11:59

by David Williams

  Her hand slackens a little, but she’s still watchful. I’ve lost some of her trust, just by knowing Emmanuel’s name. I’ll have to go carefully.

  “I know nothing about you, either, and I don’t need to know anything that you don’t want to tell me, but I promise if I’m asking questions it’s only because I want to help you.”

  Edona tenses again. “Are you a police-man?” She pronounces the syllables separately, and with some trepidation.

  “No. I’m… nothing. Just… I work for a radio station. Do you have radio where you come from?” (Stupid question.)

  “Radio? Like Radio Tirana?”

  “Where is that, Radio Tirana?”

  Edona looks at me as if she doesn’t comprehend, then says simply, “In Tirana.” She watches my face for some sign of recognition. Not getting it, she says again, “Tirana? You don’t know Tirana?”

  “Well, Geography wasn’t my best subject in school.”

  She smiles, touches my arm. Somehow my ignorance has restored her confidence in me. “Tirana in Albania,” she says. “Where is my country.”

  “You’re Albanian, right. How did you end up here?”

  Edona wells up again. “I’m not meaning to be here. I’m meaning to be in Italy.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Where is job they say, to pay back money. Good job, restorant.”

  “You owed somebody money?”

  “My father owes. We can’t pay so here is deal or he’s dead, they say. We lend you money, take you to Italy, give you good job, and you pay back in one year. Just one year is all. As soon as you pay you can go home. Or stay in good job. It’s up to you.”

  “So what went wrong?” Though I already know, or can guess, some of it. “Why aren’t you in Italy now?”

  “Because men chased our boat. Police-men, I think. Rojë bregdetare, is police of the sea.”

  “Coastguard.”

  “Dakord. They chase from Vlore in the night. We are in old engine boat, twelve, fourteen people. They are catching us. So…” Edona stops, a catch in her throat, and I can feel her body tighten against mine. I put my fingertips gently under her chin to get her to look up.

  “What? What happened?”

  Her face melts into tears once more. I can barely hear what she says through her sobs.

  “The men in our boat…”

  “What?”

  “They push people into the sea.” She grabs at my wrist. It’s as if she’s drowning and I’m her only hope. “Caterina Sopa. She’s from my village, I know her. They throw in the water, in the dark. And another girl. Next to me. She’s sitting next to me. He pushes her too. And he looks at me. Now he looks at me.”

  She shudders. I hold her more closely. “Ssh, you’re fine. You’re here now.” Some consolation, but it’s as much for me as Edona. We’re hanging on to each other in the blackness.

  “I hear girls scream in the water. I’m believing I am die. Then, uh, prozhektor… is, big light comes from other boat. And they are shouting Ndalim! Gommoni, Ndalim! But we are not stopping. We leave the girls in the water and we go sail away. Maybe polici save, maybe not. I watch the light searching for a long time, then, terr. I don’t know if they found.”

  Edona grieves quietly, and I lie silent next to her, aware of her heart beating. When she seems more settled, I prompt her to go on with her story.

  “Where did the boat go? Not to Italy?”

  I can feel her in the crook of my arm, shaking her head.

  “Back to Vlore?”

  She seems about to answer when there’s a loud banging on the bedroom door, scaring us both. I hug Edona close to me as the voice on the other side calls out, “Time is over. Please to come down.”

  “Not yet,” I shout in return. “I’ll pay.”

  “Of course, sir, no problem,” the voice comes back. “Fifteen minutes more.” He favours us with a dirty little laugh and we hear him tapping a rhythm on the banister as he retreats down the stairs.

  “Where did the boat go?” I whisper again to Edona.

  “North, I think, still my country maybe, but I don’t know the where. The men were afraid they are caught. One man, Uri, wants to throw us all in the sea. They argue about money, who gives them money. When we land they lock us all in… what is place for keep boat?”

  “Boathouse?”

