One of Us (5 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

The next time was easy. Easy for me, not so easy for the big man with a dislocated arm.

“Fell off a horse,” he said, and grinned. Then he tried to look down my t-shirt as I bent over.

“I am going to put your arm back into place,” I told him.

“You can do what you like with me, love, I’m all yours. Does it hurt much then? Don’t mind a bit of pain, know what I mean. What about you, love?” He laughed like a pig snorts, and sat with his fat legs wide open so I had to lean against them with mine to get close to him.

“No, it does not hurt,” I said to him, and to his friends who were watching. “I did this once for a little girl. She had fallen off her bicycle. She was very brave, and I did it and she did not make a single sound. After I was finished, I gave her a lollipop for being so good. Do you think you can be as tough as a little girl?”

I put his shoulder back where it should be.

“No lollipop for you,” I said.

The next time they sent me to see a girl who thought she had a venereal disease. She was small and blonde, and she did not stop drumming her fingers for a moment, even when I was examining her. Her cheek bore the mark of a fading bruise, but there was not anything that I could do for that. She told me that her name was Maja, and that she was from Slovenia.

“How did you end up here?” I asked.

The man sitting reading a newspaper and pretending not to watch my examination coughed. Maja glanced at him, and did not say anything more, she just drummed away on the bed frame, like she was tapping out a distress signal in morse code.

When I was finished I told her that she did not have a venereal disease that I could see, she had a very bad case of thrush, and what she should do about it. But I also told her that this did not mean that she did not have any diseases that I could not see.

“Have you been to a clinic?” I asked her.

She shook her head. “Not allowed. This is why I see you.”

I shook my head. This was madness. “Tell Corgan,” I told the man. “Tell him she needs to see a proper doctor. She can go to a clinic, it will be anonymous, she won’t get reported to anyone if you need to keep this all so secret. Tell him.”

He laughed. “I’m not going to
tell
Corgan anything. I’d wash your hands now love, if I were you.”

“Why?” I said to him. “I haven’t touched you.”

~

I carried on with my job at the burger restaurant. It was safe, it was familiar, and if Corgan took my papers away again it would not matter, because Peter had not been interested in seeing any in the first place. It was not easy being back at work with Sean. We did what polite people do, and so did not talk about what had happened at all. We talked less than we had before, and when we did it was only about things that did not matter, that could not matter, and that could not lead on to a conversation about anything that mattered. It was being in a lift with a stranger, over and over again.

He did little things for me, without saying anything about them. When it was my break, I would go to make a coffee, and there would be one there on the side already cooling for me. I would be on cleaning rota, and I would go to scrape the grill down but I would find that it had already been done. When I thanked him, Sean would just look embarrassed, and look away, and mutter that it was not a problem. This was Sean’s way of saying sorry to me, and I was touched that he did it. But I was still hurt that he had run from me when I needed him most, and he still looked like a school boy who had been caught looking at his father’s dirty magazines, and we still did not talk about what lay between us like a wall.

And then the next morning I came out of the hostel, and Paul was there, waiting in his blue car with his sunglasses on. They were nice, and would have suited someone else.

“Job for you,” he said. He did not look very happy.

“No time. I have to go to the shops,” I said.

“Go after,” he said. “Don’t make it hard, I’ve got to take you.”

“You are just following orders,” I said, but he did not get it.

“Aren’t we all, love,” he said. At least I think he did not get it. I scowled at him, and got into the back of the car. That was the morning that I met Elena, and everything changed.

It was the first time I had been taken back to the house where I had treated the man who had been shot. I walked in past the table full of mail. I wondered whether anyone ever collected it, if it was the same collection of junk mail, free newspapers and pizza menus that it had been when I first came to this house. Maybe the invisible people of this house did collect their post, but it was replaced again the next day by more. Maybe there were no other people in this house. Just whoever Corgan brought here, and me. I also wondered whether other people were brought here by Corgan too, not to be healed, but to be hurt.

