Buggy.

It was the same as almost all the other buggies in the area, functional, not the cheapest, certainly not the most expensive, only differing from the others queuing up for the bus or a taxi back from Aldi, insofar as it was brand new. A gift from his nan, ‘cos she didn’t want to give you cash, “just in case.”

 Much of the apparatus of childcare in this neighbourhood was handed down, or re-sold by the numerous charity shops, pre-loved in some cases, in others, not so much. Just a necessity to accompany a baby that one day might grow to love you more than the man-child who’d donated the seamen to create this opportunity for you to get on the council house waiting list. That’s what his mum had said to you because that’s the kind of slag you are and let’s face it, she should fucking know eh? His mum, a five by five with the bruises and stretch marks to prove it. But at least you’d almost felt wanted for the 15 minutes, 1 badly rolled ‘zoot and 4 ‘Stella’s, that had constituted both the courtship and conception of the baby and unlike her, you’re not old with tits down to your ankles, eh? Maybe one day you’ll win the lottery and get a boob job and move to somewhere else. You’ve never really been anywhere else, so you don’t know where you’d go with your new tits and endless cash. Probably Spain, that’s where your dad had apparently moved to when you were born. Maybe you’d go and find him and show him what a beautiful princess you’d grown into.

Maybe not, you’d never won more than £2 on the fucking lottery and in the search for unconditional love on a tight budget, there are no guarantees, only the promise of a few quid from the benefit system and one day, a place of your own that is not your own. Until then, you can get by on roll-ups, cheap tattoos, cash in the attic, McShite food via Deliveroo, to the communal front door of the property you’ll never own, uncared for and reeking of a desperation nobody even knows they have. Only the slum-landlord who hates you but loves taking the housing benefit money each month. Some of the posh women who live here on weekends, the ‘Air BnB mafia’ sometimes look at you and seem to think your situation is desperate, the middle-class, second and third property-owning, Dryrobe wearing DFL’s, who think they care of course, but they don’t. If they did, they’d stop buying up all the nice properties, wouldn’t they?  YES, THEY FUCKING WOULD. Then maybe there’d be somewhere decent for you and the baby to rent until the council got their shit together. Those women seem to have a nice life, they never seem to notice the way their husbands look at you though, those ‘nice’ men that are starved of something nasty, they know you, that’s why they steal a look at every opportunity.

Maybe one of them will buy you some new tits one day, when you’ve finally got a photo of them fucking you and you can blackmail the cunt.

Life, it’s just life and you subconsciously submit to the reality, that if there is more to life, you’re not in the queue for it, unlike the council house waiting list.

The sun came out in what the papers you never read had started calling ‘Shoreditch on Sea?’ Yeah, the 1976 version of Shoreditch a derelict desperate shithole, nothing like the micro-dosed, vegan utopia of today, populated by upwardly mobile, loudly, and proudly confident non-binary hipsters with tiny tattoos of exotic birds, geometric shapes and ‘the tree of life.’ All of them, smugly virtue-signalling their way towards full time jobs that don’t actually pay any money because having 1500 followers on Instagram, isn’t actually a fucking job, is it? However, they have the safety net of middle-class property-owning parents who’d chosen to get a degree and a real job, instead of pursuing their own dreams, 30 years ago. They sacrificed their own aspirations so that one day their offspring might get to live their ‘best life’, at least that’s what they tell themselves instead of acknowledging the fact they fucking bottled it all those years ago.

The man-child had been out getting money, he didn’t have a job, but he’d tell his mum he was going ‘out to work’ from time to time. This usually meant a quick in and out job at Aldi, ‘trackie bottoms stuffed full of bacon and the occasional leg of lamb. He pretend to be taking an ‘important’ call on his pay as you (never) go (anywhere) phone as he’d speed-walk past the overweight, under-paid and definitely uninterested security guard who couldn’t actually be arsed to guard anything. Man-child would then sell the meat at Charmaine’s flat for £20, the £20 would then be given to one of the local Roma boys who sold weed and he’d go and get stoned underneath the concrete slope that led to the roof of the Casino next to the bowling alley. From this vantage point he could watch as her dealer would arrive in his BMW with a million miles on the clock and one of those exhausts that made your car sound like a tank with bronchitis.

Man-child had actually paid her £20 for his first ever blowjob a few weeks prior to the night she’d let him fuck her without a joey on, for an extra £5 of course. So, if you included the 4 cans of ‘Stella and the weed he’d smoked with her that night, their baby son had basically cost him £30. She was going to get much more than that from the social to spend on the child each week, so as he sat watching the dealer slither out of his ‘beamer and scuttle into her flat, he figured she owed him a cut of the money that his baby was going to earn. The weed hit the spot, he pulled his hood up over his head, “Bitch..I want my money.”

She was getting fucked over the back of the sofa by her dealer, him reaching around to viciously rub her clit was the closest display of affection he could muster or indeed, that she could understand. She despised men, him in particular but her hatred for the man that had raped her at 14, one of her mums’ boyfriends, was the gold-standard in hatred, letting this two-bob drug-dealer slap her about for 3 mins was just something that had to be done. No sex= no drugs, there was never any rock and roll ‘cos that kinda music was for old men, just like that cunt who’d abused her at her mum’s house back in the day. She liked the music that always seemed to be on the radio at the dentists, “maybe they always had a radio on at the dentists to cover up your scream if they hurt you? Something to think about as he pretended to be a gangster and called her names while he pummelled her from behind. “Dirty bitch dirty dirty ‘gal you love it eh?”

He finished in her, just as she got to the end of the song that she’d been singing to herself in her head, a memory triggered by recalling her last visit to the dentists, five or more years ago. She’d have to go again now ‘cos of the baby, she’d get to the front of the queue ahead of all the foreigners. Extra money each week, free dental care, a few quid on cash from the nan she hadn’t seen since they left Enfield ten years ago and, an opportunity to go up a few places on the council house waiting list, ahead of all the foreigners…. again.

“Fucking winning ha ha ha, I’m doing alright, eh?”  She muttered to herself as she smoked the first rock she’d been given by the dealer for letting him think she fancied him for 5 minutes.

“I’m fucking winning ha ha ha.”

The baby started crying interrupting her self-congratulatory, crack-fuelled escape from reality. She finished her pipe, smoked a bit of ‘brown to take the edge off, then danced over towards the buggy singing a Beyonce song she’d once heard at the dentist.

“All the single ladies, all the single ladies.

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