The dealers knew that the PR girls were the obvious people for clubbers to ask where they could get hold of cannabis so they offered me a commission-based wage for each new customer I brought to them, which provided me with a bit of extra income and ensured that they had a constant stream of buyers. I wasn't handling the wares myself. Fair enough, I was doing something illegal, but I didn't see myself as selling drugs. My boss at The Coliseum didn't see things the same as I did though. After a couple of weeks of making cash this way, he took me to one side and broke the news to me that he didn't want me working for him any more.
'I've been informed that you are selling cannabis on Veronicas,' he told me. 'I've got to let you go because we don't want that kind of thing associated with our club.'
I hadn't physically handed over a single bag of weed, so I don't know who he got his information from. Mind you, I hadn't applied for a foreigner's identification number , which meant that my PR job wasn't exactly legit in the first place. These numbers are a legal requirement if you want to work over there, which was convenient for the owners because it meant they could get rid of me without a valid reason. That was the way things worked; staff were usually taken on illegally so that they could be dismissed at the drop of a hat.
What was I going to do for money now? Half of me was panicking that I would end up as a stripper or a prostitute, but the other half felt relieved. I had been working as a PR for far too long and wanted to either do a job that I enjoyed or move back home to live with Mum. I was gutted that I had been sacked but pleased that I no longer had to traipse along the strip, harassing passers-by and being paid a pittance for my work.
Fortunately Antonio was still on hand to give me free cocaine. He seemed uncharacteristically sympathetic when I turned up at his bar to get my daily fix and promised to help me out.
'Don't worry,' he told me. 'It's not the end of world. You can manage my club. That way, you will get to stay in Tenerife and you will always have plenty of money to party with.'
'Do you really mean it?' I asked, taken aback that he was offering me such a high-paid job completely out of the blue.
'Sure,' he told me. 'I need to spend more time with you to know that I can trust you, but once I know the trust is there, you can have the job.'
This was it; the break I had been looking for. After months of working as a lowly PR girl, I was finally moving up the ladder. Pound signs flashed in front of my eyes, only instead of representing expensive designer clothing they now represented gram after gram of coke. I was over the moon. Once I became the manager of Heaven, I would be able to live the glamorous existence that I had originally associated with life in Tenerife. There would be no more standing out on the streets all night, persuading people to go to a club. It was time for me to call the shots. My dream was coming true.
'Rack me up a line,' I grinned, 'this is cause for celebration.'
My natural excitement was soon replaced by the type of short-lived, artificial happiness that only coke can bring. Half an hour later, I would be desperately craving more. By that stage, I would no longer care that I had been offered a new job. The only thing that mattered would be whether or not I could get hold of another bag. I didn't stop to question Antonio's motive for giving a managerial position to a cocaine-addicted foreigner who wasn't legally permitted to work in the country. All I cared about was the fact that I would have more money to spend on Charlie. Unbeknown to me, I was about to pay the price for putting my addiction above the need for simple common sense. Antonio had no intention whatsoever of letting me run his club. As far as he was concerned, I was just another silly English girl for him to take advantage of.
Chapter 4
THE HOLIDAY FROM HELL
That fat, sleazy, medallion man couldn't have been any less trustworthy if he'd had scales and slithered across the floor, but when you're in the grip of a powerful addiction, you are incapable of thinking straight. Anybody who can get you drugs becomes a person that you would follow to the ends of the earth. I knew that Antonio was a slime-ball and I knew that he was a crackhead, but this slime-ball crackhead was offering me what seemed the career opportunity of a lifetime. I would have been an idiot not to take him up on it.
I decided not to tell my mum about the good news until I was one hundred per cent certain that it was going to come to fruition. If it all fell through then I would feel ten times worse if I had to explain to everyone that I had been led up the garden path. Instead I rang her up as if it was just another day on the island and was greeted by the news that my compensation had come through.
'That's absolutely brilliant,' I beamed, my face looking like it did the first time I took Ecstasy.
The payout couldn't have come at a better time. It was just what I needed to tide me over until I started at the club. Now I could spend the short period before I became a manageress getting off my trolley and I would still have cash left over to eat and pay the rent.
I filled the next few days with stupid amounts of drugs and alcohol, the most excessive night being my twenty-third birthday, which saw my friends and I getting through enough coke to keep a snowplough busy for at least a week. The occasion marked the first year of my dream career, one of the few times I had money and the fact that I could now stay in Tenerife, which meant it was the perfect excuse to have an epic bender.
My housemate and I started my birthday evening off fairly tamely at a restaurant called Harley's, an American-style diner that did tortillas and fajitas. I loved eating there because they gave you such ridiculously big portions. If you didn't feel sick at the end of your meal then there was something wrong with you.
