tacey did drugs. She did drugs the way other people have careers, except hers took more dedication. That summer she took in the crazy Russian kid that everyone else despised. Maybe she was so out of it at the time she didn't realise what she was doing, or perhaps in a lucid moment she saw more than the rest of them. Everyone despised the Russian kid at the time. The trash has to find some other trash to kick. The Russians weren't popular, except with the punters. Perhaps it was some atavistic prejudice from the cold war, but mostly it was because they would do more for less, so it made it harder for the local girls to earn a living. You step on someone's living and pretty soon they'll start stepping on your face.

That's what happened to the Russian kid. She had been working a joint down by the arcades. She'd recently got over the shock of coming to the West and finding out that the artistic dancing she was supposed to do had a lot more to do with ass than art. The real art was the universal one of making money and staying alive. Anyway, she was starting to get adjusted to it and, after burying a weighty piece of pride, she had been doing the usual Russian tricks; flashing her tits at the punters and letting them have a feel, strictly against regulations, but guaranteed to keep them drawing those dollar bills from their pockets and tucking them into her panties. Well, some of the regular girls had had a few drinks and they had seen what she was doing, so after her spot was over, and she was heading towards her trailer, they jumped her. They tore her hair, banged her head against the sidewalk like it was a basketball, and punched her in the face.

Stacey never looked where she was going, whether stoned or not, and fell over the kid. When the kid started getting up she kind of recognised her through the blood and snot, took her back to her place and cleaned her up. In her grid-locked mind Stacey thought, at the time, that she knew her better than she did. But she got to know her. She holed up at Stacey's place until she was presentable and when she was working again it seemed sensible to stay on and share expenses.

That was how it happened and they ended up forming a kind of team; a mutual support agency. Stacey made her money tricking and the kid made her money at the bars, shaking her goods and luring the timid to loosen their grip on their beer and reach for something else, in exchange for a dollar bill. When one of them was too bombed out to work the other would carry on and provide the essentials.

Stacey had no home she cared to remember but the kid wrote home regular and sent money back regular too. She was saving up but her saving kind of slowed down with Stacey around. In her letters she explained how she was working as a secretary and told them amusing stories about the strange behaviour of the Yanks; long descriptions of New York and fictional accounts of where she was living and who she knew; she was a regular Dostoyevsky. She was always only staying on for a few months more, just long enough to accumulate some extra money. But the money kept going down as well as building up - especially if Stacey wasn't turning many tricks and still feeding her habit.

Stacey was on the way down about that time. She had once been quite select, so she still had a way to go before she hit the lower basement. She had even appeared in a handful of pornographic movies, when she still had all her looks. Occasionally she was still involved in the film business but now she just filled in for some of those shots where you don't see the performer's face - mostly getting it in the ass; like a lot of jobs it wasn't any way to get noticed. Stacey was doing a good job at not thinking about it, most of the time. But those sad cases sitting at the bar, and waiting for their turn to slip their hand into the Russian kid's brassiere, were all regularly getting it in the ass in their line of work, one way or another.

The flashing neon sign outside the bar where Olga worked said Go Go. But the Johns went in anyway, you can't give anybody advice. They hadn't got any place else to go and they wanted someone to make them feel good. Inside the bar the Johns sat at the counter, their attention wandering between the video jukebox and the dancers. Each held a bottle of over priced beer in his fist, like a badge of office. With luck the beer was cold and as they held it the condensation sweated down the outside of the bottle, cooling their hot hands, while their eyes feasted on the female flesh wiggling before them. They were all losers, and not beautiful losers, just losers.

Olga sashayed onto the dance floor in her red skimpy and ground her hips to the electronic beat. Soon she was down on all fours and waving her butt in the face of an anxious looking construction worker, in an attempt to get him to relax his hold on his wallet. It worked. Moving vigorously to the horny beat of the dance music she worked her way around the snaking dance top, which curved around the drinkers, allowing them multiple views of the dancers' contortions; and it ensured the girls could get close enough to the customers to give them plenty of thrills and snap up the dollar bills.

Olga looked into their eyes; hungry eyes, expectant eyes, longing, avaricious, painful eyes. And though she hated them she smiled and flashed her eyes and waved her butt in a flimsy imitation of passion nobody but a deranged optimist could ever believe. They believed it, those who wanted to believe it. It would get them hotter if they thought she wanted them and loosen their grip on their money.

