Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution by Rachel Moran Page A

ofwhitish grey at its roots. She was sitting at the kitchen table looking as if she'd aged twenty years in the four weeks I'd been gone. She was very heavily sedated on sleeping tablets and had cut all the black out of her hair. She raised her head slowly to look at me and when her stoned eyes focused on mine she slurred: 'Look at what you've done to me'. The feeling that followed that would be difficult to describe, but was in no way uncommon. It was a deep, deep disturbance in the pit of my soul. Fear mixed with the deepest sort of concern. I was scared of her and for her at the same time. I suppose, in a sense, my mother is still frightening me today. It frightens me that I share one aspect of her mental illness: a propensity towards deep and abiding depression. When I became homeless, the first shock to me was the constant ceaseless need to remain in transit, and finding somewhere to simply be was a far bigger problem than I could have previously imagined. Nowhere you go are you left alone. Nowhere can you expect that luxury, because of course, all the private places of the world are closed to you and all the public places offer no privacy. Many of them do not even grant you admittance. As to the problems offinding somewhere to sleep: there is just literally nowhere that covers the needs even the tiniest and shabbiest of bed-sits would provide. There is nowhere that offers dryness, safety, cleanliness, warmth and comfort. A park bench may be dry, if it is not raining, and it may be clean, ifyou are lucky, but it is not safe, warm, or comfortable. The underside of a bush may be dry, again, if the weather is with you, but it is not safe, dean, warm, or comfortable. I slept in many different such locations, each as pathetic as the last. I once fell asleep on a bus that had been parked at a depot with the doors open and awoke to find myself driving through the then-green fields of west Dublin in the early hours of the morning. I hadn't a clue where I was and it was a rude awakening all right, but I reckoned it was worth it; it was the most comfortable night I'd spent in some time. I once spent a half hour or so in a fitful sleep on the cold tiled floor of a toilet cubicle in McDonald's on O'Connell Street. I hadn't been able to find anywhere to sleep the night before and was utterly exhausted so I went in there as soon as they'd opened their doors to sell Egg McMuffins for breakfast. I reckoned that at least in the toilet I'd be bolted in and safe. I was woken up and thrown out by a member of staff who'd come in to clean the toilets, and that brings me to the real and deepest damage of homelessness: the loneliness. It is the experience of being utterly unwanted, ofyour very presence being an undesirable commodity in all places and situations. Wherever you are, as a homeless person, you are unwelcome. When a person is homeless, their sense ofsocial significance is reduced to zero. It doesn't exist. Their sense of themselves is of being worthless and unwanted; a social pariah, an exile, an outsider whose very body is an unwanted intrusion they must carry with them wherever they go. They are unwanted in the most literal sense of the term. They are redundancy embodied. I felt all these feelings in homelessness. All homeless people do. It is unavoidable. When I eventually ended up meeting another homeless girl, a couple of years older than I was, it was quite by accident. She was a friend of another girl I'd been in a hostel with, and I'd been introduced to her briefly six months or a year before. Recognising each other and finding ourselves in the same predicament, it made sense to stay together for safety and companionship, though the truth ofthe matter was neither of us particularly liked the other from the start and by the time we parted ways neither of us could stand the sight of each other. We quickly teamed up in the shoplifting we'd already been at indi.vidually in order to sustain ourselves. We'd steal food, which of