Running Scared (6 page)

I returned to the entrance near to the supermarket where I’d found her, but she wasn’t there. I widened out my hunt in slowly increasing circles because I thought it likely she and her partner were working this area. But they appeared to have moved on. Maybe they’d been warned off, either by the law or because they’d trespassed on someone else’s turf. At any rate, neither Tig nor the man in the plaid jacket were to be seen.

I decided to give up and for something to do in the remaining short space of daylight, set off for Camden High Street.

Trotting down the Chalk Farm Road, I felt my spirits rise. I like this patch. To my mind, it’s the nearest thing to Dickensian London, alive and kicking in all its variety and vulgarity. So, it’s getting a tad gentrified with middle-class stores and antiques shops setting up, but it is still reassuringly eccentric and clinging to its pleb roots.

The recent rains had washed it clean. The black horses with glaring red eyes which leaped out from the façade of the Round House gleamed as if some infernal groom had buffed them up. I was lured by the promises of the Circus of Horrors and the Terrordome, but they were closed at the moment. So I went on, revelling in the used-car outlets, cheap clothes shops, the fast food dispensaries and street pedlars. I smiled up at the huge painted figures decorating the upper floor façades of the shops, the giant wooden boots, camouflaged tank, leather-jacketed rocker, silver skull and, why oh why, above the tattoo parlour, a sea of scarlet flames?

I knew that the Stables and the canalside markets wouldn’t be open now, but remnants of Inverness Street market could still be in progress and I might pick up something cheap and cheerful there. As stallholders closed up, they were often happy to let you have something virtually at cost. But before I ever got there, I glimpsed a plaid jacket ahead of me and there he was, Tig’s boyfriend. I was just in time. Seconds later, he turned into The Man in The Moon pub.

He wasn’t likely to be out in a hurry. Tig wasn’t with him, but ten to one, she wasn’t far away. I guessed they’d staked out a pitch and he’d left her begging while he spent the money on lager. I hunted in earnest now, casting about below the railway bridge and in the environs of the big drive-by supermarket which lay behind the main road, round by the bridge over the canal and at last ran her to earth in the entrance to Camden Town tube station.

She wasn’t pleased to see me. ‘You again!’ she exclaimed, and her pinched face blenched with fury. It emphasised the greenish-black patch on one cheekbone. ‘You following me around or what?’

‘Time for a coffee-break, Tig,’ I said. ‘And don’t worry about him. He’s in the pub.’

We took our polystyrene cups of coffee down by the dark olive-green canal and found a seat. Tig hunched on her end of the bench, sipping the coffee, eyes fixed on the water swirling sluggishly past, thick as treacle.

‘What’s his name?’ I asked.

‘Jo Jo.’

‘He the one who beat you up?’

Despite herself, she took one hand from the cup to touch the bruise on her face. ‘No one beat me up,’ she said. ‘It was just a slap.’ She straightened up and became belligerent, her eyes, through the rat’s tails of greasy fair hair, as cold as the canal’s waters. Since the Jubilee Street days, she’d acquired a ring through the outer edge of her left eyebrow. Speaking as one who wears a nose-stud, I’m not criticising, you understand. It was just one more detail about Tig different to the old days. ‘Anyway, it was your fault,’ she said.

‘Mine?’ I wanted to know how she’d worked that out.

‘The chocolate bar you gave me,’ she said. ‘He found it in my pocket. He said I’d been siphoning off the takings and spending them on stuff. I wasn’t.’

‘One lousy sweet?’ I gasped. ‘He thumped you because you’d bought one chocolate bar?’

‘I didn’t buy it,’ she argued. ‘You gave it to me.’

‘Oh, sorry, excuse me!’ I retorted sarcastically. ‘I didn’t realise that made it all right for him. Yes, my fault, why didn’t I think of that?’

There was a silence. She looked away. ‘Well, anyway, Fran . . . I didn’t mean it wasn’t nice of you. But when people try and help they nearly always foul you up more, you know that.’

