Free Candy by Kevin Brooks Page B

prostitute? What does that mean? How old is she? Sixteen? Seventeen? Fifteen? Fourteen? Does it matter…?
    Did it matter?
    I couldn’t convince myself that it didn’t.
    And I knew I had to talk to her. No matter how much I wanted to ignore all the questions and just enjoy the thrill of being with her, I knew it wasn’t enough. I couldn’t spend all day just gawping at her, for God’s sake. She was a person, not a photograph in a magazine. She was real.
    We were heading toward the penguin pool now. I was walking along on my own, struggling with my guilty thoughts, when I looked up and saw Candy waiting for me at the end of the pathway. She was leaning against a signpost, smoking a cigarette, studying me closely. I got the feeling she knew exactly what I was thinking.
    “Hey,” she said as I approached. “It’s good, isn’t it?”
    “What?”
    “The zoo. ”
    “Oh, yeah…”
    She rubbed her arms and pulled down her sleeves.
    I said, “Aren’t you cold without a coat?”
    “Never feel the cold,” she said. “I’ve got hot blood.”
    Her skin looked cold to me—pale and white and prickled with goose bumps—but I didn’t say anything.
    “Do you want to get a coffee or something?” she said. “There’s a little café over there.”
    “OK.”
    She dropped her cigarette to the ground and stepped on it, then looped her arm through mine and started leading me up the path. “I’ll buy you that doughnut I promised you,” she said, leaning against me. “And then you can tell me all about yourself.”
    Now I was the one with goose bumps.
    It wasn’t much of a café, just a medium-sized room with a dozen or so tables and a serving counter at the front. It was empty and quiet, though, and it had a pretty nice view, and I didn’t really care what it was like, anyway. They didn’t have any doughnuts, so we got ourselves two Jungle Platters and two mugs of coffee, and Candy insisted on paying.
    “My treat,” she said.
    “But you paid for us to get in—”
    “Don’t worry about it,” she said, pushing my money away and pulling a wad of notes from her purse. “See? I’m loaded.”
    As we took our trays to a window table, my mind drifted back to the time in McDonald’s when she’d shown Iggy a handful of notes and said, See? I wouldn’t lie to you, Iggy, you know I wouldn’t… and he’d just sat there staring at her—staring his stare—and she’d shrunk back into her seat, cowering in silence…
    I looked at her now—putting her tray on the table, sorting out the cutlery, her face flushed bright with the warmth of the café—and it was hard to imagine that Iggy even existed.
    I knew he did, though, and I knew I had to find out about him. But I also knew I had to be careful. If I said the wrong thing, if I got too pushy…I didn’t know what might happen.
    “So,” Candy said, tucking into her chips, “where do you want to start?”
    “Start what?”
    “I want to know everything about you—where you were born, who you are, what you like doing…What’s the matter?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Am I being too nosy?”
    “No, it’s not that—”
    “All right,” she said. “How about if I tell you what I think you are, and you tell me if I’m right or wrong? Is that any better?”
    “I don’t mind…”
    “Right—OK…let’s see. Your dad’s a gynecologist—”
    “I already told you that.”
    “I know —I’m just getting started. It’s no good just guessing, is it? You’ve got to start with the facts and work up from there. Fact number one: Your dad’s a gynecologist. Correct?”
    “Correct.”
    She dipped a forkful of chips into her egg, then paused,the fork in midair, looking thoughtfully at me. “That’s got to be hard work,” she said.
    “What?”
    “Being a gynecologist…I mean, you get up in the morning and go to work, and the first thing you do is start poking around inside someone’s fanny. That can’t be easy…especially if you’ve had a few drinks the