  “Ten of us closed in that place for two days, sleeping on the ground. The men are leaving for all of us just a little bread and water. There is not tualet and we have to go in the corner of the shed, like animals. Less than animals. It’s coming third day when Uri is back with another man in a car. Ramiz. They come from drinking and Uri is angry with us. He calls us bushtër. Woman dogs. He takes out gun and he makes us all go out of boating house and down to the shore. We think he is going to shoot us there. He orders take clothes off and everybody into sea. I want to swim away but I am afraid. I am afraid of Uri and afraid of the sea.”

  Edona falls silent. When I look into her face she is staring past me, unseeing, still immersed in the cold waters of the Adriatic, watching Uri on the shore with his gun. I wait, and she continues.

  “He is not meaning to kill us now. We are money for Uri. He is washing clean his women for Ramiz. He makes us to come out of the water. He laughs with Ramiz when we are coming out, tells him we are his sirenë. We are having to stand zhveshur in front of Ramiz. So he can look, so he can choose. Tonight also the same. Again and again, for choosing. And always I’m thinking, Edona, that first time, why did you choose to the shore and not to the sea?”

  Her words reach so far into my guts I let out a whimper. It’s not just that I’m feeling for Edona’s pain. It’s the stark and sickening recognition that I’m the latest in that long line of johns to pick her out for pleasuring ourselves on her and in her. I may not have fucked Edona, but I can’t absolve myself from the guilt, because that greedy desire – the base appetite for her and other women - is in me as much as in any man that has had her since she was first raped by Ramiz.

  More than rape, I discover when Edona finds the strength to go on with her story, whispering it quietly to me under the stained blanket. Ramiz was not just a trick for Uri the pimp to turn, but a pimp-master himself. He selected Edona and two others from the ten girls lined up on the beach and, after Uri had corralled the rest into the boathouse, they took all three roughly right there on the strand, like boys riding seaside donkeys, to ‘break them in’, they said. Then they threw the girls their clothes, forced them into the back seat of Ramiz’s car and drove away.

  Ramiz owned a seedy bar-cum-whorehouse at the edge of some large ex-mining town called Burrel. That’s where Edona and the other two women were made to work, shuffling topless around a tiny stage except when they were being banged in a back room by whoever took a fancy to them provided they had enough cash after their drinking to pay Ramiz for the privilege.

  When Edona finally plucked up the courage to ask him for wages to send to her family, Ramiz said, “I paid Uri one hundred and fifty thousand leke for you, child. You have to earn that money back for me, and what I spend for your keep, then we can talk about wages.”

  Before that day came, though (and surely even Edona couldn’t be so naïve to believe it ever would) it seems that Ramiz got a better offer.

  “One night,” says Edona, “Ramiz drive me to a hotel in centre of town. This is not happening before. He bring me to a man in a room. Nice room, clean bed. And Ramiz leave me there. I never see him again. This man… of course, he makes sex with me. But after, he’s like a doctor, making… er…?”

  “Examination?”

  “Yes, examine. My eyes he looks, my arms, and here, and here…” Edona touches herself delicately and approximately at the places she can’t name, or won’t. “He asks what drugs I take. I say, no drug. He asks am I having child or no. No. Then he dresses, looking and still looking at me on the bed. He tells me, ‘I am your messiah, Edona. I am fixing you for good job in UK. For this you must pay back 2,0
00 Euro I am give to Ramiz.’ I am shocked. ‘I don’t have this,’ I tell him. ‘You will have from your work for me in UK,’ he says. ‘Enough for your family also. Your father, Pjter. Your mother Anna. Your little brother Andri.’ He is going out of the room, but first he pats his coat and says to me, ‘Do not leave this room or I will shoot you.’ He smiles as he says, but I know he is meaning this.”

  Edona raises herself slightly from the bed to look directly into my eyes. “How does this man know my whole family, Marc, and I don’t know his name? Where his spies? You are his spy, maybe? How you are man with different names for different people? Do you know this man’s name?”

  “I don’t, Edona, I promise you. I don’t know anything about this set-up. It’s… I’ve heard that this sort of thing goes on, but I’m just… I can’t believe what you’re telling me.”

