13 Lessons From A Morally-Wounded Woman: Chapter 7

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Chapter 7

“Everything is better in the rain.”




“I have seen you before in that market near the old college,” The Child tells me from behind a rose-bush.


He startles me and I put my cigarette out so quickly it burns my wrist as I fumble. The Child and I haven’t had many conversations before. He is often around when I go to the shelter but he doesn’t speak much. I see him, sometimes, staring at me from the little corners he hides in. He likes to hide.


“Really?” I ask him pressing down on the tiny burn on my wrist, “I stopped going there almost a year ago. What were you doing there?”

It has been threatening to rain all evening and a flash of lightening streaks across the sky as I speak.

“I lived there,” he says in a manner too matter-of-fact for a kid to use when referring to the streets as home, “You used to give money to my friend every time you came, she told you stories everyday…”

My heart sinks as soon as he mentions her and the sheer coincidence of him knowing the only child I have ever enjoyed communicating with makes my palms sweat. This is a city of 18-million people yet somehow this four-feet tall little boy has seen me before and he knows a part of my life that is at the same time so tawdry and so precious that no one knows it. His friend, the girl I used to give money to, was a beautiful budding con woman. She couldn’t have been older than eleven and each time I went to the market she was talking to a different person, telling them a different story about her life: Sometimes her mother was dying, sometimes her dog was injured, sometimes she was homeless, sometimes she needed money for school, sometimes for her sister but there was always a story. A rich, detailed story with characters and voices and dialogues. Her stories were never a display of need or destitution, in fact, her manner was so jovial it always seemed like she was doing a bit. She was too proud to actually ask for money directly, but I knew very few people who could walk away from a conversation with her without giving her some.



She didn’t look like a child of the streets either. She once told me that she had convinced one of the baristas at the café to let her use the bathroom each morning so she could bathe and do her hair. It could have been a lie, anything with her could have been a lie, but she did always look neatly turned out. Her hair were never matted, though her clothes were ratty and too well-worn, and she never had dirty hands. I used to give her money before she told me her stories because I wanted her to know that it was payment for the skill of storytelling. She would buy a small packet of biscuits before she pocketed the rest of the cash, she’d feed half the packet to the dogs and keep the rest for her friends. I stopped going to that café after she disappeared. One day she just stopped coming around. I asked people about her but no one could tell me where she went, nor did anyone know a single detail about her that could be corroborated. We couldn’t even agree on a real name and the likelihood that our top contenders for the name were all fake too was extremely high.


“Do you know where she went?” I ask The Child.

“Don’t know,” he says, “I moved from there already before her but she was crazy, she could have gone anywhere.”

“She was crazy, wasn’t she?” I ask him, smiling.

“She used to lie to people about everything,” he says, also smiling, “She fooled so many people!”

It’s true, she really did. She did very well for herself at her weird chosen trade. Most people gave her three to four times the amount of money they would normally give a beggar child and I cant imagine anyone who walked away from her having given her nothing.

“But she was my friend,” he says quietly, “I miss her, I wish we hadn’t moved from there.”

“Why did you?” I ask him.

The smile fades from his face and the little dimples disappear, he looks towards the house; one of his eyes blinks rapidly while the other is wide open. It’s a very intense facial expression for a child. His brow is furrowed and he is digging his nails into his palm. He looks towards me and upon seeing my look of curious horror, immediately relaxes his face back into a smile.


“You shouldn’t worry so much about the school thing,” he says to me completely ignoring my question, “I can study at home.”


It is true that we are at a complete dead-end with regard to his schooling. In the past week My Only Friend and I have knocked on every door we could and come up empty handed. Ultimately we just decided to pay The Teacher a little extra to homeschool him but I am worried that he may not be able to take centralised exams once he is older because he has no documentation or formal education. My Only Friend, however, believes I worry about the wrong thing.


“Be fair,” she said to me a few days ago when we decided to throw in the towel, “Do you really believe he will get a job that is based on education? Wouldn’t it be better if we taught him to read and write but also like..to repair refrigerators?”


I knew she had a point, as ideal as I would like life to be, a lot of the our decisions of livelihood are made based on where we were born and out of whose vagina. I like to believe everyone will and can follow their dreams, be a scientist, change the world and live happily ever after even though I know it’s not true.

