Bought and Sold (Part 3 of 3)

by Stephens, Megan

  When I handed it to him he took out the SIM card, snapped the phone in two and threw the pieces out of the window.

  ‘Don’t fuck with me!’ he screamed. ‘I’m a very dangerous person. I am going to chop you up into little pieces and bury them.’ He reached across the car to where I was cowering against the door and hit me again. Then, as if at the flick of a switch, he stopped shouting and said very quietly, in a voice full of ominous threat, ‘I don’t care about the girl. The stupid bitch has caused me nothing but trouble since the moment she arrived. And then she tried to steal you away from me.’ I had spent five years believing things that couldn’t possibly be true, but even I could see that was a bizarre interpretation of what had happened. It was one I was happy to encourage, however, if it meant that Lexi would be safe and it took some of the heat off me.

  Christoph didn’t take me back to the apartment to pick up my stuff before driving me back to Athens. It wasn’t the first time, or the last, that I had to abandon my suitcase and its contents. But it didn’t matter; I didn’t own anything, so all I lost each time were a few cheap items of clothing, which were easily replaced. When we got back to the city, he took me to a posh hotel, booked a double room and had sex with me. Then he turned on his side and went to sleep.

  Living in a world where all the normal rules and expectations don’t apply really messes with your head. I wonder now if Christoph – or any of the other men who controlled me at different times during the years I was in Greece – ever did anything that was spontaneous and without some underlying purpose. I think the answer’s probably no, and that every single thing they said and did was deliberately intended to confuse and destabilise me, so that I no longer knew what ‘normal’ was. That was certainly what happened. One minute Christoph would be raging at me, saying terrible things; the next minute he would praise me and tell me I was special. Because I couldn’t ever predict what his reaction would be and never knew if something I was doing was right or wrong, I became incredibly insecure and full of self-doubt.

  He even did it when we were having sex. ‘Your legs are closed too much,’ he might say. ‘Next time, make sure they’re that far apart,’ and he would indicate the ‘right’ distance with his arms. Sometimes he would complain that my make-up was all wrong, my hair was a mess, or I was putting on weight – which was certainly never true, because I had no appetite and had to force myself to eat anything at all. I was programmed to believe it all though, and I believed it was my fault that, however hard I tried, I always seemed to get things wrong.

  Christoph slept for about an hour in the hotel that day. When he woke up, he gave me my old SIM card and a new phone, put 50 euros on the table beside the bed and told me he would be back the next morning. After he had gone, I went downstairs and spent the money he had given me on alcohol, which I drank alone in the room.

  That night, I had a text from Lexi saying that Petros had kept his word and booked a flight for her back to England. ‘You should have been on it with me,’ she wrote. I read the text maybe 20 times before I deleted it so that Christoph wouldn’t find it. Each time I read it, I tried to imagine where I would be and what I would be doing if I hadn’t been too afraid to fly back to London with my friend.

  I still feel incredibly guilty about what happened to Lexi. I invited her to visit me in Greece because I wanted so badly to believe what Christoph told me. I did what I had done a thousand times before and closed my mind to the possibility that he might have reasons other than the ones he told me about – in this case, that I deserved to have a break with a friend. I had got involved with Jak because my judgement was bad; by the time Lexi came to Athens, it was ten times worse. As a result of my immense stupidity, she came very close to being trapped into becoming a prostitute.

  I didn’t ever hear from Lexi again. I’m sure that when she thought about it, she did blame me for what almost happened to her. I know I blame myself. Despite what I told her, she must have thought I really had chosen the life I was leading; otherwise, I would have escaped with her. In a way, she would have been right, because although I didn’t choose it, I had learned to accept it because I didn’t think I deserved anything better.

  Lexi had a ‘normal’ reaction to fear: she tried to get away. So it would have been difficult for her to understand why I didn’t. But there’s another type of fear that perhaps you can only understand if you’ve experienced it. It’s a fear of nothing and of everything, of things real and imagined, and it’s so overwhelming that it prevents you doing anything except what you’ve been told to do.

