Slave Girl (16 page)

One of them pulled the curtains and another one pulled me back onto the bed. And then they took it in turns to rape me. All seven of them.

When it was over they left together too. And they thanked me – coldly and viciously – for giving them ‘a free one’.

Why did I never run to the police, tell them I was an English nursery nurse, not a prostitute; tell them I was being held against my will, fed with drugs and made to service men’s crude selfish lust all day, every day? Why not?

Would you?

B
reathe in. Snap. Spin. Pull. Click. Breathe out. Pass it on and hope for the next time.

How do you make sex more exciting for the punter who has grown bored with the routine of paying for sex? What else could spice up the experience of visiting a prostitute? What might bring back the original adrenalin rush, lost after the thrill has gone out of the basic commercial transaction of fucking?

Easy. Make the whole experience harder and dirtier. And so from so-called ‘straight’ sex the punter moves on to anal; from anal to a bit of ‘watersports’ maybe. And when the buzz slowly fades again, it’s time to move on to something a little more violent or more dangerous. Not for the punter, of course – though some do have an interest in being beaten. No, the added element of danger is rarely ever applied to him. Instead it’s all heaped on the poor, broken prostitute he has come to abuse. Make it more dangerous for her. That’ll do the trick; that’ll make it all exciting again – at least for a little while.

Because whatever anyone tells you there’s always a law of diminishing returns underlying all commercialised sex. Take it from me: I was a professional in the industry and I know how it works. Cut adrift from the deep and nourishing undercurrent of real love, sex becomes a mechanical action. And like all mechanical actions, it gets boring the more you repeat it. Hence the need for something to liven it up.

This applies to pornography just as much as it does to prostitution. And porn was something we all knew about in the Red Light District. God knows how many sex shops there were inside its claustrophobic boundaries – dozens and dozens, it seemed, all with identical glowing neon signs in the window: Magazines, Videos, Hard Core. And inside, rack after wooden rack of glossy colour images – whether on paper or on tape – of bodies being penetrated or saturated in the name of pleasure. Men’s pleasure, naturally.

Porn is a worldwide business. Its chief production centres aren’t in damp and gloomy Holland but in the relentless sunshine of Spain or southern California. Amsterdam is just a retail centre – a mass warehouse filled with the recorded images of industrialised sex, neatly stacked and readily available for home consumption. No one films or edits hardcore pornography in the Red Light District – at least not the sort of pornography most people know about.

But some stuff was made there in the time I existed within its boundaries.

In the empty and sinister warehouses that seemed to be locked-up and derelict, people – men – used 35mm cameras or videotape to capture the other sort of pornography; the sort that doesn’t get talked about – not much, not really, because those who buy it know they’ve reached the end of the line just as much as those who are used and abused to produce it.

And it doesn’t get talked about – not much, not really – by people who should know better: policemen, journalists, politicians. Why? Because it lives in that drawer where they shove all the really difficult, disturbing, awkward bits of human life that would just cost too much to really do anything about. It gets pushed to the back of their ‘too-
hard-to
-handle’ drawer.

But it shouldn’t. So let’s bring it out into the open, let’s stop hiding it in the ‘too hard’ drawer where no one even gives it a name, let alone talks about it. Its name is torture. I should know – I was there.

Gregor had some special clients – clients with lots of money who had got bored or tired of ‘normal’ sex with prostitutes (as if there could ever be such a thing). Even the constant turnover of women, the influx of new young meat, couldn’t bring back the original adrenalin rush of being able to have sex on demand. These were good customers, valuable commodities, and so Gregor found ways to cater for them. Or rather, to make his prostitutes cater for them.

The ‘game’ of ‘Russian Roulette’ has been traced back, as its name would suggest, to pre-revolutionary Russia. It began as an entertainment for prison guards, who would force a group of inmates to sit in a circle and pass around a revolver loaded with one single bullet. Each man was required to spin the cylinder, hold the gun up to his forehead – barrel pointing towards him – and pull the trigger. The guards would bet on the outcome.

The routine hadn’t changed much by the time Gregor and Pavlov ‘played’ it with their prisoners – us ‘prosties’. All of us knew about it, though it was rumoured to be something that happened only one time to each girl. A real ‘once in a lifetime’ experience.

According to these rumours, when they had a few special clients willing to fork out several hundred guilders each, Gregor and Pavlov would send a running boy to collect a couple of girls from the windows. The chosen ones would trail back after him through the alleyways to a closed-up building not far from Gregor’s café – a little huddle of human misery with no power to protect themselves from what they knew was coming, much less try and escape.

The boy would let them into the room, then he’d get the hell away from the place as fast as he could. A couple of hard wooden chairs would be set up in the middle of a pool of light. There would be the sense and shape of men in the darkness beyond. And then the game would start.

My turn came that winter. I was high on crack – of course – but still able to feel the bone-aching chill of real, raw terror. There were two of us sitting opposite each other in the harsh yellow light. I didn’t know the other girl – a piece of fresh meat, presumably new to the District.

Someone handed me a revolver. It had a short stubby barrel, but the gun felt surprisingly heavy and clumsy in my hands.

Spin the chamber. Put the muzzle against your forehead. Pull the trigger.

High as I was, my hands shook. It seemed an age before my eyes focused on the fat cylinder of metal that my hands were bringing up in front of my face.

Breathe in. Spin the chamber. Pull the trigger. Click.

