Bought and Sold Read online

  ‘You look really good,’ he said a few minutes later, when I was standing in front of him wearing a tight black vest decorated with tiny red roses, a matching frilly thong and a pair of stiletto-heeled shoes. ‘You’re going to do well tonight.’ I must have looked as anxiously miserable as I felt, because he laughed as he added, ‘Don’t worry. It’s much better to be here than doing what you’re used to doing. It’s a lot quicker. You don’t have to talk to the men. You don’t let them touch you and you don’t let them do anything without condoms, not even for extra money. All you have to do is open your legs, they fuck you, and then they leave. It really is as simple as that!’

  Maybe it did seem simple to him. Maybe to a man who had control over his own life and didn’t consider a girl like me to have anything at all in common with, say, his mother or his sister, it did seem to be merely a job. To me though, working in a brothel was a very frightening, soul-destroying prospect, and probably the worst thing I could ever have imagined myself doing.

  After Elek left, the woman told me, ‘We open in half an hour. Your hair looks a mess. Go and sort it out, and then do your make-up. You need a lot more make-up than you’re wearing.’ When she was satisfied with the way I looked, she took a handful of condoms out of the box Elek had given me and laid them out in rows on a table, four in the first row and several rows of ten underneath it. Then she handed me a piece of paper and a pencil and said, ‘Everyone pays twenty euros. You have to keep a tally. You don’t get any money for the first four, so don’t write them down; they cover your costs – rent, electricity, etc.’

  In fact, the men paid her directly and I didn’t handle any money at all. I just waited behind a curtain until she called me into the salon, which was the main room where potential customers looked me up and down and tried to decide if I was worth 20 euros, while the woman described to them with bored indifference all the things I could do. Some of the men, particularly the young ones, just came to look and had no real intention of ‘buying’. Those who did pay their money were given one of three room numbers and directed to the staircase, and I followed them up in a rickety old lift, trying to shut my mind to any thought at all.

  It was a single-girl brothel, which meant that I was the only girl working on a particular shift. The woman who ran it was nasty and devious. ‘Be quick,’ she was always telling me. ‘Get your skates on. All three rooms are full. Time is money.’ She was obviously running scams, one of which involved removing ten condoms from the table every night, instead of the agreed four, and then insisting that I had made a mistake with my tally. I wasn’t in any position to argue with her, and although I was annoyed when I realised what she was doing, it didn’t really matter who got the money: whoever it was, it wasn’t going to be me.

  ‘You can’t touch,’ I would say to all the men. Then I would lie on the bed and tell them, as the woman was always telling me, ‘Hurry up. Be quick.’ Twenty euros bought them five minutes, after which, whether they had finished or not, they had to pay again or go. When I insisted – and I was equally ruthless with all of them – some of them would start kicking off. So I would press the button beside the bed, which alerted the woman downstairs, who would call one of the Albanian ‘bouncers’ who always stood outside the house, and he would man-handle the guy out into the street – after beating him up if he was still resisting.

  When we were busy, men who decided to pay for extra time would often have to wait while I took the additional 20 euros down to the woman and got rid of the men in the other two rooms. Sometimes they got fed up with waiting and would open the door of the room they were in and start shouting, ‘Come on. Where are you?’ It took a great deal more to embarrass me than it had done just a few months earlier, but I did feel embarrassed for those men. A lot of the clients were dirty and ill-kempt, and clearly indifferent to what the rest of the world might think about them, while even well-off local businessmen didn’t seem to be bothered by the fact that there might be men in the waiting room who would recognise them.

  I had more than 50 clients that first night, and by the end of it I was in agony. Elek came to pick me up and dropped me at the hotel, and after I’d had just a few hours’ sleep, he took me back to the brothel again. I worked there night after night without a break for several weeks before he moved me on to another place, and after that to another one. Every new brothel was dingy and dirty and almost indistinguishable from the one I had just been working in. The only difference was that in some of them, despite having a consistent average of at least 50 clients every night, I would be told, ‘Try something different. You’re not doing enough.’

