Esha Ex: Chapter Twenty One

The next instalment of Esha Ex, a novel-length work of new fiction, updated daily. For more details click here.

The smell was the first thing I noticed. It smelled... decent. Not of sewers, or unwashed bodies, or old cooking oil long burnt away, costumes covered in sweat, or toxic paint, or pain or fear. Two of the anoraks went into the office on the other side of the glass, two more went behind the door to the rest of the ground floor. Devika, Riven and I went upstairs.

“What’s on the ground floor?” I asked Devika.

“A drop-in centre. Staff work there full time and the interns, who you met, divide between shift work in-office, answering the helpline and being on call. My office is upstairs. We have residential rooms in the most secure parts of the building.”

“Is the whole building yours?”

“It is,” she said proudly. “You should have seen it when we took it on. There were so many holes that you could stand on the ground floor, look up and see the sky. We started off with one room, in winter, with no heater and three phones. We had to rent chairs and tables for the first six months. That was twenty years ago.”

            Inside, the building was organised like a family home, with rag rugs covering every inch of the tiled floor and wall-hangings to muffle the noise from the outside. The place was dark but cosy, like a clan dwelling that had been there forever, but for the fire alarms and panic buttons on the walls, the laminated lists of emergency phone numbers and a heavy grille dividing the top of the stairs from the first floor landing.

“I’m just going to check on the crèche,” said Riven, and tactfully left.

“What would you like to do now?” Devika asked me.

“Do I have a choice?” I didn’t know why I was so aggressive with her. I couldn’t help it.

“Of course you have a choice. This isn’t a prison. What would you liketo do? Right this minute?”

“Wash. Get clean. Sleep.”

“Eat?”

            I considered it, putting my hand to my stomach. It wasn’t growling. It was actually numb.

“Could I wash first? And …I don’t want to beg, but if you have some clothes that would fit me? I smell.”

“Of course. But after that, when you’re rested, and only when you want to, I’d love to talk to you. Only so we can figure out how to help you best.”

“I’m not against that,” I said grudgingly.

            Devika unlocked one of the doors, keying in the code on the security pad.

“The code changes every two days.”

“What do people think this building is?” I asked.

“A community centre. And we do work that way.”

The lights over the stairs had been triggered by our movement. I looked down at my hands. They were shaking with tiredness and the nails were rimmed black. We got to the top and Devika keyed in another code.

 “Lot of security,” I said.

“It’s not to keep you in. It’s to keep others out,” said Devika, pushing the grille and holding it open for me. A healing space, was painted in flyaway words on one of the landing walls, the last word blooming into an image of a soft pink lotus. “Individuals sometimes turn up and cause trouble downstairs. They’ll say anything. Sometimes we’re raided by private search officers with warrants, on the excuse of looking for a woman who’s been registered missing by her husband or father when she left. And there are exploiters and traffickers.”

“That’s not what happened to me,” I said.

But there was Father Francis. There were the visitors to the orphanage. There were the beautiful girls, aged six and above, who went missing from the place all the time. She found a loving home, was what we were told.

Devika had unlocked a storage cupboard and was getting me a bundle of things. I stood far back, not wanting to dirty anything.

“We know of several cases where women and girls were conveyed on rubbish barges just like the one you were on. The smell fools the police dogs and none of the dock officials want to weed through all that muck. Half the officials are on the take themselves – organised crime doesn’t work without the co-operation of the legit world.”

How clever that barge was, I thought. A prison cell with no roof and no walls. 

Devika gave me a towel and a white plastic vanity case and took me down  another long hallway lined with doors. Between the doors were children’s  drawings, and there were  mini-blackboards hung on each door, with chalk doodles on them – but no names. We came to a door which had a wooden plaque on it in the shape of a penguin wearing swimming trucks and holding a bucket and spade. A wooden sliding sign read Vacant but even so, Devika knocked and called Hello.

“Sometimes people forget to slide the thing across,” she explained, “and stupidly we put it too high up for kids to reach. Beginners’ mistake.”

“I’m handy. I can fix it.”

“Well, bless you for that.”

The bathroom was huge, with a shell shaped sink and a large wet room. There were no sharp edges and no high-up rails. There was a laundry basket for used towels, a low bench with fluffy white robes folded on it and slippers underneath it. In the wet room part the shower head was set seamlessly into the ceiling. So children couldn’t get hurt by accident, and adults couldn’t hurt themselves on purpose.

“This is.. just… too nice to use,” I stammered, “and if I do use it, I might not come out for six hours.”

“If that’s how long you need, take it.”

I turned on one of the taps and put my hand in the thick flow of clear water. It smarted. As the dirt washed off I realised that the skin of my palms was swollen where I’d fallen onto it on the barge.

“Do you know what clothes and shoe size you are?” she asked.

“I’ll wear anything.”

“Do you prefer jeans or traditional? Or a mix?”

“Anything.”

“We buy things from charity shops and keep them laundered and sorted. You’re lucky it’s summer, we have a hard time finding affordable down jackets and padded boots in winter. Once you have them, they’re yours to keep. If it’s okay with you I’ll come in and leave them on that bench while you’re showering. You’ll be behind the wet room wall. I’ll have someone make up your room. Sleep for as long as you need to.”

“What if that’s days and days?”

“That’s fine. But after that, please do come and find me on the first floor. My door’s the one with the wooden anchor sign.” As she was leaving she added, “The one thing we do ask is that you clean up after yourself. I don’t mean scrubbing, just not too many splashes, so no-one slips. Leave it as you’d like to find it. We want you to feel that this is your home for now.”

            I didn’t react to that. ‘Home.’ It was an empty word. I was in another building full of strangers, another set of strangers’ clothes, another place to wash, another bed, none of which were mine.

Devika closed the door behind her softly and I heard the wooden slider click from Vacant to Occupied. I reached over to lock it but there was no lock. I put the shower on, took off my clothes and put them straight into the bin.

            I had the water up as hot as I could stand. I was so dirty that I could actually feel the grime dissolving under the water, the surface cracking, thinning out and washing away in a black grit stream around my toes. I hopped out, groped my way into the vanity bag that Devika had given me and found a bar of  glycerine soap and a tiny bottle of shampoo, went back into the nearly scalding bliss of the wet room. It was obvious that the shampoo and soap were good quality. They made a froth and didn’t run out thinly the moment they were on my skin. I was careful to put the soap in a dry spot when I wasn’t using it, and I only used a drop of shampoo.

            As I washed, I was sighing constantly. At first I didn’t realise I was doing it. I wondered what the noise was, if it could be the water pipes. But it was me. The sighs got deeper and wetter and my throat began to smart. Then I was groaning. I realised how tired I was. I washed myself until my skin was raw and my hair squeaked when I pulled it. I had soaped myself so many times my arm ached.

I was trembling and was suddenly too weak to stand up. The steam filling the room made me light-headed. I sat on the floor of the wet room. From my inner core there rolled up and out an unstoppable wave of pain and fear, weakness and unknowing, shame and anger, longing and terror, and I began to cry hard, my eyes running with thick tears.

The crying came from so deep it almost felt like I was throwing up, expelling the memories and crawling misery I’d carried inside my guts all my life, and when it was all out of me I felt physically lighter, hollowed out, shocked into awareness. My ribs and stomach hurt. I felt that I had washed myself clean and was starting again, empty. At last I saw the point of the beautiful bathroom, the expensive wet room, the water that never ran out, the good quality soap. This was what they meant to happen. They knew that women cried in here, that this was where we washed away the sins committed against us, and rebaptised ourselves, made ourselves new.