Bought and Sold Read online

  I earned between 2,000 and 2,500 euros a night, every night for two weeks. Jak and Edi drove past me at intervals to collect the money – so that I wasn’t mugged, they said. The rest of the time, they did what they had promised they would do, and watched me from a distance. Fortunately, no one ever did try to hurt me. Perhaps what helped to dissuade them was the fact that as soon as I got into a car I always said that people were following us to make sure I was safe. Even so, the possibility was always there with every new encounter.

  When I finished work in the early hours one morning, Jak and Edi had picked me up as usual and we drove to a petrol station, where Edi filled up the car. He had just got back behind the steering wheel when a police car pulled in behind us. One of the two policemen who got out of it walked around our car to the driver’s side and knocked on the window. ‘Don’t speak. Don’t say anything,’ Jak said to me over his shoulder.

  The policeman told Edi and Jak to get out of the car and then asked to see their documents. I kept very still, hoping he wouldn’t notice me on the back seat, but while he was checking their papers, the other policeman flashed the beam of his torch around the inside of the car and directly into my face. I closed my eyes and turned away from the blinding light. When I opened them again, his colleague was handing the papers back to Jak and Edi and saying, in English, ‘Go. And don’t let us see you here again. If you come back, we will arrest you. Do you understand?’

  The next day, Jak told me we were leaving. ‘It’s too risky here,’ he said, ‘and we’re not making any more money than we do in Athens.’ A couple of hours later, we were on the ferry again, on our way back to Athens.

  I didn’t know anything about the laws related to prostitution at that time, but although prostitution itself is legal in Italy, organised prostitution, controlled by a third party, is not. In Greece, on the other hand, more or less anything is legal, in brothels, on the street, pimping – although not for anyone under the age of 21, as I was.

  A few days after we had returned from Italy, Jak had another meeting with Leon, and I went with him to a burger restaurant in a different city square. There was a man with Leon this time, a Romanian who he introduced as Elek. I sat drinking my coffee while the three men talked to each other in a language I didn’t recognise. Then Leon turned to me and said, ‘We’re talking about a special anal job you’re going to do tonight.’

  I glanced anxiously at Jak, who just shrugged and said, ‘I know you hate doing anal, but the guy’s old and can’t really get it up anyway. So it won’t hurt and …’

  ‘And it’s worth two thousand euros,’ Leon interrupted him. ‘So don’t fuck it up.’ He cracked his knuckles, then looked at his watch and added, ‘I think we’ve just got time for another coffee.’

  The money wasn’t going to benefit me in any way, so it was odd how mentioning it made me feel the pressure of responsibility. It was similar to the way I’d felt when I had shoplifted in England: I hadn’t wanted to do it, but when my friend said, ‘Come on, quick; do it now,’ it had seemed as though I didn’t have a choice. As far as the three men were concerned, the matter was already decided. And then it dawned on me with sickening clarity that there must be something they weren’t telling me: 2,000 euros was a lot of money to pay for anal sex, whatever the state of virility of the old man. Even the guy with the whips, video camera and gun had only paid 1,000. I wanted to tell Jak I was frightened and beg him not to make me do it. When I saw the cold warning in his eyes, I asked instead, ‘How long will I have to stay?’

  ‘It’s just normal, about an hour, maybe less.’ Leon shrugged.

  Elek’s tone was kinder though, as he said, ‘Don’t be nervous. You’ll be fine. Do you speak any Greek?’

  ‘A bit,’ I told him. In fact, I had been surprised by how quickly I picked it up during the months I had been in Athens, particularly when few of the people I came into contact with had any interest in talking to me.

  ‘Well, make sure they don’t realise that when you go to this job tonight,’ Elek said. ‘As far as this guy is concerned, you’re an English tourist on your first visit to Greece. That’s what you say if anyone asks you, okay?’

  After we had drunk our coffee, Elek turned to me again and said, ‘I’m going to be taking over from Leon for a while. I’ll be finding you jobs from now on, and meeting up with you and Jak from time to time.’ He took my phone and put his number into it. ‘In fact, I’m going to take you to the place today.’ A few minutes later, I was sitting on the back of his motorcycle on the way to do a job I was dreading more than I had dreaded any of the ones I’d done so far.