  One night, when business was slow, I heard a man tell the brothel owner, ‘I’ve brought my son. He’s fifteen and he’s a virgin.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ she said. ‘She does virgins. It’s forty euros.’ I could tell from her voice she was smiling, but I felt sick at the thought that a man would take his son to a place like that.

  A few minutes later, when I opened the door of one of the rooms upstairs and found an anxious-looking boy sitting on the edge of the filthy bed, I just wanted to cry. He was the same age as I was, although I felt much older. I tried my best to dissuade him, telling him, ‘You’re too young. I feel like a paedophile. Please, don’t do this. This isn’t the way to lose your virginity.’ But he was determined, and then angry and humiliated because he couldn’t do it.

  When I told Elek about it afterwards, how I had hated it and didn’t want to do it again, he shrugged and said, ‘You have to. It’s normal for some Greek men. It’s what they do. They bring their sons to brothels to make them into men and to make sure they don’t turn gay.’ I didn’t know much about anything, but even I knew that was ridiculous. After what I had already seen and experienced, however, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised or disgusted by anything ‘some men do’.

  When Elek picked me up from the brothels in the early hours of the morning, I would give him half of what I had earned. Then, once a week, he would take me to a Western Union office, where I would send Jak the other half, minus 30 euros, which I was allowed to keep and spend on cigarettes and food. One night, Elek couldn’t come for some reason, so he told me to walk to the hotel where he would meet me later to collect his money. After he had been and gone, I stayed in the hotel bar and was just finishing drinking the coke he’d bought me when the Albanian hotel owner said, ‘We’ve got some girls coming in tonight,’ and winked at me as if we shared a secret. I had no idea what he meant, so I just nodded and said, ‘Oh, right.’ But I was interested enough – and certainly lonely enough – to decide that I would wait to see them.

  When eight girls came into the bar a little while later, I didn’t recognise the language they were speaking to each other. They were with a Greek man and woman, and as they all sat down, one of the girls smiled at me shyly. Another girl asked the man in English, ‘So what is the restaurant like? I haven’t worked as a waitress before. Will they teach us how to do it? Doesn’t it matter that we can’t speak Greek?’

  ‘It’s a very nice restaurant,’ the man answered. ‘And don’t worry about the language or about training for the work. You won’t have any problems, any of you.’

  The girls all nodded and I realised that they must all speak English too. One of them said something in their own language and as they all leaned forward to listen to her, I heard the man say quietly in Greek, ‘You don’t need much training to be able to lie on your back and open your legs.’ And the woman laughed.

  I quickly looked away, pretending to cough to cover up the sound of my sharp intake of breath. ‘Just stay calm,’ I told myself. ‘Don’t give any sign that you heard what he said.’ The blood was pounding in my ears and even when I clutched the edge of the seat very tightly I couldn’t stop my body shaking, because I knew what was going to happen to those poor, unsuspecting girls.

  I was still struggling to control my rising panic when the Greek couple told the girls they were just going to have a word with the hotel ow
ner – who was now out at the reception desk – and then they walked out of the bar. The girl who had smiled at me when they first came in, and who was sitting at the table nearest to mine, leaned across and said, ‘Hello. Do you work here?’

  ‘No,’ I answered, forcing myself to return her shy smile. ‘I’m … I’m just staying here for a while.’

  ‘We’re going to be staying here too,’ she said. ‘I’m Kasia. I’m from Poland. I go to college there. I’ve come here to work as a waitress for a while so that I can save some money for my studies. It’s the first time I’ve ever been away from my family. I miss them already, and my boyfriend too. But it’s a good job, I think. I can’t earn so much money in Poland.’

  Apart from a couple of my loneliest clients, it was more than anyone had told me about themselves in months. I suddenly felt desperately sad at the thought that this girl I didn’t know was the closest thing to a friend I’d had in all that time. She seemed to be a really sweet girl and I wanted to say something to her, to warn her to get out before it was too late. But I was frightened. Although I didn’t know anything about the Greek couple, I knew that the Albanian hotel owner could be violent – I had often seen him hit his wife when he was drunk. Despite my fear, however, I knew that, if there was any chance the girl could escape, I couldn’t just turn my back on her and walk away.

