Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution (3 page)

IHOMELESSNESS

We humans are so constituted that we need a sense of our own social significance. Nothing can give us more pleasure than the sense that we are wanted and useful. Conversely, nothing is more productive ofdespair than a sense that we are useless and unwanted. DR M SCOTT PECK, PEOPLE OF THE LIE I think people usually use the term 'homelessness' without ever really being able to understand what that means. I think they do so because homelessness, like prostitution, is not a place in life that is possible for someone to fully comprehend unless they've been there. A caring person will be moved by compassion to sympathise with the homeless, but unless they've been homeless themselves, they cannot truly empathise in the sense that they feel another's suffering. Not to be flippant, homelessness actually means sofalessness, chairlessness, tablelessness, Tv-lessness, fridgelessness, cookerlessness, showerlessness (a dreadful condition) and, worst of all, bedlessness. The word 'homeless' seems to present the condition as a single lack, but homelessness is actually many individual deficiencies combined. The worst ofthem are emotional; but to mention the physical challenges first: the single worst bodily aspect of homelessness is exhaustion. It is caused by several different factors including sleep-deprivation, hunger, and a constant need to remain on the move. I had left my family home a couple of months after my father's suicide. Within weeks of my father's death, my mother's paranoia and propensity for scapegoating had reached fever pitch and wt�rt� wholly concentrated on me. She assailed me verbally each and every day. In our constant rows she regularly spat out the suggestion that I should contact a social worker and find myself a hostel. The more I thought about her suggestion, the more it made sense to me. I was very scared about walking out into the world and striking out on my own, but my home life was simply intolerable and I knew I could not stay, so I did exactly as she suggested. I went down to the local health centre and asked to see a social worker. I felt very determined, as though I was finally taking control ofmy own life, but I crumpled into a mess oftears when I began explaining to the social worker why I was there. I kept repeating, 'I have to get out of there; I just have to get out of there'. She had me out of there within a week, and so began the dizzying experience of living in State care. My first placement was in a Salvation Army-run hostel in the city centre called Lefroy House. I was homeless sporadically over the span of the following eighteen months, between the ages of fourteen and fifteen-and-a-half. Whenever my stay in a hostel or B&B would come to an end, I would usually find myself homeless again. Near the beginning of my stints of utter destitution I lived a very solitary existence, not mixing with anybody, not approaching anybody, not asking for help, and, consequently, not receiving it. Sometimes I walked out of hostels, other times I was thrown out. I was never violent, but I was absolutely immovable when there were rules I didn't want to cooperate with; I was a very determined girl, and I had a mouth on me. Nonetheless, I cannot condone some of the reasons that were put forward for telling me to leave, like walking in with one shoe on because I'd just received a beating, or being found to have been hoarding tablets in a jar in my room in case I ever wanted to commit suicide. Suicide did cross my mind in childhood. The most obvious display of that was the time I had swallowed my mother's sleeping tablets. I was eleven at the time. It was 1987 and one of my abiding memories of the month I spent recovering in Temple Street children's hospital was Whitney Houston's 'I Wanna Dance with Somebody' playing on the TV in the ward. I loved the energy and the positivity of that song; it lifted my spirits to listen to it while watching Whitney bouncing around smgmg. It wasn't as ifI could forget who I was in the hospital though; I'd often be reminded by different things. One night, during the early hours, I woke up after having wet the bed and had to get up and tell the nurse. It was embarrassing and I was glad all the other children were asleep, but while the nurse was changing the sheets the girl in the bed beside me woke up and asked what was going on. I felt very humiliated because this girl was a few years younger than me and none of the other children ever wet the bed. I'd always be reminded I was a different sort of child at visiting hours. I received two or three visits in the space of the month, from my father, and he brought one of my sisters with him on one occasion. I never saw, nor expected to see, my mother. The other children's families were present every visiting hour and when they'd go, they'd leave behind big bottles of minerals and sweets and fruit and there'd often be cards and balloons. After a week or two one ofthe nurses realised that my locker was always bare and after that, I had a jug of diluted orange that she'd keep topping up from the kitchen. The difference between the other children's plastic bottles and my glass jug was certainly not lost on me. Nor was the difference between my hospital-issue nightclothes and the other children's pyjamas from home. I was very conscious of how different I looked and how different my bed looked compared to the other children's. I perceived my glass jug as a symbol of the charity I was used to from the St Vincent de Paul and elsewhere and unless I was very thirsty, I would nearly have