Copyright
HarperElement
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First published by HarperElement 2015
FIRST EDITION
© Megan Stephens and Jane Smith 2015
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Cover photograph © Yolande de Kort/Trevillion Images (posed by model)
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Source ISBN: 9780007594078
Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2015 ISBN: 9780007594115
Version: 2014-12-17
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Some Facts about Modern-day Slavery
A Police Perspective on Human Trafficking in the UK
Exclusive sample chapter
Moving Memoirs eNewsletter
Write for Us
About the Publisher
Chapter 9
The next time I saw Christoph, I somehow managed to pluck up the courage to say to him, ‘My mum wants to come to visit me. You know she lives in Greece now, on the coast? So it’s difficult to keep putting her off. And I do really want to see her.’
We were in Christoph’s car at the time, driving along a busy road on the way to a brothel a short distance from the city. He didn’t say anything at all for a minute or two. Then he slowed down, pulled in to the side of the road and stopped the car. When he leaned towards me, I flinched, thinking he was going to hit me. Instead, he opened the glove box, took out a photograph and handed it to me.
Although the image was clear and in focus, it seemed to have been taken through a doorway into a dimly lit room, and I couldn’t make any sense of it at first. Then Christoph asked me, pleasantly, ‘Is that your mum?’ And suddenly I realised that the ‘room’ was Nikos’s bar, and it felt as if someone was shaking my body from the inside.
‘Yes,’ I whispered, touching the image of my mother with my finger.
‘Well, you know what will happen to her if you do anything to make me angry.’ Christoph’s tone was still pleasant. ‘If you ever try to get away …’ He didn’t need to finish the sentence. He just looked at me without expression and did the shooting motion he sometimes did, with his fingers pointing at the photograph. Then he smiled, took the photograph out of my hand, put it back in the glove box and said, ‘It’s a great idea. So, what would you like to do while you’re mum’s here? We must make sure she has a good time.’
The fact that Christoph had a photograph of my mother seemed simply to be further proof that what he often told me was true and that he had eyes everywhere. The only person who knew where my mum would be was Jak, and I was certain he wouldn’t have taken the photograph and given it to Christoph. When I saw Jak again, a long time later, he swore he didn’t know anything about it, and I believed him. But that was before I realised that almost every emotionally charged, heart-felt word he ever spoke to me was a lie.
‘Your mum thinks you’re working as a waitress?’ Christoph asked me, although it wasn’t really a question. ‘Right, well that’s easy.’ He patted my knee and pulled the car back into the traffic. ‘We’ll plan a nice day in Athens for her.’
‘She wants to come for a couple of nights,’ I told him, knowing that I was pushing my luck, but that Mum would be hurt – and possibly suspicious – if I insisted on just a one-night visit, particularly when we hadn’t seen each other for such a long time. ‘It will take her almost a whole day to get here.’ I held my breath as I waited for Christoph’s reaction. But to my huge relief he just shrugged and said, ‘Oh well, I suppose we can manage that.’
He picked me up from the hotel a couple of days later and we went to a café, where he took a photograph of me standing next to the café owner, smiling and holding some cups on a tray. The next day, he gave me a print of the photo and said, ‘Put it in your bag. You can show it to your mum when she comes.’
Mum arrived in Athens about a week after Christoph had agreed to her visit. He had booked a room for us in a hotel in the city centre, which turned out to be basic but clean, and in a completely different league from the ones I was used to staying in.
‘Tell her you’ve been given a couple of nights off work,’ he had said. ‘Eat in a nice restaurant. Enjoy yourself.’ He had counted out 250 euros and, as he was putting the notes in my hand, added, ‘But don’t forget, I’ll be watching you, all the time, everywhere you go.’
I was incredibly excited at the thought of seeing my mum again. I had often fantasised about telling her what I was really doing in Athens, and once I knew she was coming, I tried to think of some way of letting her know the truth. Simply blurting it out while she was there wasn’t a viable option, because I knew she would insist on doing something, and then both our lives would be in danger. I thought about writing a note and putting it in her pocket so that she would find it when she was at home and safe with Nikos again. But then I imagined her reading it, flying into a panic and phoning me when I was with Christoph, and him realising what I had done, no matter what excuse I tried to make. Or instead of phoning me, she might contact the police, which would be even worse, because I didn’t know if we could trust them.
‘Focus, Megan,’ I kept telling myself. ‘There has to be some way of doing this.’ But I knew in my heart that there was no way out that wouldn’t end badly – for me and, if I did anything to involve her while she was in Athens, for my mum too.
When the day finally came, I was so excited I could barely sit still in Christoph’s car as he drove me to the coach station. After he dropped me off, I knew he was still there somewhere, watching as Mum stepped down off the coach. We were both crying as we flung our arms around each other. Mum was simply happy to see me, but for me there was an added reason, because it was the first time in more than a year that I had been held by someone who cared about me.