“You will study at home,” I tell him, “We have a great teacher.”


“She’s very sweet,” he says thoughtfully, “Why did her friend hit her?”

I am not prepared to explain that to a child. I am not even sure I understand it myself. After my brief conversation with The Teacher I spoke with everyone in the house to attempt to determine what had happened. Everyone gave me a different rendition. The Chef said the fight began as soon as The Womanfriend arrived and it seemed to be about money at first. The Seamstress, bless her heart, actually tried to convince me that when two women attempt to be man and wife nature fights against it by awakening a monster instead them. The Sisters explained that they had heard and seen nothing, and wished to not be involved at all. Number 1 just stood beside The Seamstress while she explained things to me. Number 2 told me a long story about two women in rehab and that she was sure that drugs were involved in the violence. Number 4 said I was overreacting to just one beating and that everyone was too. I expected my chat with Number 3 to yield more results but she refused to talk. She said she had heard enough from The Teacher and thought we shouldn’t interfere in their lives.

I tried to speak with The Teacher again but most of that conversation focused on her promising me that there wouldn’t be a ruckus again, I tried to explain to her that I was more concerned for her than the ruckus but she seemed to believe I was only performing concern out of a sense of duty. She had a longer conversation with My Only Friend but the gist of that was that she felt uncomfortable that so many people had been made privy to her business. Eventually we both decided to tell everyone in the house to stop bringing it up with her, we planned on keeping a closer eye on things and my friend suggested that it might be time for me to consider instituting visitation hours on the premises. I refused to do it, though, because that’s how it begins. Often a rule is made with the intention of protecting someone but what happens is that the person who makes the rule isn’t the one to enforce it. With that the enforcer, which I can only imagine would have been The Seamstress or worse the guard, uses it to pursue their agenda and exert the control they think necessary. I’ll be damned if I make a bunch of women justify their freedom to me, an old lady or a man with a stick. I’ll also be damned if I allow a woman to be abused in front of my eyes.

I’ll be damned, I was born for it.

“Sometimes when people love each other it, they can’t stand the tiniest disagreement with each other,” I explain to him, “Sometimes love makes you do angry, crazy things to each other.”

“Don’t you think that sounds more like hate?” He asks.

Children, due to the limitation of communication, are sometimes able to cut to the heart of things with so much ease it’s astounding.



“It is,” I tell him, “It’s not really ever love that makes you want to destroy a person.”

I don’t really believe that. I believe sometimes we fall in love for the destruction.


……..


Destruction was why I fell in love with My Actual Abusive Boyfriend. When I met him I had been living my dream of being a sex-worker for a little over a year, I was also attending school and getting a degree in social work. I didn’t have friends at college because it is not always possible to make time for friends when you are attempting to navigate your way through a profession you cannot learn to operate from a textbook. I fumbled a lot that year. At first I tried to work through an agency, I called several of them after compiling a list from the dirty recesses of the internet. A couple of them just refused to entertain me, one man in particular was extremely tickled by the fact that I was calling to ask for work as if I were calling a retail employer. I don’t know when we decided that we would treat directness as naivety but he spoke to me like I were a child pretending to be at work in her mom’s office. As far as I was concerned, I was calling a retail employer.



Finally, I spoke to a guy who called me in to meet him. It was one of those college-girls who need money type agencies that allows occasional prostitution. I didn’t want to work at anything too high-end because, to be honest, I didn’t believe that I was beautiful enough. By that point in my life I had gotten my weight under control but the scars of growing up a fat, ugly easy lay don’t fade even when you stop being some of those things. I believed they would laugh at me when I sent them my pictures and I would lose my nerve to actually go through with my life plans. I went for the safer and easier situation also because I wanted to be a cheap thing. It does not sit well with me to be given too high an estimation, I would rather be the well cut zircon that shines like a diamond in a display case littered with crude, glass baubles. An exquisite deception is more alluring to me than real value.


