by Jeremy Welch
The concrete slabs of high-rise blocks were built like mental asylums: drab rectangles with small windows to prevent escape and let limited light in, no requirement to offer stimulus to the inhabitants as they had been forgotten. The walls would be thin, offering no sound insulation, dismissing the purpose of individual flats as the sounds of toilets flushing, angry frustrated arguments mixed with the demands of children not attending schools flowed throughout the buildings. Although unseen the neighbours lived in each other’s flats. The substitution of gardens and coloured flowers by the graffiti tag marks of the gangs reaching as high as the strength of an aerosol can. It was a desolate place.
He had taken Rosie’s advice and memorised the route to the café.
“Don’t carry a street map or look at your phone for directions. Dress anonymously too,” she had warned.
He was dressed in dark jeans and a hoodie of brown over a white T-shirt. It was the armour suggested by Salt.
“You be careful down there, it’s not safe. It’s the dumping ground for all the illegals and unemployed. Why can’t she meet you in town?”
He had explained to her that Irena would only meet him in Bijlmer, she felt safe there away from knowing eyes. Rosie would bring her to the café.
“Safe!” Salt had cried. “She must live a hell of a dangerous life if that’s the only place she feels safe.”
He turned the corner into the street of the café. Across from him a group of young men in grey ill-fitting tracksuits crowded around a teenager on a pushbike. The teenager exchanged their cash for little packets of silver foil. Sebastian walked past unnoticed. The dealer was safe here.
Entering the café the smell of last night’s curry filled his nostrils, sharp and acerbic. He ordered a coffee and sat at the table to wait. Lighting his cigarette he noticed that everyone else smoked roll-ups; he put his packet of Marlboro Lights back in his pocket. So as not to make eye contact he looked at the ashtray and noticed the gnawed hope of someone’s future buried in the butt ends; a small collection of thin crescent-shaped fingernails poked up from the ash, one side of the nail perfect with growth, the other jagged edged as it had been torn from the finger.
The door opened to anger from the street. A dishdasha-wearing Arab was being berated by a group of Surinamer youths. There was no exchange just a tirade of mouth-twisted hate from the youths. This was a place you could hide from the law-abiding world but not from the lawless chaos of modern metropolitan deprived living; here the differences were not celebrated but highlighted as cause for vilification. Irena was right, no one would notice her here; no one in their right mind would elect to be here.
“Sebastian!” She spoke loudly as she sat down opposite him. Rosie smiled and grabbed his hand, squeezing it, offering assurance.
Irena sat down next to her. She was wearing a sexless loose grey tracksuit. Her blond hair pulled loosely across her scalp. If she had been in London it would have been described as Sunday morning chic, here it was dishevelled. She wore no makeup, her skin pallid with a hint of yellow over her right eye. She was not as he remembered her in the park; she was older, in her mid-twenties, reticent but assured, confident in the way that only those that survive on the street can be, almost hostile.
“Let’s have another coffee,” Rosie offered.
“Coke,” Irena replied mechanically; no one can spike a bottle, he remembered from his student days.
“Irena, this is the man I told you about, Sebastian.” Her waving arm introduced him.
“Hello,” was all he could think of saying.
Irena looked at him quickly, intensely. She knew what to look for in men, whom to trust, whom not to trust. She could assess quickly and correctly… now. It was the survival instinct of the feral, lessons learnt from harsh experience.
Her smile was guarded but genuine.
“Hello Sebastian.” It was an invitation to keep talking.
Rosie sat back; she had done her bit, it was his turn to take it on. Sebastian cleared his throat, drew the phone from his pocket and pushed it across the table to her.
“I’ve charged it up for you,” he said uselessly.
Her hand, palm down, moved slowly towards the phone as if to move too fast would scare it away. Her fingers touched his. Sebastian’s hand stiffened and started to move away from the phone. She lifted her hand and covered his and the phone. Her fingers were slender, youthful, and her nails short and trimmed by her teeth. He knew her hands had done more than their fair share of manual labour. The pressure of her hand almost imperceptible, but he felt it, a small squeeze. He opened his fingers and her hand slid the phone towards her. He thought he saw small red pinpricks between her fingers.
“I knew you would want it back.” With the phone gone he looked up from the table top to her face. She was looking at the glow on the screen, head bent down. He noticed that she didn’t dye her hair blond. A small splash of a tear landed on the screen blurring the picture.
“Is that a photograph of your parents?” Involuntarily he stroked his earring.
She inhaled deeply through her nose to gain control.
“It was a couple of summers ago, just before I came to work in Amsterdam.” She made no attempt to wipe the tears from her face.
“You should go and see them. It would make them happy.” He wasn’t too sure if he was talking to himself or her.
She sniffed some snot back up her nose and swallowed. Her eyes closed and her head moved from side to side.
“That’s exactly what I was thinking in the park.” Her voice was only just audible above the noise of cups on saucers. “When I’m not working I go there, I go to watch. To watch what it could have been like. To look at the young mothers and watch their children. I pray they don’t end up like me.”
Her eyes opened and she stared at him with wet and angry eyes, her voice harsh escaping from between clenched teeth.
