Sara reached down for the shopping bag at her feet, got out of the van, and crossed the road. She glanced back over her shoulder and saw Tony watching her. He looked away a full second after their eyes met.

8: Esther

8: Esther

Esther Mooney shook with nerves as she waited in the Lido Café on Belfast’s Great Victoria Street. He had said ten in the morning. It was now five past and she feared he wouldn’t come, that it had been some sort of strange and cruel joke. She wore her best clothes, the modest dress her mother had bought for her two summers ago, just a week before she died, leaving Esther an orphan. It wasn’t an expensive dress, but it had cost every last penny her mother had. Her father’s passing two years before had left them close to destitute, but her mother insisted she would have a decent dress for going to church on a Sunday. She wouldn’t be looked down upon by the others in the congregation. Her mother couldn’t bear to be pitied, to be seen to have been brought so low by their bad luck.

So low?

Her mother had no idea how deep and bottomless low can be. Esther knew. She had found out in the back of a strange man’s car and was paid a pound for the humiliation. If it were possible for a person to die twice, then her mother would have done so at the knowledge of what Esther allowed that man to do to her. As she staggered from the car, the pound note in one hand, her torn underwear in the other, she swore she would never do that again. She would starve first. When the money was spent, she chose a different degradation: she stole a roll of silk from a draper’s shop with the intention of trying to sell it to one of the traders at Smithfield Market. The shop’s owner had caught her halfway through the door, dragged her back in by her wrist, and held her down on the floor while his young assistant called the police. Esther had kicked and screamed and cursed but it did no good.

She did not go to prison, for which she supposed she should have been glad. Instead she was sent to live at the workhouse, given a bed in a dormitory full of other girls and women. All of them knew what she was as soon as she entered, that she was not from their world, that she had fallen from a greater height than them. She did not sleep those first nights, the thin blanket pulled over her head, hearing the whispers of the others. Posh girl, they called her. Stuck-up bitch.