‘Please tell me what’s going to happen to me,’ I sobbed. ‘You’re going to kill me, aren’t you? Please tell me if you are. I need to know. I’m from England and I just want to go home.’
The woman gave a snort of laughter and said scornfully, ‘No one’s going to kill you! But if you don’t shut up, he’ll tell you to leave, and then you’ll be in trouble.’
I realised we must have entered a room when the sound of our footsteps changed, and when the woman said something in Greek, a man’s voice answered. Suddenly I began to shout, ‘No! I don’t have to do this. You’re going to hurt me. They said I didn’t have to do it.’ As my panic tipped over into hysteria, I would have said anything, told any lie to stop them doing what I knew they were going to do.
‘Be calm.’ The woman’s voice was quiet and kinder than it had been before. ‘It’s all right. Don’t worry. Just take off your skirt and pants.’
Still whimpering, I had started tugging at my clothes when I heard noises behind me that made me freeze. It sounded like a drawer being opened and closed and then metal tapping against metal. The fear was like a solid weight pressing on my chest, crushing all the air out of my lungs and blocking my throat so that I couldn’t swallow. I was still struggling to breathe when I was pushed face-down on to the bed and heard the woman say, in Greek, ‘Okay? I’ll get it ready.’
‘Get what ready?’ I shrieked, forgetting what Elek had told me about not letting them know I could understand or speak the language.
For a moment, no one said anything; then a man’s voice asked, ‘Do you speak Greek?’ When I didn’t answer, he asked the question again, this time in English.
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I … I just know one or two words.’ And then my first coherent thought struck me: if it was so important to them that I didn’t speak Greek, perhaps it was something I could use to try to save myself. I started shouting, ‘Yes, I do speak Greek. I can understand everything you’re saying. So you’d better not hurt me.’ But my defiance was short-lived, and I was crying again as I begged them, ‘Please, don’t hurt me.’
‘We’re not going to hurt you,’ the man said. Then, speaking to the woman in Greek again, he asked, ‘What are we going to do now?’
‘Shall we take the blindfold off?’ she said. ‘Maybe if it calms her down …’
‘No!’ The man’s tone was emphatic. ‘Definitely not! I don’t trust this girl.’
I think the woman was hoping to calm me down when she said, ‘It’s all right. I’m just going to clean you out.’ In fact, her words had the opposite effect and I started shouting, ‘What do you mean? What are you doing?’ In some ways, it might have been better not to have asked, because what she described to me was some sort of colonic irrigation involving a length of tubing and a pump. It was horrible, but fear is tiring and by that point I just wanted to get it all over with as quickly as possible.
I had already sensed that the man was standing behind me before he spoke. ‘I don’t get very hard,’ he said. ‘And I come very quickly. So I won’t hurt you.’ It did hurt though and by the time he had finished I was crying and begging him to stop.
A few minutes later, the woman led me back down the marble corridor, removed the blindfold, pressed a button to open the gate and let me out.
As I stepped out on to the street into the sunshine, I felt disorientated in the way you do when you come out of a cinema after seeing a film in the daytime. I was anxious too, because I thought the man would tell Elek I had made a fuss and then he would tell Jak and I’d get into really bad trouble.
For the next couple of days, I kept expecting Jak to start shouting at me, but he never did – at least, not about the wealthy man who liked anal sex and didn’t want to be identified. Perhaps, if the man was someone who was well known in Greece, he didn’t want to make a fuss about what had happened and risk upsetting the people who supplied him with foreign girls to gratify his weird sexual appetites.
I was working seven days a week, doing between eight and twelve jobs a day, each of which lasted for anything from a few minutes to an hour. Jak and I got up at six o’clock every morning and were out of the hotel by nine at the latest. He took me to all the jobs, in people’s homes and in offices, and then back to the hotel. It was a routine that became my life, without my understanding how or why. If you have very low self-esteem and no confidence, you tend to accept other people’s evaluation of your worth, and it didn’t cross my mind that I might deserve better.
