5 July 2001 Thursday. 19h00 a knock on the door, and there they were. Two petite girls, runaway's, no older than thirteen years old.. They were a little different than that morning, Charlie, the friendly one kept falling asleep while eating her food, and the quiet one spoke a whole lot. It was clear they were high, eyes glassy and the pupils very tiny.

At home our circumstances rapidly changed.  When reality finally hit, our already very busy little house turned into a war zone. Two teenagers came looking for them, a boy and girl. I have no idea how they knew they were with me. The boy, about sixteen, introduced as  charlene’s brother, he was gay, in an obvious way and seemed high on something himself at the time. He said his sister is a runaway and heroine junkie. He comfortably abbreviated that he was using Heroin himself once but ‘is now clean’.  He was searching for his sister on the streets of Sunnyside and was told by a ‘dealer’ she could be found here. Struggling to absorb all the information and wondering what kind of impact this would have on my life and my own children, I just silently showed him the door to the bedroom.

Soon there was screaming and shouting, they were pushing another. No amount of interference helped, the children just continued to shove and throttle each other while the niece shouted and screamed insults like I haven’t heard in my entire 34 years of existence. Was she on something too? Eventually the fighting party left. After some time only Rosanne returned, she stayed over. She seemed distracted, tired and very nauseous.

Charlie’s mother came around later that evening to find out “what’s the story”. I learned that Charlie had a caring mother. Aggressive at first she seemed to calm down when we spoke for a while.  She had done everything she could to get her 14 year old daughter of drugs. They have been to reformatory school and in rehabilitation centers. Both her children had a heroin problem and that they have run away from home and help time and time again. Often she drove around ‘the block’ searching for her daughter. ‘The block’ is a park in Berea and the pick up point for mainly boys/ young men, drug abusing girls also ‘worked’ from there. 

“Chase her away if she comes again”, she said, speaking of her own daughter. "Doesn’t it make better sense to know where to find your daughter every time, than to drive around frantic not knowing where to start searching?" I asked. She refused.

Charlie stayed away from my house for a while. One sunday morning, very early, we heard a commotion at the gate, there was Charlie screaming “Rosie, Rosie, Rosie, Rosie” I went outside and quietly tried to calm her and convince her that Rosa wasn’t with us then, but that she had been the previous day.  She was very high, I asked her where she had been, and she responded by saying in a ditch close to my house, she didn’t want to come in to my house because she didn’t want her mother to find her.  She also couldn’t afford to be too far from my house because she had money on her and she was afraid of being robbed or beaten, while she was high.  Knowing that her mother would kill the both of us if she found her with me, I asked if there is a place I could take her too, she couldn’t hang around in the streets much longer, she was about to pass out from exhaustion.

She asked if Rosa said where she was going, on mentioning Valhalla her face lit up and she said she’ll take me to her.  We drove around for what felt like hours, unable to give me the physical address outright, she had to point me there, every stop and turn.  She fell asleep from robot to robot and would be momentarily disorientated every time I woke her to show me the road.  Finally she pointed me to a Hotel in the city.  I followed her up to the room on the first floor, the door was opened an inch when the girl knocked and replied on the groggy voice coming from inside, she was let in but I was left outside.  I stood around uncertain for a while, not reallty sure what to do next, after a short while, I decided to leave.

On my way home – my mind on playback all the time, I had to remind myself -  This was non of my business!  So, there happens to be two fourteen year old girls on drugs, living in a seedy city hotel with the reputation of a brothel and strippers joined.  There’s a tall man in a messy apartment, of which I only met part of, and he wasn’t friendly at all, he seems to accommodate both of them. I remebered she wrote something about being locked up in a room, and decided to turn back.

In the weeks that followed Charlie’s brother and niece often dropped in, to come and inquire if Charlie was there, once the brother came on his own, without a knock or a word he made his way to the bathroom, vomited and left with some insulting words….. strange! Sometimes Charlie  wasn’t at my place when they came looking for her, some times she was, if she was, she’d always be hiding from her mother, under the bed, behind the couch, in the cupboard.  Eventually she’d come out, knowing that her mother knew she was there some where.  She also knew that when she sees her Mom face to face, her mother would scream, shout, talk nicely, play the guilt trip, beg, promise, threaten, get tears in her eyes, throw her hands in the air, and eventually leave.  And Charlie would follow her quietly, always tearful.

One day Charlie stopped coming around. Charlie did not see fifteen, she died of a heroine overdose.