“And a lot of fucking good it does! That’s the day I got a beating.” Her finger pointed to the fading yellow of her bruise. “Then the punishment. I wished they had killed me.”
Rosie’s arm reached out and pulled Irena towards her. Irena folded into her warm comforting chest. She whimpered into Rosie’s jumper.
“I can’t take it anymore, Rosie, I can’t take the way they use me, the beatings. I want to die. I want to go somewhere where no one can touch me ever again.” Her shoulders shook up and down. “I love them. I want to go home.” She tearlessly wept into the soft wool of the red jumper.
Sebastian looked at Rosie, his eyes imploring her for guidance. She spoke to Irena; this wasn’t about Sebastian.
“Darling Irena, what time do you have to be at work?” Rosie spoke it into the hair of her bowed head. “You must be on time, you can’t risk another mistake.”
“Christ, Rosie, she can’t go to work today, look at the state of her.”
Firmly but gently Rosie lifted Irena’s head and kissed her on the forehead.
“She knows she has to.” She said it softly.
“She can stay with me, on the Tulp, I can protect her. Then we can go to the police.” His mind racing, grabbing at any thought that would help Irena avoid going back, back to the cell on the canal.
“No police!” It was said sharply. Irena was animated and back in control. “No police. Promise me.” She was not asking, it was an instruction. Her face fierce as that of a protective mother.
Sebastian looked bewildered and felt as if he was under assault.
Rosie looked at Irena who nodded.
“Sebastian, if you go to the police Irena’s debt passes onto her parents. They will have to pay it back. Then there’s the pictures and videos of Irena. It would crush them. So no police.”
Sebastian knew he should have thought of the consequence but he needed to help.
“OK, no police. But she can stay with me until we can come up with a plan. S
he doesn’t need to go back to work.” He pleaded for reason, he would find a plan, it would work, he knew he could make it work.
Irena looked at him kindly.
“It can’t work. They always know where I am. All of the girls are given a phone. It must be with us all the time when at work so they know where we are, they install a tracker app. That’s how they found me in the park. It was stupid but I just couldn’t go to work, not that day. It was my mother’s birthday, you see.”
Sebastian surprised himself by not feeling any fear that the pimps might know where she was now and could enter the café to reclaim their possession.
“Have you got the phone now?”
“No, we all have two phones. The ones we are given and our own. Sacha has the other one in our room. I must go and get it before I go to work.” She cradled the phone in her hand. “This one is mine. It has all my photographs and contacts. It contains my entire life.”
The door of the café opened and two youths walked in suited in jeans and sweatshirts. Sebastian watched them walk to the counter in silence. The owner reached behind the cash till and handed over an envelope. He didn’t know what made him angrier: the thought of Irena, the helplessness of the situation or the protection money being handed over.
“Right, Irena, I live at the corner from where you work. You have any trouble, I don’t care what it is, you contact me.” He took her phone and punched in his telephone number. “I mean it, Irena, ring me anytime.”
She looked at him and smiled.
“Thank you, Sebastian, Rosie is right, you’re a good man. Thank you for returning the phone and thank you also for trying to intervene in the park.” She stood up and collected her bag. “I have to go to work now.” She kissed Rosie Swiss-style, three times as if the parting could be delayed.
“Come see me at one of the De Rode Draad meetings, honey, they’re every Thursday, all day at Oude Kerk.”
Irena smiled at Rosie and nodded. She turned and put her hand out to shake Sebastian’s. It was fragile and Sebastian noticed again the red pockmarks between her fingers. He hadn’t imagined them.
“Remember, ring me if you need anything.” He gently squeezed her hand offering protection.
“I will,” she said as she walked to the door.
She didn’t look back once outside; she did pause and fiddle with her phone.
“She’s deleting your details,” Rosie said flatly. “She would never want anyone and certainly not you involved in her life. They really are alone, the forgotten ones, all alone. It’s a loveless life, they have gnawed at the carcass of parental love, there’s nothing left now. Just the bones of the past.”
As Irena walked away from the café the group of Surinamer youths made blowjob signs with their hands and thrust their hips as if fucking her. She ignored them as she walked past; there was nothing to see that would shock her, that’s how she made a living.
Sebastian sat in silence and looked through the window into the greyness of the surroundings: grey clothes, grey buildings and grey faces. The sun was bright outside but only seemed to make the hopelessness of the surrounding concrete more pronounced. The few patches of green were weeds that even here struggled for heat and life from between the cracks in the paving stones of the pavements.
“There must be a way to get her out of this, there must be.” His voice betrayed the scale and hopelessness of her situation.
“There isn’t, Sebastian. She has caused trouble for the pimps, set a bad example to the other girls. They will have punished her too, more than the beating. Probably behind a closed door in the flat they all live in. The other girls will have heard the screams as they helped themselves to her. The unseen is always the more frightening.” Rosie was weary, the repetition of what she heard every Thursday exhausting her. “They will move her soon or sell her. Hamburg, Prague maybe, anywhere their network reaches. She knows that too.”
“Rosie, there must be something I can do, anything. Not just for Irena, for your charity. Tell me what I can do.”
