Past Secrets (23 page)

and adored. I wanted to be the woman in that picture with the man telling me I was too beautiful, too incredible for him to live without me. I grew up in a place called the Linden Estate, it’s a council estate and not many dreams came true there. But there were ways of escape and I chose mine: I remember the first time Charlotte and I went out like grownups. I was in college then, and there were all these cool places to hang out.

One in particular was on the quays. They had latenight live music. It was all red inside, dark red with smeared mirrors and shiny seats where you could sit for hours making your drink last,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t like I’d thought it would be at first.

There weren’t people fighting over us, we were on the edges. Charlotte didn’t like it much, but I did.

And I wanted to fit in. I figured out that if you hung around long enough you’d become part of the scene and somehow I did. I was supposed to be working on my degree but I wasn’t doing any work. I loved sitting and watching, learning about life but not out of a book.’

Faye’s eyes were dreamy. They were the same as her daughter’s: a luminous and magnetic pewter grey with that startling ring of amber around the inky black of the pupils, Christie realised. She could suddenly see the beauty of the young Faye, the girl who’d cared how she looked, with long streaked hair like her daughter’s, a grownup woman’s body, and the heart of an eager young girl who’d wanted to be loved, to be part of something.

Christie reached out and took Faye’s hand, but Faye didn’t appear to notice. She was lost in remembering the past …

There was TJ, there was always TJ. In the outside world, there were no jobs then, people were leaving the country for London and New York looking for work, wearing their best suits and fine-tuning their resumes. But not TJ. He wasn’t cutting his long, dark hair to get a boring job. He wore his in a ponytail and it suited his long, lean face with its soulful hollows. He wasn’t a man from a romance novel, he wore a leather jacket instead of a white shirt, but his body was the same sinewy combination of muscle and energy, and there was passion in his soul and in his eyes. Faye had seen it, seen the way he looked at her, knew he wanted her.

There were a lot of them from her college hanging around The Club, and they all looked up to the older guys, the regulars like TJ, who’d seen it all and bought the ripped T-shirt. And she was a regular now, too, as much part of the place as the scent of stale smoke - cigarette and other kinds - in the air. The Club was like a second home to her.

‘Silver, baby,’ TJ said that night, ‘they oughta have a picture of you over the door.’

He called her Silver, even though it wasn’t her name. It was her new name, her club name, so it was what she was called now. She loved it. Her hair had long strands of platinum through the tawny golds and browns. Silver strands.

The music was low with an insistent bass. No

matter what music was in fashion, The Club played rock - tonight, TJ’s favourite, the Stones. Faye loved their music. Song after song, reaching into her heart and tearing it out. Every emotion was there: pain, love, sexual ecstasy, heartbreak, Mick’s voice speaking directly to her.

TJ passed her the joint.

‘Try this, Silver, you’ll like it.’

His hand was around her shoulder, touching her breast through her thin T-shirt, a gesture of possession to all the other men around the booth. Telling them she was his, Faye thought with pride.

There was a moment before she took the first drag of the joint when she thought how odd it was - her, goody-two-shoes honours student, here in a smoky bar about to smoke hash. This was unlike anything she had envisaged before. And then, the moment passed, for the heady numbness soaked into her limbs.

TJ smiled, sipped more of his Jack Daniel’s and smiled some more as he watched her get happy.

When she was happy, Faye got up and danced on her own, with TJ looking on from the back booth, his eyes hooded, watching her body undulate to the music.

That night, he sent Faye up to the bar to order drinks.

‘Hi, Maria,’ she said to the barmaid. ‘Can I have four JDs, one Coke, and three double vodkas, no ice.’

Maria was forty, maybe older. She had dyed red hair, big brown eyes and a smoker’s mouth with lots of lines. In her black jeans and teeny Tshirt, with the tattooed butterfly on her biceps, she didn’t look like Faye’s mother, but she spoke to her like a mother now.

‘Honey, you shouldn’t be here,’ Maria said, expertly filling the drinks order. ‘You’re just a nice kid. What are you, nineteen, twenty? This place isn’t for you.’

‘Why not?’ Faye asked, confused.

“Cos that man is using you, can’t you see?

They’re laughing at you, honey.’ Maria paused at the disbelieving look in Faye’s eyes. ‘I’m only trying to help. I hate to see you get tangled up in this world. Get out, while you can.’