  “It’s true.”

  “No, I mean, of course I believe you. I do believe you. But it’s… unimaginable.”

  “I’m not understanding.”

  “I’m not sure I do. I mean, how can people get away with this in… It’s the twenty-first century, for Christ’s sake. I mean, what about security? ID? How did he manage to bring you here? Did he just walk with you past Customs?”

  “He did not come with me.”

  “No?”

  “No. When he leave hotel room I lie down in his fine bed and I am thinking, maybe this is OK, now. I just have to be with this man. I am to be shok shtrati. His bed-woman. Is not so bad as with Ramiz. One man only. He will treat good. I must take care for my family. What I do? I go bathe myself for this man to come back. Is so nice. When I was little girl, before Baba lost all, I had such bathe, is warm up to my neck and sapun, is little… what is little, round…?

  “Bubbles?”

  “Dakord. Is nice. And fat white drying-cloths. I go back to bed and wait like good shok shtrati. I’m made my mind to do. But he’s not coming back.”

  “He left you?”

  “Other men is come. They have key for door and they walk in. I must go with them, they say. Dress quickly. I am thinking they are polici maybe. Outside is kamion, is truck, yes? Covered like soldier truck. I am lift into back and truck goes. Out of dark I can see eyes watching – three, four people in the back of truck with me. Later I can see they are all women, young also, afraid also. The truck stops more and again a woman is lift in. I am believing we are for jail. But the truck drives on and on. It is day until we stop for little time only, then on again the same and the same. We are very tired. At night we come to a place for trees, what is?”

  “Woods, forest.”

  “Thank you. In my language dru. We are waiting for long time in the dark. Then we see lights through the woods and noise of kamion, big one. The men shout at us natashas, nxitoj! nxitoj! and make us run to new truck coming. They give all girl bag for sleeping and water bottle, and show her hide places behind boxes. When man take me to place he shine light and we find girl also in place there. She is already travel miles in truck. This girl is of Romania. Another is of Moldova. I do not know how many all.”

  “And you came all the way to England in the back of this lorry?”

  “No, two more before. We change here, we change there. Long time. For UK I am lying like now in space under floor.”

  “False compartments. Jesus, it’s organised crime.”

  “Is crime, yes. I am stealed.”

  “It’s more than a crime, it’s slavery.”

  “Skllavëri. OK, is true.”

  I draw her in to me again. She feels so frail and light in my arms. I’m lacerated with tenderness and guilt. I have to squeeze my eyes shut because I’m losing my hold on gravity right now, and we might easily tip over the edge of the earth or float away. It’s Edona that brings me back.

  “So sorry, Marc.”

  She’s saying sorry to me.

  “What for?”

  “I’m not satisfying. Please don’t tell Boris.”

  “Who’s Boris? The guy downstairs?” Edona nods.

  “Listen.” She waits obediently, watching my face so intently that I’m glad of the darkness, otherwise she’d see how pathetic I really am. It’s only the promise that sounds strong. “I’m going to get you away from these men. Boris, Emmanuel. All of them. Trust me, I’ll get you out of here.”

  “Thank-you, but not possible.”

  Strangely, her air of hopelessness convinces me I can do this. In fact, it’s easy. How much courage does it take to call the police?

  “I’ll call the police.”

  Edona tenses up against me, just as she did when I first mentioned Emmanuel.

  “Not police, no.”

  “Why not? That’s what they’re for.”

  “I have been give often to polici for favour by men. At Uri’s. Also, on journey to UK…”

  “But this is England. We…”

  Edona’s response blow-torches my instinctive racism. The words turn to ashes in my mouth as she says, “Here too, yes, in this house.”

  I’m speechless, haunted by the image of PC Plod getting his kit off to poke Edona. Horribly, I can see myself behind him. There to fight him off? Or joining the queue.

