In amongst the tragedies, there were occasionally times when rescues were pretty funny. One of them that I remember particularly involved—let's say—a working girl.
One Friday afternoon we were called to a hotel in a part of Cape Town called Gardens. This was one of those hotels that had a ‘reputation,’ if you know what I mean. It was one of those places that, in addition to holiday packages and week-end specials, also charged hourly rates. Their brochures emphasised some unusual appointing in the bedrooms, especially in the realm of mirrors, bedding, and ‘specialised equipment.’ They experienced regular raids by the police and so had decided, in this instance, not to involve the constabulary.
Business was clearly booming. Elbowing our way into the crowded vestibule, we were met by a very worried-looking man—Mervyn—who described himself as a manager. I, irrationally, took an immediate dislike to him. He said that one of his staff had gone missing on Table Mountain. Her name, he said, was Huskie Meadows. When we looked askance, he smirked and said: “You know, like a dog,” and he mimicked the sound of a dog panting, including letting his tongue hang out. Hmm. I wondered if that was a nom de guerre, or if her parents had been high when they named her.
Whilst we try not to judge our clients, we were starting to get the picture. I think a manager should have been replaced with a four-letter word starting with P, preceded, not by an indefinite article, but by a possessive adjective. I felt no compunction to reassess my hasty judgement of him. And I hoped he could see the look of disgust I was giving him. I am not an admirer of pimps.
Apparently, Huskie was on his staff, as he put it. She had had an altercation with a client—let's call him John, since that’s what he was—about the tariff. The situation had escalated to just short of physical violence, with Huskie taking off one shoe and threatening to use it to change John’s gender. Finally, in a rage, she had stormed off, walking with a limp until she thought of stopping and putting the Shoe of Mass Destruction back on. Mervyn giggled inanely as he told us the story. I continued to dislike him.
She had then walked out the front door, saying that she planned to go to the top of the mountain to get her thoughts together. She had now been away for two hours.
We asked for a description of what Huskie was wearing. Seemingly, this was beneath Mervyn’s pay grade, so he imperiously summoned one of her colleagues.
“Call me Chéri.” She was quite stunning, with a Clara Bow hairstyle and looking as if she were on leave from les Folies Bergère.
I’m not sure whether I have the punctuation correct; she might have said “Call me, chéri!” She was a Working Girl, after all. She had a French accent which might have been affected. Chéri gave us one of the most comprehensive descriptions that we had ever received of any victim. Admittedly, there wasn’t much to describe.
Apparently, Huskie—a dyed-blonde—“you know; the collar doesn’t match the cuffs” was wearing red nail varnish on her fingers and toes, and a tattoo of a flower “where you cannot see.” She had left in her working clothes; a cerise camisole, black cami-knickers, black fishnet stockings, and red platform shoes with six‑inch heels.
“Did she have a jacket or a coat?” we asked.
“Mais non! She just walked straight out, pouf! But the clothes are not see-through,” she hastened to reassure us. “Good outdoor quality; she’s quite modeste. And the shoes are also good quality. I borrowed them to her (so, maybe she wasn’t a first-language English-speaker). They cost…” She named a price consistent with the wholesale price of a pair of low-budget flip-flops. OK, so not recommended mountaineering attire.
Mervyn, assisted by the voluble Chéri, indicated the way she had gone. Chéri—apparently a good friend of Huskie—was now in floods of Gallic (or pseudo-Gallic) tears. She offered to go with us to “give directives” (yes, I was beginning to believe that she was French). Given that she was clad much like her description of Huskie (with or without the tattoo—I knew not), and wearing, I assume, her spare pair of shoes with six-inch heels, this time in black, we politely declined.
All we could do was follow the ‘directives’ and hope that we might blunder across Huskie. There was a strong South-easter blowing which was probably going to make things unpleasant. There had been a devastating fire recently, so the topsoil and ash would be blowing round like small Saharan sandstorms. We felt pretty stupid walking up an urban tarred road dressed in climbing boots and helmets, carrying ropes and enormous rucksacks.
After about half an hour we started to get above the city and could start looking for likely routes that one might take when clad in a friend’s platform shoes. We were an all male party so, for most of us, it was beyond our imagination.
Some time later, now actually on a mountain path, we thought we heard a plaintive cry above the noise of the wind. Although we were unlikely to be overheard, it felt a bit too embarrassing to walk around shouting “Huskie! Huskie!” Instead we settled for shouting “Hello! Hello!” When we received a stronger sounding reply, we asked: “Is that Huskie?”
“Yes,” came a tearful reply. “Help! I’ve hurt my ankle.”
Guided by the sound of her voice, we found her in a shallow gully which sheltered her from the wind, but caused her to be covered with dust and ash. For all that, it was clear that she was quite pretty. Having grown up with two sisters, I immediately noticed that she had dark roots, but that’s OK. Her joy at the prospect of being rescued was overwhelming.
“Thank you so much for finding me. My ankle is all swollen. And my feet are so sore. They’re all bloody.” She held up the one attached to her uninjured ankle for our perusal. She was right; it was a bloody mess. “I can’t walk, and I thought I was going to die here.” She burst into tears.
At some point it had occurred to her that her shoes were not ideal hiking footwear, so she had removed them and continued barefoot. The fishnet stockings had not afforded her feet much protection and now looked more like yoga pants. Surprisingly, she injured her ankle after she had taken off her shoes. So maybe we were wrong about the suitability of platforms for mountain hiking. Her feet, although clearly quite tough, were badly lacerated. It seemed likely that her ankle was broken, so walking her out was not an option. We splinted the ankle and did what we could for her feet in preparation for the evacuation. Because she had no head injuries, we were able to give her some quite strong pain medication.
