The Woman He Loved Before (33 page)

Every night I go through this ritual so I can look in the mirror and see Honey before I leave. When I was dancing, Honey would only appear in the mirror at the club. It helped to separate the two. I’ve found that if Honey – confident, practical, aloof – leaves the flat and Honey returns, Eve does not spend the night crying. Because Eve is at home, in bed with a book or in front of the television immersed in
EastEnders
or
Corrie
while Honey goes out to work.

I’ve stopped crying now. And that’s all that matters.

18
^th
January 1993

I have stopped cleaning altogether and instead I become Honey, in other words ‘work’ during the day as well as at night.

I was meant to phase Honey’s work out, meant to stop, but since I’ve paid off all the debts, I have become addicted to the freedom of the money – and the ability to be myself.

I didn’t count on that, did I? Now that I am able to earn in three or four hours what I earned in a day or two of cleaning, I can do things like read books. I can visit the library and I can even
buy
books. They are no longer a luxury that I cannot justify. I can spend the afternoon walking around areas of London I am curious about, and I have even begun to save money.

Somehow – I’m not sure how, really – I have started giving some of the money I make to Elliot. He’s better now so he could work, but he doesn’t. It’s almost like I am paying him now to allow me to do this. If that makes sense? It doesn’t really to me, but I do it.

Part of it is to do with my new-found freedom. I think deep down I feel guilty that I am not tied to working all the hours God sends because I have sex with other men, and yet I cannot bring myself to do it with him. It’s not even the Eve–Honey split. I could pretend to be Honey the times that Elliot comes on to me, I could slip into that role and do it, but I don’t
want
to. I don’t want to have sex with Elliot. I feel guilty about that, so I suppose I am paying him off. Paying him to leave me alone. I pay the rent, I pay the bills, I buy the food. In the purest sense, I suppose he is my pimp because he is living off my earnings. In the real sense, he is someone I share a flat with, a bed with, but not a life with.

If he did not come back one night, I would not mind, I would not really care, but it’s not in me to throw him out. We live separate lives and that suits me.

Obviously I hide my money well. I hide it separately from my diaries because if one thing was discovered, at least I would still have the other.

My life isn’t perfect, or even good. It is … different. Better.

I wish I didn’t have to do what I do; I wish that I wasn’t having sex to finance a life where I am grateful that I am not desperately unhappy; I wish I had a life where I was happy. But for the likes of me, poor girls without any qualifications on paper, this is one way to make it through life.

Right now, not having to worry about money is the better option. Better even than the threat of being arrested, the threat of being harmed by a punter, the threat of finding out one day that Honey has taken over my – Eve’s – life.

Me (Whoever That Is)

14
^th
February 1995

There were two of them.

The first one got me up to his hotel room by accepting the price without bargaining, the other hid in the bathroom, with the knife.

They didn’t want anything except my money, and I gave it to them without arguing. I usually hid it in the ripped lining of my bag and I told them where to look, all the while my eyes fixed on the blade resting on the apple of my right cheek. My heart, too scared to beat, was cold and still in my chest, my breath came in short, slow gasps.

They made me undress to prove I wasn’t hiding any cash anywhere, then they threw me naked outside the room. Thirty seconds later, laughing loudly, they threw out my dress, my jacket, my underwear, my stockings, my shoes and my bag. With shaking hands, and with their laughter on the other side of the door still clanging like an alarm bell in my ears, I ran to the end of the corridor and got dressed.

Another woman could go to the police. She could verbally sketch out the image of the two white men with emotionless eyes and carnivorous grins who were her attackers. She could describe the number of curves and points that made up the serrated edge of the
blade and how it felt pressed into her skin. She could explain the smell of fear that filled her nostrils. She could tell of the terror of thinking she was about to be raped and left with her throat slit in a small hotel in London. She could outline the horror of imagining the details of your life and your gruesome, sordid death factually noted in a small column in a newspaper. She could recall the disgustingly delicious mix of relief and humiliation as she ran to the end of the corridor and stood by the lift getting dressed as quickly as possible, and to still feel it when she finally got home.

But I wasn’t another woman, I wasn’t any woman. I wasn’t a ‘woman’ at all, was I? I was a hooker, a whore, a prossie.

The police won’t care that I got robbed. They would probably arrest me for soliciting; they would probably question me to find out if I was on drugs. In the grand scheme of things, the hierarchy of crimes, something happening to me would rank somewhere near the bottom rung. Even if I was murdered, who would really care?

X

17
^th
February 1995

‘Aren’t you going to work?’ Elliot asked me earlier.

I haven’t been out to work in three days. I’m too scared. I can admit that here. I’ve been telling myself I don’t need to work because I’ve already earned enough to get by this month, despite being robbed the other night, but in reality I am too scared to go out there. The reminder that no one would care if something happened to me added to my fear.

Elliot was out when I got in the other night so I had bathed and cried – the first time in ages – before I forced myself to go to sleep. It would be better in the morning, I decided. But I woke up in a sweat, panicked and terrified several times in the night, and felt heavy-headed and weak by the time the sun came up.

He hadn’t noticed anything was wrong – not even that I’d taken
up smoking again. Now he noticed because I wasn’t out there, earning. I often didn’t work over the days of my period, but that was last week.

‘No,’ I said, simply, focusing on the television.

‘Why not?’ he asked, as if my job was a normal one, as if I was stupid to put it in jeopardy. As if he shouldn’t mind what I do.

‘Because three nights ago two men attacked and robbed me at knifepoint,’ I said. Stating the cold hard facts of what happened sent a chill through my heart.
Did that really happen to me?
I thought. From nowhere, the time I was attacked outside Habbie’s came into my mind. I’d stopped working for a few days after that, too.

