Sofia, a tall slim Polish girl, dumped a handful of towels in the spinner and turned to me.
“Do ya think you’ll get a visitor today, Beth?”
She was sent down for stabbing her abusive boyfriend. I liked her a lot and we had become good friends in the 10 weeks I’d known her.
“Dunno,” I replied. “Dennis might come, but I doubt it. The scumbag hasn’t been for two weeks and he’s not very talkative on the phone.”
Dennis was my bastard boyfriend, pimp or whatever he wanted to call himself. He was the reason I was in prison and I didn’t particularly care if he turned up, or not. Besides, seeing him only made me pine to be on the outside.
Apart from Dennis, I had no one who would be remotely interested in visiting me. My parents kicked me out when I left school and my sister disowned me when she found out I was dating Dennis. After closing one dryer and starting it, we began taking bedding out of the next one in line.
A lot of the younger teenagers looked up to me, probably because I was lippy and appeared to stand up for myself. It could also have been because I was a ‘looker’, but I went to extraordinary lengths to make myself look unattractive, basically to keep the predators away.
“Have you seen Mary?” Jessica asked.
Twenty one years old, blonde and heavier than the rest of us, Mary came from a different wing, but occasionally worked with us whenever we were short staffed. We hadn’t seen her around for a few days and was wondering if she was okay. A rumour was circulating the prison that she had been beaten up by one of the dykes, which was a common occurrence on our wing.
“I heard she’s got a broken arm,” Emma said.
Emma was the oldest in our tightknit group and had been banged up for robbery with violence. She was black and had spent a lot of her life in one institution or another. Apparently the last robbery was her tenth offence!
“Beth,” Jessica leant over and handed the corners of a sheet to me. “You never did tell us how you met Dennis.”
“Oh, we went to school together. He was two years above me, but the older boys seemed to home in on us younger ones. We fooled around through his final year…”
“You mean you were having sex with him before you were 16?” asked Jessica.
“Huh, we were all curious and desperate to find out what it was like to be fucked by a black guy. The rumours about their cocks being so big … I had to know!”
The whole group chuckled and nodded knowingly.
“He was the school stud and us white girls were cuing up for it,” I explained to the group, who were listening intently to my story. “When Dennis left the school, I didn’t think about him until I met him at a party about a year later. He’d just turned 18. I was dating another black fella, who I dropped like a brick when Dennis made his move.”
“Black men are better at it too!” commented Emma.
Her happy dark face was beaded with sweat and a large droplet was waiting to drip from the tip of her wide nose.
“Too right!” I agreed.
Sophia and Jessica looked at each other, as if the thought of having a shiny black cock in their snatch terrified them.
I had already told them that I had been working the streets and they never ceased asking for stories of my various encounters. I tried to resist, because the memories disgusted me, but I got so bored the tales soon tumbled out of my mouth.
What they didn’t know, was that I had only been on the streets for a couple of weeks, so was relatively inexperienced when I encountered the sadist, who nearly killed me in his strange house. I had panicked and stabbed an innocent guy and was paying a heavy price for my stupidity and for not standing up to Dennis.
“So when did he put you on the game?” Jessica asked.
“He tricked me, by persuading me to do a threesome with a mate. I was pretty drunk that night and they both fucked me together, which was pretty awesome! Then in the morning, it was just his mate. I was almost sober, so I knew what I was doing and when the guy gave me fifty quid, it got me thinking.”
“Thinking? What do you mean?” Emma asked.
“Well, the previous day, I worked ten hours on a market stall for forty five quid, cash. I’m not so bright at math, but even I could see it was easy money. Fifty quid for twenty minutes work and I actually enjoyed myself! You see I knew the guy so it seemed okay.”
We finished folding the sheets and moved on to the pillowcases. The girls had gone quiet, thinking about my easy lapse into whoring. I carried on, because the girls were spellbound.
“Dennis soon lined up a few of his mates and then word got round the market traders and before I knew it I was calling round these guy’s houses to do tricks for them. The thing is, they were all mates, or mates of mates, so I was never really taking any risks.” I paused.
The girls had stopped work, because they were engrossed by the story of my slide into prostitution. We emptied another dryer of warm pillowcases and started to fold them.
“Go on Beth, what happened next,” urged Sofia, while glancing over toward me with her soft blue eyes. She shook her mop of short blonde hair, to free it from matting in the damp atmosphere.
“Well,” I continued. “Dennis linked up with a couple of his black mates in the West End who had a few girls working the streets, out of their porn shop. They needed him to patrol their turf and keep an eye on the girls, so he dragged me down there and told me I’d have to drop my market job and go and work for his friends.”
“What did you say?” asked Sofia, in her cute, innocent Polish accent.
“I flatly refused. Earning cash on the side from his mates on the market was one thing, but blowing complete strangers, or worse,” I paused to look around to see if we were alone. “Wasn’t my cup of tea, so I told him to fuck off!”
“What happened?” gasped Jessica.
“The cunt lost his temper and beat me so badly I spent two days in bed. He bruised my ribs and thrashed my ass.”
“What about your face, Beth? You’re so pretty. You’ve got no scars…” whispered Emma.
“The bastard never damaged my face, cos you see those three guys were planning to get me working the kerbs for weeks, only I didn’t know it. Dennis admitted it one night when he was drunk.”
“My god, the lengths these bastards will go to take advantage!” Emma sighed.
“A week later I was working the street and being hunted down by the kerb crawlers,” I continued.
“Any trouble before that night?” asked Emma.
“Yes the fucking pigs picked me up twice in the first week and each time I had to spend a night in the cells. But, I was only cautioned and back working the next day. It didn’t take long to learn how to recognise their dummy cars and I was soon spotting them a mile away. Then one night this white posh guy stopped and offered me five hundred pounds for an all-nighter. I went with him and the rest is history.”
The girls had all been enthralled by my story, but knew I didn’t want to talk about the night that changed my life. On reflection, I was lucky to be alive.
We had just wheeled a fresh basket of clean linen to the store room, when one of the male screws came through the connecting doorway and pointed directly at me.
“Hudson!” he yelled.
I stopped what I was doing. “Sir!” I took two steps toward him.
“The warden wants to see you!” I looked at my friends and saw anxiety on their faces.
“What for?” I asked, equally alarmed at the sudden announcement from the screw.
“Do I look like the warden, Hudson?” I shook my head. “You’ll find out when you get there! Now get a move on.”
“Thought you might have an idea,” I muttered.
As I moved and turned sideways to pass him in the doorway, he made sure that my nipples rubbed along his uniform. The screws knew we weren’t wearing bras under our short sleeve blouses, so always tried it on if they got the opportunity.
“You know the way,” he said with a glint in his eye.
I knew that he was one of the officers who had watched me through the spyhole in the door, but he had resisted pushing things further.
I headed for the far side of the vast laundry room and tried to ignore the turning heads of my fellow inmates. The senior officer followed me into the corridor, which was the start of a long journey to the other side of the prison.
As I trudged 3 paces ahead of the officer, I started to run through the events of that fateful, freezing night, 5 months earlier.