CHAPTER EIGHT
”Tickets please” the voice of the ticket man woke her slowly as her eyes and
brain adjusted back to her immediate environment. She searched her purse
for it and gave it to him, as he punctured it and returned to her. The effects of
the drugs were wearing away and she began to feel severe pains in her body.
She was prepared however, as she brought out two tablets of acetaminophen
from her purse and swallowed them. The high speed train pulled into her stop
and she managed to get out at the last minute, walking the now familiar route
to Madams flat. Of all the girls that had been brought from Nigeria, only five of
them still lived and worked from here.
The rest had been shipped off to various locations, and they never saw each
other again. Madam had kept the girls so busy that any chance of interacting
among themselves was limited. She made her way into the flat and going
straight to the kitchen, pored herself a strong black coffee, and going straight
to the room the girls shared, she drank it down, and falling on her bed drifted
off into a deep sleep. As none of the other girls were back yet, she hoped she
could sleep peacefully till six, when she would have to wake up and return to
work.
She was awoken about an hour later by the sounds of screams in the bedroom
from three of the other girls, as they heard over a loud speaker a booming
voice at the front door.
”Police open up”
This was obviously a raid and the girls were scared. This was the first time they had been raided, and they wondered why they were targeted, despite the
fact that madam paid the police handsomely every month. The police men
broke the entrance door, and gained entrance into the bedroom where the
girls were crouching. Wasting no time, they rounded them up, and bundled
them into their van. It was only as they were being carried away that Adesuwa
noticed that this was not the regular police from the local division.
The truth was that the central government was highly embarrassed by the
alarming rate of prostitution, and had instituted a federal task force to round
up their perpetrators. They had been on the trail of her madam for a while
now and had staged this raid in order to catch as many of them as they could.
Madam had already gotten word of this a few hours earlier and had
disappeared, leaving the girls to their fate.
The girls were moved to the federal police division and locked up overnight,
without food or water. It was only after they had been visited by a Nigerian
embassy official the next day that they were fed. He assured them that they
were doing all in their powers to ensure the girls were freed from the mess
they found themselves, though he did not sound too convincing. The girls
knew there was serious trouble when after all this while; Madam did not come
to bail them out of their predicament.
The next day, a deportation order came through from the office of the Prime
Minister, and it was read to them. They were to be repatriated back to Nigeria
with immediate effect, even as they were bundled like criminals to the airport.
They saw no further sign of the airport official, and as they were bundled into
the plane with nothing on them but the clothes on their back, Adesuwa looked one last time and the land she had called home for months, certain that she
would never see it again, certain that she had failed her parents in her
responsibilities, and certain above all, that she was going to have to kill
herself.
THE END.
