Take Out (16 page)

The impact rocked the car and it teetered on two wheels. Shock waves coursed through Stevie’s body as she clung to the roof, throwing her weight toward the raised side to balance it.

It was over in a few seconds. The WRX wobbled and righted itself, vibrations ceased.

The other car continued to charge down the street. Lodged on its undercarriage, Fowler’s ripped door scraped along the road leaving an electric pattern of sparks in its wake. The car’s rego was indecipherable and so was the make; all Stevie caught was its long, low shape swerving towards the end of the road. It rumbled to the end of the street and took a sharp right. The door dislodged on the curb and bounced onto the pavement. The sound of the powerful engine roared toward the docks until darkness swallowed it. (Image 15.1)

The man gave one last grunt of satisfaction and hefted himself off her, his flaccid penis leaving a wet trail along her thigh. Was he number six or number seven tonight? Mai counted on her fingers. First there was the man in the wheelchair who Rick had helped onto the bed, then the sour-smelling truck driver friend of Rick’s. The drunken boys from the eighteenth birthday party had all looked and behaved the same: embarrassed, fumbling, reeking and, in a couple of cases, non-functioning. Mai realised then that she’d lost count. This was unusual for her, seeing as she was paid per customer—not that she ever saw much of the money she made.

Soon she and the other girls would be leaving the city. Her mind was numb with the thought of the journey ahead. Perth had been her prison for nearly a year, but at least it meant that she had been close to Niran. This time next week she would be in a place so far away, they might just as well be in another country.

They had renamed her son Joshua. She could hardly get her tongue around the western name. When she tried, the white men, the
farang,
laughed and mocked. They did their best to confuse her. They didn’t want her to learn any English words other than what she’d been taught to say to the clients; words and phrases such as
sexy big boy, handsome man, I fuck you silly, you like it doggie?
But she found she could understand a lot more of their language than she could speak. You could learn a lot in a year.

The man hauled himself from the bed and patted her on the head. In Thailand the head was an object of holiness. Once she would have cringed under his touch. She used to think a man touching her there was worse than anything he could do to the rest of her body.

Now she knew different.

Now she didn’t care.

He drew the curtain closed behind him. She heard his heavy tread on the stairs. The sound of laughing and shouting men reached her from the bar. She stripped the bed and wrapped herself in the soiled sheet and opened the curtain.

The pungent scent of ganja wafted into the cubicle and mingled with the bleachy smell of sex. She picked up the used condom from the floor—at least this guy had agreed to it wear it—and flushed it down the toilet in the bathroom opposite. The curtains in the other cubicles on the upstairs landing remained closed. From behind them she heard the fake laughter of the girls and their mechanical moans of pleasure.

Clients milled around the bar below—they often needed alcohol before partaking in the pleasures upstairs. Beer, wine, spirits or worse: their breath made Mai feel sick, though she never showed it; she never showed any of the revulsion she felt. She was good at her job and she knew it. At the top of the stairs she stood for a moment and listened to what was going on below.

With little effort, she could pick out Rick’s voice: he sounded excited and Mai had trouble deciphering his rapid speech. He was probably talking about the journey—she heard him mention that place called Broome again. She tried silently to curve her mouth around the sound. He said something about the money he would make and how he would spend it—on pills probably. Sometimes drugs were used on the girls to make them more compliant, but they were always forbidden to the guardians. Rick shouldn’t be speaking like this.

Another man spoke; she recognised Jimmy Jack’s higher tones. He seemed to be giving Rick some kind of warning, probably reminding him of what happens to those who abuse the Mamasan’s trust, what The Crow had done to Jon Pavel. Rick fell silent; there was no more talk of pills and parties. Even he had been shaken up by the events he’d witnessed.

Over a week ago, just before dawn, the other girls having only just got off to sleep, Mai had crept down to the kitchen to look for something to pop the blisters on her sore feet.

Rummaging through the kitchen cupboards she heard strange noises coming from the basement and decided to investigate. As she limped toward the closed door the sounds became clearer: dreadful screams of unspeakable agony. The Crow was at work again. She fled back up the stairs and vomited into the toilet. When she recovered sufficiently to move, she peeped from the landing and saw Rick and Jimmy Jack hauling Pavel’s charred body through the door that led to the garage.

But she would not dwell on it now. To do so would make her crazy, and there were enough crazy people in this house. Her brain had to stay clear and uncluttered; she had things to do and plans to make.

Still wrapped in her sheet, she made her way across the upstairs landing to the room she shared with five other girls. Four beds were empty, which meant the girls were still working. All except the youngest, fifteen-year-old Lin, who lay on her bed curled into a ball, hiccoughing between sobs.

Mai sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed the girl’s back.

‘I can’t take any more of this, Mai.’ The girl spoke with the accent of a northern peasant—her complexion was still quite dark. Mai was of peasant stock too, but she had lived in Bangkok long enough to smooth some of the rough edges from her voice and allow the city’s shadows to lighten her skin.

‘Work hard and you will soon pay off your debt,’ Mai said. Both Lin’s parents had died last year. Seduced by tales about the golden roads of the city, Lin had left her village and found work in a Bangkok foot-massage parlour. A few months later Jon Pavel had introduced himself to her. He told her he was going to set up a similar kind of place in Perth, Australia, and asked if she would like to manage it for him. He said it was a chance to make more money than she’d ever seen in her life—all she had to do was pay back the money he would spend to get her there.

