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Slave Girl Return to Hell
Ordinary British Girls are Being Sold into Sex Slavery; I Escaped, but Now I'm Going Back to Help Free them. This is My True Story.
By Sarah Forsyth, Tim Tate John Blake Publishing Ltd
Copyright © 2013 Sarah Forsyth and Tim Tate
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78219-634-1
CHAPTER 1
THE NINE CIRCLES OF HELL
How do you describe Hell?
Go on: try. I have been asked – am still asked, constantly – to describe what I have been through. People who knew me once, a long time ago and in another world, ask me: school friends perhaps, or members of the family I lost. People who never knew me until they picked up my book and read about things they had never thought could happen; people who have never read the book but have heard about it from friends or neighbours. Everyone asks me: what was it really like?
Perhaps they can't quite bring themselves to believe that human beings can treat each other so badly. Some have said that I must have been making it up or exaggerating. Maybe that's why they ask me to describe it over and over again.
And yet the truth is that every time I try it seems impossible to put into words the indelible horror of being forced into the waking nightmare of sex slavery, and chained to the seemingly impossible weight of addiction. Even typing this now the words seem inadequate: 'horror', 'nightmare' – how can such little words convey what it was like just to keep breathing, day after day, week after week, year after year?
So go on: try to describe the worst thing that has ever happened in your life. Force yourself back into your darkest, bleakest time; try to inhabit that memory with all its pain and sorrow and bitterness. And then multiply it: make it bigger and deeper and darker and lonelier than you can bear.
Feel the tears come back until they choke you with sobbing. Pull it around you and over you until you can't breathe and are sure you're going to die. And then you may know a tiny fraction of what it was – still is – like.
Perhaps you think I am being melodramatic or wallowing in self-pity but the truth is that I'm not talking about what I myself have gone through: I'm talking about what millions of other women are going through this very moment, as you read these words. For they are the ones trapped in sex slavery, their voices silenced by fear, their bodies shattered by abuse and degradation. And I am the person on the outside, trying to speak loudly enough to be the voice that has been taken from them, trying to help someone – anyone – see enough, care enough to break their bonds.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. We need to start at the beginning and go from there.
The headline was certainly eye-catching: 'SEX SLAVE AND THE NURSE'S HEPATITIS C HELL'.
Thousands of people must have read it that Sunday morning, perhaps over breakfast or, more likely, given this was the Sunday Sun – Newcastle's local weekly tabloid rag – in the pub. What did they think of these casual consumers of other people's misery? The writer had never met me but seemed in no doubt about my wickedness.
'Former sex slave Sara Lee subjected a nurse to a deadly Hepatitis C scare.
'Drug addict Lee was having emergency treatment for an overdose when she became aggressive and abusive and spat in the nurse's mouth. It sparked a terrifying chain of events because both Lee and the nurse knew she had been diagnosed with Hepatitis C. And for months the nurse had to undergo screening and live with the threat she had become infected. Lee was jailed for 38 days by Gateshead magistrates after admitting common assault. But the 33-year-old, from Duke Walk, Teams, Gateshead, walked free from court because she has already spent 27 days in custody on remand at Low Newton Prison waiting for the case to be heard. She was, though, ordered to pay the victim £250 from royalties she is expecting this month for her book, Slave Girl.'
I had become a local celebrity. And I couldn't be more ashamed.
The facts, of course, are never as simple or as straightforward as they appear in cold, hard print but they're as good a place as any to start.
Tracy and I had been together for a few months when we decided that we would get 'married', hence the name Sara Lee in the article. It was a civil partnership of course, not a marriage, but it felt like one in every way: from the flowers in Tracy's buttonhole and clutched tightly in my hands to the exchange of rings and the promises of love everlasting. And when it was over I became Mrs Lee.
But it was like a marriage in other, less happy, ways, too. One in three real marriages ends in divorce and same-sex civil partnerships seem to be heading in the same direction: 4.6 per cent of women like Tracy and I have their unions dissolved and we were destined to be one small, unnoticed fragment of that unhappy statistic.
We fought about everything. God knows, I can't have been easy to live with but then neither was Tracy: two very damaged, vulnerable women, brought together in adversity and clinging to each other – when we weren't arguing and scrapping – in a way that I imagine someone who is drowning snatches at any tiny scrap of flotsam that might keep them afloat.
I rarely spent more than three nights in a row in our claustrophobic first-floor flat. It was a tiny space, filled with as much desperation as smoke from the cigarettes we sucked on for comfort. Three days, three nights were as much as I could bear: I felt I was being smothered, the life force – such as it was – slowly draining out of me. And so I ran.
