Bought and Sold (Part 2 of 3)

by Stephens, Megan

  What I didn’t realise at the time was that none of Jak’s reactions was a genuine, spur-of-the-moment response. His anger, tears of regret or self-pity, praise and affection were all equally contrived. He wasn’t emotionally volatile, as he always claimed to be; he was cold, calculating and very clever. Everything he said and did was part of the process of deliberately distorting my sense of reality and brainwashing me. Even before I went to Athens, when I was getting into trouble and truanting from school, I didn’t really know who I was or who I wanted to be. After just a few months with Jak, the answer seemed to be ‘nobody’.

  Jak controlled not just the money, but also every aspect of my life. While we were out buying expensive clothes for him, he would occasionally buy a cheap outfit for me. He never got me short skirts or revealing tops, or anything else you might imagine a prostitute would wear; he always bought clothes that made me look young. Every day, he would lay out what he wanted me to wear and sometimes he would tell me to do my hair in pigtails. I think he often sold me as a little girl – an even younger little girl than I actually was. Some of the men had their own ideas about what schoolgirls should be wearing, and I would put on the clothes they brought for me, things like school uniforms with very short skirts, stockings and high heels.

  One man, called Thanos, was absolutely obsessed by porn – just the ‘normal’ stuff fortunately, not anything really horrible. He would book me every week for four or five hours, always in a hotel room, and take pictures of me wearing leather outfits or weird knickers with zips or, more often, of me naked in all sorts of pornographic poses. He was very polite, but it was obvious the first time he spoke to me that there was something peculiar about him. He was like an incredibly fussy film director. He would give me precise instructions about how to lie and how to position my arms and legs, then he’d adjust everything repeatedly, making me move an inch this way or that way until he was happy with every last detail and finally ready to take his photograph.

  Sometimes he would tie me up, take his photographs and then have sex with me. Being photographed was humiliating enough, especially for someone as shy as I was. The sex was far worse: it would go on for hours and it always hurt so much I would be crying while he was doing it. I would try to make sure he could see I was crying, because I wanted him to know he was hurting me, but he didn’t give a crap; he didn’t care about me at all. It was horrible. What sort of person gets a kick out of doing something to someone who’s clearly distressed and in pain? It makes me so angry, even now. I came across a lot of men who were like Thanos in one way or another. I still can’t understand how they function in the normal world when there’s so obviously something seriously wrong with them.

  One night, after we had been in Athens for about six months, Jak said, ‘I’m going home tomorrow.’ I never knew what would annoy him and set him off, so although I felt like jumping up and hugging him, I kept my excitement under control as I asked, ‘What do you mean? Are we going back to the coast, to your parents’ house?’

  ‘I am going home, yes,’ he said. ‘But you have to stay here.’

  It was like being punched. During the last six months, I had lost everything except Jak; and now I was going to lose him too. I didn’t even think to argue or to say that I didn’t want to continue working as a prostitute. My immediate concerns were about practical issues. Who would drop me off at clients’ houses and hotels if Jak wasn’t there to do it? Who would wait for me somewhere nearby in case I needed help? Would I be expected to take care of everything on my own? Who would look after the money?

  What I actually asked was, ‘How long will you be gone? What will happen to me?’

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ Jak said. ‘Elek will look after you.’

  I cried when Jak left the hotel the next morning. ‘I’ll be back,’ he assured me. ‘Until I am, I’ll keep in touch by phone. And remember what I told you about the money: you give half of everything you earn to Elek and once a week you send the other to me by Western Union. For fuck’s sake, stop snivelling for a minute and listen to me. Do you understand what I’m telling you? It’s really important.’

  ‘Yes, I understand,’ I said, although really I didn’t, because I believed he was going to save the money I would be sending him for our future together.

  Some teenage girls are level headed, sensible, confident and emotionally well balanced; others are naïve, gullible, easily frightened and emotionally needy. Girls in the second of those two broad categories are the ones who become victims of sex traffickers and internet grooming, and who get themselves into the sort of colossal mess I was in. They’re the ones who can be bullied and coerced into doing things that will scar them for the rest of their lives. They’re the ones who can be persuaded that almost anything and everything is their fault, and that they’re ‘not good enough’ in all sorts of important ways. Whereas the truth is that people who buy and sell other human beings are clever, manipulative, self-serving, totally devoid of any normal feelings, and have no compassion for the ‘commodities’ they trade in. People like Jak don’t do anything random: they’re running a business, and that’s what informs every single decision they make.

  Everyone’s view of the world and of what happens to them and to other people is based on their own experiences. Partly because of my childhood experiences, I still want to believe that Jak loved me – even just a little bit, at some time. If I accept that he didn’t, I have to consider the possibility that I’m not lovable, and that maybe that’s why my father didn’t care about me, and why sometimes when I was a child it seemed that my mother didn’t either. The logical part of my brain tells me that my parents behaved the way they did for reasons that had nothing to do with me and that they had complicated emotional issues of their own, perhaps because of things that happened to them in their childhood. But even though I know all that, I still find myself wondering sometimes when I’m feeling really low if it’s the whole truth.

  Jak was very good at making me believe that what happened to me was my fault. The fact is, though, that he chose me quite deliberately as his victim because I was very young and because he could tell that I was naïve, vulnerable and emotionally a bit screwed up. Human traffickers don’t prey on people who are confident, whose life experiences have been more positive than negative and who are likely to fight back.

