Bought and Sold Read online

  Sometimes he would drop me off at people’s houses, but more often I went to hotel rooms. Fortunately, most of the men just wanted ‘normal sex’ and after they had done it they were almost as keen for me to leave as I was. Some simply wanted company, and some wanted to do things I had had no idea anyone ever wanted to do.

  One of my regular clients was a businessman called Andreas who had a nice house in a wealthy part of Athens. He usually booked me for an hour, so Jak would drop me off and then go and wait for me at a café in a nearby square. Andreas didn’t ever want sex. Sometimes he would order a takeaway and we would sit and watch TV, and sometimes he would talk to me – in fluent English – about politics and all the other things that interested him. He must have been lonely, but he was kind and cheerful and I got on really well with him and used to look forward to going to his house to see him.

  Although Andreas seemed to be the sort of person you might be able to trust, I was wary about what I said to him, in case he repeated it to Jak. I did tell him about Jak though – that he was my boyfriend and that we were going to build a house and start a family. I didn’t know how the system of prostitution worked; in fact, I didn’t even know there was a system, or that I was part of it. So I told Andreas that I was a ‘willing prostitute’, working for myself, and he always gave me an extra 50 euros as I was leaving – which I always gave immediately to Jak.

  One day, Andreas said he would like to be able to see me without having to go through Leon or Jak first.

  ‘I can’t do that,’ I told him. ‘I would lose my job. And anyway, I love Jak.’

  ‘Well, if you ever do get the chance,’ he said, ‘if you’re ever on your own, come and see me.’ He wrote his phone number on a scrap of paper and gave it to me, and before I left his house, I screwed it up into a tiny ball, put it at the bottom of my handbag and prayed that Jak would never find it.

  At the opposite end of the spectrum of customers I had at that time was a man who had a whipping fetish. I begged Jak not to make me go back there after the first time, but the guy was paying 1,000 euros an hour. He became a regular client and I saw him at least once every two weeks, always at the same ‘love hotel’ in the city centre, where people rented rooms by the hour.

  He had a big bag, like the sort of thing you’d take to the gym, except that it was stuffed full of whips and canes. Sometimes, he would whip me so hard my skin would feel as though it was on fire and every inch of my back would be covered in swollen, bleeding welts. He would film it all on a video camera that was always set up on a tripod, and when I cried and begged him to stop, he just told me to shut up.

  As well as the whipping, he was into anal sex, which was also incredibly painful. When he had finished, he would drag me off the bed and say, ‘Get on your knees and open your mouth.’ Then he would urinate on my face. I always tried to keep my mouth shut, which was difficult because I was usually crying, and he’d get really angry and shout at me, ‘Next time you’re going to swallow it.’

  If you had any self-esteem, you wouldn’t let anyone do that to you. But I already felt like a piece of crap, so it was almost as though I thought being degraded and humiliated was all I deserved. He was another one who spoke good English and I did try to talk to him. I had some idea that if I could make him see me as more than just some object he was filming, he might feel sorry for me. I didn’t push it though, because I was afraid of annoying him and getting into really big trouble with Jak. I needn’t have worried because he wasn’t listening anyway: he wasn’t paying a substantial sum of money to hear anything I might have to say. However, he did stop urinating on my face after a while and he didn’t whip me quite so hard.

  The last time I saw him, I had just had a massive row with Jak. I had a stomach bug, which was making me feel really ill, and when I told Jak I wasn’t well enough to go out that day, he flew into a rage and shouted at me, ‘You’re pathetic. You’ve got an upset stomach and suddenly you can’t cope. I can’t decide if the worst thing about you is how weak you are or that you’re stupid. Don’t you ever think about anyone except yourself? You’ll have to go. I need the money.’

  Even though I was frightened of Jak by that time, I did sometimes argue with him. I think what made me brave on those occasions was the fact that I still clung to the belief that we were a couple and all the unspeakably horrible things I was doing were for our future together. So perhaps he was right, at least, about my being stupid. What upset me that day was that he had said he needed the money, not ‘we’, although I had just enough sense to know that it wouldn’t be a good idea to make a big deal about it. So I got dressed, put on my make-up and went with him in a taxi to the ‘love hotel’.

  I had been crying silently in the taxi on the way there, and by the time I knocked on the door of the hotel room, I must have looked a bit of a mess. I was sitting on the bed, trying to tidy up my make-up, when the man asked me, ‘What’s wrong? Has something happened? Tell me what’s up.’

  There seemed to be genuine sympathy in his voice, and I was feeling very low. So I told him, ‘I don’t know how I feel about doing this work. I have sex with all these people and it’s … it’s not really me.’ It was a pathetic explanation, particularly in view of what I was actually talking about. But I didn’t know any other of way of describing it. What I was doing was something I had never even imagined anyone did, and the way it made me feel was something I couldn’t put into words.

  The man sat down on the bed beside me and started asking me questions. How many men did I have sex with every day? How much money was I getting? I told him I wasn’t getting any money at all. ‘My boyfriend keeps it,’ I said. Then – not wanting to admit, to either of us, the possibility that Jak might be a bad person – I added quickly, ‘But he does pay for all our food, and things like that.’

