The Trafficked

by Lee Weeks

  ‘There she is.’ Father Finn went forward to help her with the washing. He took the heavy baskets from her and set them down near the entrance to her house.

  ‘Hello, Wednesday. Do you remember this handsome man?’ He nodded in Mann’s direction. Wednesday smiled up at Mann, and then she quickly looked away as her eyes immediately spilt the tears she’d been holding back. ‘And this lady is Becky—a policewoman from the UK.’ Wednesday looked from one to the other, her eyes shining through the tears. She wiped her face and then her hand on her shorts.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, clutching Becky’s hand. ‘Thank you, sir, ma’am. You come find my baby?’ Her eyes were black-rimmed, bagged below from sorrow and lack of sleep.

  Father Finn spoke to her in Tagalog. She listened and bowed her head respectfully at the Father’s words. He finished in English.

  ‘Johnny here, and his colleague, Becky, will help us look for her. We will do our best, Wednesday, you know that. You must hold out hope. Be brave, be strong…’

  ‘Please come in…’ she said as she pulled back the net curtain for them to enter. Inside she switched on a light. One bare bulb hung down. The wire ran along the ceiling and disappeared. The walls were made up of flattened cans and pieces of plywood. A piece of plywood on bricks served both as a sitting platform and a bed.

  The Father spoke to her again and she nodded her agreement.

  ‘She thinks her daughter was being watched by the DDS. She thinks that she was targeted by them. Other children have told Wednesday that they saw the men in black several times before Maya disappeared. She has been to the killing field, where the bodies are usually dumped. Her daughter is not there. She says many young girls have disappeared recently. No one knows where they go, but there is talk of them ending up in one of the sex resorts.’

  Wednesday started to cry. Father Finn hugged her again and spoke softly. She took a photo from her pocket and handed it to him. He passed it to the others. The little girl sat, hands in her lap, school uniform on, and smiled at the camera. Her oversized front teeth were slightly crossed, which gave her an elfin look. She looked a lot like her mother—same big eyes, triangular face. She was a pretty child.

  ‘Can we keep this?’ Becky asked gently.

  Wednesday nodded and smiled. A small spark of hope entered her eyes. She looked at each of them, then she took Becky’s hand and held it with both of hers.

  ‘My little girl—so small.’ She wiped the tears from her eyes.

  Becky put her arm around her.

  ‘We will do our best to find her, Wednesday.’

  Father Finn spoke to her again. She listened, but halfway through the conversation she lowered her eyes and looked at the floor as she shook her head.

  ‘She has heard that her little girl has been taken to Angeles. I told her she must stay where she is. I will go there myself and look for her.’ Wednesday nodded and looked at Becky and Mann—dread in her eyes.

  ‘The Father is right, Wednesday,’ Mann said. ‘Stay here where she can find you. We will look for her for you.’ He turned the photo over. On the back was written Maya’s name and her age. ‘We will look for Maya for you.’

  34

  Maya looked at the bed next to her where Perla had been. The mattress had been washed by the women and laid on its end against the wall to dry. Maya had watched them do it. The Kano had spread the blanket over the floor and pulled Perla onto it. Perla had been left in the middle of the room whilst the women washed the floor. Maya had looked at Perla for a long time. Perla’s body was stiff and strange-looking and she lay awkwardly. The Kano had shouted at them and he had hit her when she looked at Perla, but still Maya had not been able to take her eyes from her. She could not help thinking how uncomfortable she looked.

  Now, three days later, Perla was gone, but her blood crept back out of the cracks in the floor and formed a black ragged line. Maya could smell it. Like bad meat. She kept staring at the line. It was as if every time she took her eyes from it, it moved closer.

  35

  Back on the street, Father Finn started the engine and turned the car around. Mann insisted Becky sat in the front this time. He knew she would want to ask Father Finn a lot of questions, he could see it in her face. She might have seen poverty on a backpacker’s trip to India but there was nothing like having this kind of real insight into a world that most would never want to know.