‘You’re wrong,’ Faye said. ‘Nobody’s using me.’

Maria moved closer to her. ‘Honey, you know what they call you? Silver.’

‘It’s because of my hair,’ Faye said, smiling, shaking her mane.

‘No,’ said Maria flatly. ‘It’s because TJ’s the Lone Ranger. His horse was called Silver. It’s because he rides you.’

‘What’s up, Silver?’ TJ asked when she came back with the drinks. ‘You don’t look happy to see me.’ He didn’t like people’s minds moving from him. Except when they were wasted, and even then, he’d keep his hand on her thigh possessively, reminding her of his presence.

‘Nothing,’ she said. She drank half of her vodka and leaned in against him to take the joint.

This was it, right? What else was there?

The next morning, there were so many of them lying around TJ’s tiny flat, the usual assortment of bodies on the floor, the smell of dirty feet, sweat, cigarette smoke, who knew what else. Faye sat up in the bed. She was wearing her T-shirt and knickers but no jeans, and she couldn’t really remember getting here. She hugged her knees up to herself in an attempt to get comfort. From somewhere she could hear ‘Gimme Shelter’ playing on the stereo, another song in the soundtrack to this life.

This life, the life of being TJ’s Silver.

She felt her skin crawl.

Faye had never liked herself much. Other people she liked. It was herself she had no time for.

She had been grateful to lose herself in this numbing new life with TJ and The Club. But now she saw it all with stunning clarity and she loathed who she’d become.

‘Hey, Silver,’ said one of the guys from the floor, opening an eye. ‘How’s it going?’

Silver. Everybody had known what it stood for except her. That’s all she was: Silver, the Lone Ranger’s ride, nothing more. Not a person. A ride.

All the hopes and dreams of a young human being cruelly dismissed by one word.

She found her jeans at the end of the bed, pulled them on.

She bent down to put on her socks and winced.

In the mirror, she saw the reason for the pain: there were bruises down her back, angry, livid marks.

Trawling back through the mental fog of the night before, she could remember her and TJ in the kitchen having sex up against the kitchen cabinets, with people everywhere, nobody noticing, nobody caring. Even now, she could feel the ridge of formica digging into her tender back. This was the great new world she was in, this was where she’d thought she was special.

A world of being treated like dirt by people who didn’t care, who were looking for victims, people to use.

Faye didn’t know where she got the strength but, somewhere deep inside her, she found courage.

She gathered her stuff together. There wasn’t much really, nothing to mark her presence there at all.

There was no sign of TJ. He was probably off with some other woman, poor cow. Faye felt sorry for her.

Nobody noticed as she slipped out and closed the door behind her.

‘But I was pregnant,’ she told Christie and Faye as they sat in Christie’s beautiful room with the dogs at their feet. ‘It must have happened that night, the night before I left. I worked it out. Him and me in the kitchen, up against the cabinets.’

She wiped her eyes with a rough gesture. ‘Pregnant and alone.’ She laughed, mirthlessly. ‘Because I was hardly going to find TJ and say, “Hi, Daddy, what sort of cot will we buy? Are you planning to be there at the birth?” I had to leave college because

I was so unwell and couldn’t cope. My mother was so good to me and took care of us both. She helped through the pregnancy, then, after Amber was born, she would babysit so I could work. I did anything - bar work, McDonald’s. You can eat your dinner off the floors in McDonald’s,’ Faye said, suddenly smiling. ‘I know, because I’ve scrubbed them. You wouldn’t believe how fussed they are. Finally, when I got a proper job we moved here, to start again on Summer Street. There’s something so hopeful about this place, isn’t there?

I felt it from the first.’ She looked beseechingly at Maggie and Christie, wanting them to understand. ‘I could begin again here, I could be someone new, someone Amber could be proud of. And I wanted her to be proud of me. The only other person who knows the whole story is my mother,’ Faye added. ‘Nobody else. I was too ashamed. My mother worked so hard all her life to put me and my brother through college and I paid her back like that, thinking so little of myself that I let people use me. Mistaking sex for intimacy, thinking TJ’s behaviour signified love and respect and affection.

How dumb could I have been?’ she said hoarsely.

