Bought and Sold (Part 3 of 3)

by Stephens, Megan

  All Mum and Nikos knew was what the doctor had told Mum on the phone – that I had tried to kill myself and that they had been treating me for anxiety and depression. I hadn’t slept on the coach for more than a few minutes at a time and I was exhausted. So we didn’t talk much that night. What I did tell them, though, was that from the time I had moved to Athens with Jak, I had been working as a prostitute.

  ‘But the photographs …’ Mum crossed her arms, hugging herself tightly, and bent forward for a moment. ‘You were always smiling in the photographs,’ she said, sitting upright again. ‘You looked so happy.’

  ‘They were all faked,’ I told her.

  It was really difficult telling them the truth. For six years they had believed that I had made a success of my life in Athens and I hated disappointing them – and humiliating myself. I think Mum was so shocked by what I was saying that she couldn’t really take it in. Nikos understood it though, and he put his head in his hands and sobbed. Then suddenly he stood up, sending the little coffee table skidding across the tiled floor, and shouted angrily, ‘Jak did this thing to you! He comes to my bar and talks to me like a friend knowing what he has done to you!’

  It wasn’t until much later, when Mum and I were back in England, that I told her more specifically about some of the things that had happened in Athens. What I did tell her and Nikos, though, was that I had been arrested with Christoph and had been too afraid to admit the truth when the judge asked me if I had been trafficked.

  ‘Oh my God, Megan!’ The colour drained out of Mum’s face and I thought she was going to pass out. ‘We saw something about it on the news, didn’t we, Nikos?’ Nikos nodded and closed his eyes. ‘I can’t bear to think about it,’ Mum said. ‘We were sitting here watching the television while you were living a nightmare that was being reported on the news.’

  The next morning, I took the SIM card out of my phone and threw the handset in a bin at the side of the road. I don’t know why I kept the SIM card. I think in some weird, mixed-up way I still had feelings for Christoph and that, despite everything, I was reluctant to cut my last remaining connection with him. It’s difficult to explain, even to myself. But, again, I think it was at least partly because I didn’t want to accept the fact that I had never meant anything to Christoph either. It’s hurtful under any circumstances to have to face the fact that someone you’ve cared about never cared about you. It’s even worse to have to accept that you were nothing more to them than a commodity to be bought, sold and disposed of without a backward glance as soon as you had outgrown your financial usefulness.

  Mum cried when I told her I’d had syphilis; and she was angry when I described how, one day in the car, Christoph had shown me a photograph of her standing laughing in Nikos’s bar and had threatened to kill her if I ever gave him away.

  ‘I wish he had come after me,’ she said. ‘If I had known what he was doing to you, I might have killed him with my own hands. If he thinks I’m afraid of him, he can think again.’ It was nice that Mum wanted to protect me, but if she had known, as I did, what Christoph was capable of, she would have known that if he ever did come looking for us, we wouldn’t stand a chance.

  Although I was taking the tablets they had given me at the hospital, I still jumped at the sound of every backfiring car, banging door and raised voice. I hadn’t realised until I was among people again just how scared I had learned to be. Mum tried to make the few days before I left Greece as pleasant as possible for me, but I felt as though I didn’t fit into normal society anymore. I was ill at ease all the time – when we were buying food in the supermarket, sitting in a café drinking coffee, or walking along the road in broad daylight surrounded by other people. Whatever we were doing, I couldn’t ever rid myself of the feeling that we were being watched and followed.

  I wasn’t just anxious because I was afraid that Christoph would send someone to find me and take me back to Athens. I kept thinking about Jak too. And when I had been staying with Mum and Nikos for three days, I saw him coming out of a local supermarket. Mum and I were weaving our way into the shop between bins of brightly coloured beach balls and racks of postcards, and she didn’t notice him. When he saw me and beckoned me over, I hung back and let her go in without me.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Jak took hold of my hand. ‘I couldn’t contact you. I tried everything.’ He began to cry. ‘I sent people to look for you. What’s been going on, Megan?’