  When Christoph came the next day, he took me to an apartment that, although pretty basic, was quite spacious compared with all the other places I had stayed. There was a small living room with a bed and sliding doors that opened on to a tiny balcony, an even smaller bedroom, a bathroom and a galley kitchen with just enough room for a sink, a cooker and a filthy, mould-encrusted, under-the-counter fridge. I had lived off takeaways for the last five years, and I really liked the idea of being able to cook for myself. So, after I had dropped off my bag at the apartment, Christoph took me to a supermarket and bought me some food.

  Once again, the only thing that had changed was the place I slept. Everything else continued pretty much in the same way it had done before. Christoph picked me up every morning, took me to a brothel or to do escort jobs, and then dropped me off again in the early hours of the next day. The fact that I’d had syphilis didn’t seem to matter from any practical point of view, except that now all the men that had sex with me had to wear condoms. When I wasn’t working, I was in the apartment, with nothing to do except sleep or eat. In fact, the only thing that ever varied from day to day was the way Christoph treated me. Sometimes, he would arrive at the apartment and, without any warning or apparent reason, start punching me in the head. Or he would grab me by the neck, lift my feet off the floor and slam me against the wall, shouting into my face, ‘Your time’s running out now. You’re not earning enough money. You need to start acting more innocent. What’s the matter with you? You’re like a smackhead. Men want fresh meat and you’re getting old.’ I was 19; I felt much older, and incredibly tired.

  One day, after Christoph had been shouting at me and punching me repeatedly until my ear had begun to bleed, he got some scissors from the kitchen and cut up all my clothes. Then he grabbed a handful of my hair, yanking my head to one side so sharply it felt as though my neck was going to snap, and cut out all my hair extensions.

  Later, when he had calmed down, he took me to get my hair cut properly. He told the hairdresser he was my dad and that I had thrown a bit of a wobbly and hacked at it myself. ‘I’ll come back for her in about an hour,’ he said, patting my shoulder and raising his eyebrows at her as if to say, ‘What is she like?’ I felt really embarrassed, like some spoilt brat of a girl who’d had a tantrum. And although I spoke Greek well by that time, the hairdresser could tell that I wasn’t actually Greek. So I don’t know what she thought.

  When someone shouts at you and is violent, and you just have to stand there and take it because you can’t turn away and there’s nowhere to hide, you feel like a very frightened, vulnerable child. The worst thing of all, though, was knowing that Christoph was right and I was no longer ‘good enough’ to be a prostitute in a sleazy brothel. And if I wasn’t good enough for that, what was I good enough for?

  One evening when I had my period and wasn’t working, Christoph came to the apartment anyway. As soon as I had closed the front door behind him, he started slapping me and shouting really horrible things. Then, suddenly, he stopped, turned around and stormed out again.

  After he had left, I stayed on my knees on the floor and cried in a way that was different from all the ways I had cried before. I think it was the first time I had ever felt so upset purely for my own sake. I was having flashbacks to everything that had happened since I had come to Athens almost six years earlier – years that I now realised I was never going to get back, but that would colour my life for eve
r.

  There had been a few items of cheap clothing and a bottle of vodka in the apartment when I moved in. I often wondered what had happened to the girl who had left them there, and I thought about her again now. Was she going through the same experiences I was? Did anyone else feel the way I did? I sometimes felt as though I was living in some kind of parallel universe that had always existed alongside the one I had lived in as a child and where the things I was doing were normal. I could hear Christoph’s voice in my head saying, ‘Men want fresh meat and you’re getting old.’ Like any young person, I couldn’t imagine myself actually being old, but it did make me wonder what would happen to me when men didn’t want to have sex with me at all and I was no longer any use to Christoph. The present was frightening; the future seemed even more so.

