text: It wasn’t what I was expecting. No, I wasn’t expecting this at all. I’ll find us a place, you said. A place just for the two of us. A place that we can call home, where they won’t bother us, you said. I met you at the start of spring. I saw you as I came out from school. You were tall, skinny, long black hair, clothes that said you didn’t give a damn. You smiled, I blushed, lowered my head, walked away. The next day you were there again. You smiled again. I smiled back before blushing, lowering my head, walking away. And each day you and your smiles got closer. You waved, you said ‘Hi’, and soon you were walking with me, talking with me. Making me feel special. Carrie mocked me. Carrie said you were no good, from the wrong end of town. What did she know? She was just jealous, jealous because you had chosen me instead of her. Okay, so your clothes weren’t so good, you’d not had the advantages she’s had. And if that’s the way you choose to dress, who’s she to judge? Carrie’s never been my friend anyway. Stuck up cow. Bella and Jade are the same about you, don’t think you’re right for me, but that’s because they care, because they don’t want to lose me as a friend. They don’t understand either. They’ve not had boyfriends before, they don’t understand. They say I’m too young, but I don’t feel too young. Age is just a number, right? It’s not as if you’re old. You’re just three years older than me, seventeen to my fourteen. You smoke, which I don’t like, but those rollups make you appear older than you are. They’re just jealous I decide. They don’t know what it’s like to be kissed. Or perhaps they do, you say, perhaps they’re a couple of lesbians. Leave them to have each other, you say. And we laugh at that. I don’t tell my parents about you. They wouldn’t understand, and they have busy lives. Callum, my brother, can’t wait for me to leave home. Can’t wait for me to take my GCSEs, take my A levels, go to uni. Then, he says, then he can have my room. I’ve always been the model student, always expected to do well in exams, but you tell me it’s a waste of time. You’ve finished school, and still you can’t get a job. Though when I ask about your schooling, you just shrug. We soon stop talking education. Kissing you is all the education I need for now. My grades start to slip. At parents evening, mum and dad are asked if there’s problems at home. My attention, they’re told, is elsewhere. To my parents this is news, but they’re always so busy they don’t see what’s in my life. At home, they question me about it. I say Bella and Jade don’t want to be my friends anymore. Simple as. It upset me at the time, but I’m over it now. Callum, my lovely, hateful brother, tells them I have a boyfriend. We go to the same school, so of course he’s seen you. They ask about you, but I go to my room and won’t tell. After all, we’ve only kissed. And touched a little bit, though I can tell you want more. Every day my parents ask about you. They say I’m too young, only fourteen. Yeah, but I’ll be fifteen in the summer, and once I’m fifteen, I’ll be almost sixteen, old enough. It’s bad at home, and you say it’s bad for you too. Your mother drinks, her boyfriend’s violent, so she drinks more. I ask about your dad, and you say “What dad? There’s never been a dad, only boyfriends.” And all the while my parents are getting worse. They take me to school each morning to make sure I get there, but I leave before the end of the day to spend time with you. As the year moves into summer, we find quiet places to be together, to kiss, to touch, but nothing more. You ask, “If I find a place for us, if I find a place, will you come with me?” I realise what you’re asking. I realise you’re asking me to give myself to you. I’m not sure, but Carrie mocks me, Bella and Jade aren’t talking to me, Callum torments me, and my parents won’t get off my case. So I say yes. If you find a place, if you find a love nest for us, then yes, I’ll come. And I say it expecting it to not come true, because how would we manage? How could we if you didn’t have a job and I hadn’t finished my education. But I say yes, because it’s my dream to be with you. I say yes, because I’m in love with the idea of us being together, of building a life for ourselves. And one day you come. You say you’ve found a place. It’s not much, you say, but it’s a start. And you’ve got work. I’m shocked, surprised. What work, I ask. Helping a friend out, you say. But what’s this place? You’ll see, you tell me. Nothing much, but it’s a start. I ask about furniture and you say not to worry about that. So, it’s furnished, or so I think. And I imagine a small