Bought and Sold Read online

  On almost every street corner in Athens, there are kiosks selling newspapers and magazines, postcards, sweets, chocolate, cigarettes, even souvenirs and clothes. When we got out of the taxi, Jak told me to wait while he went to one of them. When he came back, he handed me what felt like a flimsy cardboard box in a brown paper bag, pointed to an office building on the other side of the road and said, ‘Go up the stairs to the top floor. Knock on the glass door and give this to the guy who opens it.’

  ‘What is it?’ I asked him.

  ‘Just do it,’ he snapped.

  Although Jak’s anger always took me by surprise and shocked me, I wasn’t really frightened of him. But I hated it when he was annoyed with me. So I took the package and turned to cross the road.

  ‘I’ll wait for you here,’ he called after me, pleasant again now that I was doing what he had wanted me to do.

  The woman at the reception desk glanced up when I pushed open the door from the street, and then looked away again as I started to walk up the stairs. The shoes I was wearing had pointed toes and stiletto heels, and long before I had reached the top floor my feet were sore and my legs were shaking. As I stumbled up the last two flights of stairs, I was breathless and, for some reason, had begun to feel uneasy.

  The brass plaque on the wall beside the glass doors at the top of the building announced – in both English and Greek – that it was the office of a lawyer. The man who opened the door when I rang the bell was fat and old – at least, he looked old to me.

  Snatching the package out of my hands, he told me, in English, to ‘Come in and stand over there.’ I wished I had the confidence to tell him I had done what I’d been asked to do and now I was going to leave. Instead, I did a sort of nervous side-step across the marble-tiled floor and said nothing.

  When he locked the glass doors, I felt a sudden rush of fear. But before I could react in any way, he had opened another door and pushed me through it. In the middle of the small, windowless room he had thrust me into there was a single bed and, at the foot of it, a video camera on a tripod. The only other bit of furniture in the room was a television, playing silently in a corner.

  I was so frightened and convinced that he was going to murder me, that I just stood there making little whimpering noises like a defeated and submissive animal. When the man grabbed hold of my vest top and shoved me down on to the bed, I was so shocked my mind went completely blank and I think I barely struggled as he flipped me over on to my back, pulled up my skirt, ripped off my pants and forced himself inside me. The pain was excruciating, but I was too traumatised even to cry.

  When he lifted himself off me, I raised my head from the bed and saw the blood. I didn’t know it was normal the first time you have sex, and I thought he had done something even more terrible than rape me. And then he did it again.

  It was only afterwards, when I was standing beside the bed trying to straighten my skirt, that I realised the soundless scenes playing out on the television were from some horrible, violent porn film. Then the man took a wad of 50-euro notes out of his pocket, thrust them into my hand and told me to get out. ‘Go,’ he kept saying angrily as he pushed me towards the door – as if I might have some reason to want to stay.

  I was still holding my shoes in my hand as I hurried towards the door of the little room. When my toes touched something and sent it skidding across the floor, I glanced down and saw the package Jak had given me, now out of its brown paper bag and lying open, so that I could see the packets of condoms it contained.

  I had to hold tightly to the handrail to stop myself falling as I stumbled down the stairs. By the time I had crossed the road outside the office building and thrown myself into Jak’s arms, the tears that had been suppressed by shock were streaming down my face.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Jak asked. ‘Your body is shaking. What’s happened?’

  ‘He … I can’t …’ I stammered.

  ‘Wait.’ Jak half-turned towards the street and raised his hand. ‘We’ll get a taxi and then you can tell me what’s happened to upset you so much.’

  A few moments later, we were sitting in the back of a taxi, and as it pulled out into the traffic on the busy street, I told him. I was far too shocked and upset to even think about how he would react, but I was completely unprepared for his calm response.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘But what we can do? It won’t be for long. I love you and you love me. Soon we’ll have enough money to start a family and then we’ll be together for ever.’