When she was dancing Olga adopted this trash personality, like a suit of armour it covered her real self. It was another's flesh the punters stroked and prodded, it was not hers. The sweaty palms touched not her but someone else close to her yet far away, like a dream friend.

Sometimes Olga would reflect on this strange place called America; a place where you could make a lot of money, if you did the things people wanted. A place where you could be completely free and completely neglected, where you could get rich quick or die in the gutter and nobody would care.

They lived down in Coney Island. In the morning you could still catch the sea breeze as it played among the litter, rolling the occasional discarded beer bottle along the boardwalk, before the engine fumes overcame it. It was good to walk along the pier in the morning, past the boarded up stalls and the debris of the night before. The tangled hulk of the roller-coaster, quietly silhouetted against the sky, looked like the skeletal remains of a dinosaur. It felt like walking on the set of one of those 1950s science fiction horror films where everyone has fled town before the approach of giant mutant ants. It was quiet in the morning and got steadily louder as the day progressed.

One strange effect of taking in the Russian kid was to bring some kind of lost normalcy back into Stacey's life. The neat homey things that Olga did around the apartment would remind her of home. It was strange that it took living with a foreigner, someone whose home was oceans away, to bring back to Stacey what home meant. She even began to think maybe things could change. Perhaps all that uncool home stuff wasn't so bad after all, if it didn't involve everybody telling you what to do all the time; and anyway Olga glamorised it with her foreign touch. She would bring home cut flowers and place them in a vase on the table. They would be sitting there, like a telegram from heaven, when Stacey got in. But real home wasn't like that. Real home was always getting the blame and never feeling right.

When she started to grow up Stacey no longer felt at home at home. Her father would look at her as if he wanted to fuck her and hit her all at the same time. It alarmed her. There was a rage about the place that seemed to be caused by her body growing up and there was nothing she could do about it. Because of all this she stayed out a lot. She got friendly with other kids who stayed out a lot. But this just annoyed her dad even more. He told her she was a tramp when all she wanted was to be herself. When he hit her her mother just stood there watching, or walked away when it got too intense, she never helped. Her mother's only response was to go to the doctor and demand her tranquilliser dosage be upped. After a while, after her father had kept on looking at her that way and kept on telling her she was a tramp she said to herself, Okay, I'll be a tramp. So one day she just packed a bag and left. She stole as much money as she could find around the house but it wasn't much. She was fifteen. She'd been upping and leaving places ever since. And all the time she was just searching for someone in whom she could place her trust. But she never found them. She kept dumping her heart in people's laps only to have them get up quick and dump it on the floor. That was how it felt. People were unreliable, but drugs were different, with drugs you knew what you had most of the time, you could rely on drugs, they always gave you what you wanted.

But with Olga Stacey had found someone who didn't jump a mile when she showed them her vulnerability. She liked that. And though they often argued, usually about money, about where it had gone, they got on well. Olga was like an imaginary sister to Stacey, and was way better than the real thing.

Sometimes, late at night or early in the morning, when they had finished working, Stacey would tell Olga a story. They would climb into bed together and snuggle beneath the blankets and Stacey would tell her favourite day-dream. In the story Stacey receives an unexpected inheritance; some distant but well-heeled relative with an unquestioning affection for some long trapped, and hopelessly out of date, memory of Stacey in her blossoming girlhood. Stacey would inherit this big old place out in the country, out in the middle of the fields and the forests, most of which, it turned out, belonged to Stacey now. Stacey and Olga would move in and play house in their imaginations.

They'd go through all the rooms, it was a big house and there were a lot of rooms. They'd admire the views, decorate the walls and furnish the spaces. When they got bored they'd take walks in the 'park', that's what all the land around the house was called, and they'd fish in the river but always throw what they caught back. They'd talk about how they would get there and what they would do when they got there. And they would always end up in each others' arms in a big but cosy-warm bed that had an all together familiar feel to it; like the bed they were in. Outside the sirens would wail, the drunks argue and the sullen kids kick shit out of the trash-cans, but inside their room was warmed by their imaginations, and their vistas looked out not at the shabby brick walls but at the rolling park land of some beautiful Connecticut of the mind. And pretty soon Olga would fall asleep, and Stacey would listen, in the half-light provided by the street lights, to the sound of Olga's breathing and the sweet rise and fall of that contentment would lull Stacey to sleep.

