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  After he had left, I stayed on my knees on the floor and cried in a way that was different from all the ways I had cried before. I think it was the first time I had ever felt so upset purely for my own sake. I was having flashbacks to everything that had happened since I had come to Athens almost six years earlier – years that I now realised I was never going to get back, but that would colour my life for ever.

  There had been a few items of cheap clothing and a bottle of vodka in the apartment when I moved in. I often wondered what had happened to the girl who had left them there, and I thought about her again now. Was she going through the same experiences I was? Did anyone else feel the way I did? I sometimes felt as though I was living in some kind of parallel universe that had always existed alongside the one I had lived in as a child and where the things I was doing were normal. I could hear Christoph’s voice in my head saying, ‘Men want fresh meat and you’re getting old.’ Like any young person, I couldn’t imagine myself actually being old, but it did make me wonder what would happen to me when men didn’t want to have sex with me at all and I was no longer any use to Christoph. The present was frightening; the future seemed even more so.

  I thought about my mum a hundred times every day, and I thought about her then, as I was kneeling on the floor, crying like someone bereaved. I felt more alone and more in despair than I had felt at any other time during all the lonely, desperate years I had been in Greece. And then I remembered the bottle of vodka that had been left in a kitchen cupboard, presumably by the previous occupant of the apartment.

  I started drinking it straight from the bottle, but it was so strong and foul-tasting it made me retch. So I poured some into a glass and added water, which enabled me to drink it quickly without being sick. I found some painkillers in the kitchen too, and swallowed all of them. Then I stumbled into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirrored door of the cabinet on the wall.

  ‘I hate you,’ I screamed at my reflection. ‘You’re nothing. Nobody cares about you. Nobody loves you. Why are you still here? You don’t deserve to be alive.’

  But only the coldest, blackest-hearted person could really have hated the pathetic, pitiable girl who was looking back at me from the mirror. As all the anger and frustration drained out of me as I reached out my hand to touch her swollen face and then opened the door of the cabinet to make her disappear.

  Amongst the few discarded items on the shelves inside was a razor. When I touched its handle, the anger returned and as I ran back into the kitchen, I began to slash at my wrists and neck with its blade. I started cutting my arms, then my legs, and before long there was blood everywhere, on my body, soaking into my clothes, splashed on the walls and dripping on to the floor.

  I don’t know what it was specifically that made me pass out; it could have been the alcohol, the tablets, stress caused by my manic episode, blood loss, or a combination of all four. I collapsed next to the open glass door that led out on to the balcony. The neighbours had heard me shouting and crashing around the apartment, and when they saw me slumped on the floor covered in blood, they called the police.

  It must have been the sound of the front door being kicked in that woke me up. I came to slowly, like a diver rising up from the depths of the ocean, and at first I was disorientated and couldn’t remember what had happened. I heard the sound of running footsteps and voices shouting ‘Police!’, and suddenly the living room seemed to be full of men with guns. Somehow, I managed to get to my feet and out on to the balcony, where I tried to throw myself over the railing that surrounded it.

  The apartment was on the fifth floor and I would certainly have been killed if two of the policemen hadn’t managed to grab hold of my legs just as my stomach hit the metal rail. But I didn’t want to be saved, so I struggled and tried to fight them off. I was still kicking and swearing at them when they put the handcuffs on me. And as they walked with me out of the building, I started shouting, ‘He’s still watching me. I know he’s here. He won’t stop until he gets me. He’s got other girls, you know. He’s going to kill me.’

  ‘Who’s watching you?’ one of the policemen asked me. ‘Who’s going to kill you?’

  ‘The man,’ I told him. ‘There’s a horrible man. I won’t say his name.’

  I only dared mention Christoph’s existence at all because I was drunk. So perhaps it was also the vodka that suddenly made me realise that I was incredibly tired of always being afraid. To the policemen, I must have sounded like every other paranoid drunk they had ever had to deal with.

