Slave Girl (14 page)

The girls shared a couple of strong, soothing joints with me as we talked into the night. All three of us were strung out on drugs and not ready or able to slump down and sleep on the single dirty mattress. It felt somehow comforting to talk with them, as if there were some kind of safety in their experience and even in their existence. I’m ashamed to say now that I can’t remember either of their names – or even if I ever asked.

All through that night we could hear the sounds of the dogs outside our door: heavy, threatening sounds, that made sleep hard to come by, even when we did lie down. I’d been terrified of dogs ever since that terrible care home in the wilds of England. I’d never been able to forget the awful feeling of being chased across the fields as I made one of my futile attempts at escape; never shaken off the memory of them closing in on me in the dark, and the knowledge – certain and unforgiving – that I would soon feel their breath and then their horrible slobbering mouths snapping at my legs. So what the Czech girls told me about the ones just a few feet away behind the locked door filled me with a cold, numbing dread.

‘The dogs are the worst. They’re bull mastiffs – huge and powerful. They answer only to Gregor and Pavlov and will do anything – anything – they tell them. Gregor feeds them some kind of meat that looks different to dog food. We don’t know what it is, but there is a lot of blood in it and it looks like it’s still warm when he gives it to them. Sometimes he threatens us with them – it’s like a game, you’ll see for yourself. Whatever you do, don’t try to run away. Those dogs will get you – and that will be the end of you.’

At some point I fell asleep. It seemed like only a few minutes had passed when the girls shook me awake and told me we were about to be fetched by Pavlov.

‘Just follow us; do what we do. We’ll show you.’

Pavlov arrived a few minutes later. We heard him undoing the heavy bolts and the big padlock and stood up, ready and waiting to do his bidding. We’re just like the dogs, I remember thinking: trained to obey and be ready at the sound of our ‘master’ approaching.

There was a filthy little toilet and shower room off the corridor outside our door. Pavlov led us there and watched as, in turn, we stripped off and washed our thin, neglected bodies under the trickle of water it produced. As we stepped out he handed us a small, threadbare towel to dry ourselves – and laid out a line of white powder on the toilet seat. Each of us greedily snorted up our share.

Was I an addict by then? Had I already fallen into the relentless slavery of the razor and the little white line? Powder cocaine is definitely addictive and I was ingesting huge and regular quantities by that point. But snorting coke is a relatively slow and insidious path to dependence. I’m not sure whether at that stage I was using it, or it was the other way round. Either way, it wouldn’t be long before I discovered a much more direct route to the ‘pleasures’ of cocaine. And when I did, I would be its slave for ever more.

Gregor and Pavlov drove us back into the Red Light District. Gregor had, it turned out, a number of rooms on long-term rent. Ours would be a little complex of windows – two upstairs and one directly beneath – with a connecting corridor and stairs. It was in one of the more expensive areas – close to the main tourist paths beside one of the canals. Outside, Pavlov handed us a plastic shopping bag – our working ‘uniforms’ of bra and skimpy thong – plus a few wraps of coke and some strong cannabis to keep us going. Then, with a curt warning not to talk to other pimps, we were left to get on with the day’s business. Or rather the day’s business and that of the night too. I soon discovered that Gregor’s girls didn’t work eight-hour shifts: we started at ten and would finish in the early hours of the morning. And God help us if we didn’t do enough punters.

As the days progressed and I grew accustomed to the new routine, I dimly remembered what Sally had said to me on that first night in Holland – ‘You’ll count yourself lucky if John hangs on to you.’ Now I knew what she meant. Reece had been content – at least most of the time – if I serviced around ten men a day: Gregor wasn’t going to put up with anything less than the profits from 17 or 18 punters – and if too many of those had opted for cheap blow-jobs or, worse still, a fully-clothed wank, then he immediately suspected us of cheating him.

‘You get a punter and he fucks you – yes? I don’t want to know no fucking blow-jobs. I don’t want to know no fucking quickies with your hands. You get him to fuck you and you get him to pay you good. Or Pavlov, he fucking sort you out. Okay.’