Much as I enjoyed stuffing my face, I spent the entire time I was at Harley's thinking about how much coke we were going to take when we hit Veronicas. By the time I got to my dessert, I was itching to get out the door so that we could start our drug and drink session. The last thing I remember is leaving the restaurant happy in the knowledge that I could afford to buy bag after bag of Colombian marching powder. Everything after that is just a cocaine-induced blur.
The next day, I woke up with a banging headache and a funny feeling that something wasn't right.
'What the hell happened last night?' I asked Jackie.
'I don't know, which means we probably had a good time,' she half laughed, half grimaced, sounding as if she was attempting to appear cheerful whilst in the grip of the comedown to end all comedowns.
As the room came into focus through my fuzzy, screwed-up eyes, I noticed that my passport was missing from my bedside table. I had very few belongings at the time so it was immediately obvious. There is nothing like waking up after a bender and realising that something as important as that has gone walkabout to make your heart skip a beat.
'Where the hell is my passport?' I gasped, feeling as if the air had just been sucked out of my lungs.
This was the last thing I needed. Had someone stolen it or had I just misplaced it whilst I was out snorting? I needed to know as soon as possible so that I could give my tired mind a break from panicking.
'Don't ask me, I haven't taken it,' my half-comatose flatmate replied. 'All I can remember is that you were talking to Antonio in his office for ages after we finished clubbing. Maybe he knows where it's gone.'
Without my passport, I would be stuck on the island and couldn't go running home to Wingrave if my dream job came to nothing, so I flew out of the door to see if my boss-to-be had convinced me to hand it over to him for some unknown reason. I had no time for niceties; the minute I set foot in his office, I shouted, 'Where is my passport?'
'I am keeping it safe for you. You're coming to Brazil with me, remember?'
Brazil? What was this crazy crackhead on about?
'When did I agree to this?' I asked, although I had an inkling that it was probably during the twelve hours that were missing from my memory.
'Last night. You agreed to come away with me on a trip because my wife can't make it.'
At this point I thought, 'Y
ou dirty devil.' It seemed to me as if he was attempting to get me alone with him in a foreign country so that he could make a move.
'I've got a spare ticket. I need you to come with me so that I can see whether you can be trusted to manage my club. I want to be sure that you won't run off with my money if I leave you in charge.'
His story seemed plausible enough. Looking after a club was a huge responsibility and there was a lot of cash involved. Maybe this trip to Brazil was a test to see how much I wanted the position. The more Antonio talked, the more convincing he seemed. I still thought that he probably wanted to have his way with me but figured I could always give him the cold shoulder if he tried it on. Putting up with an amorous, hairy-chested Spaniard for a week was a small price to pay for being given such a glamorous, well-paid job.
'You can't tell anybody else you're going though,' Antonio told me, his face wrinkling up and suddenly looking super-serious.
The sleazy bugger didn't want his wife to find out that he was taking a girl with him.
'Right OK,' I smirked. 'Your secret's safe with me.'
'And don't tell your mum either.'
Eh? This one didn't make much sense. Did he think my dear old mum was going to somehow find his missus's number and get on the blower to her from England to tell her what was going on? Of all the things Antonio had said to me, this was the only one that left me feeling slightly suspicious. Why the need for all the secrecy? He must have really set his sights on getting into my knickers. He was taking every possible precaution to avoid people getting on to his plan.
Part of me thought, 'Maybe you should give this one a miss,' but the other ninety-nine per cent of my brain thought, 'Tropical paradise. Lovely, long, golden beaches covered in palm trees. Holiday of a lifetime.' Not only was it the final obstacle before I could become a manageress but I was also getting a free vacation to an exotic Latin American country full of bronzed Latino men and beautiful, sun-drenched scenery. Once again, I felt as if I would be a fool to say no.
'OK, I'll keep it between us. Don't worry about that,' I told him. 'When do we set off?'
'We're going next week. I'm glad you have decided to take me up on my offer. You will love Brazil.'
I was excited about the trip but slightly disappointed that I couldn't tell my friends the news. There would be plenty of time for celebrating with them later on when I was raking it in at my new club though. I could almost smell the money – and I knew what money meant. It meant piles of high-quality cocaine. Now that I knew my dream career was just around the corner, I could afford to take things up a notch. The week before my holiday was spent hammering as much charlie as I could fit up my schnozzle. If it's possible to get higher than I did during that period, then it must be incredibly difficult, that's all I can say. I felt as if I was floating on a white, powdery cloud of drug-induced euphoria.
On the day of the trip, I was tired from the previous night's excess but at the same time eager to get on the plane. I didn't even tell Jackie I was leaving; I just packed my bags and went. To be honest, my life in Tenerife was such a mess that she probably assumed I'd finally had enough and returned home to England.
As I boarded the plane with my fat, greasy travel companion, I envisioned chilling out on a gorgeous, sunny beach, surrounded by happy, smiling locals, who had possibly just arrived back from some sort of carnival. Brazil was a party country; everyone knew that. It was a place where people danced the samba 24/7 and lived la vida loca. This was going to be some holiday.