  At the police station, someone cleaned me up, bandaged the worst lacerations on my arms, and asked what had happened to me. ‘I cut myself,’ I told him. Then I laughed like someone who had lost her mind. In fact, the policemen gave me coffee and were nice to me. They even let me go outside to smoke a cigarette, although the policeman who came with me didn’t hesitate to draw his gun when I tried to run away, and I heard a click as he released the safety catch.

  When they asked me for my passport, I told them, ‘It’s probably in the apartment somewhere. Oh no, wait a minute, I think I threw it in the bin.’ I laughed again, as though I had made a really funny joke.

  ‘Well, we’re going to have to look for it there then,’ one of the policemen said. But I knew they would never find it, because Christoph had it.

  For the next few hours, I sat in the police station, drinking coffee and staring into space, my mind completely empty of any thoughts. By the time they finally took me out and put me in another car, the anaesthetic effect of the vodka was wearing off and I was starting to feel sick.

  ‘We’re going to take you to the hospital,’ one of the policemen told me. And even in my confused, drunken state, I could see that that was probably a good idea: I didn’t want to get blood poisoning from someone else’s discarded razor to add to all my other problems. I wouldn’t have got into the police car as willingly as I did, however, if I had known where they were really going to take me.

  Chapter 13

  The car stopped at the main entrance to a dilapidated-looking brick building. When the two police officers took me inside, I sat in an office, still handcuffed, while a man asked me lots of questions. Had I ever tried to do this sort of thing before? Where did I come from? Did I have family in Greece? What job did I do?

  ‘I’m a prostitute,’ I told him. This time, I wasn’t sure if the loud, manic laugh really did come from me, although when I looked closely at the man and the nurse who was standing beside him, they didn’t seem to be laughing at all. ‘I’m only joking,’ I said. ‘I’m a waitress really. I’ve been missing my family and friends. I suppose everything just got on top of me.’ I think I told him that I couldn’t cope anymore and that all I wanted to do was die. Mostly, though, I doubt whether my answers to his questions made much sense, and some of them were totally untrue.

  Eventually, the man stood up, nodded at the nurse and said, ‘Right, well, first of all we need to have a look at those cuts and get them cleaned up.’

  The nurse took me into another room, where she dabbed brown liquid on the broken skin of my arms, legs, face, neck, chest and breasts, and then re-bandaged the worst of it.

  ‘Great. Okay,’ I said when she had finished. ‘Well, I’m all right to go now then, am I?’ When she didn’t answer, I turned to the two policemen. But they didn’t say anything either. They just looked at the nurse, one of them wished me good luck, and then they walked out of the room.

  My cockiness – which was part alcohol induced, part faked bravado, part mental breakdown – evaporated instantly and I shouted, ‘Hey! Wait! Where are you going? What’s going on?’ I was about to follow the policemen when two men in white coats appeared in the doorway and stuck a needle in my arm.

  I think I kept on screaming and shouting for another few seconds, although it might just have been in my head. Then all the muscles in my body seemed to relax. I tried to concentrate on sending a message from my brain to my legs, but nothing happened; so I glanced down quickl
y to make sure they were still there, and then laughed, in embarrassment this time.

  Someone helped me on to a bed. Perhaps it was the same person who tied my arms to its railings with thick bands of leather. I couldn’t see anyone clearly by that time, because my head was full of swirling white fog and my eyes wouldn’t focus.

  I remember lying on my back looking up at the lights in the ceiling and wondering why they were moving. And then I was in a room, still lying on the bed, and there was another girl sitting on another bed with her arms clasped around her knees, rocking slowly backwards and forwards. The girl didn’t look at me, and for a while I lay there watching her. Eventually I asked her, ‘What are you doing? Why are you in here?’ And the sound of my voice made me laugh because it was deep and croaky, not like my real voice at all, and it seemed to echo inside my head. Again, maybe I didn’t actually say the words out loud, because the girl kept rocking backwards and forwards and didn’t answer.