  Elek stopped outside an apartment building in an area of the city where a lot of wealthy bankers, politicians and high-ranking government officials lived. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘This is what’s going to happen. When you get inside, a woman will be there to meet you. She’ll put a blindfold over your eyes and …’

  Suddenly I knew why the man was willing to pay so much money: the only possible explanation was that I was going to be murdered. ‘I don’t want to do it,’ I whimpered.

  ‘What do you mean you don’t want to do it?’ Elek’s earlier friendliness had been replaced by terse anger. ‘You’ve got no choice now. You can’t just change your mind. These are important people, you know; they haven’t got time to waste.’ He took out his phone, dialled a number and said in English, ‘We’re here, at the gates.’ One of the security cameras above the wrought-iron railings moved almost imperceptibly, then there was a buzzing sound from the gate and Elek pushed it open, saying as he did so, ‘Don’t worry. It’ll be fine. Phone me when you’re ready to leave and I’ll be here to pick you up.’

  I was just stepping into the courtyard when his phone rang. He reached out to catch the gate with his hand and told me to wait while he answered it, and after listening for a moment he said, ‘I’m going to have to come with you.’

  A woman with short grey hair and a sour expression met us just inside the apartment block and handed Elek a fat envelope, which he slipped into an inside pocket of his jacket. Then he turned and walked away. I knew it must be the 2,000 euros. But why pay it to Elek in advance? People usually gave the money to me when I did escort jobs. It seemed to be further proof that something really bad was going to happen to me, something that would prevent me being able to leave with the money myself. It did cross my mind to start screaming. There must have been people in some of the apartments who would have heard me and, at the very least, would have opened their doors to see what was happening. But, for some reason, the fact that the money had already been paid made me think that wasn’t an option.

  After Elek had gone, the woman took a strip of material out of the pocket of her dress and indicated for me to turn round. Then she placed a blindfold over my eyes and tied it behind my head. I was shaking and had begun to cry when I asked her, ‘Why are you doing this? Why do I have to wear a blindfold?’

  ‘Because this man is well known,’ she answered, in heavily accented English. ‘You must not see this man.’

  For a moment, I had a strange sense of calm, as though my mind had given up and simply accepted the fact that if they really were planning to kill me, there was nothing I could do about it now. It didn’t last long though. I’m not the sort of person who is struck dumb by fear; panic makes me voluble, and I was sobbing loudly as the woman tightened the blindfold and checked to make sure I couldn’t see. Then she took hold of my arm and led me down the marble-floored corridor, telling me sharply to, ‘Stop crying! Shut up! Stop now!’ When I stumbled, she clicked her tongue irritably and then put her arm around my waist to support me.

  ‘Please tell me what’s going to happen to me,’ I sobbed. ‘You’re going to kill me, aren’t you? Please tell me if you are. I need to know. I’m from England and I just want to go home.’

  The woman gave a snort of laughter and said scornfully, ‘No one’s going to kill you! But if you don’t shut up, he’ll tell you to leave, and then you’ll be in trouble.’ />
  I realised we must have entered a room when the sound of our footsteps changed, and when the woman said something in Greek, a man’s voice answered. Suddenly I began to shout, ‘No! I don’t have to do this. You’re going to hurt me. They said I didn’t have to do it.’ As my panic tipped over into hysteria, I would have said anything, told any lie to stop them doing what I knew they were going to do.

  ‘Be calm.’ The woman’s voice was quiet and kinder than it had been before. ‘It’s all right. Don’t worry. Just take off your skirt and pants.’

  Still whimpering, I had started tugging at my clothes when I heard noises behind me that made me freeze. It sounded like a drawer being opened and closed and then metal tapping against metal. The fear was like a solid weight pressing on my chest, crushing all the air out of my lungs and blocking my throat so that I couldn’t swallow. I was still struggling to breathe when I was pushed face-down on to the bed and heard the woman say, in Greek, ‘Okay? I’ll get it ready.’