  At first, I couldn’t understand what he was saying. No one in their right mind would inflict the horrible experience I had just had on anyone, even someone they didn’t like. So the idea that Jak knew what was going to happen to me when he sent me into the office building simply didn’t make any sense. Then I remembered the condoms, and for a moment my certainty wavered. But I knew there had to be some other explanation – because Jak loved me.

  I didn’t even consider the possibility that there might be some link between what had just happened to me and the money Leon had given Jak in the burger restaurant. The part of my brain that normally gathers together fragments of information and combines them into something that makes sense seemed to have shut down. And it was all so far beyond anything I had ever experienced or knew about, it was like a surreal nightmare. So when Jak told me to give him the money, I simply handed him the wad of notes I had been given by the lawyer who had raped me.

  ‘You see!’ Jak ran his thumb along the edge of the notes and then flicked through them quickly. ‘Already we can start to save for a car. Then we will buy a house. And then …’ He patted my knee without looking at me. ‘Then we will have somewhere for our children to live.’

  I still couldn’t see any connection between what he was saying and what had happened to me. Then, suddenly, I understood it, and all the air that should have been flowing into my lungs seemed to have gathered in a solid lump at the back of the throat so that I couldn’t breathe. And I was still crying, almost hysterically, when the taxi pulled up outside Jak’s cousin’s apartment.

  ‘Go and have a shower,’ Jak told me, as soon as we got inside. ‘Then we’ll go out and get something to eat.’

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ I said. ‘I don’t want anything to eat. I want to talk to you. And I want to talk to my mum.’ As I said the words, talking to my mum became the only thing in the world that mattered to me.

  ‘Just have a shower,’ Jak said again. ‘Then we’ll work it all out.’

  My clothes smelt of the sweat of the man who had stolen my virginity. ‘No, not stolen it,’ I thought sadly, a sob catching in my throat, ‘bought it.’ I don’t how long I had been standing under the shower, trying to wash all traces of the lawyer off my skin, when I heard Jak calling my name.

  ‘I won’t be a minute,’ I said, because I knew that however long I stayed in the shower, no amount of soap and water would ever make me clean again.

  Jak borrowed his cousin’s motorbike and we drove to the other side of the city, down a rocky track beside a beach and then up into the hills. When Jak stopped and turned off the engine, he took hold of my hand, looked into my eyes and said, ‘I love you.’ But this time I turned away.

  ‘I can’t do what you’re asking me to do,’ I told him. ‘There are other ways of earning money. It might take us longer to save the money we need, but that doesn’t matter, does it?’ While I was speaking, the expression on his face changed to cold indifference and I could feel the muscles in my stomach contracting as I said, ‘I need to talk to my mum. Please, Jak, let me phone her. I can’t do … that. There must be some other way.’

  ‘There is no other way,’ he said. ‘For God’s sake, Megan, stop making such a fuss. I’ve said I love you and that it’ll be all right. What’s the matter with you?’

  It was as if all my self-disgust and fear had rolled up tightly into a ball of anger and I shouted at him, ‘I want to speak to my mum. I won’t do it. I can’t believe you’re asking me to do some
thing like that.’

  What Jak did next took me so much by surprise that I wouldn’t have had time to react even if I had realised what he was going to do. Jumping to his feet, he grabbed hold of my hair, threw me down on the ground and started kicking me. Instinctively, I curled up into a ball and tried to cover my face with my arms, and he continued to kick my back with so much force it felt as though all the bones in my spine were being smashed. All the time he was attacking me, he was shouting at me in Albanian. Then he bent down, picked up a rock, threw it at me, spat on my prostrate body, swung his leg over the seat of the motorbike and drove away, leaving me lying on the stony ground in a state of physical and mental shock.

  The sound of the motorbike’s engine had faded into the distance by the time I tried to get up. Every movement made me wince with pain as I crawled to a rock and pulled myself up so that I could sit on it.

  ‘Please come back,’ I sobbed into the silence. ‘I’m sorry, Jak. Please don’t leave me here on my own. Please let everything be all right again.’

  What I really wanted though, even more than I wanted Jak to come back for me, was my mum.

