“I was fifteen, or so I was told. I lived in this very sterile, new-built flat, apartment, with my aunt. She said she was my aunt, but she looked nothing like me, nothing – she had dark wavy hair that was always a bit greasy and was going grey... she used to get it covered up with dye sometimes, but most of the time she didn’t bother. And she had olive skin and dark brown eyes. I mean, I know genetics can do funny things but you know, Maudie, what I look like. What we look like. We used to pretend we were sisters, do you remember?
“The flat was like a hotel, one of those totally anonymous chain hotels; all beige carpet and magnolia walls and some god-awful landscape painting on one wall. In a mock-gold frame. I saw a lot of those hotels later on in life... but I’ll come to that later. It had four bedrooms so was pretty big, and every so often some other kids stayed over. My aunt – Tracey, her name was – said she was fostering them, short-term, you know, for the council. They were always girls, normally about twelve, maybe a little bit older. Tracey told me that they’d been through horrible situations and they were emotionally damaged, and because of that, they might tell a lot of lies. So I wasn’t to take anything they said to me very seriously. But they never said much – they just stayed in their rooms and watched TV. They never stayed long. I think the most time any of them were there was about a week. They used to creep me out a bit, to be honest, they were so silent. I used to run into them in the kitchen when I was getting something to eat, and they’d just look at me with these big eyes, all in silence.
“It’s hard to explain just how weird things were. For a start, I had no memory of anything before my time at the flat. I don’t even remember arriving at the flat. Do you see what I mean? Well, put it this way, have you ever had a general anaesthetic? It’s not like falling asleep and waking up. There’s no sense of time having passed. It’s like a slice out of time, you’re conscious one minute, the next you’re not, then you come back to life and in between is nothing. Nothing at all. That’s what my life was like. There was me, in the flat with Tracey, and the weird kids, and before that, nothing. Not a single thing.
“Of course, I knew that wasn’t normal. I didn’t go to school so I had no – what’s the word? – no frame of reference, but I knew that most people didn’t just pop into being aged fifteen. So I asked Tracey, and guess what she told me? I’d been in a car accident, a bad one. It had killed my parents. I’d survived, but I’d gone into a coma, a long one, six months or something, and only now was I really recovering.
“When she told me that, I sort of accepted it. I mean, I couldn’t remember anything anyway, nothing. And I used to get these really bad headaches, migraines, I suppose, which fitted in with the car crash story, and I had weird digestion, lots of stomach bugs and urine infections, nice stuff like that. But I didn’t have any scars on me.
That wasn’t the worst part, though. The worst was the men that sometimes came to the flat. It was mostly just this one man – Colin, his name was – and sometimes he brought another guy with him, I was never sure of his name. And – I can’t really describe it – I’d look at them, or they’d catch my eye and I would just – break. I would go to pieces inside. I can’t really describe it... it’s as if the second I saw them, a gigantic rush of – of horror would swamp me. They never said much to me but occasionally, they’d laugh together. At me, I think it was. I can’t describe how that made me feel. Just – it was so black, this wave, it was like drowning. I used to get really out of it, you know, with booze, if I knew they were coming round and I couldn’t leave the house. God, it was –
“I just sort of carried on. I mean, I couldn’t put my finger on why I felt so bad, so I kind of buried it and just went on, day to day. There were little, odd things though, that cropped up. I remember asking Tracey if I could have my birth certificate so I could get a passport – I think I had some sort of idea about going abroad – I wanted to escape for a bit, to run away – and she said she didn’t have it. She said she’d lost it.
“Anyway, the day I turned sixteen – or the day Tracey told me I turned sixteen – she threw me out. She said it was time for me to take care of myself now, that she’d kept her end of the bargain and kept me until now but enough was enough and it was time for me to make my own way in the world. You can just see it, can’t you? A sixteen year old kid with memory loss, out on the streets of London. Yeah, we were in London, some god-awful bit of South London, by the way. The really shitty part, with the pound shops and the bookies and the off-licence with the sign saying ‘we can’t sell alcohol before eight o’clock’ – that’s eight o’clock in the morning – and the crappy, crappy boutiques with their synthetic, awful, fake-jewelled-studded clothes in the smudgy window, and the obese, sweating black girls with their fifty screaming, corn-rowed kids in tow, and the scrawny, skaggy white girls with their horrible greasy hair and their toddlers sucking on a can of Red Bull, and the alcoholics trying to buy Special Brew at nine o’clock in the morning, and the mad people, who’d been thrown out of any kind of care home due to being complete arseholes and a complete lack of anyone, anyone, who had any kind of class, or dignity, or worth...
“For the first couple of years, I thought I was going to be okay. I had a little bit of money that Tracey had given me and she’d told me to go to this café up in the East End, where someone would give me a job. So I went there, and they did give me a job, and I was a waitress there for a year or so. I lived in this tiny, shitty little bedsit in Walthamstow, and went to work, and came back and slept and did my usual bury-my-head-in-the-sand type thing, so I wouldn’t be able to think about anything. I kept getting the black waves, every so often, mostly after men talked to me in the café. I got through it by drinking a lot and smoking and not thinking about what it might mean.
“After a while, I started going out with this bloke, Michael. He used to come into the café – he was the foreman of a building site nearby – and after a while I moved in with him. It was about the same time I got sacked for being drunk at work. Michael said it didn’t matter, he’d look after me, and for a while it was fine, I just sort of stayed at his place and we went out and had fun. He was really into his coke and, after a while, I got into it too; it made me feel even better than the booze. After a while, I wasn’t getting the black waves anymore, not as long as I could do the white lines. Then Michael started getting a bit arsey with me, having a go at me for taking all his charlie and never paying my way. I said I didn’t know what I could do and he said he could think of one thing I was good at...
“The only surprise was how long it took me to become a hooker. I didn’t even mind it so much after a while – I liked the attention. I liked the fact that I was getting paid for doing what other girls were stupid enough to do for free. I couldn’t understand why anyone – anyone – would want to fuck for fun. But that’s what men wanted and so that’s what they got – at the right price, anyway.
“After a while, I left Michael and set up on my own, in Soho. I shared with this other girl, Susie. She was okay. We used to work, and then we’d go out clubbing and pretend we were normal girls on a night out.
“Ironically enough, it was one of my regulars who saved me. He was an older guy, he must have been in his mid-fifties, and he saw that I was getting more and more strung out. He came round to see me but he didn’t want sex with me, not that time. Instead, he just made me sit on the bed and tell him what was wrong. And I just broke down; I was such a snivelling, sobbing mess – you should have seen my face, snot pouring from my nose, no wonder he didn’t want to fuck me – and he told me I needed to get off the drugs, that I needed to talk to a therapist and that he would make me an appointment with a drugs counsellor. And he did, and I went along and after that, it was okay. Not good, you understand, but better. And it got better, slowly, day by day. Susie came along with me for a while and things were going really well. But then she had a major relapse. I had to get away from her and so I moved down to Brighton. And I kind of pulled myself together, slowly. That’s when things really started coming together.