  I don’t know if it was his tears that tipped the balance, or if I would have believed him whatever he had said or done; because I did desperately want what he told me to be true. I was elated at the thought that he had been searching for me and that he hadn’t meant to leave me alone in Athens to be used and abused as a prostitute for all those years. So when he tore off the corner of his newspaper, wrote his phone number on it and held it out to me, I reached out my hand to take it and promised to text him later that day. Then I breathed deeply a few times to try to control my nervous excitement and went into the shop to find Mum.

  Back at the apartment, I asked Nikos to lend me a phone. As soon as I put my SIM card into it, it began to ring. The call was from Christoph’s number, as were all the dozens of other missed calls and texts that came flooding in. I didn’t answer it, of course, and he kept on ringing and sending messages while I was writing a text to Jak. Jak sent a text back to me almost immediately, asking me to meet him half an hour later outside the shop where I had seen him earlier.

  I hadn’t told Mum much about the men who had trafficked me, so I think she understood even less than I did that they were ruthless criminals who made huge sums of money out of buying and selling human beings. If she had known, she would have felt quite differently when I told her I was going to go out for a walk. As it was, I think she saw it as a sign that I was starting to regain some self-confidence and she was pleased.

  I should have told her the truth. The fact that I didn’t must have meant that I knew she would try to stop me. It’s hard to believe when I think about it now that, after everything that had happened to me during the last six years, I had apparently learned almost nothing.

  Chapter 14

  Jak was waiting for me outside the supermarket. He was sitting behind the steering wheel of a brand new car, so I didn’t see him at first, because I had expected him to be on his old motorcycle, or another one like it. He leaned across the front passenger seat and pushed the door open for me, and I sat beside him as he drove along the road that curved down to the sea.

  He stopped at the bottom of the hill and it wasn’t until we had got out of the car that I realised we were looking out across the beach where we used to sit with his friends when I first met him. The sun was quite low in the sky, almost at our eye level, and it looked as though the surface of the water was covered with thousands of tiny, constantly moving mirrors.

  I could hear a motorbike engine in the distance and as it got closer I recognised its distinctive rattling sound. ‘Quick, get back in the car,’ I said urgently to Jak. ‘I can’t be seen with you.’ I was still trying to open the passenger door when Nikos came round the corner on his ancient Mego motorcycle. I ducked down, but I didn’t know whether he had seen me and my heart was racing as Jak sped off along the road away from him.

  ‘You’ll have to take me back to the shop,’ I said. ‘We can’t see each other again. Mum and Nikos blame you for everything that happened to me. I blamed you too, but …’ I didn’t finish the sentence and Jak didn’t seem to notice my hesitation. As he drove me back to the shop, he talked cheerfully about the house he had built for himself – the fulfilment of a long-held ambition, he said, as though it was a dream I had never shared.

  When I was getting out of the car, he took hold of my hand and said, ‘Keep in touch, Megan. You know how much I love you, don’t you? I’m so sorry for what happened to you. I didn’t know anything about it, I promise. I didn’t receive a single euro of the money you were earning.’

  I watched him drive away. Then I we
nt into the supermarket and bought a large bottle of cheap retsina, which I buried at the bottom of my bag.

  Mum and Nikos were waiting for me back at the apartment.

  ‘What have you been doing?’ Mum demanded as soon as I walked through the door.

  ‘I saw you!’ Nikos was close to tears. ‘I saw you with him! I tried to follow you but he drove too fast. Why didn’t you come with me, on my bike?’

  ‘What is wrong with you, Megan?’ Mum sounded distraught. ‘Why in God’s name would you go back to him?’

  ‘Just leave me alone,’ I shouted at them. ‘You don’t know anything. None of it was Jak’s fault. But I’m not going to see him again, so you needn’t worry.’

