Just before we settled down in the same room as Courtney and her boyfriend, Ricky pushed some drawers against the door. ‘No lock on it,’ he whispered. ‘This way, no one else will get in. The rest can sort themselves out.’ I fell asleep on a bed with no sheet and no pillow. It was that sort of place.
It felt like I’d only just gone to sleep when there was a banging on the door.
‘Let me in, for fuck’s sake,’ boomed a girl’s voice, deep and threatening.
‘Go away,’ Courtney said, her voice croaky from alcohol and lack of sleep. ‘This is our room.’
‘No, it’s not – it’s mine!’ shouted the girl on the landing. ‘And you’d better open the door now or I’ll smash your fucking face in.’
The girl with the booming voice was clearly someone to reckon with physically, because even as Courtney blanched, then dipped beneath her duvet, the door was beginning to open. Ricky clearly knew the intruder, and quickly jumped up to start pulling at the drawers so she could get in. A moment later, the fat face of a girl, red, blotchy and angry, appeared in the doorway.
‘Do that again and you’re dead,’ she shouted, her lumbering frame moving towards the window, reaching down to shift piles of debris and discarded clothes as she went. ‘Who’s moved my shoes?’ she glowered.
I shrank away from her. I had no idea where her shoes were, nor anything else about her, but I wasn’t about to say. She had a presence that said, If you know what’s good for you, stay back.
Luckily for all of us, she found the missing shoes next to the TV and seemed to calm down, before sitting down on Ricky’s bed to put them on.
As I say, she was a big girl, wearing leggings that must have been four or even five times bigger than mine, plus a white, oversized T-shirt that had the words ‘Fuck You!’ picked out in black.
Her eyes held mine. ‘Who are you?’ she asked, her voice gravelly, her eyes fixing me with the sort of gaze you daren’t ignore. I thought she must be at least a year older than me, maybe two.
‘Hannah,’ I said nervously. ‘I go to school with Ricky.’
‘Emma,’ she said, by way of introduction. ‘His cousin.’
She started looking me up and down, disapprovingly. ‘Which school do you go to?’ she asked.
I told her, and she scoffed. ‘Which year?’
‘Year Eleven,’ I said. ‘Well, in September I will be…’
It turned out that although she looked older, there were actually only five months between our birthdays – and we were in the same school year. Not that it seemed to matter to her, because she said she hardly ever went.
‘They can’t make me,’ she said, breaking into a smile I thought she’d never find. ‘I just never turn up. And, anyway, it’s shit.’
By that time we were all wide awake, so we went downstairs and spoke some more – her, me and Courtney. Straight off, she told us she was the hardest girl in Rochdale, and we didn’t doubt it. ‘No one fucks with me,’ she added, just to make sure we’d got the whole picture.
Still bleary from the drinking, I found myself drawn to Emma as she sprawled on the sofa as if she, not Harry, owned it. Right from the start, she seemed to have a strange power. It wasn’t just her size, her physical presence. Even now I find it hard to understand, let alone explain – there was something menacing about her, while at the same time there was something about her that made me look up to her. I knew straight away that I was scared of her, but I also liked the way she seemed to stick up for herself. I found myself thinking, If she’s my friend, no one’s ever going to kick off against me.
I hadn’t doubted her authority from the moment she’d spoken that first time in the bedroom, and I wouldn’t doubt it for a long time.
We spoke for an hour or more. She told the two of us how she’d beaten girls up at school, and lads, and how she was so hard that she had to have a social worker. She wouldn’t take crap from anyone, she said, and I could see that she meant it.
‘Milly’s at your school isn’t she? You know her?’
I nodded.
‘Yeah – threw her down the stairs a while back. Thought she was someone.’
Beside me, Courtney, usually so bubbly, seemed to have gone into her shell.
The conversation ended abruptly when Emma’s mobile rang. ‘Yeah, coming now,’ she said into the phone and, a moment later, she was gone, sweeping up her handbag and heading for the front door.
Courtney and I watched her climb into the back of the cab, a red Toyota. I noticed it had a sign on the side that said it was from a company called Streamline. In the months to come I’d see it a lot.
‘Wow,’ Courtney breathed, once she’d gone.
‘Yeah, I know. Scary, eh?’
‘You bet,’ Courtney replied, still quiet, quieter than I’d ever known her.
In the silence I tried to fathom this strange new person in my life. If you’ve ever seen the film, This is England, you’ve had a glimpse of Emma. She wasn’t psychotic, not like the shaven-headed guy in the film running the gang of skinheads, but she still carried that sense of menace. Like him, it wasn’t always so much what she said as how she actually said it. And, like him, she knew she had a reputation that made people scared. You just felt all the time that she was on the verge of kicking off, even if she wasn’t.
There’s a scene in This is England where the hard guy cries – over a girl, I think. But not Emma. Over the next seven months that I got to know her, I never saw any soft side in her. I’d see her get mad plenty of times, but not upset: never upset. At times she’d rant like she had Tourette’s, not so bad that she’d scream, but pretty close. I would also come to realise that she had the kind of look your mum and dad give you when you’re little to stop you doing something – as a kid you know that look, and when it comes you can’t do anything but obey it. In Emma’s case, though, it didn’t stop you doing something – it made you do something, even if you didn’t want to. Added to this, her mood could switch as suddenly as a taxi light coming on, and it made her incredibly unsettling to be around. You just never knew where you were with her.
Maybe it was that that drew me in, and made me look up to her in some weird kind of way. You could be mates with her, yes, but only on her terms – you had to be scared of her, too. I for one called her by her proper name, never her nickname. Braver kids than me called her the name that fitted her best: the Honey Monster, though it was always behind her back.
The next time we saw her, she said she’d been out partying and chilling with some of her Asian mates. A friend of hers, Roxanne, had been with her and they’d had ‘a massive good time’. It only added to her allure for me. I was hypnotised by her, dangerously so.
Once I’d moved into this house of horrors, I actually found myself settling into the madness of what was beginning to feel like a chaotic version of home. I didn’t want to go back to Mum and Dad. Although this place was pretty dreary, I loved the freedom – and the sense that, finally, at fifteen, I could be somewhere where I felt less hassled, less put upon. My very own, independent me.
I hadn’t actually heard from my parents. Maybe they didn’t mind, or else they were giving me the space to be a teenager. About time, I thought, though at the back of my mind, for all the people and wonderful chaos around me, I felt a little lonely, a little confused at times.
Emma and I talked again, her telling me of all the places she knew and all the friends she had. She talked about having an Asian boyfriend and lots of Asian friends. She seemed to know so many people.