Читать книгу Slave Girl - Sarah Forsyth - Страница 5

More than anything it was the dogs.

There were two of them – bull mastiffs, sat on the other side of the door, day and night. I was locked in anyway, but if I even tried the handle the dogs would bark wildly and I knew that within seconds someone would be there to check on me. I was scared of the men who came running to the door of that shabby, dirty, miserable flat, but most of all I was terrified of the dogs. I knew what they could do – would do, given the chance – if the men let them at me.

Afterwards, that’s what no one seemed able to grasp. ‘Why didn’t you run away?’ they asked. ‘Surely you must have had some chance to escape?’

But the dogs were always there. Between them and the men – and the drugs they fed me day in, day out till I didn’t know which way was up and I’d reached that terrible place where I needed them as much as I hated them – there wasn’t a hope, really.

They knew that, of course. They’d worked hard to get me like that: to get me hooked on crack cocaine. That, and scaring me beyond belief by blowing a young girl’s brains out in front of my face.

I staggered through those days, weeks and months, each day the same: men and drugs, more drugs and more men. My life was ebbing away as slowly as the water in the dirty brown canal which oozed towards the North Sea. How many men paid their 150 guilders for a few minutes of rough and selfish relief? I couldn’t tell you: by the time I might have thought to keep count, I wouldn’t have been able to.

How many rocks of crack, how many lines of coke or joints of strong, calming marijuana did I consume? I couldn’t have tallied them up. Someone did, of course: nothing comes for free in Amsterdam, not in the Red Light District at any rate. And I paid the bill – the bill for the drugs that dulled my brain while I sold my body in the shabby neon-lit window by the canal – by selling myself again. A vicious cycle played out ten, fifteen times a day, seven days a week.

No, there wasn’t any escape from that hell. Not until that day when through the haze of my addiction and desperation I saw half a slim chance and somehow found the courage to snatch at it. Not until that day when my legs carried me away while my mind screamed with fear. Not until – for almost the first time in my life – someone came to my aid and stood beside me, not because they wanted something but out of common humanity.

That was the start of my journey out of hell: that first act of unselfish kindness. But if I’d known then how long the journey would be and how hard the road, would I have had the strength to start along it?

I honestly don’t know.