  It sounds crazy now, the idea of sitting in a hotel room and confiding in a man who paid 1,000 euros an hour to film himself whipping me and having anal sex with me. I had hit rock bottom – or thought I had, because I didn’t know then that things could get any worse – and it seemed better to have him to talk to than no one at all. And he did seem to be listening to me. So when he started telling me about all his important, influential contacts in the international film industry, I almost dared to believe he was going to offer to help me.

  ‘Do you know what?’ he said suddenly, leaning down and taking a gun out of his bag. ‘I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve looked at this gun and thought about ending it all.’ He turned it over in his hands. ‘Is that the way you feel today? Do you feel like you want to end it all?’

  A vein in my temple was throbbing and I could taste the sharp taste of vomit. But I forced myself to keep breathing.

  ‘Is that how you feel?’ he asked me again. When I still didn’t answer, his tone changed and he said angrily, ‘I’m asking you a question. Tell me!’

  ‘I suppose I do feel a bit like that,’ I whispered. ‘But I’d never do it.’

  ‘Hold the gun,’ he said, his voice very quiet now. ‘Go on, take it.’ He put it in my hand. ‘It’s loaded.’

  ‘No, please, I don’t …’ My heart was thudding, but when I tried to give the gun back to him, he wouldn’t take it.

  Suddenly he stood up and shouted, ‘Hold it up to your head. No one should have to live like this. Just put the gun to your head, pull the trigger and it will all be over.’ I pressed the cold metal of the gun against the side of my head and started to scream. ‘Shhh,’ he said. ‘It’s all right. Go on.’ And I pulled the trigger.

  Before that day, I would have said categorically that I wasn’t the sort of person who would ever try to take her own life – whatever sort of person that is. Maybe it was because I’d had a brief, illuminating flash of understanding about what my life with Jak really was and I knew that, whatever I had been telling myself, in reality I had no one. In that split second as I held the gun to my head, aware of nothing except the man’s voice telling me how simple it would be to put an end to
the terrible mess my life had become, I think I lost my grip on reality.

  They say people who’ve committed suicide have killed themselves ‘while the balance of their mind was disturbed’. Maybe, sometimes, they do it during a brief period when they see things clearly and realise it’s their only way out. For me, though, it was just a passing moment of insanity, so it was very fortunate that the gun wasn’t loaded and I didn’t blow my own head off in a room in a ‘love hotel’ in Athens.

  After I had pulled the trigger, I dropped the gun on the floor, and I was still sitting on the bed in a state of shock when the man bent down and picked it up. Then he laughed and said, ‘You really were going to do it, eh? Is it really that bad? Well, I’m not going to see you anymore. You’ve obviously got issues.’

  Although I didn’t realise it until much later, a lot of the jobs I was doing were being set up by the Frenchman, Leon, the man I had met in the burger restaurant who was splitting the proceeds with Jak. For the next few days, I waited in a state of anxious dread for the moment when Jak would find out that the man who had enough money to indulge his fetish for whipping young women had decided to dispense with my services, and would fly into a furious rage. For some reason, it didn’t ever happen and he never mentioned the man to me again.

  The fact that I had escaped the violent beating I’d anticipated from Jak did nothing to lessen the indelible mark the incident left on me. I kept thinking about how close I had come to killing myself, and started having flashbacks and nightmares, often waking up in a cold sweat after dreaming that I had heard the click of the gun’s empty cartridge.

  I couldn’t understand how anyone could do to someone else what that man had done to me; he didn’t even know me or have any reason to dislike me. He was right about one thing though: I obviously did have ‘issues’. I began to think I wasn’t normal, not least because no normal person who didn’t actually want to die – as I didn’t – would hold a gun to their head and pull the trigger, however much they were coerced and bullied into doing so by someone else.

  I was already deeply unhappy and confused before that day; after it, I didn’t seem to be able to make sense of anything at all. I kept telling myself that at least I had Jak. But if that was true, why was there a black hole of loneliness inside me that seemed to get bigger every day? The reality was that the only person in the entire world who actually cared about me was my mother, and I was beginning to wonder if I would ever see again.

  In fact, it wasn’t long after my inadvertent suicide attempt that my mother came back to Greece to live with Nikos, the man who owned the bar where I had first met Jak. While she had been in England, Jak had occasionally let me use his phone to call her. ‘Tell her you’re working as a waitress,’ he’d said. ‘And tell her how happy you are.’

  ‘It’s really fun,’ I told Mum. ‘And I’m earning good money. Jak and I are saving up to build our own house. We’ve got all sorts of plans for the future.’ As I said it, I could actually see the house in my head, and imagine how impressed Mum and Nikos would be when they visited us there and saw how well I was taking care of everything.

  ‘As long as you really are happy and Jak’s looking after you,’ Mum said.

  ‘Oh, he is,’ I assured her, closing my eyes for a moment and swallowing the lump that had lodged itself in my throat.

