Bought and Sold Page 15

  You would have thought that being able to wander around in the real world might have made me think about running away. Odd as it may sound, I didn’t even consider it. If you’ve ever had the sort of migraine that whites out your peripheral vision, you might be able to understand what it was like: the only thing I could see was what was directly ahead of me, which was my life as a prostitute; everything else was blurred and out of focus. Even if Christoph hadn’t had my passport, I think I would still have been too afraid and too distrustful – of the police and everyone else – to have gone to anyone for help. I don’t know if Christoph was aware that I went out. He had certainly made sure – as Jak, Leon and Elek had done before him – that when he wasn’t there to control me, the paranoia he had encouraged in me would do the job instead.

  After I had been working at the brothel for a few days, Kyra took me to a local hospital to get the results of the tests I’d had done in Athens. I wouldn’t have known most of the medical terms the doctor used if he had said them in English, and I certainly didn’t understand them in Greek. What I did understand, though, was that there was a problem and that I was going to have to return to the hospital for treatment.

  Kyra told the doctor she would explain it all to me properly later. But when we got outside, she just handed me the piece of paper he had given her, jabbed at it angrily with her finger and made a disgusted sort of ‘pfffing’ sound. She kept repeating a word and telling me I was dirty, until I finally realised that what she was saying was that I had syphilis. The only thing I knew about syphilis was that it was what killed Henry VIII (although I don’t think people believe that anymore); I thought it was incurable and that I was going to die.

  ‘You’re a dirty tramp.’ Kyra spat the words at me. ‘Well, you can’t work for me anymore. I only have clean girls working in my brothel.’ It was ridiculous to accuse me of being dirty: it wasn’t my choice to be having unprotected sex with hundreds of ‘dirty’ men; it was something she and Christoph were making me do. I didn’t see it like that at the time though. I thought she was right and that it was my fault, and I felt humiliated, contaminated and unclean.

  Christoph picked me up later that night and drove me back to Athens. It was a long journey and he stopped periodically, sometimes to buy bottles of beer for me and sometimes so that I could do things to him. Although I still hated the taste of alcohol, I had begun to appreciate the false sense of cheerful confidence it gave me and I drank it whenever I got the chance. That night, I drank the bottles of beer Christoph bought for me as if they were water. So I was a bit drunk by the time we got back to Athens and Christoph dropped me off at the hotel, which was the one I had been staying in before I went to work at Kyra’s brothel. Fortunately, I was so tired I fell asleep before the effects of the alcohol wore off, and I was able to postpone the moment when I would have to face the miserable reality of my situation.

  I had second-stage syphilis, which apparently meant I must have had it for about a year. Christoph came with me to the hospital and took the same course of tablets that I was prescribed – because he would already have caught it from me, he said. I suppose that’s why he still had sex with me afterwards, although less frequently than he had done before and always using a condom. I felt really bad about what had happened, and I thought Christoph didn’t love me anymore because of it – which, when I think about it now, isn’t as incongruous as the fact that I believed he had ever loved me at all.

  Sometimes when he came to pick me up to take me to a job, his wife would be in the car. When she had come to the police station that day, with the oxygen tank I had never seen Christoph use before or since, she had looked as though she was only just managing not to spit in my face. Her feelings towards me didn’t change, and I always felt very uncomfortable when she was there. And now, of course, I had an added reason for being embarrassed, because I was having sex with her husband. Ironically, and completely unfairly, Christoph blamed me for the fact that he couldn’t have sex with his wife because I had given him syphilis! He told me that I must never, under any circumstances, tell her anything. I assumed he was only referring to the sex, because she must have known how he earned his money.

