Bought and Sold Page 19

  When I was getting out of the car, he took hold of my hand and said, ‘Keep in touch, Megan. You know how much I love you, don’t you? I’m so sorry for what happened to you. I didn’t know anything about it, I promise. I didn’t receive a single euro of the money you were earning.’

  I watched him drive away. Then I went into the supermarket and bought a large bottle of cheap retsina, which I buried at the bottom of my bag.

  Mum and Nikos were waiting for me back at the apartment.

  ‘What have you been doing?’ Mum demanded as soon as I walked through the door.

  ‘I saw you!’ Nikos was close to tears. ‘I saw you with him! I tried to follow you but he drove too fast. Why didn’t you come with me, on my bike?’

  ‘What is wrong with you, Megan?’ Mum sounded distraught. ‘Why in God’s name would you go back to him?’

  ‘Just leave me alone,’ I shouted at them. ‘You don’t know anything. None of it was Jak’s fault. But I’m not going to see him again, so you needn’t worry.’

  ‘Oh, Megan!’ My righteous indignation faltered a bit when I saw the pain in Mum’s eyes, and even more when Nikos added, in a low, anguished voice, ‘I wish you were flying back to England today, so that I could know you were safe.’

  I didn’t want to talk about it; I didn’t want to think about Jak’s house, or his expensive car, or the fact that the crooked, discoloured teeth he had never been able to afford to get fixed were now perfectly even and white. I went into the room that was serving as a makeshift bedroom for me, sat down on the bed and opened the bottle of retsina.

  I drank it straight from the bottle, hiding it away in my bag again after every swig. I must have been a quarter of the way through it and was just lifting it to my lips again when Mum walked into the room. She had started to say something as she was opening the door, and when she realised what I was doing she just stood there, open mouthed, for a few seconds. Then, suddenly, she went ballistic and started shouting at me, ‘What are you doing? You can’t start drinking! Is that what you’re planning to do, turn to drink in the hope that it will solve all your problems?’ She snatched the bottle out of my hands, splashing wine over the bedclothes.

  Her fury evaporated as quickly as it had come, and as she sank down on to the bed beside me, she said, ‘Please, Megan. Please don’t do this. It isn’t the answer. You know that, don’t you?’ She sounded weary and despairing, and then anxious as she added, ‘Nikos mustn’t know about this. He’s already worried to death about you. He blames himself for not knowing what Jak is. If he thought you were turning to drink, it would break his heart.’

  That night, Mum and I walked together down to the seafront, where we sat outside a café and ate ice-cream. I had been barely aware of the two guys sitting at the table next to ours, until one of them leaned across and said in Albanian, ‘Megan? It’s you, isn’t? Hi!’ His name was Vasos; he was married to one of Jak’s cousins and I had met him – and liked him – when I was living with Jak’s parents.

  ‘You look so different,’ he said. ‘But of course it must be years since I last saw you. Did you go back to England? What have you been up to all this time?’

  I don’t know if he knew. I think now that he probably did. But instead of answering his question, I asked him about Jak and what he had been doing while I’d been away.

  ‘Oh, just working and getting on with his new life.’ He shrugged his shoulders and looked uncomfortable. ‘You know how it is.’

  ‘What’s his new life like?’ I asked. ‘Has he got anyone … a girlfriend?’

  Vasos shrugged again and looked away.

  ‘It’s okay.’ I tried to sound as though it didn’t matter. ‘You can tell me. I just want to know what’s going on.’

  Perhaps he really was a nice guy; I don’t know what reason he would have had for telling me the truth, other than sympathy because he could see that I was upset.

  ‘Jak’s married,’ Vasos said. ‘He saved up a lot of money so that he and his wife could have a good life together.’

  We were speaking in Albanian, so Mum didn’t understand what we were saying. But the hurt that felt like a sharp physical pain must have been clearly visible on my face and she quickly hustled me away.

  I don’t know whether Vasos was trying to make sure I understood that anything there might have been in the past between me and Jak was now over. It certainly would have taken someone even more delusional than I was to have persisted in believing that Jak had ever loved me. It was the first time I had really faced the truth: while I was trapped in a nightmare of loneliness, degradation and violence, Jak had been ‘saving money’ he hadn’t earned so that he could marry someone else and build the house he always told me we would live in together one day with our children. The thought of him living in ‘our house’ with his wife was almost worse than anything else.

  I didn’t ever see Jak again. The brief conversation I had with Vasos that day forced me to consider the possibility that he was an unscrupulous, self-serving, amoral criminal. But it wasn’t until fairly recently that I finally stopped making excuses for him in my heart and accepted what he had done. One of the many difficult things I had to come to terms with was the fact that I had set out on what I had thought was going to be my life with Jak feeling like a hero. I had believed him when he told me that his mother was very ill and, in a way, I had been proud of myself for doing something in order to earn the money to pay for the operation that might save her life. Or maybe that was simply how I justified it to myself at the time, so that I didn’t have to acknowledge the reality, which was that I was gullible, easily manipulated and too lacking in self-confidence to say no.

