Ex-Pagan 4 Christ

As soon as I left home I ended up having a pretty wild life. I'd always wanted excitement - which you don't really get living in the suburbs with respectable, middle-class parents. Now, though, I was living with five other sixteen-year-olds in a pretty disgusting (but cheap) area of London. We were all making pretty low wages but compared to pocket-money, thought we were rich.

Most of the time we lived on noodles and tea - we had better things to spend our money on than food! Almost every night we went out partying in the city - and there are a lot of places you can party, even all night if you want to. We were really too young to get into the bars and clubs, and to drink alcohol, but like most other girls our age, had discovered that the careful application of makeup, the right clothes and a confident manner would enable you to pass off as eighteen at the least.

We drank a great deal on those sessions - often finding the drink was bought for us by guys looking for a little fun. Often we'd find ourselves falling over drunk on the way home, collapsing in squeals of laughter on our high heels and having to be helped up. On less pleasant occasions we'd find ourselves throwing up in rubbish bins or alleyways - many a shop owner must have got an unpleasant surprise when he came to work the next morning!

Men were always hovering around us, buying drinks, chatting us up, looking for girls to go home with. Its a normal part of club culture (especially if you look easy, as we did) and we enjoyed the attention. Sometimes we would bring guys home - in my case it was often because I felt I owed them for the drinks they'd bought.

This happened so often that we made a new house rule - only have sex in your own bedroom and turn up your music because no one wants to hear you! We thought we were having a fantastic time - lots of sex, lots of alcohol, wild lives and irresonsibility. Yet there were so many times when I woke up feeling ashamed of the anonymous liasons, the sex-for-drink system, the short-lived and unfulfilling relationships. And we all felt the affects of the alcohol - terrible, week-long hangovers, sore throats from vomiting, pasty skin, bad teeth and money problems. All this the Lord knew of and had had written down long before, but we were too stupid to find it out: Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whoever is deceived thereby is not wise. (Proverbs 20:1)

And so we went on for six months or so, drinking, partying and having casual sex; thinking we were having a great time. Then I met John. I met him in a club in Leicester Square. We wouldn't normally go there as its a tourist trap, and the doormen were more than usually strict about age, but we had gone for some reason or other. Standing in a sweaty club, drinking overpriced wine, I spotted the most gorgeous man. I thought he looked like one of the Gothic poets - all floppy dark hair and fancy clothing. Having quite a few drinks in me by that stage, I went over, introduced myself and asked him if he'd got his frilly shirt at the South Kensington market (which sells goth and punk clothes). It turned out he was a devotee of charity shops and had never been, and by the end of the evening we agreed to meet there! Before I knew it (the purchase of some flares later) John and I were an item. He was a few years older than me - 27, and worked in telephone sales. Like me, he lived to party rather than work. He was an out-and-out goth guy, into angry, alienated music and horror stories, and I loved him. This was the first long-term relationship I'd ever had and it went great, for a while.

John always smoked heavily, and I never had, but I did recognise that something smelled a little different when I went round to his flat one evening. John treated it as no big deal, but I was a bit shocked that he was smoking pot (marijuana). He kept saying that it was fine, non-addictive and normal - and that only weirdos were anti-drugs, so eventually I accepted a joint from him. I felt much better afterwards, not nearly so stressed as I had been, and I thought any boyfriend who could offer me such things must be wonderful!

I started really getting into John's lifestyle. I dyed my long hair black, wore blackclothes and makeup, and listened to goth bands. We even went to goth clubs. Meanwhile I ended up buying quite a lot of pot from John.

One night we wound up in a basement bar in Camden listening to a goth band with dark and depressing lyrics. I was standing listening, smoking a joint, when I noticed John had gone off somewhere. I was starting to get a bit worried when one of his friends appeared. Brian was always a bit "gothier-than-thou" and never failed to make me feel like a teenage poseur. This time he started on drugs, saying that only hippies and little kids smoked hash anymore, that the hard core goths, the real goths, were all into coke (cocaine). As usual he made me feel like a little girl, but I told him that John only smoked pot and his example was fine by me. Brian nearly killed himself laughing and said John used coke too - in fact he was snorting it right now in the gents! Sure enough, when John came back he was buzzing, and I took him to task for not having told me before. He told me to chill out and offered me some - saying he thought I was too immature to want any before. I got fairly annoyed at that and (in a truly immature act) demanded some coke so I could prove I wasn't immature. One sniff and I was in heaven, thinking I was great, filled with energy.

I loved it so much it took less than a week to get hooked.

Now my problems really began - my new drug habit was expensive and neither John nor I had a great deal of money. The times of going out partying were well and truly over - we needed drugs more. We ended up spending most of our time in John's flat or my room, taking the stuff. Worse still, there was a shortage of coke for a while and we ended up taking heroin because we needed a fix, any fix, so badly. Within a matter of months I had gone from being someone who only drank to a mainlining heroin junkie.

To make matters worse one of my housemates started to go weird on me. All of them knew I was on drugs by this stage - I'd rifled their handbags then come back high often enough, and they were increasingly cold to me. Then Clare, one of my housemates, started asking me about religion and whether I believed I would be punished for stealing. I tried to brush her off but she was pretty persistent. It turned out Clare had become a Christian, but I wouldn't listen to her preaching - I wanted drugs, not churches.

As my stealing got worse, my housemates came to hate me. I was spending all my money on drugs now, coming back high and aggressive, and never paying my share of the rent of bills. The final straw came when I stole everyone else's rent money by kicking in the door of the girl who was keeping it until rent day. They all agreed - I had to get out right away or they would call the police.

So I ended up with only John's place as my refuge. But we hadn't been getting on lately - we were just two addicts sharing space rather than lovers now anyway. We were both selfish, and put drugs before each other. Still I went and stayed with him for a while. Being there all the time made us row a great deal and one day, high on heroin, he hit me during an argument. I left that day. I stole all his money and food a room in a squalid house where I could stay rent-free if I did a bit of cleaning. I got a job dancing in a club to make more money, and bought lots of drugs just before I left.

Even with all this, I still thought things were OK at this point. It took a lot more than this before God got through to me.