  Jak had bought me a cheap phone of my own, so that I could call him when I finished jobs, and he let me use it to text and talk to my mum too now that she was back in Greece. I wasn’t allowed to give the number to anyone else – not that I would have had anyone else to give it to. Jak checked the phone every day, just to make sure, and he read all the messages Mum and I sent each other: ‘Are you all right?’ ‘I love you.’ ‘I can’t wait to see you.’

  He didn’t seem to worry that I might tell her the truth in a phone call. I suppose he was too confident of his own manipulative powers, and perhaps of my gullibility too. And he made sure that I was afraid of Leon, by saying things like, ‘You don’t want to do anything that would upset him – and, believe me, he would find out.’

  It might have been true, or it might simply have been a useful way of covering up the fact that it was Jak himself I should have been most afraid of.

  Chapter 6

  One day, when we had been in Athens for a few months, Jak had a phone call from an Albanian friend of his called Edi who lived in Italy. ‘There’s a lot of money to be made there,’ he told me afterwards. ‘Edi suggested we should go out to stay with him for a while and try it out.’ I said I didn’t want to go, but Jak had already made up his mind.

  I didn’t really consider the implications of the fact that Jak had a friend in Italy who knew all about the business of prostitution. I think I had given up trying to work out why anything happened. If I had thought about it – or wondered how he knew people like Leon – I might have come to the conclusion that even before he met me, Jak had known something about prostitution too, and that he hadn’t got me involved in it by chance.

  Edi met us off the ferry in Italy a couple of days later and that night he took us out in his car to show me the road where I would be working. I knew some basic Greek by that time and understood more or less how things worked in Greece. So I had been dreading starting again in a country where I didn’t speak or understand the language at all. What I hadn’t realised was that I would be working outside.

  ‘I don’t want to stand on the street,’ I told Jak and Edi, my voice shrill with panic. ‘Can’t I do escorting?’ A few weeks earlier, I had been appalled and terrified by the thought of escorting; now it seemed to be very much the lesser of two evils.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ Edi said, as if he was reassuring an unnecessarily anxious, fretful child.

  There were times – like this one – when I felt as though I had become trapped inside someone else’s life. I was like a character in a film who’s been mistaken for another character and decides, for plot-related reasons, to go along with it and pretend they really are that person. I had been mistaken for a prostitute, but it would all get sorted out in the end, as long as I held on to the memory of who I really was. The problem was, though, that Jak seemed to have forgotten that I wasn’t really a prostitute, and that sometimes made it difficult for me to be certain about my true identity. It was a problem I thought would only be made worse by having to stand on a street corner waiting to be picked up by any stranger who wanted to have sex with me.

  That night, Edi drove down a long, dimly lit road where dozens of girls and transsexuals were already in their places ready for the night’s work that lay ahead of them. He stopped the car a short distance past where the last girl was standing, just beyond the arc of light cast by the final streetlight, and said, ‘This is where you’ll be working tomorrow night. We’ll be parked over there.’ He pointed to somewhere in the darkness on the other side of the road. ‘We’ll be able to see what’s going on, and we’ll follow every car you get into.’

  ‘I can’t do it,’ I whispered, but neither he nor Jak seemed to hear me.

  The next morning, the two men took me out and bought me a short skirt, a belly top with a halter neck and a pair of high-stiletto-heeled shoes. They were the sort of shiny, cheap clothes people might imagine a hooker would wear, and quite different from the more subdued, almost childish clothes Jak had previously bought for me. Just as it was starting to get dark, I did my hair and make-up, Jak put glittery gel all over my body, and then Edi drove us back to the street where the prostitutes were already gathering.

  Before they dropped me off, Edi slowed down as he passed two large trees separated by a patch of grass on the opposite side of the road from ‘my spot’. ‘That’s where we’ll be parked,’ he said. ‘As long as you stay where I showed you, we’ll be able to see you from there. So you’ll be perfectly safe.’

  There wasn’t any part of what I was about to do that would be ‘perfectly safe’. Even someone as naïve and apparently willing to lie to themselves as I was could see that. Onc
e again, I don’t know why I didn’t simply say, ‘I’m not going to do it.’ When I had some counselling a little while ago, the therapist talked about learned behaviour, dependency and all the other complicated characteristics that might make some people identifiable to traffickers as potential victims. If you add fear of violence to all those other factors, I suppose you arrive at some sort of explanation.

  I didn’t speak any Italian, but Edi had told me what to say, and when I was standing at the side of the road, shivering and feeling sick, I kept going over the unfamiliar words in my head. When the first car pulled up beside me, I must have managed to say something that made sense, because a few seconds later I was sitting in the passenger seat, praying silently that Jak and Edi had seen me get into the car and weren’t far behind us. As the guy drove down the road looking for somewhere to stop, I had to fight the urge to turn round and see if they were there. Then I caught sight of Edi’s car reflected in the wing mirror and almost cried with relief.

  The first man wanted oral sex, as most of the others did. I hated doing it. But at least it was quick, and within minutes I was standing in the cold darkness at the side of the road again, waiting to be picked up by someone else.