'Anyway,' Jill said, 'I really think you're going to need some help. You've been through a terrible experience. I'm going to check that someone comes to see you within the next couple of days.' She leaned forward, concerned.
'You only want to make yourself feel better, Sergeant. I said I'm not interested.'
Honey paused, and Jill reached her hand forward, to comfort, reassure.
'Don't fuckin' touch me.' The tall woman suddenly stood, towering over Jill, screaming down at her. Her eyes looked crazy now.
Her voice cracked, saliva frothed in the corners of her mouth; she was standing between Jill and the door. 'Do you think some fucking social worker is going to take away all the shit that's happened to me in my life?' she screeched.
Jill knew that to avoid escalating the situation she needed to be calm, but authoritative.
'You need to SIT DOWN,' she ordered in her police voice. 'I said, sit down, Honey,' she repeated, waving away a uniformed colleague who'd obviously heard the shouting, his face questioning through the clear panel in the door.
She watched Honey register where she was and crumple back into the chair.
'Just don't fucking touch me,' she said quietly now, her voice almost dead again, but with a tear sliding through the make-up on her face. 'I have to be wasted before anyone can touch me. Speaking of which,' Honey wiped her manicured finger down the trail made by the solitary tear, 'are we done here? I've got to go score.' Jill couldn't get Honey out of her mind for the rest of the day. She followed up with the hospital and collected all the information she could, but there was little to go on, and she doubted they were going to get these guys. They'd worn condoms, according to Honey, and had pocketed them before they left. It sounded to Jill like they'd done it before, and that the crime had been planned, rather than opportunistic.
She didn't feel she could send the mental health team around to Honey's home after she'd been so insistent she be left alone, but she also didn't want to just leave her like that, without any help. She decided to go to Honey's house and make sure she was okay. Leaving Scotty to do some paper-work for a South Maroubra break-and-enter, she made her way over to the address Honey had given her that morning.
Honey had a bed-sit in a large housing commission block at Malabar. This beachside suburb, home of Long Bay Gaol, also housed an uncomfortable mix of long-term public housing tenants, pensioners and retirees. A handful of new millionaires had built self-conscious mansions on blocks left to them by their parents. Waterfront was waterfront in Sydney, even when the suburb had one of the highest break-and-enter rates in the state.
Jill jogged up three flights of graffitied stairs, her hand over her mouth to block the piss-stench that permeated everything. A woman cursed in a singsong heroin whine. She heard a door slam, and a child crying. From behind a screenless window, a radio played J.J. Cale's 'Cocaine'. She'd be using that too if she had to live here.
She reached Honey's door and knocked. Nothing. She tried again. There was no-one home. Jill felt guiltily relieved. She had turned to leave when the door opened on a chain.
'Yeah?' the flat voice was also slurred now. This was a bad idea.
'Honey. It's Jillian Jackson. I just came to make sure you're all right.' The room beyond the crack in the door was dark and smoky.
The door shut and then reopened. Honey stepped back and stood there. Jill was supposed to go in.
The two rooms that made up the entire unit were visible from the entry. The kitchen, laundry and sitting area were all part of one room, and Jill could see the tiny bedroom, with a double bed draped in a purple spread. Dark curtains covered the only window in the sitting room. The place smelled of stale smoke, but the surfaces looked pretty clean.
She swallowed and walked past Honey into the flat and waited for her eyes to adjust so she could look around.
'I'm not going to pretend I'm here with good news, Honey,' she started, watching the tall woman walk towards a Formica dining setting that took up most of the room. She perched on a chair at the table opposite Honey. 'It's going to be hard to catch these guys unless we get lucky or you remember something else.'
'Oh I never get lucky, Jill,' Honey took a drag of her cigarette, 'and they never get caught.'
Her hair in a ponytail, and the lolly-green contacts removed, Honey looked more like a fourteen-year-old school-girl than the pimped-out prostitute who'd come to the station today. Jill could see she was stoned, but she seemed calmer than that morning, and her speech was slow.
'It sounds like you've had it pretty hard,' said Jill cautiously, wondering what she was doing here, why she was inviting this woman to tell her a story she wasn't going to want to hear. She didn't need this right now.
God, it's hot in here, she thought.
Honey laughed flatly and leaned back in her chair, an appraising look on her face.
'You know I never asked you to come here, Sergeant Jackson,' she said, 'and I don't need your help.' She took another drag of her cigarette. 'So what do you want from me? Last cop in here got a blow job. The two before him wanted me to rat out the speed dealers in 31A. So what's your thing?'
Jill felt stupid. Her head had started to thump again and the smoke was making her throat dry. She realised she hadn't eaten anything since a banana at breakfast.
'Look, I'm sorry, Honey. You just looked really bad this morning and I wanted to make sure you hadn't done something silly. I knew if I sent mental health over here, you'd freak out, so I came myself. I'll get out of your way now. I'm glad you're okay.' She stood to go, hoping Honey would stand too and let her out.
Instead, Honey stayed seated. Her head on a slight angle, her eyes showed she was still obviously weighing Jill up. 'Can I get you a coffee?' she asked, finally.
'Water. Water would be great,' said Jill, sitting again, 'and do you have any Panadol?'
12
Over the next two hours, Jill learned that Honey had run away from home twice by the age of ten. The second time she'd left, her mother had not even tried to find her, furious that her latest boyfriend spent more time watching Honey than her.
Watching Honey's every move was not the only thing her stepfather had done, though. At least three nights a week, he would stumble, drunk, into Honey's bedroom and perform oral sex on the frightened little boy. The other four days of the week, apparently cleansing himself of feelings of shame, the man would subject Honey to beatings and verbal abuse. When the nighttime visits escalated to sodomy, Honey fled, living in a park with other children who felt safer sleeping under a bridge than in their own beds.
One wet and freezing Sydney winter's night, Honey was huddled in the dirty stairwell of a supermarket, eating a barbecue chicken pilfered from a fat shopper's trolley. Her new friend Mia, a beautiful Vietnamese girl who looked around Honey's age but was actually fourteen, was sharing the meal. Honey had been wearing girl's clothes whenever she could for as long as she could remember and now that there was no one to interfere, her black hair was curling down almost to her shoulders. She knew that no one she met for the first time would think of her as anything other than the girl she believed she was.
'What would you say if I said there was somewhere we could stay tonight?' Mia had asked Honey, trying to wipe her chicken-greasy hands on the inside of her jeans so the stains wouldn't be so obvious. She glanced at Honey sideways from underneath her long, black fringe.
'I'd say what the hell are we doing here?' Honey laughed. 'Let's go. Now!' And she'd dragged Mia up from the filthy stairs on which they sat. Honey told Jill that she could tell even then that Mia was scared of the place they were going, but she didn't really care. Nowhere was safe anyway, right?