preferred it to be empty. The nurse who put it there was a kind person though. I remember her well. She more or less took me under her wing and would bring me around with her while she was doing her work. I remember one day slapping her belly and laughing after she'd told me in a dismal tone that she'd reached ten stone and wasn't happy about it. I thought she looked lovely and was worrying about nothing. She'd give me sweets sometimes. I distinctly remember her handing me a packet of Cadbury Eclairs one day when she took lllt' out li1r a walk in the grounds; Cadbury Eclairs reminded me of her for a long time after that. I actually really enjoyed my time in the hospital and only got upset when it was time to go home. To this day, unlike most people, I find great comfort and reassurance in the smell of hospital disinfectant. When the day came for my father to bring me home, I'll never forget the shock I got on seeing my mother. She had always dyed her hair black but she'd nearly always have a thick strip ofwhitish grey at its roots. She was sitting at the kitchen table looking as if she'd aged twenty years in the four weeks I'd been gone. She was very heavily sedated on sleeping tablets and had cut all the black out of her hair. She raised her head slowly to look at me and when her stoned eyes focused on mine she slurred: 'Look at what you've done to me'. The feeling that followed that would be difficult to describe, but was in no way uncommon. It was a deep, deep disturbance in the pit of my soul. Fear mixed with the deepest sort of concern. I was scared of her and for her at the same time. I suppose, in a sense, my mother is still frightening me today. It frightens me that I share one aspect of her mental illness: a propensity towards deep and abiding depression. When I became homeless, the first shock to me was the constant ceaseless need to remain in transit, and finding somewhere to simply be was a far bigger problem than I could have previously imagined. Nowhere you go are you left alone. Nowhere can you expect that luxury, because of course, all the private places of the world are closed to you and all the public places offer no privacy. Many of them do not even grant you admittance. As to the problems offinding somewhere to sleep: there is just literally nowhere that covers the needs even the tiniest and shabbiest of bed-sits would provide. There is nowhere that offers dryness, safety, cleanliness, warmth and comfort. A park bench may be dry, if it is not raining, and it may be clean, ifyou are lucky, but it is not safe, warm, or comfortable. The underside of a bush may be dry, again, if the weather is with you, but it is not safe, dean, warm, or comfortable. I slept in many different such locations, each as pathetic as the last. I once fell asleep on a bus that had been parked at a depot with the doors open and awoke to find myself driving through the then-green fields of west Dublin in the early hours of the morning. I hadn't a clue where I was and it was a rude awakening all right, but I reckoned it was worth it; it was the most comfortable night I'd spent in some time. I once spent a half hour or so in a fitful sleep on the cold tiled floor of a toilet cubicle in McDonald's on O'Connell Street. I hadn't been able to find anywhere to sleep the night before and was utterly exhausted so I went in there as soon as they'd opened their doors to sell Egg McMuffins for breakfast. I reckoned that at least in the toilet I'd be bolted in and safe. I was woken up and thrown out by a member of staff who'd come in to clean the toilets, and that brings me to the real and deepest damage of homelessness: the loneliness. It is the experience of being utterly unwanted, ofyour very presence being an undesirable commodity in all places and situations. Wherever you are, as a homeless person, you are unwelcome. When a person is homeless, their sense ofsocial significance is reduced to zero. It doesn't exist. Their sense of themselves is of being worthless and unwanted; a social pariah, an exile, an outsider whose very body is an unwanted intrusion they must carry with them wherever they go. They are unwanted in the most literal sense of the term. They are redundancy embodied. I felt all these feelings in homelessness. All homeless people do. It is unavoidable. When I eventually ended up meeting another homeless girl, a couple of years older than I was, it was quite by accident. She was a friend of another girl I'd been in a hostel with, and I'd been introduced to her briefly six months or a year before. Recognising each other and finding ourselves in the same predicament, it made sense to stay together for safety and companionship, though the truth ofthe matter was neither of us particularly liked the other from the start and by the time we parted ways neither of us could stand the sight of each other. We quickly teamed up in the shoplifting we'd already been at indi.vidually in order to sustain ourselves. We'd steal food, which of course we'd eat, but together we progressed to converting into cash stolen clothes, perfumes and inexpensive jewellery, which we'd rob from the major department stores in town. As a shoplifter, I was highly prolific but totally without skill. I actually once found myself in Store Street garda station twice in the same day. The only deception I was gifted at was coming up with an increasingly fantastical array of bogus names and addresses. I could think up anything on the spot and make it sound credible and in fact, if I had been able to apply the same skill to shoplifting, I probably never would have been caught in the first