  ‘Oh, Megan!’ My righteous indignation faltered a bit when I saw the pain in Mum’s eyes, and even more when Nikos added, in a low, anguished voice, ‘I wish you were flying back to England today, so that I could know you were safe.’

  I didn’t want to talk about it; I didn’t want to think about Jak’s house, or his expensive car, or the fact that the crooked, discoloured teeth he had never been able to afford to get fixed were now perfectly even and white. I went into the room that was serving as a makeshift bedroom for me, sat down on the bed and opened the bottle of retsina.

  I drank it straight from the bottle, hiding it away in my bag again after every swig. I must have been a quarter of the way through it and was just lifting it to my lips again when Mum walked into the room. She had started to say something as she was opening the door, and when she realised what I was doing she just stood there, open mouthed, for a few seconds. Then, suddenly, she went ballistic and started shouting at me, ‘What are you doing? You can’t start drinking! Is that what you’re planning to do, turn to drink in the hope that it will solve all your problems?’ She snatched the bottle out of my hands, splashing wine over the bedclothes.

  Her fury evaporated as quickly as it had come, and as she sank down on to the bed beside me, she said, ‘Please, Megan. Please don’t do this. It isn’t the answer. You know that, don’t you?’ She sounded weary and despairing, and then anxious as she added, ‘Nikos mustn’t know about this. He’s already worried to death about you. He blames himself for not knowing what Jak is. If he thought you were turning to drink, it would break his heart.’

  That night, Mum and I walked together down to the seafront, where we sat outside a café and ate ice-cream. I had been barely aware of the two guys sitting at the table next to ours, until one of them leaned across and said in Albanian, ‘Megan? It’s you, isn’t? Hi!’ His name was Vasos; he was married to one of Jak’s cousins and I had met him – and liked him – when I was living with Jak’s parents.

  ‘You look so different,’ he said. ‘But of course it must be years since I last saw you. Did you go back to England? What have you been up to all this time?’

  I don’t know if he knew. I think now that he probably did. But instead of answering his question, I asked him about Jak and what he had been doing while I’d been away.

  ‘Oh, just working and getting on with his new life.’ He shrugged his shoulders and looked uncomfortable. ‘You know how it is.’

  ‘What’s his new life like?’ I asked. ‘Has he got anyone … a girlfriend?’

  Vasos shrugged again and looked away.

  ‘It’s okay.’ I tried to sound as though it didn’t matter. ‘You can tell me. I just want to know what’s going on.’

  Perhaps he really was a nice guy; I don’t know what reason he would have had for telling me the truth, other than sympathy because he could see that I was upset.

  ‘Jak’s married,’ Vasos said. ‘He saved up a lot of money so that he and his wife could have a good life together.’

  We were speaking in Albanian, so Mum didn’t understand what we were saying. But the hurt that felt like a sharp physical pain must have been clearly visible on my face and she quickly hustled me away.

  I don’t know whether Vasos was trying to make sure I understood that anything there might have been in the past between me and Jak was now over. It certainly would have taken someone even more delusional than I was to have persisted in believing that Jak had ever loved me. It was the first time I had really faced the truth: while I was trapped in a nightmare of loneliness, degradation and violence, Jak had been ‘saving money’ he hadn’t earned so that he could marry someone else and build the house he always told me we would live in together one day with our children. The thought of him living in ‘our house’ with his wife was almost worse than anything else.

  I didn’t ever see Jak again. The brief conversation I had with Vasos that day forced me to consider the possibility that he was an unscrupulous, self-serving, amoral criminal. But it wasn’t until fairly recently that I finally stopped making excuses for him in my heart and accepted what he had done. One of the many difficult things I had to come to terms with was the fact that I had set out on what I had thought was going to be my life with Jak feeling like a hero. I had believed him when he told me that his mother was very ill and, in a way, I had been proud of myself for doing something in order to earn the money to pay for the operation that might save her life. Or maybe that was simply how I justified it to myself at the time, so that I didn’t have to acknowledge the reality, which was that I was gullible, easily manipulated and too lacking in self-confidence to say no.

