Slave Girl (11 page)

Who were these men, I found myself wondering. Where did they come from? Were they married, in relationships – or on their own and desperate? And what sort of upbringing had they had which let them believe it was okay to have sex for money, to force themselves on an obviously unhappy and unwilling stranger?

All the time Sally had been sitting in the little room next door – keeping an eye out for you, she said. And she kept taking the drugs: lines of coke, followed by big pungent joints. She seemed half out of it and I wondered how much use she would have been if I’d had any sort of trouble.

To my surprise I found that I was hungry. I looked at my watch: 2pm. There hadn’t been any breakfast and I realised my body was craving something – anything – inside it just to keep going. I asked Sally about lunch and she gave me one of her looks, as if to say, where the hell do you think you are?

‘This isn’t an office job, Sarah. There’s no lunch hour. We can’t just pop out for a bite to eat, or a look round the shops. We work our shifts here without a break.’

She dug into her bag and handed me a fistful of what looked like multi-coloured pills. Given her intake of other drugs I assumed the worst and recoiled from her outstretched hand.

‘Suit yourself. They’re M&Ms, not fucking pills. They’re the only “lunch” we’re going to get.’

She pronounced the word ‘lunch’ with such heavy sarcasm that I burst out in hysterical laughter. Sally looked at me and starting laughing too. And then reality hit back and the laughter turned into sobbing and we ended up clinging onto each other, crying our eyes out. We ate the M&Ms, though.

Sally agreed to do the next few punters. We exchanged places and I sat in the next-door room, keeping an eye out for her. The room stank of cigarette smoke. She had been chain-smoking all morning and the air was heavy with stale nicotine. I had smoked since I was a child – I was definitely addicted to tobacco – but even I found the atmosphere oppressive and choking. I wanted to open the door, to let in a little air – even a little of the watery sunshine that dribbled through the dirty room. But of course I couldn’t. Reece had locked us in – and I didn’t imagine Sally had a key.

As the afternoon wore on I found myself dipping into her fag packets – she seemed to have an enormous supply – and lighting up one cig after another. You’ve been on the game less than a day, I told myself. Already you’re living up to the stereotype they show on telly – the cheap hooker smoking herself stupid. I promised myself that I would cut back; I’d make myself wait at least half an hour between cigs. But it didn’t work. The boredom and the depression set in quickly and I was soon lighting a new fag from the glowing butt of the old one. Smoking seemed the only way to measure the time as it passed in our dreary, sordid little world.

Sally did two punters – it was a slow afternoon, she said – before telling me I was on again. I forced myself into the room and stood right up against the glass window, staring out at the street. People stared back. What did they think when they saw me? What went through their minds as they watched a frightened little girl-woman, a child, really, wearing an adult’s costume and forced into an adult’s world?

It wasn’t long before the afternoon business picked up and then took off as the evening set in. Punter after punter seemed drawn to my window. A depressing number of them wanted to come in. At one point two men were even arguing about who got there first. From what I could see, prostitutes in other windows further down the alley weren’t doing so much business. Men walked up and down, checked them out and then came back for another gawp at me. I began to feel as if I were a mannequin in some bizarre clothing store and that these would-be punters were assessing the fashions I was displaying, comparing them with those of a rival couturier hanging on all the other mannequins. Except that this was no boutique – and we weren’t wearing the latest fashions or anything much at all. It was a meat market – a butcher’s shop window – and the girls in the windows were the prime cuts. Still, it didn’t explain why my window was attracting so much attention, so in one of the few lulls I asked Sally why we had become so popular.

‘It isn’t “we”, Sarah. It’s you. And there’s two reasons for that. The first is simply that you’re new. A lot of the punters here come down to the Red Light District frequently – several times a week for many of them. Sometimes they buy, sometimes they don’t – but one of the things that always tempts them is a new girl – “fresh meat” we call it here.

‘The other thing is the way you look. How old are you now? Nineteen? But you don’t look a day older than 14: you’re attracting the guys who like their meat young as well as fresh. There’s a real market for that – and you’re a safe way for them to indulge their fantasy of fucking a little girl.’

