Felicity Young - Take Out

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)

Image 16.1

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

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?’

She replied without words, making the last dab harder than necessary, causing him to hiss out a breath. Collecting the soiled cotton wool balls, she tossed them in the bin and began to pack up her first aid box.

His mobile phone rang. He listened to an update from the Fremantle police, spoke a few succinct words and hung up. ‘My car’s been towed away and the door collected,’ he told her. ‘They tell me it’s scarred with streaks of green paint.’

Stevie hadn’t told him about the scraping from Skye’s car she’d sent to the lab. She reminded herself to give Mark a ring tomorrow to see if the results had come through. She looked at her watch: today, she amended. ‘Green paint, like on Skye’s,’ she said. ‘They’d better damn well take a paint sample this time. What kind of car does Marius have?’

‘A dark blue Audi, undamaged and not driven recently. The Fremantle cops say he hasn’t left the club since we saw him.’

‘That doesn’t discount one of his thugs in another car.’

‘All the cars in the staff parking area have been checked and an alert put out for a green car with a freshly crumpled bumper. I’ll organise someone to pick up Marius and the woman for questioning tomorrow, let them stew at home over night.’

‘But if it’s not Marius, who else could it be? That attempt on us must mean we’re getting close to something. Could Pavel and Hardegan be behind all this?’