I was aware of Christoph following us on several occasions while my mum was in Athens. At least twice, he drove past in his car and beeped the horn – just to let me know – and I waved and told Mum it was a friend. I’m sure he had other people watching us too. It didn’t matter though, because I wasn’t going to let anything spoil the few precious hours I had with my mother.
On the first evening, we got a taxi from the hotel to a place by the sea where there are lots of bars and cafés. We bought hotdogs and sat outside a café talking and talking. I kept looking at Mum, trying to memorise everything about her and about the evening we were spending together – an evening I had believed I would never have – and imagining what it would be like to go home on the coach with her.
There was a small amusement
park on the seafront, and after we had eaten our hotdogs, we went on some of the rides and I forgot about things for a while and had fun. Then we bought a bottle of wine and went back to the hotel room, where we got a bit drunk and started dancing to music on the radio. A song came on that I knew and I sang along to it in Greek, while Mum sat on the bed and listened. When it had finished, she clapped and told me I was brilliant. ‘You’ve got a lovely voice,’ she said. ‘And I can’t believe how well you speak Greek. I’ve been so impressed by the way you talk to everyone. I’ve been here almost as long as you have, and I can barely speak it at all.’
‘It’s just practice, Mum,’ I said. ‘If you know people – friends,’ I stumbled over the word, ‘friends who don’t speak English, you soon learn.’ I sounded casual, but in fact I felt incredibly proud of her praise.
It must have been about 2 o’clock in the morning when a man poked his head around the wall that divided our balcony from the one next door and said angrily, ‘Hey! Some people are trying to sleep. Keep the noise down.’ We were behaving badly and the poor man had every right to be fed up with us. But we were drunk, he had a single curl of hair hanging from his otherwise bald scalp, and we couldn’t stop laughing.
I hadn’t laughed like that, enjoyed myself or had someone to talk to for as long as I could remember, and I didn’t want the night to end. We did eventually fall asleep though. When we woke up the next morning we both felt a bit rough, so we sat on the balcony in the sunshine, smoking cigarettes, drinking iced coffee and talking. Mum rang Nikos and then handed the phone to me, saying, ‘He wants to talk to you.’
‘You must come to see us here very soon,’ Nikos said. ‘When you next get some time off work, come then. Okay?’ And I promised him that I would.
That evening, Mum wanted me to show her where I worked.
‘I don’t want to go there on my day off,’ I told her.
‘We won’t stay long,’ she said. ‘I want to be able to imagine you at work. And I want to meet your boss.’
‘I’m there all the time. I don’t want to take you there today,’ I insisted, hating the fact that I sounded like the petulant teenager I sometimes used to be, and that I was lying to her. ‘Anyway, I’ve got a surprise planned for you.’
Mum still moaned a bit, but I knew I’d got myself out of it. And then she suddenly asked, ‘Shall I stay another day? I would love to come to the café and have a coffee while you’re working. Why don’t I do that?’
People say that the most convincing liars are the ones who manage to delude themselves into believing that what they’re saying is actually true. I think for me it was simply a case of ‘practice makes perfect’: I always knew when I was lying to other people – but it was simply something I had to do, every day. I can’t remember now how I managed to persuade Mum to stick to her original plan and not stay any longer. What I do remember, though, is that I was really upset because I knew I had hurt her feelings.
What was true was that I had planned a surprise for her that night. Using what was left of the 250 euros Christoph had given me, I took her to a port just outside the city to have a meal at one of its fish restaurants. First, we wandered through a marina, trying to decide which of the many massive, incredibly expensive boats we would buy if we had a few million euros to spare. Then I chose a restaurant that had a glass floor and a huge picture window facing the water.
Although it started to rain just as we sat down to eat, we could still see the lights along the coast and watch the illuminated water lapping underneath our feet. As we were still recovering from the excesses of the night before, we decided against drinking any more alcohol with what turned out to be a really good three-course dinner.
At one point, Mum looked at me and said, ‘I always wanted the best for you, Megan. I’m so proud of you. You’re so clever, working and making a life for yourself, and speaking Greek the way you do.’ I had to force myself to keep smiling. And as I was desperately searching for something to focus on so that I wouldn’t burst into tears and tell her the truth, I remembered the photograph. Taking it out of my bag, I passed it across the table to my mum and said, ‘This is the café where I’m working. And this is my boss.’
‘Is he good to work for?’ She tilted the photograph towards the light. ‘Ah, he looks really nice.’
‘Yes, he’s great,’ I said. ‘He treats me really well. And the customers are good too. I get loads of tips. That’s how I could afford to bring you here this evening.’
‘Can I keep this? I want to show it to Nikos, and put it up on the wall in the bar.’ When I nodded, Mum put the photograph in her handbag, and I had to look away quickly so that she wouldn’t see the tears that escaped before I could stop them. In fact, she scanned the photograph when she got home, and put it on her phone and on Facebook with a note saying, ‘This is Megan with her boss at the café where she’s working. She’s happy and doing really well in Athens.’