  When understanding finally came, it sent my whole world crashing down around me. In some ways, I would have preferred never to have known the truth – at least then I would have been left with the illusion that someone really had loved me and cared about me.

  When Mum and I flew home to England at the end of the week, we didn’t stay with my grandparents, as the doctor at the hospital had wanted me to do, although we did meet up with them a few days after we got back. Nikos had insisted on giving Mum enough money to support us both until we could work out what to do next, and she had booked us into a bed and breakfast just around the corner from where some friends of hers lived.

  Within a couple of days of arriving back in England, she made an appointment for me to see a doctor. I didn’t tell him anything about what I had been doing in Greece; I just said I had been depressed and I showed him the tablets I’d been given by the psychiatrist. He looked at the labels on the bottles carefully, then scooped them all up and dumped them in the bin beside his desk. ‘Just take these,’ he said, handing me a prescription for the anti-depressant Prozac.

  When we left the doctor’s surgery, Mum took me to a pharmacy to get the new tablets and then to a walk-in sexual health clinic. I hated having to contaminate my new life by admitting I’d had syphilis. I told the nurse that I had been treated for it in Greece and she said it would be a good idea to do some tests to make sure everything was okay. I knew I hadn’t taken the tablets exactly the way I should have done, but I was shocked when she said I still had it.

  ‘We can clear it up now with an injection of penicillin,’ she said, in a matter-of-fact, non-judgemental way that made me feel grateful to her. ‘It hurts a bit – we do it in your backside – but the good news is that you only need to have one.’

  I hate injections, and now that no one was hurting me on an almost daily basis, I hated the thought of being hurt. I must have looked as miserable as I felt, because the nurse touched my arm and said, ‘You do need to get rid of it, Megan. I expect you’ve looked on the internet, so you’ll know what the long-term effects can be if it isn’t cleared up completely.’

  In fact, I hadn’t looked it up at all. At the time, the prospect of having to do anything about anything was overwhelmingly daunting. As far as the syphilis was concerned, I think I had hoped that if I ignored it, it might go aw
ay. I knew that was stupid though. So I gritted my teeth and had the injection.

  The nurse was right about it hurting, but when she had done it she said, ‘You’re the first person I’ve ever known who didn’t even flinch.’ What she didn’t know, of course, was that I’d had an almost infinite number of far more painful experiences, as well as lots of practice at detaching my mind when horrible things were being done to my body.

  Even now, only fear and sudden loud noises make me flinch. For example, after I had been back in England for a few months, I was standing at some pedestrian lights in the town centre, waiting to cross the road, when two men came up behind me. They were talking quite loudly, joking with each other, and when one of them raised his arm I cringed and took a sideways step away from him. The man laughed and said, ‘Bloody hell, love! What’s up with you? You don’t have to cower away from me like that. I’m not going to bite you or murder you or something.’ So I laughed too and made a joke of it.

  I’m still afraid of strangers. I used to tell myself, ‘You’re all right now. You’re safe. You don’t have to worry about anything.’ But I could never quite make myself believe it.

  After Mum went back to Greece, I began the task of trying to rebuild my life, and found myself struggling in all sorts of ways. If you don’t have any self-respect, it’s difficult to do the sort of things ‘self-respecting people’ do – like apply for jobs or believe you have a right to be treated decently. I did have a few low-paid jobs and I worked in a shop for a while, but for someone who jumped at every sound and viewed every male customer with anxious suspicion, it wasn’t surprising that I didn’t last very long.

  As the weeks passed and I became better able to control my instinctive overreaction to strangers, I got another job working in a shop, where I became friendly with another girl who worked there called Claire. When I got to know her, I told her a bit about my story and said that I was scared because I thought people connected to the traffickers might be looking for me in England.

  I think Claire must have said something to the owner of the shop, because one day, just before closing time, a man came in and started talking to me, asking me about myself. I was nervous at first, and even thought for a moment that it might be some sort of trap. But the man was pleasant and not in any way intimidating, and when he told me that he worked for an anti-trafficking charity and gave me a phone number to call if I ever needed someone to talk to, I took the bit of paper he held out to me.

  I didn’t call the number immediately. In fact, I almost forgot about it, until I got fed up with walking down roads with my fists clenched, trying to stop myself turning round to see if anyone really was following me. Within days of plucking up the courage to make that phone call, I was in a safe house in London.

  After all the turmoil and chaos I had been used to, it was like living in a calm, well-organised family home. The people who ran the safe house were supportive and taught me some of the life skills I had missed out on learning during my lost teenage years. I still had terrible nightmares, many of which involved the sound of gunshots, and I would often wake up sobbing, convinced that Christoph was standing in the shadows of the bedroom. What had changed, though, was that now when I woke up in the night, sweating and frightened, I could go downstairs and there would be someone to talk to and to tell me everything was all right and I was safe.

  There were three other girls in the house while I was there. They had all been trafficked and one of them had a baby. You might assume we would have talked to each other about what had happened to us, but we didn’t really say much at all. Perhaps we didn’t need to. I think there was a silently acknowledged bond between us, which would certainly explain why none of the other girls told the staff when I started drinking again. I was breaking one of the strictest rules of the house, and this time there really was no one else to blame but myself.