  I needed to think. So I said something polite to Kasia and went upstairs to my room, where I sat on the balcony smoking a cigarette, trying to clear my head of the white noise of confusion.

  Chapter 8

  I was still sitting on the balcony when Kasia appeared on the one next door. She seemed pleased to see me there and to have someone to talk to. She told me about her home, her studies in Poland and how she was already feeling homesick. And I explained how I had come to Greece on holiday with my mum and how we had both fallen in love and decided to stay. Then I told her what I had heard the Greek couple say in the bar downstairs.

  For a moment she just stared at me, as though her grasp of English had suddenly failed her, and then she burst into tears.

  ‘Hush,’ I whispered across the balcony railings. ‘Don’t let anyone hear you crying. Come round to my room. I’ll open the door. But be quiet, for heaven’s sake.’

  Her face was white and she was shaking when I let her into my room.

  ‘Where are the other girls?’ I asked her.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I think they’re still downstairs, talking about all the things we’re going to do while we’re here.’ A sob caught in the back of her throat and I put my hand on her arm. ‘I’m going to try to help you. It will be all right,’ I assured her, although I had no real reason to believe that it would be.

  ‘I’ve got my phone,’ she said, as if she had only just remembered it. ‘You can speak Greek. We’ll just call the police and …’

  ‘No, we can’t do that,’ I interrupted her. ‘I don’t know if we can trust the police.’ Jak had warned me many times that if I ever went to the police, he would know, and I was afraid that even if Kasia didn’t mention my name, he would find out somehow that I had been involved.

  ‘What am I going to do?’ she wailed. ‘I can’t stay here. I have to go home. I want my mum and my boyfriend. I came here to work as a waitress. I can’t do … that.’

  Suddenly, I remembered the phone number written on the screwed-up piece of paper I had hidden at the bottom of my bag. ‘There is someone who might help us,’ I told Kasia. ‘He’s a nice guy, and very rich. I’m sure he would buy you a plane ticket home if I tell him what’s happened.’ In fact, I didn’t even know if the bit of paper was still there. But it was, and I had a sense of elation as I smoothed it out and discovered that the numbers written on it were still just legible.

  I sent a text to Andreas saying, ‘It’s Megan. Please phone me urgently on this number.’ And my phone rang almost immediately.

  ‘It’s lovely to hear from you,’ Andreas said, in his quiet, competent-sounding voice. ‘I hope this means you’re going to come to see me.’

  ‘I need your help,’ I told him. ‘I’m with a girl who needs to get out of a really bad situation. Will you help us? Please.’

  ‘Come round.’ Andreas was instantly serious. ‘You know where I am. Get a taxi. I’ll pay for it when you get here.’

  ‘I really do think he’ll help you to get home,’ I said to Kasia. ‘First though, we have to get out of here without anyone seeing us.’

  I think I was even more scared than she was, because I knew what would happen if I got caught trying to help her escape. But I felt proud too, for daring to try to help her when I hadn’t ever dared to help myself. Ironically, perhaps, I was so focused on trying to save Kasia, so she wouldn’t have to go through what I was going through, that I didn’t really think about myself at all. So I didn’t consider the possibility that if Andreas could get Kasia out of the country and home, maybe he could do the same for me. In all the scenarios I might have imagined, I was an invisible presence. I suppose that was because in my mind, as well as in the minds of everyone I ever had anything to do with, I was a non-person. The only thing that concerned me at that moment, though, was how to get out of the hotel with Kasia and somehow find my way to Andreas’s house.

  ‘Just follow me,’ I told the pale, visibly shaking girl. ‘Stay close and don’t make a sound.’ Then I opened the bedroom door very slowly, held my breath and listened for a few seconds, before, very cautiously, putting my head out just far enough to be able to see in both directions along the almost-dark corridor.

