I’m huddled in a frozen ball, my hands pressing my knees together. ‘Please don’t rape me.’

I have a gun in my mouth. I don’t know much about guns, but the taste of the metal makes me want to gag. It’s 1999, 3am on a Saturday, Hillbrow, Johannesburg and I’ve never been more terrified in my life. There are four people in the one-roomed, dingy flat on Soper Road: a Nigerian dealer, two coloured gangstas and me.

“Open your legs,” a surly, scar-faced specimen called Baby Face instructs me.

I’m huddled in a frozen ball, my hands pressing my knees together.

“Please don’t rape me.”

My voice is small. My lips mercury-cold. I’m a broken bird – no crying, just a crackled whimper. Oh God, this can’t be happening to me. The terror, the fear gets the better of me. Hysteria rises.

“Shoot me, don’t rape me, shootmedon’trapemeshootme.”

The words are a desperate mantra. God’s not listening. The gun thuds into my temple. Pistol-whipped. Metal on skull silences me. Blank out.

“I don’t like sex.” He grins. “I like rape.”

He unzips his trousers. It’s all slow motion now.

“Please wear a condom,” I whisper. Weirdly, he obliges.

In this moment that is extended like elastic in time, I am vaguely relieved. Safe sex. No diseases. No Aids, gonorrhoea, STDs. It’s insane. I am about to be raped and I am relieved that latex is going to put some weird distance between this sicko and me.

I enter a place of white noise. The kind when you’re a kid and hold a shell against your ear and you hear the sea rushing in, that’s the space I go to. I turn my head and concentrate on the floral pattern on the yellowing wallpaper. I know I am defeated.

Now I close my eyes. Blank out. He pulls my stockings down and he rapes me. It’s strangely silent, unemotional. There is no violence, no struggle. Just empty blank. He is weak; crack-cocaine cock can’t do much, pushes pathetically into me. Sad stocking sausage. It doesn’t last long. Maybe three minutes.

I turn to the side and see the other two watching. I know they are coming to get me.

“Condoms,” I say. “Please wear.”

They oblige; one by one they move to me. It’s like a weird, ominous dance, slow motion. I am on an altar, a sacrifice, and they are penetrating me in some kind of symbolic act against all women.

Maybe they just want to get laid. Who knows? Are they having a good time? I wonder. What are they getting out of this? Do they like me? Do they think I’m fat? This must be the most unsexual, unerotic experience. It’s like fucking a dead person – necrophilia. Maybe they like that.

All these things go round and round in my head while one by one they rape me. The whole experience is over in less than thirty minutes. That’s all the time it’s taken to change me forever. Now I am raped. It hits me dull force. I am a zombie, dead. I am cut off, truncated to the core. It’s over. I go into the bathroom. I run a hot bath. I need something to burn me, clean it all away. The condoms are left lying near the bed. Pathetic drooped latex near the cigarette butt-burnt plastic dustbin.

My head is showing swelling, bruising. The eyes that stare back at me in the murky bathroom mirror are not mine. The steam is washing everything I knew about me away. I know I am never, ever, ever going to be the same again. I lie in the water. I get out. I put on my clothes, pull on my stockings. I go back to the bedroom. They are smoking.

My rapists give me a rock. Crack cocaine, my reward. I smoke it greedily on the glass pipe. Some call it sucking the devil’s cock. It is, it is. It is this little white drug that has brought me to this place, this hell.

Three weeks ago I was a mother, a housewife, a poet living in a four-bedroomed house in the North West. I had a full-time maid, a husband, a washing machine, two sons, a drug habit and a percolator. Now I am raped.

It feels like a career description: “What are you?” – a question to be asked at cocktail parties, glasses tinkling. Pause. “I am raped.”

My addiction to crack keeps me in this room with my rapists. I share more drugs. Soon it’s as though nothing has happened. They seem nonplussed by the events of half an hour ago.

They laugh and speak, referring to me intermittently. I seem to be forgetting quickly too. If I block it all out and take loads of drugs right now, perhaps it will be like this has never happened. Perhaps I will forget it all. As I bend down to suck the pipe and feel my heart race triple speed, I think . . . ”What you really need now is a hit of heroin, some smack.”

“Can you organise some brown for me – you know, heroin? I need to come down,” I whisper to no one in particular. My relationship with heroin began in 1993, as a flirtation.

“This is the baddest, worstest, most pushing of the limits of life,” I think secretively, hugging my tummy that has for the last hour been heaving merrily into a rust-orange, urine-stained toilet bowl.

All from smoking a single line of brown liquid, gliding like a snake-dragon slowly… Tinfoil catching the glint of a single candle, blowing weakly in the large, dank lounge of a draughty, unrenovated house in pre-election Yeoville.

“This stuff is amaaazing!” I sigh languidly.

Sarah Bernhardt to herself. Mata Hari in an opium den. Maud Allan. It’s just me and the brown and Lou and the darkness of The Velvet Underground. I’ve never met a junkie who liked light. You can’t. It reminds you too much of the other world, the ‘real world’, the world of tomorrow, later, sometime, soon, whenever . . . 8–4 jobs, insurance, medical aid, 2.5 kids, Aids, policies for life, death, hail, rain, cancer, education, plastic surgery. So much fucking insurance it makes me hurl, bring up again.