I climbed the stairs to the room on the third floor. The scarred door was open a little, so I pushed it further, and walked in.

She was standing with her back to me, smoking a cigarette and looking out of the window as if she was watching something out there that she did not want to lose sight of. She wore a coat that looked as if it would have a very expensive label inside it, a pair of tight jeans, trainers that were very white. Her hair was dark, and pulled back into a simple pony tail held with a glittery band, like a child would wear. I could tell by the way that she was standing that she was in pain. She held herself with the delicate stillness that you use when any movement at all hurts.

“Hello,” I said. “I am Anna.”

She didn’t turn round. She dragged on her cigarette. Blew the smoke at the glass in front of her.

I stood there, waiting for her.

She stared out at the roofs of the houses opposite. I did not know what she saw, but it was not what was there. I waited.

“So,” she said in the end, stubbing her cigarette out on the windowsill. “You going to get on with what he’s paid you to do?”

“He doesn’t pay me.”

She laughed, but there was no humour in it. “Yes, he does. Somehow. Or you would not be here.” The woman was a foreigner here too, I could hear it in her words. Her voice made me think of home. She turned from the window, and sat down on the bed. But still she did not look at me.

I picked up my bag, dragged the chair from the wall across to the bed, and sat down on the edge of it. I had learnt that if you sat in the middle it sank down towards the floor as if it was trying to eat you. “Where are you hurt?”

She ignored me, focusing on the cigarette in one hand, the lighter in the other, trying to make one meet the other when both were shaking. She got there in the end, took a long drag, and blew the smoke out towards her lap. Then she looked up at me.

“Only on the outside.”

“OK,” I said. “Then let’s have a look at the outside.”

For a moment she hesitated, and her brittle shell cracked and I saw the girl beneath. Then the mask was back. She looked at me.

“You’re not British. You’re foreign, like me. A long way from home.”

“That’s right,” I said. I did not want to commit to any more. I did not want to talk about my home. I could not place her, did not want to get caught up in any of the eternal rivalries of the region. But she wasn’t interested in where I came from, only interested in the fact that I did not come from here.

“You like it here?”

I shrugged. She nodded. We both understood. It was nothing against the country. Just the fact that we both worked for Corgan meant that we were part of the country beneath the country. And that was a different place.

“I could live here,” she said. “Some day. Live like one of them. I am saving up what I can and one day I will have enough to leave all of this. One day. I will move to Canada, to Vancouver. One day.”

And what if he doesn’t want to let you go, I thought. But I did not say it.

“I have a boy,” she said. “Back home. He is with my sister now, but one day, when I am settled and have a new life he will come with me to Canada.”

“How old is he?” I asked.

“Three,” she said, and she stared past me into the distance, through the dusty flowers on the wallpaper, through the damp plaster and the crumbling brick and out, across the land and over the cold grey of the sea and then on to land again, where she saw him, playing with some toy cars. Or maybe sleeping, his face so still and peaceful. “Three,” she said again, and then she looked down at the floor and smoked furiously at her cigarette until it was all gone.

I sat and waited, and thought of my family, and said nothing.

“I want drugs,” she said in the end, and she unzipped her coat, and shrugged it off. “For the pain. You are no doctor if you do not give me drugs for the pain.”

“I will see,” I said. “First show me where you are hurt.”

She laughed, and pulled her t-shirt over her head, without any embarrassment, but with an intake of breath as if I had kicked her. She was not wearing a bra underneath. The straps would have cut too hard into the dark marks that blossomed across her skin like ugly flowers. She sat on the bed, held her arms up so I could look at her properly, and I heard her make a little cry when she raised them even though she tried not to let me hear it.

“Corgan?” I said, and she shook her head. “One of his men?” The same. “Then who did this to you?”

“Men,” she said, as if she was spitting something unpleasant from her mouth. “But it is nothing. It goes. You look after it for me, it goes.” But she did not look at me, in case her eyes said something different to her mouth.