  I had just stepped out of the room and was turning back to whisper to her to follow me when we heard a loud bellowing shout. Kasia made a whimpering sound and I pulled her out into the corridor, hissing at her, ‘Quick! Go into your room and lock the door.’ And then I did the same.

  It was the hotel owner’s voice we had heard; I could tell that he was very drunk and in a rage. Why he was screaming my name and threatening to kill me, I didn’t know, nor did I ever find out. Just a few seconds after I had darted back into my room and locked the door, he was hammering on it with his fists. As I stood, flattened against the wall, I could see through the small window above the door the knife he was waving above his head, and I began to pray. Like everything else in the hotel, the door of my room was flimsy and cheaply made, and I knew it wouldn’t take him long to bust it off its hinges. There was only one other way out. Shaking and telling myself, ‘It’ll be all right; just don’t look down,’ I climbed up on to the worn-stone parapet that surrounded my balcony, took a deep breath and stepped across the three-storey drop to the road below onto Kasia’s balcony.

  When she saw me appear in front of her, Kasia had to clamp her hand over her mouth to stop herself screaming. My legs were shaking so much I stumbled and nearly fell, and she put her arm round me to help me into her room, where we stood together, listening to the hotel owner ranting and raving and kicking my door. When the noise stopped abruptly, the whole world seemed to fall silent. A few seconds later, I heard the lift door opening and closing, followed by the distinctive whirring sound it made as it moved between floors.

  We waited and listened for a minute or two longer, in case it was a trick. Then we crept out into the corridor, ran down the stairs, through the open door of the hotel and out into the street. Luckily, no one saw us and once we were outside we just kept running, following the tramline to the next stop, where we jumped on a tram that would take us to the part of town where Andreas lived. It would probably have made more sense to do what he had suggested and get a taxi. But I was panicking and, fortunately, we didn’t encounter a ticket inspector before the tram reached our stop and we jumped off.

  When Andreas opened the front door of his expensive townhouse, we almost fell across the threshold. He ushered us into his elegantly furnished living room, and after I had calmed down enough to be able to tell him what had happened, he picked up the phone and booked Kasia a ticket on a flight to Poland.

  ‘Can she s
tay with you until it’s time for her to leave?’ I asked Andreas. ‘Will you look after her? I have to go back to the hotel.’ He promised he would, and I knew he would keep his word.

  ‘And you?’ he asked me. ‘Are you all right? Don’t you want me to book a flight to somewhere for you too?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I lied. ‘Just take care of Kasia. You don’t have to worry about me.’ After all, where would I have gone? Kasia had a mother, a boyfriend and a home in Poland; whereas my mother was living in Greece – not far enough away for me, or her, to be safe from danger – and there was no one waiting for me back in England.

  It was fear that was really imprisoning me and preventing me from trying to escape. Elek rarely used violence to control me, as Jak had done. His methods were more subtle – I had seen the gun he kept under the seat of his motorcycle – and I believed him when he told me that someone was always watching me and when he threatened, in the same calm, matter-of-fact voice, that there would be ‘massive trouble’ if I ever tried to run away.

  I didn’t want to think about what was going to happen to the other Polish girls. I knew I couldn’t help them all. Although the risk I had already taken in leaving the hotel had been worth it for Kasia’s sake, I didn’t know what would happen when I went back. Any potentially plausible excuse I might be able to come up with – that I had been frightened by the hotel owner, for example – would only be believed if I didn’t stay away too long. I had become very paranoid; I was even convinced that my phone was being tracked. So I was also anxious to get away from Andreas’s house as quickly as possible in case someone did come after me and found Kaisa there too. The trouble was, the prospect of going back to the hotel was every bit as frightening as not going back. When I think about it now, it seems incredible that I had an opportunity to escape and didn’t take it.

  Kasia hugged me and thanked me and said she would get in touch as soon as she was safely out of the country. Then Andreas put me in a taxi and I sat on the back seat, praying no one had discovered that both Kasia and I were missing and, if they had, that they wouldn’t connect her disappearance with mine.