Can't Anyone Help Me? (28 page)

Two hours later, I was finished. My hair, now glossy and several shades lighter, bounced on my shoulders. The street look had disappeared, all right. I just looked like a rather scruffily dressed teenager with a new hairstyle. Then I remembered all my new clothes: that look was about to change.

Eddie was waiting in Reception. He told me I looked great, tipped the stylist extravagantly, then took me for something to eat at a small wine bar where he knew the owner. It was a smart place, with pale wooden tables, chairs with cushioned seats and flower arrangements at the entrance. No questions were asked as to my age when he ordered for me, without asking, a glass of white wine and a club sandwich.

A taxi was hailed once we had finished and, surrounded by bags, I sank happily back on the seat.

In the flat I did what I had done nearly three years previously. I took out makeup and created a new me. On went the clothes and out I came, smiling with shyness and pleasure at how I knew I must look.

We went to a club that night; three large doormen stood outside and greeted Eddie as an old friend. That place, all chrome and glass, where men of all ages wore suits and girls very little, was nothing like the clubs I had visited with Dave. A long bar with a mirrored back, silver cocktail shakers, waiters in black and a small restaurant behind a glass wall made up the ground floor. Downstairs, in what must once have been a basement, there was a dance floor where a DJ mixed and spun his vinyl, while above our heads the multifaceted silver sphere rotated, sending flashes of colour down on to us.

We danced to the thumping sounds of the music, and then it was back upstairs for more drinks.

Eddie seemed to know so many of the beautiful people in the club. He took me to a room and shared a spliff with me.

‘Cool,’ I said, as I dragged down the smoke of the first grass I’d had for several months.

For the rest of the evening I danced, laughed, felt happy and carefree, and over the next couple of weeks little changed.

‘A favour’ was how he put it. A friend of his wanted to meet me, take me out for dinner. All I had to do was be nice. It would help him with his business – something he was rather vague about.

What could I say? He had changed my life, taken me off the streets, given me a place to stay.

That was the first time he mixed something else with the tobacco and marijuana. ‘This will make you feel good,’ he said, passing me the joint – and he was right. Within a few minutes, I felt as if I was cocooned in the softest of cotton wool. My whole body was completely relaxed and a sleepy euphoria swept through me. It was the most incredible buzz, far better than the strongest grass or the happy, drowsy feeling I got from Mandies.

That was my introduction to heroin.

I still felt warm and calm as he put me into a taxi and told the driver where to take me: an address in Bayswater. ‘It’s his flat,’ he said, and told me which bell to ring.

Of course, that man and I never did go out for dinner.

There were more favours and more of something else mixed into my joints. The men were not great conversationalists – after all, there was no pretence about why I was there – but I still heard their excuses.

Going with a girl like me was not the same as being unfaithful.

‘I love my wife,’ most said; one even took a phone call from his and reassured her of that when he was still inside me.

I think if I hadn’t met Gina, I would have ended up working the streets around King’s Cross, desperate for my next fix. For that, I learnt, was what had happened to other girls who had had the misfortune to be ‘rescued’ by Eddie.

I remember so clearly the night I first saw her.

Eddie, in one of his increasingly rare spells of good humour, had taken me to a music venue in Hammersmith. We smoked joints before we left and, for once, he let me wear jeans tucked into a pair of boots and my old leather jacket – it reminded me of Dave.

There were three bands playing, but it was the last one that Eddie told me was going to be good. The drummer, obviously well known to the crowd, received a round of applause as he took his seat. His hands and feet flew as he provided a throbbing bass note below the electric guitars and the amplified voices of the band. The crowd went wild as the lead singer moved to the edge of the stage and, jumping up and down, they screamed for more after each song.

That was when I saw Gina, though I didn’t know her name then. I was still buzzing with the effects of the joint and the wine that I was drinking when I saw an olive-skinned face with a wide mouth bare of makeup and dark brown hair that was almost black tumbling in thick waves to her shoulders. Her long silver earrings sparkled as, head thrown back, she laughed at something someone in her group had said. I knew I wanted to meet her. I also knew a lot more than I had the night I had met Eddie. I knew he didn’t want me to have friends. Friends might put ideas into my head.

I knew it was the heroin, mixed with marijuana, that gave me the buzz I had started to crave. I knew he was a far bigger drug dealer than Dave had ever been. I knew that he had girls whose drug habit had wrecked their looks and were working the streets around King’s Cross – I had met some when they had come to the flat. In some perverse way he wanted me to see them, wanted me to know what might happen, should I ever refuse what he considered was ‘nice work’. That meant being sent to hotels and smart flats, rather than having to work the streets and give blow-jobs in the backs of cars. Some, like me, had once lived in his flat and catered for the ‘top end of the market’, as he liked to call it. But as their looks faded, they had ended up in less salubrious places.

I had learnt that Eddie did not work alone. There were the doormen, barmen and club owners he had in his pocket. He supplied drugs and girls, and they received commission on every one of their introductions. They in turn reported back when a girl got ‘out of line’. He always used that term for any girl who tried to get out of his clutches or to work alone.

Getting out of line, I also learnt, ended badly.

Dave had thrashed a boy who had stolen from him, but Eddie had beaten girls who had tried to pocket more than he thought was their share of what they earned from prostitution. As far as he was concerned, he owned them. I had grown to fear Eddie. I knew I was trapped.

In a crowded bar it’s impossible to monitor everything. While Eddie was talking to other people, I managed to get myself included in Gina’s group’s conversation. I found out that they were always there on a Friday night and was determined to meet up with them again. But how would I manage to do that?

My wish was granted just two weeks later. Eddie had business in Brighton. ‘I’ll be away for the night,’ he told me.