I went in to meet him the next day and the entire experience was both exhilarating and uncomfortable. He lived in a strange part of the heart of town. It was a village, surrounded by high-rises, hipster cafes and gymnasiums on all sides. When you entered his street, suddenly all the amenities of the big city seemed to disappear. The addresses were scribbled in chalk right onto the exposed-brick of the rectangular structures that were crammed together in a matchbox structure. There were children playing with old tyres in the streets and down at the end of the lane there was what can only be described as a cow-shelter. The cow-shelter, unlike the rest of the buildings, was painted. I walked down the street counting off numbers until I came to the front of his house. It has been raining all day and even though it had let up for a few hours the entire street smelled of mud, gutters and cow-dung. I stood in front of the house for a moment. There was no gate and the door to the house was open, but a curtain was pulled across the gap. I looked for a doorbell but I couldn’t find one.

“Excuse me,” I said in a small voice before repeating it much louder, “Excuse me.”


A couple of people in the street looked at me and just as I was contemplating calling him on the phone instead, a young boy came outside. I gave him the name of the person I was there to meet, he sized me up and down, and asked me to wait. A few minutes later, a much older man came out through the doors. I greeted him and before I could say anything he began speaking to me in a language that I couldn’t even decipher well-enough to know if I had the right person. I explained to him in the only sentence I could say that I didn’t speak the language. He asked me if I was the girl who had called the day before and I confirmed as much.

“Ah.. come, come,” he said pulling the curtain as I followed him inside, “Didn’t think you would actually come.”

I was not surprised to hear that but I was astounded by house I walked into. It was so, homely. There a red and golden sofa set on one end of the room, ghastly, and littered with cushions of every colour and design. On the other end of the room there was a dining-table covered in a white plastic sheet, a woman sat at the table cutting the tails off of a pile of ladyfingers. I nodded my head at her taking note of how much make-up she seemed to be wearing for a woman just chopping vegetables on the dining table. A small child ran around the house in nothing but a long white vest that seemed to covered in mango-stains. I am not sure what I had expected but it wasn’t that. Maybe a back alley and a dark room with a strange men inspecting me.

The Pimp himself looked like any other guy. His lime green shirt was unbuttoned to the third button revealing a rich tapestry of hair across his chest and a gold chain with a picture of one of eleventy billion gods on it. I couldn’t tell him apart from the guy who sold me my cigarettes. He gestured to me to have a city and said something to the woman at the table in a different language. She got up immediately and brought me a glass of water, I refused it because I wanted to be a whore, not a victim of trafficking. He seemed unperturbed by my refusal. We sat in silence while the woman took the glass back to the kitchen. She came back in a moment, picked up the dirty child and disappeared behind the curtain that probably led to the bedroom.


“Very beautiful,” he said to me, moving to the chair next to me, “Very fair skin, very popular over here.”


He said the word popular with such elongation of the vowels that it took me a full minute to understand what he had said. He asked me why I wanted to do this and I gave him the answer I has rehearsed my entire life.

“Money problems,” I told him.

“Everybody money problems,” he said, “Same for me, money problem.”
I had no money problems but I had a sneaking suspicion that telling people this was my dream job would put me in a strange position. Sex work is only conscionable when it is born from desperation, we are comfortable with whores as long as we look at them as the pitiable things that other people use. We don’t know what to do with people who don’t associate morality with chastity. He explained to me how they worked. He asked me questions about whether I had been with men before as if he were asking me about what I studied at school. All the while I could hear his wife speaking with the children on the other end of the curtain. He explained to me that most of the girls who worked with him did so on an occasional basis, and if I wanted to do the same I could text him in the morning on days that I was available. He also explained that he would always meet the guy first, take his share of the payment and I would take the rest from them when I met them. The sheer amount of technical details to hash out once we began discussing this business sanitised it until it just felt like we were discussing any other form of trade. I think I expected that he would demand sex from me immediately but it didn’t even come up. Instead we talked cuts, safety, communication and other things that are relevant when you begin any new job.


“You start today?” he asked me after I had asked all my questions.

“Today?” I repeated to end specific end.

“You don’t come back tomorrow if you don’t start today,” he said with nonchalance, “Better is it start today.”

I wondered if I would come back the day after and even though I had spent my entire life waiting for that moment I couldn’t say for sure that I would have. There is moment between the realisation of fantasy in reality that gives me pause every single time. For just one moment, I considered running away and building myself a newer, more normal life. It’s was only a moment, though, a moment in which I forgot who I was.