  ‘Get what ready?’ I shrieked, forgetting what Elek had told me about not letting them know I could understand or speak the language.

  For a moment, no one said anything; then a man’s voice asked, ‘Do you speak Greek?’ When I didn’t answer, he asked the question again, this time in English.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I … I just know one or two words.’ And then my first coherent thought struck me: if it was so important to them that I didn’t speak Greek, perhaps it was something I could use to try to save myself. I started shouting, ‘Yes, I do speak Greek. I can understand everything you’re saying. So you’d better not hurt me.’ But my defiance was short-lived, and I was crying again as I begged them, ‘Please, don’t hurt me.’

  ‘We’re not going to hurt you,’ the man said. Then, speaking to the woman in Greek again, he asked, ‘What are we going to do now?’

  ‘Shall we take the blindfold off?’ she said. ‘Maybe if it calms her down …’

  ‘No!’ The man’s tone was emphatic. ‘Definitely not! I don’t trust this girl.’

  I think the woman was hoping to calm me down when she said, ‘It’s all right. I’m just going to clean you out.’ In fact, her words had the opposite effect and I started shouting, ‘What do you mean? What are you doing?’ In some ways, it might have been better not to have asked, because what she described to me was some sort of colonic irrigation involving a length of tubing and a pump. It was horrible, but fear is tiring and by that point I just wanted to get it all over with as quickly as possible.

  I had already sensed that the man was standing behind me before he spoke. ‘I don’t get very hard,’ he said. ‘And I come very quickly. So I won’t hurt you.’ It did hurt though and by the time he had finished I was crying and begging him to stop.

  A few minutes later, the woman led me back down the marble corridor, removed the blindfold, pressed a button to open the gate and let me out.

  As I stepped out on to the street into the sunshine, I felt disorientated in the way you do when you come out of a cinema after seeing a film in the daytime. I was anxious too, because I thought the man would tell Elek I had made a fuss and then he would tell Jak and I’d get into really bad trouble.

  For the next couple of days, I kept expecting Jak to start shouting at me, but he never did – at least, not about the wealthy man who liked anal sex and didn’t want to be identified. Perhaps, if the man was someone who was well known in Greece, he didn’t want to make a fuss about what had happened and risk upsetting the people who supplied him with foreign girls to gratify his weird sexual appetites.

  I was working seven days a week, doing between eight and twelve jobs a day, each of which lasted for anything from a few minutes to an hour. Jak and I got up at six o’clock every morning and were out of the hotel by nine at the latest. He took me to all the jobs, in people’s homes and in offices, and then back to the hotel. It was a routine that became my life, without my understanding how or why. If you have very low self-esteem and no confidence, you tend to accept other people’s evaluation of your worth, and it didn’t cross my mind that I might deserve better.

  One of my regular clients was an optician. He would usually be shutting up shop when Jak dropped me off. On the occasions when he did still have someone with him, he would say to me quite casually, as if I was just another customer, ‘Hi. How are you? Just give me five minutes please and I’ll be with you.’ And I would sit down to wait for him, feeling embarrassed and wondering if the person trying on frames for their new glasses knew why I was really there. When the customer had gone, he would close the shop, pull down the shutters and we would either go into a tiny back room or he would take me to an empty apartment just around the corner.

  The optician was one of a few men who didn’t use condoms. I dreaded doing it that way, but Jak told me it was okay because both he and Leon – and later Elek – always checked their health papers and made sure that they were clean. Even though I chose to believe him, despite the fact that I knew it cost the men more to do it without a condom, I still worried about it.

  I was in the shop with the optician one day when his wife and children turned up. The shutters were down so she couldn’t see us. But when she kept ringing the bell, I was sure she must know we were in there. It was horrible. I felt terrible, as though what was happening was my fault rather than the fault of the man who was cheating on his wife by having sex with a prostitute. I was scared too, and used to dread going there after that.