‘OK if I go to that bar and listen to some music?’ I asked, trying to sound as though I didn’t care either way.

He was in a good mood because he had arranged the meeting with his Brighton ‘connections’. New clubs were opening there and he was setting up a dealer network to supply the drugs. He smiled and said, ‘Sure,’ not thinking that it might be more than music I was interested in. He peeled some notes off the wad he always had in his pocket and gave them to me. When things were going his way Eddie could be generous, but I had already seen what a bad mood could bring.

‘Make sure you get the manager to order you a taxi back here,’ he said. ‘It can get rough round that area.’ Maybe he said it out of concern but, knowing Eddie, it was more likely that he wanted to check I had gone straight home after the club closed.

When I reached the club, Gina was there with her friends, who welcomed me with smiles. Over the evening, it became clear to me that not only did they know who Eddie was but also what he did.

‘Are you his newest girl?’ they asked me, not unkindly but knowingly. That was the first time I admitted to myself just what Eddie was, and what I had become.

From that night onwards, I felt a connection between Gina and myself. I loved how she laughed, how her silver bracelets jangled when she lifted her thick mane of hair off her face. More than anything I loved how, even knowing what I did, she had allowed me to join her group.

I arranged to meet her in the daytime when I managed to leave the flat on one pretext or another. Occasionally there were evenings when Eddie had no work for me and nights when he was away. The music venue seemed to be one place he didn’t mind me going to on my own.

For the first time since Dave had left me, I saw what a normal life was, and I yearned to be part of it, just to be a teenager without problems. I also wanted to be with Gina more and more. At night, when I drifted off to sleep, her face came into my mind and it was her laugh that I heard ringing in my ears.

Apart from Dave, I had never had any interest in boys. Until I met Gina, I had put it down simply to not liking men, but as I thought more and more about her, I began to accept that perhaps there was another reason.

Maybe Eddie caught me daydreaming once too often or asking too frequently if I could leave the flat. Whatever the reason, he decided to tie me to him in a different way. He introduced me to the needle, showed me the buzz that came from heroin when injected straight into a vein.

He did it for me the first time, tied the strap round my arm, slapped it till the vein stood out and slid the needle in. The buzz was instant and so much more than I’d experienced when I smoked it. This was unreal. It was so beautiful and I wanted more.

The first time is always the best, I discovered, but that doesn’t stop you searching for that exquisite feeling again. That’s why they call it ‘chasing the dragon’.

‘You have to get away,’ Gina said. ‘You’ve got to get off the drugs, Jackie. You’ve seen what happens to girls who are on that stuff you’re taking.

‘And it’s Eddie and his ilk who get them hooked. It’s so they won’t leave them.’

‘He’d find me,’ I said, and told her about other girls who had thought they could escape him. How his network had found them and the beatings they had received. Then, when they were bruised and in pain, the drugs they craved had been withheld until they had agreed to work the streets.

‘He never lets them go willingly, not even when they’re so low they’re selling themselves for a tenner. It’s a matter of principle with him. One gets away and more might leave. He’d rather see them dead.’

‘Yeah, I’ve heard all that too,’ Gina said, ‘but I only half believed it.’

‘Well, trust me, it’s true,’ I said, and felt defeated. If he could have a girl who worked the streets beaten to within an inch of her life, what would he do to me? I knew how much I was worth to him. Four or five men a week brought him in around a thousand pounds out of which he fed and clothed me, sent me to the hairdresser and gave me the odd present. Ten girls working the King’s Cross area didn’t earn him as much as that. Even I could work out that one docile underage girl was worth a great deal of money to him.

But, frightened as I was, Eddie had made a mistake when he had shown me the most wretched of his girls, those with dark rings round their eyes and the pallid complexion of the junkie. By doing that, he had shown me my future.

Although I’d said it wasn’t a future I wanted for myself, Gina wasn’t satisfied. One evening she bundled me into a taxi and made it take us to the areas where some of the street girls worked. I saw girls perhaps a couple of years older than me, standing on spindly legs that hardly appeared strong enough to support their weight. As each car passed, they looked hopefully at the driver, willing him to stop. They wore tiny mini skirts that only just covered their crotches and low-cut tops, while their feet were crammed into the highest stilettos. Nearly all of them had backcombed bleached-blonde hair, and every one of their heavily made-up faces bore the blank, dead look of someone drugged up to the eyeballs.

‘Look at them, Jackie,’ Gina said. ‘That’s your future if you don’t get away. They risk their lives every time they climb into the back of a car, but do they care? No, they don’t, Jackie. They only care about their next fix. And, even worse, do men like Eddie care? No. Those girls aren’t people to his sort, just money. They can be replaced when they die, killed by a punter or bad drugs. But think, Jackie, not one of those girls came into this world a junkie. They were children once, and however bad their homes were, they had a future. They don’t now. They’ll be lucky to see their thirtieth birthdays – or unlucky depending on how you look at it.

‘You might be his favourite now, but sooner or later, he‘ll find some other lost soul, younger than you, get her hooked, then put her to work.

‘You might last a bit longer than most. He struck lucky with you. Bet he never guessed how well you’d scrub up – but you won’t last for ever. Those men he sends you to, they like change, you know. They want young innocents. They don’t want the same girl every time – it takes the adventure away. Get real, Jackie. Eddie and his friends are evil bastards, and when you can’t bring in the big money, he’ll throw you out to work the streets with them,’ she said, pointing at the sad street girls who had clearly seen better days.

She was silent then and left me to think about what she had shown me. The taxi dropped us off at a coffee shop, and once we were seated, she broached the subject of my addiction. She told me about a centre where I could get help to come off heroin and how they would prescribe other drugs, far less harmful, that would help. ‘They don’t expect you just to stop, you know, Jackie.’