  I had been working as a prostitute for about five years when I found out I had syphilis, with maybe the last two of them under Christoph’s control. It’s difficult to put all the events into chronological order because I didn’t have any real concept of time and no means of measuring it. There was nothing to distinguish the days, weeks, months and years from all the others that had gone before them, or from those that were to follow them. The only thing that could change from one month to the next was the brothel I was working in, which might be in a different town. Even the brothels and, with a few exceptions, the brothel owners were pretty much the same. And so were most of the men who paid a few euros to have five-minute sex with a girl they couldn’t have picked out of a line-up of two.

  By the time I had been working as a prostitute for five years, I had almost forgotten the life I used to imagine I might have, working as a waitress to earn enough money to put myself through college. After a while, you don’t really think about anything, certainly not the future, which you know will be exactly like the present, or worse.

  One day, Christoph picked me up from the hotel and drove me to do an ‘outcall’, an escorting job on the other side of the city. Afterwards, when he was driving me back to the hotel, he stopped the car in a public car park and said, ‘We need to talk.’

  It felt as though something was squeezing my stomach, making me feel sick and sending a spasm of anxiety throughout my whole body. What had I done wrong? I tried to think of everything that had happened during the last couple of days. And then I realised that Christoph was speaking to me again in a voice that didn’t sound angry at all.

  ‘I think you should open a Facebook account,’ he said. ‘Get in touch with some of your friends back in England. You’ve proved that you can be trusted. It’s time for you to have a bit of freedom in your life and do something nice.’

  I had been expecting him to slap me or, at the very least, to shout at me for something I had or hadn’t done. So, for the few seconds it took for me to understand what he was saying, I just stared at him. Even when it did sink in, I hardly dared to believe it.

  ‘We’ll do it now. Come on.’ Christoph smiled and got out of the car, and I walked beside him across the car park, down the street and into an internet café.

  When your life is pretty much at rock bottom, you’d think it would take a lot to make you feel happy. For me, it was quite the reverse: even relatively insignificant, inconsequential events seemed exciting. Knowing that Christoph was pleased with me would have been enough to cheer me up; the thought that I was going to be able to make contact with old friends from home made me feel like a child who had just been told that it was Christmas.

  In the café, Christoph ordered us each a coffee and then, after he had set up a Facebook account for me, I began to search for people I used to know five years ago. I sent messages to a couple of girls who used to be my friends, asking how they were and what they were doing and saying that I was working in Greece. Then I began to feel anxious again: would anyone answer? It suddenly seemed really important that someone did.

  When we were back in the car, Christoph handed me a new phone and said, ‘Take it. I think I can trust you now.’ I don’t know if I thought he meant that he wouldn’t check it regularly for texts and to see what calls I made and received, but whatever I thought, I remember that I felt special, and proud to have earned his praise.

  We went back to the same café every day for the next three days, so that I could check for messages. I almost cried when I saw that people had posted comments on my Facebook page. And I was really excited when I got an email in response to the message I had sent to a girl called Lexi, who’d been a good friend of mine at school. She said she was really glad I had got in touch at last and she asked me loads of questions, about where I was living and what I w
as doing. Christoph had put up some of the photographs he took from time to time for me to send my mother, and Lexi said she had barely recognised me and that it looked as though I was having a great time.

  Christoph said he was really pleased for me and told me what to say in response to Lexi’s message – that I loved living in Athens and was earning a lot of money working in a bar that was very popular with tourists. It was odd: while I was writing Christoph’s words, I felt a sort of glow of excitement inside me, as though what I was saying was true.

  When Christoph came to pick me up the next day and take me back to the internet café, he asked me, ‘Why don’t you invite your friend Lexi to come and stay with you for a holiday?’ I didn’t answer him, because I thought I must have misunderstood what he had said. ‘I think you already know that I have feelings for you,’ he continued, ‘feelings that I don’t have for any of the other girls. You’re different, special. You’ve worked hard and you’ve earned a break. So tell your friend that I’ll pay for her flight and that she won’t have to worry about money while she’s here either.’