There were bruises and bite marks, and down her stomach a series of small circles that were puffy and red. A couple were weeping clear fluid.

“Are these cigarette burns?”

She nodded.

“And these?”

“Those are different,” she said. “Old. Not what you are here for.”

I looked at her for a moment, and she looked away. The needle marks were not recent. Not as recent as the rest, anyway. I placed my hands on her gently, checking for a broken rib, not finding enough space that wasn’t hurt in some way already.

“You have been tortured,” I said, applying iodine dressings, cleaning scratches and bite marks. “This is torture.”

“This is money,” she said. “See, here, these bite marks? That is more than a teacher would earn in a month at home. These scratches, food for a week on the table for my son, some winter clothes. These bruises, some new boots.”

“And how much of the money do you get to keep?”

She said nothing.

“I hope he teaches them a lesson,” I said.

She frowned, not understanding.

“If you work for Corgan’s men, then they will do something,” I said. “To the men who did this to you. They pimp for you, yes, take your money? Then this is what they do for you in return. They protect you.”

She laughed, and the sound made me feel as if a cold wind was blowing through the room.

“Do something? Oh yes, they will do something. That is why I get treated better than the other girls. Because I am special. For now. They will call my clients when I am fit to work again, that is what they will do. That is why you are here, doctor. To patch me up, heal me quick, because they don’t want to be handling damaged goods. That’s what Corgan says. No damaged goods. The men, they want to feel like it is them who damage for the first time.”

I blinked, looking at her, hearing the words but not understanding them. It was not my language, it was not her language, and I was not sure if I had heard her right. But I looked at her, and I understood. I felt sick. “I am not going to do this. I am not. I am a doctor.” Or something near that. “I am not going to make you well just so beasts can pay to do this to you again—I cannot, I will not allow it, you must not allow it, it is wrong—”

She rolled her eyes, pushed my hand away.

“I will not do it for much longer,” she said.

“You can not do it
any
longer,” I said. “You cannot. They will go too far, they will beat you to death. You will get an infection, you will puncture a lung, you do not know all the ways, I have worked in hospitals, I have seen the ways a body can be hurt, you do not know them—”

“Oh, I do. I do know them, better than you do. Believe me. Listen, you are not like them.” She smiled then, for the first time, and put her hand over mine, gently, and squeezed. “I can tell, because you are stupid.” She did not say it in a mean way. “Corgan works with people, in my country, the people who bring girls like me here. That’s what they do. They take girls from there, fill our heads with dreams, a man called Lomax brings us here and then Corgan’s men fill us with heroin, and beat us until we are broken. And then put us to work. This is who you work for, doctor. And this man knows I have a son. I have no choice, I have
no
choice, he knows I have a son. So I save what money I can, and I send back what I can to my sister, and I hope that some day he grows tired of me or the men do not want me any more, some new girl is on the scene, or I find a way to make enough money so I can get my boy and go where Corgan and his men cannot reach us. I have cousins in Canada, in Vancouver, he would not find me there. I can live with my son and we can begin our lives all over again.”

If he grows tired of you, I thought, he will give you to the men who do this to you now, and tell them they can do what they like. I wanted to be sick. I can not work for this man, I thought. I can not work for a man who does this. I knew Corgan was a criminal, but I thought it was drugs, robberies, running girls who would be walking the streets anyway. I did not know that he was a seller of people. I have known such men. I could not work for him. Would not.

“There must be a way,” I said. “There must.”

“I know,” she said. “I say that every night.”

I could not do this. Would not do this. I felt a rage well up inside me like I was going to vomit, a rage like I had not felt since I had fled my home. I had been scared, I had been frightened, I had been sad, I had been numb. But now, I was angry. I had known such men.

~

I threw open the front door so hard that it bounced back from the wall and would have hit me if I had not been out of it so fast, and already storming down the path.