Dirty Work

by Julia Bell

  ‘What do you do? To pay them back?’

  She looks at the floor. ‘In Italy, sometimes dancing,’ she says. ‘Here –’ she shrugs – ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Is it –’ I don’t really know how to say it – ‘like in the magazine?’ I flap it at her.

  Natasha doesn’t answer.

  ‘They want us to have . . . sex with people, don’t they?’ I feel embarrassed even saying the word. ‘With men who pay for it. That’s why we’re here.’

  A sickly rush of realization makes the hairs on my arms stand up. That’s why we’re here. That’s how we pay them back. I swallow hard. I’ve never had sex with anyone before. I don’t even know how to do it or if I’ll like it. When we did sex in our PSE class, Mrs Munson showed us how to put condoms on a banana.

  ‘What good is that!’ Kaz snorted, pinging her condom across the room like a rubber band. ‘It’s not like I’m going to go out with a banana, is it, miss?’And the whole class burst out laughing.

  Now I can admit why the men have been looking at us like they have: sleazy, sizing us up, and it’s not funny at all. The thought of my body being anywhere close to Fat Burger Man makes me feel sick. Like I want to throw up my whole guts. Suddenly, and very urgently, I want to be with Mum. I swallow to stop myself from crying.

  ‘Do you have to – with them?’ I point at the door.

  Natasha shrugs. ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

  ‘That’s disgusting!’

  She flinches when I say this and her eyes tighten like she’s angry. ‘Listen, English. You don’t know anything about my life! Now I tell you something. My name is not Natasha.’

  I sniff. ‘What is it then?’

  ‘Oksana.’

  ‘Ox what?’

  ‘Oksana.’ She stares at me, like she wants me to know something very important. ‘Oksana Droski. And I’m not supposed to be here either!’

  13

  Oksana

  The girl in the shop was right. The factory did get closed down. Men in expensive black suits came from Moscow and said that it belonged to them now because they had a piece of paper stamped by the tax office that said so. The next day all the workers had to queue to apply for their own jobs and some of the older, slower ones never got rehired.

  When they hired Father again, they paid him a few roubles right there, when he signed his contract. A goodwill gesture, they said, on account of the fact that the new contract no longer allowed the workers to belong to any unions. And, although the pay was officially less than it was before, at least they paid. He pulled out the thin fold of notes to show me.

  ‘See?’ he said, kissing the money. ‘A country that is always building will always need concrete!’

  The concrete factory was part of the Miracle he said. ‘The Economics Miracle that is happening all over the world!’ It was like a fever, a spreading fire, soon everyone would have money, a better future, a better chance of life. ‘It is happening in your lifetime, Oksana. Your children will be blessed.’

  ‘Is it a God miracle?’ I asked.

  He just laughed at me. ‘No! It is a President miracle!’

  ‘Then it’s an illusion,’ I said to him certainly.

  ‘What?’ He stared at me for a moment.

  ‘Human magic is an illusion. That’s what Mother said.’

  He looked like he might be angry with me. His mouth went thin and hard. But when he spoke his voice was thick and croaky.

  ‘Well she’s not here to argue any more is she?’ he said. And for a moment I thought he was saying that he was pleased she was dead, except there was one thin tear streaking his cheek, a shiny stripe through the dirt on his face.

  The moment Viktor’s arms were long enough, he locked them round my neck and set there, like a lump of concrete. In the morning he would shout in my ear until I woke up and fed him. Some days he would pretend to be a dog all day and want to lick his water from a bowl on the floor. He whined and pinched and cried so that I started to hate him. And I wished a few thousand times a day that Mother would just walk in through the door and take him away from me.

  Even though Father was earning money again it wasn’t enough to make us rich. By the time we’d paid for rent and bills there was hardly enough left over for food and clothes. Father said it would get better in a few months when the factory was on its feet again, but as far as I could tell things were just as bad as they were before. How was he supposed to work ten hours a day when he couldn’t even feed himself properly? And now there was no union there weren’t even any food stamps or joints of meat from the collective farm or complimentary canteen sugar.