‘You didn’t give them all your money, did you?’ Elliot asked, his concern for the money so very touching.

‘Yes, I’m fine, thanks for asking,’ I replied.

‘Well, you’re obviously fine,’ he replied, as if I was stupid. ‘Did they get all your cash?’

‘Why haven’t you asked if they raped me?’ I asked.

‘Well, they can’t can they?’ he said with a casual shrug. ‘You’re a prossie.

You can’t rape a prossie.’

‘Oh, fuck off, you wanker,’ I said to him.

‘What? You can’t, can you?’

‘No means no – whoever is saying it. When I went up to that man’s room, I had agreed to have sex with him for money. If I changed my mind and didn’t take his money, that doesn’t give him the right to do it anyway.’

‘Yeah, but—’

‘Shut up. If you want to carry on living here and getting money from me, just shut up.’

I turned up the sound on the TV, pulled my legs up to my chest and stared hard at the screen. I had to get away from him, I realised. He was poison. If he hadn’t stolen all my money, I would not be sitting here, disgusted with my body, unsure of who I am, desperate to be able to get out of this cycle I’m in.

I’m stuck again, of course. I didn’t want to do this long-term, but here I am two and a half years later.

Things have got to get better soon, right?

Right?

Lady (ha ha) In A Mess

libby

‘What would you like to get out of these sessions, Libby?’ the woman sitting opposite me asks.

I am in a room in her basement flat where she works from. The opaque blinds that cover the large windows let in some light from the street, and the space is a delicate mixture of functional and comfortable. Two of the walls have bookcases filled with books on psychology, psychotherapy, counselling and trauma. The third wall, behind her head, and beside the door is taken up with her framed diplomas and qualifications. Beneath the window, behind me, is a large wooden desk, which is neat and orderly. She has also managed to fit in two large, squashy chairs that you sink into. Both have three cushions – excessive but probably necessary to create the illusion of comfort. Nothing like comfort is going to take place in here.

‘I don’t know,’ I admit.

I want to get back to being me again, I want to go back to the part of my life where I thought Jack loved me and I only needed to give him time to heal so he could show me so completely. I want to stop having weird dreams. I want to have my face and my hair back. I want to understand how someone who seems as nice as Eve can get sucked into the world she did. I want a lot of things that are highly unlikely to come from just talking to this woman.

‘That’s a good place to start, believe it or not. You’re probably more open to the process if you don’t have any unrealistic expectations.’

I’ve been known to give the unrealistic expectations spiel to people who come to have a facial in the hopes it’ll reverse the twenty years of sunbaking/sleeping in make-up/smoking/excessive drinking they’ve done. ‘You’re lucky to have a good underlying bone structure,’ I used to say. ‘A long-lasting, youthful complexion comes down to genes as well as taking care of yourself. I think a course of facials will help a lot, but I can’t promise it’ll reverse all the damage.’ In other words, you have unrealistic expectations – the only way they would be realistic is if I had access to a time machine so I could go back, slather you in sunblock, slap the cigarette out of your hands, stand over you while you wash make-up off every night or send you home to bed after just a few drinks.

I’m sure this woman is saying the same thing because she heard briefly about my problems on the phone and probably thought I was a textbook case who she could talk and nurture back to health. In 3D, full Technicolor, she is now probably thinking the same thing I think when I see a sun-loving, booze-swigging smoker who wants to look like the young model on the front of a magazine: unrealistic expectations.

I say nothing to Orla Jenkins. Most people I give the spiel to accept that I am going to do the best I can while expecting a miracle. I am realistic enough to know that there will be no miracles from this process – I might be lucky and walk away feeling better about myself but with all the other issues still raging in the background.

‘What’s the most pressing problem you have at the moment?’ Orla Jenkins asks.

I want to leave my husband. I’m obsessed with a dead woman. I still can’t completely assimilate the horror of looking in the mirror and seeing someone completely different to the image I have of myself in my head. Leaving the house is like a hell where
I am being tortured in the most intimate ways. ‘I can’t get into a car.’

‘How did you get here today?’

‘I walked.’

‘And how was that?’

‘Not easy, since walking anything but a short distance is very hard.’

‘Have you been in a car since the accident?’ she asks.

‘Yes, on the way home from the hospital. I couldn’t get on the bus so it had to be in a taxi.’

‘And that’s it?’

‘Yes.’

‘How did it feel being in the back of that taxi?’

‘Not good,’ I say. ‘It probably wouldn’t be so bad if I was driving. I don’t like the idea of sitting there passively and being …’ My voice stops working.

‘And being?’ Orla Jenkins prods.

I shrug. ‘I don’t know,’ I mumble.

‘Being in control seems quite important to you. Do you like to be in control?’

Doesn’t everyone? Aren’t even the people who relinquish control to others constantly plagued with doubt that they’re not doing the right thing? ‘Yes, but I don’t see that as anything unusual. Don’t most people like to be in control?’

‘But life is full of things and instances that are out of your control.’

I have been picking at my nails and manage to break a small bubble, to slip the edge of my thumb nail under it then lift away a flap of base coat, varnish and top coat in one go. It peels back across my nail like the lid of a yoghurt pot. It’s gratifying enough to take away the sting of her words, a reminder that I am walking proof that most of life is random and out of control. That a man I have never met, who thinks he can make a dash for a small gap in traffic but misjudges it because he has his mobile hooked between his chin and his shoulder and isn’t concentrating, can
change my life. I’m not going to say ‘wreck my life’ because it isn’t wrecked. I still have my life, I can still walk and talk, I haven’t lost anyone in the purest sense – Jack is an exceptional case – so my life isn’t wrecked. Although I’ll probably never go back to being a beauty therapist. Even with make-up and a wig until my hair grows back, I don’t think I could do that job again. But despite that, I am still lucky. I know that.