"She walks in and says come on let's have it
She brings out the worst you can be
It's a good day for a bad habit
Don't you dare to disagree"

-Racoon, 'No mercy'

Church songs were playing on the radio, women with angelic voices were hitting notes higher than a junkie had ever been. The basses were singing low like roaring engines. How she wished she could be in church like before. Memories drifted through her head, she remembered sitting next to her brother and listening to the endless choir songs. Her mother was soprano in the church choir with consisted of old ladies -including her mom-. The whole family would come every Christmas to Valendal to listen to the choir.
Lillian did the dishes. She scrubbed the brown-spotted dining plates. An old grey radio was standing on a barstool that looked like it could break down if someone blew at it. The house was furnitured with ugly 50's couches and the kitchen looked like a 30's nightmare. The building was old and made to hold ten people, only seven made use of it, the other three bedrooms were filled with garbage and one was a computer and sewing room, 'owned' by Charlot and Jiu.
Jiu claimed that her stage-name meant wine in Chinese, she wouldn't tell her real name and wanted to be called; "just Jiu". She also claimed to come from China and was smuggled here in London via the Chinese mafia, Lillian proclaimed her stories bullshit. Jiu looked nowhere near Chinese and spoke English with an posh accent. Probably a british daddies-girl who wanted to experience the party lifestyle without being caught.
The party lifestyle was for most of the inhabitants of house Flowerdale more a burden than a party. It was their way of life and there was nowhere out, it wasn't fun anymore, and for Lillian it never had been. She never got why all the rich girls called it a 'glamorous living', 'Living like a diva', 'doing what you love for money'.
She didn't do what she loved, most girls in this house didn't. Only the newlings liked the attention of the gross men.
All of the girls were owned by Kast, who provided them a home, food, electricity and safety, sometimes even drugs. He did this in exchange for eighty percent of the money they girls made. Lillian didn't care, even if he asked her hundred percent, she just wanted to live remotely stable.
She remembered her former home, being an middle-upper class white girl, with no troubles a person who wasn't close to her could see, or hear about. Many called her lucky to have a home like that. Lucky to be her, others just didn't care about her. Lillian had average friends, lived a seemingly average life and had average aspirations. Her looks were dodgy though, a broken nose from a 'fight with her neighbor dog', throw away the neighbor and dog and replace it with stepdad, and a few small scars on her rib cage from 'falling on badly placed nails' which also could be replaced with violence and her stepdad. She had her nose fixed as soon as she was in Britain by an almost-graduated plastic surgeon with the money she had saved up when she still lived in the Netherlands.
She had a long road behind her, and had a long road to go.
Lillian ran away. A runaway girl with no future, she had no identity, her name was untraceable in Britain, she basically did not exist here.
She used to search up the Dutch news about the disappearance of Lillian Kruisling, her heart always skipped a beat when she heard a Dutch accent say her name on the BNR* channel se often watched in her bed. The news about her calmed down after two months of intensive police reports, every trace of her led to an dead end.
She didn't plan her disappearance very well but it worked. She applied to summer school 'humanities and resources' in Britain, and threw away her passport in the trash cans of Heathrow, then she ran away with Kast, the guy she met online and talked about how they could help each other.
Kast was a very honest man, he was in his mid thirties and looked nowhere near a pimp, more like a hardworking father. Kast told her from the beginning what was waiting for her here in London. A life as a 'go-go dancer' and a 'sugar-girl'.
Lillian prefered the sugar girl terrain instead of the gogo dancers. It just felt more right to spend time with a dude without doing something remotely weird than dancing in front of thirsty guys.
Kast was okay with it and tried to pass on as much jobs as possible on her. Lonely guys in their fifties who wanted some company of a young woman, she had very vanilla customers. They mostly only wanted to talk with her, or watch movies together. One even wanted her to cook, which was no biggie for Lillian, she did whatever they wanted to at first, but now she had set her own rules.
Jiu picked up some clean dishes that Lillian had put on the countertop.
"Having a free night aren't you?" she said.
"Yes, its sunday so its not like I would have much customers anyway." Lillian dried the last cup.
"Nice, it's my day off today too." Jiu reached out for the cupboard.
Lillian was silent. Jiu awkwardly drummed on the countertop with her fingers and fled away to her sewing room.
Lillian took a seat at the long table, she looked through the mail. Most mail were bills, electricity, mortgage, a plumber. Her eye bat at a fancy letter. The envelope had a classy sign on it, curly letters wrote her name. "Lillian Kruisling." She felt her heart stop and her breath fail. Did they found her? The sign was nowhere near familiar to Lillian. Her hands were shaking, her mouth opened but no sound came. She looked at the letter with big eyes and pulled the letter out of there, in one pull. Letters were strangely drifting through her vision. She read every letter but couldn't put it together. Her eyes just dazed over the text. No.
"Dear Lillian," she said, in awe. How could someone have found her.
He did. He did find her and nobody else did, and she had no idea how. She was nothing here, she even had a different name, only her roommates knew her real name. "Or should I call you Dibella?". Fuck. How did he know? How?
He asked her to come to America, Baltimore, Maryland. Lillian didn't even know Maryland existed until now. The letter contained a fake passport and a ticket for the plane tomorrow, six in the morning. Her dad finally wanted to meet her. She found relief and comfort in it. There was someone who cared about her. He wanted to see her, hopefully save her from here. A smile flared up, she jumped around with the letter in her hand. Her life was about to change, for the good.
Lillian had tried to contact her mysterious dad many times before, she never got a letter back. Her mom told her his address and that was it. Nothing more, nothing less. She never told Lillian how they met, why she was born. Maybe she could finally get some answers.
She might have considered not going if she still lived in the Netherlands.
But now she was a dirty dancer and there weren't any worse places she could be in her life, it only could go uphill from here.
Lillian decided to go, to her dad, someone with the name H. Lecter.