Career of Evil

By late afternoon she was hot, tired and trying not to resent her mother, who had texted repeatedly throughout the day with questions about the wedding. The last, telling her to ring the florist, who had yet another finicky question for her, arrived just as Robin had decided she needed something to drink. Wondering how Linda would react if she texted back and said she’d decided to have plastic flowers everywhere — on her head, in her bouquet, all over the church — anything to stop having to make decisions — she crossed to the chip shop, which sold chilled fizzy drinks.

She had barely touched the door handle when somebody collided with her, also aiming for the chip-shop door.

“Sorry,” said Robin automatically, and then, “oh my God.”

Stephanie’s face was swollen and purple, one eye almost entirely closed.

The impact had not been hard, but the smaller girl had been bounced off her. Robin reached out to stop her stumbling.

“Jesus — what happened?”

She spoke as though she knew Stephanie. In a sense, she felt she did. Observing the girl’s little routines, becoming familiar with her body language, her clothing and her liking for Coke had fostered a one-sided sense of kinship. Now she found it natural and easy to ask a question hardly any British stranger would ask of another: “Are you all right?”

How she managed it, Robin hardly knew, but two minutes later she was settling Stephanie into a chair in the welcome shade of the Stage Door Café, a few doors along from the chip shop. Stephanie was obviously in pain and ashamed of her appearance, but at the same time she had become too hungry and thirsty to remain upstairs in the flat. Now she had simply bowed to a stronger will, thrown off balance by the older woman’s solicitude, by the offer of a free meal. Robin gabbled nonsensically as she ushered Stephanie down the street, maintaining the fiction that her quixotic offer of sandwiches was due to her guilt at having almost knocked Stephanie over.

Stephanie accepted a cold Fanta and a tuna sandwich with mumbled thanks, but after a few mouthfuls she put her hand to her cheek as though in pain and set the sandwich down.

“Tooth?” asked Robin solicitously.

The girl nodded. A tear trickled out of her unclosed eye.

“Who did this?” Robin said urgently, reaching across the table for Stephanie’s hand.

She was playing a character, growing into the role as she improvised. The straw hat and the long sundress she was wearing had unconsciously suggested a hippyish girl full of altruism who thought that she could save Stephanie. Robin felt a tiny reciprocal squeeze of her fingers even as Stephanie shook her head to indicate that she was not going to give away her attacker.

“Somebody you know?” Robin whispered.

More tears rolled down Stephanie’s face. She withdrew her hand from Robin’s and sipped her Fanta, wincing again as the cold liquid made contact with what Robin thought was probably a cracked tooth.

“Is he your father?” Robin whispered.

It would have been an easy assumption to make. Stephanie could not possibly be older than seventeen. She was so thin that she barely had breasts. Tears had washed away any trace of the kohl that usually outlined her eyes. Her grubby face was infantile, with the suggestion of an overbite, but all was dominated by the purple and gray bruising. Whittaker had pummeled her until the blood vessels in her right eye had burst: the sliver that was visible was scarlet.

“No,” whispered Stephanie. “Boyfriend.”

“Where is he?” Robin asked, reaching again for Stephanie’s hand, now chilly from contact with the cold Fanta.

“Away,” said Stephanie.

“Does he live with you?”

Stephanie nodded and tried to drink more Fanta, keeping the icy liquid away from the damaged side of her face.

“I didn’t wan’ ’im to go,” whispered Stephanie.

As Robin leaned in, the girl’s restraint suddenly dissolved in the face of kindness and sugar.

“I aksed to go wiv ’im and ’e wouldn’t take me. I know ’e’s out tomming, I know ’e is. ’E’s got someone else, I ’eard Banjo saying sumfing. ’E’s got anuvver girl somewhere.”

To Robin’s disbelief, Stephanie’s primary source of pain, far worse than that of her cracked tooth and her bruised and broken face, was the thought that filthy, crack-dealing Whittaker might be somewhere else, sleeping with another woman.

“I on’y wan’ed to go wiv ’im,” Stephanie repeated, and tears slid more thickly down her face, stinging that slit of an eye into a more furious redness.

Robin knew that the kind, slightly dippy girl she had been impersonating would now earnestly beseech Stephanie to leave a man who had beaten her so badly. The trouble was, she was sure that would be the surest way to make Stephanie walk out on her.

“He got angry because you wanted to go with him?” she repeated. “Where has he gone?”