Bought and Sold Page 11

  Andreas had given the taxi driver money and I asked him to drop me off a short distance from the hotel. As I walked quickly along the road with my heart thudding, I kept my head down, hiding my face from anyone who might see and recognise me. Rounding the corner into the road where the hotel was, I heard the sound of voices before I saw the police cars. When I looked up, the hotel seemed to be swarming with police.

  My first, excited, thought was that the other girls had somehow found out what was really planned for them and had phoned the police for help. It was only later that I discovered what had actually happened was that when the hotel owner hadn’t been able to find me, he had directed his drunken aggression towards his wife. It was someone who had seen him attacking her that had called the police. When they arrived – by the carload – they’d arrested the hotel owner and closed the hotel.

  Somehow, Elek had already heard what had happened and my phone started ringing while I was still standing outside, trying to persuade one of the policemen to let me go in.

  ‘Pack up all your stuff,’ Elek told me. ‘I’ll come and get you as soon as I can.’

  I didn’t know why the hotel owner had been threatening to kill me. At the time I thought it might have been because he had found out I had spoken to Kasia, and therefore he might already have told Elek. So although Elek didn’t sound angry when he spoke to me on the phone, I felt sick with anxiety as I waited for him.

  Fortunately, the policeman let me go into the hotel to collect my things, and when Elek arrived he was more concerned with other potential problems than with anything I might have been doing before he got there. ‘If anyone asks you any questions,’ he warned me, ‘say you’re in Greece on holiday.’ By some miracle, I had got away with it. The hotel owner was sent to prison for assaulting his wife and the hotel was shut down. I don’t know what happened to the other girls. I hope with all my heart that they went home to their families in Poland.

  When he came to pick me up, Elek drove me to another hotel, where he told me to wait until he came back for me. All the places I stayed while I was in Athens were more like doss-houses than hotels; this one was the dirtiest, most cockroach-infested of them all.

  The following day, I had a text from Andreas asking if it was okay for him to phone me. After I had texted him back to say that it was, he told me, ‘It’s good news. Everything went according to plan. Kasia is safely back in Poland. She sent me an email when she got home and she asked me to tell you, “Thank you very much for saving my life.” She says she hopes you do well and that she would like to keep in touch with you.’

  ‘Thank you for getting her out, Andreas,’ I said. ‘I knew you would. I’m really grateful to you.’

  Fortunately, as Elek didn’t really care what I did as long as he got his money, he rarely checked my phone, so he didn’t find out about the call from Andreas. I erased the text messages though, and then I threw myself across the dirty, stained sheet on the bed and cried until I couldn’t cry any more. Why hadn’t I admitted to Andreas that I wasn’t the ‘willing’ prostitute I pretended to be? Why hadn’t I asked him to help me, too? I was glad Kasia had escaped and I was proud of the role I had played in helping her to do so. But I was filled with despair at the realisation that I had missed what might be the only opportunity I would ever have to break the invisible bonds that bound me to a life of unremitting loneliness and humiliation.

  When Elek came to pick me up the next day, he took me to a café, where he introduced me to a Greek man, probably in his fifties, called Christoph. After they had spoken to each other briefly, Christoph handed Elek a wad of notes.

  ‘He’ll look after you now,’ Elek told me. ‘I’ll see you around.’ Then he stood up, shook the other man’s hand, and walked away.

  I don’t know if it’s possible to feel any more mortified and ashamed than I did as I sat in the café that day trying to make sense of the fact that I had just been sold. It had happened before, of course, when Leon had bought a ‘half-share’ in me from Jak, and when he had sold his share on again to Elek. I hadn’t understood what was happening then, and I don’t think I really even understood it now. As long as I clung to the belief that everything I did was for Jak and me, I could stop my brain trying to process the facts I didn’t want to accept. In reality, though, after he had left me in Athens, Jak had never phoned me or answered my calls. He had just sent me a text every few days – no words, just a kiss or a love heart. And then, after a while, I had stopped hearing anything from him at all. The truth I was refusing to face was that his only remaining interest in me was financial.