  ‘I’ve got a knife,’ I shouted, to what was probably an empty corridor outside the open door of the room. ‘I’d hidden it in my shirt. I’m going to stab myself with it. Uh-oh, I’m doing it now.’

  I didn’t have a knife of course, and as my arms were still tied to the head of the bed, I couldn’t have done anything with it if I had. I just wanted someone to come into the room so that I could tell them … I don’t know what I wanted to tell them. It didn’t matter anyway, because no one did come. But I didn’t give up: I kept on shouting until I lost my voice and thought I was about to die of thirst. All the time, the girl kept rocking. And still no one came.

  I must have fallen asleep eventually. When I woke up, there was light streaming in through a barred window and I felt almost calm. I hadn’t been awake very long when a nurse came in, unstrapped my wrists and asked me if I would like to have a shower. I felt better when I was clean, although for some reason I couldn’t stop crying. The nurse sat on the bed beside me and talked to me in a kind, gentle way. Then she took me to the canteen, where, despite having eaten nothing for at least 24 hours, I only managed to drink some orange juice.

  I was heavily medicated, so everything that happened during the next few days is all jumbled up in my mind. I know that at some point, maybe after breakfast on that first morning, the nurse took me out for a walk around the vast hospital grounds. Beyond the grass that surrounded the building there was a small forest, and beyond the forest were two huge gates flanked on either side by a very high wall topped with barbed wire and numerous cameras. I think it was seeing those gates that finally made me understand that I had been sectioned and was in a mental hospital.

  During that first day, I was taken by another nurse back to the office I had been in the previous day, where I was asked more questions by a man who turned out to be the hospital’s chief psychiatrist. Paradoxically – considering I had almost killed myself and was an in-patient in a psychiatric hospital in a foreign country – all I was really worried about was what I had shouted as I was leaving the apartment building with the police. I knew I had said something about Christoph, but I couldn’t remember if I had said his name. I kept wondering if he had been watching from somewhere in the shadows and had heard whatever it was I said.

  I think I spent most of the rest of that day lying on my bed, moping and recovering from all the alcohol I had drunk the day before. At some point, after I had seen the psychiatrist, I was given all the things that had been in my bag when the police found me, and it wasn’t long before my phone rang.

  ‘Where are you?’ Christoph sounded angry. ‘The woman I rent the apartment from says you caused trouble and that she won’t rent it to me anymore. What did you do? What’s going on?’

  ‘I got drunk,’ I told him, in a sad little girl’s voice. ‘I’m sorry. I was stupid. I cut myself, on purpose, so the police arrested me and now I’m in a hospital.’

  I waited for his anger to explode. But when he spoke again his tone had changed completely. ‘Why, baby?’ he asked. ‘I’m so upset that you’ve done something like that to yourself. Why would you do that? What’s going on?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered again.

  ‘What have you told them at the hospital?’ There was a hard edge to his voice.

  ‘They think I’ve got “issues”,’ I told him. ‘They’ve put me on medication and they say I need some help.’

  ‘I think they’re right, baby.’ He was solicitous again now. ‘I think you’ve been struggling for the last few weeks. I noticed it and now I wish I had taken you to the hospital myself. Am I allowed to visit you?’

  I told him I would ask and, very gently, without my being aware of it, he began to close the trap around me again.

  Visiting hours at the hospital were flexible and when Christoph came the following day, he was almost invisible behind a huge bunch of flowers, and he was carrying in his other hand a bag full of nice things to eat and drink. I told the hospital staff he was a friend, someone who looked after me, and he went out of his way to be polite and charming to them. Despite everything, I couldn’t help being pleased to see him.