  In about a year Viktor would be old enough to go to school and then I could go back too. But I would be fourteen by then, and so far behind the others I’d have to start again, with all the eleven-year-olds.

  Adik tried to help in the beginning. He brought me his school-books and let me do his homework for him, and played with Viktor and took him out for walks. But then he stopped going so much to school and started hanging out with Mikki and Kolya and Dimitri, and they called each other Brat and listened to gangster rap on tapes that Kolya made from recording the radio on an old Dictaphone. They hung around outside the shop, protecting the neighbourhood and harassing anyone they didn’t like.

  They called me Sestra and let me hang out with them and bring Viktor too. All that summer when I was thirteen we sat around on crates under the tattered green awning that leaked when it rained. Sometimes Mikki and Adik would turn up with ‘presents’: a CD player, a bottle of vodka, a battered old Game Boy that only worked if you held the batteries in while you were playing it, a pair of Levi’s that didn’t fit anyone properly.

  We were klevo, kruto, we were cool – at least that’s what Adik said. ‘Like a family.’ It was better than being at home all day listening to Viktor whining, but sometimes sitting there, getting ridges in my bum from the hard plastic of the crates, it seemed pointless. I should have been in school, Viktor should have been at home . . . my Mother should still be alive.

  He was outside the shop showing off his mobile phone to Adik and Mikki and Kolya the first time I met him. They were crowding around him, their trousers too small, their mouths too slack. I nearly turned back home when I saw him in his shiny suit, with his Ray-Ban sunglasses and the new Audi that he said he’d driven here all the way from Germany.

  I didn’t want him to see me. My hair was tied up with a strip that I’d torn out of an old cushion cover and there were holes in my trainers, and with Viktor’s sweaty hand clutching mine, he would think, like most people, that Viktor was my son, and then he’d give me disbelieving looks when I tried to explain.

  But Adik waved me over, and Mikki called my name, and there was nowhere to hide or pretend like I hadn’t seen them.

  ‘Hey, Oksana! Guess what!’ Adik ran some of the way to meet me. ‘I’ve got a job!’ His face was red and flushed. ‘Look!’ He pulled a note out of his sleeve. A dollar bill. ‘He gave me this.’

  I slowed down. No one around here gave away money for free. And how come Adik was so special? He didn’t even know how to write his own name. ‘What for?’

  He wouldn’t look at me. ‘Business,’ he said.

  ‘What kind of business?’

  He shrugged. ‘Tommy’s business.’

  ‘Tommy?!’ I snorted. ‘Who has a real name like that?’ And then an ache of jealousy. How come Adik got to have his dreams come true and not me?

  ‘Who’s this?’ Tommy asked as we got closer, nodding his head at me. His hair was dark black and cut into a fin at the top. He looked tanned and clean, handsome, and he smelled of expensive perfume like a rock star or a model, not like a Russian.

  ‘Oksana,’ Adik said, ‘and her brother, Viktor.’

  He let out a low whistle and closed the car door. ‘Hey, princess.’ And he gave a ridiculous bow like I was some kind of queen. The boys laughed and whooped. I didn’t know what to do, stuck somewhere between being flattered and feeling cross.


  He said he was from around here, and he couldn’t understand why no one remembered him.

  He said he was working for a big company now and they were doing some speculating in the area. ‘We value stuff. Decide if something’s worth buying.’

  ‘What kind of stuff?’

  ‘Oh just local businesses, stuff like that.’ He lit a cigarette and kicked at a scruff of brown grass that was growing out of a crack in the kerb like it was a football. He didn’t seem very good at standing still. ‘You got a boyfriend yet, princess?’

  ‘No.’ That was the kind of question Tetya Svetlana always asked when she called from Moscow at Christmas. And then she’d screech with laughter like the idea of me having a boyfriend was some big joke.

  ‘So you hang around with these guys all day? You don’t go to school?’ He waved a hand at the boys, who were sitting in his car listening to Eminem on the stereo.

  ‘I have to look after him.’ I pointed at Viktor who was busy posting sticks down the drain.

  ‘Ah.’ He raised his eyebrows like he was disappointed. And for one second I wanted to pick Viktor up and stuff him down the drain too. It wasn’t Viktor’s fault. I knew it wasn’t Viktor’s fault. But it wasn’t fair.