“I start today.” I told him.

He said he would text me the details in the evening. He also told me the name of the hotel I should go to and the guy I should talk to about a room there. He warned me never to talk to anyone else about it and to never go anywhere else with someone I was meeting. The hotel he told me about was one of those places that everyone knows but no one ever goes to. It was situated right beside a rain gutter and that was the only thing you’d smell when you stepped out of that building, which was a shame because evenings in that city are simply delightful all year round. The cool wind would blow and while in the rest of the city that meant outdoor seating at every damn bar, at that corner it meant your nostrils would be overcome with the heady mix of garbage, sewage and something dead. I don’t know why but I always liked that smell but I suppose I’ve known a long time that I like weird smells.


Sometimes just bad ones. Even today my favourite smell is that of day-old piss and semen, and fresh blood combining in a thick, slightly moist, absorbent fabric. I don’t quite see people lining up to buy the line of perfume I’d launch. Rather like that hotel, which over the years had become more landmark than a place actual people visited. Everyone used it to give directions in the area. I guess that happens to old hotels, parlours and bars in every city, they become the relics from our childhoods that we never play with anymore, and the ruins from our youth we only venture into in our memories, but we like having them there. We lug them in boxes from town to town and fight against their demolition from court-to-court. We don’t do anything with them. I had always wondered who would ever stay at that hotel whenever I passed by it on my morning run. I couldn’t have imagined the answer to that question would be me.


I couldn’t believe the name the first time The Pimp said it to me, again, I had the slightest urge to flee the scene. There is a line, as I said, where playing out casual fantasies about sex work and sleeping with men for professional or other favours crosses into actual, qualifiable prostitution and it always becomes real when a real hotel room is involved. When he took the name of the place, it was like he was asking me to cross into a mythical land that didn’t really exist. As if the government had sent me a letter ordering me to report to Hogwarts, it was an immeasurable mash-up of fantasy and reality, and one rubs up against the other like nails on a wall. The urge to flee was replaced with the adrenaline of adventure. I went home and waited for him to send me the text. The longer I waited the more worried I felt that it would never come, it was like waiting for a lover to text you back the morning after. At length he sent me a message with a name, a phone number and a time.

He had told me before that he would meet me outside the hotel to ensure everything went smoothly because it was my first time. I spent about as many hours getting ready as a bride is meant to. I took care of everything. I dressed myself in the same black skirt and top that I would always wear, I painted my lips red and put a string of pearls around my neck. The pearls were real and I hated them, I loathe everything they are supposed to represent: finesse, propriety, daintiness, beauty. I loathe all those things and when father had sent them to me on my sixteenth birthday I had decided in that very moment that I wouldn’t wear them until I was a whore. I left my house an hour early even though I lived only a few kilometres from the place, I took the longest way I possibly could and got there with only five minutes to spare and an annoying beat from a song I couldn’t recall stuck in my head. The entire city smelled of the freshness of the rain except for that corner which smelled only of the refuse and muck of the entire neighbourhood.

The Pimp was standing outside with a much better looking man than I had expected. He was a small man, perhaps a inch shorter than me. His pants were tighter than they needed to be and his shirt was much bigger. I walked to them and politely greeted them both. The man looked shy and I would learn later that for the most part experienced whoremongers are a rare breed, most men who hire whores are more scared of us than we are of them. The Pimp took me aside and told me that I looked beautiful, it would have been an extremely paternal moment if he hadn’t just taken money for my vagina from some guy I didn’t even know. He explained that he had spoken to the guy about the room but I should still ask to speak to him so I knew how to do it in the future. He left shortly after. The client and I walked into the hotel. He didn’t say anything to me and for once in my life I didn’t feel any pressure to correct that. I owed him my body, not my words.


