“People are going to start talking,” she teases.
“There’s nothing to talk about.” The statement is too abrupt. Her eyebrows lift almost imperceptibly.
She lights a cigarette and then guillotines the flame with the lid of her lighter. For a fleeting moment I see the light reflect off the golden specks in her green eyes. No matter how Elisa styles her hair it always appears sleep-tousled and wild. She cocks her head to one side and looks at me intently.
“I saw you on the news. You were very brave.”
“I was terrified.”
“Is he going to be OK— the boy on the roof?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to be OK?”
The question surprises me, but I don’t know how to respond. I follow her back into the hall and help her stack the chairs. She unplugs the overhead projector and hands me a box of pamphlets. The same painting of Mary Magdalene is printed on the front fold.
Elisa puts her chin on my shoulder. “Mary Magdalene is the patron saint of prostitutes.”
“I thought she was a redeemed sinner.”
Annoyed, she corrects me. “The Gnostic Gospels call her a visionary. She’s also been called the Apostle of Apostles because she brought them the news of the Resurrection.”
“And you believe all that?”
“Jesus disappears for three days and the first person to see him alive is a whore. I’d say that was pretty typical!” She doesn’t laugh. It isn’t meant to be funny.
I follow her back onto the front steps, where she turns and locks the door.
“I have my car. I can give you a lift to your office,” she says, fumbling for her keys. We turn the corner and I see her red Volkswagen Beetle on a parking meter.
“There is another reason I chose that painting,” she explains.
“Because it was painted by a woman.”
“Yes, but that’s not all. It’s because of what happened to the artist. Artemisia Gentileschi was raped when she was nineteen by her instructor, Tassi, although he denied touching her. During his trial he said Artemisia was a lousy painter, who invented the rape story because she was jealous. He accused her of being ‘an insatiable whore’ and called all his friends to give evidence against her. They even had her examined by midwives to find out if she was still a virgin.”
Elisa sighs dolefully. “Not much has changed in four centuries. The only difference now is that we don’t torture our rape victims with thumbscrews to find out if they’re telling the truth.”
Turning on the car radio, she signals that she doesn’t want to talk. I lean back in the passenger seat and listen to Phil Collins singing “Another Day in Paradise.”
I first set eyes on Elisa in a grotty interview room at a children’s home in Brentford in the mid-eighties. I had just been accepted as a trainee clinical psychologist with the West London Health Authority.
She walked in, sat down and lit a cigarette without acknowledging I was there. She was only fifteen years old, yet had a fluid grace and certainty of movement that caught the eye and held it for too long.
With one elbow propped on the table and the cigarette held a few inches from her mouth, she stared past me to a window high on the wall. Smoke curled into her unruly fringe of hair. Her nose had been broken at some point and a front tooth was chipped. Periodically she ran her tongue across the jagged edge.
Elisa had been rescued from a “trick pad”— a temporary brothel set up in the basement of a derelict house. The doors had been rigged so they couldn’t be opened from the inside. She and another adolescent prostitute were imprisoned for three days and raped by dozens of men who were offered sex with underage girls.
A judge had placed her into care, but Elisa spent most of her time trying to escape from the children’s home. She was too old to be placed with a foster family and too young to live on her own.
In that first meeting she looked at me with a mixture of curiosity and contempt. She was accustomed to dealing with men. Men could be manipulated.
She shrugged and crossed her legs, smoothing her hands along her thighs.
“How old are you now, Elisa?”
“You know that already,” she said, motioning to the file in my hands. “I can wait while you read it, if you like.” She was teasing me.
“Where are your parents?”
“Dead, hopefully.”
According to the file notes Elisa had been living with her mother and stepfather in Leeds when she ran away from home just after her fourteenth birthday.
Most of her answers were the bare minimum— why use two words when one will do? She sounded cocky and indifferent, but I knew she was hurting. Eventually I managed to get under her skin. “How the hell can you know so little?” she yelled, her eyes glistening with emotion.
It was time to take a risk.
“You think you’re a woman, don’t you? You think you know how to manipulate men like me. Well, you’re wrong! I’m not a walking fifty quid note looking for a blow job or a quick fuck in a back lane. Don’t waste my time. I’ve got more important places to be.”
Anger flared in her eyes and then disappeared as they misted over. She started crying. For the first time she looked and acted her age. The story came tumbling out, in between her sobs.
Her stepfather, a successful businessman in Leeds, had made a lot of money buying flats and doing them up. He was a real catch for a single mum like Elisa’s. It meant they could move out of their council flat and into a proper house with a garden. Elisa had her own room. She went to grammar school.
One night when she was twelve, her stepfather came to her room. “This is what grown-ups do,” he said, putting her legs over his shoulders and his hand over her mouth.
“He was nice to me after that,” she said. “He used to buy me clothes and makeup.”
This went on for two years until Elisa became pregnant. Her mother called her a slut and demanded to know the name of the father. She stood over her, waiting for an answer and Elisa glimpsed her stepfather in the doorway. He ran his forefinger across his throat.
She ran away. In the pocket of her school blazer she had the name of an abortion clinic in south London. At the clinic she met a nurse in her mid-forties with a kind face. Her name was Shirley and she offered Elisa a place to stay while she recuperated.
“Hold on to your school uniform.”
“Why?”
“It might come in handy.”
Shirley was a mother figure to half a dozen teenage girls and they all loved her. She made them feel safe.
“Her son was a real dickhead,” said Elisa. “He slept with a shotgun under his bed and he thought he could have sex with any of us. Wanker! The first time Shirley took me out to work, she was saying, ‘Go on, you can do it.’ I was standing on Bayswater Road wearing my school uniform. ‘It’s OK, just ask them if they want a girl,’ she said. I didn’t want to disappoint Shirley. I knew she’d be angry.
“Next time she took me out, I did some hand jobs, but I couldn’t do the sex. I don’t know why. It took me three months. I was getting too tall for my school uniform, but Shirley said I had the legs to get away with it. I was her Little Pot of Gold.”
Elisa didn’t call the men she slept with “punters.” She didn’t like any suggestion that they were gambling with their money. She was a sure thing. And she didn’t treat them with contempt, even if many were cheating on their wives, fiancées and girlfriends. This was purely business— a simple commercial transaction— she had something to sell and they wanted to buy it.
As the months went by she became desensitized. She had a new family now. Then one day a rival pimp snatched her off the street. He wanted her for a one-off engagement, he said. He locked her in the basement of a house and collected money at the door from the men who queued up. A river of skin, of all different colors, flowed across her body and leaked inside her. “I was their Little White Fucktoy,” she said, as she stubbed out another cigarette.