  I’m a stronger person now than I was then, although I still need to work on my confidence and self-esteem. When I look back on that time, I feel angry with myself and incredibly sad. When you truly believe that you’re nothing, you don’t even consider the possibility that you have a choice about anything. You’re like a puppet, waiting for someone to pick up your strings and control your actions. And when the puppeteer puts you down, you don’t do anything, because you’ve got so used to being a puppet you’ve forgotten that you were ever able to think and act for yourself.

  Now that Elek had handed the strings to Christoph, the only thing that changed for me immediately was that it was Christoph who picked me up every morning from the hotel room I shared with a whole army of cockroaches. For the next few months, I continued to work in different brothels around the city, sometimes during the day and sometimes at night. I did some escorting jobs as well, in hotel rooms and in the homes of people who had never even heard the nocturnal sound of an insect’s scuttling feet.

  I worked alone in some of the brothels; others were studios, where I would be one of two girls working at any particular time and where men would come in, look at us both and then choose between us. For someone with already barely measurable self-confidence, not being picked might have been difficult to process – even when the person doing the picking was just some sleaze-ball who had wandered in off the street. But, by that time, I didn’t feel anything at all.

  Christoph didn’t hit me. In fact, he often praised me. ‘Look at you!’ he would say. ‘You’re stunning. You must be proud. You must tell yourself, “I am a good and special person.” Go on, say it.’ And I was so lonely and so starved of affection that for a moment I did feel special, simply because he said I was.

  One day he told me, ‘You shouldn’t be doing this. Why are you doing this?’

  ‘So that my boyfriend and I can build our own house and have a family,’ I answered.

  ‘Ah, you will have a lovely place!’ Christoph looked into the distance and smiled, as if he, too, could see the image I still clung to. For a while, his words brought definition again to the dream that had begun to fade, and I could almost believe that one day it would become a reality.

  Most of the girls who worked in the brothels were Albanian and Romanian, a few were Greek, others were Polish, Russian, Lithuanian and Moldovan. Although I didn’t really talk to any of them, I began to suspect that most of them weren’t doing the work any more willingly than I was. Even when I worked with other girls in the studios, we rarely spoke to each other. I wanted to talk to them, but when I tried to do so, I think I came across as being needy and a bit weird. The dehumanising effect of what I was doing seemed to have damaged my ability to communicate with other people.

  I would see girls out on the streets – students and girls who worked in shops and offices – and I would want to be one of them so badly it was almost like a physical pain. They were living the life I had imagined I would when I came to Athens with Jak. As I watched them laughing and talking to each other, sometimes walking arm in arm, I could feel their energy and confidence, and it would make me sad to realise that I was invisible to them.

  When every day is the same and nothing changes, there’s no way of keeping track of the passage of time as the weeks become months. So I don’t know how long I had been in Athens when Christoph started taking me to different cities to live and work alone i
n brothels for a few weeks at a time. All the brothels were open for business 22 hours a day, 7 days a week. There were no days off, and it wasn’t long before I was completely shattered. They closed for a couple of hours in the early mornings so that the cleaners could come in, and that was when I was supposed to sleep. The problem was that I was usually so far beyond exhaustion, and so hyped up on iced coffee and the energy tablets the brothel owners gave me, that any sleep I did have was restless. Fortunately, there were few customers during siesta time and some of the brothels would close for two or three hours in the afternoons too – and then I would sleep as though I had been knocked unconscious.

  The windows of all the brothels were barred and boarded up and I never knew whether it was day or night, which messed up my body clock even more. Apart from the exhaustion, it didn’t really make any difference to me though: I wasn’t going anywhere, so I had no need to know what time of day or even day of the week it was.

