Slave Girl (12 page)

My life was certainly organised for me, a routine created by Reece and policed largely by Sally. We would be taken to the window every day, including Sunday. No days off were allowed – not that I would have known what to do with the time even if Reece and Sally had allowed me out of their sight. Where would I have gone to in this city devoted to – and run by – the sex business? And, as it happened, weekends – and Sundays especially – were generally the busiest days. And nights.

Every weekend thousands of tourists swarmed into the Red Light District. They crammed into the hash cafés; they walked up and down the sordid streets and crowded into the little alleyways. They spent hours – and hundreds of guilders – in the sex shops, and queued up in polite lines to get into the live sex shows, where they could watch a bored young man and women go through the tedious mechanics of having pointless, joyless sex. Apparently they always applauded at the end.

And they came, above all, to see us: the ‘Prosties’. From time to time Amsterdam pretends it doesn’t really approve of the Red Light District and announces a crackdown on the sex trade. In 2007, for example, it made a great song and dance about closing down one of the live sex shows and getting rid of 51 – a whole
51
– of the 400-odd windows.
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But it never really meant it. If it had been serious it would have shut them all: closed every window, every sex cinema, porno shop and drug café. Other cities in Holland have thrown the sex trade out of town; Amsterdam doesn’t want to. Why? Because it brings in the tourists. And the suffering of women like me is a small price to pay for the wealth this trade brings in to Amsterdam.

‘Who were all these tourists?’ I wondered as I stood in bra and pants under the pink neon lights of ‘my’ window. ‘Where had they come from? Why were they here? What was going through their minds as they tramped down the streets, got stoned in the cafés and gawped at us in our underwear?’

The truth is they were all sorts. There was everything from organised Red Light District tours
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(‘On your left, the famous Casa Rosso, live sex show; on your right, a prostitute in one of our internationally known windows’) to mobs of drunken football supporters in Holland for some big match or other. There were stag parties of boozed-up British boys, hen parties of women in stupid costumes; there were single blokes with a grim determination to wallow in as much filth as possible in 48-hours.

There were couples getting – presumably – some kind of vicarious thrill from being surrounded by so much seediness. There were even families with teenagers or young children: what in God’s name did these parents tell their kids about us? Did they swallow Amsterdam’s hypocritical rubbish – ‘Yes, darling, that lady is a prostitute. She chooses to work here and is safe because she’s working in a designated Red Light Zone’ – is that what they said? If so, I suppose their children will come back as adults – maybe as punters, maybe bringing their own kids. And so the lies and the pain and the exploitation will be passed down to another generation.

God, I despised them, these sex-tourists, these privileged normal people with their safe little lives to retreat to after a weekend slumming it in what they probably called ‘the naughtiness’ of the Red Light District. I despised them whether or not they knocked on my window with their wallets at the ready and their stupid, selfish lust visible through their clothes. I despised the men for their greed and their vicious callousness. I despised the women they were with for smiling –
smiling
, for Christ’s sake – as they watched their husbands or partners walk through my door and emerge ten minutes later, all macho and swaggering. I loathed them, one and all – and do you know why? Because I was jealous. They had what I could now only dream of – and fitfully at that: they had freedom.

Did any of them think about me – and the hundreds of women like me, trapped in their dirty glass prisons? Did any of them ask a question, show some sympathy, do anything that revealed some trace of humanity? Yes, of course they did – or to be more truthful, some of them made a pathetic little half-hearted attempt.

Are you okay, love? Is something the matter? Do you need anything?

And then, sometimes prompted, sometimes not, they’d shuffle off out the door leaving an extra ‘tip’ – a whole ten guilders to be treasured and hidden from Reece; ten lousy guilders for me to spend on something to make the pain go away, while he kept the 100 or 150 guilders they’d coughed up for the sex.

Because all of them, even the ones who wanted you to think they were nice men, caring men, men with a conscience; all of them still got their pound of flesh and left with their balls as well as their wallets lighter. They weren’t nice at all; their show of concern was just that – a show, and I quickly learned to see that it was designed not to make me feel better but to salve their own consciences.

