While I walk

While I walk I’m thinking, thinking about everything, if you can ever know anything. Yesterday... Something happened, occurred I suppose you can laugh now, everything is always happening or at least is there being. I'm sorry I’m waffling again, always have talked too much or not enough. You know depending on the times when you should talk and when you shouldn’t. I always get that timing wrong, always… You’ll have to think of it with me or it won’t work, you won't be able to envisage the sourness, the odour, the reek of the place and I’m not just talking physically I’m talking mentally. When he came near you… Anyway I’ve gone off again so here goes I suppose.1

I remember the room as being cold, yes at first that’s what it was, the cold that woke me. Can you believe in a hazy doze I had been content just to sit and happily pretend that I might not be the one. The one they might chose to do the thing, whatever this thing involved. 2

I woke to find the room damp and musty with green stains curling themselves down the walls. Mould: old and new covered the floor in twirling shadows of green, grey and brown. The others were there as well, we all must have looked dirty I think but it didn’t really register at the time. Our eyes were on him, the one, the one that would choose. I can still feel him now staring at us all, at me. He terrified me, so normal, such an apparently insignificant person but the eyes showed. Those eyes showed something else. Those pits carried you into his deranged soul and made you a part of him because once you had looked you couldn’t have ever scrubbed the dirt away. I still feel it now, that clinging dirty sensation that still creeps up even when you think you have reached peace.3

Try to imagine fifteen people all in one small room, all trying to push away from a small chair in the middle, half of them still drugged on the floor. We were all afraid and had good reason. He was picking one of us for a job. One of his lowest of the low, the imported stock that in a year or so would start to look older than their own mothers, with the pain and abuse they carried weighing heavily. I suppose that sort of explains itself, we were to be chosen because he knew of our fear, knew of our need to rise out of the place he had set us down in. Sounds almost biblical that, though we were not trying to raise ourselves to heaven only to the earth or what the earth used to be like for us. So with equal hope and fear we wanted and hated the idea of being chosen.4

There was silence in the room as he stood atop the chair; he was going to say the name. Number 313 he said I’m choosing you, were we that low a people that he used the numbers we had had on our ferry tickets. That thought crossed my mind first you see, I looked down and what did I realise, I realised it was me, I was the one. Then silence, just silence as I looked around me at the people I had travelled with, come to care about, pitying me and hating me at the same time, with there angry and sad faces spiralling into one.5

I don’t remember much after that, how I got to the hotel, I was in shock I think. I felt a prevailing sense of loss, I remember that clearly, the feeling that nothing of any connection I would ever feel to another being would ever be pure again. The hotel was clean that is all I can tell, beautifully clean. I must of looked pretty bad I think, a couple of people tried to talk to me before they saw who I was with. After that, feelings of cleanliness and of water, of soap but then the night came or my night as it were, he came. I don’t think I can help you image the terror, the pain of what I felt. I suppose I should have been grateful that it was only one man on me, only one man for the moment who would do this to me in my night.6

The day after I was still numb but a odd awareness had filled me, a need for survival that I had not felt before. The hotel room was oddly clean with pale blue wall paper and long cream curtains, but maybe that was just because of the blood on the bed. My blood, my innocence that had been stripped all over again, I must not think like that though, I was going to do a job and do it well. But the fear of what that ‘job’ was would not leave me.7

He walked in and I involuntary flinched, I couldn’t stand him there, I couldn’t, I couldn’t, I couldn’t breath. I started to hyperventilate. At the back of my mind a voice said calmly that I was having a panic attack. He slapped me; I was stunned I couldn’t say a word. I just stared at him, so normal. His mouth, his teeth, he tongue, his eyes, his hair, his nose, his skin all so normal. He then started to explain what I would have to do.8

It happened like this, I would be outside of a school and I’d take a… I’d take a… I would snatch a child. While he talked, in my mind I was screaming, screaming why is it me, why do I have to pass on my pain to another like others do. Why do I have to service the darkness?9

I would be outside the school at pick-up time, the child was to be black and slim with big eyes. Any child would do they just had to fit in with the description. I was to then pick up the child, with bribery ideally but with force if necessary. I was to look like any other mother picking up a child (they had chosen a large poorer intercity school so I would not be noticed also it was more likely to have an adequate child). I was to take the child back to the hotel. From there I had no information. 10

I had to wait a week till I had to do my job. The hotel’s staff were kind to me in their way, they knew what I suffered in the night and slipped me pain killers with my breakfast. I was thankful and not angry that they were not helping me more. Most have to keep on living for somebody else; they had families who depended on them. One to the many I suppose.11

So finally I come to the final happening. I drove up to that school yesterday and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it for myself; to take this child would mean my freedom, my spirit back, my control over who I was but… I think I realised that to do this thing would only bring me further away from that goal, all I would be doing was passing on my own pain onto a 10 year old girl. 12

So I didn’t do it, I drove and I drove and I drove, until I came to a street and I started walking, and I just walked and I’ve not stopped walking since nearly for nearly 24 hours, my legs haven’t stopped moving, I’ll never let him find me, never. 13

So that’s who I am, a number, a thing, nothing more to you people than a prostitute foreigner, doesn’t it matter that I was promised better? No, it doesn’t, it only matters that I’m there if you want me, me on that bed ready for you, groaning with pleasure of course. What do you think I’m feeling?14