  I believed every single word of it. I felt proud to be special, happy that Christoph was pleased with me, and almost ecstatic at the prospect of having a friend again, even if it would be for just a few days. When I look back on it now, I almost feel contempt for the gullible, pathetic, easily manipulated girl I was then.

  Lexi answered my message immediately, accepting Christoph’s invitation, and within a week she was on her way to visit me in Athens.

  Her flight arrived in the early hours of the morning and Christoph drove me to the airport to meet her. As I stood at the arrivals gate, waiting for her to come through the door, I felt excited but apprehensive, as though I had stepped outside the reality of my life and into some sort of parallel universe. And then I saw Lexi, waving frantically and almost bouncing with delight. We laughed as we hugged each other, and then I introduced her to ‘my friend Christoph’, who smiled and charmed her and insisted on carrying her backpack.

  Instead of taking us to the hotel I was staying at, as I had assumed he would do, Christoph drove into the city centre and parked outside a house in a narrow street. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t had a chance to sort out a room in the hotel for your friend,’ he said, smiling apologetically at Lexi. ‘So I’m going to leave you both here with a friend of mine while I go and do that now. I won’t be long.’

  As incredible as it seems to me now, I didn’t suspect a thing. In fact, it wasn’t until the front door of the house was opened by a cheerful Albanian man Christoph introduced to us as Zamir that I felt the first prickle of doubt.

  Christoph didn’t come into the house with us. He left us on the doorstep, saying he would be back within an hour or so. Lexi and I followed Zamir into the living room, where two more men were sitting watching television and drinking whisky. I suddenly felt anxious and uneasy. But the men were pleasant and friendly, so we took the drinks they offered us and after we had all been chatting for a while, I began to relax.

  We were all laughing about something when Lexi stood up and said she needed to go to the toilet. One of the men picked up the remote and turned off the TV. ‘Tell her to sit down,’ he said, in a very different voice. When I glanced towards him, I saw that he was looking from one to the other of us with an expression of scornful disdain. In that split-second, I realised that I had made a terrible mistake. A voice in my head was shouting, ‘No! You idiot! What have you done?’ And my whole body began to shake.

  Lexi hadn’t understood what the man had said, but there was no mistaking the threat in his voice or the suddenly tense atmosphere in the room, and she began to cry.

  ‘You do know what’s happened, don’t you?’ the man asked me. ‘You understand what you and your friend will be doing? You belong to us now. We bought you off Christoph, for four thousand euros.’ He made a sideways movement with his head to indicate Lexi. ‘You’d better explain it to your friend.’

  Why was I shocked and hurt at the thought that Christoph had sold me to these men? What possible grounds did I have for believing that a man who treated me like an inanimate commodity actually cared about me and wanted to do something nice for me? The answer, in part, was that I was so desperate to have a friend, my mind had simply blocked out any information that didn’t support what I wanted to believe. I had felt guilty and ashamed every day for more than five years, but never as much as I did that day.

  You can adapt to almost any new normality, given time, and over the last few years my emotions and reactions had been damped down. But Lexi was used to a more rational, everyday sort of normality, and when I told her what the man had said, she started screaming and running round the room, flailing her arms, bumping into the furniture and sending all the whisky glasses crashing to the floor.

  When Zamir’s two friends stood up, I raised my arms instinctively to cover my face. But instead of lashing out at us with their fists, as I had expected them to do, one of the men said to Zamir, ‘We don’t want to do this. They’re going to get us into trouble.’ Then they walked out of the living room and a few seconds later we heard the front door open and close behind them.

  Lexi was still sobbing and shouting when Zamir walked out of the living room too, and I could hear him somewhere at the front of the house, talking rapidly and angrily on his phone. Realising that it would probably be our only opportunity, I snatched up Lexi’s backpack and thrust it into her hand, then pulled her with me out of the living room, across the hallway and into a room at the back of the house. I had only just managed to turn the key in the lock when Zamir started kicking the door and screaming threats at us. Lexi was screaming too and I was sobbing. But I knew that if we were going to stand any chance at all of getting out of the house, I had to force myself to think.

