Bought and Sold Page 14

  As soon as the courtroom had been cleared, I told the judge, ‘I don’t think I really understood the question. Can you speak in English?’ She must have thought I was stupid and that I would have a very limited grasp of my own language too, because she spoke very slowly, saying, ‘I asked you if you had been trafficked, and you answered “Yes.”’

  ‘Oh no! No, that’s not true,’ I said, wiping the sweat from my hands on to my crumpled skirt. ‘No, no. I’m really sorry. I can’t believe I said that.’

  She looked at me coldly for a moment. Then she made an irritable clicking noise with her tongue, sighed and told the court officer to let everyone back into the courtroom. I forced myself to look directly at Christoph as he walked in, and I prayed that somehow he would be able to tell from the expression in my eyes that I was sorry.

  After the judge had explained to everyone that I had made a mistake, I related the story of how I had ended up in a car with a man I didn’t know. Then she asked Christoph why the police had found thousands of condoms in the boot of his car, 10,000 euros and the passports of numerous women in the glove box, and a small arsenal of weapons under the driver’s seat.

  ‘I can’t answer this question,’ Christoph told her, his self-confidence clearly restored, ‘because it is not my car. It is a car I borrowed from a friend, who I haven’t seen or heard from in a long time.’

  ‘And what is this friend’s name?’ You could tell by the way the judge asked the question that she already knew that the name he would give her would belong to a man who didn’t exist.

  A few minutes later, the hearing was adjourned and Christoph and I were driven back, separately, to the police station.

  I saw Christoph briefly when we got back to the police station. We passed each other in the corridor and he gave me a warning look. Then I was taken into a small office where four police officers started firing questions at me. They were really pushing me to give them answers, I suppose in the hope that I would eventually slip up and tell them what they wanted to know.

  ‘You know him, don’t you?’ one of the policemen asked. ‘Why don’t you tell us the truth? You know him and he’s making you work. He’s trafficking you, isn’t he? Answer the question.’

  ‘I don’t know him,’ I insisted. ‘He just gave me a lift.’

  ‘Well, if you’re working for yourself, you must have some money. How much are you earning? How much have you got saved? What do spend your money on?’

  ‘I spend everything I earn,’ I said. ‘I buy clothes. I go out. That’s why I haven’t got any money saved up. I like the work I’m doing. I just want you to leave me alone.’

  I felt almost pleased with myself for outwitting the policemen and protecting Christoph, even though, by lying to them and refusing to answer their questions, I was blocking any attempts they might have made to help me. But I knew I couldn’t trust anyone, particularly after the way the two policemen had treated me and Flori in the cell the previous night.

  In fact, I thought it was all part of an elaborate test. Christoph had told me many times that he had contacts in the police, and I was (almost) certain that if I did say anything, they would tell him and he would send people to kill my mum, and then me. I was sure that the advice the girl had given me the night before was right and that the only way to survive was to keep my mouth shut. So I stuck to my story and answered their questions without telling them anything.

  Despite the fact that they were firing questions at me, I think, to begin with, the policemen wanted me to believe that they were on my side. Eventually, though, as their patience began to wear thin, they started getting really annoyed with me and one of them suddenly pushed back his chair, stood up and said, ‘Come with me. Come.’

  As I walked out of the room and into the corridor behind him, I heard a sharp sound like something cracking, and when he opened another door, I saw Christoph. He was slumped on a chair and a man was slapping him repeatedly across the face. I gasped and the man stood upright, stretching the muscles in his back. Then Christoph turned his head and looked at me, and I felt a surge of sympathetic affection for the weak, wounded old man he appeared to be. That sounds absurd, I know, that I felt sorry for the man who sold me many times every day to anyone who was willing to pay a few euros to have sex with me. Unlikely as it may sound, though, it is possible, when no one cares about you at all, to become attached to the one person who sometimes says nice things to you.

  I felt guilty, too, because I thought that what was being done to Christoph was my fault. ‘Please don’t let them hit him,’ I said to the police officer who had opened the door. ‘He’s done nothing wrong. You have to believe me. I barely even know him. He was just helping out a friend by giving me a lift.’

  The policeman didn’t answer. He just closed the door and opened another one, a little further along the corridor. One of his colleagues followed us into the small, cramped office and suddenly I felt really frightened because I was certain that the moment had come when, somehow, they were going to force me to tell them the truth.

  Instead of doing any of the things they do in films, though, one of the policemen took a bottle out of a cupboard, put a glass down on the table in front of me, poured whisky into it and said, ‘Drink that. It’ll help you to calm down.’

  Seeing Christoph looking tired and almost defeated, when I was used to him being strong and totally in control, had really upset and unnerved me, and I was crying. In fact, I cried a lot of the time when I was in the police station. So although I hated the taste of alcohol, I only hesitated for a moment before lifting the glass to my lips and taking a sip of the whisky.

  ‘Drink more,’ the policeman shouted, snatching up the glass and gripping my chin in his strong fingers as he tried to force it into my mouth. ‘Drink it. You will speak to us. We need to know the truth.’ Then he thrust the glass into my hand and as soon as I had drunk the whisky he filled it up again.