She smiled in a tired way and replied.
“Write, write well, be successful, make a lot of money and give some to De Rode Draad,” she laughed. “Seriously, Sebastian, be careful. Don’t let your emotions get involved, you’re not equipped to handle these people. No one is, that’s why it goes on. The girls always have me and the charity to fall back on, we do the best we can.”
They walked back to the metro in silence. At the graffiti-scrawled entrance of the station lay a beggar slumped on a bed of cardboard, his arm slashed by heroin tramlines; a mongrel dog with a head too big for its body cocked its leg and peed on the beggar’s leg.
“I’m glad I got the phone to her, but the meeting didn’t make a difference, did it? Nothing’s changed, it’s still all the same, the same shitty life for her.”
Rosie looked at him gently.
“It did make a difference. Small, but it did. You showed her there is hope, there is some good in the world. You did make a difference, believe me.”
Sebastian nodded but didn’t agree.
Chapter 14
1
He knew it was impossible to solve Irena’s predicament, knew that he couldn’t really make her life any different, but he felt he could make it better, he just didn’t know how. Rosie’s charity, always too little money, offering morsels of help when what they needed was a daily square meal. He wanted to do something. Anything. The helplessness of the situation was beyond his control, the problem too big. He recalled Rosie’s last comments: “Don’t let your emotions get involved, you’re not equipped to handle these people, no one is, that’s why it goes on.” There were others who were dealing with the problem: politicians, police, border controls, even the United Nations. Sebastian knew each side of the argument well; he had hashed and rehashed them. The conclusion was always the same: a slight remembered lesson in his early teens delivered by the mousey, frill-collared, twinset-and-pearls-wearing Miss Swift. It was the only time he ever remembered her raising her eyes to meet the eyes of her pupils in the classroom. She spoke it softly but determinedly.
“What man is a man who does not make the world better? It is the courage of decisions made that make the world a better place.”
He had retreated into his writing with discipline to help expunge those thoughts. He could change his life for the better, through the completion of the book. He worked until the evening. It was then he knew that Irena would be at work. He felt like a man with a charge. He walked past her window. He had the same surveying role as her pimp, except he was watching over her. Sebastian’s breathing was even and controlled if her curtains were open. When she saw him her enticing dance didn’t stop, but her eyes shut for five seconds and she smiled softly. The unspoken but mutually understood language told him she was fine, she was coping. When the sun-bleached curtain was drawn he would walk by with a quickened heartbeat, trying to suppress his imagination. He would walk back past the window ten minutes later, the curtain now open. It never lasted more than ten minutes he had learnt. Ten minutes of soulless pleasure for the paying punter, interminable suffering for her.
It had been Anneke’s idea, the walk past.
“When there is no hope and only loneliness, the slightest act of kindness and consideration can be all-comforting. The physical link may be tenuous but the thought provides the reason to go on, the means by which it can be endured.”
“You don’t know that, Anneke, how can you?” He was sharp with her; it sounded platitudinous to him.
“Oh Sebastian, I know. I really do know. I know what it’s like to be alone. I know the feeling of desolation. The knowledge that nothing will ever be worth having again, nothing will alleviate the misery, the only thing keeping you alive is the past. But you can’t live there. You can try to recreate it, but it’s never quite the same.”
Apart from her telling him about the meeting with Umu
ntu he had never heard her speak of anything so personal.
Salt and Pepper had praised him for his act in the park, the returning of the phone, but with the advantage of twenty-something age had told him he had done all he could do. The future awaited, he had been noble but it was now time to move on. It wasn’t meant in any callous way, just the way it was. There was wickedness in the world but there was more good than bad.
He met Umuntu for a drink after the show.
“What do you think you can do to change her life? You can’t eradicate time, you can’t take her back and let her start again, this time missing out the errors.”
“I know that, but there must be something that I can do.” Sebastian was looking for guidance. He knew Umuntu had had a hard life but made better now. He knew Umuntu couldn’t eradicate the past, he carried it with him, it formed him, made him what he was now. He hoped Umuntu could guide him to whatever the catalyst was that would do the same for Irena.
“Sometimes circumstances make people what they are. The events that happen to them are beyond their control, utterly beyond their control. It’s these events that form us. Look, when I worked in the Congo, the civil war was at its height and there was lawlessness, killings, rape everywhere. In the middle of all this was a well-organised smooth-operating hell. We were mining for diamonds, no machines just manpower, digging, sifting, digging, sifting, sleep and then the same again. The death rate was high. Those that got too weak were shot and dumped in the jungle.” The words were difficult for Umuntu to say; he had lived this life once.
“You know at the height of the war people left the cities and towns and tried to start again in the jungle. They felt safer there, a kind of reverse evolution. They felt safer in the jungle than the cities. I escaped and joined them. It was no different, just more chaotic and lawless, absolutely primeval. I met someone in the jungle. He knew he would never get out, knew he wouldn’t survive. The machete wounds had become infected, he was dying slowly, uselessly. He only asked one thing from me: that I should live his life for him when he was gone. Live the life of two. I said yes of course.”