  Chapter 5

  I had no phone, no money and no one to turn to for help except Jak. So all the time I was sitting on the rock, which must have been a couple of hours, I kept telling myself, ‘He will come back.’ The light had begun to fade and it had started getting cold by the time I heard the sound of a motorbike in the distance. Then I told myself instead, ‘It will be Jak and not some stranger who’ll find me here in the darkness on my own.’

  I was so relieved when Jak’s motorbike appeared around a bend in the road that I’d have forgiven him for assaulting me even if he hadn’t kept saying how sorry he was and that he loved me. ‘It’s all right,’ I told him, a dozen times. And I truly did believe that what had happened must have been my fault.

  Despite his apparent remorse, that incident marked a change in Jak’s attitude towards me. Looking back on it now, I suppose he had begun the process of breaking me down. Suddenly, it seemed that everything about me was wrong – the clothes I wore, the way I looked, the way I did my hair, the things I said. I became afraid of upsetting him, partly because I was frightened of being physically attacked again and partly because I thought that if I kept getting things wrong, he would leave me. The reality was that I was becoming dependent on him, practically and emotionally. So, mostly, I did whatever he told me to do.

  When I was a child and my mother’s relationship with John began to fall apart, she became overwhelmed by her own problems. In my early teens, I argued with her about things that didn’t matter, because what I believed mattered least of all was me. As I imagine many children do in similar situations, I thought it was my fault my father had left us and that he didn’t love me. Now I felt the same way about my relationship with Jak: I believed that when he was angry with me, it was because I wasn’t good enough.

  Two days after I was raped by the lawyer, Jak and I moved into a hotel and I started working as an escort. For the next six months, we moved from one dingy, cheap hotel to another, and every day I had sex with between six and eight men. Jak always went with me in a taxi to drop me off at their homes or hotel rooms. Then he would wait for me in a café to take me to the next job. I wore the clothes he bought for me and had sex with the men he told me to have sex with. To say I hated it would be a ridiculous understatement. I don’t know why I didn’t scream and shout and refuse to do it. I think perhaps it was because some part of me that might have resisted it had already started to shrivel up, and it just kept on getting smaller and smaller every day until it disappeared.

  It wasn’t until after I had started doing the escort work that Jak and I had sex for the first time. He didn’t force me to do it with him, but I didn’t like it. Maybe becoming a prostitute had made it impossible for me to enjoy having sex with anyone, even the man I still thought I loved. After the first time, he did it with me every morning and every night, even when he was angry with me.

  What happened during the daytime was mostly predictable. What I couldn’t ever predict, however, was what sort of mood Jak would be in at night. Sometimes, he would order a takeaway and we’d sit together in whatever dismal hotel room we were staying in and watch a film on the TV. On those occasions, I shut my mind to what I had been doing during the day and felt almost contented. Far more common, however, were the evenings when he’d fly into a rage for no apparent reason and hit me.

  He would sometimes humiliate and embarrass me in public, too. For example, one day we were having coffee at a café when I said something that made him angry. Without any warning, he stood up, almost knocking over the table, and poured a jug of water over my head, spat on me and walked away, leaving me sitting there with everyone staring at me.

  I hated the way he put my mum down too. He didn’t know anything about her, yet he always insisted on telling me that ‘No Albanian mother would behave like she does.’ Which was pretty rich coming from someone whose mother, I suspect now, didn’t have entirely clean hands and who, at the very least, knew about the crimes her son was involved in. I didn’t know any of that at the time, though. It just upset me when he talked that way about my mum, because I really loved her. What was almost worse than Jak’s criticism, however, was when he said that my mum was sexy and he insisted on describing all the things he would like to do to her, even when I cried and begged him to stop.

  Whenever I told him that it really upset me when he talked about my mum like that, he just laughed. I realise now, of course, that it wasn’t insensitivity or random unpleasantness that made him do it. Everything he said about my mum was calculated and quite deliberate, because what he was trying to do was drive a wedge between us. If he could separate us – emotionally as well as physically – I would be entirely dependent on him, and therefore much easier to control and manipulate.

