LUISA CAPELO    CALL LATER     FRIDAYS

Only first chapter

FRIDAYS         By Luisa Capelo

On Monday I wake up. Get breakfast done. Wake up the children. Wash them. Help them getting dressed. Make sure they eat to the last cornflake on heir bawls. Take them to school. Come back home. Clean the house (every day I concentrate a little bit more in a different area). Start cooking dinner. Go shopping (if needed). If shopping is out of the question, I normally go out to have a quick coffee with my friends. All mums from the area. Then we all go to pick up our kids. Come back home. Give them dinner. An hour or so of games or television all together. At last I make them go to bed. And finally I get the only time of the day that is truly mine… I sit on the sofa, in front of the telly, planning what to do with those precious moments. Normally I just fall asleep trying to decide, and wake up with a terrible pain in my neck.

On Tuesday I wake up. . Get breakfast done. Wake up the children. Wash them. Help them getting dressed. Make sure they eat to the last cornflake on heir bawls. Take them to school. Come back home. Clean the house (every day I concentrate a little bit more in a different area). Start cooking dinner. Go shopping (if needed). If shopping is out of the question, I normally go out to have a quick coffee with my friends. All mums from the area. Then we all go to pick up our kids. Come back home. Give them dinner. An hour or so of games or television all together. At last I make them go to bed. And finally I get the only time of the day that is truly mine… I sit on the sofa, in front of the telly, planning what to do with those precious minutes. Normally I just fall asleep trying to decide, and wake up with a terrible pain in my neck.

I won’t go on. I’m sure you got the picture by now. But Fridays are different, on Fridays a bus and a train journey will take me to "the office" after dropping the kids.

"The office" is an old flat, in a very common block of flats, in a nice secluded area.

Nobody lives in "the office", but there is a bed. Nobody prepares meals, but there is a kitchen. There are not computers, or printers, or typing machines. Where I work on Fridays, there are condoms and tissues instead of paper and staples. A big mirror on top of the bed instead of a screen…

I never chose to do it in the first place. Chained to that radiator in central London.

I had arrived to England through a "friend of the family", from Poland, my homeland.

It had cost me all my savings. This man had promised me a job, a lot of friends, and a life of luxury and commodities.

Instead he locked me naked in a bedroom where a lot of men used me as a tissue, and then discarded me. I didn’t even get to know their names. Let alone receive any money from them.

One morning when I was allowed to the toilet, I left, undressed. I escaped, shocked by fear. I didn’t care for anything, just to run away, far…

A taxi was kind enough to stop and help me. He took me to the flat of a girl I had met in the journey to the UK. She had given me her address before saying our good byes and good lucks. And she was my guardian angel, till I learned in this world there are no guardian angels at all.

But now I have a family, and a home, and Mondays and Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and Saturdays and Sundays again.

If I close my eyes I can still smell his scent, sweet and overwhelming. The choice of many young boys. Cheap, but somehow, striking.

I can see his smiley eyes, and I wonder if they are still so roguish.

And his meaty lips… how I used to love kissing them!

And his hands, his hands… They fascinated me. Skinny, with very long delicate fingers, slightly twisted, as if someone had hurt them on purpose for being so beautiful.

And the touch of them… oh yes… that I definitely will always remember! They woke me up into who I really am. And I’ve never felt the same with any other pair of hands in the planet. And as you will have guessed, I have had a few experiences already.

But he is special because he is the one I love, since the moment I set eyes on him till today, right now. Who knows what will happen tomorrow? I don’t like making plans.

I love him, I LOVE HIM, and my soul is breaking like a fragile glass just by thinking of him once more.

All those men only make me more aware of how much I miss him by my side… of the mistake I made leaving him behind, of how dead I am since I cannot share my life with his.

My kids are from another man, and yet, thinking of taking them to Poland to him make me want to scream.

If only we could just erase time.

He let me go that day; maybe he didn’t love me all that much.

Then again, I was the one leaving! Would he believe I was crying blood inside as I was doing it? Probably not.

I light the cigarette, though is not me any more who presses the switch in the lighter, it’s her… the woman my family don’t know anything about.

I am sitting in the living room (probably I should call it "waiting room…) with the maid. Already in my working clothes. Frozen. They have the windows opened, as usual, to get rid of the smoke they say… as if!

I tried that one myself for years at my parent’s when I was a teenager, till I realised the only way to make smoke disappear from a room was to stop smoking on them.

I took the fag to my lips and soaked my mouth with it’s substance… yeah! The first cigarette of the day still tasted as good as the first ever. Shame the other two hundred plus tasted of mucky ashtray…

I looked at the maid’s face involved now in smoke. She was pretty, or she could have been had she taken any care of herself. But obviously that face had stopped using night creams, scrubs, and other ointments many moons ago.

Can I trust her? Of course not. I haven’t met anybody in this industry yet worth of any trust. Well, maybe a couple of girls, but they were so wasted last time I saw them that I doubt very much they are still on this planet.

I have another puff and close my eyes. How are my kids right now? Nothing has changed in that respect… I have been working since soon after the second one was born… but I’ve never stopped worrying to death thinking of them while I am at work.

What would happen if their father found out what I am doing? He would get the custody then, no doubt, and Iwould get thrown of the country. After all we aren’t a family any more. I’m officially Polish again.

Polish and a prostitute. Not a good combination for a mother… How cruel everything is… I am doing this for them. So I can give them a decent education, and hopefully a decent future. So nobody can take them away from me, because I cannot maintain them. And yet, if they find out…

No point thinking about it again. No point in wasting any time.

I open my new book, and I get into it, hopefully I’ll have a few more minutes till the clients start arriving.

Knock knock!

Was it the door or my heart?

And there we go again…

 LUISA CAPELO    CALL LATER     FRIDAYS