  Then he got a call on his mobile phone and he kicked the boys out of his car, put his sunglasses back on and was gone with a screech of tyres and a cloud of gritty dust.

  Adik couldn’t stop talking about him. ‘Did you see those sunglasses?’ ‘What about that car?’ ‘He’s been to America! London! Berlin! Paris!’

  Mikki dragged his toe in a circle. ‘I don’t know, man. What’s he doing around here?’

  ‘Like he said. He’s come to put some luck back into his old town. That’s what I’m going to do. One day when I’ve got loads of money.’

  ‘Hey, man! What about us?’ Mikki said. ‘I thought we were coming too!’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I’m not staying here!’ I was offended by the idea that he thought he could go just like that, leaving me behind. ‘I want a job too.’

  ‘OK, OK. I’ll ask him next time I see him.’

  ‘I bet we don’t see him again,’ Dimitri, who had been watching us from a distance, said. ‘I bet he’s ex-police or a spy. What does he want with a rat like you?’ He came up to Adik, suddenly taller, bigger, better fed.

  ‘You calling me a rat?’

  ‘Yes. And you stink like the chicken shed you sleep in. This isn’t a proper gang with you in it. You’re embarrassing, you’re not a brother.’

  And then they started fighting. I can’t even think who threw the first punch it was all so quick. Suddenly Adik was on the floor with Mikki and Dimitri kicking him and Kolya holding him down.

  Viktor started yelling and I shouted at them to stop, but it was useless. By the time we got Adik back to the apartment he’d split his lip and got two black eyes.

  ‘I tell you, Oksana,’ he said, struggling to talk, ‘Tommy will save us. I promise you. I’m going to go to Paris and London and New York and Los Angeles. I’m going to make millions of billions of money.’

  ‘And what about me?’Although I didn’t believe him for one minute, I still felt a stab of jealousy that he could have such big dreams when he knew I was stuck with Father and Viktor.

  ‘Then I’ll come back and marry you!’ he said, like this was obvious all along.

  ‘Marry me? Who said I wanted to marry you?’ I teased him, though secretly I was pleased.

  ‘When I have all the things, the jewellery and clothes and cars, you won’t be able to say no.’

  I thought about this for a moment. ‘Can we have a big house?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Big enough for Father and Viktor?’

  ‘We can buy them their own houses!’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll marry you.’

  Adik grinned and then winced because it hurt his face. ‘Can I have a kiss then?’

  ‘A kiss?’ I was thirteen and I’d never kissed anyone who wasn’t family before.

  ‘Yes, we have to have a kiss if we’re going to get married.’ He brought his face close to mine, his skin was hot and sore and his lips were cracked and dry and flecked with blood.

  I turned my face so he pecked me on the cheek. His lips felt rough and papery but they gave me a ticklish feeling all over my cheek.

  ‘Aw, Oksana,’ he said, trying to kiss me again.

  ‘Getoff!’ I giggled, and brushed him aside. ‘You can have a proper kiss when you come back with all your money.’

  ‘But that might be years away! Can’t I have just a little one? Just for now?’

  I looked at him. His eye was swelling up so it was nearly closed over. He wasn’t about to go anywhere and make lots of money. He was just Adik with a broken face, still thin and scruffy.

  ‘OK,’ I said, puckering my lips.

  14

  Oksana

  The Estonians are paranoid. I heard the girls bitching about me in the lounge where they make us wait for the clients, now I have started work for the Turkish too. I know how it is to be them. When new girls come there is always trouble. But they are also very stupid. I figured out in Italy that it doesn’t mean, just because the boss squeezes you round the waist in front of the customers, or buys you a drink, that he likes you. Because there are always new girls coming along, snapping at your feet; prettier, younger girls who make more money.

  They think Hope is here for the ‘Internet’. I don’t know what this means exactly, but I heard of some places that do live shows that people pay to see online. In Italy Antonio had a small website with pictures of models that were meant to be like us on it. He only kept six girls at a time, because he said he was offering his clients perfection and it was amazing how quickly ripe fruit went bad in the heat.