  I thought about my mum a hundred times every day, and I thought about her then, as I was kneeling on the floor, crying like someone bereaved. I felt more alone and more in despair than I had felt at any other time during all the lonely, desperate years I had been in Greece. And then I remembered the bottle of vodka that had been left in a kitchen cupboard, presumably by the previous occupant of the apartment.

  I started drinking it straight from the bottle, but it was so strong and foul-tasting it made me retch. So I poured some into a glass and added water, which enabled me to drink it quickly without being sick. I found some painkillers in the kitchen too, and swallowed all of them. Then I stumbled into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirrored door of the cabinet on the wall.

  ‘I hate you,’ I screamed at my reflection. ‘You’re nothing. Nobody cares about you. Nobody loves you. Why are you still here? You don’t deserve to be alive.’

  But only the coldest, blackest-hearted person could really have hated the pathetic, pitiable girl who was looking back at me from the mirror. As all the anger and frustration drained out of me as I reached out my hand to touch her swollen face and then opened the door of the cabinet to make her disappear.

  Amongst the few discarded items on the shelves inside was a razor. When I touched its handle, the anger returned and as I ran back into the kitchen, I began to slash at my wrists and neck with its blade. I started cutting my arms, then my legs, and before long there was blood everywhere, on my body, soaking into my clothes, splashed on the walls and dripping on to the floor.

  I don’t know what it was specifically that made me pass out; it could have been the alcohol, the tablets, stress caused by my manic episode, blood loss, or a combination of all four. I collapsed next to the open glass door that led out on to the balcony. The neighbours had heard me shouting and crashing around the apartment, and when they saw me slumped on the floor covered in blood, they called the police.

  It must have been the sound of the front door being kicked in that woke me up. I came to slowly, like a diver rising up from the depths of the ocean, and at first I was disorientated and couldn’t remember what had happened. I heard the sound of running footsteps and voices shouting ‘Police!’, and suddenly the living room seemed to be full of men with guns. Somehow, I managed to get to my feet and out on to the balcony, where I tried to throw myself over the railing that surrounded it.

  The apartment was on the fifth floor and I would certainly have been killed if two of the policemen hadn’t managed to grab hold of my legs just as my stomach hit the metal rail. But I didn’t want to be saved, so I struggled and tried to fight them off. I was still kicking and swearing at them when they put the handcuffs on me. And as they walked with me out of the building, I started shouting, ‘He’s still watching me. I know he’s here. He won’t stop until he gets me. He’s got other girls, you know. He’s going to kill me.’

  ‘Who’s watching you?’ one of the policemen asked me. ‘Who’s going to kill you?’

  ‘The man,’ I told him. ‘There’s a horrible man. I won’t say his name.’

  I only dared mention Christoph’s existence at all because I was drunk. So perhaps it was also the vodka that suddenly made me realise that I was incredibly tired of always being afraid. To the policemen, I must have sounded like every other paranoid drunk they had ever had to deal with.

  At the police station, someone cleaned me up, bandaged the worst lacerations on my arms, and asked what had happened to me. ‘I cut myself,’ I told him. Then I laughed like someone who had lost her mind. In fact, the policemen gave me coffee and were nice to me. They even let me go outside to smoke a cigarette, although the policeman who came with me didn’t hesitate to draw his gun when I tried to run away, and I heard a click as he released the safety catch.

  When they asked me for my passport, I told them, ‘It’s probably in the apartment somewhere. Oh no, wait a minute, I think I threw it in the bin.’ I laughed again, as though I had made a really funny joke.

  ‘Well, we’re going to have to look for it there then,’ one of the policemen said. But I knew they would never find it, because Christoph had it.

  For the next few hours, I sat in the police station, drinking coffee and staring into space, my mind completely empty of any thoughts. By the time they finally took me out and put me in another car, the anaesthetic effect of the vodka was wearing off and I was starting to feel sick.