  There were lots of things I didn’t know about sex before I went to Greece. One of them was that there are men who derive sexual pleasure from inflicting pain on women. I came across quite a few men like that while I was there, as well as some who frightened me for other reasons.

  Jak took me to do an escorting job one day at a dilapidated old house that was set slightly apart from its neighbours at the end of a dark street. I told him as he was dropping me off, ‘I’ve got a really sick feeling about this place. I think there’s something wrong here.’

  ‘Well, you’ve got your phone,’ he said. ‘If you feel as though you’re in any danger, you can speed dial me and I’ll come straight back. I’m not going far. I’ll be waiting for you in a café just round the corner.’

  Perhaps the fact that I felt grateful to him for those few words of comfort is an indication of how distorted normality had become for me. Despite his reassurances, however, I felt very nervous as I walked up the path and rang the bell on what appeared to be a metal front door. The guy who opened it was probably in his mid-forties, with greasy hair, stained clothes and long, dirty fingernails.

  When he led the way into a room that stank of vomit and stale sweat, I had to force myself to sit down on the grimy, threadbare sofa. Then he just stood there in front of me, laughing and making weird twitching movements with his head, and it felt as though hundreds of tiny insects were crawling all over my skin. I was so unnerved by him that I had already begun to move my hand, very slowly, towards the pocket where I’d put my mobile phone, when two very bad things happened almost simultaneously. The first was that I suddenly remembered that I had transferred the phone from my pocket to my handbag as Jak and I were leaving the hotel. The second was that I noticed an axe propped up against the wall a few feet away from where the man was standing.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said in Greek. ‘I … I’m afraid I feel sick. So … I’m just going to go.’ I opened my handbag as I was speaking and began, surreptitiously and blindly, to search for my phone. ‘My boyfriend’s waiting for me outside. I’m going to phone him and tell him I’m leaving your house now.’ I tried to sound confident, but he must have been able to hear the panic in my voice. He stared at me almost blankly for a second, as if he was trying to remember who I was and why I was in his house. Then he said, very loudly, in English, ‘No! Do not move.’

  The sound of his voice had almost the same effect as a physical blow and I burst into tears, pleading with him like a little girl, ‘Please, don’t hurt me. I know you’re going to hurt m
e. Please don’t.’

  ‘I am going to hurt you.’ He repeated the words several times, very slowly, as if he was examining them one by one in his mind.

  ‘What are you going to do to me?’ I whispered, not because I really wanted to know, but because some instinct was prompting me to try to make him talk to me. I think I hoped that it might make him see me as a human being, or maybe I was simply trying to buy myself some time. Stupidly though, I let my eyes return to the axe. The man glanced sideways to see what I was looking at, and then, in what seemed to be just one swift movement, snatched it up and held its mud-caked blade against my throat.

  As the cold steel touched my skin, I threw up. The man dropped the axe on the floor at his feet and started to laugh. Grabbing the opportunity while he was distracted, I reached into my bag, pulled out my phone and pressed Jak’s number on speed dial. Mercifully, Jak answered almost immediately and as soon as I heard his voice I blurted out, ‘I can’t do this. I need to get out of here right now.’

  ‘Ah, don’t go.’ The man leered at me, displaying a mouthful of uneven, nicotine-stained teeth. ‘I was only joking.’

  Clutching my bag to my chest like a shield, I jumped up and ran to the front door. I was still struggling to open it when I felt his arm touch the side of my body. When I tried to scream, no sound came out. Then, through the blinding haze of my panic, I realised that he had opened the door for me and was letting me go.

  My heart was thudding as I ran down the path and out on to the street. I had hoped to find Jak already there and waiting for me, but there was no sign of him. I phoned him again, glancing round me all the time as I did so, expecting the man to come after me. But he didn’t follow me and a few minutes later I was sitting on the back of Jak’s motorcycle, crying silently and thinking, with desperate longing, about my mother.

  I thought Jak would sympathise and say how sorry he was that I’d had to go through such a horrible ordeal. So I was completely taken aback when he closed the door of our hotel room and started shouting at me for messing up ‘such a simple job’.