  ‘We need you to tell us the truth,’ the other policeman said, sternly but more calmly. ‘We’ve been after this man for a long time. We have to stop him. Isn’t that what you want too? All we need is one person to tell us the truth so that we can nail him. And then it will all be over.’

  I don’t know if it was the whisky that turned my fear into panic, or if it was guilt because I had been struggling with the thought that time might be running out for the girls in the apartment. But suddenly I burst into tears. ‘There are other girls,’ I said, the words tumbling out of my mouth as though they were trying to escape before I changed my mind. ‘There are other girls who need help. I’ve seen them. They’re locked in an apartment. There was a child there too – she was just a little girl. But men came and took her away. Please, you have to help them.’

  One of the policemen put his hand on my shoulder and I saw him exchange a look of quiet triumph with his colleague, which faded instantly when I added, in a completely different, sly tone, ‘But I don’t know him. I don’t know who he is.’

  It was almost as if someone was flicking a switch in my head that was making my emotions veer wildly between guilt and fear – for myself, for all the other girls who were trapped in the same spiral of hopeless despair and, paradoxically, for Christoph. I was desperate to get away from him: whatever some people prefer to believe, no one in their right mind would ever willingly live the sort of life I was living. The only way I had been able to survive at all was by locking my emotions in a box and throwing away the key. But I was scared, not only of Christoph, but also because I had been so brainwashed by him and by the controlling men who had owned my life before him that I didn’t know what would happen to me if I was set free.

  One thing I did realise, however, was that I was damned if I did tell the truth and damned if I didn’t. If Christoph went to prison because of something I said, he would send one of his people after me and, even more importantly, after my mother. If I didn’t say anything to the police, I would be condemning to a life of misery and abuse all the other girls he had already traff
icked and all the ones he would go on to trick in the future. It felt like a huge responsibility and an impossible choice. What swayed it for me in the end, though, was the thought of something terrible happening to my mum.

  The two policemen continued to fire questions at me for what seemed like hours. And I continued to stick to my story, until eventually I was taken back to the cell.

  The next day, I was released, and as I walked out of the police station with Christoph, he handed me 50 euros and said, ‘Good girl. Go back to the hotel. I’ll be in touch.’

  Chapter 11

  I took a taxi back to the hotel, where I had a shower and then sat on the bed, not knowing what to do or what was going to happen next. I didn’t have to wait long. Christoph called that evening to say everything was back to normal and he was coming to pick me up.

  As he was driving me to a brothel that night, he told me again that I was a ‘good girl’. ‘You’re one of the clever ones,’ he said. ‘You’re not like the other girls. You’re special. I can trust you. I love you, you know.’ Only a fool would have believed him. Or someone who was so starved of affection and convinced of her own worthlessness that she clutched with both hands at the pathetic straw of comfort that was being offered to her.

  I don’t know what happened with the police. Christoph told me some time later that the court hearing had been adjourned, and then I never heard anything more about it. I didn’t do any more daytime escorting for a while after that. Instead, I worked in one of four different brothels every night, and occasionally during the day as well. None of them was far from the hotel I was staying in, so I would often walk to them on my own and then back again the next morning. Christoph ordered takeaways for me and phoned me regularly, and when I wasn’t working or sleeping, I sat in my dingy hotel room texting my mum.

  Despite the fact that everything got back to normal pretty quickly – or, at least, to what I had learned to accept as normal – it wasn’t long before something seemed to have changed.

  ‘What’s up with you?’ Christoph asked me. ‘You used to make at least three thousand euros a day and now you’re not earning anything like that.’

  ‘Maybe people just don’t have the money to spare,’ I said. ‘I am trying my best.’

  ‘Look at you!’ He put his hand under my chin and jerked my head upwards. ‘You’ve got bags under your eyes. Don’t you get enough sleep? How many times have I told you that when you’re not working you should be sleeping, not messing about? You can have showers when you wake up, or at work when things are quiet. Come on, Megan. You have to do better than this.’

  It wasn’t long after that when he took me to a small town several miles outside Athens, where he left me to work in a brothel that was one of maybe ten on the same road. He came back a couple of times every week to collect the money I had earned. Sometimes the woman who ran the brothel would say, ‘You and I will keep the money for the next customer who comes in and not tell Christoph.’ But although she was nice to me, I couldn’t be sure she wasn’t setting me up. So I always said, ‘I can’t. I have to be loyal to him.’ What good would the money have been to me anyway?

  One day, the woman told me, ‘I’ve just had a phone call from Christoph. From now on, when I introduce you in the waiting room, I’m to say that you do a “no-condom programme” for twenty euros more.’

  I didn’t know much about AIDS, and even less about other sexually transmitted diseases; but I knew enough to be horrified by the prospect of having unprotected sex with the sort of men who visited the brothel. I had occasionally had to do it before then, but not as part of a regular ‘programme’ – for an extra 20 euros that wasn’t going to be of any benefit to me.