‘You were only a kid,’ Christie said, feeling nothing but compassion for Faye. ‘You did what so many women do: think sex is love, when it’s not. You know now, and you must forgive yourself.

You can’t feel guilty for ever.’

‘I should have told Amber,’ said Faye blankly, as if she didn’t hear Christie. Or, at least, couldn’t hear the words ‘forgive yourself’ because she’d told herself so often that she had ruined her life. ‘As a parent, you want your child to look up to you, to respect you and, as I don’t respect myself for what I did, how could she? How could I tell her that her father was a lowlife scumbag who had never cared?’

‘Did he know about her?’ Maggie asked.

‘I brought her to see him at The Club when she was six months old.’

Faye thought she looked pretty good by then. A lot of the baby weight was gone and she could fit into her old jeans. Men still looked at her, admiring.

Amber was so cute, fluffy hair spilling out from under her crimson fleecy hat, wrapped up against the cold. Even then, her intelligence was apparent.

She was so alert, watched everything with those huge magnetic eyes. How could anybody not love her, not want to be her father?

The Club hadn’t changed an iota, even the people slumped at the bar in the early evening looked the same ‘You can’t bring a kid in here,’ yelled the barman grumpily.

‘Why not?’ Faye said.

He shrugged. ‘Don’t come moaning to me about passive smoking, OK?’

‘I’m looking for TJ.’ ‘He’s in the back booth.’

She should have known. Why even ask? The back booth: their spiritual home.

Some of the faces round the table had changed.

There was no sign of Jimi. She hoped he’d got out.

He was like her too, a sweet guy in over his head.

Everyone at the table was clearly out of it, and holding court in the middle was TJ, the inevitable girl on his arm, not someone Faye knew. Except he was thinner now, and his face was even more gaunt.

‘Hey, darlin’.’ He smiled. ‘You joining us?’

He didn’t recognise her, Faye realised, and she was standing there with his child in her arms.

‘TJ, it’s me, Faye,’ she said. His eyes remained distant, the thousand-yard stare of a joint-smoker.

Then, with a shock, she saw that the long, sinewy arm thrown around the girl had needle tracks in it. That was the one thing she had never known TJ do: shoot up. He could drink or smoke anyone under the table. He smoked dope and when he could get it, he was a hound for coke, but heroin had been off limits. Heroin was playing Russian roulette with a bullet in every chamber.

Thank goodness she had got away.

‘It’s Silver!’ said someone.

It was Jackie, older than TJ, one of the leaders of the crew, a man with a face like a gravel pit.

Jackie raised a glass to her. ‘Hey, sweet kid you got there. She’s not yours, is she?’

‘Yeah, she’s mine,’ said Faye, holding Amber so tightly to her that the baby, who’d been drifting off to sleep, woke up and mewled with discomfort.

‘What

are you bringing a kid here for, Silver?

It ruins the atmosphere. How can we party with a kid around? You up for a party?’

‘I was supposed to meet someone,’ Faye said, realising there would be no sign of recognition from TJ. ‘But I guess they’re not here.’

And without looking back, she walked out of The Club. Amber, her reason for living, snuggled in closer, happy, in her mother’s arms.

‘I never saw him again,’ Faye told her audience. ‘I never even tried to look for him. I told Amber her dad was from Scotland and died in a car crash soon after she was born. I said we’d never married, but we meant to, so it was like being a widow. I changed my name to my mother’s maiden name but called myself Mrs so people wouldn’t label us.

And I said when he’d died, I’d lost touch with his family, that his parents were dead and he was an only child. More lies. It scared the hell out of me to wonder what would happen if Amber discovered the truth and tried to find TJ. He might still be a junkie.’ She shivered. ‘If he hasn’t died of his habit - ninety per cent of heroin addicts do, you know. So that’s the story. Memoirs of a woman from The We Screwed Up But Hey, We’re Still Here Club, that’s what I used to think it should be called.’

Maggie burst out laughing. ‘Hey, can I join up?’

Faye looked at Christie, as if expecting the older woman’s disapproval but there was nothing but sympathy and warmth in Christie’s kind eyes.

‘You deserve to be president of that club and get a medal,’ she said. ‘Amber’s a beautiful girl, Faye. You have nothing to be ashamed of. You should be proud of the way you’ve brought her up on your own and she should be proud of you.