Bought and Sold (Part 3 of 3)

by Stephens, Megan

  ‘What’s up with you?’ Christoph asked me. ‘You used to make at least three thousand euros a day and now you’re not earning anything like that.’

  ‘Maybe people just don’t have the money to spare,’ I said. ‘I am trying my best.’

  ‘Look at you!’ He put his hand under my chin and jerked my head upwards. ‘You’ve got bags under your eyes. Don’t you get enough sleep? How many times have I told you that when you’re not working you should be sleeping, not messing about? You can have showers when you wake up, or at work when things are quiet. Come on, Megan. You have to do better than this.’

  It wasn’t long after that when he took me to a small town several miles outside Athens, where he left me to work in a brothel that was one of maybe ten on the same road. He came back a couple of times every week to collect the money I had earned. Sometimes the woman who ran the brothel would say, ‘You and I will keep the money for the next customer who comes in and not tell Christoph.’ But although she was nice to me, I couldn’t be sure she wasn’t setting me up. So I always said, ‘I can’t. I have to be loyal to him.’ What good would the money have been to me anyway?

  One day, the woman told me, ‘I’ve just had a phone call from Christoph. From now on, when I introduce you in the waiting room, I’m to say that you do a “no-condom programme” for twenty euros more.’

  I didn’t know much about AIDS, and even less about other sexually transmitted diseases; but I knew enough to be horrified by the prospect of having unprotected sex with the sort of men who visited the brothel. I had occasionally had to do it before then, but not as part of a regular ‘programme’ – for an extra 20 euros that wasn’t going to be of any benefit to me.

  Although he did sometimes hit me, Christoph wasn’t as violent as Jak had been. So it wasn’t really because I was afraid of him that I didn’t ask him not to make me do it. I had been in Athens for more than four years by that time, and I was so used to doing whatever I was told to do that I simply accepted the fact that I had no choice – about who I had sex with and under what conditions, or about anything else. I was very anxious though, which, as it turned out, I was right to be.

  I had been living and working at the brothel for a few weeks when Christoph arrived at 2 o’clock one morning to drive me back to Athens. I must have fallen asleep after just a few minutes, so I don’t know how long he had been driving when I woke up to find that he had stopped the car at the side of the road and opened his trousers. When I had done what he told me to do, he started kissing me, telling me how special I was and that he loved me.

  I hadn’t seen or heard anything from Jak for months. I had already been vulnerable when I met him, and I was far more emotionally fragile and defenceless by the time Christoph told me he cared about me. It was true that he was significantly older than my own father and that he was selling me as a prostitute many times every day. But I was lonely and starved of affection, and wanted to believe that someone cared about me.

  At some point during every day after that, Christoph had sex with me. He always did it without a condom and he would often slap me and pull my hair so hard it felt as though my scalp was on fire and my neck was going to break. Sometimes he would say afterwards, ‘That was shit. You made it really boring for me. What’s your problem? Don’t you like me?’ The sad fact was that I did like him; that’s what’s so difficult to understand when I think about it now. I just didn’t like having sex with him any more than I had liked having it with Jak.

  The stomach cramps I used to get whenever I had my period had more or less stopped. So I couldn’t understand why, after I had been back in Athens for a few weeks, I started getting stomach pains that were far worse than any I had ever had before. By the time I realised they weren’t cyclical and I was getting them almost every day, I had developed a burning sensation too, as though my kidneys were on fire. Eventually, the pain got so bad that I had to stop whatever I was doing when it started, so that I could curl into a ball and clutch my knees to my chest.

  It happened one night when Christoph was driving me to work. I suddenly felt sick and my whole body seemed to be covered in goose bumps. When I told him about the pain, he reached across and hit me in the face with such force I almost bit right through my tongue. I was so shocked by what he had done that when he gripped my chin and turned my head so that I was facing him, I blinked and then cringed in anticipation of his next blow. Instead of hitting me again, however, he looked at me for a few seconds and then said, ‘We’ll go to the doctor in the morning and get you checked out.’

  I still had to work that night, regardless of the pain. The woman at the brothel gave me painkillers, which didn’t really help much. In fact, I don’t know how I managed to have sex at all; a lot of the men who visited the brothels were rough, but they seemed to be worse than ever that night. Somehow, I did get through it, and the next day Christoph took me to the doctor.

  When Christoph picked me up in the morning, he said, ‘You need a blood test, a urine test and a gynaecological examination.’ I only had the standard health certificate required by all visitors to Greece, and I assumed that he wanted me to have the tests so that I could get the papers I needed to work in a brothel. But at 18, I was still three years below the age at which it’s legal to work as a prostitute in Greece.

  After I’d had all the tests done, he drove me to another town where I was going to be working in yet another brothel. We picked up the owner of the brothel en route – a tough-looking, heavily pregnant woman called Kyra, who more or less ignored me but chatted with Christoph as though the two of them were old friends. When Christoph stopped the car outside the brothel – which was a house on a main road that ran through the centre of the town – Kyra got out, hitched up her dress and urinated on the pavement in full view of everyone driving past. That’s when I first began to suspect that her establishment might not even be as ‘five star’ as Dimitri’s had been.