The next morning, Christoph texted me to ask what time my mum was leaving and to tell me to wait in the café at the coach station for him when she had gone. Despite what he said, however, I was edgy and anxious as Mum and I said goodbye, because I thought he might already be there, watching.
When Mum walked away from me across the concourse, a little voice in my head was saying, ‘Why don’t you go with her? Go on, just get on the coach. What’s he going to do with all these people around?’ I had a sharp pain in my chest and suddenly I couldn’t bear the thought of Mum leaving me there on my own. I had just taken a step towards her when she turned, waved to me and mouthed the words, ‘I’m so proud of you, Megan.’ Suddenly I knew I couldn’t tell her the truth, because I wanted her to be proud of me, not ashamed. So I forced myself to smile and wave back at her, and then to watch her coach pull out on to the road before disappearing into the traffic.
The only good memories I have of all the years I was in Athens are of those two days I spent with my mother. It still makes me cry when I think about it today
I had been sitting in the café at the coach station for about an hour when Christoph finally turned up. He ordered a coffee for himself and another one for me, asked if my mother had enjoyed her visit, and then said, ‘I’m going out of town tonight. You’ll be working in a brothel on the coast while I’m away. We’ll get your coach ticket when we’ve had our coffee. Then I’ll drop you back at the hotel so that you can pack your suitcase.’
My coach left late in the evening of that day and arrived at the town on the coast in the early hours of the following morning. It was a long and tiring journey, but the worst thing about it was that it gave me time to think – about Mum and about what might have happened if I had gone with her. In reality though, I knew that escaping hadn’t ever been an option, because there was nowhere I could go where Christoph wouldn’t find me and, one way or another, bring me back into line.
I was met off the coach by a very camp Greek brothel owner called Dimitri, who threw up his hands in horror when he saw me. After making me turn round a couple of times while he examined me, he shrieked, ‘Oh my God! We’re going to have to get you sorted out right away. First, we need to get you some hair extensions.’
‘But I’ve already got them,’ I said.
He lifted a strand of my hair between his thumb and first finger, the way you might pick up a small dead animal by its tail, and said, ‘I mean proper hair extensions. Then we’ll buy you some nice underwear. I don’t know what sort of places you’ve worked in before, but I don’t have tramps working for me. My place is five star.’
Four hours and 800 euros later, I had new hair extensions and new nails. It seemed an awful lot of money for Dimitri to have spent, but he would soon recoup his investment.
I hadn’t managed to sleep much on the coach and by the time I started work that night, I was really tired. Dimitri’s ‘five-star’ brothel turned out to be every bit as cold, dingy, airless and disgusting as all the other brothels I had worked in. I worked alone, and, despite my make-over, didn’t do
very well on the first night. In fact, quite a few of the men who came in looked at me and went away again. Some of them obviously had no intention of paying for sex; others presumably found someone they liked the look of at one of the other 50 or more brothels in the area that all competed with each other for customers.
‘All the other places seem to be doing better than mine,’ Dimitri told me later. ‘I’m sick of changing girls. I just need to find the right one and then everything will be okay.’
After two more nights of averaging about 40 customers a night – rather than the 50 or 60 Dimitri was hoping for – it began to look as though I wasn’t the right girl either, and my self-esteem sank to an all-time low. It’s a very surreal experience, feeling ugly because some disgustingly sleazy guy takes one look at you and decides he would rather have five-minute sex with someone else.
Christoph phoned me every night, and what concerned me far more than feeling ugly was the thought that he would be angry with me when he found out I wasn’t doing well. In fact, he was fine about it. ‘Just try harder tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about it. You’re new there. You’ll get busy when people get to know you.’ Things never did change, however, and a couple of weeks later I was on a coach again, heading back to Athens.
Christoph met me at the coach station and took me to a hotel in the city centre I hadn’t stayed in before. I started doing some escorting during the days, as well as working in brothels at night.
Early one morning, Christoph phoned me and said, ‘I’m coming to get you now. Pack your bag and be ready to leave immediately. The police are on my trail.’ He sounded stressed, and as soon as I had put the phone down, I started running round the hotel room like a headless chicken, scooping up clothes and things from the bathroom and stuffing them into my suitcase. I didn’t have much, so it didn’t take me long, and by the time Christoph arrived I was packed and ready to go.
I don’t think Christoph had ever been angry with me before that day. But as I sat beside him in the car, he seemed tense and preoccupied and barely spoke to me. It was just a short drive to the apartment building where he parked and told me, tersely, to get out of the car. I had learned a long time ago, as a small child, not to do or say anything that might irritate people who are stressed or in a bad mood. So I followed him silently along the dank, dirty corridor into one of the apartments, where five frightened-looking girls were sitting on the floor in a small, airless room.
Bought and Sold (Part 3 of 3) Page 1