Slave Girl (21 page)

The second was tedium. Sitting in that little flat day and night with only the telly, the booze and the fags for company, I was completely bored.

And the third was Sally herself. There had always been some connection between us, some little spark of something that lodged itself at the back of our brains, tucked away until a time when it was safe to take it out and examine it. And now seemed as good a time as any.

I don’t think I loved Sally. I was definitely attracted to her with all that implied. I can’t in all honesty say that I’d missed sex, either. God knows, I had been raped and abused so many times by so many men that I never, ever wanted to go to bed with one again. But there was definitely something lacking, something I knew I needed: the touch of another human being, given freely and with love – or if love was too much to ask, then affection at the very least.

I felt the same old pull of attraction between us the moment I saw Sally again. And she must have felt it, too, because that day was the start of a relationship between us that would last nine long months. In those months we gave each other comfort – two abused, vulnerable women, clinging together. But I was also able to ask her – sometimes angrily, sometimes simply sadly – how could she have done what she did to me? How could she – how could
anyone
– deliberately set out to ensnare a fellow human being, to kidnap and turn them into a drug-addicted sex slave?

But Sally’s answer was always the same: ‘It was Reece. I can’t tell you how scared I was of him – and yet so absolutely dependent on him. Whatever he said, I did. He controlled me, body and soul. And you saw for yourself how happy he was to use his fists if I dared step out of line.

‘I know what I did to you was wrong – so terribly wrong. I have hated myself for years for the hurt I made you go through. But that was a different Sally – the old Sally, not the person here now.’

And I believed her. Every word. And mostly I forgave her. Mostly.

It would be lovely to say that this relationship with Sally was good for me; lovely to report that it brought peace or happiness to my fractured life. I definitely needed someone and I was convinced – despite my mum’s deep disapproval – that the right ‘someone’ was Sally. As ever, my mum knew better than me. It wasn’t that she didn’t approve of lesbians. I think I could have hooked up with an alien from Mars if he, she or it was kind and decent and good for me. But however much I told her that Sally was a good person, that she’d been just as much of a victim as me, Mum never forgot that without Sally’s efforts I might never have been lured into prostitution. Never forgot – and never forgave.

And it didn’t help that for the first few months while she got herself sorted out, Sally agreed to manage a brothel. It was a sad, horrible semi-legal little ‘massage parlour’ in the town where she had settled. Of course it wasn’t there for massage – any more than it was a ‘parlour’; it was just a different front on the same vicious meat-rack where Sally and I had been exhibited. But with typical British hypocrisy it was deemed ‘semi-legal’ because it didn’t boast about what it was, and although the police knew where it was and what went on there, they never really bothered about it.

Now, you’d think that after all we’d been through neither Sally nor I would have wanted anything to do with the sex business. You’d think that even if driven to it as a short-term, stop-gap way of getting some money together, it might have dawned on us that the women who worked there could well have been trafficked into the same sort of slavery we’d endured in Amsterdam.

You’d think, wouldn’t you?

In all honesty I don’t know whether that ever crossed my mind. Not when Sally told me where she was working, or when – a couple of months into our relationship – she asked me if she could route the brothel’s phone line up to my flat in Gateshead. The idea was to stop the working girls having to answer the phone so often, so they would be free to service more punters. And so men who rang up asking for details of the brothel would – without ever knowing it – have their calls routed 300 miles north to my flat. And in return I got a few quid every week.

Like I say, I’m not sure whether the fact that I was exploiting these poor women, just as much as I had been exploited, ever really lodged in my mind. But it should have. Less than three years after escaping from the life of a sex slave in de Rosse Buurt – from all those desperate months in which I was forced to rent out my body to earn money for my captors – I had become a part-time pimp. Like I say, I’m not proud.

That wasn’t the only echo of my wretched past to
resurface
. I had also started to use drugs again – not much, not like an addict does, just a little now and then, just to take the edge off. At least, that’s what I told myself.

