“What name did she use?”
I hesitate, not really wanting to say it out loud, but realize that I have to now. “She called herself Maggie. Maggie O’Neil, but that isn’t her real name.”
“How do you know that isn’t her real name?”
“Because Maggie O’Neil is dead.”
Eighteen
Essex, 1987
“Look alive, you need to get up, get dressed, and come downstairs today. I don’t have time to keep checking on you,” says Maggie, bursting into the room in her nightie. She pulls back the curtains, revealing another rainy day behind the bars on the window. She tugs the duvet off my bed and I shiver. I am still wearing pajamas that say AIMEE on the front to remind me of my new name. I’ve been wearing them ever since I arrived here, which I think is three days ago now.
“Why are there bars on the window?”
“To keep the bad men out. There are bad people who try to take things that don’t belong to them, and the bars help keep us safe.”
I don’t feel safe when she tells me this, I feel scared. Then I think about how I don’t belong to Maggie, but she took me.
She opens the white wardrobe and I can see that it is full of clothes. Someone else’s. Maggie takes out a purple top and a pair of trousers, then lays them on the bed, along with some underwear and socks. “Put those on,” she says before leaving the room.
When she comes back, she is dressed and her face is covered in color. Orange on her cheeks, brown on her eyes, red on her lips. She’s wearing a short skirt and long boots. She looks at me in my trousers, which keep falling down, then shakes her head and tuts. She tuts a lot.
“You’re still too skinny, you need to eat more. Take them off.”
I do as she says while she opens the wardrobe again, her hand scraping the hangers along the pole as though she is cross with everything she sees.
“Try these.” She scrunches up some dark blue material, making me put one leg inside, then the other. I’ve never seen anything like it.
“What are they?”
“They’re called dungarees,” she replies, strapping me inside them. I repeat the name without making any sound, enjoying the silent shape the new word forces my tongue to make inside my mouth. “Come on then, I’ve got work to do. Hurry up and get downstairs.”
I’ve never been back down the stairs since I arrived.
I’m not allowed.
There’s even a white gate across the top to remind me.
When Maggie opens the gate and pushes me down the first step, I get scared. I’d forgotten how many steps there were, and I get a pain in my tummy looking down at them all. We didn’t have any steps at all at home, we lived in something called a bungalow, and I think I preferred living down on the ground.
“What are these?” I ask, stepping over one of the orange strips of wood on the floor, careful not to hurt my feet on the metal spikes.
“They are carpet grippers, and the green stuff is carpet liner. Hurry up.”
“Where’s the carpet?” I walk my fingers along the cork wall.
“Carpet costs money, and money doesn’t grow on trees. You have a nice carpet in your bedroom, that’s all you need to worry about. You have the nicest room in the flat, so try to be grateful, Baby Girl.” That is what she likes to call me now: Baby Girl. It is another new name, just like Aimee.
At the bottom of the stairs I think we might be going outside, and I’m worried because I’m not wearing a coat or shoes. But we are not going outside. Instead, Maggie takes out her giant set of keys and starts unlocking the metal door I saw the first night I arrived here. Then she slides the bolts at the top, middle, and bottom. When she opens the door, I can’t see anything, only black, but then she flicks a switch and lights come on all over the ceiling above me. It’s as though we have stepped inside a spaceship.
“This is the shop,” she says.
It doesn’t look like a shop. There are lots of TV screens everywhere, and I wonder how anyone could watch more than one television program at a time. Bits of newspapers are taped to the white walls, next to posters covered with numbers and pictures of horses. There are black leather stools that are taller than I am, and ashtrays everywhere. In the corner of the room is a counter that looks a bit like the ones you see in a bank. It has a glass panel with just a few holes for speaking through.
“You are never to come into the shop when we have customers. You are to stay in the back room.” She unlocks the door that leads behind the counter, where I can see two shopping tills and lots of little bits of paper.
“What does the shop sell?”
“We’re bookmakers.”
I think about that for a little while. “Then where are all the books?”
She laughs. “We don’t sell books, Baby Girl.”
“Then what do you sell?”
She thinks for a moment, then smiles at me. “Dreams.”
I don’t understand.
We walk through another room where there are telephones, a big scary-looking machine, and a dirty-looking sink. Then we’re inside a smaller room, with just a dusty desk, a chair, a tiny TV, and another door with locks that looks as if it might lead outside. She pushes me down onto the chair, and her hand hurts my shoulder.
“Will I be allowed to go home in time for my birthday next week? I’m going to be six on the sixteenth of September.”
“This is your home now, and it is not your birthday next week. Your birthday is in April, and you’re going to be seven next year.”
I don’t know what to say about that. She is wrong. I know how old I am, and I know when my birthday is.
“Do you know what a bet is?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s like I bet you one conker that it will rain today.”
She laughs and I remember how pretty she looks when she smiles. “Yes, clever girl, that’s exactly what it is. The shop is somewhere people come to place bets, but not about the weather; they mostly bet on horses and sometimes dogs.”
“Horses and dogs? How can you bet on a horse?”
“Well, the horses race, and the people place bets on which one will come first. But they don’t do it for conkers, they do it for money.”
I try to make sense of it all. “What if they lose?”
“Good question. If they lose, we keep their money and buy more carpets for upstairs. Do you understand?”
I shake my head no, and she starts to look cross again.
“If it’s a shop, then don’t you have to sell something?”
“We do, I told you already. We sell dreams, Baby Girl. Dreams that will never come true.”
Nineteen
London, 2017
“I’m afraid I still don’t follow,” I say.
Detective Alex Croft and her sidekick have been in my dressing room for some time now, and it’s starting to feel as if there isn’t enough oxygen in here for the three of us. I keep staring at the door, like an emergency exit I’d like to escape through, but she just keeps staring at me, then expels another sigh before speaking.
“I’m asking you, again, what happened when you got back from the petrol station?”