Bought and Sold (Part 2 of 3)

by Stephens, Megan

  A vein in my temple was throbbing and I could taste the sharp taste of vomit. But I forced myself to keep breathing.

  ‘Is that how you feel?’ he asked me again. When I still didn’t answer, his tone changed and he said angrily, ‘I’m asking you a question. Tell me!’

  ‘I suppose I do feel a bit like that,’ I whispered. ‘But I’d never do it.’

  ‘Hold the gun,’ he said, his voice very quiet now. ‘Go on, take it.’ He put it in my hand. ‘It’s loaded.’

  ‘No, please, I don’t …’ My heart was thudding, but when I tried to give the gun back to him, he wouldn’t take it.

  Suddenly he stood up and shouted, ‘Hold it up to your head. No one should have to live like this. Just put the gun to your head, pull the trigger and it will all be over.’ I pressed the cold metal of the gun against the side of my head and started to scream. ‘Shhh,’ he said. ‘It’s all right. Go on.’ And I pulled the trigger.

  Before that day, I would have said categorically that I wasn’t the sort of person who would ever try to take her own life – whatever sort of person that is. Maybe it was because I’d had a brief, illuminating flash of understanding about what my life with Jak really was and I knew that, whatever I had been telling myself, in reality I had no one. In that split second as I held the gun to my head, aware of nothing except the man’s voice telling me how simple it would be to put an end to the terrible mess my life had become, I think I lost my grip on reality.

  They say people who’ve committed suicide have killed themselves ‘while the balance of their mind was disturbed’. Maybe, sometimes, they do it during a brief period when they see things clearly and realise it’s their only way out. For me, though, it was just a passing moment of insanity, so it was very fortunate that the gun wasn’t loaded and I didn’t blow my own head off in a room in a ‘love hotel’ in Athens.

  After I had pulled the trigger, I dropped the gun on the floor, and I was still sitting on the bed in a state of shock when the man bent down and picked it up. Then he laughed and said, ‘You really were going to do it, eh? Is it really that bad? Well, I’m not going to see you anymore. You’ve obviously got issues.’

  Although I didn’t realise it until much later, a lot of the jobs I was doing were being set up by the Frenchman, Leon, the man I had met in the burger restaurant who was splitting the proceeds with Jak. For the next few days, I waited in a state of anxious dread for the moment when Jak would find out that the man who had enough money to indulge his fetish for whipping young women had decided to dispense with my services, and would fly into a furious rage. For some reason, it didn’t ever happen and he never mentioned the man to me again.

  The fact that I had escaped the violent beating I’d anticipated from Jak did nothing to lessen the indelible mark the incident left on me. I kept thinking about how close I had come to killing myself, and started having flashbacks and nightmares, often waking up in a cold sweat after dreaming that I had heard the click of the gun’s empty cartridge.

  I couldn’t understand how anyone could do to someone else what that man had done to me; he didn’t even know me or have any reason to dislike me. He was right about one thing though: I obviously did have ‘issues’. I began to think I wasn’t normal, not least because no normal person who didn’t actually want to die – as I didn’t – would hold a gun to their head and pull the trigger, however much they were coerced and bullied into doing so by someone else.

  I was already deeply unhappy and confused before that day; after it, I didn’t seem to be able to make sense of anything at all. I kept telling myself that at least I had Jak. But if that was true, why was there a black hole of loneliness inside me that seemed to get bigger every day? The reality was that the only person in the entire world who actually cared about me was my mother, and I was beginning to wonder if I would ever see again.

  In fact, it wasn’t long after my inadvertent suicide attempt that my mother came back to Greece to live with Nikos, the man who owned the bar where I had first met Jak. While she had been in England, Jak had occasionally let me use his phone to call her. ‘Tell her you’re working as a waitress,’ he’d said. ‘And tell her how happy you are.’

  ‘It’s really fun,’ I told Mum. ‘And I’m earning good money. Jak and I are saving up to build our own house. We’ve got all sorts of plans for the future.’ As I said it, I could actually see the house in my head, and imagine how impressed Mum and Nikos would be when they visited us there and saw how well I was taking care of everything.

  ‘As long as you really are happy and Jak’s looking after you,’ Mum said.

  ‘Oh, he is,’ I assured her, closing my eyes for a moment and swallowing the lump that had lodged itself in my throat.

  Jak had bought me a cheap phone of my own, so that I could call him when I finished jobs, and he let me use it to text and talk to my mum too now that she was back in Greece. I wasn’t allowed to give the number to anyone else – not that I would have had anyone else to give it to. Jak checked the phone every day, just to make sure, and he read all the messages Mum and I sent each other: ‘Are you all right?’ ‘I love you.’ ‘I can’t wait to see you.’

