I was gonna say “Any hole’s a …” ¹ but then thought better of it — there are certain thresholds of propriety over which even I prefer not to step on occasion … at least not if I don’t want to offend absolutely everyone that is 😉
But …
I expect there'll be violence and maybe even murder or suicide by the end of it — the light in her eyes finally extinguished after a lifetime in which ... dulled by addiction and despair ... they never got to shine to begin with.
Bereft of hope she'll dare dream only of a painless death to bring an end to the torment of her miserable existence ... but it's as likely that she'll be brutally beaten to death by one of her johns as that she'll overdose.
In a bitter twist to her tragic tale, a sheaf of secret writings will be found ... exquisite, beautiful, insightful and heart-rending, they are masterpieces and could have made her rich and famous — but I'll just toss them in a trashcan, douse them with lighter fuel and destroy them … I don't want to leave any evidence that might lead to my conviction as an accessory to her murder.
Her end will be an inconvenience, because I'll have to find another source of income … but I was gonna have to cut her loose sooner or later anyway, so whatever ².
Her biography is like that of the Little Match Girl ³ ... only without the uplifting elements: she suffers ceaselessly and the World never even notices, let alone cares ... her life worthless, meaningless and full of naught but a pain even she herself is beyond perceiving any more than a fish notices the water around it — less able even than that.
It's a squalid, little story of manipulation and abuse, in which I don't even make sufficient material gain to claw my way out of the gutter myself ... my dreams, hopes and aspirations pathetically unambitious ... but what pitiable little I do get comes at the expense of wrecking the life of someone weaker and more pathetic than even I.
What's not to love about it?
—
¹ If you’re uncertain where I was going with that, I’m sure Mr Tinney would be able to ‘enlighten’ you — he knows the seamier side of Life well, I think, and will almost certainly have little trouble with the idiom … you don’t need to be a football fan to figure out what the goal was.
² It’ll be irksome having to groom a replacement, sure, but not insurmountable; there are plenty of runaways and other desperate wretches not daring to believe in knights in shining armour who will take them away from it all … away from the want, the fear, the degradation … and to them, the simple offer to take them under my wing and protect them from others will be more than they hoped for in their wildest dreams … I’ll appear to them as a saviour … almost a saint … all but Heaven sent in fact — if it weren’t for the inconvenience of the necessary investment of my time, it’d be too easy really.
³ Loitering, fearful, around the doorway of Life and tugging her forelock in the hope someone might take pity and smile condescendingly at her … pressing her nose against its vitrines, sighing wistfully as she does so, able to do no more than imagine what delights might lie behind them … before dying of hypothermia and/or hunger in the snow, as soulless monsters … breezing, Pontius Pilate like, past in a flurry of irresponsibility for the lives of others or the state of a society that favours them at the expense of the rest … step over her tiny, fragile corpse on their way to or from some obscenely decadent buffet for those whose girth is exceeded only by their greed, muttering darkly about how the likes of her shouldn’t be allowed there anyway ⁴ … which is the closest she will get to tasting the milk of human kindness in her lifetime.
⁴ Her sort are unsightly and her poverty … whether self-induced or otherwise doesn’t concern them … offends their sensibilities — ihre Armut kotzt sie an.
