Bahareh finished touching up her lipstick and turned to Annie. Annie sat on the bed
staring straight out of the window on the opposite wall. Her unwashed brown skin shone of
excess oil and sweat.
“Oh come on, go take a bath. You look like melting chocolate, and not in a good
way,” said Bahareh, “count your blessings, will you? At least you will have a room to stay.
Write your masterpiece in there.”
She waited for Annie to respond. Annie didn’t move. Bahareh modulated her voice
and spoke in a dramatic but calm tone, stressing each word:
“It’s just half-an-hour from Melbourne. You can come meet me any time. All you
need to do is massage her, clean the house, do the laundry, and take out the trash. It’s an
old woman’s home after all. For Chrissake, I am not sending you to a brothel.”
Annie looked away.
“Annie, look at me,” Bahareh said, forcing Annie’s face close, “Mercy is the best
option you have. I wish I could afford to keep you here, but I can’t. You know that.
Remember, I am risking my job for you.”
-*-
B-301, White Birch Street, Finglas.
Annie knew it was going to be a dingy unit on the third floor of a public housing
complex overlooking the sea. It was no secret that White Birch Street stood for everything
that had gone wrong and was still going wrong with the public housing system.
That night Annie slept on the thick carpet in Bahareh’s living room clutching her
mother’s stained photo, wanting to slip back into her mother’s arms. Years ago, when her
Mercy by Rashmi Patel 2
father had wanted her to study something practical, her mother had solemnly defended
Annie’s writerly ambitions:
“She is going to be a writer. All that talent stuffed in her chest will poison her to
death if she doesn’t pour it out in words.”
Her mother had died after a long battle with cancer and her father had succumbed
to loneliness soon thereafter. Now, sleeping on that dusty carpet, she could not bear the
thought that she had failed them both without any chance of redemption. As for her unsold
writing, it was poisoning her anyway.
-*-
Unit B-301 on White Birch street had been tidied to welcome Annie. Still, the
cramped unit smelled of damp carpets and rotting wood. Mercy Baldwin Smith rubbed her
nose and surrendered herself to the stench. She didn’t want to be apologetic about it by
spraying those cheap room fresheners. Chemical cocktails, she called them. She turned her
attention to the walls, moist and discoloured from broken plumbing, and the two large
carpets that covered the living room, stubborn in their unwelcoming appearance. Her curved
spine asserted its presence by sending signals of sharp, stinging pain every time she
exhaled. Trying to rub it with her bony fingers was an exercise in self-humiliation: her arm
could barely reach beyond the side of her thick waist.