Top of the pile was, predictably, the hospital shot. The new mum propped on pillows, holding the new baby close to her chest and giving the camera an exhausted smile. Chrissie Higgins looked more raddled than radiant. She must have been about the same age her daughter was now, but you wouldn’t have guessed it. Her face was puffy, her skin looked rough and there were dark smudges under her eyes. It could have been the toll of a hard labour, but more likely it had been a hard life. Nevertheless, I could see the resemblance to her daughter.
‘I wasn’t much to look at,’ Scarlett said without glancing at the photo. ‘I look like a hundred-year-old monkey.’
She wasn’t far wrong. ‘All babies look like that,’ I said. ‘But we’re programmed to love our own so we don’t notice.’
Scarlett snorted. ‘Programmed to love our own? I don’t fucking think so! My mum couldn’t wait to get out of the hospital and have a drink. She was down the pub before I was a week old.’
‘Did she take you with her?’
‘Sometimes. Mostly she left me with her mum. She was already an alcoholic. And my dad was in between stretches and she didn’t want to lose him, which meant she had to go out on the town with him. She didn’t want some other slapper catching his eye and snagging him.’ That blistering contempt again. ‘Like anyone would think he was a catch, for fuck’s sake.’ She folded her arms tight against her chest and sighed. ‘Is this what we’re going to do, then? Look at old photos so I can have a good bitch about how crap my life’s been?’
I smiled. I had to defuse her defensiveness. ‘Well, the readers have to learn how crap it was. That’s the only way they’ll understand the scale of the journey you’ve made,’ I said mildly. ‘We’ll come back to the pictures another time, once I have a clearer sense of where they fit in. What I want to talk about today is when you were a kid. We can’t just ignore it, pretend it never happened. Not if you’re going to explain your life properly to your own child. I can see it wasn’t a great time for you, which is all the more reason to get it out of the way. Then it’s not hanging over you.’
She considered what I’d said, then nodded. ‘You’re right. OK. What do you want to know?’
Standard procedure, step one. ‘What’s your earliest memory?’
Like they all do, she thought for a moment. ‘At the funfair,’ she said slowly. ‘With my dad.’
I softened and lowered my voice. ‘What I want you to do now is close your eyes and picture that memory. I want you to sink back into it, like you were sinking into the most comfortable bed. Let everything go and picture that little girl at the funfair. Let the years float away and flow backwards in time to that trip to the funfair.’
Scarlett burst out laughing. ‘What is this? You trying to hypnotise me, or what?’
‘Not exactly. I’m trying to get you to relax, that’s all. A strong memory’s a good place to start.’
‘You’re not going to get me under the influence and make me do all sorts?’
From what I’d seen of Scarlett on TV, it didn’t take much to achieve that. But it wouldn’t have been helpful to point that out. ‘No. I’m just trying to get the ball rolling. If you don’t want to start with that memory, we’ll move on to something else. But I’m warning you now, I’ll want to come back here. So we might as well deal with it now.’
‘Why not? It’s not like there’s a problem with it or owt. It was only a trip to the fair.’ She rolled her eyes then leaned back, resting her head against a cowhide-covered cushion and closing her eyes. I waited and, after a pause, her breathing slowed. When she spoke again, her voice was slower and more measured. ‘I’m at the funfair. It tastes of hot dogs and onions and diesel and candy floss. The air smells hot. I’m up in the sky . . . ’
‘Are you on a ride?’ I spoke softly, not wanting to break the moment.
‘I’m on my dad’s shoulders. I’m up above everybody’s heads. It’s dark, ’cos it’s night time. There’s coloured lights everywhere, it’s like I’m inside a rainbow or summat. My hand’s in my dad’s hair, it’s really thick and wiry and if I grab on too tight he shouts at me to leave off.’
‘Is your mum there too?’
‘I can see the top of her head if I look down. They’ve both got cans, I can smell they’re drinking beer. But they’re laughing and joking and it’s like we’re just like everybody else.’ She opened her eyes and sat up abruptly. ‘That’s why I remember it. For once, I didn’t feel scummy. Like everybody was looking down on us.’ She shook her head with a grim smile. ‘We were the neighbours from hell. Nobody wanted us living next door.’
