‘Do-gooders,’ Giddy sneered, as if people who did good were actually bad (which, of course, they were in this instance). Davy was a pal of the do-gooding blokes – Tony and Mick – and it was Davy who had first invited them to visit the Elms. Tony was the Bassani’s ice-cream guy and when he came to visit he brought big unlabelled tubs of ice-cream with him. They were usually half melted by the time he arrived but that was still okay. He’d dish it out himself, getting the girls to line up for it and then saying something to each one of them in turn – ‘There you go, sweetheart, get that down your throat,’ or ‘Have a lick of that, love,’ and everyone giggled, even Giddy.
Tony and Mick were local businessmen, according to Davy. Local celebrities too, always in the papers for one thing or another. Not that either Fee or Tina read the papers, but Davy showed them. Tony had a big car, a Bentley, that he took the girls for rides in. Tina had never been in the car but Fee said she’d got all kinds of stuff for going for rides – sweets, cigarettes, even cash. She didn’t say what she’d had to do to earn these rewards, but you could guess. Mick owned amusement arcades and seaside attractions and Fee said that if they got to Brid, Tony and Mick would give them jobs, and then they could get somewhere to live and they would be free to do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted.
The Flea and Teeny. Running away. They were twelve years old.
They got their first lift on a garage forecourt on the outskirts of town from a quiet lorry-driver who bought them crisps and cans of Pepsi. They told him they were sixteen and he laughed because he didn’t believe them and when he dropped them off at a roundabout he said, ‘Have a good time at the seaside, girls,’ and gave them a couple of quid to spend. ‘Buy yourselves a stick of rock,’ he said, ‘and don’t let the boys kiss you.’
The next lift was from a bloke who was driving a big beige estate car and who said after a few miles, ‘I’m not a taxi service, girls, I don’t give rides for free,’ and Fee said, ‘Neither do taxis,’ and he said, ‘You’re a cheeky little bitch, aren’t you?’ He stopped at a lay-by and Fee told Tina to get out of the car for five minutes, and when she got back in the driver didn’t say anything more about being a taxi service and he took them all the way to Bridlington and dropped them off right on South Marine Drive. ‘Dirty bugger,’ Fee said after they’d clambered out and he’d driven off. When they arrived in Brid they bought chips and fags with the money the first lorry-driver had given them.
‘This is the life,’ Fee said as they leant against the railings on the Prom and smoked their cigarettes while they watched the waves coming in.
Not much of a life, it turned out. Mick gave them a caravan to stay in, it was on the edge of a site he owned and it was one step away from the knacker’s yard. And he did give them jobs, of a sort. Sometimes they worked on the funfair or on reception at the caravan site, but mostly they were needed to go to Tony and Mick’s ‘parties’. Before she went to the first one Tina had imagined balloons and ice-cream and games, the kind of party she’d never had, but she couldn’t have been more wrong. There wasn’t even any ice-cream, which you might have thought there would be, given who Bassani was. There were games, though. Definitely not the kind of games you got at kids’ parties, although there were a couple of other girls there about their age. There were always loads of kids, they came and went all the time. Not just girls, boys too. ‘Just think about something else,’ one of the girls advised her. ‘Something nice. Unicorns or rainbows,’ she added cynically.
It wasn’t just the parties either, Mick and Tony’s friends came to the caravan sometimes as well. The passion wagon, Mick laughingly called it. (Awful to recall. The kind of memory you spend thirty years trying to block out.) ‘Don’t complain,’ he said. ‘You’ve got nowhere else to go. And anyway, you know you like it. You’re a right pair of