One day Billy turned up from nowhere. He arrived so suddenly he might have dropped out of the sky, but looking at him his origins were more likely to be from a lower region.

Billy was one of Stacey's old boyfriends. They had had a thing going once but, like all the others, he had left Stacey in the lurch when it suited him. And now he was back, all smiles and promises, optimistic talk, dollar bills and deceit. Stacey swallowed it all; she always did. She believed his big talk schemes and didn't probe his reasons for leaving or for suddenly reappearing. She was just happy. Billy threw some money around and they all had a laugh; that kind of good time that always has a bad time lurking behind it. Billy had been in the army when he was no more than a kid. The brutality of battlefields came naturally to him and he still had an unnerving tendency to turn places into war zones, even now. When Billy's eyes slid along the curves of Olga's body it made her shiver. It was like a trickle of cold water running down her. From that moment she could not relax in his presence.

He began to visit the apartment so often he might as well have lived there. She could always sense his presence; he gave off a scent of violence, like an approaching street gang; his eyes were always hunting. Stacey didn't seem to perceive his unfathomable menace, which chilled Olga's bones, she drifted closer and closer to him, oblivious to the damage that burned in his eyes. She seemed to lack that early warning system that screamed danger to Olga every time she saw him. Stacey had been living for too long in the confusion and chaos induced by analgesics for misplaced hopes and dreams, and the natural messages of self-preservation got lost somewhere along the way.

Olga could see it coming but couldn't tell it. She could think of no way of breaking into Stacey's dream of happiness and, like a vandal, shattering her carefully assembled trinkets of affection. Stacey, Olga said to herself, was too trusting; she had let a snake into the house and now you never knew where it might turn up.

It made Olga uneasy. One day she returned early from a shopping trip and caught Billy looking more than usually suspicious. As she entered the room he had been making some hasty rearrangement of the furniture. Later that day she searched around the room and discovered, hidden beneath the springs of the sofa, a weighty brown paper parcel. Inside its crinkled skin sat a big fat hand-gun with sleek rounds of ammunition rolling around beside it. She quickly re-wrapped the parcel and put it back beneath the sofa; it was some time before she could stop her hands shaking.

A day or two later she looked again and the parcel had gone. Billy too was gone, for a while. For a few weeks the apartment was free of his brooding presence. Stacey drooped, but Olga blossomed with relief; only in his complete absence did she realise how terrified she was by his presence. But Billy soon turned up again, all predatory smiles, hugs for Stacey and bundles of notes, promising parties. He even tried to fix Olga up with one of his friends. Any friend of Billy's was poison as far as Olga was concerned and Billy's buddy soon found out how cold it could get in Siberia.

After she found the gun she tried to warn Stacey about Billy. But Stacey wouldn't listen, she seemed to think it was some kind of cunning Russian plot to deprive her of her boyfriend and got all glarey eyed. Stacey was convinced that Olga was jealous and started picking fights and getting all possessive over silly things. Eventually Olga couldn't take it anymore and walked out; she stayed at a friend's place for a few weeks. It was lucky for Olga that she moved out when she did because shortly after that the N.Y.P.D. paid a call to the apartment. They set to dismantling it and it turned out Billy had stashed quite a heap of stuff there. Of course, the police didn't believe Stacey when she said she knew nothing about it; working in the sex industry and using drugs doesn't do a whole lot for your credibility with the police. It was a few days after they arrested Stacey that they picked up Billy. Turned out he was dealing in quite a big way and was implicated in some rough stuff with business rivals.

Stacey got sent down as an accessory. Once they got her inside she started to freak out. It was the first time her bloodstream had been clean for a long time and it didn't like it. If she could stick it maybe it would save her life; perhaps that bastard Billy did her a favour after all. You never can tell. Olga went up to see her at first but the look in her eyes declared she had had all she wanted to see of the land of the free. It wasn't long after that Olga went back home to Estonia. Turned out she wasn't Russian after all but as near as makes no difference to an American.

Stacey eventually got sent to some kind of secure rehab. place up in Connecticut. She got a postcard from Olga the other day, on the front was a picture of the interior of some palace they have over there. On the back she'd written, Look, I found our place. Stacey held the card very gently in her hands, as if the slightest pressure might break it. It quivered slightly as her hands shook. The card looked fragile, it was a bit crumpled at the corners, but it had come a long way.

[END]

© Colin Pink 2002