I had a therapist once. Mr Tuppeny, he was called. Wanted me to call him ‘Buddy’.

Apparently ‘Bastard’ wasn’t close enough. Nor was ‘Wanker’ or any of the other plethora of creative names I took the liberty of coming up with. So I just called him Mr Tuppeny, or Penny if I was in a particularly good mood. But back to the matter at hand; I had a therapist.

Why did I have a therapist?

Because my father ruined my life. Left me, my brother and my mother in favour of a better life in sunny old Spain. He jumped on an air-ship, left us a note scrawled out in quick quill ink and abandoned us here. In Londonaria, right at the peak of the ‘New Industrial Revolution of 2098’, as the papers are calling it.

If we were one of the rich, or at least reasonably well-of, families we would have been fine; protected by an upper-class status and enough money to buy silence over my father’s affair with a Spaniard in order to save my mother’s dignity. But no. We lived in the Gutter, a small huddle of shacks in Londonaria’s east end.

Technically, the Gutter is a village; that’s just the council’s way of sugar-coating shit in order to pass it off as a lollipop. In reality, the Gutter is a place for those with nowhere else to go; a place scarcely fit for dying rats, let alone humans, let alone children.The Gutter consists of about thirty ‘houses’ in a kind of penguin-huddle formation, surrounded by a small ring of water which, when I was younger, I would pretend to be a moat. Each ‘house’ holds five ‘units’, all with two bedrooms and a living room; bathrooms and kitchens are communal, meaning that most residence will deny it being their turn to keep it them clean. They say once you enter the Gutter that the smell of the sweat-trickling streets will never leave you, they call it the ‘Foul Stench of Poverty’; I call it the aroma of truth, the potent pleas of the people.

Father left us in the Gutter without as much as a banknote.

He left us to rot like the mouldy corpse I wish he was. As you can imagine this had quite an adverse effect on the mentality of a twelve-year-old girl growing up in a murky place like the Gutter where revenge is often rife. To put it lightly, I may have slightly lost my mind. To put it technically, I developed some kind of issue with some long fancy name to do with hostility and guilt and all that bullshit. So Mother carted me of to Mr Tuppeny, an old friend of her uncle who’s family made their money on clockwork robotics, hence the old man’s fancy false limb with it’s visible bronze pumps and cogs, whirring away as though screaming it’s owner’s praise and status. It was obvious though that his wealth wasn’t all too grand, lest he would have had more robotic parts than just one arm; I’ve seen people before with their faces being the only human thing about them.

The thought makes me shiver; I mean, imagine growing up being cuddled into the side of a metallic mother or falling asleep to the rusty snores of a robotic lover.  I’ve never seen the appeal myself. It’s almost like their hiding their humanity, like they’re ashamed of it; of whom, of what, they are.

I can still remember now, four years later at age sixteen, the precise scent of Mr Tuppeny’s office; a classy cocktail of cigar smoke, machine oil and rosewater. I never did find out where the rosewater fragrance originated from, only that it was ever-present and somehow made my insides knot together with every breath of it I took. People say that I am an extremely observant person, a fact that I do not even wish to deny, so you can probably understand how much that invisible rosewater wound me up. I remember having a go at Mr Tuppeny for it once, yelling and screaming and then breaking down in tears for reasons that I care not to remember. He comforted me, looked at me through his monocle with such a look of pity that it made my heart break, shattering like my pride.

I was pathetic.          

I changed that day; some would say that I finally snapped. I say that I grew up. I realised that yes, life sucks like a whore and that yes, it’s not going to get any easier so why act like someone will help me, wait for me when I fall behind? That day I shed my old skin and became a woman, the kind of woman who doesn’t need anyone, much less some stupid father living it up with his rich Spanish boyfriend.

Of course Mother resented the new me; the new Julianna Roberta Beckstein. But then again, she just would. She still thought of me as being my little brother Franklin’s age and with all the innocence that it entails. I wish.

We often came to blows about it, her calling me ‘cold’ and ‘heartless’; me calling her all manner of awful names in return, us two swapping insults like a common currency with the vigour of two greedy bankers.  

Not once did I ever stop loving her though. She was all I had by the way of a parent, all I had left to cling onto in my dream of us three being a proper, normal little family. Who was I fooling? My mother, as a disgraced woman, couldn’t hold a legal job and soon turned to… alternative methods of work.

My mother became a whore.

A common, filthy whore. Yet not once did she lose her humanity; not once did she ever show me anything less than what I had always expected to see from her. And that is how I knew she loved us, the fact that she could go out to do that every night and not break.

She did it for us, so that we could keep our meagre accommodation in the Gutter; so that we could go to school and live to maybe one day make it out of dirty little rats’ nest.

And this is why I regret what I did just three simple hours ago. Mother and I were having one of our usual scraps, Franklin hiding under the cloak of his worn hand-me-down security blanket, about some trivial matter or another. I didn’t mean to say it, or perhaps I did; just not in the way that her beautiful diamond-grey eyes told me she took it.

I told her that I hate her.

I called her a whore.

I made her cry.

I was going to say sorry, of course I was. I’d made her a cake and everything, I’d even gotten Franklin to help me without burning the kitchen down or getting cake mix down his white button-up shirt. But the cake was never eaten, the apology never made; our family to be forever broken.

It’s hard to think that I’ll never see her again; the way she made her drab, dust-coloured gown float around her feet like ocean waves or the way that she could click the heels of her lace-up boots to make a tune as good as any instrument could ever make. The way she never truly stopped believing in me, the way she could never give up on her precious little family.

It’s impossible to think that the steam-carriage didn’t see her trip on the cobbles of the road.

It’s impossible to think that she’s dead.

It’s impossible to think that Franklin and I are going to America, to be adopted by some well-to-do, and probably half-robotic, family.

Maybe we will get the life Mother wanted for us after all. In fact, I know we will. I will make sure of it. For her sake, for Franklin’s sake.

For my sake.