It wasn’t a question. ‘Okay’ meant one thing with Gregor: ‘You do exactly what I tell you. End of story.’

And so we did everything we could to make him more money. Every little trick, every little con or mind game you could work on a punter, we worked it. Did he look the type to fall for a sob story? Milk it for all it’s worth. Did he want it rough – to feel like he was hurting us? Squeal and writhe and tell him it hurts – but don’t stop, it’s okay. Just another 20 and you can hurt me again.

Did it hurt? Ever? By then, the drugs took care of much of the pain, even the inevitable dry soreness of servicing at least 150 men every week. Pain? Who cares? Give us another line and another big fat joint and it all goes away.

Except that it doesn’t. Not really. Not ever. Oh, you can dull it, suppress it, anaesthetise it; but it’s still there in the background. Pain exists for a reason: it’s a way of telling you that you should stop what you’re doing.

I didn’t stop, of course. Even if I’d had enough free will left to want to try and stop, Gregor and Pavlov wouldn’t have let me. And they had a very direct way of letting all of us girls know it.

I liked Reuben. All of us girls liked Reuben: that was the whole point. Reuben was black – or rather a lovely,
mocha-coffee
shade of brown; he was Moroccan and handsome and he knew it. He was a pimp – of course – but he was one of the ‘nice’ ones – the ‘Loverboys’, the ones that charmed girls, made them feel special, made them feel like he was their boyfriend; made them want to work the windows, want to fuck dirty horrible punters – just so they could give Reuben some money. Oh, Reuben was a ‘nice’ pimp alright. It says a lot about the debased, distorted glass through which we all saw life that all of us girls liked him. Because when he wasn’t smarming around innocent girls and persuading them that he loved them and that he needed just a little bit of money – just a few days, darling, just for me, my love – he hung around the windows in the Red Light District, looking for other pimps’ girls that he could lure into his stable of profitable flesh.

He heard about me early on – attracted, I suppose, because I looked young and there was always a premium on girls who looked a bit like jailbait. He’d started hanging round my window when I’d worked for Reece. When I was sold to Gregor and moved to a different window several streets away it took him a few weeks to track me down.

A few weeks doesn’t sound like a lot – especially in an area as relatively compact as Amsterdam’s Red Light District. And in any normal place it certainly wouldn’t be enough to make it difficult to locate a person who, after all, exhibited herself in a full-length glass window up to 16 hours a day. But it’s a measure, I suppose, of just how many identical neon-lit windows there were – each containing a girl in a skimpy bikini – and how often the curtains would close on her, hiding her from view, that it took him so long to find me again.

But find me he did, and I liked leaning out of my upstairs window, passing the boring – if scary – times between punters – with idle gossip and flirtatious chit-chat. Maybe those meaningless, stupid conversations were as close to normal life as I ever got – though they were inevitably interrupted by the need to service another punter or hoover up another line of coke.

And then one day he was gone.

The Red Light District was – is still – in some ways like a village. A village in a dangerous and cannibalistic jungle, certainly, but a village nonetheless. Everybody knew everybody’s business – or at least the business it was safe to know. The jungle drums beat and the rhythms of the street ebbed and flowed. Information flowed through the alleyways as silently and mysteriously as internet chatter is today.

No one told me Reuben was dead; no one needed to. We all just knew. Somehow, in some form of collective osmosis, every prostitute in every window just knew. And we all ‘just knew’ who had killed him and why. Gregor’s men had had enough of Reuben tapping up girls that didn’t belong to him. His death was a message – a warning – to all the other Reubens working the streets and alleyways of de Rosse Buurt: there’s a line you don’t step over – and if you do so, this is what happens.

We missed Reuben.
I
missed Reuben. Of course we did. And then someone found his head – a few telling metres away from his body – and we all missed him some more. And then we had another line, another joint, and got on with fucking punters for money.

