I begged her never to take heroin again and told her that if she continued it would kill her.
‘So what?’ Not quite the answer I had expected, so I was taken aback momentarily. ‘What is the point of living anyway?’ she said. ‘I don’t want to live any more, and I don’t want to go back to my family because Mum’s boyfriend keeps fucking me and Mum believes him over me. I don’t want to be a hooker but how can I get a normal job when I am only eleven?’
I told her that she needed to save her money and she would be able to rise above this work.
‘That’s a load of crap, I’m worthless, disposable and unlovable,’ she said. My heart went out to her, I was her at the same age, I’d wanted to die too. The only difference between us was that she had a means at her disposal.
It did look grim for her, but I was ever the optimist. A couple of weeks after I’d spoken to her, she left the club in exchange for working the streets for a pimp, as no brothel would employ her, to support her heroin addiction. It was so sad, but Brenda was a clone of every other girl who chose to do street work. We would often see the Salvation Army workers waltzing about in their suits, ready, willing and able to help in any way they could. Anyone over sixteen was happy to stop for a chat and accept their sandwiches or soup. But anyone under sixteen would bolt for the protective shadows or safety of the brothels. It was explained to me by Nico that the Salvos had a legal duty to return all underage kids who presented for assistance back to their parents.
I understood emotional abuse better than the best of them, but the abuse that Brenda suffered was persistent sexual abuse at the hands of her protector from the age of eight. That I couldn’t entirely fathom. The common belief running through all the kids—boys and girls—working the Cross, was that this seedy little underworld where everyone is only out for themselves, where people are property, was a better and safer alternative than going home. The stories I heard on quiet nights chilled me to the core: alcoholic parents; parents with extreme addictions; non-existent parents. But the hardest stories to hear were the ones that always ended with the same line: ‘At least here I get to choose who I fuck.’ I understood completely—the police rarely believe these kinds of stories from children. When you have already reached out to a parent and exposed your ugly truth, only to be called a liar, you tend to give up and just suppress your pain.
These kids anaesthetised it with heroin. It was offered to them free of charge until they got hooked, then they had to work for it. It was not uncommon to find a junkie dead from an overdose, sometimes in one of the rooms at the club, sometimes in the laundry but most of the time backstage. Apparently this is because the lighting is so much better there to find the vein. Generally I would be told by the bouncers to put a line through a girl’s name for the rest of the night. At the end of the night I would stupidly put the girl’s money in an envelope for her to collect on her next shift. But Spiro would reach over to grab the girl’s envelope, open it and place the cash in his wallet.
I’d ask, ‘Oi, won’t she want to know what happened to her money?’
‘No.’
‘Why is that, I’d want to know where my money got to.’
‘Stupid cunt OD’d!’
That shut me up. I soon stopped bothering with the envelopes whenever a bouncer told me to draw a line through someone’s name.
The first time I found a girl, I buzzed the bouncers to come up immediately. They established that she was dead and to my shock and horror they carried her downstairs and propped her up against the skip bin and went back to work. One of the doormen explained to me that no club wants to be seen employing underage addicts, and no one wants to get caught transporting dead junkies in their car. Finally, as he put it, ‘And no fucker wants to pay for a dead junkie’s funeral. So this way, koukla, it’s best for all. She just died where she is sitting now, why should we draw unwanted attention to ourselves, hey? You understand, there’s a good girl. Don’t worry, tomorrow the police will find her.’
I had a hundred questions but I knew that the doorman wouldn’t answer them. My biggest question was how the police would identify her. Most of the time girls only trusted a handful of people with that information. Even if the bodies were found by the Salvos, the girls were forever giving them false names because they were afraid of being returned home. With a false name you got the benefits the Salvos offered, which was primarily a warm bed, a bit of food or the grand prize—if you gave them your real name—assistance in getting a Medicare card.