  Patients and their visitors could go into a sitting room or walk around the grounds. Christoph came with me to my room first, while I put away the things he had brought for me. My roommate – the girl with empty eyes who spent hours every day in perpetual rocking motion – wasn’t there. So there was no one except me to see Christoph touch my arm or hear him say, ‘You have no idea how much I miss fucking you. I can’t wait until things are back to normal. I’m going to get you a lovely apartment when you’re better. I think it’s time you had a rest. Maybe you should have a holiday. Don’t worry, my girl. I’ll sort it out.’

  Christoph often called me ‘my girl’ and I liked it. I had always wanted to be someone’s girl. I had thought for a while I was Jak’s and had felt special because of it. When I was very young, I used to think I was my dad’s girl, before things changed and he seemed to stop caring about everything and everyone else. It’s funny how something so simple mattered so much to me. Being called ‘my girl’ by Christoph had been one of the reasons why I had fooled myself into believing he had real feelings for me. Among the other reasons were self-deception fuelled by emotional neediness and the fact that I had absolutely no judgement about men or relationships.

  Christoph’s quiet, soothing tone didn’t alter as he added, ‘If you say anything about what you’ve been doing, no one will believe you. They’ll think you’re crazy, and they’ll keep you in here for ever. If by any chance they did believe you and I got into trouble because of something you had said, you would have signed your own death warrant – and your mother’s too.’ It was little wonder that I was always confused and uncertain.

  I was put on several different types of medication while I was in the hospital, including an antidepressant, a drug to boost the antidepressant, and another drug to help reduce anxiety. I also had daily assessment sessions with the psychiatrist. I didn’t ever talk about Christoph or anything that had happened to me during what was now the last six years. But I began to think that the psychiatrist knew. As the days merged into weeks, he often told me I was making good progress. Then, one day, he said, ‘I don’t think you really want to kill yourself, do you, Megan? I think you had a specific reason for doing what you did. If you need our help, we can protect you, you know.’

  He was a nice man, and although I didn’t believe that, ultimately, he really would be able to protect me from Christoph, I knew that his good intentions were genuine. In fact, strange as it may seem, I actually liked being in the hospital. I felt safe there, for the first time in years. It was like being inside an impenetrable but invisible bubble: I could take part in whatever was going on around me while at the same time remaining cushioned and protected. Something else I liked about being there was the fact that I made friends and had people to talk to.

  There was one old lady I became particularly close to. She was usually sweet and friendly, and then sometimes when you tried to talk to her she wo
uld tell you to ‘eff off’. She was never aggressive or vicious though, and it just made everyone laugh. One day, she gave me a box with a pink bow tied round it. I thought at first when I lifted the lid that it was full of cotton wool. Then I saw the silver cross. ‘It’s for you,’ the old lady said. ‘It’s a present. I want you to have it.’ She gave me a card too, in which she had written ‘Good luck’ in Greek. I’ve still got them both – the silver cross and the card; they’re two of my most treasured possessions.

  Perhaps it’s only after you’ve been starved of human contact for a while that you realise just how important it is to be able to interact with other people. Since Jak had left me in Athens, I had only rarely had even the sort of mundane conversations you have with people in shops. I had worked alone in brothels most of the time, and then gone back to a hotel room or an apartment, where I had been on my own again. During the years, the loneliness had built up inside me until it was like something solid. It was at least partly because of that loneliness and aloneness that I had become so dependent on Christoph, and why I was now so grateful for the fact that everyone at the hospital was kind to me.

  Christoph visited me almost every other day. We would walk around the grounds and he would talk about the apartment he was going to get for me and how everything was going to be different when I was better. He always repeated his warning too, about what would happen if I told anyone the truth – although he didn’t use the word ‘truth’, of course.

  Despite feeling safe in the hospital, I always had the thought that I wasn’t going to be able to stay for ever at the back of my mind as I began to get better. After I had been there for almost three months, I was lying on my bed one morning, crying and praying that something would happen to get me out of the mess I was trapped in, when a nurse came into my room. I didn’t know she was there until she sat down on the bed beside me, took hold of my hand and said, ‘I know, Megan. And it’s going to be okay.’