CHLOEE

On the way back from Belfast last Sunday night, I met a young girl at Victoria station at 3 o'clock in the morning. She asked me for a light, and her hands were shaking. She held a cigarette between her fingers, but what I noticed was her hands were soiled and dirty, as if she had rubbed them in coal. Her hair was black as well, and so was her jacket and her trousers which added much mystery to the persona.

But what could a girl that age with hip-teenage white shoes be doing alone in London at 3 in the morning? So don't be surprised if when she approached me, asking for a light, my first reaction was to ignore her. Then I said to myself: "face it, she's a junkie".

A junkie at that age !?! She was so innocent looking, so febrile, so in need of help! She was crying and shaking and asking me for money to pay for her bus ride home. She told me that she had just turned 21, that she had gone out for her birthday on Saturday Night, and that she had been robbed and was feeling very down, that nobody was helping her, that all she wanted was to go home.

She told me her name was Chloée and how she had been to the police to report the crime, to the hospital because she was epileptic and had spent the previous night out in the streets. You could tell she was freezing with her skimpy black teenage party clothes. She told me that she was studying pathology (the study of dead bodies), so I thought that she might not be a junkie, but maybe just a depressed girl lost in the streets of London. She was cold and shivering, and crying, and sounded sincere. Before my Bourgeois pity took the best of me, my mind came awake with an idea: since she looked like a junkie, I was going to try to trick her into admitting it.

We walked in silence for a bit when I decided to go for the pitch:

"Hey, Chloée, do you want a fix ?" I asked her.

"No !" she cried. "How could you! You disgust me! I am so offended that you think I'm a druggie".

And she started moaning and sobbing and she ran away from me and I caught her up and told her I was sorry; that she could trust me. I reckoned that was she not to be a junkie (and the probability of that was very very low), it was too big of a risk to just ignore an epileptic-distressed 21 year-old and let her get raped in a dark street of London.

So she talked me into giving her about £20.  I had proposed to pay her taxi back home, but then she went on about a story of a taxi driver and rape. She gave me her telephone number, and promised she would phone me to give me the money back. But money was not of importance to me, what I wanted was for her to go and see a shrink and sort herself out! When I gave her the money, she said she needed to go for a pee, and that I was to wait for her and not run away, because she found that I was very nice, and she wanted to see me again and talk to me. So in my naivety, I waited but to my disappointment she never came back.

I was slightly traumatised by this experience, and pissed off that my hard-earned money had gone to a heroine dealer. I wanted to help her, and instead she stole my money. Her face keeps on popping up in my head and her voice keeps ringing in my ears. I dialed the number she gave me but it was out of order. I'd like to write a song, a poem for her. Chloée if ever you're reading this send me an email!