I let her simmer. We finished our coffee and she slung her cup into the canal where it bobbed away. The old Tig, who’d arrived bright-eyed and bushy-tailed from the Heart of England, wouldn’t have dreamed of littering up the place like that.

‘Why’d you take up with him?’

‘Why do you think?’ She shrugged. ‘He’s not so bad.’ She glanced sideways at me. ‘If you want to know, I had – a bad experience. I was raped.’ She spoke the last words with an awful blankness of voice and expression.

I waited. After a moment, she went on, ‘I was on the game at the time, but I hadn’t bargained for that. I was stupid. I should have realised – I mean, a regular working prostitute would’ve sized up the situation and got out of there, but I walked into it, didn’t I?’

‘It was a punter, then?’ I prompted her.

‘Yes, or I thought so. I thought he was on his own. He came up to me, youngish guy, bit drunk, City type. It was a Friday evening. He’d been celebrating the end of the week, I thought, and now he was looking for a cheap lay. I went with him to his car – I told you I was stupid – and the next thing I knew, there were two other guys, pals of his. They bundled me into the car and drove me to a house. They were just like him, hooray Henrys, red braces, Italian suits, the lot. Drunk as skunks. They kept me there for, I suppose, a couple of hours while they had their pervy fun. I don’t know exactly how long, I just wanted to get it all over with and get out of there alive. My biggest fear was they wouldn’t let me leave. But they did in the end.’

‘Do you know where this house is?’ I asked angrily.

‘No, it was dark. I was too scared to take notice, I was watching them, not watching the surroundings. I didn’t know what they were going to do next. There were the three of them and I didn’t know which one of them to watch. They laughed all the time. One of them was sick, threw up on the floor and the first one swore at him so I guess it was his house and his carpet. Perhaps that’s what made him think the time had come to call a halt to the fun and games. At any rate, he told me to get dressed. They got to arguing a bit while I scrambled into my gear as fast as I could. I knew they were arguing about what to do with me. I thought perhaps I could run while they were distracted, and get outside. They wouldn’t want a scene in the street.

‘But then the first one – I don’t know any of their names – he grabbed my arm and shoved me along ahead of him down the hall, out and back into the car. He told me not to say a word or he’d take me straight down to the river and hold my head under till I drowned. The river police pull out bodies every day, he said. I’d just be one more, floating past. I believed him. I sat there almost too frightened to breathe. He drove me back to King’s Cross, which was where he’d picked me up. He gave me eighty quid and said, “Don’t try telling anyone it was rape, sweetheart. You offered and I paid.”’

‘Eighty quid,’ I said, ‘would hardly have covered it even if you’d agreed. That’s under thirty quid each.’

‘What was I going to do, argue? He tossed me out and drove off. I told you, Fran, I thought they’d kill me. I was just so pleased when he drove off . . . Afterwards, though, I couldn’t put the whole business out of my mind. I was too scared for the meat trade. So I took up with Jo Jo and we do all right, with me begging and Jo Jo watching out for me. I’ve had no more trouble with men since Jo Jo’s been around.’

‘What about the habit?’ I asked.

A dull flush stained her pale cheeks. ‘I’m clean now, Fran, I swear. That was when I was turning tricks to get the money for a fix. After the rape, I knew I had to break the habit because as long as I was on it, I’d take any risk to get the money. I went on to methadone and now I’m clean.’

I told her that was great, because it was. It had taken courage and perseverance but most of all, it showed that Tig hadn’t slid so far down the ladder that she no longer realised how bad things were.

‘What about you, Fran?’ she asked. ‘You seem to be doing all right.’

I explained that I was working temporarily at the newsagent’s, just while Hari was in India.

‘You haven’t cracked it as an actress, then?’ She gave a little smile.

‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘I will.’

‘Sure,’ she said. It niggled.

‘I also,’ I said, ‘look into things for people.’

That made her suspicious. ‘What sort of things? What sort of people?’

