CHAPTER 36
It was a little bit quieter on the ride home, as tired bodies recovered from hangovers, and nobody was really in a rush to leave such a lovely spot. We took a break at the top of the first real climb, where the quarries looked out over the flatter lands to the North, before descending to the busier ‘Amman’ towns and the faster roads back to Cardiff. After we got home, both bathrooms had queues for the balm of hot water, but I made the girls lay the tents out to dry and air before they indulged in steam and soak.

“Maisie?”

She looked up at me, a peg bag in her hand as she set the contents on a bed of dry newspaper.

“Yeah…”

“What did you think of the weekend?”

She stared at me for a few seconds, and I realised she was trying to work out the reason for my question. Was it a request for an honest opinion, or a test?

“Um. It was good. Er…”

She paused, and then suddenly grinned, as she decided which way to play her hand.

“Willies! That man they tied down on the grass, he had… It was like a button, yeah?”

“Ah, girl, the Lazy Riders, they do that every bloody year…”

The conversation drifted into my own memories of other rallies, and she was smiling naturally now, with occasional chuckle.

“You fancy another trip like that?”

“I get a choice?”

“Absolutely. My girls, our friends here, we do things together, but nobody ever has to do something they don’t want to. Maisie, love: all of us have been in places where somebody else tells us what we have to do. That doesn’t happen here. You’ve seen how good the doors are, you’ve met Rosie and Carl?”

“What happened to his face?”

I took a deep breath, trying to find the words, and then they arrived in a rush.

“He loved someone, and another man hurt them, so Carl gave all he had to give, tried to make things right again. That’s the sort of man you can trust, but I can see you have worries about men, so have a think on this. You’ve met Carl and Rosie. I know you met a right pig before Posh and Moira found you. So, if you ever feel worried, just think about how Carl and Rosie might treat anyone who pisses me off, or does that to anyone I care about, aye?”

“Fuck… yeah. Not healthy for them, isn’t it?”

“Absolutely. So you have them, and you have three girls here who care about you. Three other girls”

That last was deliberate, of course, but it did what I wanted it to do, and that, in hindsight, was the real beginning of Maisie’s healing, although we did start keeping men away from the House as a policy.

That was a two-part decision. Many of my past and future girls had been so brutalised by men that they couldn’t deal with their presence, unless they were carefully prepared. Exceptions could be made, Paul and Sparky being good examples, Carl another, but the principle was set, as was the name of our place.

There was never any way on Earth, not a snowball’s fucking chance in Hell, that I would call our establishment anything that mentioned castles, keeps, hills, views, and so it became, by default, ‘The House’, which ignored the fact that it was actually two houses. The next step, before Nita, Heidi and Paul hit me with what turned out to be a pile of serious ‘problems’, was to take the van to the mountains. It needed a little preparation first, as there were now five of us, and that meant seats to the rear, as well as an adaptation of the partition to take a window with a sliding panel. A couple of the lads at work knew their way around that sort of thing far better than I did, so with the help of a decent meal at Ruth’s each, we had wheels suitable for our days in the hills, and a visit to the big outdoor shop had the rest of my growing flock properly outfitted.

Thank god for the government money Heidi and Nita were sending me.

We went up. Pat met us there, and of course it pissed down almost non-stop. Our tents were sound, we ate in pubs and cafes, and the back of the van, and my old friend led us on easier walks that still involved moments where we were walking shin-deep through flowing water. Our trip back was broken by outbursts of laughter from the girls as Kim and Nell tried to explain how gorgeous the place really was, honestly, trust me, you HAVE to see it when, and Maisie made the cutting remark that at least the bathroom was warm when it was all steamed up. Nell steered the replies to that one, calling through the open panel in the partition.

“Maze?”

“Yeah?”

“How did you feel when you were in your bag, listening to the rain?”

The new girl sat in silence for a few seconds, gathering her thoughts before replying.

“Will you promise not to laugh?”

“Of course, unless you tell a joke. But we don’t normally laugh at yours anyway, do we?”

“Bitch! Anyway, trying to be serious here. In the sleeping bag, yeah? All snuggled up and warm, and the rain… The sound, made me feel safe, somehow. Once I got to trusting the tent, it was like being in a nest, safe, warm, and it was really comforting. Like the world was all cut off, just me and Kim in there, all the worries and problems locked away. That’s how it felt. Until I had to get up for a wee, of course”

That last brought a chuckle, and a squeeze of Maisie’s hand from Kim, but there was still a rush to be first for the bathroom when we finally got home. The girl was most definitely healing, and with a slight pang of jealousy, which surprised me, I realised that most of the hard work was being done by the other children.

I slapped myself down mentally for that thought. I might not have done as much as Mam and Dad had for me, but then again how could I ever live up to their standards? I had, however, done my best, and it was working well, and that was all the credit I needed.

We made our way through the Summer, and Maisie bloomed. Dr Thomas made his visits, I carried on with the ‘day job’, and that little moment at the rally faded into my memories, although I was certainly enough of an adult by then to realise that some wounds can never fully heal, that a raw spot can stay in the mind forever, wrapped in numbing layers but still capable of cutting through them.

Cathy was doing the residents a service just then, triggered by a remark from Dr Thomas, and as the Internet steadily became the massive affair it is now, she was trawling for news items, all on the subject of law and how we fitted into it. Case after case came up, and while the coverage varied in style from outright hatred of people like us to an almost patronisingly saccharine ‘positive’ strand, Cathy was filtering the reality from the opinion. There were several high-profile ones, but what Cathy turned up left me seething.

Each one seemed to start in one of two ways. Somebody would be treated badly, they would complain, and the resulting outcome always seemed to add up to “Well, what should a pervert/freak/abomination like you expect?”

The second way a story would start was, to my eyes, far worse. Someone would be living their life the same way as anyone else would hope to, and some filthy little shit of a self-styled ‘journalist’ would find out that their history was like mine, as far as their womanhood, that is, and the papers would proceed to open up their privacy and comprehensively shit all over it in the name of ‘legitimate public interest’. Many years later, met one of the victims, and they told how the vermin had doorstepped their colleagues, digging for the ‘Ugh! Vile!’ reaction, and when the response was one of love, acceptance and support, the rags just made up their own lies.

The paper I really grew to hate was the Mail, but I despised the News of the World. Nothing could ever be beneath them because they dwelt at the lowest of all levels. I watched Cathy as she fed me her little summaries, and what I saw there was despair. She and Nell would change their names, their A-levels would be awarded appropriately, they would, if all went as planned, succeed at university in the same way, but. Always that ‘but’. I caught her one day as she stood in the kitchen with knife drawer open, her back to me as she simply stared at the contents.

“I can hear you breathing, Debbie”

“You okay?”

Her own breath shuddered for a second, before she pushed the drawer to.

“I will be. Have to be. Someone has to be there to watch Nell’s back, am I right?”

She pushed her hands into the pockets of her chunky cardigan and took the few steps needed to allow her to lay her head on my breast.

“Why do so many people hate us?”

I wrapped my arms around her, pulling her close, sharing our warmth.

“Count how many people don’t, love”