Junk - Melvin Burgess [64]
‘There’ll be deaths,’ she repeated.
‘Yeah! You’re all gonna die! Yeah!’ Lily was funny. She was dancing round the room like a ghost. She was on form that day, like she was at the party where I met her. She danced up to Vonny. ‘Live fast, die young, babe, before you get any older,’ she sang. Vonny looked at her like she was going to be sick, like she’d no right to be thinking like that.
I enjoyed it at the time. But they come round too often, both of them together, or one at a time. And it’s all they ever want to talk about. I reckon they’re more addicted than I am.
We get really young kids round here buying smack sometimes. I mean, I was fourteen when I started and now I’m fifteen and a half but some of these are thirteen and I’ve even seen twelve-year-olds turn up. I feel guilty about selling to them, but then I think, what else have they got? These kids didn’t leave home to get a slice of life like me. They left home because they needed to escape.
They couldn’t handle home. Trouble is, they can’t handle the street, either. They don’t take smack to have a good time; they take it to escape. They don’t go on the game to make money; they do it just to survive. They ought to be working in a café or at school or being milk monitor for the nursery round the corner.
It’s different with them.
They really ought not to be on the game, though. Apart from anything else I wouldn’t trust men who want girls that young. But there you go – there’s no other way they can earn money. That’s true for us, too.
What else do you have to sell?
That’s about as far as it goes if you’re under age. You can get some lousy job where you work 2,000 hours a week for some fat git sweatshop. Or you can spend a couple of days a week on your back…
There’s this one little kid I pass on the way to work. She hangs around the corner of Brook Road flogging her lamb chop. She has this long wimpy bloke with her, he can’t be more than fourteen, but I wouldn’t put her down as a teenager. She dresses up in make-up and high heels. I suppose she thinks she looks sophisticated, but actually she does good trade because she looks like what she is – a little girl all dressed up.
She does a trick and they go together and spend the money on sweets and heroin.
When she comes round here I try and talk to her. I say to her, ‘Look, you can be anything you want, you don’t have to hang around here…’ And she just looks at me and sighs. She likes to linger here. I suppose it’s the company. If I go on at her too much, she sighs and says, ‘Can I go now?’ as if she needs my permission to leave the house.
I sometimes wonder if I shouldn’t turn her in for her own good, but Lily reckons she ran away for a reason, and she’s probably better off where she is.
Maybe. At least she’s in control of her own life. But I feel bad about those kids. They deserve some sort of life. Me, I’ve made my own choices and I’m happy with it. Yeah. Yes, I am. I’m in control of my life and I love it, and I love myself and I love Tar and I love my friends.
The thing is, I know my limits. I’m sensible about it. Lily says I do everything sensibly even when I go over the top. Too right. I take care of myself. I eat well. Always make the punters use a condom. I don’t work on the streets; I do it through the massage parlour. I don’t share needles, except with Tar. I’m not a junkie. I can stop it whenever I want. I do sometimes, for a week or so, just to show myself I’m still on top. I don’t have Aids. I don’t even have non-specific urethritis.
Lily goes out and works on the street, even though she could get a job at the parlour with her looks. She says she doesn’t want to work for anyone except herself. Basically she believes in magic. Believing in magic the Lily way means that you never get harmed no matter what you do… and if you do, it’s because you were meant to.
It’s a funny thing with Lily but it seems to work for her; nothing seems to harm her. I don’t mean she never gets hurt.