  ‘We’re going to take you to the hospital,’ one of the policemen told me. And even in my confused, drunken state, I could see that that was probably a good idea: I didn’t want to get blood poisoning from someone else’s discarded razor to add to all my other problems. I wouldn’t have got into the police car as willingly as I did, however, if I had known where they were really going to take me.

  Chapter 13

  The car stopped at the main entrance to a dilapidated-looking brick building. When the two police officers took me inside, I sat in an office, still handcuffed, while a man asked me lots of questions. Had I ever tried to do this sort of thing before? Where did I come from? Did I have family in Greece? What job did I do?

  ‘I’m a prostitute,’ I told him. This time, I wasn’t sure if the loud, manic laugh really did come from me, although when I looked closely at the man and the nurse who was standing beside him, they didn’t seem to be laughing at all. ‘I’m only joking,’ I said. ‘I’m a waitress really. I’ve been missing my family and friends. I suppose everything just got on top of me.’ I think I told him that I couldn’t cope anymore and that all I wanted to do was die. Mostly, though, I doubt whether my answers to his questions made much sense, and some of them were totally untrue.

  Eventually, the man stood up, nodded at the nurse and said, ‘Right, well, first of all we need to have a look at those cuts and get them cleaned up.’

  The nurse took me into another room, where she dabbed brown liquid on the broken skin of my arms, legs, face, neck, chest and breasts, and then re-bandaged the worst of it.

  ‘Great. Okay,’ I said when she had finished. ‘Well, I’m all right to go now then, am I?’ When she didn’t answer, I turned to the two policemen. But they didn’t say anything either. They just looked at the nurse, one of them wished me good luck, and then they walked out of the room.

  My cockiness – which was part alcohol induced, part faked bravado, part mental breakdown – evaporated instantly and I shouted, ‘Hey! Wait! Where are you going? What’s going on?’ I was about to follow the policemen when two men in white coats appeared in the doorway and stuck a needle in my arm.

  I think I kept on screaming and shouting for another few seconds, although it might just have been in my head. Then all the muscles in my body seemed to relax. I tried to concentrate on sending a message from my brain to my legs, but nothing happened; so I glanced down quickly to make sure they were still there, and then laughed, in embarrassment this time.

  Someone helped me on to a bed. Perhaps it was the same person who tied my arms to its railings with thick bands of leather. I couldn’t see anyone clearly by that time, because my head was full of swirling white fog and my eyes wouldn’t focus.

  I remember lying on my back looking up at the lights in the ceili
ng and wondering why they were moving. And then I was in a room, still lying on the bed, and there was another girl sitting on another bed with her arms clasped around her knees, rocking slowly backwards and forwards. The girl didn’t look at me, and for a while I lay there watching her. Eventually I asked her, ‘What are you doing? Why are you in here?’ And the sound of my voice made me laugh because it was deep and croaky, not like my real voice at all, and it seemed to echo inside my head. Again, maybe I didn’t actually say the words out loud, because the girl kept rocking backwards and forwards and didn’t answer.

  ‘I’ve got a knife,’ I shouted, to what was probably an empty corridor outside the open door of the room. ‘I’d hidden it in my shirt. I’m going to stab myself with it. Uh-oh, I’m doing it now.’

  I didn’t have a knife of course, and as my arms were still tied to the head of the bed, I couldn’t have done anything with it if I had. I just wanted someone to come into the room so that I could tell them … I don’t know what I wanted to tell them. It didn’t matter anyway, because no one did come. But I didn’t give up: I kept on shouting until I lost my voice and thought I was about to die of thirst. All the time, the girl kept rocking. And still no one came.

  I must have fallen asleep eventually. When I woke up, there was light streaming in through a barred window and I felt almost calm. I hadn’t been awake very long when a nurse came in, unstrapped my wrists and asked me if I would like to have a shower. I felt better when I was clean, although for some reason I couldn’t stop crying. The nurse sat on the bed beside me and talked to me in a kind, gentle way. Then she took me to the canteen, where, despite having eaten nothing for at least 24 hours, I only managed to drink some orange juice.