Angel is back. She has been raped again. A different guy this time. She asks me to photograph the graze on her wrist from where he trussed her up to stop her escaping.

‘He tied me up with those plastic cable things.’

‘Zip ties?’

‘Yeah! A zip tie.’

She is excited that I’ve guessed right, like some perverse game of ‘I Spy’. It’s the only time her voice raises beyond monotone.

‘Where are the marks? These?’

‘No they’re my trackies. Don’t photograph them. I don’t want them in the photos.’

‘Okay, so this on your wrist?’

I’m distracted by her fake nails. Too clean, too done, too new. They don’t fit the rest of the picture.

‘Yeah.’

The mark is light and starting to heal. She doesn’t know when it happened, can’t place days in alignment; they stumble together like a drunk walking a wayward line.

‘Yeah, and can you check my back too?’

She undresses in front of me. Her body is tiny with child-sized thighs and a slightly sticking-out tummy, her belly button is adorned with a ring. She is equal parts world weary and juvenile, a grown-up not yet fully grown. I look at her and shudder at what the perverts must think about her child-like form. It’s a distasteful thought and I grimace it away.

‘And my tooth? He chipped that off, not that you can really tell because look at my teeth.’

Her mouth, like that of so many other women I have met, is rotting; a by-product of homelessness, neglect and drug addiction. She gets distracted by the mirror and starts squeezing her pimples while she talks to me.

‘It all started with the sexual abuse, me being out here. And now it just keeps happening.’

‘Well you are pretty vulnerable out there.’

She turns and stares blankly at me for a long time, eyes flat and lifeless.

‘Yeah.’

We can take a report if you want.

‘Nah. What’s the point? They’ll just say it’s my fault for working or whatever.’

‘Okay. They do take those reports pretty seriously though, but you don’t have to.’

‘Nah. What’s the point?’

‘Are you still hanging out with S.?’ (Her boyfriend and sometime spotter)

‘He’s in jail.’

‘Oh. When did that happen?’

‘Last week.’

She goes back to picking pimples.

‘I shouldn’t be doing this.’

She means picking. I want it to mean everything.

* Track marks from intravenous drug use.