Noreen got to her feet and marched in circles around the floor, her fists and her jaw clenched, her nostrils flaring. Esther played the words over in her mind.

“What do you mean, please them?”

Noreen stopped, stared at her. “You know what I mean.”

Joy glanced at Mary. “We don’t like to talk out loud about it.”

Esther remembered the man in the car, his sticky hands, his tainted breath. Her walking away with her underwear in her hand, swearing to herself that she’d never allow such a thing to happen again.

“No,” she said. “They won’t touch me. I won’t have it.”

Noreen sat down again on the bed opposite. “They don’t care what you’ll have or you won’t. They’ll take what they want.”

“Not from me,” Esther said, meaning it. “And I won’t die here. I swear on my mother and my father’s grave, I will not die here.”

Noreen and Joy could not look at her. But Mary could. Her eyes deep and black and seeing into Esther’s very soul. Esther could stand to hold her gaze for no more than a moment, then she had to look away.

15: Mary

15: Mary

I was doting on that girl from the moment she came down them stairs. Or fell down them, I suppose. Most of the time I couldn’t wait to get upstairs into the light, even if I had to work like a dog, it was better than down there in the dark and the damp and the smell. But when she was there, that’s where I wanted to stay. The only thing I wanted was to be with her. I near wished she’d cry more so I could cuddle in and comfort her. And it wasn’t just that she was awful pretty and that she smelled clean and good and she didn’t have the filth under her nails that we did. It was because she was from out there, from the real world, where real people lived.

Sometimes I thought out there was just in my head. A place where people could go wherever they wanted whenever they wanted and no one was bating them and they could eat all the food they could fit in their mouths and they could drive cars and go to the seaside or the big city and all those things. Sometimes I felt like none of that was real, it was just stories Mummy Joy and Mummy Noreen telt me, and there was nothing further away than I could see from the windows or the yard.

And now here, wasn’t there someone from out there, and that made it real, and that made her special, and I wanted to know everything about it. So when the Mummies was upstairs working again, I asked her.

Says I, What’s it like out there? What’s the real world like?

Better than this, says she.