Not me, not this time.

Breathe out. Pass it over. Sit. Watch. Listen.

The sour smell of urine drifted across the pool of light: one of us – or a punter in the darkness? Who knows; who cares?

Snap. Spin. Click. See the gun being handed back to me. Feel its weight in my palm. Breathe in and start again.

How long did this go on? Surely it can’t have gone on more than a few minutes – the chamber of a revolver only has six chambers for bullets, doesn’t it? All I knew was that it felt like I sat there for hours, taking turns to point a gun at my own head and pull the trigger.

What was going through my mind all this time? It may sound odd, but the one emotion I can’t remember experiencing was relief. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that this would be exactly what I felt as my hand – its fingers still clenched tightly around the grip of the gun – dropped down from my head? But I didn’t.

The main sensation I can remember to this day – both in the memories that wash, uninvited, through my brain and when the nightmares claim me in the dark of night – is guilt: a terrible, overwhelming feeling of remorse that I was responsible for what might happen to the terrified girl opposite me. It was my fault that I had survived – and my fault that she might not.

Maybe she felt the same way and maybe, too, that’s what the men in the darkness could smell on us and what made the whole surreal, depraved scene so potent for them. The feeling of such absolute power over two helpless sex slaves that they even took responsibility for the seemingly inevitable outcome of flirting with death.

But there was another sensation that grew inside me each time I brought the revolver up to my head and the trigger clicked on an empty chamber: I felt cheated. Why did the gun not fire, emptying its little load of lead into my temple? Why couldn’t my brains be spewed all over the warehouse floor? Why couldn’t I have the blessed, easy relief of instant death?

I knew the answer, of course I did. Because my feelings – even my desperate, genuine longing for oblivion – weren’t important. I was just meat, and meat doesn’t matter.

Was the gun ever loaded? It can’t have been. I may have been a coked-up crack whore but I would have remembered if the gun had gone off. So a trick, then; a game – obviously. But why? What erotic pleasure could anyone get from watching the terror of two broken, desperate women? And if it did arouse them – God knows how – what would they need the next time? What could Gregor do to ramp up the thrills for them after this?

For a little time they would have the videotape to feed their fantasies. The fear played out repetitively on their television screens; horror neatly packaged in a black plastic box to be enjoyed alone (presumably) again and again in the safety of their homes. Maybe copies of it would also be sold – discreetly of course, never on public display – in the porno shops that littered the streets around us. Gregor certainly had his fingers in that lucrative market. And a tape like that would fetch much, much more than the industrial porn of Hollywood or Spain.

In the past when I have told people this story, I see in their eyes that they don’t believe me. Some even tell me outright that I must be making it up, or imagining it. They can’t believe – or is it that they don’t
want
to believe? – that anyone would trade so willingly in the torture of a fellow human being, much less that they would take home a record of it to replay and masturbate over until the grainy images lost their power to arouse.

I know those people – the people who push the story away into their own mental ‘too-hard drawer’. They are the same people I watched from my window as they walked up and down the dirty streets of de Rosse Buurt, staring at the
bikini-clad
women trapped behind plate glass; they are the same people who took the tours of the District, stopping in the sex shops, marvelling at the array of glossily packaged commercial porn and maybe buying one to take home – a little souvenir of their ‘naughty’ weekend.

Oh, I know those people. And I despise them; not just for who they are and what they chose to see, but for what they chose to ignore. They didn’t see – couldn’t have, or how else could they claim I had made up the Russian Roulette? – the other racks in those same porno shops, the racks with tape after highly priced tape showing girls tied up, abused and tortured. Ropes, whips, clamps and the angry red marks of beatings on white skin or the tell-tale traces of blood at the edges. No, they saw – but never saw – this shrink-wrapped wank fodder. Nor did their blinkered eyes register the magazines devoted to the rape of women by farm animals; they could not have done.

Because if they had seen all this –
really
seen it and not hidden the memories away – how could they have doubted that some men get their sexual pleasure from hurting others? Or that men like Gregor were only to willing to cater to them, provided the price was right?

The truth is that the Red Light District exists to meet the needs of men who don’t give a damn about the pain and suffering of others – just so long as they can pay to watch or feel it, and then walk away afterwards. And there is no perversion, no degradation, no pain or hurt that someone won’t be willing to profit from. We knew, we women in our glass prisons, the truth about the District; knew there were evil men happy to sell anything, anybody to anyone with enough money to pay for it.

We knew about the empty warehouses with their black walls and custom-built torture chambers; we knew all about the ropes and the pulleys and big wooden paddles. We knew about the women who had grown too old or too
drug-ravaged
to stand in the windows and now worked out on the streets, desperate enough to submit to any pain or degradation for the price of a rock of crack.

We knew about the children, too, and the places that sold magazines or videos showing the rape of babies, toddlers and pre-teens. Amsterdam was always the centre of the international child pornography marketplace.

I knew about it all, dimly and through the dark glass of the crack pipe which turned my mouth into a burned and scarred gash in my sallow, empty face. I knew about it all, and after the Russian Roulette, I thought there was nothing else left. Nothing would ever be so terrifying again that it would pierce the swaddling blanket of my drug-fuelled stupor.

How wrong I was.

Par had been working the window for a week. She was Thai, young – probably not even my age – and bewildered; a peasant girl from a remote village, tricked and trafficked into the blinding lights of Amsterdam’s meat market.