‘But you still managed to have a good time together. At the fair.’
‘Why do you think I remember it?’ Scarlett leans forward, apparently animated by genuine curiosity.
‘Because it was fun, I suppose?’
‘Because it was a complete bloody one-off,’ she said bitterly. ‘I hardly have any memories of my dad. I was only six when he died and he spent most of those six years inside. Apart from the fair, all I remember is him and my mum drunk and fighting. Shouting and slapping each other. The kind of thing that makes you want to hide under the bed and lie in your own piss when you’re little.’
There wasn’t much I could say that didn’t sound patronising or dismissive. ‘Do you ask people about him? People who knew him?’
‘Of course I do. You want to know shit like that, don’t you?’
‘Of course you do. And you want to pass that knowledge on to your kid. So tell me what you know about him. What other people have told you.’
It was a depressing tale. Alan Higgins was one of seven kids who had run wild from childhood thanks to an alcoholic father and a tranked-up mother. His older brothers had introduced him to burglary, car theft and a wide range of scams at an early age and he’d taken to crime with gusto. Unfor tunately his enthusiasm wasn’t matched by his skill, his intelligence or his luck. By the time he’d met Chrissie, he’d been in detention twice as a juvenile and once as an adult. Last time, he’d discovered the delights of heroin and from then on, his life became a tired treadmill of stealing to feed his habit, getting caught, going to jail and coming out to start the cycle all over again. He managed to stay out long enough to impregnate Chrissie with Scarlett and Jade, her older sister, but he was seldom around for the day-to-day.
‘Everybody that knew him says he wasn’t a bad lad,’ Scarlett said wearily. ‘He was just weak. And lazy. If you’re rich and you’re weak and lazy, somebody makes sure you end up with a job and shit. But if you’re poor, you end up like my dad.’ It was another of those startling insights. And as soon as she’d spoken, Scarlett looked as if she wanted to snatch the words back.
I didn’t want to make an issue of it. I was beginning to suspect there might be more to the Scarlett Harlot than met the eye, and I didn’t want to make her wary of me. ‘How did he die?’ I said, moving the conversation along. I thought I knew the answer, but I wanted to hear it from her. To see how honest she was going to be.
‘You know how he died. You’ve not come here without googling me. It’s on the Internet. You tell me.’ Arms folded again, she stared me down.
‘Of course I googled you. I checked you out before I agreed to meet you in the first place. If I hadn’t been interested by what I read, you’d never have heard my name. But that doesn’t mean I believe everything online. I’d be pretty crap at my job if I did. I know what I read about your dad. You probably know what I read. What I’m asking is for you to tell me the truth.’ We were barely an hour into the day and already I was feeling worn out. Scarlett was harder to calm down than a cat in a vet’s waiting room. Most minor celebs were so thrilled to have an audience and so convinced that every aspect of their lives was fascinating, the problem was shutting them up. But Scarlett was making me work for a living. It had been a while, and I was no longer certain I was going to enjoy this project.
She glared at me for a little longer, then relented. ‘It’s true. What it says online. He died from AIDS. He must have got it off a dirty needle. In jail, they all shared needles all the time. They didn’t have a choice. There’s no fucking needle exchanges in the nick. So, yeah, a dirty needle.’ Her mouth twisted in a harsh line. ‘Or else whatever he had to do to get smack when he was inside. I’m not stupid, I know what goes on.’
‘That must have been hard for your mum.’
‘No kidding. All the finger-pointing, the name-calling. I was too young to get it at the time, but believe me, it went on for years. Until I was well able to understand. Ignorant bastards that thought because he had AIDS, so did she. And so did me and Jade. At school, in the street, lads would point and jeer, “There goes the AIDS sisters,” and shit like that. We had to toughen up early, me and Jade.’
‘Was he back home when he died?’
‘No, thank God. That would have made it even worse. He died in jail. My mum went mental at them, said he should be allowed out on compassionate grounds, but her heart wasn’t in it. She likes a battle for its own sake. Having him home would have done her head in. It would have been me and Jade looking after him, not her.’
