I was used to moving. As a child, every year we moved. Those were the days when we didn’t have a national school curriculum. Every school did its own thing. What they hated most were kids like us who were only passing through. Or so it seemed. I was an arty, shy kid who had very loving parents. But, a year in an adult’s life is not long. A year in a child’s is an eternity. I have had my childhood analysed many times. When you have a nervous breakdown at 14 that usually begs the question why? For me it was one unlucky circumstance after another. When I look back I know the moment when my life shattered, when I no longer trusted an adult. At the age of nine I was badly bullied by two female teachers. For years I blocked it out but when I returned to live in Devon 10 years ago, I had to face the startling truth that not even my worst recalls came anywhere near to what actually happened. We left there and I went to another school that helped me heal and then another move and at 12, I went to a brand new Comprehensive school. They had decided to create a class from the bright misfits, often excluded from other schools, and the triers from the lower streams. Anyone new that year came into that class – and that was me. Within a year it had all gone hideously wrong. Teachers wouldn’t teach us because some of the boys were violent. I stopped going, I hung about the town. I had my first acid tab at thirteen. I had the breakdown. I tried to commit suicide. When I came around I was very unhappy to still be alive. I was expelled whilst I was recovering from the breakdown and I went to a convent. I thought about nothing but getting out. I left there at 15 and I was accepted t Art College. Art was my passion. Painting, drawing and writing poems and stories, that was my love. I dropped out of Art College after a few weeks. They wanted me to take my missing GCSEs and I hated the restrictions,. I went to work in a hotel for the summer. It was there my second most damaging episode happened. I was stalked and repeatedly sexually assaulted by a friend of the family. Now, sex attacks were nothing new to me, I had had five sex attacks on me by five strangers since the age of five or six. This was different. This was a friend of the family. Suddenly everything those two female teachers had said to me about myself made sense – I was a bad person. Something inside me came out, through my eyes; somehow Uncle Dave just couldn’t help himself. It all made horrible sense. I answered an ad in the Lady magazine for an au pair in Sweden and I left. Over the next few years I tried to make sense of everything. I had good months and bad. I wrote diaries, I wrote poems. I tried to sort my head out. I stayed in Sweden for a year, came back and then set off for a kibbutz in Israel without a map, got hideously sick in France and was taken in and looked after by an old Parisian couple. Came back and then went to Germany, worked as a barmaid, DJ, got accused of being a witch (for the second time) ended up in Munich. Got beaten up and worse and came back to the UK to take my missing GCSEs and As. Did well enough but couldn’t settle so took off to Hong Kong. It was a British colony then. I arrived with another one way ticket. I had been doing modelling on and off for a few years. I came to HK armed with my portfolio. I went to the agencies but no one had immediate work and it was so incredibly expensive to live in Hong Kong that I ran out of money immediately. I had gone with a friend. She had a return ticket, I did not. She was planning to use it. I had no idea what I had planned. The only thing I did understand was that I needed to work. I took a tram down to the Wanchai district. I walked up the steps of a plush night club and I asked if they had work. I was looking for anything – barmaid, washer upper, anything. A mamansan came to meet me. She hired me as a hostess. Within a week I met Teresa in a bar. Teresa was Chinese but she spoke very good English with a Canadian accent. She was engaged to a Canadian and had returned to Hong Kong just to renew her visa. I asked Teresa if she could get me any speed. I was used to taking seed prescribed by the doctor in the form of diet pills, to keep thin for modelling. She told me she could get the local equivalent. I remember asking her... it’s not heroin is it? No, she said, but she lied. Within a few weeks I was hooked and totally dependent on her and it. People ask me what it was like. It was like living behind a wall of glass bricks. You can see trough them but they are distorted and no one can touch you. All that matters is your heroin. It becomes your only friend in the world. It dictates your day. My friend left. She had enough of watching me vomit and suffer and mess up. She went back to UK. After 6 months I tried to come off it and I succeeded briefly but with my friend gone Teresa moved in with me and my hell began in earnest. She had got into trouble. She had stood guarantor for a friend’s gambling debt in Macau. The friend had gone to Japan and left her with the debt. Now the triad shad come for the money had Teresa didn’t have it so they beat her badly. Every day they returned until she couldn’t walk without the aid of a stick and she was a broken woman. She missed her chance to go back to Canada and she was desperate and I was still dependent on her. I paid all the money I had towards paying off her debt. I thought it had been enough but I discovered that she had sold me as part of the debt repayment. She moved us out to the New Territories, then just fishing villages. I was the only white person there. I lost complete contact with the outside world. Teresa became my jailor, my tormentor, everything about her was torture. I lived in a stilt house, with no electricity in the typhoons of summer, no way of getting out when we were cut off with mud slides but also nowhere to go as I lay on my bed fixing all day and all night, watching the lizards and the spiders crawl up my wall as and l listened to Teresa speaking to the men who came any time of day or night and who sometimes opened the door of my room and stared at me and talked about me as if I were a ghost. I realised I was dying. It had been months since I had left