Where did I run to? Half the time I couldn't tell you. Not to my mum's, that's for sure. She was still wary of me and quite right, too. She'd come to our wedding on that cold clear day in 2007, but she didn't like Tracy and didn't like the way we existed. I say 'existed' because you couldn't call it living, not in the way that real people, people who haven't been damaged in the way we had been live. Not for us the Mills & Boon romance or the happy ever after we'd imagined.
I was still dependent on my methadone: while being weaned off the cocaine and crack I'd been fed in Amsterdam, I'd been put on morphine and had ended up addicted to that instead. Methadone was supposed to be a way of managing the cravings but really it just replaced one bad 'street' drug with another, chemically pure poison.
It poisoned my body, it poisoned my mind, but most of all it poisoned our relationship. Tracy was adamant that I should get myself off it, but it's easier said than done. I needed it to block out the searing pain that I was afraid to confront: the pain of being abused as a child and then re-abused as a sex slave in the Red Light District. And so methadone became the third person in our partnership, and no marriage can survive with three people inside it – especially not if one of the three is as jealous and demanding a lover as methadone.
Sometimes when I ran I would seek out others like me: misery loves company, so the saying goes, and round our way there's plenty of that to go round. Although methadone is prescribed under strict conditions and the little plastic cups of its numbing green liquid are meant to be swallowed by an addict in the presence of the pharmacist who dispenses it, there always seemed to be people selling doses on the streets or in dingy flats, smelling of stale cigarettes and even staler empty cans of super-strong lager. Perfect for someone like me: a real home from home.
Of course I never stayed away for long. Something – maybe the need for someone special to hold, maybe the hope that love could be possible for Sarah Forsyth – always sent me back to Tracy and my legal status as Mrs Lee, her wife. Guilt, too, played its part: I'd made a promise in that Register Office and I'd made a home – of sorts – in our little flat. It was first time in more than 15 years that I'd tried to make a home and I wanted so much to make it work. Maybe if I tried harder next time I could make it all alright. But there was a next time, and another next time and countless more after that. The same old tawdry pattern of arguments, running away and drowning my sorrows in the company of those just as lonely, damaged and desperate as me.
Does that sound like self-pity? I hope not because it was thanks to this miserable routine that I finally began to heal. But being me, that healing had to begin with a very physical wound.
I was in a pub – not exactly an unusual occurrence in those days. It was one of the times when I had run away and I lost myself in booze. Somehow a fight began: a raised voice, an argument, a glass snatched, smashed and thrust at my face. I ducked but the jagged edge of the broken glass caught me on the side of my head. Blood poured faster than I thought it could; the pub went from vicious noise to shocked silence. Someone pointed at me and yelled for the staff to call an ambulance: my left ear was hanging from the side of my face, attached only by a sliver of skin.
Flashing lights. Hospital corridors. A & E. I was weak from the loss of blood and almost delirious. Even so I remember thinking, 'Has it really come to this? Have I got this far, got away from Amsterdam, escaped the clutches of my traffickers, only to bleed to death from a random fight in a grubby pub, full of sad and broken fellow addicts?'
They sewed my ear back on: stitch after shameful stitch, a physical mark of how low I'd fallen there for everyone to see. And they kept me in overnight for observation. But that night I was the one doing the observation: I looked at myself and I saw what I had become – and I hated it. I hated me, I hated my marriage, and I hated my addiction. There in that hospital bed I saw that I had hit rock bottom: I had sunk even further and deeper than when I was behind those neon-lit windows in Amsterdam. That Sarah didn't have a choice but this one did, and I was determined to make it.
It sounds easy when I put it like that. But it wasn't, not by a long chalk.
The next day a social worker rang my mum to tell her that I was being taken away from Gateshead to a sort of safe house. My poor mum. She must have been wondering if this would ever end: the first time she'd seen me after I escaped from the Red Light District I was in a safe house somewhere in Holland, under police protection from sex traffickers. 12 years on and I was being carted off to another one by social workers, worried about a bunch of violent drug addicts.
Knowing Mum, she must have been feeling a whole contradictory range of emotions: relief that I was being taken away from all the influences she thought were bad for me, but fear I was slipping back into my old, self-destructive ways. Anger that her life was once again being turned upside down by her wayward daughter, but hope that this time, please this time, it would be the start of a new beginning. Or something like it.