Every addict – whatever their drug of choice – will tell you they’ve fallen off the wagon at least once during their recovery period. Sometimes they – we – fall off more than once and it takes a great deal of willpower to climb back on again; a great deal of willpower or a catastrophic reminder of why we had to stop in the first place.

I was in a car. It was night. Someone – I have no idea who – was driving me back home to Gateshead from the town where the brothel was located. I have no memory of who else was in the car with us, just that we were doing some kind of drugs I’d never seen before. And the rest is blackness. Maybe because of the methadone and the diazepam, maybe because it didn’t recognise the particular poison I ingested, my body simply shut down.

Somehow I must have managed to give Eddie’s phone number to my companions, because the next thing I can remember is waking up in hospital in Newcastle with his big kind face looking at me sadly. I had – apparently – died that night: been clinically dead in the ambulance, until someone somehow dragged me back to the land of the living. Eddie didn’t say anything other than that, but he didn’t really need to.

My relationship with Sally didn’t end that day; we carried on seeing each other for a little while. But she was getting her life together at last – working hard to put all the poison of Amsterdam and everything associated with it behind her. She found herself a new flat, landed a decent enough job and stopped managing the brothel. Somehow, without ever planning it or making a definite decision we drifted apart. The visits petered out; the phone calls stopped. Not long afterwards I ended the phone-diversion arrangement. Mum was overjoyed, and I vowed to stay completely clear of street drugs forever.

But that doesn’t mean I was clean or straight. Not by a long chalk. I was still on huge doses of methadone and diazepam, and I was still drinking heavily. Anyone who saw me then would have assumed I was a head-case, or off my face on something. But then again, the sort of people who saw me like that wouldn’t really have cared much. I was still hanging around with some pretty dubious characters, the sort of people, you might say, who had seen life from the bottom up. We were bonded together by weariness and desperation and – of course – booze.

Mum hated it. She and I still saw each other and she even let my friends – if that’s what they were – come into her house. I can still remember her shock and disgust at finding out that one of them had urinated all over – and through – her living-room sofa. Proud? No, I can’t say I am.

By 2001 my life had sunk to its lowest ebb – or so I thought. And then two incidents – one very close to another – happened that took me even lower. Both involved death.

I was coming home to the little flat late one Saturday night. I’d been out with a few friends and was in the back of a taxi when I saw two men on a street corner, struggling with each other. I didn’t pay much attention at the time – two lads having a fight on the street wasn’t exactly unusual for that part of town.

But this was no ordinary weekend bust-up, all booze and bravado and a black eye to boast about the next morning. As it turned out I’d witnessed the early stages of a robbery – one of the blokes was mugging the other – and just after my taxi drove past them, the victim was killed. The police appealed for witnesses, but I never read a newspaper in those days so I didn’t hear anything about it. But the taxi driver did, and he gave the police the phone number I’d used when I booked him. Eddie came round to see me and warned me the man who’d done the robbery was a notorious local villain, with a nasty reputation for violence. Because I’d seen him more clearly than the taxi driver I would be a vital witness at his subsequent trial.

Gateshead can be like a little village – dead easy to find out where someone lives – and so Eddie wearily told me that I’d need to go into the witness protection programme. I’d be moved out of town and kept under surveillance until the case was over.

It was while I was away that the second death happened. My brother had been ill for some time. He’d contracted cancer of the mouth and had been undergoing treatment when he suddenly passed away. I didn’t hear about this until a few weeks later and when I did I was devastated. I’d looked up to my big brother all my life; he’d helped through the difficult times in care and he’d stood by me when I got back from Amsterdam. Now he was gone. Tucked away in police protection I’d even missed his funeral.

I was completely shattered by his death. Somehow there didn’t seem any point in getting up in the morning any more – much less trying to get my life back on track. My brother had been good and kind and decent: why did he have to die? And if someone like him could be snuffed out like that – without any reason or justification – what was the point of trying to live an honest, respectable life?

