NAMELESS 4. Lee Battersby.
Leah dropped to one knee, arm pressed against her stomach to hold in the pain. She recognised the stabbing in her guts, the burn in her throat. But it was impossible. She'd been clean for what, a year and a half? There shouldn't be this sudden need, this rancid fire that threatened to engulf her. Using the brick wall as a lever she found her feet, stumbled down the alleyway looking for a way out. Couldn't go back the way she came: the stretch-armed man would be waiting. Had to get away, deeper into the shadows and refuse. Had to get to the Trashwife.
The Trashwife had saved Leah the last time the need ate her up, found her face down behind a dumpster, shaking and incoherent. She'd nursed her off the junk, fed her, held her hand as she screamed and begged for anything, fucking anything to stop it hurting. When Leah finally gained the strength to walk unaided she'd taken her back onto the streets, to the front of the clinic, and clipped her across the ear.
"Don't go back," she'd said, with a hug and a mother's kiss. Then she'd walked away, and Leah had been clean for eighteen months. Until now. Leah rounded the corner at the end of the alleyway, and began to run.
There's a Trashwife in every big city, if you know where to look. More than one, as many as you care to count - someone who spends so much time at the bottom of the ladder, amongst the trash and the losers and the cast-offs, that all the knowledge that begins pure and unadulterated at the top of the social pyramid trickles down to them, filtered through all the layers of social strata in between, so that they know the same things as everyone else but from the bottom up - they own the underside of knowledge, the dirty, footstep-stained versions of the truths we all take for granted.
By the time Leah fell through the tarpaulin door of her hovel, she was nothing more than sweat and shivers, without the strength to beg for help or explain her panic. The Trashwife looked at her over the edge of the ripped magazine she was reading, and curled her nose.
"First the English princess dies and now this," she said, dropping the magazine. "What did I tell you about going back?"
Leah had no strength with which to speak. It was all she could do to raise her hand. The Trashwife saw what it contained and gasped. She knelt next to Leah and prised the stone from her fingers. As soon as it left her grasp, the burning ceased. Leah sobbed, and curled into a ball, huddling against the sudden chill inside.
"Where did you get this?" the Trashwife asked, staring at Leah with amazement. "Jesus, girl, don't you know what this is?"
"What is it?"
"Death," the Trashwife said, placing it carefully on a pile of books. "Bad death."
(Lee Battersby)
