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
Over 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 underneath her long, black fringe.
'I'd say what the hell are we doing here?' Honey laughed. 'Let's go. Now!' And she'd dragged Mia up from the filthy stairs on which they sat. Honey told Jill that she could tell even then that Mia was scared of the place they were going, but she didn't really care. Nowhere was safe anyway, right?
Mia and Honey had caught the train from Parramatta to Auburn and jumped down onto the tracks to avoid the ticket collectors. They'd scrambled up to the soggy street above the station platform and looked around. Kebab shops and amusement centres spilled coloured lights onto the wet roads, but the rain, and the dinner hour of 6 p.m., meant there were few people about.
'Um, I think it's this way,' Mia had said, holding onto Honey's cold hand as they made their way through the darkening streets. The shops alternated with houses and unit blocks now, and Mia eventually stopped in front of a block of flats, pushing the hood back from her sweatshirt, revealing her dark eyes. 'Shit,' she muttered, 'I know it's one of these.'
While they stood there shivering, a fat black car glided into the gutter in front of the units. A tall, skinny man with a scarred face and broken nose exited the front passenger's door. He threw them a hungry look, and opened the back door of the expensive car. Mia pulled at Honey's hand.
This was Honey's first sight of Mr Sebastian – a man in a dark suit. He stepped from the rear seat, pushing aside the thin man who was trying to offer him an umbrella. He smiled widely at Honey and Mia, his eyes on them from the moment the door had been cracked.
'What are you children doing out here in the rain?' he had asked them, covering the ground between them alarmingly quickly. 'Are you lost?'
Honey had expected Mia to make a typical smartarsed reply to this stranger, and was taken aback by her head-bowed silence and the white knuckled grip of her hand.
'Ah, I see it's little Mia,' he said when they didn't answer, 'and a friend. Lovely. Lovely,' he beamed, smiling down into Honey's face. 'I'm glad you've come to visit us, Mia,' he said, still looking at Honey. 'Let's get inside.'
The man had placed his big hand in the small of Honey's back, and marched them forwards towards the unit block. Honey noted that she and Mia were suddenly flanked on three sides by the men who'd got out of the car.
Although the apartment block was unprepossessing from the outside, the unit into which they were steered seemed amazing to Honey. The heavy front door opened into a wide room and Honey told Jill she'd later learned that the apartment had been rebuilt from the inside and took up the entire floor. Shiny white floors stretched towards several closed doors at the back of the large room. Huge potted palms filled the corners, and low leather lounges were wrapped around coffee tables and two huge television screens. A small boy in pyjamas was asleep on one of the lounges, sucking his thumb. Another boy, who looked about Honey's age, did not look up when the door opened, intent upon the joystick and video game in front of him. A white cat snaked out of a shining black kitchen and slinked around a corner before Honey could bend to pat her.
Honey and Mia stayed at the apartment for three days, helping themselves to food from the walk-in pantry and huge refrigerator, watching TV, and playing video games with Ethan and Andrew, the two boys sharing the unit. Honey slept curled up on one of the lounges with Mia and the white cat, occasionally waking when men came and went at odd hours.
On their second day at the unit, Mia had left with one of the men. She did not want to talk to Honey when she returned that evening, instead sitting with her knees under her chin, playing video games for hours.
Honey didn't see Mr Sebastian again until the morning of their fourth day. She was sick of being inside and she and Mia had decided to go shoplifting for clothes at Westfield in Parramatta.
She and Mia were trying to figure out how to open the front door of the unit when it was opened suddenly, sending her sprawling backwards. There hadn't even been a sound to indicate the heavy door was about to open. She looked up to see Mr Sebastian smiling down at her, offering her his big hand. The smile didn't reach his eyes.
'Yougirls going somewhere, are you?' he asked, as Honey scrambled to her feet, ignoring his hand. Neither she nor Mia said a word.
'I'm going to need you today, Honey, Mia, so I don't want you going anywhere you could get lost. I'm hosting a dinner party tonight, and I'll be requiring your assistance.'
He walked past them into the kitchen, filling a glass with filtered water from the specially fitted tap on the granite benchtop. He spoke rapidly in another language to the hook-nosed man who'd entered the unit behind him, then turned back to the girls.
'Jamaal has some clothes for you to wear tonight. You can try them on now, please.'
Later that night Honey discovered the price of a warm place to sleep and food whenever she wanted it. Within a month or so she learned that being 'nice' to Mr Sebastian's friends also meant that she was given enough money to buy herself new clothes, jewellery and make-up. For the first month, although disgusted by the groping, fondling old men she was expected to kiss and cuddle, she'd thought that she could tolerate these weekly evenings for the exchange.
One night, however, a flabby white man, older than most of the others, had tried to push his penis into her bottom. She had run from him into the small bathroom that was attached to the bedroom they were in. Crying, she'd locked the door and hoped the man would get tired of waiting and leave.
Within ten minutes, she'd stopped crying and was plucking her eyebrows in the mirror when the door was kicked in. Mr Sebastian slammed the back of his hand across her mouth, splitting her lip and loosening her tooth. Jamaal picked her cowering body up from the floor and held out her arm. The thin man was smiling with stained teeth as he clenched his thumb and forefinger around her tiny bicep to restrict the blood flow. Flicking her arm a few times, Mr Sebastian then slid a thin needle into a vein in the crease inside her elbow. Both men stood back as she vomited into the bathtub, and then, her sobs subsiding, they led her back into the bedroom and left her with