In films and plays or TV dramas about prostitution there’s always a ‘good punter’ – some sort of shabby hero who begins by being a user of prostitutes but ends up becoming their friend or comforter. A decent man, shamed by his desires, who ends up as their confidant and ultimately their saviour. Oh, there’s always a ‘good punter’ in the
make-believe
world of sex; and then life imitates art and in some red light district somewhere in the world some stupid bastard of a punter starts thinking he’s this God-like figure who can rescue his ‘friends’ from a life on the game. Only he doesn’t, not really. He just hangs about and talks to them – about himself, of course. He never really asks much about them at all. And sometimes – surprisingly often – he turns nasty and begins killing them.

As the days and weeks dragged by in Amsterdam I got to know this sort of man. They’d come to my window and pass the endless hours by talking rubbish – never once asking what my life was really like – until I had to tell them to fuck off because I knew Reece would be out there somewhere on the streets watching me and making sure I earned him enough money. Here’s what I’d have told them if they had ever bothered to ask. Or at least what I like to think now that I would have had the strength to tell them. Whether the Sarah I was then would have had the energy or even the interest to tell them the lousy truth I really don’t know.

The room I worked in was no bigger than eight feet by six: just enough for a single bed along the back wall, the sink, the basket for tissues and used condoms. The front wall was, of course, all glass; the other walls were rough plaster, flaking and cracked with age. The floor was bare concrete, scuffed and ingrained with the dirt of thousands of filthy shoes.

We, the prosties, were supposed to keep it clean – God knows how, or with what – but even if I’d cared enough, I would have been fighting a losing battle. Cockroaches were my constant companions: I’d step on them in the stupid stilettos I had to wear, these together with a worn and tatty bikini formed my ‘uniform’ so kindly provided by Reece from the money I earned him. But you could never kill the cockroaches. Whenever I lifted my foot up, they’d somehow survived and would scuttle off into the corner of the room. And then they’d come back again; just like the punters, really.

And how many of those punters there were. Whether it was because they thought I was young, or just the newest meat on the block, I saw – I serviced – at least ten every day. Ten men with thick wallets, heavy balls – and absolutely no compassion in their hearts.

And it was always the same routine: hook them, open the door, grab their hand, pull them in – smiling all the while, making them feel special, feel wanted, valued even. Make them feel like their wives don’t any more; give them that little rush of adrenalin that comes with doing something illicit; make them want it so much that they come back and want it again. While all the time my stomach was churning and my mouth was dry and my pulse was pumping. A bitter bile curdled in my stomach, bubbling and brewing like poison in a witch’s cauldron. As for my head, well, that was a different trick – two different tricks, really: two tricks put together which flicked the off switch in my brain and allowed my body to function automatically.

The first trick was to train my mind to disengage – to divert itself out of the real world where a man was getting his penis out, ready to abuse me, and into a world of nothingness; a world where nothing happened – neither bad nor good – just safe, enveloping nothingness. You might call it autopilot, except that word sounds too benign, too positive. My trick – and that of countless other women like me – was to find an empty mental space and to park my head there for the duration of the ‘business’. It was what I had seen Sally do that first day in the window and I became as expert at it as she was.

And the second technique – the one that ran in parallel and increasingly ensured that the first one worked? We’ll come to that – and shortly.

Every day then was the same: being fucked, a cursory wash, a cigarette (or several), being fucked again, getting washed again, more cigs, and on and on all through the shift. No food, just M&Ms through the days and maybe the chance of some bit of greasy crap on the way back to where we stayed. If we could blag it, or if Reece was in a good mood.

There were still two of us working the window. Reece was gone all day and night working on a mysterious deal, and Sally seemed to like being with me. She kept breaking down, saying how sorry she was that she’d helped lure me into this life. She’d cry and want me to hold her, then she’d promise – faithfully promise – that she’d get me out; somehow she’d think of a way of helping me escape. As for herself, she was too far gone, sunk too deep in this swamp ever to climb out. But I was different, she said. I didn’t deserve to be there.