  I had been doing the escort work for a few weeks when I started feeling ill. Eventually, after I had thrown up a few times, Jak took me to the hospital, where they did a scan and told me I was ten weeks’ pregnant. I was ecstatic, particularly when Jak seemed to be pleased about it too. I phoned my mum as soon as we came out of the hospital, and although I could tell she wasn’t very happy about the news, I was relieved that she didn’t raise the subject of abortion, as I had half-expected her to do. I didn’t see being pregnant at 14 as any kind of problem. In fact, quite the opposite, because it would mean that I would be able to stop doing the escort work and then Jak and I, and our children, would live happily ever after.

  Although I had two regular clients who didn’t use condoms, only Jak ever came inside me. So there was no question about whether the baby was his. Just a few weeks earlier, my mum had been the only person in the world who cared about me at all. Now I had Jak and soon I would have a baby to love and take care of, and to love me too.

  That night, Jak phoned his mother, and after he had spoken to her he told me, ‘My mum says you shouldn’t keep the baby. She thinks it’s too early and it will ruin everything.’ The bubble of happiness I had been bouncing around in all day had been pricked and I was devastated. I couldn’t imagine what it was that his mother thought a baby would ruin – but then I didn’t know anything about what Jak was really planning for my future. When I told him how upset I was that his mother had even suggested I should have an abortion, we had a huge row and he stormed out of the hotel, leaving me sitting on the bed crying.

  When he came back a couple of hours later, we had something to eat, watched TV and went to bed, without either of us having said very much. Since I had started feeling sick, I had been finding it difficult to sleep at night, so for the last few nights I had slept on a sort of rubber mat on the floor. I lay down on it again that night and after Jak got into the bed we started to talk. I told him I thought the fact that we were going to have a baby should be making us happy and then I tried to explain why I had been upset by what his mother had said. I think that’s when we started arguing again.

&
nbsp; Suddenly, I couldn’t bear it any longer. I got up, went over to the bed and said, ‘Please, Jak, don’t let’s argue.’ Then I bent down to hug him, just as his foot shot out from under the bedclothes and he kicked me in the stomach with such force I fell backwards and slid across the tiled floor to the other side of the room. For a moment, I just lay there, slumped against the wall, shocked and bewildered. Then the pain started – somewhere deep in my stomach at first and then spreading like fire throughout my body. I was still leaning against the wall sobbing when Jak turned over and went to sleep.

  The next morning, when I started bleeding clots of blood, I was very frightened. Jak took me to the pharmacy and bought me some painkillers for period pains. But although I was in almost constant pain for the next two weeks, he didn’t ever suggest I should go to the hospital, and I didn’t dare ask him to take me.

  I didn’t understand that I was having a miscarriage. When I did realise that I had lost the baby, it seemed like a tragedy; whereas, in fact, it was a blessing – certainly for the child, because God knows what would have happened to it if it had been born.

  It was a long time before I allowed myself to accept the fact that Jak hadn’t simply lashed out at me with his foot in a thoughtless fit of temper. I may not have understood about abortions and miscarriages or about what would really have been involved in having a baby in the situation I was in. I realise now that Jak did, and that he knew exactly what he was doing when he kicked me. By that time, rarely a day passed when he didn’t slap me, punch me in the head or drag me around the room by my hair. But he was always careful not to leave marks on any part of my body that could be seen by anyone else. And he never kicked me in the stomach again.

  As he systematically took control of every aspect of my life, I was learning to be afraid of him. He would fly into rages, which often seemed to be prompted by jealousy that, even as I became increasingly confused and disorientated, seemed to me to be bizarre in the circumstances. Sometimes, he would ask me about one of the men who had paid to have sex with me that day. ‘Tell me what you did with him,’ he would say. ‘Go on, tell me. You liked it, didn’t you?’ I wanted to shout that I had hated it and that I couldn’t bear even to talk about it. But if I didn’t answer his questions, he would only get angrier. So I would describe the disgusting, depraved things the man had done to me and then Jak would have sex with me too. And although it was just another ordeal I had to pretend I enjoyed, I did still love him, ridiculous as that sounds when I say it now.