Junk - Melvin Burgess [65]
But the thing was, she was all right again in half an hour. She was back on the street that evening. I’d have been terrified to go out there again, but there she was, chirpy as ever. She was even proud of it. That’s her secret, I suppose. Everything that happens to her she’s proud of. She makes it special by it happening to her.
Me and Sal, we’ve got this amazing job at the parlour – Dido’s Health Parlour. It’s nice and clean. It’s safe because you’re on the premises and there’s the other girls around and the management don’t want anything bad to happen or they lose their business. You get a better class of punter. Lily has to take them as they come, straight off the street. Some of those lorry drivers have been sitting in the cab twelve hours, sweating. At the parlour, if you think the customer’s a bit ripe you just fling him a towel and say, ‘I’ll come and give you your massage when you’ve had your shower.’
Of course the management don’t want people to get turned away so you can’t pick and choose. You can’t say, ‘I don’t fancy him, I’ll have him instead.’ That’s not fair on the other girls. But if someone asks you to do something kinky they send in Joe and he shows them the door. And the boss, Gordon, is really good. If it’s someone really gross or someone you really can’t stand he’ll try and overcharge him or get rid of him somehow. If the customer still wants it, he offers him to one of the other girls for extra money. Usually Elaine, because she really doesn’t care. Yuk! As it is, I like to do a little junk – not enough to be out of it, just enough, you know, so I’m not totally all there.
It’s a public service, really. After the bank holiday you get this queue of men in the waiting room. I mean they don’t get it at home with their wives or they’re too shy to find a girl of their own. So they come to us. If it wasn’t for us they’d probably be out on the street hunting down young girls. Sal and I have a joke about it.
‘You on PPD today?’
‘Yeah, Pervert Prevention Duty.’
I get three hundred quid a week some weeks, if I go for it. Pretty demeaning, eh? Fifteen years old, three hundred quid a week. I keep thinking I’d like to go back and show my parents. Not what I’m doing; not what I’m earning, either, ‘cause they might guess. Just me. Just show them me, so they can see I’m doing all right.
Only, not yet. I’d like to wait until I’m clean before that. I do too much, I know that. I’m planning on getting myself straight for a few weeks. I’ll go and see them then. I keep meaning to ring them but… it does my head in. I just can’t bear to talk to them these days. Even my mum. I miss her, but I can’t talk to her. It’ll come. I can wait. I mean, she’s not gonna die tomorrow, right?
Chapter Eighteen
Tar
SINCE I GOT BETTER
I BIN HAAPPY THIS WAY
AND BETTERBETTERBETTERBETTER’S THE WAY
I’M GONNAGONNAGONNAGONNA STAAAAY-YA
Lurky
If I lean out of the window and look down the City Road I see all the houses and the windows and doors in them, with rooms and rooms behind the windows and doors. I feel like I’m looking behind a forest or into a deep ocean. Behind the streets there’s office blocks and shop buildings. On a hill there’s a group of tower blocks. They look like frilly bricks from this distance.
I’m part of a tribe. We live behind the windows and doors. Sometimes we go out in the streets, quick enough to shop or to visit each other. In this part of town, in the houses and the flats, one above the other, side by side, there are many tribes. Shop assistants, clerks, office workers, that sort of thing. The Asians, running their shops or keeping their homes; the West Indians, the Irish, the Poles, the people who like this and do that – all tribes, mixed together and jumbled up. Going about their lives, rubbing shoulders, doing