Exposure Read Online Free Page A

been many things but for about a year now had been a place where women worked sewing machines. They made cheap clothes with expensive labels sewn into them. The business, which had no name, was owned by a man of Turkish origin called Señor Oguz. Señor Oguz had been antsy about the kids in the shed, about them using the tap in the yard, and about the boy with all the hair filching rags from his wastebins. The Child Protection Order made it a criminal act to provide street kids with shelter or food or anything else (including rags, probably) on the grounds that it “encouraged homelessness and destitution.” But Fidel had spoken to Señor Oguz over a free cold beer and chilled him out. During the same conversation, he had also mentioned, helpfully, that Señor Oguz was misspelling the word DIESEL on his phony labels.
    Felicia sat in the shed while the last of the daylight leeched away. She was not afraid of the dark. All the same, she would have liked the companionship of a candle flame. There were still several stumps in the plastic bag stashed in the corner, but she was unwilling to light one until Bush got back. The bed she shared with Bianca was a wooden pallet covered with blankets, and she sat on it cross-legged, fighting to control her anxiety. This was always the worst part of the day, waiting for Bush. She used fragments of pop songs and her small repertoire of good memories to ward off bad imaginings of what might have happened to him. And Bianca.
    Sometimes she fantasized about a life without Bianca in it. These dream stories were not wrapped in a twinkling mist of happiness. They were not like Bianca’s ridiculous fantasies of celebrity. They were modest. One of her favorites was that she and Bush would take over the bar from Fidel and Nina and, like them, grow old but stay in love. Another was that she and Bush would live in a house. The house moved from place to place, although she had no idea what other places there might be. But it always had real furniture like in the shop windows. And a bedroom and a bed with white sheets. In which she would lie with Bush. Alone with Bush. Sometimes there would be open windows and pale drifting curtains and sometimes the sound of the sea, which was a blue sound. But all these fantasies needed a prologue, a prologue in which Bianca disappeared. She could not — would not — allow herself to picture how this might happen. Because Bush loved his sister, and therefore she, Felicia, had to love her too.
    Bianca. Mother of God, where was she?
    Felicia was, she believed, fourteen years old. And that was a very bad age to be. It made her a victim twice over. It forced choices upon her: choices that involved the way she looked and what she wore. Choices that she could not make for herself.
    If the Ratcatchers caught her, it was unlikely that she could pass for over sixteen. She had no papers, of course, and she was slightly built. They would take her, and although she did not believe all the stories about what happened next, she did not want to be taken.
    But she was becoming a woman. Her breasts were undeniable, and boys — and men with wolf eyes — had started to look at her. She didn’t want to be forced into an alleyway and —
    Felicia should not have let herself fall asleep in the afternoon and allowed Bianca to slip away. If she was not back before Bush, he would go searching for her. He would go away into the night.
    For the last six months, Felicia had worn a pair of loose Bermuda shorts that Nina had given her. They were much too big; she fastened them around her waist with a length of string. But they made her legs look thinner and less shapely, which was good. She had two T-shirts that she wore in rotation: one on, the other washed under the tap in the yard and dried on the roof of the shed. Both had gotten smaller. She walked slightly stooped with her arms crossed over her chest, so that maybe the boys and the wolf men would not notice her. Trying to look like a