Roxanne

“Give me everything in the till. Notes only! Don’t make me nervous or I’ll shoot!” The waitress handed me twenty dollars. I fled back to the car and John hightailed it outta there. At seventeen she was living in an old car, fleeing across the Australian desert, committing  armed robberies to please the convicted child molester who had  ‘befriended her’. Taking handfuls of drugs to block out her memories of an abused childhood, life was on the streets, years in and out of mental institutions, cold and hungry days on the run, and panic attacks in jail. Slashing herself was the only thing she knew to do even when the drugs could not keep the terror at bay. Living with severe dissociative disorder, and a lifetime of abuse. Her abusers broke her down, before she had chance to build herself up.  ‘Roxanne' is a fascinating, sometimes confronting, insight into a life most of us will only hear about fleetingly on the six o’clock news. There’s always more to the story, and this is Roxanne’s.