place, a tiny place even, a bedsit, or a room over a shop. Somewhere where there’s a small stove, just enough to heat up a tin of soup, a twenty-year-old sofa where we can sit in the evening. A too-small bed in the corner where we’ll finally make love. I’m scared, but I’m excited too. My parents have really been getting on my nerves, really having a go at me, trying to ground me. We agree to meet. I go to school, but I’ve stuffed some clothes in my school bag. I post the key back through the letterbox. I’m done with family. And when I leave school, you’re there to meet me. As I look at you, smoking your roll-ups, I wonder if I’m doing the right thing. Then you see me, and I realise it’s too late. And you brought me to this place, not some squalid bedsit with 20-year-old furniture, but this place. A large house, a large garden, lower than squalid. A squat. We share the house with your new friends, with Baker, the friend who you’re doing the favours for, with Dulcie, his girl. Baker leers, grins knowingly when I come in, and you don’t even notice the way he looks at me, how uncomfortable I feel. Dulcie, in her short, short skirt and laddered tights, just smiles vacantly, as if she’s listening to the best sounds in the world. I wonder if there’s something wrong with her. There’s a sofa downstairs, covered in mould where it sat in the rain for a week before it was rescued for this place. It’s in the back room. The front room we can’t use because the floorboards are rotten. You mutter something in Baker’s ear who looks at me, raises his eyebrows and smiles knowingly. Then you take me upstairs to our ‘room’, to the cosy little ‘love-nest’. To the room that’s bare except for an ancient, stained mattress and a sleeping bag. I ask if this is a joke. I thought this was supposed to be better than what we had. You say it is, for you it is better, better than having to watch your mother drink herself into an early grave, watch her being beaten by her boyfriend, knowing that if you got in the way it would be you that was beaten. She won’t even realise I’ve gone, you say of your mother. I wonder then about my parents, what they must be thinking. Have they missed me yet? I look at my phone. Too early for my parents to be home, but my brother will be back from school, will have found the key. Will he realise what it means? And then you take hold of me. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it,” you ask. And not taking any notice of my answer, no, not here, you lay me down on that disgusting mattress and take me. You call it making love. It hurts, but then it should the first time, shouldn’t it? Afterwards you kiss me, say it’ll be better next time and leave me, telling me you’ll be back later - you have to go to work. I lie on that mattress and cry for a while, wondering what I’ve done, listening as you go out the house. Then I see him, Baker. He’s at the door, grinning. “Just wondered if you were okay,” he says. I don’t answer but pull my knees up to my chest, turn over so he can’t see my tears. He laughs, walks away. I hear others coming into the house, but I don’t go down. Eventually you return and you bring me downstairs. There’s another two girls there, Dee and Zoe. They say hi, sit down. You sit on the mouldy sofa and pull me possessively onto your knee. Someone’s bought a couple of Pizzas to eat, and they’re shared about. I realise how hungry I am and take my share. Dulcie wanders in and is offered a slice, but she says she’s not hungry. She so skinny, she looks like she hasn’t eaten in a week. You’re smoking again, one of your rollups, and you offer it to me. I say no, I don’t smoke, and everyone laughs. The cigarette is passed round, and Baker leans in towards me, blows smoke in my face. “You should try some love, good stuff this.” I feel dizzy, lightheaded as I realise what it is. Soon you drag me up. I’m partly relieved, it means I can get out of that room, but upstairs you make is clear that you want me for one thing only. And after, when you’ve gone to sleep, I move apart from you and cry myself to sleep. The following morning, or is it afternoon by now, I find that my phone and my watch are gone. When I ask about them, I’m told we all have to contribute. Baker gives you something, some packets, and you leave to sell your wares. Baker gets a call, says he has to go out. “Keep an eye on that one,” he tells Dee and Zoe. Dulcie’s still sleeping. Zoe goes to the bathroom, and Dee takes me to one side. “Got family?” I don’t answer straight away. “Yeah, I can see you have. What did you think you were getting yourself into? Some sort of little love nest?” I