  ‘Think about Inter Milan or Juventus,’ he said one evening when it was Serie A Cup Final. He would show it on the screens at the bar instead of porn. ‘Once the players get old and tired their price goes down. So it is with girls.’

  I never listened to him when he was talking. He liked to talk too much. He wanted to believe that we didn’t mind what we were doing – ‘In Italy we pray to women like you. Have you never heard of Mary Magdalene? For Italians you are a goddess.’

  After all, it wasn’t his fault that in the big wheel of the world he was the boss and we were girls. It could so easily be the other way round! He was so full of excuses, even more so than Zergei, who he sold me on to eventually. ‘I’m not a bad man. I just got born on the wrong side of the bed. Bad things followed my name. So in the end I think, “What the hell?” and I stop trying to resist.’

  When there is no money, first of all you look around to see what there is that you can sell. Chairs you can chop up for firewood, bowls or plates, saucepans or knives, a summer dress, sunflower seeds stolen from the fields. But that only buys bits – a bag of flour, maybe bread, sometimes meat, most likely only a little milk – and when that’s gone you start to get desperate. You scratch around in your head and try to figure out what else there is in the house that might be worth money. But no one wants a dirty mattress or a broken radio. You need food, soap, new trousers to replace the ones that you have grown too tall for, shoes for the winter; you’d like a new cooker to replace the one that short-circuits every time you use the hob, some proper washing powder to make your clothes smell clean, enough credits to have the heating on in the cold weather.

  You get so flat and bored and desperate that you could crush yourself and squeeze out the juice and sell it to the first thirsty person that walks past with money in their pocket. You could grind your bones into flour for pancakes, plait your hair into fisherman’s rope, squeeze out your eyes and sell them to a blind man, anything; anything seems better than just sitting, your belly sore with hunger, waiting for something to happen.

  But now I wish with all my heart to be back there. I wouldn’t mind the cold, Viktor’s clingy whining, Adik fidgeting at the sound of every distant engine. That wo
uld be like heaven compared to this. Here in this room, in London, the breath squeezed out of me, sore and gasping, like the fish Adik used to catch, flopping about on the riverbank while they died.

  He says he’s sorry. He looks at his shoes as he buttons up his jeans and mumbles an apology. At least he wasn’t rude or angry, like some of them. At first, I used to get upset. The way they looked at me afterwards, and called me names. I thought maybe it was because I wasn’t good enough, or sexy enough, or pretty enough, not like the other girls, the older ones from Belarus and Latvia, the blonde ones who could pretend they were Scandinavian. Antonio said he didn’t want me in the club, on show to everybody, at least not at first. I learned later it was because he didn’t want someone spotting that I was underage.

  In my head I am not here, on this dirty mattress in England. In my head I am up above the earth, where the wind howls and the air rushes against my face. Up here I can see the whole of the world turning like a globe: America, Australia, China, India, Africa, Europe, and, all the time, above me, stretching around nearly the whole of the top of the world, Russia. I swoop down low over this country and its dark black forests and blue lakes, its craggy mountains and the endless yellow plains. I fly on and on, further up into the north, where nobody lives, where there is always frost and snow, to the places where it is so cold you can freeze to death in a second. Where the ice is so white it is blinding. This is where I go in my head while they pay for my body. I figured out in Italy that if I am already frozen inside no one can ever get in and hurt me.

  It’s late, the time of the night just before it tips over into morning. Three, maybe four o’clock. I feel so tired. I want to sleep, but it’s like the Turkish are staying open late just to spite me. I doze on the scruffy sofa in the ‘client’ lounge, jumping awake every time I hear a door slam. There hasn’t been a new client for over half an hour.

  The Turkish guys are in the corridor outside, sitting on chairs, smoking. They take it in turns to take money from the men, and show them the girls. In fact, they show them photos of us so they can choose who they want. If we’re busy they offer them coffee, vodka, smokes while they wait, which all cost extra. Beyond the corridor is another flight of stairs that leads to the door where they come in. I have only seen down from the top of the stairs, when one of the Turkish men took me to the bathroom. At the bottom is a security gate and a heavy blue door with bolts and locks all over it.