‘Mostly people who can’t get help anywhere else. Like a private detective, you know, only I’m not official. I’m not fixed up with a proper organisation or the tax and insurance people would get me. Anyway, I don’t do enough work for that. But what I have done has been all right.’

I suppose simple pride must have echoed in my voice, but why not? I’d been reasonably successful, considering.

Tig looked impressed but persisted, ‘But what sort of things do you do? Say, if someone came to you and told you they wanted something arranged but they couldn’t do it themselves, would you do that?’

‘I do anything legal,’ I said, perhaps not as cautiously as I might’ve done.

‘Should’ve thought that cramped your style a bit,’ said Tig. ‘Sticking to the law, I mean. Don’t the coppers get in your way?’

‘Yes,’ I said, adding airily, ‘but I can handle them.’

You know what they say about pride coming before a fall, don’t you? Tig didn’t ask anything else but sat scowling at the canal water and twisting one finger in a lank strand of hair.

‘You know,’ I said, breaking in on whatever deep thoughts she was having, ‘I was really surprised to see you the other day. I thought you’d have gone home long before now, back to where you came from.’

She gave a strangled little laugh. ‘I can’t go back, not now, not like I am. Can you imagine their faces if they saw me now? No, of course you can’t. You don’t know them.’

‘You mean your parents?’

‘They’re really respectable people,’ she said dully. ‘Really decent. My mother’s so houseproud she can’t even bear to see the streaks the rain makes on the windows. She’s out there polishing them off as soon as the rain stops. She’s always polishing everything up. A perfect house, that’s what she runs, because that’s what he likes, my dad. Everything just so. I can’t go back, Fran.’

‘You could try.’ I leaned forward. ‘Listen, Tig, sooner or later Jo Jo’s going to get tired of you, right? You’re certainly going to want to get away from him. Where are you going from here?’

‘Don’t!’ There was so much pain in her voice that I was conscience-stricken at my question. ‘What do you think, Fran? What do you imagine
I
think about, day in, day out? How do you think I like facing another Christmas on the streets? Even if Jo Jo and I find a place in a hostel, it’ll be for a few days only – and then going back out is worse. I can’t get along with these charities and I’m not like you, Fran, a survivor.’

‘Pull yourself together!’ I said sharply. ‘That isn’t true and you know it. It took guts to get yourself off drugs and you wouldn’t have done that if you hadn’t had some other vision for yourself, some idea of getting away from all this—’

Suddenly she struck out at me wildly, sobbing in dry gasps, her fists clenched into rock-hard little mallets. She caught me a couple of times, but I fended off most blows because she was too disorganised and angry to think about targeting them. At last they became weaker and finally stopped. Her hands dropped back in her lap.

For a moment she was still, then she sat up, tossed back her hair, and turned a stony face to me. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said. ‘I’m not making any money sitting here chewing the fat with you.’

‘Write to your family!’ I urged. ‘A postcard, that’s all. Call them!’

‘How can I? Don’t be stupid, Fran.’ She sounded weary and exasperated. ‘I don’t even know what the situation is back home now. Maybe they don’t live in that house any more. Perhaps they were so ashamed when I left that they couldn’t face the neighbours. Perhaps they’ve moved. It’s the sort of thing they’d do.’

‘And perhaps they’re still there, hoping that the next time the phone rings—’

‘Shut up!’ she hissed.

She’d jumped to her feet with the last words and was making to walk off. I knew that if I lost her now, I’d lost her for good. She’d never sit and talk to me again. She was several yards away already, at the foot of the stone steps up to the bridge.

‘What have you got to lose?’ I yelled desperately.

I thought she mightn’t have heard me but she stopped and turned. The light was fading very fast and I couldn’t make out her face, only her dark spindly form. Her voice, eerily thin, came through the gloom. It gave me goosebumps. ‘They hope I’m dead, Fran. For them, I am dead. Soon I will be dead. We both know that.’