‘I
am ready, I am ready, I am ready …’

Every morning I’d wake up in that dirty room, with the dogs growling outside the door, and the same song playing over and over on a music system somewhere very close. I had never heard it before – and have never heard it since – but every morning back then its repetitive lyrics pounded into my brain.

‘I am ready, I am ready, I am ready …
10

Whether or not Gregor and Pavlov planned it that way, the song had a hypnotic sort of effect on me. Coupled with the lines of coke for ‘breakfast’, it seemed to re-enforce the message that Gregor drummed into his prostitutes every morning: ‘You owe me. I bought you and you have to work till you pay back what I paid for you. Don’t give me no crap about not feeling good; don’t tell me you feel shit. You go work and earn money. Now.’

The words swam around in my head, floating on a sea of cocaine: ‘I am ready, I am ready, I am ready …’ And every morning as I climbed into the back of Gregor’s blue van to be transported to my place of business – a regular commuter to the demi-monde of sexual commerce – I was ready. In a way.

I had become a robot: a breathing, walking and (sometimes) talking sex doll, rentable for 15 minutes at a time, and displaying no outward signs of any distress. How could I have shown even the slightest twitch of emotion or pain when I was so heavily sedated with drugs?

Because by now it wasn’t just lines of powdered cocaine alternating with sweet, warm hits of hash. Now I had been introduced to a new type of anaesthesia – almost instantly effective at blocking out all the noise and hurt of my daily grind. I had been initiated into the private hell of ‘crack’.

Take a wrap of powder cocaine, dissolved in a mixture of sodium bicarbonate and water. Boil it until a solid substance separates from the boiling mixture. Remove and allow to dry, and there you have it – a ‘rock’ or ‘stone’ of ‘crack’ cocaine, ready for use and abuse.

I’ve never made crack – though it’s absurdly easy to do (which is one of the reasons for its popularity); I never had to. The efficiency and productivity of Gregor’s business empire meant that it was available 24 hours a day. Or, more accurately, it was ‘made available’. Because crack has one big advantage to a drug dealer – more important even than the ease of production and the happy way it allows a gram of powder cocaine to be converted into a large number of individually saleable ‘rocks’, each no more than one-tenth of a gram in weight. And that advantage is commercially efficient and ruthlessly exploited: crack cocaine is one of the most instantly addictive of all street drugs.

For those who are fortunate enough never to have encountered crack, what academics (and users) call the ‘delivery system’ is inhalation. In other words, it’s smoked. The rock is placed at the end of a glass pipe – frequently adapted from one of those little single rose vases that ordinary people – those who have the luxury of romance in their life – give to their partners as a token of love.

To those of us working in the windows it was a token of desperation. Drop a rock in at one end, heat it with a cheap lighter and inhale the fumes from the other end: result – instant oblivion. And if we couldn’t find a romantic single rose vase – in other words, most of the time – we adapted anything we could lay our hands on: Pepsi cans, plastic water bottles, anything to funnel into our desperate mouths the overwhelming rush of crack.

Crack (its name comes from the noise of the water trapped in the rock heating up and – quite literally – ‘cracking’) hits the system quicker and more potently than any other drug. In less than two seconds from pulling the fumes into your lungs a huge jolt of smoking coke hits your brain.

The first time I sucked on a crack pipe – provided, of course, by one of Gregor’s men – my eyes rolled back in my head and I fell to the floor, vomiting uncontrollably as my body reacted to the sheer intensity of the drug. I had absolutely no idea where I was – and couldn’t have cared less. Perfect – just the job for getting on with ‘the job’.

But a crack high lasts only a very short time – 20 minutes is a good rule of thumb, and then only for the first few rocks. After that each high is slightly less powerful and over slightly quicker. And it leaves behind an all-consuming need for more. This is no mere craving; it’s an absolutely unforgiving and overwhelming necessity. All that matters to the crack user is where his or her next rock is coming from. Addiction is almost instantaneous – and that’s why the dealers love it so much. One hit on the pipe and you’ve got a user for life – however long or short that life might be.