Ruth Jacobs writes a series of novels entitled Soul Destruction, which expose the dark world and the harsh reality of life as a call girl. Her debut novel, Soul Destruction: Unforgivable, was released on 29 April 2013 by Caffeine Nights. Ruth studied prostitution in the late 1990s, which sparked her interest in the subject. She draws on her research and the women she interviewed for inspiration. She also has firsthand experience of many of the topics she writes about such as posttraumatic stress disorder, rape, and drug and alcohol addiction. In addition to her fiction writing, Ruth is also involved in non-fiction for her charity and human rights campaigning work in the areas of anti-sexual exploitation and anti-human trafficking.
Soul Destruction: Unforgivable
Enter the
bleak existence of a call girl haunted by the atrocities of her childhood. In
the spring of 1997, Shelley Hansard is a drug addict with a heroin habit and
crack psychosis. Her desirability as a top London call girl is waning.
When her
client dies in a suite at The Lanesborough Hotel, Shelley’s complex double-life
is blasted deeper into chaos. In her psychotic state, the skills required
to keep up her multiple personas are weakening. Amidst her few friends, and
what remains of her broken family, she struggles to maintain her wall of lies.
During this
tumultuous time, she is presented with an opportunity to take revenge on a
client who raped her and her friends. But in her unbalanced state of mind, can
she stop a serial rapist?
The Stranger, the Coke Can and the
Futuristic Street Installation taken from Soul Destruction: Unforgivable by Ruth Jacobs.
Shelley
found herself squatting on the dirty floor of a public toilet in Camden Town,
trying to avoid the sparkling streams of urine under the dim light. Twenty
minutes earlier, she’d plucked a young man from the street. He’d been sitting
on the pavement by the Tube station, begging, appearing to be homeless. She had
a knack for picking them – the junkies – and she was rarely wrong.
She
entrusted him with one-hundred and twenty pounds to score sixty brown and sixty
white. He both scored and brought back the drugs – the latter not being a given
when strangers score for strangers, especially when buying heroin and crack.
With that action, sadly, he proved more reliable and perhaps more deserving of
her trust than the majority of people with whom she associated.
Although in
her cigarette packet she still had the crack from The Lanesborough, she needed
more. And she needed the heroin to come down, but before coming down, she
wanted to get as high as she knew how. Speedballing. The superlative
combination of heroin and crack. The transportation to Shangri-la.
None of her
friends took heroin. The only two heroin dealers she knew – Jay and Ajay –
weren’t answering their phones. That was why she had to follow her usual Plan
B, which she imagined was no more jeopardous than working.
The stranger
had suggested shooting up in the toilet on Inverness Street. She didn’t want to
wait to walk back to her car so had accompanied him inside the futuristic
street installation. Though the outside was modern, inside it was rank. One of
the worst public conveniences Shelley had ever used for a hit. The stench of
stale urine permeated every cell in the depths of her nasal cavities and from
there, travelled down her throat like post-nasal drip. Even though she kept her
mouth shut, she could taste it on her tongue. It was making her gag.
The spoon he
cooked up in wasn’t a spoon at all. Neither of them had one, so he used the
bottom of a coke can as a substitute. Shelley hoped the boiling would sterilise
the metal. She would have preferred her own clean spoon, but it was in her
glove box.
She wondered
if that was everything he owned, bundled into the small rucksack on his back.
She didn’t ask. She didn’t say anything. And neither did he. Why was she
dressed for the office when she was shooting up in a public toilet? Not that it
would have been difficult to conjure an alternative to what happened at The Lanesborough,
but she wasn’t there for conversation. She was there to forget. In her own way.
Not by the falsehoods Marianne tried to peddle.
She rolled
up her sleeves to choose a vein. Her arms were clean. So far, she’d managed to
evade the track marks, lumps, scabs, bruises and abscesses that would have been
tantamount to commercial suicide. To charge upwards of two-hundred and fifty
pounds an hour, her clients could never know she was an injector. So injecting
had to be organised, alternating numerous veins in her arms, hands, legs and
feet. If she was messy, she’d only be able to solicit clients on the street,
and streetwalking came with far more risk and a far lower financial reward.
When the
heroin had dissolved, she added a rock of crack. With the young man holding the
can steady, she used the plunger end of her syringe to grind the white stone
into the brown water. She hurried, craving to feel the warm safe-danger, her
body pulsating, and her head pumping like it was pumping out every tormenting memory
it stored. Soon, the relentless playback of those pictures and scenes would
stop. She would have her reprieve. Her respite. And although earning the money
to pay for it created new images, as abhorrent as they were, what she was
originally escaping from was worse.
Shelley
proffered her gold twenty-pack. He took a cigarette and, using his teeth, tore
off a chunk of filter. He snatched it from his mouth with his thumb and index
finger then dropped it into the concoction. Shelley noticed the scabs on his
lips and the dirt under his fingernails. The filter wasn’t clean. She needed
the hit.
“You first.” A gentleman, he held the can out
in front of Shelley, letting her draw up her shot before him.
“Pass it
here.” Shelley positioned her filled syringe between her teeth and reached for
the can to reciprocate.
Once his
barrel was full, she delicately placed the empty can on what seemed like a dry
area of the floor, saving the filter for the next fix. If she was taking one
hit from the dirty filter, what difference would a second make?
She wrapped
one hand around her wrist. She squeezed. On cue, her pulse thumped and the map
of blue veins rose from the back of her hand. She let go, swiped the syringe
from her mouth, removed the orange cap with her teeth and inserted the needle
into a sinking vein at the base of her hand. Pulling back on the plunger, blood
swirled into her medicine. Inside, her rush was brewing. She pushed it all in.
Soul
Destruction: Unforgivable was released 29 April 2013. Available worldwide
from all major online retailers in paperback and e-book. Also available direct from Caffeine Nights.
Further
information and contact details:
Ruth Jacobs’s Amazon author page - UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ruth-Jacobs/e/B008OJ0ZMC and US: http://www.amazon.com/Ruth-Jacobs/e/B008OJ0ZMC
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