that place. I lay on my bed and I thought about my life and I realised that I was now faced with the ultimate decision. I was dying. I knew I was dying. I also knew that I could easily die there and no one would ever find my body. My life would have added up to nothing. I was 23, just a grain of sand in the desert. I lay there, watching my pupils dilate, fixing the purest China White and my mind went back to the year dot. I recalled memories I didn’t know I had and I lived my life again and I sorted it. Whilst I could not make sense of what had happened to me, of the sex attacks, of the bullying, I could decided to put it in a box and file it or I could let it ruin my life. I decided to live. I ran away from Teresa and went back into the centre of Hong Kong, back into the clubs. I signed up to the government’s methadone program. I couldn’t afford anything else. I had no money. Every evening the same taxi driver picked me up and took me to a village hall to get my orange juice – the bitter tasting methadone. Every night we waited until all the old men had gone and then I ran in, gave my urine sample, got my juice and ran out. I was allowed to cut down 15 ml every three days. That’s what I did. I went to work as a hostess in the smartest club I could find and if kept moving cheap hotels every few days to try and lose Teresa. She found me – twice. I was appalled at how badly beaten up she was. I promised to go back but I kept running. I met someone in a club. His name was Philip. He was a prominent layer. I never meant to fall in love, and neither did he. We talked about me staying or going. We both knew he would not be able to divorce and I could never be just a concubine. It was then he discovered that I was not free to leave. I was triad owned, destined to be trafficked out to Taiwan or Japan and used in private clubs etc, as a sex slave, kept on heroin and then disposed of when I was too sick to work anymore. The triads new exactly where I was – why wouldn’t they? Hong Kong nightclubs were and still are owned by them. it’s a legitimate way of laundering illegitimate funds.
In Hong Kong society everyone either owes the triads a favour you are owed. Philip was owed. We spent our one and only night together before, on the last 15 ml of methadone, I got on a plane home.
You had some pretty rough times in Hong Kong, times most people would want to block out, was it cathartic to write about those times? Also, do you think you could have written the book without having experienced them?
My time in Hong Kong was just one of the many experiences I have had in my life. I travelled from the age of seventeen so, as you can imagine, there is not much in life that I haven't had a taster of, good and bad. Hong Kong was special because I reached a stand off. I hit a brick wall and faced death and thought - that is not what I want.
Hong Kong left me with an understanding of myself and others that has been invaluable in my writing but it is only one part of my life. If I hadn't have written a book based in Hong Kong i would have written one based somewhere else. Here is a photo of me taken then.
How autobiographical is your first book The Trophy Taker?
It dips in and out of my time there. i was a hostess. I was a heroin addict and i became embroiled in a triad debt. But, i don't consider it to be very autobiographical. Some of the characters i based on women I met there. For instance, the sisters Lucy and Ka Mei are based on two sisters. The younger one sold her virginity and came to work in the club I was in because her sister got in trouble with a triad debt. There was also a serial killer known as Doctor Lam who was killing women and collecting trophies when I lived there. The first draft of the book was definitely based on me but because i like big fight scenes and epic sets i decided i would much rather just use my experiences to write a thriller.
what's it like when you go back to Hong Kong now?
Physically it looks much the same except they keep claiming more of the sea and building out from the harbour. There is the same buzz - a massive rush of adrenalin and millions of people moving around in a small space. i can recommend it to anyone. it is a unique mix of East and West all coming together to make money..
What were your influences getting started and how have they changed?
Tolkien when I was young, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon all through my life. Henry Miller was a great influence to me in my teens and twenties. He epitomised the writer to me. I read and reread J Fennimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans which still seems the perfect story to me. Now, I feel I have formed my own style my influences are taken from anywhere and everywhere, films, books and life.
What is your process when writing?
I have to work within a tight timeframe so I will get the outline down and try not to edit too much before I work through to the end of the first draft. I have to submerge myself inside the story and go a bit mad for a while. I am a plot led person so my outline is very important to me. I can’t bear not having a good ending and I need to plan for that all along the way. I get up early and answer emails first, just to give myself time to wake up a bit, then I start writing by seven. I write until something interrupts me, such as a gym class or the dog needs walking or my son needs me. I write most of my pacy stuff and get actual words down in the morning. I get wordier stuff done later on in the day and evening. I have an office that i work in but I do my editing either on the kitchen table or in my bed.
Who do you admire?
In my own genre:John Burdett,George Pelecanocos. I love Jeffery Deaver‘s attention to detail, Elmore Leonard’s quirky voice, Lee Child’s consistent high standard, James Patterson in the Alex Cross mode, Raymond Chandler for the exquisite one liner - she was as playful as a kitten in a house that didn’t much care for cats.....
Out of genre: The classics - Dickens, Hardy, DH Lawrence especially. Alexander Trocchi for pure brilliance, Albert Camus for breathtaking description and Gabriel Garcia Marquez for being simply perfect.
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