  I told myself that drinking was just a coping mechanism. But I had seen the damage alcohol can do and I should have known better than anyone that it doesn’t help you to cope at all; quite the reverse, in fact.

  I managed to keep it a secret for a while, until I got really drunk one day and started crying and carrying on downstairs. The staff at the house must have realised immediately what was wrong with me. When they searched my room and found the bottle, they called an ambulance and I was taken to hospital and sectioned. I had been in the safe house for about six months and I thought at the time that it was rather a drastic overreaction to my getting drunk, but I think they were scared – for me, for the other very vulnerable girls in the house and for the baby. Maybe they hoped, too, that it would be a wake-up call that would make me realise wrong decisions have consequences. It was certainly a shock to find myself in a psychiatric hospital again.

  When I was discharged from the hospital after just a few days, they wouldn’t let me go back to the safe house: I had broken the rules and there were no second chances. I was devastated. Just when I was finally getting the practical and emotional support I so desperately needed, I had messed it all up. A voice in my head kept saying, ‘Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.’ What made me feel even worse was the knowledge that I had let down the people who had trusted me and who had done everything they could to try to help me.

  Fortunately, with the help and support of my grandparents, I was eventually able to move into a small rented flat. Then I found a part-time job and enrolled on a course at college to try to catch up on my prematurely terminated education. I still find it difficult to stick at things, and sometimes it all feels too difficult and too much of struggle. When that happens, I remind myself that at least I now have a future, which, for a long time, is something I didn’t think I would ever have.

  I’m determined not to see myself as a victim. I used to get frustrated and miserable because I didn’t seem to be getting over what happened to me in Greece – until I realised that I wasn’t ever going to ‘get over’ it. That doesn’t mean I’m constantly replaying the events of those years in my mind. I know that I have to accept the fact that, as I can’t change what happened, I need to focus my energies on keeping it in the past and learning to live with it. I used to blame myself for everything, but I know now that, at 14 years old, I wasn’t really responsible for it, or emotionally strong enough to resist it.

  Some people will blame me entirely for everything that happened to me and perhaps particularly for not attempting to escape when I had the opportunity to do so. Someone told me recently that hostages and kidnap victims can develop something called Stockholm syndrome, which makes them empathise with their captors and even form strong attachments with them. I think the idea is that affected hostages respond defensively to the trauma of being threatened and beaten by starting to see lack of abuse as kindness. Maybe that’s what happened to me. The reasons don’t really matter now.

  I don’t blame my mum for it either: I know she’ll always regret leaving me with Jak. Mum and Nikos are still together. They’ve moved away from the town where they met – and where I met Jak – but they’ve stayed in Greece. I’ll never go back to Greece, so I really miss her. We talk regularly on the phone and she comes to England as often as she can, and I’ve got my grandparents, who would do whatever they could to help me if I ever needed it. Old habits die hard though, and I still have a tendency to pretend that everything’s okay, even when it isn’t.

  I’m lucky to have had the support of some really good friends, and particularly of my sister. I didn’t see or have any contact with my sister for six years, so I’m really grateful to have a good relationship with her now. She’s doing really well and I’m very proud of her. I haven’t said much about her in my story because I don’t want to drag her into it. As things turned out, not coming to Greece with Mum and me was probably the best thing that could have happened to her.

  It’s funny: when I was in Greece I was worried about not having a future; now that I’m back here, it’s the past that’s at the root of all my problems. All I can do is try to focus on making the best of
whatever lies ahead. It isn’t easy; I often feel as though I’m struggling to keep my head above water while swimming round and round in a pool of black despair. Sometimes, the anger that is always there in a tight little knot inside me bursts out and I fly into a rage. I’ve never physically hurt anyone though, other than myself. For a while, whenever it all got too much, I would get drunk; then the fear would come back and I would start to cry. But mostly I do what everyone else does: I cope the best way I can.

  I didn’t even know human trafficking existed when I went to Greece at the age of 14. In fact, I was just one of an estimated 2.4 million men, women and children who are currently victims of human trafficking around the world. Some of them are physically incarcerated, while others are imprisoned – as I was – by fear, threats and violence. The buying and selling of people is big business, which generates a massive global income second only to that of drug trafficking.

  I want to tell you that since I’ve been back in England I’ve moved on and I’m doing great. The truth is that I haven’t and I’m not. But I am doing okay, and I know things will get better. There are always going to be times when my life stalls and when even treading water seems to require a huge amount of effort I simply can’t make. That’s just the way it is. I can’t change it, so I have to learn to live with it. I’m not going to let it beat me though. For almost six years from the age of 14, I lived a life of unrelenting isolation, degradation and brutality. If I can survive that – and I did – I know that I can survive anything.

  What happened to me in Greece will affect me for the rest of my life – both mentally and physically, in the form of the injuries I sustained during the course of many beatings. I still battle against low self-esteem and I often have nightmares that are so real and terrifying that I’m afraid to go back to sleep. But I know now that I was one of the lucky ones, because I escaped and I do have a future; whereas many of the other millions of people who are currently victims of trafficking will continue to be bought and sold for the rest of their lives.