you get, the less you care. And no one else cares either. It’s amazing how easy it is to fall through the cracks and end up on the street. Then you become invisible.’
‘So what happened to pull you out of it?’
‘Melisa happened. You asked me who she was. She was a charity worker, here in the States on some kind of exchange visa. She found me in the stinking basement of a building in Detroit along with an assortment of junkies, winos and meth heads. I was only on the booze, which in some ways is even more pathetic. I wasn’t even a proper washout.
‘One day I was sleeping off a drunk when this angel appeared asking for Annie. Annie was a runaway teen who worked the streets to fund her habit and keep her pimp happy. She was also eight months pregnant. Melisa was part of the women’s health programme, training to be a midwife and volunteering in her spare time. Annie had missed her check-up so Melisa had come into that stinking basement just because she was worried about her. That took some guts.
‘Anyway, we found Annie unconscious, lying on a stained mattress in one of the smaller rooms in the basement people used sometimes to turn tricks. The reason she had missed her appointment was that she was in labour and had turned to her painkiller of choice. She was totally out of it, the needle still in her arm – and the baby was coming.
‘Melisa was incredible. There was no sense of judgement or disgust about what she was doing or where she was, she just got down to the business of bringing that baby into the world. And when it was born, something so small and perfect and new in the middle of all that filth, I felt ashamed.’
He took a deep breath as the memories came fast and painful.
‘I was helping her clean the baby when the boyfriend arrived – a mean son-of-a-bitch called Floyd who kept in shape by handing out beatings to the women he ran and anyone else who got in his way. He saw the child and told us to leave. Melisa refused. I don’t know if he was going to kill it and get Annie back on the streets and earning again, or maybe he had a buyer lined up – everything has a street-value, even a newborn baby.’
Shepherd stared out at the busy concourse but in his mind he was back in that basement room, filth, food wrappers and empty bottles on the floor, a fading Apocalypse Now movie poster tacked to the wall with a bright orange sun that shone no light into that dark place.
‘Melisa refused to move. Floyd pulled a knife. I’d heard he’d been known to slice the face of any girl who crossed him so I reacted, grabbed a bottle from the floor and threw it at him. It caught him on the side of the head, hard enough to knock him back but not enough to stop him. Next thing I know I’m on top of him, knees pinning his arms down, another bottle in my hand. And I just kept hitting him with it. I knew if I let him get up he’d kill me and probably kill Melisa too so I just kept hitting him until he stopped moving. The bottle must have broken at some point and cut his neck. I didn’t even realize. There was so much blood. It was like someone had turned on a tap.
‘I can’t even remember what happened next but somehow Melisa got us all out of there. She took us to the shelter where she worked and cleaned us all up. I was all for turning myself in but she told me not to. She said it was an accident, self-defence, and that I should wait until the police came looking.’
‘Let me guess,’ Franklin said, ‘they never did.’
‘I guess one less scumbag on the streets doesn’t warrant too much of an investigation. So I stayed at the shelter and started getting myself back together. I kicked the booze, got on the twelve-step programme, started running computer training courses and setting up networks and websites for the charity, just making myself useful and giving myself an excuse to keep hanging around.
‘God knows how but Melisa and I ended up falling in love. I guess we shared this big secret that created an intimacy and things just grew from there. Hell of a first date.