients washing themselves first and using French letters. This place is properly run.’
Then Dolly went in to Ellie’s room where Ellie was loading six 45 rpm records on to the retaining arm of her little red Dansette. Dolly told her about Celia’s offer while they sat on Ellie’s bed and listened to ‘Stand By Me’, then ‘Crying’, and then Patsy Cline was wailing on about falling to pieces when Ellie said: ‘Do it.’
Ellie shook out a couple of Player’s cigarettes from a packet and passed Dolly one. She struck a match and lit them both up. ‘Lay down any ground rules first, though. Celia knows I don’t do the French polishes – the blow jobs – never have, don’t like that at all, and she makes sure the clients know it. Anything you really draw the line at, tell her.’
‘I’m not sure,’ said Dolly, pulling a face as she exhaled smoke. She liked smoking. It calmed the nerves, even if it did turn your fingers yellow. And she was remembering the time when the punter had disregarded Ellie’s wishes, become obsessive and dangerous, and they’d had to call for the Delaney mob to do a dark alley job on the stupid cunt.
‘The money’s bloody good,’ said Ellie.
Dolly thought it over. It wouldn’t be like all that had happened in the past, with Dad. She would be in charge, that was the difference. And this time, should anything untoward happen, there was always the Delaneys to fall back on. She liked the thought of that, very much.
Thoughts of what happened years back always made her feel depressed. She tried not to think about it, but she didn’t always succeed. Sometimes, she still caught the bus and went down the end of the street where she had grown up. She watched for Dad going to work, and she saw Sarah and the boys, growing up now, in big school, and little Sand bumbling about the place. She couldn’t talk to them, couldn’t even know them any more, because they would ask why did she go, and she couldn’t tell them, couldn’t even speak of it.
She didn’t see Mum, but no surprises there; Mum was probably banged up in the funny farm by now, a permanent resident instead of a part-time visitor. Thinking of Mum was the worst thing of all, because she ought to feel sorry for her but she couldn’t.
She mulled Celia’s offer over for a couple of days, then thought of the money and all that she could do with it out in the big wide world some day in the future when she was no longer so scared as she was right now, scared like she had been ever since the man-and-woman stuff had started with Dad. So she said yes.
It wasn’t so bad. All she had to do, she discovered, was what she had always done in the past – just take herself off somewhere in her mind while it happened, let that familiar old blankness settle over her and then, wallop, two minutes and it was all over and the customer was off out the door.
By the time she hit nineteen, she had a pretty good stash of loot put aside in the bottom of her wardrobe but she had no idea what to do with it. Dreams, plans, those were for other people. Unlike Ellie, there was nothing she objected to with the clients because she was never actually there while it happened. So she did the lot. The blow jobs, the full sex, the hand jobs, anal, even some tying up and whipping (although most clients preferred to go to the more experienced Aretha for those services) and she even accommodated the Golden Rainers who liked to piss on a woman for some weird perverted reason of their own.
‘Oh, I seen worse than that, girl,’ said Aretha. ‘One of my boys? He likes to eat my . . . well, I think you get the picture.’
Nothing was off limits to Dolly, because she never felt it, was never truly aware of it happening. Somewhere, deep in her core, she knew that something had been killed in her; something that had once been alive and well was now dead and rotten.
‘Smarten yourself up a bit, will you, Doll?’ Celia asked sometimes when the blackness descended and Dolly’s scruffiness reached a new low.
Dolly kept up with the home dye but her hair did look frazzled. Sometimes an inch of dark root showed through. She chain-smoked and didn’t eat good food, only rubbish, so her skin was bad and she had to slather thick make-up on it to make it look passable.
Celia nagged Dolly sometimes about her appearance, but the truth was she didn’t much care what she looked like because what was it for? The punters, who climbed on board and used her? Fuck them. If they didn’t like it, they knew what they could do.
Despite the bad memories it conjured up, she still made the occasional bus trip to her old home, just to stand at the end of the street, watching. She didn’t know why. It was something she felt she had to do, a compulsion, beyond her control. Common sense said leave it. The past was dead and it should stay that way. But every so often she’d get the urge to go back there and no amount of reasoning with herself could stop her.
Then one day – the day when she realized hell had opened up – she stood there at the end of the street for over an hour. That day she saw no boys, no Nige, no Dick, no little Sand trying to jump over the front wall and falling on his arse as usual, no Mum. What she did see was Sarah, her little sis, now fourteen years old, coming out of the door with Dad, and going out the front gate.
She saw Dad’s arm draped around Sarah’s shoulders. Saw his springy bow-legged walk, and felt her stomach heave.
But the worst thing? When she thought about it afterwards – and she couldn’t stop thinking about it, try as she might – the very worst thing was Sarah’s face. It was turned up to her father’s and Dolly saw clearly that it wore an expression that was cowed but at the same time pitifully hopeful. Dolly’s heart stopped in her chest as she saw it. Sarah’s face said: I’ll be good, Dad, so please don’t hurt me. I love you, Dad, why do you hurt me?
And in that instant, sick beyond words, sick to her stomach, Dolly knew.