She was actually closer to Tafelberg Road than to the city streets; not a bad effort in those ludicrous shoes. We radioed for a stretcher party to meet us on Tafelberg Road and asked them to summon an ambulance.
She sat there miserably, leaning against a burnt tree stump, dirty, lacerated feet stuck out in front of her, legs at an immodest angle, a cigarette in her hand. Somehow, somewhere, in that outfit she had found a place to secrete a packet of smokes. There’s no accounting for the creativity of an addict. Although quite attractive, she was a pathetic sight. I felt really sorry for her.
“Lucky your nail polish is OK,” I remarked, smiling, and tickled her foot, trying to lighten the mood.
Probably a little high on the medication, she laughed and seemed to relax. “I just hope that my feet come right. I use them a lot in my work. You wouldn’t believe how many men like my feet; and some girls, but mostly I think they’re just jealous. The guys have some strange things that they want me to do.” Diplomatically, we all nodded sagely as though we’d all been there, and fully understood the problem. The fact that any complication with her ankle, which was badly displaced, might mean that she could never wear Chéri’s ridiculous shoes again didn’t seem to have occurred to her. It struck me that in spite of the shoes, she had surprisingly straight toes. Maybe, like me, she spent most of her life barefoot.
The ice having been broken, she regaled us with some hilarious stories of the strange requirements of her various clients—mostly male—and of their activities. I think that she had been expecting us to be judgemental and was pleasantly surprised at the acceptance she found. In mountain rescue, we picked up all sorts of people. When badly injured or dead, a judge looks much the same as a convict, a hooker much like a nun. The novelty of judging them wears off rapidly; that’s not what we were there for. The time passed quite quickly. For all the levity, I still felt sorry for her.
When the stretcher party arrived we decided that, given the relatively short distance we had to move her and the fact that she didn’t weigh much, it was probably not worth deploying a stretcher. Instead, we took turns to carry her on our backs for the 70- or 80‑metre ascent to the road, assisted from above by the stretcher party hauling us with ropes, and steadied by our colleagues walking beside us.
While I was carrying her on the last stretch to the road, she whispered in my ear: “Any time you feel like a bit of fun, just call in at the hotel and ask for me—Huskie. It could be my way to pay you back. If you leave a message, make sure you spell Huskie with an -ie. If you spell it with a -y, the receptionists make stupid jokes about dog food. And don’t come on Fridays—we’re full of disgusting fat old businessmen cheating on their wives. I’m not gay, but I quite enjoy a girl or two after the businessmen. Girls are so much more gentle. And they know my anatomy better than any man.
“I don’t drink and I’ve never used drugs in my life, so I don’t have any other escape, like some of my co-workers. The old businessmen are never interested in my feet, or even my boobs; they just want to see if their equipment still works and then probably brag about it in the pub. I don’t know why they don’t save it for their poor wives.” She sounded quite moralistic. “They make me sick!” she concluded vehemently.
I thanked her courteously for her offer. Although I was single, I had no intention of taking her up on it, well-meaning though it no doubt was. I found myself wondering what had got her into this lifestyle.
Ever the professional, while she was talking, she had managed to do something quite embarrassing with the heel of her uninjured foot. Blushing, I was relieved when we got her up to the road and were able to load her into the ambulance.
The paramedics confirmed that her ankle was most probably broken and would likely need surgery. They were really nice to her, which gladdened my heart. The last view I had into the ambulance, one paramedic was helping her to clean Chéri’s shoes, to which she had furiously clung during the whole ordeal.
I have never met her again, but I can’t help wondering what became of her. The fantasy part of my mind hopes that she had a Pretty‑Woman‑like encounter and lived happily ever after, married to a man who cherished her. But, like Hamlet, “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams” (Act 2, Scene ii). My objective, cynical, realistic mind realises that she was more likely to have ended her life prematurely due to suicide, drugs or disease, or face-down in a gutter—a victim of violence, possibly at the hand of Mervyn.
In a way, this encounter left me no less disquieted than if it had been a body recovery.
Although I have taken a light-hearted approach to this story, please don’t think that I am judging or denigrating sex workers. In the course of my work in the community, I have known many women who have turned to prostitution as a last resort in order to feed their children and have then become trapped in the lifestyle. Many have been victims of sexual abuse, particularly as children. Alas, our permissive, woke society can talk up a storm, but remains very intolerant of the plight of sex workers.
I have very strong opinions about prostitution and, contrary to what you might be thinking, I side with the sex workers. I firmly believe that prostitution should not be de-criminalised, but that the acquisition of the services of a sex worker should be severely punished and that the transgressors should be named and shamed. Perhaps then more men would be faithful to their wives.
If I had my way, pimps would be manacled, then knelt down and shot between the… knees.
Just as a matter of interest, I prepared the draft of this post using Collabora Office (OpenOffice for Android) and the voice-to-text feature of G-Board on my mobile phone. It didn’t always understand me precisely, so I had to make a few corrections. For some strange reason, these corrections were generally preceded and followed by the word ‘bucket.’ The first time I actually typed anything was after I had imported it onto my laptop. I need not have done this—I could have done all the editing and uploading on my mobile—but I’m a bit old fashioned.