Felicity Young - Take Out

‘Trafficking and smuggling share some characteristics,’ Stevie explained, standing with him beside the open car door, ‘but it’s the voluntariness than sets them apart. In both scenarios people are illegally taken across borders and exploited. But those who are trafficked, as opposed to smuggled, are taken against their will and used as sex slaves: women, girls, young males—’

The squeal of tyres cut Stevie off. They whirled to face the noise. A car barrelled out of the darkness towards them, headlights on full beam.

It wasn’t going to stop.

The street was narrow; the open car door took up most of its width.

‘Get in!’ Stevie yelled at Fowler who’d frozen to the spot. She gave him a shove, heard the side of his head crunch against the doorframe.

She scrambled onto the roof of Fowler’s car using the door sill as a springboard. The hurtling car slammed into the WRX, knocking it further up the curb. With a shriek of tearing metal, the door was severed like a limb.

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)

Image 15.1

TUESDAY

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

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.