  I had, on average, about 50 clients a night. On the worst night of all, 110 men paid to have sex with me. The owner of the brothel I was working in at the time was a man who was quite nice to me, and when I ran out of the back door after my 110th client and was violently sick, he closed up early. I thought that was decent of him – which shows just how distorted my sense of normality had become. But it was certainly more than the owners of most of the other brothels I had worked in would have done.

  I was ill after that night – not because of it, as it turned out, but because I had a stomach bug. I was already so run down physically that after a few days of severe sickness and diarrhoea, which left me shivering and curled up in agony, I became very weak. Christoph was sympathetic. He called me ‘poor girl’ and on the days when I was too ill even to get out of bed, he brought me food (which I couldn’t eat). He still made me work some nights though, even after I had thrown up on a client, and his apparent concern for me didn’t stretch to getting me the hospital treatment I really needed.

  After I had been ill for two weeks – by which time I was so painfully thin I looked like one of the walking dead – he moved me to another hotel in central Athens and, at last, took me to a hospital. When the doctor examined me, he said I had Salmonella poisoning and was seriously dehydrated. So they kept me there for a few hours while they put me on a drip. Christoph stayed with me, which I thought was nice of him and a sign that he really did care about me, as he always said he did. It was much later when I realised that what he had actually been doing was making sure I didn’t have any direct, one-to-one communication with hospital staff.

  As soon as I recovered from the stomach bug, I started doing escort work during the day and working at night in one of the many brothels in the city centre. I would walk back to the hotel at around 6 a.m., sleep till 9, and be ready when Christoph came to pick me up – never later than 10 – to take me to the first of the day’s escorting jobs, most of which were in apartments in the nicer areas of the city.

  Mum and I texted each other every day and sometimes she phoned me too. I had a special, cheerful voice I used as I described to her how well I was doing in my job as a waitress. It was obviously convincing, because she often said, ‘You sound so happy, Megan. I’m so pleased for you.’

  ‘I think Jak and I have split up,’ I told her one day, a long time after he had stopped answering even my texts. ‘But I’ve made new friends here and I’m fine about it. In fact, I’m thinking of going to college, to do a beauty course – you know, hair and nails.’ I was surprised by how easily the lies came and by the fact that, as I was telling them, I could almost believe I was living the life I was describing.

  ‘I can’t wait to see you any longer,’ Mum said when she phoned me a few days later. ‘You keep putting me off, saying you’re busy. And I can understand that you can’t spare the time to come here. But what if I came to Athens? Even if you can’t get any time off work, we could at least spend a few hours together.’

  ‘I’ll see if I can work something out,’ I told her.

  It had been a long time since I had last seen her, and although it was what I wanted more than anything else in the world, the thought of her coming to Athens threw me into a state of panic.

  Chapter 9

  The next time I saw Christoph, I somehow managed to pluck up the courage to say to him, ‘My mum wants to come to visit me. You know she lives in Greece now, on the coast? So it’s difficult to keep putting her off. And I do really want to see her.’

  We were in Christoph’s car at the time, driving along a busy road on the way to a brothel a short distance from the city. He didn’t say anything at all for a minute or two. Then he slowed down, pulled in to the side of the road and stopped the car. When he leaned towards me, I flinched, thinking he was going to hit me. Instead, he opened the glove box, took out a photograph and handed it to me.

  Although the image was clear and in focus, it seemed to have been taken through a doorway into a dimly lit room, and I couldn’t make any sense of it at first. Then Christoph asked me, pleasantly, ‘Is that your mum?’ And suddenly I realised that the ‘room’ was Nikos’s bar, and it felt as if someone was shaking my body from the inside.

  ‘Yes,’ I whispered, touching the image of my mother with my finger.