On her first night Lin was hired to an Australian businessman who took her to a swanky hotel where he paid five thousand dollars for her virginity. When she tried to run away she was fined more than she’d been allowed to keep from that night. And then she was fined again for arguing with another girl. The cycle continued, the debt mounted. In some places girls had to pay for the drugs used to control them and that too was added to their debt. That was the thing Mai worked hardest to protect her girls from—once the drugs got hold of you there was no going back.

‘But you haven’t paid off your debt yet,’ Lin said, ‘and you’ve been doing this a lot longer than me.’

Mai sighed. ‘I will never pay off my debt. Besides, it is different for me; I was doing this long before I was brought to Australia—I knew what was in store for me. My mistake was in believing they would let me keep my baby.’ Sometimes it’s need that makes you do certain things. Mai wasn’t ashamed of anything she’d done. What made her ashamed was that she had been taken as a fool. When she was a child she believed her good fortune was the result of a previous life of virtue. Now she realised it was the opposite. She must have been very bad in her former life to end up here, trapped in an Australian brothel.

Lin broke into her thoughts, ‘“Do good receive good, do evil receive evil.”’ It was a Buddhist saying they’d all learned by rote at school.

‘You think there is nothing you can do to change things here,’ Mai said, ‘and that is why you can sit back meekly and accept what has happened to you? I am not so sure I feel that way any more. I don’t see why we can’t seek to improve our lives now.’

Lin shook her head. ‘Things will change, everything is temporary—we just have to wait.’

‘When you’ve been doing this as long as I have, you might not want to sit around and wait for things to change. You can help things change for yourself, you know.’

Lin’s voice rose, ‘I don’t know what you mean or what you are planning, Mai, and I don’t want to hear it.’ She put her hands over her ears like the
hear-no-evil
monkey. ‘They said they will kill your baby if you try to escape. You can’t risk that.’

Mai paused. ‘Who says I will try to escape?’

Lin looked back at Mai, first with incomprehension, then panic. She shook her head vigorously. ‘I’m not listening, I’m not listening!’

Mai slipped off the bed, straightened Lin’s sheets and plumped her pillows. ‘You don’t need to. Forget about it. Maybe things will be better in Broome. You never know, you might meet a nice man who will take you away from this.’ She’d been doing her best to convince the girls that better things lay ahead and it seemed to be working. Who knows, some of them really might be able to pay off their debts and return home—it did happen sometimes.

Lin’s eyes followed Mai around the room as she turned down the other girls’ beds. Finally she began to calm. ‘Little mother,’ she whispered. And then, ‘Mai, what does it feel like to have a baby?’

It feels as if you are being split in two, Mai thought. Then, when the baby is taken from you, you are split in two all over again. ‘There will be plenty of time to talk on the bus, but not now. Now we must sleep. We are going a long way tomorrow with several days of driving.’

‘I’m in trouble with Rick,’ Lin said, finally getting to the cause of her tears. ‘My last client complained to him, I think. I couldn’t act for him, my body turned to ice when he touched me. He had red scaly skin and long dirty hair with bugs in it—I saw them sprinkled like pepper on the white pillow.’

As if on cue, Rick called to Lin from the bottom of the stairs. Lin clutched at Mai’s hand. They heard the sharp slap of his thongs upon the wooden boards of the landing. He walked like an elephant, the floor shaking under his tread. He flung open the door. ‘Get out,’ he snarled at Mai.

Grabbing her toilet bag from her nightstand, Mai fled to the bathroom without looking back. She turned the shower on as high as it would go to block the sound of Lin’s cries. As she stared at the water trailing down the shower screen, she noticed how each tear-shaped drop obediently followed the course of the preceding drop. It doesn’t have to be like that, she thought.

‘Jai yen yen,’ she whispered words of comfort to Lin, as she stood there, rigid under the pricking spray. Cool your heart.

Like me. (Image 16.1)

After they’d called the incident in to the local police and filled out the report, they caught a cab to Stevie’s house. She gritted her teeth as she stood in the kitchen and dabbed antiseptic at the angry graze on the side of Fowler’s head. ‘Try and hold still, will you?’

He flinched. ‘You didn’t have to push me quite so hard.’

‘I didn’t push hard enough. Your fat arse did such a good job at blocking the door I couldn’t get in.’

That shut him up. It annoyed her that he still hadn’t thanked her for saving his life. He’d spent most of the journey back from Fremantle whingeing about his wrecked car. He started on it again. ‘That’s two bloody cars in the panel beaters now,’ he grumbled.

‘But you’ve still got your father’s car haven’t you?’

‘No. Had a bingle in it the other night, nothing major. I just hope to hell it’s fixed before he finds out. With any luck he won’t notice. I don’t want the damn thing anyway, it’s too old, too expensive to maintain. I can’t see the point of buying someone else’s problems.’ He paused. Stevie followed his gaze around her dilapidated kitchen and, tacked onto it, the skillion-roofed lean-to they used as a temporary family room. The real estate agent had called it a ‘sunken lounge.’ Izzy’s toys lay strewn across the floor, and a sagging bright orange couch Monty had picked up from someone’s front verge fronted the brown veneer TV. Their new old house might seem like Buckingham Palace to them, Stevie conceded, but through a stranger’s eyes it probably did have a few shortcomings. Fowler waved his hands around to further his point. ‘I mean, look at this place—what were you thinking?’