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PROLOGUE
London, UK
November 1994
She covered her ears, but nothing would deaden the thin, high-pitched wailing. The baby was hungry. Cold, too, probably. The last of the formula had been used this morning, so even if she had a couple of pounds to put in the meter in order to boil a kettle, she couldn’t make any milk. Her own meagre supply had long since dried up.
She picked up the fretful child, held her to her chest. “It’s okay, baby. Mummy will find a way.”
But would she? Could she? At seventeen, with no job, and soon to have no home either since she had about as much chance of finding another month’s rent as flying to the moon, what possible waycouldshe find?
She’d managed to get this far, surely a few months more…
But how? And what then? As far as she could work out, the only sources of income open to her were prostitution and begging, and neither of those could really be done with a six-month-old crying baby in tow. There was no one she could ask to mind her infant daughter. No one she could trust anyway.
She stiffened her shoulders. She would not give in now. They had come this far, her and Naomi. She could manage. She had to.
The next morningshe was awake at dawn, holding her whining daughter, waiting for the shops to open. She had no money, but surely they wouldn’t deny a hungry baby a carton of ready-mixed formula. That didn’t even need heating up. She could offer to work for an hour or so to pay for it. Mrs Patel who ran the mini-market on the corner had four children of her own, she’d understand.
Mrs Patel understood nothing of the sort. “You pay,” was all she had to say on the matter.
When the bedraggled, desperate girl pleaded for help, she offered to phone the police if she didn’t get out of the shop.
Trudging back onto the pavement, she was seized with one final mad impulse, one last act of defiant desperation. One moment the empty cola bottle was in her hand, the next she’d hurled it through the shop window.
Momentarily transfixed with shock at what she’d done, her feet broke into a run of their own accord, but the police car parked on the corner was faster than one young woman carrying a baby. She sobbed as she was bundled into the back seat of the car, begged the officers to let her go home.
“My baby is hungry. I need to feed her, change her…”
“Well, love, we can do all of that at the station.” The policeman wasn’t unkind, but neither was he changing his mind.
She was arrested for criminal damage.
“Don’t lockme in a cell. Please, my baby needs me…” She wept, clung to Naomi and huddled in a hard plastic chair in the custody area. The sergeant brought her a cup of tea and sat next to her.
“How old are you, love?”
“Seventeen,” she sobbed.
“Is there no one at home to help? Your mam an’ dad, maybe?”
She shook her head. “They told me to go. It’s just us, me and Naomi.”
“And how old is Naomi?” he asked.
“Six months.”
“She’s certainly not very happy,” he observed.
Naomi had never let up her pitiful wailing.
“Sh-she’s hungry. I asked at the shop for milk, but they wouldn’t let me have any. I’ve no money to pay for it, and they wouldn’t let me work.”
“You’ve no job then?”
She shook her head.
“A place to live?”
