Cronicles of an unpopular life

FRIDAYS

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 sofas, 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 trip. 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.

*****************

HIM

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 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.

*****************

A cigarette

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 fist 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 that 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?

*****************