  Mann opened the windows in the back and looked long and hard at the slums that they were all so grateful to leave behind.

  ‘Has she lived there since she left the refuge, Father?’ asked Becky.

  ‘Yes, she came back here when she found out she was pregnant, and she brought her daughter up here. She lives for that little girl. It’s not easy on your own, but Wednesday has done a good job with Maya. I talked to the teachers at the school and they say Maya’s a bright little girl and always clean and tidy. Wednesday’s own mother sold her to a bar owner when she was seven. He was, and still is, a known paedophile in the Angeles area. He promised he would send her to school and that she would grow up in his household. I don’t for one minute expect the mother believed a cock and bull story like that—but it eased her conscience, no?’

  They headed towards town. The city began to build up around them.

  ‘Wednesday has done well to make it, once the girls are broken it is very hard to make them whole again—they often run back to the bar owners when they are rescued.’

  ‘I know all the reasons on paper but I will never really understand how a mother can sell her own daughter?’

  ‘Poverty Ignorance. It’s hard to understand, but it goes back further than one generation. It isn’t easy bringing up any child, especially an Amerasian. Wednesday’s father was an American sailor who left when the Clark naval base shut down and he deserted her and her mother.’

  ‘Doesn’t she have any rights?’

  ‘The American government ruled that they were the children born from prostitution, but it isn’t true—lots of these women were common-law wives.’

  ‘But the children, can’t they find their real fathers now?’

  ‘I have helped some track their fathers. I have helped them write letters. Of the dozens we have sent, only one has come back and that was because the man wanted to put his affairs in order as he was dying of cancer.’ Father Finn was clearly moved and angry as his voice climbed in pitch and his face reddened. ‘The men who abandoned these women and children simply don’t care.’ He banged his palms on the old leather steering wheel and caused a volley of beeping horns as he veered to the left. Mann sat up in the back and moved forward. ‘The American bases did untold damage here,’ Father Finn continued. ‘I believe it also ruined the men themselves—they came over here as young, impressionable lads, they witnessed the demeaning of women, the rape of children, and they became desensitised. In those days it wasn’t uncommon to witness spectacles such as boxing matches staged between the girls. You have to ask yourself what that would do to the mind of a young man, no?’ Father Finn shook his head sadly.

  ‘What do you think has happened to Maya, Father?’ asked Becky.

  The father sighed. ‘I know it’s an odd thing to hope for, but our best scenario is that the child is a victim of traffickers and that she is still in the Philippines. The alternative is that she is already dead, killed by the DDS or has been trafficked abroad.’

  ‘But, if she’s alive and still in the Philippines, she could be anywhere by now, couldn’t she, Father?’

  They came to a standstill in the rush-hour traffic heading through the city. Exposed bunches of black cables hung down like destroyed spiders’ webs and crisscrossed the street above their heads. All around them workers were hanging out of the side of Jeepneys. Becky no longer needed to shout, but her chest felt tight with the fumes coming in the open window. People smiled at her as they watched her from the traffic jam. She couldn’t get over how friendly they were.

  Mann bought a breadfruit from a man walking along the r
ows of stationary traffic selling a variety of goods from fruit to feather dusters and fishing rods.

  ‘Luckily…’ he leaned in between the two front seats ‘…it does not affect the whole of the seven thousand islands—there are distinct sex tourism areas. I think Angeles is where she’ll be—it has the seediest reputation.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Father Finn. ‘There is one man there worse than the rest; he calls himself the Colonel. He is the man who pimped Wednesday all those years ago and he is still there.’ Father Finn shook his head in disbelief. ‘He has set himself up as a God in Angeles; it should not be allowed to happen.’

  Mann turned the breadfruit round absent-mindedly in his hands as he spoke.

