Darlinghurst Road Read Online Free Page A

cycle would begin again the next night with another a new face
turning up every week almost like clockwork.
    The older, more experienced ones had learned
how to blend a little but the new faces were very young and very
obvious. They would be living on the streets, still learning how to
survive in that world and desperate for shelter or money, would
often end up being taken home and used by some guy who had picked
them up that night. I saw plenty of girls in the same situation and
it never got any easier. In my opinion, it takes a particular
callousness to pick up a young person, use them for sex and then
walk away not caring if they’re still alive tomorrow.
     
    Kayla
    I've never been much good at pinning down
ages but she was young, painfully young. I caught her hanging
around the coin booths downstairs. My job was clear, I had to ask
her to leave because a quick conversation left no doubt that she
was looking for someone to pay her for sex and besides, she was
definitely underage and I couldn't allow that. When I gave her the
speech about no prostitution on the premises, she asked naively
“where do I go then?” I offered to buy her a Coke from our machine,
she accepted, we went back upstairs to the store and talked for a
while.
    She said her name was Kayla and the gist of
the story was that her mother had kicked her out. There was no
father, her mother was a drug addicted prostitute who worked from a
home in the suburbs and it was all the kid had ever known. I
remembered how big and bright those streets seemed when I was her
age compared to the dirty, cramped world of a few square miles that
I knew now.
    I had to do it. I tried to play social
worker, call around, maybe find her some shelter somewhere but she
refused. Kayla was only a part of my life for around thirty minutes
but I will never forget her. The last time that I saw her, she was
walking down the street toward her first paid sexual encounter.
God, I hope the bastard was gentle with her.
     
    Cathy
    Cathy was another early starter and she was
dead by the age of twenty. She once confided that she had been on
the street since the age of thirteen and had been a prostitute just
as long. By fifteen, Heroin was in her veins. The spiral down from
there is short and nearly always predictable. Heroin quickly
becomes the primary motivation in life.
    The back door of the Pleasure Palace is only
accessible to the staff but still, no one really uses it and if it
wasn't for the fire code, it would probably be boarded up. The door
exits to a narrow inner city alley and it's a dark, dirty little
place where, apart from the rats, nobody ever seems to go. This is
where the police found Cathy on a Sunday morning; dead from an
overdose of heroin. I found out that night when the police came in
to ask their questions.
    They only asked the basics of course because
they already knew the story by heart. It was a regular occurrence
around The Cross and Cathy was a case number, a junkie hooker who
killed herself in the back alley of a sleazy sex club, not the
first, won't be the last.
    She had a small tattoo on her right ankle of
a butterfly and a brother by the name of David. I don’t know much
more about her but I do know that Cathy was a human being as well
as a statistic and her death saddened me.
     
    Trevor
    Trevor was a real hard man who had been
around The Cross for a long time. With serious underworld
connections and an attitude to match, he was the real deal as they
say and yet, he never flaunted it. Trevor was extremely discrete
about his criminal contacts and it wasn't until you really got to
know him that some of the veneer started to slip away. Still, after
being part of the Kings Cross furniture for so long, most of the
people who knew him had probably figured out that Trevor was deeply
involved with organized crime but hey, it was The Cross, it didn't
affect them and nobody really cared. Only once did I ever see
Trevor lose his cool and be indiscrete. A few days