The safe house turned out to be a lovely little place on the coast. Whitley Bay is no more than 10 miles from Gateshead but it felt like a world away. Once upon a time it was a favourite holiday destination for working people from all across the Northeast. It has a wonderful long sandy beach, stretching from St Mary's Island in the north to Cullercoats in the south. Its other chief claim to fame was Spanish City – a permanent funfair built to rival Blackpool's Pleasure Beach. Dire Straits immortalised it in their hit song 'Tunnel Of Love' – which was played every morning until the whole park closed down in 2002.
Everyone from Gateshead knew the Spanish City: most of us had been there – or dreamed of going there – as kids. But now as I walked up and down the golden sands I didn't miss it: I was just so relieved to be free, in a place where no one knew me and I wasn't surrounded by the sad and desperate people I had called my friends.
I stayed in Whitley Bay for two months. It was here that I took the first faltering steps on what would turn out to be my ultimate – if meandering – road to recovery. Mum came to see me as often as she could get time away from work, and I began a pattern of skipping days of collecting and drinking my shot of methadone. At the time I thought it was good idea: I hated queuing up with other addicts, waiting for the chemist to hand over the little plastic beaker of 'normality'. But, as it turned out, it proved to be both good and bad in equal measures.
At the end of two months, I was ready to leave the safety of the little house on the windy coastline but where would I go? I couldn't – wouldn't – go home to Tracy, and I didn't want to slip back into the shadowy world of my old addict acquaintances.
It took me a few days but then I remembered an old, old friend who had been good and true and supportive of me in the years between Amsterdam and Tracy: Eddie. Of course, I'd go and stay with Eddie.
I owe Eddie more than I can ever tell him. If you're reading this, Eddie: you were a huge part of my recovery, one of the first and most vital of foundations on which I finally built a life. Thank you, old friend – thank you.
Eddie also lived in Gateshead, but in a much nicer, less grubby part of town than me. There had never been anything between us romantically, much less sexually, but I knew I could trust him with my life. And that's exactly what I did.
For the very first time I had a taste of normality – real life as it's lived by normal people. There were no drugs and even though he enjoyed a drink like most normal people, Eddie never, ever, in the year I stayed with him brought alcohol into the house. This was a first for me: with Tracy there was always beer – strong stuff – and I always kept a bottle of vodka handy. With Eddie there was no booze around me, and I began to feel that I might one day be able to do without it.
My doctor also began reassessing my medication. For the past 12 years I'd been on diazepam – known to most people by its trade name of Valium. It's a powerful antidepressant and was given to me to control the anxiety and panic attacks I still suffered as a result of what had happened in Amsterdam. Valium is also used to help alcoholics kick the drink – but if that was ever considered for me then I'd done a pretty good job of boozing and pill popping at the same time.
Gradually the doctor reduced my dosage, taking me down in stages so that my body could understand the process and readjust. It's the classic way of coming off any addictive medication – and diazepam is very addictive indeed, especially if you've been on it as long as I had. And slowly but surely, my body did come to terms with less and less diazepam. But my mind – well, that's a whole different story.
At this point I started to suffer from anxiety and spasmodic panic attacks; the memories of everything I'd been through would suddenly flood into my mind and drown out everything else. I began to see the faces of people I had seen walking by the windows in Amsterdam, staring back at me now just as they had stared at me as I posed and pirouetted, desperately trying to lure them into my little corner of Hell so that I could keep up the flow of money my pimps demanded of me every single day.
People today can't believe that I could have noticed these faces; but I did, oh I did. Old faces, young faces, sad faces, happy faces ... I stood there every day and every night in that neon-lit glass prison with nothing else to do but look out and try and hook them. Half of me was desperate to find the next customer – fearful as I was of the beatings that would come my way if I didn't meet my quota of clients – while the other half was, I think, searching for a face in the crowd that might, just might, be someone with enough spark of humanity to see how wretched I was and somehow do something to put an end to it.
So, yes, I saw and remembered the faces, and now, as my body adjusted to ever-lower doses of the anti-depressant, my mind conjured them back up to stare back at me and haunt my waking hours with the searing pain of traffic that had passed by me and sometimes through me.
Does that describe Hell? No, it describes just one of its circles. According to literature, Hell consists of nine circles of suffering, all located within the earth. By now, I was going through every single one of them.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Slave Girl Return to Hell by Sarah Forsyth, Tim Tate. Copyright © 2013 Sarah Forsyth and Tim Tate. Excerpted by permission of John Blake Publishing Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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