  ‘I know the Colonel. I’ve been watching him over the years. His network of paedophile businesses has been allowed to continue for so long that now he believes no one can touch him. But he’s made a mistake siding with his new friends—the White Circle—they are a new trafficking group who are muscling their way in. The kidnap of the girl in the UK is linked to them and their power struggle. He might think he’s about to hit it big, but he’s wrong. His time just ran out. We will find Maya, find out who has Amy Tang, and then we will shut him down, Father, once and for all. If the locals won’t do it—we’ll do it for them.’ He looked at his hands—he had ruined the breadfruit.

  ‘If Maya is alive then she could well be hidden there, no? She will probably be being seasoned.’ Father Finn glanced over at Becky. He did not want to have to explain the term—he didn’t need to.

  ‘I know what “seasoning” is,’ said Becky. ‘It’s a softening-up process preparing them for the ordeal, making them ready to be sold for sex, to accept it and not give any trouble. It involves different stages: intimidation, isolation, disorientation, bullying and violence. Then, when their spirit is broken, they are sold. Who would be most likely to buy her?’

  ‘A wealthy Asian or Caucasian,’ answered Father Finn. ‘She will be kept under lock and key and used for a week by him exclusively. Their virginity is the premium. It has all sorts of beliefs tied up in it: of course you’re not going to get AIDS from a virgin. Some of them even believe it can cure AIDS,’ added the Father, shaking his head incredulously. After a week their price drops, but they are still valuable. For the next two weeks they will be offered to select customers who can pay. After that they go into a brothel, chained to the bed like all the others. She will be servicing eight or more men a day and kept in nothing more than a cage. They get very sick. The life expectancy of a working girl in Angeles is not good, it has been reported as being twenty-five but no one can be sure. They don’t get enough food and they get beaten. TB still kills many, as do untreated STDs. AIDS is just starting here, but everyone is in denial about it. No one wants to admit to being HIV positive because that is the end of their working life then, and there is no help for them.’

  All the time the Father was speaking, Becky held Maya’s photo in her hand and stared at it. ‘How will she survive all that?’

  ‘What is your plan now, you two?’ Father Finn changed the subject abruptly. He never liked to dwell too long in melancholy. He had lived with the poverty and degradation for so long that he knew it would break him if he didn’t hang on to hope.

  ‘I suggest we stay here tonight, Becky. See if anyone at the refuge can come up with anything to help us. Then we make our way up to Angeles.’

  ‘Thank the Lord!’ Father Finn crossed himself and flashed a mischievous look at Becky in the mirror as the traffic freed up and they were able to move slowly along the road. ‘My life wouldn’t be worth living if I came back to the refuge without you. When they knew Johnny Mann was coming it started them all off. It’s all the girls were talking about today. Where is Johnny? What time will he get here? How is my hair? Does my bum look big in this? They’d started bickering and fighting over who was going to wear what by the time I left.’

  Mann started to protest. Becky laughed.

  ‘I bet they had.’

  ‘So, spend the night with us. I have a friend with a plane. He is at your disposal. You will like him. Remy was a priest, now married with too many children for me to count and a small airline business. He helps keep the mosquito population down by spraying insecticide now and again, and he is also the flying doctor when needs must. I will ring him now and organise for him to fly you up tomorrow. I have a few more days’ work here, then I’ll be heading back to Angeles to continue the search for Maya.’

  They passed a sign on the road: a young girl in a tight white bodice was holding a bottle of whisky:

  Have you ever tasted a fifteen-year-old?

  36

  Maya needed to go to the toilet. She was hungry and she was dirty. She was not chained up like the other girls, but she was too frightened to move in any case. Maya was not allowed to leave the room. She was only allowed to walk as far as the toilet. She was not allowed to talk to anyone, and she was told that if she stepped outside the windowless room she would be killed straight away. The other girls were older than her and had been there for a long time. Maya listened to them talk to one another. They had to go with men all day long. Downstairs, where there were rooms. The men would come and then all the girls had to go and sit in a room and the men would choose which ones they wanted. The girls were never allowed to leave the Bordello. When they were finished with one man they had to go back in the room and wait for another. At night-time they came to sleep for a few hours and the Kano chained them up.