And of course I knew she was talking rubbish. There was no way Sally was ever going to help me escape. She needed me as much as I had needed her at the start – not to mention the fact that she was absolutely terrified of what Reece would do to her if he thought she had helped me to get out of his clutches. And anyway, I was in no state to care that much what she said.

At night we were still sleeping in the same room – her in the bed with Reece, me on the mattress. But there were other girls in the room too, three of them sharing a disgusting double mattress, which appeared from God knows where. They were foreign girls, two from Thailand, one from somewhere else in Europe. I don’t think they were Reece’s girls, but I couldn’t be sure; they didn’t speak too much English and the circumstances we were in didn’t exactly lend themselves to much in the way of detailed conversation.

What I did gather was that none of them were there willingly. The European girl – she was from Poland or somewhere like that – had been tricked into coming to Amsterdam – just like me, except the bogus job she had been promised was working in a bar. She’d been forced to hand over her passport to the man who trafficked her, beaten, raped and put to work the next day. The Thai girls had been sold into the sex trade as children and had gradually been bought and sold by pimps who trafficked them from
south-east
Asia and through some of the biggest cities in Europe: Belgrade, Vienna and Frankfurt were just some of the places they’d been put to work.

And each time they were sold, their new pimps told them that they had to pay back the money he’d paid for them. They were in Holland illegally, without any passports or identification
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they had been told that if they complained to the police they would be locked up and their families arrested back home in Thailand. They were saddest girls I had ever met, completely lost in a hell of other people’s making and dulled by the realisation that, for them, there was no escape.

But I learned something from those girls: using condoms didn’t automatically protect you from diseases. Both of them had contracted gonorrhoea somewhere along their travels and had gone several months before a pimp had procured some dodgy penicillin to treat the infection. He added the cost to the money they ‘owed’ him – and of course he made them keep working throughout.

In fact, sexually transmitted infections were common throughout the Red Light District: gonorrhoea and chlamydia, mainly, but HIV and AIDS were on the rise too.
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Not that the pimps cared much about that – punters were hardly likely to come back and complain, and if a girl got too sick to work they generally found a way of getting rid of her and making money at the same time.

Gradually, I grew to understand the hierarchy of competing pimps and how they fought for control of a complex ecology of sexual slavery operating inside the Red Light District.

At the bottom of the heap were one-man-band operators – men like John Reece – who ran a small number of women. They generally rented the cheapest windows in the low-rent alleyways. Often, like Reece, they were drug-users and prone to violence – but then the whole area was constantly on the verge of tipping into murderous inter-pimp violence. Sometimes it did.

Above these sole-trading ‘entrepreneurs’ was a veritable United Nations of organised groups of pimps, each different nationality seeking to get its hands on the latest, the youngest, the most profitable new meat – and often viciously attacking each other when one or other of them lured a valuable commodity away from her ‘rightful’ owners.

During my time there were three main ethnic groupings, each with their own identifiable methods of ensnaring women and then making them work. The smallest – then – were known as ‘The Turks’. They brought experienced prostitutes in from Eastern Europe: tough, hard-eyed girls, whose demeanour was that of middle-aged women – even though few were older than 25. The Turks pretty much kept themselves – and their girls – to themselves, and it was rare that a rival pimp tried to trespass on their patch.

The ‘Loverboys’ were the biggest group of pimps in the District – both in terms of their own number and in terms of the number of prostitutes working for them. There were probably no more than 20 or so ‘Loverboys’ (though it sometimes seemed there must be more). They were young Moroccan guys, good-looking and well turned out, who would typically target vulnerable young girls, seduce them and then ‘persuade’ them to work the windows to support their new ‘boyfriend’. Perhaps if he had been born in Casablanca, not Leicester then John Reece might have been a ‘Loverboy’. He’d certainly used the same technique to con Sally into being a prostitute for him.