  There were only two ways into and out of the room we were locked in – through the door that was about to come crashing in on us, and through the window in the wall opposite it. For a few precious seconds, I fumbled with the catch on the window before managing to open it. Then I almost pushed Lexi out of it. As I was climbing out after her, looking over my shoulder and expecting to see Zamir burst into the room behind me, I almost missed my footing and fell. Then my feet touched the ground and we started running.

  I don’t know what people thought when they saw us, two girls running side by side through the city centre, crying and glancing behind them every few seconds like hunted animals. I didn’t have a destination in mind; I was simply following my instinct to get as far away from the house as possible. I thought, as I always did, that someone might be watching me. But we couldn’t keep running for ever. So when we rounded a corner and saw a policeman standing at the side of the road, I stopped, with my hand on Lexi’s arm, and tried to catch my breath.

  ‘Please help us,’ I said as soon as I could speak. As I tried to explain to the policeman what had happened, Lexi kept shouting, in English, ‘Help us! We’ve been kidnapped!’

  ‘You’re safe now,’ the policeman said when I eventually paused again for breath. ‘You had better come with me.’ So we followed him across the road into the lobby of a hotel, where he told us to wait while he went outside again to make a phone call.

  We sat down in some chairs in a corner of the lobby where we could see the entrance but wouldn’t be immediately visible to anyone coming into the hotel. And that’s when I suddenly realised that I had been there before. In fact, it was the hotel I had stayed in with Mum when she came to Athens to visit me. I would have been panic-stricken wherever we had been waiting, but one of the last places in the world I wanted to be at that moment was in a hotel that was owned by a friend of Christoph’s and where someone might recognise me. Turning slightly in my chair so that I had my back to the reception desk, I let my hair fall forward over my face. I was still trying to decide what to do, if anything, when I saw Christoph.

  He had just pushed open the door from the street and was scanning the lobby as if he was looking for someone. I shrank b
ack into my seat and whispered to Lexi to put her head down. But it was too late. Christoph had already seen us and was walking towards us across the brown-tiled floor.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, smiling as he looked, first at Lexi, then at me. ‘I had no idea. I can’t believe what happened to you. I’m so angry with Zamir. Thank heavens you’re both safe. Please, come with me.’

  It took a moment for the fact to sink in that rather than being angry with us, he was smiling and apologising. And then it dawned on me that if Christoph knew what had happened to us, he must have been the person the policeman had phoned when he had gone outside – which meant that no one was coming to help us.

  Chapter 12

  Instead of taking us to the hotel I had been staying in, Christoph drove us to an apartment about an hour from the city. He kept saying how angry he was with the three Albanians and telling us we mustn’t worry anymore because he would take care of us.

  ‘Stay here,’ he said when we arrived at the apartment. ‘Don’t go out on your own.’ He looked at me without expression for a few seconds before adding, ‘I’ll be back in the morning with some money and to show you around the area. It’s a very interesting place. I think you’ll like it.’

  In fact, he didn’t come back the next day, or the day after that. I was now more convinced than ever that someone would always be watching me, and as Lexi and I were too frightened to leave the apartment, we had nothing to eat. Being hungry was an added stress for Lexi, but I had survived for longer on just tap water. Although we both had phones, neither of us had any credit, and after what had just happened, going to a police station wasn’t an option either.

  As the hours ticked by, Lexi became more frightened, and I found it increasingly difficult to think of anything even remotely reassuring to say to her. I didn’t tell her the truth about Christoph, partly because I knew it would make her panic even more, and partly because it would have meant having to tell her the truth about me too. Stuck in that apartment together, we already had enough problems without Lexi having to process the fact that I had lied to her about my wonderful life in Athens and was a prostitute, and I didn’t want to have to deal with the knowledge that she despised me.