Sharon released the hand brake and let the car coast after her.
"All right," she said through the window, 'we'll talk about something else. "
"Yeah? Uke what? Swap recipes and tips on chipping away old nail polish?"
"If you Uke, yes. Why not?"
"You know sodding well why not!"
Sharon let the car roll on down the hill, Doris, head down, crossing the road behind her. By the time Sharon had stopped the car and got out, they were level.
"Come on, Doris. A deal."
Yeah? What's that? "
"I'll buy you a meal and we'll talk and if you don't want to say anything more about Marlene, that's fine."
"I thought I didn't get paid for my time?"
Sharon was standing next to her now, taller, having to stoop down; Sharon wearing a leather jacket, unzipped, over her souvenir T-shirt from a Prince concert, blue jeans and a pair of ankle-high Kickers, green with a grease mark on one heel.
"This isn't buying your time, it's buying you lunch."
Lunch? "
"Tea, dinner, whatever. Come on, when did you last eat?"
"That's where I was going now." "So fine. Where to?"
Doris grinned, just a little, not giving it too much. "McDonald's.
Got these vouchers I've been saving from the Post. Two McChicken sandwiches for a couple of quid. "
"Okay," Sharon said.
"Why don't we go in the car? That way, we could go to the one by the canal, what do you say?"
Sharon told Doris to keep her McChicken vouchers for another occasion and splashed out on two Big Macs, fries, apple pies, cola. They had stopped at the paper shop on Lenton Boulevard so that Doris could buy another twenty Bensons, king size. There was a seat by the window, and although they couldn't actually see the canal from there, they could work out where it was, across the other side of Sainsbury's car park, to the right of Homebase.
Doris picked out most of the middle of her Big Mac, toying with the bun but never really eating it. The fries she dunked in a generous puddle of red sauce. Sharon ate slowly, saying little, trying to make the younger woman feel at ease.
Doris told her about a childhood bounded by Hackney Marshes and Homerton Hospital; Dalston, Clapton, Hackney, Leyton. A familiar enough story, familiar to Sharon certainly, not so very different from her own; the same story many of the working girls had to tell.
When it was told at all. And Doris, not a product of what sociologists and politicians called a broken home; no one-parent family hers. Her father, on the dole, had always been there. Always.
Through the unbroken veil of cigarette smoke, beneath the slow-fading bruise, Sharon looked for the child in Doris's eighteen-year-old face but it had long been driven out. she says: if only I could be three again, struggling with my shoe laces; start all over, go back to the beginning shake my mother abuse my father "You reckon her for it, don't you?" Doris said suddenly, pushing away the carapace of her apple pie.
"That bloke got himself knifed. You reckon her for that."
"Do you know where she was, Doris? That evening? Where she was working? Was it the hotels?"
"I already told you, I hadn't seen her since the Tuesday."
"Tuesday afternoon."
"Right."
"When you lent her the money. The fifty pounds you never got back."
Doris mouthed an oath. Sharon reached for her cola and drank a little more. Doris lit another cigarette. Two lads walking past outside shouted something they could neither of them make out and one of the lads went into a swagger, cupping non-existent breasts. His mate laughed so much he nearly got clipped by a passing car.
"She wanted it for drugs, didn't she?" Sharon said.
Doris nodded.
"Crack."
"How bad is she?"
It seemed a long time before Doris answered.
"Look, you know as well as what I do, there's girls out there, they don't keep high, they go crazy and once it gets like that, there's nothing they won't do to score. These dealers, they play 'em along, let 'em get in debt, serious now, hundreds I'm talking, easy. Once it's like that, they can do what they like with them. Sex shows, dyke stuff, animals. This one bloke, charged his mates a tenner each to wank off over this girl while his alsatian licked her out." Doris shuddered and made a face.
"Marlene, though, she wasn't like that. She was bright, dead clever.
Older, too. Been around, but it didn't show. That's how come she could 200 work the hotels. Me, now, I walk in and they've got me walking right out again, regular revolving door. Not Marlene. That's why I was surprised when she started doing crack. Oh, we'd have the odd spliff once in a while, who doesn't? But crack. " Doris shook her head.
"First, it was just weekends, fifteen, twenty quid a rock. You know, when we was busy. Never ends up like that, though, does it? Marlene, she could see what was happening to her. Kept trying to kick. Even went to that place, you know, down by the Square. What's it called?
Crack Awareness, something like that. Got worse anyway. Got so she hated what she was doing, couldn't stand being touched. Being with some bloke, any bloke, but, of course, that's what she had to do.
Keep earning, more and more, trying to stay ahead. "
In another part of the restaurant, twenty or so eight- and nine-year-olds were having a party, flicking Chicken McNuggets across the tables, wearing cardboard cutout hats.
"How much," Sharon asked, 'had she got to hate it? "
"She used to say, next man who touches me, I'm going to kill him."
"And you thought she was serious? You thought she meant it?"
"No, don't be bloody stupid, course I didn't! We say that all the time."
"Then what?" Sharon said.
Doris took a long drag on her cigarette.
"Week or so back, the night that other bloke was done, you know, stabbed. It was in the paper, found him starkers in the road."
Sharon waited, Doris taking her time.
"I ran into Marlene," Doris said, 'she was leaning on this wall off Forest Road, looked like she'd just been throwing up. There was blood all down her front. Up her hand and arm. "
To an almighty roar from the children, one of the McDonalds staff jumped up on to the middle of their table dressed as Mr McChicken, and started napping his wings.
Sharon bided her time.
"Who did she cop from, Doris?"
Doris blinked at her across the smoke from her cigarette.
"Richie. I don't know… I don't know where, but yes, Richie that's the only one I ever heard her mention. That's who she said."
Dorothy Birdwell's fingers fumbled with her water glass, almost sending it tumbling, and for once Marius was not poised to intervene and set everything to rights. Marius, in fact, was nowhere to be seen. It gave her a pinched feeling in the back of the throat, making it difficult to breathe. And as for talking. Dorothy steadied herself and, with almost exaggerated care, brought the glass to her lips. The forty or so people who had gathered to hear her thoughts on Christianity and the crime novel, with special attention to the work of Dorothy L. Sayers, watched and waited patiently. After all, she could sense them thinking, at her age you can't expect too much.
Well, expectations were strange things. She reached out towards the small table at her side and lifted her copy of Such a Strange Lady into her lap.
"As we can be only too aware," she began, 'living as we do in these particular times, it is difficult not to see the art of biography and the wish of the individual for privacy as being incompatible. Think then only of a young woman, an only child, born at Christchurch Cathedral Choir School, a Christian scholar whose second book of poems was titled Catholic Tales and Christian Songs, and yet who nevertheless became pregnant out of wedlock and secretly gave birth to an illegimate son. How irreconc'l- able the gulf between the life that is apparent and expected and the life that is actually lived. "