As if to prove her right, the next punter was a middle-aged man – German, by the sound of him – who insisted on talking to me in a heavy accent. While he fucked me he kept saying, ‘Who’s Daddy’s best little girl, then?’

Could he have known what that did to me? What memories he dragged up of my own father abusing me from when I was three years old? Of course he couldn’t. But he should have: he should have asked himself, ‘What’s this very young-looking girl doing here, fucking me for my money? What happened in her life to lead her to this?’ Because if he had thought about it he might well have guessed – or maybe had just the tiniest inkling – that what he was actually doing was re-abusing a girl who’d been sexually abused all her life. But he didn’t care and he didn’t ask; he was interested only in pushing his penis into me and fucking me, lost in his fantasy world of incest and child rape.

When he left I leaned over the little sink and vomited. I tasted the bitter bile and watched as the half-digested
multi-coloured
M&Ms swirled round the basin and down the plug hole. Sally came up behind me and touched me cautiously on the shoulder. She held out a joint and – without saying a single word – told me this was what I needed. I took the little cone-shaped paper from her fingers, brought it up to my lips and drew in a huge gulp of sweet-tasting smoke. It made me cough and gag all at the same time and my eyes watered, even as they never left Sally’s face.

But I pulled the drug down deep into my lungs. I wanted it to swamp me, to swaddle me and my tortured mind and my aching body in a big comfortable blanket of relief. I felt the smoke sear the back of my throat; I tasted the aromatic cloyingness on my tongue just as the dizzying rush of the drug hit my brain. I abandoned myself – willingly and gratefully – to its numbing embrace.

And in that moment I was lost.

By the time the shift was over I had done ten punters and Sally four. The pile of used condoms and tissues was up to the top of the bin and there was a stack of more than 2,000 guilders waiting for Reece.

But I had also smoked another five huge joints, welcoming the powerful waves of anaesthesia which washed over and through me with each deep drag. Sally explained that the stuff was hash – hashish, or cannabis resin – and that even though it was many times more potent than joints which could get you locked up in England, here in Amsterdam it was sold quite openly.

‘You get it from the men who run the cafés – the drug cafés, yes? You do know about the drug cafés, right?’

I nodded blearily. I’d read all about them in the guidebooks I’d devoured when Amsterdam was a place of dreams, not nightmares. I’d smiled at the amusing way these books described the ‘wickedness’ of Amsterdam’s cannabis cafés. And anyway, everyone in the world had heard of them and knew that they were really an enlightened and long-term experiment – a success story. The newspapers back home were constantly full of articles in praise of them and how they stopped the problem of hard drugs getting out of control in Holland.

Sally told me to forget all that.

‘Actually you don’t know about the cafés. Not really you don’t. Not what really happens there. But you will soon enough. You’ll find out, one way or another. But that’s enough for tonight. You’ve done okay. Your first day, and you did okay. Tomorrow won’t be as bad. You’re a professional now – a “prosty” as they call us here.’

She said it as if it was something to be proud of; as if I’d done something clever. I almost felt like I was about to be presented with some surreal Brownies’ badge: Well done, Sarah Forsyth: you’ve thoroughly earned your Fucking Men For Money Badge. You’re a credit to the Prosty Pack.’

But even through the haze of hash I knew that I hadn’t done anything good. I had allowed myself to be sexually assaulted – ten times – by men who didn’t give a damn about the pain they caused. And I had taken my first drugs. I hadn’t earned a Brownie badge or done anything to make anyone proud of me. I knew what Sarah Forsyth was – and what she was going to be from now on: I was a cheap whore, a ‘prosty’. Sarah Forsyth, qualified nursery nurse from Gateshead was no more. That was the old Sarah. This new Sarah who lived – or existed – in Amsterdam was something quite different: Sarah was a prostitute.

