I’ve been sitting on this for a while. A state noted (increasingly vocally) by the people who regularly read this. Its been floating in my head waiting to be written, just seven words resonating, and I’m trying to pad around it, but its a definite writers stumbling block. How do you work with the words “There’s no point, I have no future”? Where do you possibly go from there? Its so finite; an ending, not a beginning. Because here’s the thing; what if those words are true? And if they’re true, if it is an ending, can you possibly make it a beginning?

I went to see Mercedes in the psychiatry ward at The Alfred. She had been in there for weeks and a social worker from Sacred Heart Mission called to tell me that she wanted me to visit. She was worried I’d forget that she had signed up for the project and she would miss out on telling her story.

Mental health, along with drug addiction, is a reoccurring theme amongst sex workers, though certainly not for all of the women. Mostly it’s a chicken/egg scenario. What came first? There is no way to tell.

I rode my bike through the freezing winter night to see her. As I waited for her to finish her shower I watched the other patients as they shuffled awkwardly around the ward under strangely placed pools of dim light. It is difficult to find words to describe the alien nature of a psych ward, because the scary part lies in the almost normality. It’s there that the fine line of mental stability is trod and, more often, crossed.

The image we are given is that psych wards are the place for the dispossessed, strange and drooling, an image that deliberately removes us, making the mentally ill ‘the other’; not us, not even close to us. And some of the people are definitely strange. The guy grimly clenching a Pepsi can while shaking his finger at me and muttering about my being a woman was a little challenging, but the reality is that a lot of the people are the same as us.

The scars on Mercedes arms tell a tale far more succinctly than I can manage in words. She had caused herself great, great harm. When I first saw her routinely ravaged arms I guessed she would have to hate herself more than I’m capable of imagining.

She was desperate for me to take her portrait with a cheap set of black rosary beads that she ripped open from a plastic packet. As I photographed her we talked, she asked me if I believed whores could actually pray.
I said I didn’t think her profession affected her ability to believe in God. What I was actually thinking was that if I still believed in God after going through the hell evident in every deep score on her soft arms, being a whore wouldn’t even come into the equation.

I signed her out for leave so we could walk in the park outside the hospital and take photographs. The sun was warm and her excitement about the project was infectious. She told every woman from the psych ward that she came across, most of them on smoke breaks, that they should join up and do it. ‘You get a free camera,’ she said. I didn’t want to rein her in so I let it slide, being politely discouraging in the wake of her enthusiasm, like mopping up after an exuberant kid in the bath.

Until we came to the woman in the tracksuit. She looked like a suburban housewife; pink trackies, bitten nails, and eyebrows that had been tweezed too thin, uneven lines in a blank face. She sucked on a ciggie. Mercedes called out to her, holding her camera aloft, ‘You should join in this photography project.’

The woman looked at her and shook her head almost imperceptibly. Mercedes persisted, ‘It’s really good,’ she said. The woman exhaled, ‘There’s no point.’ Mercedes raised her own tweezed brown in question. The woman turned her face and dragged on her cigarette. ‘There’s no point, I have no future.’ The conversation was ended. We walked on, the daylight suddenly too harsh and illuminating.

It was satisfying being the person Mercedes wanted to visit her, just as its a honour to be bestowed with the stories of all the women I am working with. The dead-voiced woman with the cigarette made me worry though. Worry how deeply I am entwining myself in their lives with this project, giving them hope in the chance to tell their stories. I’m not a hopeless idealist, but I do want it to be a release, a chance, maybe even a beginning for some of the women who have chosen to be a part of it. But at the end of the day I get to walk away and they, who have shown their scars to the world and bravely told their stories, stay and continue to live them. All I have to hold on to is that they believe there is a point, that they do have a future.