Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution by Rachel Moran Read Free Book Online Page A

visit her alone, as my mother never had any time for that sort of thing and my parents were separated at the time. When the day came for me to collect her and bring her home, I found, to my horror, at the bus stop on Westmoreland Street, that I had lost the pound note my mother had given me for our bus fare. It was about seven or eight o'clock in the evening but it was wintertime and already very dark. There was no turning back and I got the bus to Cherry Orchard and decided to worry about how to get us both home when I got there. (I cannot remember if I had change enough to get that bus or if I had to make my case to the bus driver. I'd say it was probably the latter, because I do remember talking to him, which wouldn't have been necessary otherwise.) I got off the bus and walked up the long dark road lined with poplar trees that seemed, against the night sky, to be menacingly tall and resolved that there was nothing for it but to appeal to someone's sense of charity. I made my way into the hospital and when my sister and I were getting ready to leave, I explained to the nurse that I had lost our bus fare, told her how far we had to go, and asked if she'd be able to give me the money for the bus home. The look on her face was one I'd seen on many faces and it was something that made me deeply uncomfortable, that I had that effect on people; that my presence so often worked the features of strangers into that same sense of affronted appal. They were little stabs, those expressions. She called a taxi for us and paid the driver in advance. I remember on the taxi ride home feeling warm, grateful and ashamed. Ofcourse there were good times: I remember (and strangely this memory induces the greatest sadness ofall) my mother sitting on my father's knee as they kissed and cuddled and hugged to the tune ofKris Kristofferson's 'Loving her was Easier (Than Anything I'll Ever do Again)', which played loudly on the old vinyl record player. I saw this scene more than once and I came to identify that song very clearly as an expression of their love. To this day I cannot listen to it without battling a tidal wave of emotion, the origins of which I'm certain, but the transition of a happy thought into tears confuses me still. I did love Christmas-time as a child, poverty or not. I adored the smell of the pine trees. I still do. When we lived in the city centre my mother would take me into O'Connell Street and Henry Street shopping and I would be mesmerised at the sight of all the lights. I remember one Christmas, after we'd moved out of town, my father bringing home a tree so tall he had to practically saw it in half in order to make it fit into the kitchen, which was like walking into a forest by the time he'd completed the operation. I felt as if I was in Narnia and I know that my enduring insistence on buying a huge genuine tree every December has its origins in that day. Sometimes my father would play silly games with us where he'd fashion a ridiculous looking hat out of some old cloth and stylt.� himself as a wizard and he'd stand there asking us questions. If we guessed the right answer we'd win a chocolate bar out of a bag he'd be holding. If ever, in the morning time, there'd be hot porridge or gas in the heater, you could be sure my father was responsible for it. He'd line us up on the wooden benches and place the heater opposite us so we could warm our legs. If there was any jam in the house, he'd put a dollop of it in the porridge, which my mother derided as a common low-class habit he'd picked up back in the days when he'd been running around Cabra West with the arse hanging out of his trousers. This view of his upbringing was, like so many other things, a fiction of her mind. Sometimes I used to sit on the stairs outside the sitting room listening to my father playing guitar. I have never heard anyone play like that. My father was a great jazz guitarist and had been a member of several Irish showbands, including the Dublin City