  ‘Well, you know what will happen to her if you do anything to make me angry.’ Christoph’s tone was still pleasant. ‘If you ever try to get away …’ He didn’t need to finish the sentence. He just looked at me without expression and did the shooting motion he sometimes did, with his fingers pointing at the photograph. Then he smiled, took the photograph out of my hand, put it back in the glove box and said, ‘It’s a great idea. So, what would you like to do while you’re mum’s here? We must make sure she has a good time.’

  The fact that Christoph had a photograph of my mother seemed simply to be further proof that what he often told me was true and that he had eyes everywhere. The only person who knew where my mum would be was Jak, and I was certain he wouldn’t have taken the photograph and given it to Christoph. When I saw Jak again, a long time later, he swore he didn’t know anything about it, and I believed him. But that was before I realised that almost every emotionally charged, heart-felt word he ever spoke to me was a lie.

  ‘Your mum thinks you’re working as a waitress?’ Christoph asked me, although it wasn’t really a question. ‘Right, well that’s easy.’ He patted my knee and pulled the car back into the traffic. ‘We’ll plan a nice day in Athens for her.’

  ‘She wants to come for a couple of nights,’ I told him, knowing that I was pushing my luck, but that Mum would be hurt – and possibly suspicious – if I insisted on just a one-night visit, particularly when we hadn’t seen each other for such a long time. ‘It will take her almost a whole day to get here.’ I held my breath as I waited for Christoph’s reaction. But to my huge relief he just shrugged and said, ‘Oh well, I suppose we can manage that.’

  He picked me up from the hotel a couple of days later and we went to a café, where he took a photograph of me standing next to the café owner, smiling and holding some cups on a tray. The next day, he gave me a print of the photo and said, ‘Put it in your bag. You can show it to your mum when she comes.’

  Mum arrived in Athens about a week after Christoph had agreed to her visit. He had booked a room for us in a hotel in the city centre, which turned out to be basic but clean, and in a completely different league from the ones I was used to staying in.

  ‘Tell her you’ve been given a couple of nights off work,’ he had said. ‘Eat in a nice restaurant. Enjoy yourself.’ He had counted out 250 euros and, as he was putting the notes in my hand, added, ‘But don’t forget, I’ll be watching you, all the time, everywhere you go.’

  I was incredibly excited at the thought of seeing my mum again. I had often fantasised about telling her what I was really doing in Athens, and once I knew she was coming, I tried to think of some way of letting her know the truth. Simply blurting it out while she was there wasn’t a viable option, because
I knew she would insist on doing something, and then both our lives would be in danger. I thought about writing a note and putting it in her pocket so that she would find it when she was at home and safe with Nikos again. But then I imagined her reading it, flying into a panic and phoning me when I was with Christoph, and him realising what I had done, no matter what excuse I tried to make. Or instead of phoning me, she might contact the police, which would be even worse, because I didn’t know if we could trust them.

  ‘Focus, Megan,’ I kept telling myself. ‘There has to be some way of doing this.’ But I knew in my heart that there was no way out that wouldn’t end badly – for me and, if I did anything to involve her while she was in Athens, for my mum too.

  When the day finally came, I was so excited I could barely sit still in Christoph’s car as he drove me to the coach station. After he dropped me off, I knew he was still there somewhere, watching as Mum stepped down off the coach. We were both crying as we flung our arms around each other. Mum was simply happy to see me, but for me there was an added reason, because it was the first time in more than a year that I had been held by someone who cared about me.

  I was aware of Christoph following us on several occasions while my mum was in Athens. At least twice, he drove past in his car and beeped the horn – just to let me know – and I waved and told Mum it was a friend. I’m sure he had other people watching us too. It didn’t matter though, because I wasn’t going to let anything spoil the few precious hours I had with my mother.

  On the first evening, we got a taxi from the hotel to a place by the sea where there are lots of bars and cafés. We bought hotdogs and sat outside a café talking and talking. I kept looking at Mum, trying to memorise everything about her and about the evening we were spending together – an evening I had believed I would never have – and imagining what it would be like to go home on the coach with her.