P
ast central station with its thousands of commuters and ordinary people. Cross the road and turn right into Nieuwegbrugsteeg. A quick right into Wijngaardsstraatje, a left and then almost immediately right again down alongside the Voorburgwal canal. Three hundred yards past the sex shops and the coffee shops, then one more right into Trompettersteeg. All the way along and diagonally across into Goldbergersteeg. First window on the right: that was where you’d find me.

You’d have passed by at least a hundred other, almost identical windows just following that particular route. If you lost your way in the maze of little alleys, you’d have taken in hundreds more. Each one with its own scantily-clad cargo of human misery; there all hours of the day and night for your pleasure. Old women, young women; thin women, fat women. Thais, Africans, Europeans; white women, black women, and the women on Bloedstraat who weren’t really women at all, despite their appearances. Amsterdam’s Rosse Buurt had something for all tastes, and it was all very carefully organised.

As the days in our little corner of hell mounted up, Sally filled me in on the way the Red Light District operated. Technically, there wasn’t just one, but two districts in which prostitution took place. The largest, covering 6,500 square metres of prime city centre real estate, was called De Wallen. The second was called Singelgebied, named after the Singel canal that ran alongside it, but since the areas adjoined each other, and the sex business happily spread out its tentacles wherever it could, the whole section of Amsterdam from the twin canals of Voorburgwal and Achterburgwal and out to the Singel was effectively one large drug-dealing flesh market.

There were at least three live sex shows; dozens of porno shops, sex cinemas and drug cafés; one of the world’s most exclusive brothels (exclusive, that is, by way of price); and more than 500 very visible prostitutes displayed in around 350 neon-lit windows.

Prostitution wasn’t actually legal
2
, any more than the extreme pornography readily available for sale or rent, or the hash and marijuana, samples of which were neatly displayed in efficient ring-binder files on the counters of the drug cafés; customers could browse for their drug of choice and then smoke it in the freely-provided cigarette papers
3
.

Instead, all of this – the drugs, the pornography, the prostitution – was officially ‘tolerated’. What that meant in practice was a vicious and extremely lucrative free-for-all in which anything and everything had its price – and the people at the top of the tree grew obscenely wealthy on the pain and suffering of those at the bottom.

Charlie Geerts had grown fat – literally and metaphorically – from this official hypocrisy. Geerts was known variously as ‘Fat Charlie’ (a reference to his impressive girth) and ‘The Emperor of Sex’ – a title he had earned by being the biggest and wealthiest landlord in the Red Light District.

Geerts owned the majority of the prostitutes’ windows (and much else besides), renting them out to pimps at the rate of 50 guilders per eight-hour shift. His business was perfectly legal – respectable even – despite the fact that pimping itself was against the law. Officially, the policy of tolerating prostitution had been put in place partly to ensure that women wanting to enter the sex industry of their own volition could do so safely and independently by renting their own highly visible premises.

In reality, any girl foolish or naïve enough to believe that the ‘Raam verhuur’ (Window for Rent) signs applied to her, and to set up shop for herself in one of them, very quickly received a short and painful lesson in market economics from one of Amsterdam’s legions of competing pimps. Oh, de Rosse Buurt was organised alright: organised on the finest principles of free market capitalism.

And its intricate mechanisms ticked over night and day, silently and efficiently, like one of the exquisitely expensive Swiss watches that adorned the wrists of those who did the organising. Money flowed through De Wallen and Singelgebied as consistently and inexorably as the water sloughed through the canals that bounded them.

The pimps and porno store owners made money; the coffee shop owners made money; landlords like Fat Charlie Geerts made huge sums of money from renting out property to them. Even the city council and the Dutch government made a fortune: 4.2 million foreign tourists flocked to Amsterdam every year: the vast majority spent some time – and generally some money – in the Red Light District.

And all of this intricately organised economy was based on one thing: the pain, suffering and tears of women slaving every day in the sex industry; women who by and large didn’t get to keep much (or in my case, any) of the cash they generated. Somebody once said that when they came face to face with the evil of Nazi Germany what struck them was its banality. That wasn’t the word I’d use to describe Amsterdam’s Red Light District – here, the evil was organised.