When Gracie and Chantelle came round together in the pitch-darkness, all they could do was hold each other and weep.
It hadn’t taken long for the grogginess caused by the drug to wear off, and the full horror of their predicament to seep through them. They were in an underground dungeon; they could tell that from the dankness and the stink – sewage of some sort was close by.
‘This must be a game,’ Chantelle stammered. ‘Some kind of cruel, spiteful game.’
‘I don’t think this is a game, Chant,’ Gracie replied.
‘So why they doing this?’
‘Can’t help you there, darling.’ Gracie didn’t know where she was finding it inside herself to be the stronger one, even though she too was shivering with terror.
Some of the stories she’d heard in the past were so horrible that she didn’t want to think about them: not just the girls who’d been murdered – murders were ten-a-penny; they were almost a relief after some other things she’d been told: girls who’d been held prisoner for years in wardrobes with only tiny holes through which to breathe; girls who’d been found with their eyelids fastened down by superglue, their pussy lips stapled together; girls who’d been chained up in cellars and used as baby factories.
God alone knew what awaited them down here. Gracie had already decided that she would kill Chantelle before she let anything like that happen to her, and then she’d kill herself. She didn’t know how she’d do it, but death by almost any means seemed preferable to prolonged torture and abuse. But whatever their predicament eventually demanded of her, all she knew at present was that she had to be strong for her childlike friend. So she stifled her own sobs, and wiped away her tears and the mucus running from her nose, and squeezed Chantelle all the harder, the younger girl’s head resting on her shoulder. Gracie kissed the dry, ropy hair and brushed it down.
‘Why do they do these things to us, Grace?’ Chantelle wept. ‘Why do they hate us so much? We don’t hurt anyone.’
‘I don’t know, pet … I just don’t.’
‘All we do is offer a service. We’re the ones who take all the risk, we’re the ones who have to deal with the dirt … and we don’t get much for it. A few quid, that’s all.’
‘I know, pet.’
‘Remember two years ago when that bastard beat me up, lashed me with his belt until I could hardly walk? Called me a pox-ridden whore?’
‘Yes I do.’
Gracie could hardly have forgotten; it was a Saturday night in high summer and she was the one who’d half-carried Chantelle to hospital, and had then stood alongside her in A&E, propping her up because there was nowhere to sit down. They’d waited there nearly three hours, being virtually ignored by the staff, who’d assumed from their tarty garb and smeary make-up that they were just another pair of slatternly girls who’d got too drunk in the city centre.
‘Why would he do that?’ Chantelle gabbled. ‘I go for health checks all the time. I wouldn’t go on the street if there was something wrong with me, you know that.’
‘I know …’
‘And that pretty little blonde girl. What’s in this for her?’
‘Who knows, pet. Maybe she’s a prisoner too?’
‘I don’t think so …’
‘No.’ Gracie didn’t think so either.
In retrospect, there’d been something altogether too confident about that platinum-haired totty-maude. A slip of a seventeen-year-old – she couldn’t have been more than that, Gracie decided – approaching two street-walkers as casually as you like, not batting an eyelid at the squalid environment where she found them. How had a forty-four-year-old like Gracie not seen through it? It had been a well-rehearsed routine, she realised: telling them lies about porno films, offering silly money, providing a plush ride. It was like she did it all the time. Gracie couldn’t conceal a whimper of her own at that thought.
‘What?’ Chantelle asked.
‘It’s nothing … it’s nothing, pet.’
‘What … tell me?’
‘I hope you’re happy, you little bitch!’ Gracie bellowed into the darkness overhead. When she’d first woken up down here, she’d probed her way around the encompassing wall. There’d been no entrance, which meant they’d been dropped down from above – they were in a pit of some sort. ‘You hear me?’ she shouted, her voice so shrill it became a screech. ‘You bitch! You nasty little bitch! This how you get your kicks is it, imprisoning people who’ve never done you no wrong?’
‘Shhh!’ Chantelle mumbled, pressing snot-stained fingers to Gracie’s lips. ‘You’ll make them angry.’
Who cares? Gracie nearly said. What can they do to us that they aren’t already planning? But she didn’t say that. Instead, she pulled her friend close again and wrapped her arms around her. This time they sobbed together.