Free Postcards From Berlin by Margaret Leroy Page B

close to the other girls. I kept myself a little apart, not wanting them to find out about me. I saw this as
     a temporary thing. When things are OK, when this bad bit is over, when I’m back with my mother, I thought — then I will talk
     to them, make friends, be one of them. Not till then. Aimee at The Poplars was my only friend.
    She was wild, Aimee: a sharp, knowing face, hair like fire, tattoos all down her arm. She had a razor blade sewn into the
     hem of her jeans. For emergencies, she said. She never went to school.
    Aimee got picked on a lot by the staff at The Poplars. They told her she was trouble. She wasn’t like me; she wouldn’t just
     go along with things and bide her time. I’d always been able to do this — blend into the background, not be conspicuous, not
     be seen — but Aimee couldn’t or wouldn’t: There was something in her, some flame that wouldn’t be quenched. Brian Meredith
     hit her more than the others: for nicking stuff and getting into fights and being lippy. She used to call him Megadeath. “He’s
     got it coming,” she’d say. “I’ll do him over. Just you wait. One day.” Once he kept her for three weeks in Pindown. When she
     came out she’d ripped all the skin from the sides of her fingernails and sometimes she’d shout in her sleep.
    She ran away often. Sometimes she took me with her. She showed me how to do it, how to travel on a train without a ticket
     by hiding in the toilet, how to steal. We’d plan it all together in the room we shared, the street light falling through the
     thin curtains onto the battered candlewick of our bedspreads. Each time it was like falling in love; each time we thought
     this was the day, the time, the Real Thing. Usually, we’d head for Brighton, where Aimee had heard you could live in a squat
     and find some people who’d help you. Brighton was our promised land. We knew how it would be. We’d sell jewelry, those little
     leather thongs with stones on, we’d live on chips, read fortunes: We’d be like the older girls you saw there on the seafront,
     with their impossible glamour, their ratty ribboned hair and Oxfam coats and thin, thin bodies and wide, generous smiles.
    We’d pack our bags with a change of clothes and Kit Kats we’d nicked from Woolworths or minipacks of Frosties, and put on
     our trainers and go. And maybe we’d get there, and sleep on the beach by the pier, and the police would come and pick us up,
     and we’d be put in Pindown.
    The third time, they let me out after a week of Pin-down: I was quiet and sensible and sat at the table and wrote down the
     wrong things I’d done. But Aimee was kept there for fifteen days, and when she came out she had a chest infection. They’d
     taken the fuse out of the fire because she’d been stroppy, she said.
    I woke that night to see her sitting up in bed, the bedspread pulled up to her chin, her fists all bone, clasping it so tightly.
     The orange light through the curtains made her skin look sickly.
    “I’m going to tell,” she said, through her coughs. “What it’s like here. What he does, that motherfucking bastard.”
    “No,” I said. “You mustn’t. You can’t.”
    “Just watch me,” she said.
    Her social worker from the Civic Centre, Jonny Leverett, was a pallid man who wore heavy metal sweatshirts. The next time
     he came, he took her out in his Skoda, and they were gone for hours.
    “Well?” I said, when she came back.
    “I told him,” she said. Tearing at the skin at the sides of her fingernails. “They’ll have to do something now. They’ll have
     to come and get Megadeath. They’ll have to lock him up. Life would be too short for him.”
    Two days later, there was a case conference in the staff room. The car park was full of smart cars, and Lesley served coffee
     in the china cups that were kept for visiting professionals. Jonny Leverett came to take Aimee in.
    I was watching television when she found me.
    “I’m going to Avalon