  “There’s bad apples in every barrel,” I manage to say at last, listening to myself shift into phone-in mode, all external calmness and balance, then, realising she may not understand the expression, “I will find some good people to help you.“

  But it’s me who doesn’t immediately understand when Edona says, “No. They will send me back to my country.”

  “Well… isn’t that what you want?”

  “My father will be kill if I go back with no money. Maybe already, I don’t know. I fear to go back.”

  Another wave of guilt washes over me for my complicity in Edona’s plight. I’m nauseous with self-loathing, lying pressed against this half-naked young girl. I have to tear myself away, but for all the struggle inside me I try to do it with a show of gentleness. I have the sense that any sudden movement would shatter her, as if she was some fine artist’s delicate creation. My hand never leaves hers. When I finally get to my feet, reluctant, she looks up at me tearfully, and I have to hug her just once more, stroking her hair like a parent trying to soothe his little girl’s nightmares away.

  “I will do something, but I won’t put you or your family in danger. I promise.” I know I’m deluding myself as well as her, but it’s the only thing I can say that allows me to leave her in that narrow bedroom on her own while I steal away down the stairs.

  If only I could have kept on going, past the reception room door, out through the front porch, along the path and off to make plans for Edona’s escape. But of course Mr Primark Suit is at the foot of the stairs waiting for me, smiling in a way that suggests we share a secret now, him and me against the world. Which I guess we do.

  I’ll say this about Boris, he’s good at his job. As I’m getting to the last step on the staircase he moves aside, briskly lifts the correct coat from the assortment on the pegs and hands it to me with a conspiratorial smirk. “Well, Mr Oliver. I’m thinking you are liking little Edona very much, yes? Sweet girl.”

  With the advantage of the step I’m perhaps an inch taller than him. I could break his face with a well-placed head butt. I hesitate, and the moment is gone. He is firmly back in control, moving between me and the door as I take my coat.

  “Just the matter of the bill, sir. Our girls are please to delight for one hundred pounds. For your longer pleasure tonight is two hundred pounds. Of course, you may wish to leave a little extra, a little gift for Edona, is entirely to you. Even sweeter next time, maybe, eh?” He leers in my face. “And your drinks, sir, fifteen pounds.”

  I raise no objection over the outrageous price of one vodka martini, for the simple reason that I’m numbed with the sudden realisation that I have nowhere near enough cash on me to pay for anything beyond the drink. A glance inside my wallet confirms this. The ten-pound notes tucked in there look crisp and new, but there are only a
couple of them.

  “Mmm, do you accept credit cards?”

  “No, sir. Is difficult for us.”

  Is difficult for me. I hook out the notes and proffer them apologetically. “Sorry, this seems to be all the cash I have at the moment.”

  All bonhomie discarded, the Slav takes the money with the air of a snooty head waiter, rubs them between his thumb and forefinger to confirm there really are only two notes there, then looks at me silently, inviting the next move.

  “I could drop the rest in tomorrow. What time do you… open?”

  He fixes me with a stare that might have lasted forever if I hadn’t broken the spell by clipping my heels against the bottom step and half-stumbling backwards. That brings a contemptuous sneer out of Boris and a gesture towards the chair parked next to the CCTV monitor.

  “Please to sit.”

  His conditioned politeness doesn’t disguise the menace behind his instruction. I do as I’m told and watch him guardedly, eyes widening when he reaches to his inside pocket. He turns his back on me and walks into the space beyond the staircase, cell phone in hand. He mutters privately into the mouthpiece for a minute, then snaps the phone shut as he swivels and paces in my direction. He stops and leans on the banister, arms folded, watching me impassively without another word. Not having any options, I sit and do my best to look unconcerned, all but shitting myself on the seat.

  I reckon this little tableau lasts about ten minutes. Three times it’s interrupted by girls in dressing gowns leading clients from the front room upstairs to the bedrooms. Each time, the girls avert their eyes as they pass between us, Boris switches on a quick bright smile for the johns, they acknowledge him and cast a filthy glance my way. One seems very close to cuffing me as he goes by, just for the hell of it.