As soon as we walked in I could see that it was the type of place that someone had really cared about once, a long time ago. Someone had cared about those brown and cream couches, those maroon curtains and that old desk with the polish peeling off to reveal that strange part of the stripped down wood that was unpainted and clearly neglected; you could see that when those decisions were made someone was investing in their dreams. Personally I have never wanted to run a hotel but I have had dreams and I know when someone’s dreams are standing alive in front of me, faded and gutter-scented, but still standing when somehow every single stone around them has changed. I wondered if whoever it was that first built that place knew that someday someone like me would come there to lay in those bulk-bought beds for a price that never did truly lay on the nightstand. I asked the guy at the reception if he was the one that The Pimp had mentioned and he nodded his head. I wondered if he knew back when he was a child and that hotel was a new, fancy place that he couldn’t go eat at, that someday he would make his money renting rooms to whores between check-out and check-in to make more money than his dad did. Some jobs are so difficult to explain to your kids, or the guy you meet when you’re buying soap at the corner store.


The guy gave me a key and a room-number, I gestured to the client to come with me and he followed me into the elevator. He stood at the other end of the elevator as if coming closer to me than necessary would eviscerate him and I didn’t care so much because I was trying to keep myself from having a panic attack from being in an elevator. Once we entered the room, things became a lot easier because I took my clothes off immediately. I didn’t know then what kind of whore I would be but I knew that confidence always works. I undressed and I rubbed myself against his body. I kissed his neck and unbuttoned his shirt and after that it was like riding a really boring bicycle. Sex has always been easy for me, the difficult part came after when I asked him for money. I couldn’t figure out the right moment to do it so I opted for one second after he was done. He seemed to expect it, I also realised that I was supposed to make him pay for the room beforehand and had completely forgotten. Luckily for me he wasn’t the kind of guy who was trying to get away with not paying. He paid me as soon as he could uncross his eyes and I went into the bathroom to wash myself up. When I came out he was already gone. It made me laugh because I thought it was the whore that got paid to leave. I walked downstairs instead of taking the elevator because once I was alone my fear of them was more important than the needs of the person with me, I paid the guy at the desk and he reminded me that in the future I should make the guy do that in advance. I nodded my head and told him it was my first time and I was learning, he was not as amused by that as I was. I walked out the doors of the hotel and walked to the bar three doors down where I picked up a guy to have sex with for free, I just needed to compare the two experiences. I could barely distinguish between the two men.

That’s how fine the line between love and hatred feels for me sometimes. I could never tell if the man punching me loved me or hated me; I couldn’t tell if his need to destroy me was consumption by love or a result of obsessive hatred.



……….



I know is that I am lying to The Child as I explain to him that violence is a symptom of hatred. In reality maybe violence is a symptom of entitlement more than anything else. My Actual Abusive Boyfriend was able to beat me the way he did because he believed he owned my being and was entitled to my suffering; my mother was able to do it because as her child she believed she as entitled to do anything to me.


“I don’t think I love anyone,” The Child says to me in response.


I don’t know why he said that and I am half-tempted to disregard it entirely but before I can give into the urge to investigate it further we are interrupted by My Only Friend walking towards us from inside the house. She has been supervising the repairs that were being made to the light-fixtures, we don’t normally do that ourselves but of late we have been trying to spend more time inside the house to have a more firm handle on the things that are going on.

“I found this,” she says showing a tennis ball to The Child.


He takes the ball from her and runs away to the other end of the garden. She puts people at ease with so little effort, I love that about her. I always feel like I am standing on the edge of a vast lake when I am with her. I have always felt like I make people uncomfortable by sounding like an overly-sentient robot but she always sounds alive. You can always hear the flesh and blood in her veins.

“Shall we go?” She asks me.


The Boyfriend is in his hometown for the umpteenth hearing on an unending trial and I have been staying with her for the past couple of days. She doesn’t like being alone in the house and I always enjoy her company. I nod and stand up, putting the cigarette butt into my pocket where it will likely remain until it goes through a wash-cycle. It has been a calm day, too calm, and I am restless. As we walk out of the gate, it starts to drizzle. She looks up at the sky and then rolls her eyes at me. She really does not like the rain, she’s a sunshine and humidity kind of person.


“Why are you doing this?” She asks me as if I have a remote control in my pocket that controls the rain.


I hold her hand and pull her closer to me. I’ve never known anyone else I can touch with no intention of fucking.


“I love you,” I tell her.

She smiles and squeezes my hand.

“I love you too,” she says.


It begins to pour in the earnest and with each crack of thunder I feel my restlessness abating. She runs to take cover under a tree.


“Will you fucking stop it?” She yells at me.

I can’t. Everything is better in the rain.



………..