  When understanding finally came, it sent my whole world crashing down around me. In some ways, I would have preferred never to have known the truth – at least then I would have been left with the illusion that someone really had loved me and cared about me.

  When Mum and I flew home to England at the end of the week, we didn’t stay with my grandparents, as the doctor at the hospital had wanted me to do, although we did meet up with them a few days after we got back. Nikos had insisted on giving Mum enough money to support us both until we could work out what to do next, and she had booked us into a bed and breakfast just around the corner from where some friends of hers lived.

  Within a couple of days of arriving back in England, she made an appointment for me to see a doctor. I didn’t tell him anything about what I had been doing in Greece; I just said I had been depressed and I showed him the tablets I’d been given by the psychiatrist. He looked at the labels on the bottles carefully, then scooped them all up and dumped them in the bin beside his desk. ‘Just take these,’ he said, handing me a prescription for the anti-depressant Prozac.

  When we left the doctor’s surgery, Mum took me to a pharmacy to get the new tablets and then to a walk-in sexual health clinic. I hated having to contaminate my new life by admitting I’d had syphilis. I told the nurse that I had been treated for it in Greece and she said it would be a good idea to do some tests to make sure everything was okay. I knew I hadn’t taken the tablets exactly the way I should have done, but I was shocked when she said I still had it.

  ‘We can clear it up now with an injection of penicillin,’ she said, in a matter-of-fact, non-judgemental way that made me feel grateful to her. ‘It hurts a bit – we do it in your backside – but the good news is that you only need to have one.’

  I hate injections, and now that no one was hurting me on an almost daily basis, I hated the thought of being hurt. I must have looked as miserable as I felt, because the nurse touched my arm and said, ‘You do need to get rid of it, Megan. I expect you’ve looked on the internet, so you’ll know what the long-term effects can be if it isn’t cleared up completely.’

  In fact, I hadn’t looked it up at all. At the time, the prospect of having to do anything about anything was overwhelmingly daunting. As far as the syphilis was concerned, I think I had hoped that if I ignored it, it might go away. I knew that was stupid though. So I gritted my teeth and had the injection.

  The nurse was right about it hurting, but when she had done it she said, ‘You’re the first person I’ve ever known who didn’t even flinch.’ What she didn’t know, of course, was that I’d had an almost infinite number of far more painful experiences, as w
ell as lots of practice at detaching my mind when horrible things were being done to my body.

  Even now, only fear and sudden loud noises make me flinch. For example, after I had been back in England for a few months, I was standing at some pedestrian lights in the town centre, waiting to cross the road, when two men came up behind me. They were talking quite loudly, joking with each other, and when one of them raised his arm I cringed and took a sideways step away from him. The man laughed and said, ‘Bloody hell, love! What’s up with you? You don’t have to cower away from me like that. I’m not going to bite you or murder you or something.’ So I laughed too and made a joke of it.

  I’m still afraid of strangers. I used to tell myself, ‘You’re all right now. You’re safe. You don’t have to worry about anything.’ But I could never quite make myself believe it.

  After Mum went back to Greece, I began the task of trying to rebuild my life, and found myself struggling in all sorts of ways. If you don’t have any self-respect, it’s difficult to do the sort of things ‘self-respecting people’ do – like apply for jobs or believe you have a right to be treated decently. I did have a few low-paid jobs and I worked in a shop for a while, but for someone who jumped at every sound and viewed every male customer with anxious suspicion, it wasn’t surprising that I didn’t last very long.

  As the weeks passed and I became better able to control my instinctive overreaction to strangers, I got another job working in a shop, where I became friendly with another girl who worked there called Claire. When I got to know her, I told her a bit about my story and said that I was scared because I thought people connected to the traffickers might be looking for me in England.