One of my regular clients was an optician. He would usually be shutting up shop when Jak dropped me off. On the occasions when he did still have someone with him, he would say to me quite casually, as if I was just another customer, ‘Hi. How are you? Just give me five minutes please and I’ll be with you.’ And I would sit down to wait for him, feeling embarrassed and wondering if the person trying on frames for their new glasses knew why I was really there. When the customer had gone, he would close the shop, pull down the shutters and we would either go into a tiny back room or he would take me to an empty apartment just around the corner.
The optician was one of a few men who didn’t use condoms. I dreaded doing it that way, but Jak told me it was okay because both he and Leon – and later Elek – always checked their health papers and made sure that they were clean. Even though I chose to believe him, despite the fact that I knew it cost the men more to do it without a condom, I still worried about it.
I was in the shop with the optician one day when his wife and children turned up. The shutters were down so she couldn’t see us. But when she kept ringing the bell, I was sure she must know we were in there. It was horrible. I felt terrible, as though what was happening was my fault rather than the fault of the man who was cheating on his wife by having sex with a prostitute. I was scared too, and used to dread going there after that.
There were lots of things I didn’t know about sex before I went to Greece. One of them was that there are men who derive sexual pleasure from inflicting pain on women. I came across quite a few men like that while I was there, as well as some who frightened me for other reasons.
Jak took me to do an escorting job one day at a dilapidated old house that was set slightly apart from its neighbours at the end of a dark street. I told him as he was dropping me off, ‘I’ve got a really sick feeling about this place. I think there’s something wrong here.’
‘Well, you’ve got your phone,’ he said. ‘If you feel as though you’re in any danger, you can speed dial me and I’ll come straight back. I’m not going far. I’ll be waiting for you in a café just round the corner.’
Perhaps the fact that I felt grateful to him for those few words of comfort is an indication of how distorted normality had become for me. Despite his reassurances, however, I felt very nervous as I walked up the path and rang the bell on what appeared to be a metal front door. The guy who opened it was probably in his mid-forties, with greasy hair, stained clothes and long, dirty fingernails.
When he led the way into a room that stank of vomit and stale sweat, I had to force myself to sit down on the grimy, threadbare sofa. Then he just stood there in front of me, laughing and making weird twitching movements with his head, and it felt as though hundreds of tiny insects were crawling all over my skin. I was so unnerved by him that I had already begun to move my hand, very slowly, towards the pocket where I’d put my mobile phone, when two very bad things happened almost simultaneously. The first was that I suddenly remembered that I had transferred the phone from my pocket to my handbag as Jak and I were leaving the hotel. The second was that I noticed an axe propped up against the wall a few feet away from where the man was standing.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said in Greek. ‘I … I’m afraid I feel sick. So … I’m just going to go.’ I opened my handbag as I was speaking and began, surreptitiously and blindly, to search for my phone. ‘My boyfriend’s waiting for me outside. I’m going to phone him and tell him I’m leaving your house now.’ I tried to sound confident, but he must have been a
ble to hear the panic in my voice. He stared at me almost blankly for a second, as if he was trying to remember who I was and why I was in his house. Then he said, very loudly, in English, ‘No! Do not move.’
The sound of his voice had almost the same effect as a physical blow and I burst into tears, pleading with him like a little girl, ‘Please, don’t hurt me. I know you’re going to hurt me. Please don’t.’
‘I am going to hurt you.’ He repeated the words several times, very slowly, as if he was examining them one by one in his mind.
‘What are you going to do to me?’ I whispered, not because I really wanted to know, but because some instinct was prompting me to try to make him talk to me. I think I hoped that it might make him see me as a human being, or maybe I was simply trying to buy myself some time. Stupidly though, I let my eyes return to the axe. The man glanced sideways to see what I was looking at, and then, in what seemed to be just one swift movement, snatched it up and held its mud-caked blade against my throat.