place. There was memory involved also; I always had to remember the face of the arresting garda and match the name I'd given to the face I'd given it to. I suppose the guards didn't pay much attention to us kids, having as they did much more serious matters to attend to, which would explain why this kind of messing was possible. I had presented myself as Lisa Simpson on the day the ruse was finally blown, which happened when my brother was escorted in the door as I was getting ready to walk out of it. We roared laughing and greeted each other by the front desk with high enthusiasm, not having seen each in a year or two by that time. Of course, a garda asked who we were to each other and when my brother announced that we were brother and sister, they realised the disparity in the surnames and that someone was clearly lying. I was promptly marched back to the cells, the joy of the reunion significantly soured. I knew I'd never get away with lying in Store Street after that, so I began stealing on the south side of town, where if I was caught (which I'd come to accept as an occupational hazard) I'd be brought to the garda station in Pearse Street. Although my behaviour was deliberately designed to exasperate, there was no malicious intent on my part. I had a generally good-natured attitude towards the police and knew that I was the guilty party and presented a pain in the arse they had to deal with. At that point, when I was regularly stealing, life was in some ways a good deal better than it had been during the previous year. The physical lacks of my life were abating to some extent, but the emotional ones tormented as ever and it wasn't long before I discovered the synthetic solace ofdrink. Before long, as soon as we'd sold the last ofour shoplifted wares around the flats complexes and housing estates, it would be time to go to the pub and get drunk. I was a tall and well-developed girl, and the laws were laxer then, and I never had any trouble getting served. In fact, I'd often get served until the early hours of the morning when I'd be steaming drunk. My friend and I began staying with people she knew in a rented flat in the city centre. I would never be anything approaching happy there. It was somewhere to sleep, and some ofthe people were nice enough, but I was starting to dislike her more and more and some of the people she'd introduced me to left a lot to be desired. We had been staying there for weeks and I'd been feeling it was time to move on since the first night we arrived. Eventually I did, after I discovered she'd been robbing me. When I write about the days of my youth I can feel it coming back to me; or parts of it, and rarely the good parts. I can feel myself slowing down, reverting back to that awkward, shy and utterly under-confident young person, desperate for escape and for relief, and I can feel my writing change as a result. When I dwell on my place in those times I make a transition to the person I once was and never want to be again, and I actually feel myself stripped of the strides I've since made, because this recounting is not possible without reliving, and this reliving involves the mental stripping away of all the days between those days and this one. When I theorise on the routes into and out ofthose experiences, I am the me of today and I feel the indifference of distance; when I recount specific incidences I am the me of yesterday, and I feel again that awful sense of becoming numb and nullified. To write this book is to take a journey into somewhere I don't want to go, but must. I have to visit this place one last time before I'll earn my own blessing never to have to come here again. Homelessness: my memories ofit echo a time utterly imbued with the absence of prospects and
vibrate with the opus of loss. It is joylessness, and for many, hopelessness also. I remember it still, usually at night, when I am lying between the white cotton sheets of my warm and comfortable bed. I think of all the people out there wandering around cold and shaking, hungry and thirsty, lonely, tired and broken in spirit, and I shudder in my warm bed and say a quick prayer for them; and the last thing I feel before sleep is guilt, because the last thing I do is try to rid my mind of their image. That prostitution is a documented consequence of homelessness is not at all surprising to me, since all of the teenaged girls I knew (including myself) had come to it from a place of homelessness and destitution; but it might be newsworthy to some people, so I will include some documentary evidence of that here. This particular quote is quite chilling to me, as it could have been written to describe my situation exactly: 'Homelessness is a recognised entry route into prostitution, which, in the case of young people and children, is often a result of running away (Home Office, 2004a). Running away can be an attempt to make a positive move, a means of breaking away from an intolerable home life in order to make a fresh start. It can also be seen as an attempt to exercise control over the situation. However, while a young woman may be making an attempt to be assertive, she would simultaneously be increasing her vulnerability to manipulation: (Cusick et al, 2003) The above findings were published in a British Home Office report and reproduced in the 2005 Ruhama1 research report, 'The Next Step Initiative'. The link between teenage homelessness and prostitution is so abundantly clear that even if I had never worked as a prostitute, I would still understand the existence of it, because homelessness is so Ihoroughly and relentlessly traumatic a person