Free Vodka Doesn't Freeze by Leah Giarratano

with a double bed draped in a purple spread. Dark curtains covered the only window in the sitting room. The place smelled of stale smoke, but the surfaces looked pretty clean.
     
She swallowed and walked past Honey into the flat and waited for her eyes to adjust so she could look around.
     
'I'm not going to pretend I'm here with good news, Honey,' she started, watching the tall woman walk towards a Formica dining setting that took up most of the room. She perched on a chair at the table opposite Honey. 'It's going to be hard to catch these guys unless we get lucky or you remember something else.'
     
'Oh I never get lucky, Jill,' Honey took a drag of her cigarette, 'and they never get caught.'
     
Her hair in a ponytail, and the lolly-green contacts removed, Honey looked more like a fourteen-year-old school-girl than the pimped-out prostitute who'd come to the station today. Jill could see she was stoned, but she seemed calmer than that morning, and her speech was slow.
     
'It sounds like you've had it pretty hard,' said Jill cautiously, wondering what she was doing here, why she was inviting this woman to tell her a story she wasn't going to want to hear. She didn't need this right now.
     
God, it's hot in here, she thought.
     
Honey laughed flatly and leaned back in her chair, an appraising look on her face.
     
'You know I never asked you to come here, Sergeant Jackson,' she said, 'and I don't need your help.' She took another drag of her cigarette. 'So what do you want from me? Last cop in here got a blow job. The two before him wanted me to rat out the speed dealers in 31A. So what's your thing?'
     
Jill felt stupid. Her head had started to thump again and the smoke was making her throat dry. She realised she hadn't eaten anything since a banana at breakfast.
     
'Look, I'm sorry, Honey. You just looked really bad this morning and I wanted to make sure you hadn't done something silly. I knew if I sent mental health over here, you'd freak out, so I came myself. I'll get out of your way now. I'm glad you're okay.' She stood to go, hoping Honey would stand too and let her out.
     
Instead, Honey stayed seated. Her head on a slight angle, her eyes showed she was still obviously weighing Jill up. 'Can I get you a coffee?' she asked, finally.
     
'Water. Water would be great,' said Jill, sitting again, 'and do you have any Panadol?'
     

12
O VER THE NEXT TWO HOURS , Jill learned that Honey had run away from home twice by the age of ten. The second time she'd left, her mother had not even tried to find her, furious that her latest boyfriend spent more time watching Honey than her.
     
Watching Honey's every move was not the only thing her stepfather had done, though. At least three nights a week, he would stumble, drunk, into Honey's bedroom and perform oral sex on the frightened little boy. The other four days of the week, apparently cleansing himself of feelings of shame, the man would subject Honey to beatings and verbal abuse. When the nighttime visits escalated to sodomy, Honey fled, living in a park with other children who felt safer sleeping under a bridge than in their own beds.
     
One wet and freezing Sydney winter's night, Honey was huddled in the dirty stairwell of a supermarket, eating a barbecue chicken pilfered from a fat shopper's trolley. Her new friend Mia, a beautiful Vietnamese girl who looked around Honey's age but was actually fourteen, was sharing the meal. Honey had been wearing girl's clothes whenever she could for as long as she could remember and now that there was no one to interfere, her black hair was curling down almost to her shoulders. She knew that no one she met for the first time would think of her as anything other than the girl she believed she was.
     
'What would you say if I said there was somewhere we could stay tonight?' Mia had asked Honey, trying to wipe her chicken-greasy hands on the inside of her jeans so the stains wouldn't be so obvious. She glanced at Honey sideways from