Writing for Fun
June 2015
The Turn Of A Card - Joan Bond
With the turn of the card I was in. I had been perfecting this means of entry for a while now and it had provided my income.
I didn't go for people who needed money but the rogues that went on business meetings and used call girls like me.
I hated the men who used women and having been used I wished to divest them of the rest of their money and a little extra sometimes in a little blackmail. I would creep back an hour after I had left when they were deeply asleep after plenty of drinks and my services and go through their wallets.
I had once been a normal and happily married woman, nice house and kids. Because of Jimmy, my husband, always wanting more money, becoming involved with gambling we lost everything. Not only that but he was heavily in debt to a syndicate when he just disappeared from our life; they turned on me for what was owed to them.
I couldn't go to work with children to pay them back but they wouldn't give up and suggested a way of payment. I had to be a part of a call girl system and they would insist on three guys a night. God how I hated it all, but they threatened my kids lives if I didn't pay back a thousand quid a week.
I became so embittered that I thought I would try anything to get free and therefore the theft and blackmail started.
There was no point in going to the police so I had to get out of this trouble myself.
One night one of the guys was a decent man and didn't want sex, just to talk. He wanted to end his life and just wanted to be friendly with someone before he did it.
Because I sat and talked I couldn't take the money, although looking back, he wouldn't want it any more. When I didn't have enough to pay the bastard gambler boss he had one of his boys teach me a lesson with a beating. He just threw me out of the car into the road, and as it happened a police car pulled into the car park as he belted out and they took me to the hospital. I told them I couldn't stay in as my kids were being looked after and I had to get home.
The sergeant took pity on me and taking me home he made me tell him what was happening. I was by this time so frightened and tired of all the life I was having to live that I told him all about it. At the station when I went to make a statement later. I learnt that they had a case against this crook but no one who admitted to knowing what was going on.
I was so desperate I agreed that if they had a case to prosecute I would be a witness. They would find me a safe house, they said, where the kids would be safe with me.
I was delivered home, not in a police car, but there was no one there. The kids and the sitter had gone. I went mental. I phoned the sitter - no reply. I told the police and they were about to start a search for them when I saw the note stuck to the board in the kitchen with a message to say Danny, my five year old, had been unwell and the sitter had taken them to the hospital.
That finished me. No witness account and no crook. I packed all our goods and, collecting the kids, I left. Collecting them from the hospital we went to a small hotel while _ made arrangements to go away . . . a long way away and never to come back.