will take any route, however dangerous or disgusting, to escape it. The desperation ofhomelessness is so pronounced that those afflicted hy it are sometimes willing to risk death for the release of escaping it for a single night. I know this is true because one evening a friend took a Ruhama is the only group that provides frontline services to prostituted women deliberate overdose in front ofme to secure herself a hospital bed for the night. The plan was that she would be kept in the hospital and I would be allowed to wait for her overnight in the waiting room. I told her she was mad but she was determined to go through with it so I told her I'd make sure she was okay. She took an entire box of Feminax (female pain-relief medication) that she'd stolen from a chemist. There was a moment of hilarity in it, dark and all as the situation was, because she'd taken the overdose on the south side of the quays and she wanted to be taken to the Mater hospital on the north side, so to avoid being taken to StJames's hospital, I had to half-carry her over the Ha'penny Bridge. We didn't expect that she'd be kept in more than one night. We just thought she'd have her stomach pumped and that would be the end of that. The plan worked out all right for her and her health was not affected, thankfully, but she was kept in the hospital for several days and after the first night I was told to leave the waiting room, so I was right back where I started, except now I was alone again. In homelessness, you are not invisible to people, but rather not worth looking at. Most people regard you in this way; most, but not all. I will never forget the day another teenager gave me a fiver while I was trying to sleep on the steps ofBest's in O'Connell Street. There is a short period of respite between about six and half-seven in the morning in summertime during which it is relatively safe to sleep in public ifyou are in the centre of town. This is because it is not dark, the shops have not opened yet so it's not too busy to prevent you sleeping, but also there are enough people around so that you're unlikely to be molested in your sleep. It was about seven o'clock in the morning the day that girl approached me and I had been walking around all night and was utterly exhausted, but couldn't sleep properly on the cold stone steps. I had been trying to sleep in a sitting position with my arms folded on my knees and my head in them when she shook me gently by the shoulder. I looked up at her. She smiled a soft sort of smile and handed me something. I put my hand out �ly out of reflex. I'd never begged while I was homeless and I had no idea she was handing me money until it was in my palm and she'd turned to walk away. She was only about eighteen or nineteen und st.�t.�mcd to be at the tail-end of a wild night out. I remember distinctly thinking how she was only a girl, a few years older than I was. I remember the stab of receiving compassion, somehow different from the days of my childhood, not as acute. Probably because it was so unexpected; the first thing I had experienced on having been roused from sleep, or probably because it had been given without my having to ask for it. I remember watching her shiny chestnut hair as she walked down O'Connell Street, and I remember feeling a peculiar blend of shock and love. I waited till McDonald's was open and bought myself some breakfast. That was over twenty years ago. The woman that girl became has most likely forgotten me. I have never forgotten her. It probably sounds like a funny thing to be considering as a lack when faced with so many more pressing ones, but when I was homeless I really missed reading. Because I am someone who loves books and reading it was something that I really missed. You might think you can read anywhere, but when you're homeless without a penny to your name you can't buy a book to begin with; the odd bit of money you come across you'll immediately convert into food. I used to look longingly into bookstore windows and really wish I could go in and read a book, hut I would not do that for fear of a staff member coming along and reminding me I was not in a library and the shame I knew would result from that. I knew I couldn't join a library either because you cannot do anything in this world without an address. People who've never been homeless would not relate to this and some of them might think me mad, but these days I have a home and once in a while I reach out and spread my hand flat on its walls and reflect to myself that I can touch it, I can actually feel it, the thing I wanted so hadly back then. One of the strangest things about my experience of homelessness, and probably one of those most worth recording, is the feelings I remember of my very first time on the street. There was the feeling of an irresistible and seductive pleasure to destitution in disguise, but it was a fragile creature and it perished like a little bird in the depths of an unendurable winter. I had morphed destitution into freedom in my own mind, but the ruse didn't last long. There was cold, I remember that, and the suddenly awful changeability of the Irish weather; how rain and sleet would assail you by turns and then the sudden appearance of the sun would warm the wet off your clothes, only for the iron grey clouds to roll again over the wide-open roof of everything. If my autonomy itself was vulnerable, I myself was more so, and I felt it then, as freedom morphed into destitution; I felt it in the bones of me, though I could not have articulated it to anyone and wouldn't have anyway, for shame. Chapter 6 ('-> ITHE FIRST DAY