I’m ashamed to say that I sat brooding like this for a long time. The fact that my mother would be hurting far more than me – she’d all but lost one daughter, and had now had to bury her son – was drowned out in a sea of self-pity. I’ll say it again: I’m not proud.

For the next few months I went into a tail-spin of
self-destructive
behaviour. The few friends I hung around with tended to be as damaged as me. Misery, they say, loves company – and there’s always a friend to drink with when you look at life from the bottom of a bottle, or though the haze of drugs. Because despite all my promises, despite all the vows I’d made to myself and my family after the night I died in the ambulance, I’d fallen off the wagon once again. Hanging round with drunks and drug addicts is a sure-fire route back into the slavery of the powder and the pills.

There was only one way it was going to end; only one place my particular road was leading. And sure enough I got there.

Despite all the nonsense you read in the newspapers or see on TV there’s nothing easy or exciting about prisons. Most of them are stinking cesspits of human misery and failure. I hate the kind of exploitative television series that uses the backdrop of a women’s prison to paint a garish and sanitised picture of life inside, just as much as I despise the lazy journalists who write newspaper stories suggesting that life inside is too comfortable or soft.

Do the people watching know – or care – what the reality is? Or are they just like the visitors to the Red Light District, who tramped round the streets gawping at the bikini-clad women in the pink neon windows, slumming it in safety?

It was my own fault, of course, that I ended up in prison. One of the down-and-outs I had been hanging around with stole a cheque book. Then he made out a cheque for £2,500 and wrote my name as the payee. (Why £2,500, I have no idea. It’s hardly a figure likely to pass unnoticed.) My part in this clever plan was to take the cheque into a bank and try to have it cashed. You can guess the result. When the police came calling they also wanted to talk to me about a little spell of shop-lifting I’d been involved in. I owned up straightaway and was charged with those thefts, as well as the cheque fraud.

In court I admitted all the charges. No defence; no
self-justification
. I told the court a little bit about my life, but when it came down to it I was a thief – and a pretty stupid one at that.

I was sent to an assessment centre first of all. It was on the other side of the country and I was supposed to be held there for six weeks. But the moment I got there I knew I couldn’t stay. Almost every other inmate was in for prostitution – and being cooped up amongst them was like being transported back to the sleeping room in Gregor’s house. My mind flipped and I began having nightmares. I saw the dogs coming to get me; I saw the gun and the game of Russian Roulette; and I saw Par – poor Par – and her head being blown off her shoulders while the video cameras whirred. I had to get out.

Security was pretty lax – we weren’t seen as high-risk prisoners – and it didn’t take long to work out how to escape. And so, one Friday, after just 14 days, I absconded. I got myself to the nearest big city – Liverpool – where I handed myself into the police and tried to explain that I wasn’t trying to avoid my sentence – I just couldn’t handle being at that assessment centre.

I spent the weekend at Styal Prison in Cheshire before being sent back to Gateshead and Low Newton Young People’s Remand Centre. After several months, someone there must have decided to hand me a second chance, because I found myself back on the street on parole.

But I was still trapped in my spiral of self-destructive behaviour. One of the conditions of my parole was to live at a particular address – a sort of half-way house between prison and freedom. But I quickly breached this condition – and was promptly carted back off to jail. Fortunately for me, it was one of the more enlightened outposts of the penal system – Low Newton Prison. Even so, it was still a prison. The system meant that we women were still locked up in our cells much of the day and all of the night; we were still treated as pieces of meat to be moved from one place to another.

And there were still drugs and the constant threat of unwanted sexual attentions from fellow prisoners being forced on us. It didn’t take long for it to dawn on me that I had succeeded in exchanging the prison of my window in the Red Light District for a very similar incarceration there. The only real difference was that the walls were now solid stone rather than glass.