As the cold steel touched my skin, I threw up. The man dropped the axe on the floor at his feet and started to laugh. Grabbing the opportunity while he was distracted, I reached into my bag, pulled out my phone and pressed Jak’s number on speed dial. Mercifully, Jak answered almost immediately and as soon as I heard his voice I blurted out, ‘I can’t do this. I need to get out of here right now.’
‘Ah, don’t go.’ The man leered at me, displaying a mouthful of uneven, nicotine-stained teeth. ‘I was only joking.’
Clutching my bag to my chest like a shield, I jumped up and ran to the front door. I was still struggling to open it when I felt his arm touch the side of my body. When I tried to scream, no sound came out. Then, through the blinding haze of my panic, I realised that he had opened the door for me and was letting me go.
My heart was thudding as I ran down the path and out on to the street. I had hoped to find Jak already there and waiting for me, but there was no sign of him. I phoned him again, glancing round me all the time as I did so, expecting the man to come after me. But he didn’t follow me and a few minutes later I was sitting on the back of Jak’s motorcycle, crying silently and thinking, with desperate longing, about my mother.
I thought Jak would sympathise and say how sorry he was that I’d had to go through such a horrible ordeal. So I was completely taken aback when he closed the door of our hotel room and started shouting at me for messing up ‘such a simple job’.
‘But the man had an axe,’ I told him, angry now as well as hurt by his reaction. ‘I thought you would be relieved that I hadn’t come to any harm.’
Jak’s first punch literally lifted me off the ground and sent me flying across the room. I was still lying on the floor, dazed and shocked, when he twisted his fingers in my hair, dragged me to my feet and banged my head repeatedly against the wall. Then he thrust his fingers between my teeth and lifted me off the floor, scraping his nails along the roof of my mouth as he did so. It felt as though every part of the inside of my mouth was swelling up, blocking my throat and making me choke. The pain was excruciating and I had the metallic taste of blood in my mouth. I had never seen him in such a furious rage. While I was gasping for breath, he kept on punching me, and each blow sent my head crashing back against the wall. When he finally let go of me, darkness rushed in and I crumpled on to the floor at his feet.
I think I must have lost consciousness for a moment, because the next thing I remember is hearing Jak shouting into the phone, ‘Help! You have to help me. I think I might have killed her.’ When I opened my eyes again, Jak and the Albanian owner of the hotel were looking down at me.
I had learned quite a bit of Albanian from Jak by that time, although the barely controlled panic in both men’s voices would have been recognisable in any language. The hotel owner kept swearing and saying angrily, ‘You stupid idiot! What have you done to her?’ I think he was the one who slid his arm underneath me to lift my head and shoulders off the floor and then put two broad, rough-skinned fingers into my mouth until they were touching the back of my throat. For a moment the pain was so intense I thought I was going to pass out. Then my whole body convulsed and, for the second time that evening, I threw up.
Jak made me stay in bed for the next couple of days – although, in fact, I didn’t need any persuasion. The inside of my mouth was so swollen and sore I could barely swallow, and I had a relentless headache that was, almost literally, blinding. When Jak sat beside me, trying to feed me soup, he apologised over and over again for what he had done. ‘Sometimes I can’t control my anger,’ he said. ‘You know that my family has always lived in poverty: that’s where the rage comes from. I get angry when I think that my parents have nothing. And sometimes I take it out on you. But it won’t happen again, I promise.’
Apart from some bruising around my mouth, I had almost no visible marks anywhere on my body as a result of Jak’s assault. I didn’t realise it until much later, but that wasn’t accidental. Although he was often physically violent with me after that day, he never did actually lose control, despite often appearing to do so, and he was always very careful not to cut or bruise any part of me that would be seen by someone else.
This time, like every subsequent time he attacked me, he managed to convince me that it would never happen again. And this time, like every subsequent time he attacked me, I believed him. I think part of the reason why I allowed myself to be persuaded that he really was full of remorse was because I had seen him panic when he thought he had really hurt me. I mistook his reaction for concern about me, rather than realising that the only person he was ever concerned for was himself. It was a very long time before I accepted the fact that what upset Jak – and the hotel owner – so much that day when he thought he had killed me was the prospect of having to dispose of my body without anyone finding out what he had done.