  After Kyra had shown me round, she and Christoph went with me to the apartment I would be staying in. Then Christoph left, and for the next few weeks Kyra picked me up every morning or evening, depending on what shift I was doing, and drove me to the brothel, where for the next 15 hours I had between 80 and 90 customers. In most other respects, it was much the same as all the other places I had worked: the building was dismal and run-down, and the men were almost indistinguishable from each other. Kyra was pretty much like every other brothel keeper I had come across, except perhaps for being a bit more cocky and the fact that she was a borderline certifiable psychopath. But there was one fundamental, incredibly important difference between working at Kyra’s brothel and at any of the others: when I finished work and went back to the apartment, I could go out.

  It was a very weird but really good feeling just walking around on my own. Even after a 15-hour shift when I was exhausted, I wanted to do it even more than I wanted to sleep. Sometimes I would go out during the day, sometimes at night, depending on what shifts I was doing. I often went to a café not far from the apartment, which was beside a stream and a lovely stone bridge. I couldn’t buy anything, because I didn’t have any money, but I didn’t care. I was happy just sitting there, drinking a glass of water and watching people.

  I would try to imagine that I was one of the other people sitting in the café or walking along the path beside the stream, someone living a normal life, with a job, a home, a family and friends. It wasn’t easy, not least because I had no idea what it would be like to be one of those people. I felt detached from everyone else, as though there was some invisible barrier between them and me that kept me apart and separate. It didn’t really matter though: just being able to watch them was enough.

  You would have thought that being able to wander around in the real world might have made me think about running away. Odd as it may sound, I didn’t even consider it. If you’ve ever had the sort of migraine that whites out your peripheral vision, you might be able to understand what it was like: the only thing I could see was what was di
rectly ahead of me, which was my life as a prostitute; everything else was blurred and out of focus. Even if Christoph hadn’t had my passport, I think I would still have been too afraid and too distrustful – of the police and everyone else – to have gone to anyone for help. I don’t know if Christoph was aware that I went out. He had certainly made sure – as Jak, Leon and Elek had done before him – that when he wasn’t there to control me, the paranoia he had encouraged in me would do the job instead.

  After I had been working at the brothel for a few days, Kyra took me to a local hospital to get the results of the tests I’d had done in Athens. I wouldn’t have known most of the medical terms the doctor used if he had said them in English, and I certainly didn’t understand them in Greek. What I did understand, though, was that there was a problem and that I was going to have to return to the hospital for treatment.

  Kyra told the doctor she would explain it all to me properly later. But when we got outside, she just handed me the piece of paper he had given her, jabbed at it angrily with her finger and made a disgusted sort of ‘pfffing’ sound. She kept repeating a word and telling me I was dirty, until I finally realised that what she was saying was that I had syphilis. The only thing I knew about syphilis was that it was what killed Henry VIII (although I don’t think people believe that anymore); I thought it was incurable and that I was going to die.

  ‘You’re a dirty tramp.’ Kyra spat the words at me. ‘Well, you can’t work for me anymore. I only have clean girls working in my brothel.’ It was ridiculous to accuse me of being dirty: it wasn’t my choice to be having unprotected sex with hundreds of ‘dirty’ men; it was something she and Christoph were making me do. I didn’t see it like that at the time though. I thought she was right and that it was my fault, and I felt humiliated, contaminated and unclean.

  Christoph picked me up later that night and drove me back to Athens. It was a long journey and he stopped periodically, sometimes to buy bottles of beer for me and sometimes so that I could do things to him. Although I still hated the taste of alcohol, I had begun to appreciate the false sense of cheerful confidence it gave me and I drank it whenever I got the chance. That night, I drank the bottles of beer Christoph bought for me as if they were water. So I was a bit drunk by the time we got back to Athens and Christoph dropped me off at the hotel, which was the one I had been staying in before I went to work at Kyra’s brothel. Fortunately, I was so tired I fell asleep before the effects of the alcohol wore off, and I was able to postpone the moment when I would have to face the miserable reality of my situation.

  I had second-stage syphilis, which apparently meant I must have had it for about a year. Christoph came with me to the hospital and took the same course of tablets that I was prescribed – because he would already have caught it from me, he said. I suppose that’s why he still had sex with me afterwards, although less frequently than he had done before and always using a condom. I felt really bad about what had happened, and I thought Christoph didn’t love me anymore because of it – which, when I think about it now, isn’t as incongruous as the fact that I believed he had ever loved me at all.

  Sometimes when he came to pick me up to take me to a job, his wife would be in the car. When she had come to the police station that day, with the oxygen tank I had never seen Christoph use before or since, she had looked as though she was only just managing not to spit in my face. Her feelings towards me didn’t change, and I always felt very uncomfortable when she was there. And now, of course, I had an added reason for being embarrassed, because I was having sex with her husband. Ironically, and completely unfairly, Christoph blamed me for the fact that he couldn’t have sex with his wife because I had given him syphilis! He told me that I must never, under any circumstances, tell her anything. I assumed he was only referring to the sex, because she must have known how he earned his money.

