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addiction most of his adult life, nomadically moving around the city to various
shelters and has extensive knowledge of the heroin street trade around the city.
He offered to help me locate the people I needed to photograph, accompanied by
his friend Ross.
I sometimes struggled with the fallible reality of it all. The world I was in
seemed so strange and I began to look at my city in a totally different way.
One night while out walking, I met Lisa. She was the type of girl you’d never
look at twice in the street. She looked vulnerable, sullen and at the point of
starvation. She was from the Welsh valleys, an abusive home, and she’d decided
to head for Cardiff where a life on the streets followed. Lisa was gang-raped a
short while ago and the effect has obviously taken its toll. She drinks heavily and
shoots heroin on the steps of the city’s courthouse most nights. Her eyes are
empty and her stare is blank. She has been a self-harmer for many years and it
keeps getting worse, the pain etched on her face.
One thing that has struck me is the amount of mentally ill people that walk
our streets. Being homeless and addicted to drugs often leads to mental
afflictions and other issues. I’d often arrange times and places to meet a lot of
these people but it never worked out. They’d never show up, and I grew
accustomed to it.
See more of Andrew McNeill’s work at www.andrewmcneillphotography.com
May 2014 |
drinkanddrugsnews
| 9
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com
Cover story |
Street life
Jayne’s story
‘I COME FROM A SAFE, QUIET AND BACKWARD VILLAGE
called Cwmgors. I had been for a night out at the local pub called TJ’s.
As I was walking home I vaguely remember feeling a sharp pain to the
back of my head.
‘I woke to find myself tied to a chair with a severe headache and I
realised I must have been hit across the head and lost consciousness. As
my sight began to focus I realised I was in a dark and dirty room with an
old mattress on the floor. I was tied to the chair by my hands and feet
and I had blood dripping from my head and hands, I could hear moaning
and screaming and foreign voices and I had no idea who they belonged
to as I didn’t recognise any of them. I would later realise they were
either Polish or Romanian.
‘Two men then came into the room carrying a syringe, which
contained a dark-coloured liquid, and the other a long rope. I tried as
best I could to fight them off but I was tied and it was of little use. There
was a sharp pain in my arm and suddenly I felt very drowsy and weak. I
vomited everywhere as I felt I was on a rollercoaster. They started to
undress me, opening my shirt and touching me. They undid my jeans
and I could feel their hands everywhere. I tried screaming through my
gag but I was floating on the drugs they had injected into me. They
started beating me around the head and they knocked out some of my
teeth. A few hours later when I came round, they came back in and
injected me again.
‘This ordeal went on for two or three months. They fed me at times,
but not much. I watched as other girls were brought into the room. I had
no idea where they were from, as most of the time they kept injecting
me. Some of the girls looked like they had lost the will to fight back and
the same thing was happening to me. I kept thinking of my son and how
much I wanted to be with him again.
‘What I eventually learned was that these men were kidnapping girls
and controlling them with heroin in order for them to work in brothels
around the country. They were sex traffickers.
‘It was pure luck that I got away. One night, all the girls were busy
with clients and they had forgotten to inject me. After a few hours of
rocking my body and hands back and forth, one of the ties on my hand
had loosened itself and I managed to untie the rest of my body. I found a
window, which I managed to open, and I just jumped, not caring if I
broke every bone in my legs. I literally staggered for a few miles to a
house where I managed to call for help.’
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