  Although he did sometimes hit me, Christoph wasn’t as violent as Jak had been. So it wasn’t really because I was afraid of him that I didn’t ask him not to make me do it. I had been in Athens for more than four years by that time, and I was so used to doing whatever I was told to do that I simply accepted the fact that I had no choice – about who I had sex with and under what conditions, or about anything else. I was very anxious though, which, as it turned out, I was right to be.

  I had been living and working at the brothel for a few weeks when Christoph arrived at 2 o’clock one morning to drive me back to Athens. I must have fallen asleep after just a few minutes, so I don’t know how long he had been driving when I woke up to find that he had stopped the car at the side of the road and opened his trousers. When I had done what he told me to do, he started kissing me, telling me how special I was and that he loved me.

  I hadn’t seen or heard anything from Jak for months. I had already been vulnerable when I met him, and I was far more emotionally fragile and defenceless by the time Christoph told me he cared about me. It was true that he was significantly older than my own father and that he was selling me as a prostitute many times every day. But I was lonely and starved of affection, and wanted to believe that someone cared about me.

  At some point during every day after that, Christoph had sex with me. He always did it without a condom and he would often slap me and pull my hair so hard it felt as though my scalp was on fire and my neck was going to break. Sometimes he would say afterwards, ‘That was shit. You made it really boring for me. What’s your problem? Don’t you like me?’ The sad fact was that I did like him; that’s what’s so difficult to understand when I think about it now. I just didn’t like having sex with him any more than I had liked having it with Jak.

  The stomach cramps I used to get whenever I had my period had more or less stopped. So I couldn’t understand why, after I had been back in Athens for a few weeks, I started getting stomach pains that were far worse than any I had ever had before. By the time I realised they weren’t cyclical and I was getting them almost every day, I had developed a burning sensation too, as though my kidneys were on fire. Eventually, the pain got so bad that I had to stop whatever I was doing when it started, so that I could curl into a ball and clutch my knees to my chest.

  It happened one night when Christoph was driving me to work. I suddenly felt sick and my whole body seemed to be covered in goose bumps. When I told him about the pain, he reached across and hit me in the face with such force I almost bit right through my tongue. I was so shocked by what he had done that when he gripped my chin and turned my head so that I was facing him, I blinked and then cringed in anticipation of his next blow. Instead of hitting me again, however, he looked at me for a few seconds and then said, ‘We’ll go to the doctor in the morning and get you checked out.’

  I still had to work that night, regardless of the pain. The woman at the brothel gave me painkillers, which didn’t really help much. In fact, I don’t know how I managed to have sex at all; a lot of the men who visited the brothels were rough, but they seemed to be worse than ever that night. Somehow, I did get through it, and the next day Christoph took me to the doctor.

  When Christoph picked me up in the morning, he said, ‘You need a blood test, a urine test and a gynaecological examination.’ I only had the standard health certificate required by all visitors to Greece, and I assumed that he wanted me to have the tests so that I could get the papers I needed to work in a brothel. But at 18, I was still three years below the age at which it’s legal to work as a prostitute in Greece.

  After I’d had all the tests done, he drove me to another town where I was going to be working in yet another brothel. We picked up the owner of the brothel en route – a tough-looking, heavily pregnant woman called Kyra, who more or less ignored me but chatted with Christoph as though the two of them were old friends. When Christoph stopped the car outside the brothel – which was a house on a main road that ran through the centre of the town – Kyra got out, hitched up her dress and urinated on the pavement in full view of everyone driving past. That’s when I first began to suspect that her establishment might not even be as ‘five star’ as Dimitri’s had been.

  After Kyra had shown me round, she and Christoph went with me to the apartment
I would be staying in. Then Christoph left, and for the next few weeks Kyra picked me up every morning or evening, depending on what shift I was doing, and drove me to the brothel, where for the next 15 hours I had between 80 and 90 customers. In most other respects, it was much the same as all the other places I had worked: the building was dismal and run-down, and the men were almost indistinguishable from each other. Kyra was pretty much like every other brothel keeper I had come across, except perhaps for being a bit more cocky and the fact that she was a borderline certifiable psychopath. But there was one fundamental, incredibly important difference between working at Kyra’s brothel and at any of the others: when I finished work and went back to the apartment, I could go out.

  It was a very weird but really good feeling just walking around on my own. Even after a 15-hour shift when I was exhausted, I wanted to do it even more than I wanted to sleep. Sometimes I would go out during the day, sometimes at night, depending on what shifts I was doing. I often went to a café not far from the apartment, which was beside a stream and a lovely stone bridge. I couldn’t buy anything, because I didn’t have any money, but I didn’t care. I was happy just sitting there, drinking a glass of water and watching people.

  I would try to imagine that I was one of the other people sitting in the café or walking along the path beside the stream, someone living a normal life, with a job, a home, a family and friends. It wasn’t easy, not least because I had no idea what it would be like to be one of those people. I felt detached from everyone else, as though there was some invisible barrier between them and me that kept me apart and separate. It didn’t really matter though: just being able to watch them was enough.