nod. “Look girl, I can’t let you go now, more than my life’s worth, but as soon as you can, get the fuck out of here. Otherwise you’ll end up like her.” She nods towards Dulcie. When I look blank, she pulls up the unconscious Dulcie’s sleeve and I see the needle marks. “It’s the only way she can cope with what they make her do to earn her keep. She was like you, a nice girl. Zoe and I grew up streetwise. We don’t like it, but we cope. Do a bit of weed, but that’s all. Baker keeps Dulcie like this so she won’t complain too much. So, first chance you get, go.” I tell her how we only came here to be together, how you needed to get away from your alcoholic mother and her violent boyfriend. “That’s as maybe, love, but you mark my words, Baker’ll soon have you working, and soon the rosy glow of escaping your mum and dad’ll wear off.” That night, after we’d had sex - I was already seeing it as having sex, not making love - I lay there thinking about how much he smelt, and not just from what it was he was smoking. I thought I must smell too. I hadn’t had a wash of any sort in over two days. There was no water in this place, no power, no lights. It wasn’t long before I was put to work. Did you know? Or did you just ignore it, pretend that I didn’t exist once you were outside working? That first time Baker brought home a friend he thought I might like to meet. Not that this friend wanted to chat. When I tried to protest, I was told I had to pull your weight. The money from my phone, my watch, that had long gone. Afterwards Dee came to see me. “First one’s always the worst. Here.” She handed me a tablet. When I asked what it was, she said, “Only a sleeping tablet. Help you sleep tonight.” I accepted the tablet, not really caring if it was anything more, but I didn’t hear you come back that night. There were others, of course there were, and still you didn’t seem to notice. And sometimes you didn’t even seem to notice me at all. And it came so that I didn’t notice who I shared that mattress with either. One evening, you were still working, Baker was on the phone. Dulcie had not looked well all week, hadn’t eaten anything for days that I had seen. I went in to see if she was okay, only to see that she’d finally checked out of this place. Her body was beginning to turn blue, the needle still in her arm. Her skeletal frame would not have to turn any more tricks. When I told Baker, he threw a fit, as if it was my fault, not his, that she’d died. “We’ll have to get out of here,” he said. He told me to get my coat, we were leaving. I didn’t have a coat, I’d arrived in summer and now we were edging towards winter, so I took Dulcie’s. I didn’t think she’d miss it. Baker dragged me out, took hold of me by the wrist, pulling me along. It was the first time I’d been out the place since I got there. We went through the town, along deadbeat roads. We were going to another place, he said. I wondered what would become of you, you who I thought I’d loved so much, but maybe he was just throwing you to the dogs as well. Maybe he thought you’d take the rap for Dulcie. It’s as he was dragging me through town that I saw her. We‘d got to some traffic lights, Baker was trying to drag me across the road when I looked at the stopped car. There was Carrie, Carrie with her dad and her brother. I remembered what Dee had said, to get out when I could. Carrie and I had never been friends, but I had to try. I stopped, pulled my hand from his and ran to that car. Baker tried to grab my arm, tried to drag me away, but I screamed. I could see Carrie’s face as she recognized me, recognized who I was. Carrie, who told her dad and her brother to help me. Carrie who shouted attracting the attention of others so Baker had no other option but to run away alone. I was taken back then. Back home, back to where I used to belong. There were hugs, there were tears. Even my brother was glad to see me, and he hadn’t taken my room. It’s early days, and we’re still trying to work it out, still trying to see if we can fit the pieces back together. I’m sorry you’ve not got a roof over your head. If you did have a roof, it’d probably be a prison cell. At least my statement saved you from that. But now you’re on the streets, and I don’t know what I can do about that. I wish you’d go and get help. You’re not like Baker. I wish you’d get clean, turn your life around. Then you could get a room, a small place, a tiny place even, a bedsit, or a room over a shop. And maybe then you could take a girl there, heat up some soup on the small stove, sit together on the twenty-year-old sofa, sleep in that too-small bed. Start a new life.