Chapter Sixty
Sixty
Mary and Denise weren’t really sisters, but they had known each other since they were both young teenagers, back in the UK.
To escape being beaten up and sexually abused by her mother’s drunken boyfriend, Mary, or Grace-Kelly, as she was then, had run away from home in the middle of the night at the age of fifteen.
The abuse had started when she was only twelve years old.
Denise’s childhood story, or Julia Cunningham, as she was known back then, hadn’t been that much dissimilar.
She, too, had run away from a terribly abusive household in her early teens.
Her stepfather, a greasy-haired, big-bellied slob of a man, who consistently smelled of fried onions and kebab meat, had started forcing himself onto her on the night of her thirteenth birthday.
The abuse repeated itself at least once a week for exactly two years, until her fifteenth birthday, when Julia sneaked up on her drunken stepfather, who had fallen asleep on the living room couch, after forcing himself into her once again.
The sight disgusted Julia, and she decided that she’d had enough.
If her mother wouldn’t do anything about the abuse that she knew was happening, then Julia would.
In the kitchen, she boiled a full kettle of salty water before pouring the scalding liquid onto her stepfather’s testicles and smashing the kettle against his head.
She didn’t stick around to find out what happened next.
A few weeks later, Grace and Julia met by chance on the streets of Liverpool, northwest England.
Grace had come from one of the poorest suburbs in Birmingham and Julia from Blackpool, in Lancashire.
They were both fifteen, homeless, hungry and hurting – but most of all, they both hated their families, especially their ‘stepfathers’ – and a sad truth about humanity was that ‘hate’ could bring people together and create a much stronger bond than ‘love’ ever could.
The two girls immediately became more than friends.
To each other, they became the cool sister that neither girl ever had, and very quickly discovered that they had something else in common other than their deep hate for their families.
Even at such a young age, they were both breathtakingly pretty…
and theirs was the kind of pretty that would make intelligent men do the dumbest of things, make tough men cry, sturdy men go weak at the knees and important men crawl at their feet.
Theirs was the kind of pretty that would make husbands divorce their wives and leave their children behind…
it was the kind of pretty that men and women would die – and kill – for.
‘If you have it, flaunt it.’ That was what Dylan, a boy who they’d also met on the streets of Liverpool, used to tell them.
He was a couple of years older than Grace and Julia, and worked at a small traveling funfair called ZigDust, where he was in charge of one of the ‘rigged’ games of chance.
The three of them quickly struck up a tight friendship, and Dylan managed to convince Mr. McKeelan, the funfair owner, to take the girls in and give them a job.
It wasn’t much, or even a good job – mainly cleaning and helping out with the children’s rides – but it kept them fed and a roof over their heads.
It was then, as they traveled around with the funfair, that the two girls discovered that they both had a natural talent when it came to picking up different accents.
Whichever city they landed in – Liverpool, Newcastle, Birmingham, Manchester…
it didn’t matter – they could pick up the local accent in a matter of minutes…
and they would both sound pitch perfect.
Recognizing how useful the girls’ beauty and their incredible ability to easily blend in with the locals would be to him, Dylan decided to teach Grace and Julia how to con and pickpocket people on the streets.
It was Dylan who taught them their first-ever con, a different spin on the classic ‘cup and ball’ game – three cups, one ball – find the ball.
One night, while their funfair was in Leeds, Yorkshire, after scoring the most amount of money that they’d ever scored on a single evening, pickpocketing shoppers during Christmas season, the three of them decided to celebrate with a couple of bottles of Champagne.
Dylan had tried it once, but neither of the girls had ever had Champagne before.
At the time, Dylan was eighteen years old and both Grace and Julia just sixteen.
The three of them danced, and laughed, and drank, but what the girls didn’t know was that while they were getting drunker and drunker on bubbles, Dylan was getting high on crystal meth and dropping small rocks of MDMA into the girls’ glasses.
Two bottles quickly became four, and the girls began feeling lightheaded and unsteady in a way that they’d never done before.
It didn’t take long for the world around them to start spinning, turning the room into a kaleidoscope of dizzying shapes and colors until they both passed out.
What exactly happened next, and for how long, they had never really found out, but Grace, who had crashed out face-first on top of some cushions in a corner of the room, opened her eyes for just an instant.
Not long enough for her to be able to see anything, but definitely long enough for the entire room to spin around her once again.
Grace felt something come alive inside her stomach before it fast-tracked its way up to her throat.
No time to look for a bucket or a bathroom.
Instead, Grace stuck her face between the cushions and vomited…
twice… that helped wake her up a little, but she still didn’t really know what was going on.
What Grace did know for sure was that she needed a large glass of water and some fresh air…
pronto. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand before slowly shifting her position on the cushions and that was when she saw Dylan across the room from her.
‘What the fuck?’ Those words came out tasting of puke.
Dylan was dressed in just his underwear, and he was lying on top of Julia, who was still passed out, but completely naked – her blouse, bra, jeans and panties, all discarded to one side.
‘What the fuck?’ Grace called again, bile-spit flying out of her lips, as she tried to push herself into a sitting position.
Her head was still all over the place, but the shock of what she’d just seen was sobering her up faster than black coffee and a cold shower.
‘What the fuck are you doing, Dylan?’ She managed to find the strength and crawl a couple of feet towards him.
Caught red-handed, Dylan had paused for a split second, but he was way too high, drunk and invested in what he was doing to be able to stop. Instead, he twisted his body around and slapped Grace across the face… hard.
‘Get off me, you fucking slag. She likes it. You gonna have to wait your turn.’ His face was awkwardly contorted, with a maniac look inside his eyes.
Grace fell backwards, as a blob of blood formed at the corner of her lips.
Dylan turned his attention back to Julia.
‘Jules,’ Grace tried yelling, knowing pretty well what was just about to happen, but the alcohol and the tears had weakened her vocal cords considerably. ‘Wake up, Jules… please… wake the fuck up.’
‘You better shut the fuck up before I shu—’ Dylan never finished his sentence. As he began turning his head to look back at Grace… BAM… his face was met by the thick end of one of the empty Champagne bottles… the one that Grace had swung at his head.
Blood flew up in the air from the cut just above his right eyebrow and Dylan dropped like a dead weight. He wasn’t dead though, and it took Grace the will of gods not to slice his penis off and shove it inside his mouth.
‘What the fuck is wrong with men?’ Grace kept on asking herself, as she finally managed to wake Julia up before helping her get dressed.
Julia was still too out of it to understand what had just happened.
After stripping Dylan of all the cash he had – enough to see them through at least a couple of weeks – Grace tied him to the bed and simply left him there, bleeding from a head wound, on the floor of that dirty caravan.
And that was how, at only sixteen years of age, Grace and Julia found themselves having to run away from abusive men for the second time in their lives… and Grace had a feeling that it wouldn’t be the last time either.