I had been in Athens with Jak for about six months by that time. I don’t think my teachers back in England, or the policeman who had picked me up for shoplifting, would have recognised the emaciated, timid girl with a trance-like expression and dark rings under her eyes as the same mouthy, stubborn teenager they’d had to deal with less than a year earlier. The only strong emotion I ever really felt now was fear, and even that seemed to fade almost as quickly as it came.
Without being consciously aware that it had happened, I had accepted the fact that I no longer controlled any aspect of my life. In a way, that made things less complicated, because if there wasn’t anything I could do to change the course of events, there was no point trying – and trying would have involved the use of physical and mental energy I simply didn’t have.
What I did need to concentrate on was learning how to separate my mind from my body. I knew instinctively that it was the only way I would manage to survive being regularly assaulted by men whose depraved sexual appetites made them unable to empathise with me or even see me as another human being.
In time, the thought of dying became less frightening too: it doesn’t seem like such a big deal when you’re living a life that couldn’t possibly get any worse. At least, that’s what I thought then. But I was wrong. Nothing could have prepared me for how bad my life was about to become.
Chapter 7
When I was in England, I used to dread getting my period. It always lasted for at least a week and was really painful. Even in Greece it was so bad that Jak used to give me the time off. I looked forward to those few days every month when we would do things together that normal couples do – except that when we went out shopping, it was only Jak that would be buying clothes and often gold for himself. He had a lot of money to spend, because I earned well over 1,000 euros almost every day for the rest of the month, plus tips, which I used to give him too. There was no question of trying to hide anything from him, because he checked my phone and went through my bag regularly.
I believed Jak when he told me he had been brought up in poverty, so although I was earning the money by doing something I desperately didn’t want to do, I
was happy when he bought himself expensive clothes. He would often say to me, ‘One day, we’re going to eat the best meat. One day, we’ll be rich.’ And I would feel pleased that he was pleased. It makes me very sad when I think about that now.
On the days when I had my period we would also go to cafés and eat in fast-food restaurants. I only ever held money in my hand for as long as it took me to walk out of a client’s house or hotel room and give it to Jak. Consequently, he paid for everything, which I interpreted as a sign that he really did love me. (You can see signs of anything anywhere if you look hard enough for them.) After I had been in Greece for a while, my periods got a lot better, but I didn’t tell Jak. I pretended they were as bad as they had always been. In fact, I would sometimes exaggerate how much they hurt and how long they lasted, just so I didn’t lose those precious days off.
After the day when I ran away from the man with the axe and Jak punched me and sent me flying across the room, he was often violent towards me. Surprisingly, perhaps, I did sometimes try to stand up to him. Occasionally when he shouted at me, I would shout back and we’d have a loud, angry argument. I wasn’t being brave; I think I did it because I couldn’t bring myself to accept that we weren’t ‘in a relationship’. If I’d had to admit that, there wouldn’t have been one single thing to make my life worth living.
If Jak got into a rage with me when we were out, he would sometimes just walk away and leave me stranded in the street. I didn’t have any money, so I couldn’t get a taxi, and there were times when I would have to walk a long way to find whatever hotel we were staying in. I suppose the strangest thing of all is the fact that I always did go back to the hotel. But Jak and Leon often warned me about what would happen if I ever went to the police, and because I had no reason not to believe them, running away simply didn’t seem to be an option. I suppose it was like any other relationship with a violent partner – based partly on fear, partly on the belief that every time they hit you it’s actually your fault. Logically, it doesn’t make any sense not to leave someone the first time they raise their hand to you, or to stay with a man who’s making you do the things I was doing. I really did think I was to blame every time Jak was angry and, absurd as it sounds, I did still love him.
Bought and Sold (Part 2 of 3) Page 3