  Now Maya must wait until the Kano came to unlock the chains and then she could go to the toilet. At the end of the room was a sick girl. She did not go to work with the others—she was too ill. The more Maya looked at the girl, the more uncomfortable Maya became. She seemed to just be laying there staring at Maya. Was she dead too, like Perla? Then the sick girl coughed and Maya jumped. The sick girl smiled at her and held her hand up to beckon Maya to her. Maya looked at the arm—it stayed suspended in the air, thin and black like a spider’s leg. The girl started coughing again. She turned away from Maya and coughed for several minutes, spitting blood out over her blanket before laying back down, exhausted. For a few minutes Maya watched the girl’s chest rise and fall and listened to the squealing noise of her difficult breathing, then the girl turned and beckoned Maya forward again.

  Maya walked gingerly towards her. When she got to her side Maya saw that she was not much older than Perla had been.

  ‘My name is Rosie.’ The girl pointed to herself and then pointed at Maya. ‘You?’

  ‘Maya.’

  ‘Come,’ Rosie smiled.

  Maya climbed onto the bed and lay down beside her and Rosie wrapped her arm around her and drew her in close. They lay like two spoons in the murky darkness of the quiet room and listened to the sound of the other girls sleeping.

  ‘Listen to me, Maya,’ Rosie whispered. ‘And I will tell you what you have to do to stay alive…’

  37

  ‘It’s a lovely place, Father.’

  They pulled up outside the white-painted villa, shaded with mature palms that left their shadows on the white walls. A mosaic front of blue tiles gave the place a Moorish feel.

  ‘We renovated an old government building, but it has a beautiful Spanish feel to it, and it’s important that we are in the city where the trouble is. But it is not as beautiful as the refuge in Angeles—that is built on the side of a mountain, surrounded by forest—you will see it, I hope.’

  ‘And how many children do you have here?’

  ‘Five more than we should—thirty-five, at the moment. We have expanded the refuge so many times over the years and still it never is big enough, but we are always working on ways to improve it. We have created small centres in the countryside. We realised early on that it was not enough just to rescue the children from the brothels and the prisons and streets. There was no point in just returning them to their families. The whole family needed to change. We are providing them with an income by reviving traditional techniques,
basket-weaving, coconut-shell jewellery, that kind of thing. We sell the things over the Internet and to trade fares. It has really taken off in the last two years. We now have five hundred families supported by the scheme. Supporting themselves and supporting each other.’

  ‘Where did most of the children come from?’

  Father Finn’s face turned distant and troubled as he turned to talk to them.

  ‘From the streets, from the jails. The children are not supposed to be imprisoned any more. They have their own detention centres. But they are, sadly, not much better than the prison. They have very little to eat and no exercise; there are eighty to a cell that was only meant to house twenty. They have to take it in turns to sleep and the place is regularly flooded.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘We still find children locked up with adults, even though the government promised that it would stop. We go around regularly, usually every Saturday night, and see if there are any children locked up. We find it often.’ The Father looked back to the door to make sure he had time to tell them before they got inside the refuge. ‘When we found Eduardo he was locked in a cell with twelve men, made to clean their faeces around the stinking hole that is the toilet in the corner of the cell, and he was passed from lap to lap, raped in the corner of the cell. If he refused to let them have sex with him he was beaten and starved. If he cried he was beaten and starved. When we found him he was lying on the floor of the cell, covered in sores and septic wounds, bitten by cockroaches and mosquitoes. He wasn’t even allowed the dignity of clothing…’ Father Finn banged his palm against the steering wheel and the anger returned to his face. ‘That’s why it is important to bring Eduardo’s case before government. They must be held accountable, no?’