Charmaine was hard up after the long weekend and had not slept in two whole days. The bank holiday weather had scorched the vast, cast blocks making up the half-vacant Jericho of a housing estate— a colossus earmarked for the eternal grave of unforgiving landfill. Inky swallows, high above the concrete citadel, swooped and soared, while cheering youths scored goals within steel-lined footie pitches, but, stubbornly, she had decided against leaving the rank, airless flat, in favour of remaining as drunk as possible. The remainder of the borrowed cash, a frayed, rubber-banded roll of twenties that had been lurking in her ceramic, double-decker bus biscuit tin amongst stale bourbon crumbs, was done with after a twelve-hour stint at the bookies, a commiseratory homeward splurge in the off-licence, of Trini rum and Kuwaiti fags, icing a fateful cake. Race after race, neck sore, throat full, bright eyes dilated with desperation, bangles jangling with subdued punches of air.
The penultimate day of the long weekend off from the factory had been wasted in a pair of holed knickers, eyes rotting over, watching game shows hosted by orange men in shiny suits, and olden-day films in which the men were nice to women. Within the dusty hallway mirror’s glare, she offered herself a rare, exhausted glance. Her inherited, father’s St. Lucian hue was in combat with her mother’s Slavic wrinkles, unhelped by the gallery of bedroom tattoos of names long forgotten, and symbols longer ignored, lining her wrinkled neck and sternum, outlines blurred and blown. Lower, she did her best to avoid the more honest, rounded angles, while stretching, poking at herself. Her shrinking lips needed redoing, as did her tousled extensions, horsey strands of crimped blonde right beside creeping wiry greys, in as much supply as the eviction letters piled up behind the front door. The sight caused her to swig from a lukewarm can, while drowsily reminiscing of the glory days, when the pills were cheap, the booze, cheaper, and the sex, aplenty, Ayia Napa Anthems Volume 3 blaring throughout the entire sixth-floor flat. A time before she was a mother, when silly things like bills, tax and visitation rights were alien, foreign words worth laughing at.

At around six in the evening, her front door boomed with five violent knocks. Wiping the corner of her eyes and checking the fullness of half-exposed breasts, she took the door off the brass latch. It was Ray. He didn’t look pleased. Ray was the boy, Karim’s father. Karim had been taken away a fortnight after his ninth birthday by the social, and Ray, despite seeing the concept of child support as some airy guideline akin to wearing a bicycle helmet, did his very best to blame her for it. They had deemed her flat as ‘non-conducive with a safe environment’, and, along with a well-established inability to keep up with her rent, maintained that she was simply unfit for her parental duties. Karim was being fostered by a white family down in Suffolk, who owned a house, a dog and a swimming pool in a long back garden that looked like a tennis court. Although very homesick, the boy very much enjoyed the fuss made over him, as well as the novelty of the many strange new concepts he was introduced to, such as supper and cadets.
In the doorway, Ray stared ahead with a pissed sneer. His maroon overalls were dotted with pools of car oil, and his half-exposed chest presented greying curls of hair, beneath chains of moody gold. Though he still had a thick enough barnet, his face, squishy and asymmetrical, had aged poorly, much like a tree stump, hacked at during a damp winter, reluctantly producing new shoots.
Alright, Ray, gorgeous? Charmaine flirted, nervously. Wow, aren’t you a sight for sore eyes? Work good? You been working out? Mmm— you look hench, Ray.
Ray was having none of it.
Yeah, yeah. Fetch me a drink, will you? He said, barging past her, heading for the living room. So, she did just that.
Pouring out tumblers of Glen’s, Charmaine set about reclining across the ancient sofa, attempting to look as coy and pubescent, and appealing as possible. She paddled her leggings-clad pins over the sofa’s disembowelled arm and laughed extra hard, at all of his inflexions, even the ones that went nowhere. As usual, Ray had come straight from work at the garage and had received a call on his lunch break. As far as she could tell, his second cousin (on his father’s side), Francis, up in Salford, had a prospective buyer bail on him, last minute, on a shipment of white from a Polish hooligan outfit in Doncaster. Though Francis had sent his best lads out to find the fucker, Ray, having invested just shy of a grand into the deal, was out of pocket. Every tumbler he knocked back seemed to make his words more demonic, erratic, and difficult to digest, with Charmaine enjoying the unpredictable fury. Within a break, as smooth as a magician, Charmaine retrieved a baggie from the inside of her brassiere, rubbing the leftovers over sore gums. Ray mumbled, with a wheeze.
Oi, he barked mightily, I’m talking to you. You listening, or what?
Yeah, course, babe, said Charmaine, sheepishly.
Well, go and fucking get it got!
What?
Ray gritted his tombstone-grey teeth between a purple tongue.
The money! There an echo in here, or something? I need the dough I lent you, and I need it now. So get it got.
Charmaine knew what was coming. After pretending to search the shelves and behind the sofa, Ray frogmarched her into the kitchen. He made her empty every drawer in the kitchen, the biscuit tin, and even the vacant fridge shelves, before, with a furious tackle, putting his hands on her. Each thuggish blow was harder than the last. Charmaine curled up like an armadillo, absorbing impact by way of a bitten lip. She’d seen one in a documentary once and had wondered how such a peculiar thing could be real.
I’m sorry, Ray, she wept, the metallic taste of plasma washed over her cracked, frail enamel. 

When she woke, hours later, the kitchen was pitch-black. Her face, half-sticky from a layer of ancient grease from the kitchen floor tiles, was numb, ribs tender and precarious with a smattering of new bruises. The telly in the living room was on, and sitting, nursed the dregs of a fifth of cognac like a calf to a teat, before opening another. Each of the channels she flicked through seemed to have entered their respective afterlives: adverts for holidays, ice cream, condoms all had an air of a collective, unsettling morbidness and longing for past lives.
Just as she was drifting off, Charmaine heard a noise. It was downstairs, the metallic flutter of the letterbox. At the bottom step, she shone her phone’s torch in the direction of the door, and saw it. There it was, a pamphlet, simple and alien, lying on the landing floor. Its laminated prism, when held to her face, revealed a woman on the cover— shiny blonde bob, pristine blazer, elbow-high legs. She could have very easily been a supermodel or an MP— perhaps both at once. In one photograph, she was seated on what looked like a luxury aeroplane, while in another, she was dining at a country club. In another, she was holding a puppy, while rolling on the floor of an impossibly airy living room. Charmaine opened it, muttering the words she recognised, guided by a shaky finger.

Do you need money, quickly and reliably, but have bad credit?

Charmaine blinked. She sat on the naked, final step.

Want to move forward in life, but the drain of daily expenses keeps holding you back? To have a passive income stream, but feel investments, or starting a business, are far too risky, unrealistic, and out of reach? Want to be part of something bigger, but keep on feeling stuck within the smallness of life? If you’ve answered yes to at least one of these things, we are here to present a simple, safe, savvy, secure future for you: Jacob’s Ladder.

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