We had to travel via Gran Canaria because there were no direct flights from Tenerife to Brazil, which was a bit of a pain in the arse. Gran Canaria was only twenty minutes away but the fact we couldn't fly straight to our destination added a lot of faffing about to the journey. When the plane finally touched down in Brazil, I felt a mixture of emotions. On the one hand I was buzzing at the prospect of exploring somewhere new, but on the other, I couldn't help but feel as if I was at Antonio's mercy. I hadn't brought any money with me, which meant I was totally reliant upon him. This made me slightly uneasy but then again, he had paid for the trip so it was only fair that he was in control.
We got a taxi from the airport to our hotel, which was in the coastal city of Salvador in the north-east of the country. The further we drove, the poorer the people on the streets began to look. The housing seemed to deteriorate as well. Every building we passed was more rundown than the last and we appeared to be heading into the centre of a slum.
'Are our digs on the other side of this little ghetto here then?' I asked Antonio.
'No, it's there,' he told me, pointing to the only fairly pleasant looking building in what could have passed for a shanty town. It was as if somebody had built a luxury hotel in the middle of Moss Side. I had known that bits of Brazil were impoverished but didn't expect them to be the parts the tourists stayed in. There were feral children everywhere, roaming the streets in packs. I felt like telling the taxi driver to turn around and take us back to the airport but gritted my teeth and thought of managing my own club.
As we dragged our luggage into the hotel, a mob of dirty, stick-thin street kids held out their hands in unison for change. It was very, very frightening. I made a mental note to never leave the hotel unless I had Antonio with me.
We checked our things into our room and then headed out for a bite to eat. I was now starving. The last of the cocaine was finally out of my system and I felt as if I had to make up for all the food that I had missed out on whilst too high to feel hungry.
'Do you want to go to a rodízio?' Antonio asked me. 'I will buy you a meal to celebrate the first night of our holiday.'
A rodízio is a traditional Brazilian buffet where waiters walk around the room at regular intervals with big plates of food and you have a card that says 'yes' on one side and 'no' on the other. You use the card to show whether or not you want each course and pay a fixed price regardless of how much you eat. I had been to one of these places before in Tenerife and liked the idea of having lots of different dishes. I'm the type of person who is always eyeing up other people's food in restaurants and wishing I could have a bite, which means that buffets are my ideal type of meal.
'Sounds good to me,' I said. 'I'm so hungry I could eat a horse.'
The food at the rodízio couldn't have been nicer. Waiters came round every ten minutes with big skewers of meat, which I devoured in two seconds flat. It took a hell of a long time for me to turn my card over. I think the owners must have been worried that I was going to eat them out of house and home.
That first evening, however, was the only time Antonio ever took me out for food. He hadn't brought much cash with him and barely had enough to get by. Splashing out for the meal at the rodízio was obviously a front to try and convince me that he was loaded. In reality his pockets were full of dust, lint and cobwebs.
As if the fact that we didn't have a bean to spend between us wasn't bad enough, it chucked it down with rain the whole time we were there. I had expected Brazil to be bone dry all year round.
Even if the weather had been nice and Antonio had had money, I still wouldn't have spent much time outside of the hotel because the whole of Salvador reeked of poverty. The locals were all dressed in filthy, tattered clothes and didn't seem very friendly, although in fairness this was probably a result of living in dire poverty whilst rich, Western tourists flaunted their wealth in front of them. I really felt for the kids on the street but hadn't had any coke since I left Tenerife and was growing increasingly more paranoid as the days went by. Being mugged was the last thing I needed, so I holed up in my room and spent a good part of the week in bed.
The more I lay there, the more anxious I felt. The lack of cocaine was sending me insane. I kept see-sawing between being mentally exhausted and uncontrollably angry. Every little thing annoyed me and I couldn't focus on anything. The one benefit to my withdrawal was that I no longer cared if Antonio made any advances on me. The only thing that I was capable of worrying about was the fact tha
t I was desperately craving drugs and couldn't get my hands on any. He wasn't usually in the room for very long anyway. Most days he was out doing God knows what, whilst I tried in vain to sleep off my cravings.
One of the few times I did leave the hotel was when Antonio roped me into going on a drug-finding mission with him. He was in an even worse state than I was and seemed intent on getting a fix.
'We'll ask a taxi driver if he knows anybody who can help us,' he told me. 'If he can't tell us where to get drugs then I don't know what we're going to do. I really need cocaína, Terry. I need it right now.'
The cabbie told us that our best bet was to go to a street party and try to score some off the people there.
'Where there is music and dancing, somebody might have what you need,' he advised us. 'I can take you to one if you want?'
'Go for it,' said Antonio. 'It's always worth a try.'
Passport To Hell: How I Survived Sadistic Prison Guards and Hardened Criminals in Spain's Toughest Prisons Page 4