  I had been working as a prostitute for about five years when I found out I had syphilis, with maybe the last two of them under Christoph’s control. It’s difficult to put all the events into chronological order because I didn’t have any real concept of time and no means of measuring it. There was nothing to distinguish the days, weeks, months and years from all the others that had gone before them, or from those that were to follow them. The only thing that could change from one month to the next was the brothel I was working in, which might be in a different town. Even the brothels and, with a few exceptions, the brothel owners were pretty much the same. And so were most of the men who paid a few euros to have five-minute sex with a girl they couldn’t have picked out of a line-up of two.

  By the time I had been working as a prostitute for five years, I had almost forgotten the life I used to imagine I might have, working as a waitress to earn enough money to put myself through college. After a while, you don’t really think about anything, certainly not the future, which you know will be exactly like the present, or worse.

  One day, Christoph picked me up from the hotel and drove me to do an ‘outcall’, an escorting job on the other side of the city. Afterwards, when he was driving me back to the hotel, he stopped the car in a public car park and said, ‘We need to talk.’

  It felt as though something was squeezing my stomach, making me feel sick and sending a spasm of anxiety throughout my whole body. What had I done wrong? I tried to think of everything that had happened during the last couple of days. And then I realised that Christoph was speaking to me again in a voice that didn’t sound angry at all.

  ‘I think you should open a Facebook account,’ he said. ‘Get in touch with some of your friends back in England. You’ve proved that you can be trusted. It’s time for you to have a bit of freedom in your life and do something nice.’

  I had been expecting him to slap me or, at the very least, to shout at me for something I had or hadn’t done. So, for the few seconds it took for me to understand what he was saying, I just stared at him. Even when it did sink in, I hardly dared to believe it.

  ‘We’ll do it now. Come on.’ Christoph smiled and got out of the car, and I walked beside him across the car park, down the street and into an internet café.

  When your life is pretty much at rock bottom, you’d think it would take a lot to make you feel happy. For me, it was quite the reverse: even relatively insignificant, inconsequential events seemed exciting. Knowing that Christoph was pleased with me would have been enough to cheer me up; the thought that I was going to be able to make contact with old friends from home made me feel like a child who had just been told that it was Christmas.

  In the café, Christoph ordered us each a coffee and then, after he had set up a Facebook account for me, I began to search for people I used to know five years ago. I sent messages to a couple of girls who used to be my friends, asking how they were and what they were doing and saying that I was working in Greece. Then I began to feel anxious again: would anyone answer? It suddenly seemed really important that someone did.

  When we were back in the car, Christoph handed me a new phone and said, ‘Take it. I think I can trust you now.’ I don’t know if I thought he meant that he wouldn’t check it regularly for texts and to see what calls I made and received, but whatever I thought, I remember that I felt special, and proud to have earned his praise.

  We went back to the same café every day for the next three days, so that I could check for messages. I almost cried when I saw that people had posted comments on my Facebook page. And I was really excited when I got an email in response to the message I had sent to a girl called Lexi, who’d been a good friend of mine at school. She said she was really glad I had got in touch at last and she asked me loads of questions, about where I was living and what I was doing. Christoph had put up some of the photographs he took from time to time for me to send my mother, and Lexi said she had barely recognised me and that it looked as though I was having a great time.

  Christoph said he was really pleased for me and told me what to say in response to Lexi’s message – that I loved living in Athens and
was earning a lot of money working in a bar that was very popular with tourists. It was odd: while I was writing Christoph’s words, I felt a sort of glow of excitement inside me, as though what I was saying was true.

  When Christoph came to pick me up the next day and take me back to the internet café, he asked me, ‘Why don’t you invite your friend Lexi to come and stay with you for a holiday?’ I didn’t answer him, because I thought I must have misunderstood what he had said. ‘I think you already know that I have feelings for you,’ he continued, ‘feelings that I don’t have for any of the other girls. You’re different, special. You’ve worked hard and you’ve earned a break. So tell your friend that I’ll pay for her flight and that she won’t have to worry about money while she’s here either.’

  I believed every single word of it. I felt proud to be special, happy that Christoph was pleased with me, and almost ecstatic at the prospect of having a friend again, even if it would be for just a few days. When I look back on it now, I almost feel contempt for the gullible, pathetic, easily manipulated girl I was then.

  Lexi answered my message immediately, accepting Christoph’s invitation, and within a week she was on her way to visit me in Athens.

  Her flight arrived in the early hours of the morning and Christoph drove me to the airport to meet her. As I stood at the arrivals gate, waiting for her to come through the door, I felt excited but apprehensive, as though I had stepped outside the reality of my life and into some sort of parallel universe. And then I saw Lexi, waving frantically and almost bouncing with delight. We laughed as we hugged each other, and then I introduced her to ‘my friend Christoph’, who smiled and charmed her and insisted on carrying her backpack.

  Instead of taking us to the hotel I was staying at, as I had assumed he would do, Christoph drove into the city centre and parked outside a house in a narrow street. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t had a chance to sort out a room in the hotel for your friend,’ he said, smiling apologetically at Lexi. ‘So I’m going to leave you both here with a friend of mine while I go and do that now. I won’t be long.’