  He didn’t seem to worry that I might tell her the truth in a phone call. I suppose he was too confident of his own manipulative powers, and perhaps of my gullibility too. And he made sure that I was afraid of Leon, by saying things like, ‘You don’t want to do anything that would upset him – and, believe me, he would find out.’

  It might have been true, or it might simply have been a useful way of covering up the fact that it was Jak himself I should have been most afraid of.

  Chapter 6

  One day, when we had been in Athens for a few months, Jak had a phone call from an Albanian friend of his called Edi who lived in Italy. ‘There’s a lot of money to be made there,’ he told me afterwards. ‘Edi suggested we should go out to stay with him for a while and try it out.’ I said I didn’t want to go, but Jak had already made up his mind.

  I didn’t really consider the implications of the fact that Jak had a friend in Italy who knew all about the business of prostitution. I think I had given up trying to work out why anything happened. If I had thought about it – or wondered how he knew people like Leon – I might have come to the conclusion that even before he met me, Jak had known something about prostitution too, and that he hadn’t got me involved in it by chance.

  Edi met us off the ferry in Italy a couple of days later and that night he took us out in his car to show me the road where I would be working. I knew some basic Greek by that time and understood more or less how things worked in Greece. So I had been dreading starting again in a country where I didn’t speak or understand the language at all. What I hadn’t realised was that I would be working outside.

  ‘I don’t want to stand on the street,’ I told Jak and Edi, my voice shrill with panic. ‘Can’t I do escorting?’ A few weeks earlier, I had been appalled and terrified by the thought of escorting; now it seemed to be very much the lesser of two evils.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ Edi said, as if he was reassuring an unnecessarily anxious, fretful child.

  There were times – like this one – when I felt as though I had become trapped inside someone else’s life. I was like a character in a film who’s been mistaken for another character and decides, for plot-related reasons, to go along with it and pretend they really are that person. I had been mistaken for a prostitute, but it would all get sorted out in the end, as long as I held on to the memory of who I really was. The problem was, though, that Jak seemed to have forgotten that I wasn’t really a prostitute, and that sometimes made it difficult for me to be certain about my true identity. It was a problem I thought would only be made worse by having to stand on a street corner waiting to be picked up by any stranger who wanted to have sex with me.

  That night, Edi drove down a long, dimly lit road where dozens of girls and transsexuals were already in their places ready for the night’s work that lay ahead o
f them. He stopped the car a short distance past where the last girl was standing, just beyond the arc of light cast by the final streetlight, and said, ‘This is where you’ll be working tomorrow night. We’ll be parked over there.’ He pointed to somewhere in the darkness on the other side of the road. ‘We’ll be able to see what’s going on, and we’ll follow every car you get into.’

  ‘I can’t do it,’ I whispered, but neither he nor Jak seemed to hear me.

  The next morning, the two men took me out and bought me a short skirt, a belly top with a halter neck and a pair of high-stiletto-heeled shoes. They were the sort of shiny, cheap clothes people might imagine a hooker would wear, and quite different from the more subdued, almost childish clothes Jak had previously bought for me. Just as it was starting to get dark, I did my hair and make-up, Jak put glittery gel all over my body, and then Edi drove us back to the street where the prostitutes were already gathering.

  Before they dropped me off, Edi slowed down as he passed two large trees separated by a patch of grass on the opposite side of the road from ‘my spot’. ‘That’s where we’ll be parked,’ he said. ‘As long as you stay where I showed you, we’ll be able to see you from there. So you’ll be perfectly safe.’

  There wasn’t any part of what I was about to do that would be ‘perfectly safe’. Even someone as naïve and apparently willing to lie to themselves as I was could see that. Once again, I don’t know why I didn’t simply say, ‘I’m not going to do it.’ When I had some counselling a little while ago, the therapist talked about learned behaviour, dependency and all the other complicated characteristics that might make some people identifiable to traffickers as potential victims. If you add fear of violence to all those other factors, I suppose you arrive at some sort of explanation.

  I didn’t speak any Italian, but Edi had told me what to say, and when I was standing at the side of the road, shivering and feeling sick, I kept going over the unfamiliar words in my head. When the first car pulled up beside me, I must have managed to say something that made sense, because a few seconds later I was sitting in the passenger seat, praying silently that Jak and Edi had seen me get into the car and weren’t far behind us. As the guy drove down the road looking for somewhere to stop, I had to fight the urge to turn round and see if they were there. Then I caught sight of Edi’s car reflected in the wing mirror and almost cried with relief.

  The first man wanted oral sex, as most of the others did. I hated doing it. But at least it was quick, and within minutes I was standing in the cold darkness at the side of the road again, waiting to be picked up by someone else.

  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 th
e 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.