  When Jak left me that morning in the horrible, cockroach-infested hotel room, I was distraught. I was still lying on the bed crying when the phone in the room rang. When I answered it, the Albanian hotel owner said, ‘Get yourself ready and be downstairs in the bar in 15 minutes.’

  I didn’t get a chance to ask him, ‘Get ready for what?’ I had no idea what was going to happen next; I was like a little dog waiting for its master to tell it what to do. Fifteen minutes later, I had washed my tear-stained face, put on some make-up and was downstairs, sitting at one of the tables in the bar. The hotel owner was already there, drinking whisky, and he called across the room to ask me if I wanted a drink.

  ‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Elek will be here soon. Why don’t you have a drink while you’re waiting for him?’ he persisted. And because I didn’t want to offend or annoy him, I relented and asked for some water. ‘Not water!’ He sounded scornful. ‘Have a proper drink.’

  ‘No thanks, I don’t really like alcohol,’ I said. ‘Water will be fine.’ But he was already pouring whisky into a glass, which he put down on the table in front of me, saying almost aggressively, ‘Come on, try this.’

  ‘I said I wanted water.’ I tried to sound confident so that he wouldn’t know I was suddenly feeling anxious. ‘Just because my boyfriend has gone doesn’t mean you can tell me what to do.’

  ‘Drink it!’ The hotel owner slammed his fist down on the table with such force that a crack appeared on its surface.

  After I had drunk the whole glass of whisky in one mouthful, a warm glow seemed to spread through my body. The man laughed and asked if I wanted another one, and this
time when I said no, he shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Okay, later then. Later, you and me will have a drink together.’

  When Elek arrived at the hotel, he came into the bar, sat down beside me and said, ‘The escorting work is dying down. We’re going to have to go to the next level.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, anxiety rippling like waves through my body. ‘What next level?’

  Elek always spoke to me in either English or Greek, but as I didn’t know the word ‘bordello’ in either language, I didn’t understand when he told me that that’s where I would be working. When I asked him what it was, he said, ‘It’s like … It’s inside sex.’

  ‘Inside what?’ I felt sick. Surely there couldn’t be any perverted sexual acts I didn’t already know about. I was almost relieved when Elek said, ‘Working in a bordello is like working inside a house. I’ll pick you up tonight. This work is very tiring, so to begin with you’ll be in one of the less busy places.’ Even then, I don’t think I really understood that a ‘bordello’ was a brothel.

  After Elek left, I went upstairs to my room and waited. He phoned me several times during the afternoon and then came back for me on his motorbike in the early evening and drove to the centre of Athens. The small stone house he stopped outside was almost identical to all the other houses in the long narrow street, most of which had coloured lamps hanging next to their metal front doors.

  I had never been inside a brothel before, and the ones I’d seen in films were nothing like the cold, damp room I was taken into, which was lit by disco lights and stank of sweat and stale alcohol. Elek introduced me to the brothel owner, a huge, grubby-looking woman who reminded me of Agatha Trunchbull in the film Matilda. Then he gave me a small box with ‘250 Condoms’ written on the side of it and said, ‘You’ll need these.’ I began to panic. Why would I need so many? How long was Elek going to leave me there? Doing the escorting work, I usually had around 8 clients a day, and I was still trying to divide 250 by 8 when Elek handed me some clothes and told me to go and put them on.

  ‘You look really good,’ he said a few minutes later, when I was standing in front of him wearing a tight black vest decorated with tiny red roses, a matching frilly thong and a pair of stiletto-heeled shoes. ‘You’re going to do well tonight.’ I must have looked as anxiously miserable as I felt, because he laughed as he added, ‘Don’t worry. It’s much better to be here than doing what you’re used to doing. It’s a lot quicker. You don’t have to talk to the men. You don’t let them touch you and you don’t let them do anything without condoms, not even for extra money. All you have to do is open your legs, they fuck you, and then they leave. It really is as simple as that!’

  Maybe it did seem simple to him. Maybe to a man who had control over his own life and didn’t consider a girl like me to have anything at all in common with, say, his mother or his sister, it did seem to be merely a job. To me though, working in a brothel was a very frightening, soul-destroying prospect, and probably the worst thing I could ever have imagined myself doing.

  After Elek left, the woman told me, ‘We open in half an hour. Your hair looks a mess. Go and sort it out, and then do your make-up. You need a lot more make-up than you’re wearing.’ When she was satisfied with the way I looked, she took a handful of condoms out of the box Elek had given me and laid them out in rows on a table, four in the first row and several rows of ten underneath it. Then she handed me a piece of paper and a pencil and said, ‘Everyone pays twenty euros. You have to keep a tally. You don’t get any money for the first four, so don’t write them down; they cover your costs – rent, electricity, etc.’

  In fact, the men paid her directly and I didn’t handle any money at all. I just waited behind a curtain until she called me into the salon, which was the main room where potential customers looked me up and down and tried to decide if I was worth 20 euros, while the woman described to them with bored indifference all the things I could do. Some of the men, particularly the young ones, just came to look and had no real intention of ‘buying’. Those who did pay their money were given one of three room numbers and directed to the staircase, and I followed them up in a rickety old lift, trying to shut my mind to any thought at all.

  It was a single-girl brothel, which meant that I was the only girl working on a particular shift. The woman who ran it was nasty and devious. ‘Be quick,’ she was always telling me. ‘Get your skates on. All three rooms are full. Time is money.’ She was obviously running scams, one of which involved removing ten condoms from the table every night, instead of the agreed four, and then insisting that I had made a mistake with my tally. I wasn’t in any position to argue with her, and although I was annoyed when I realised what she was doing, it didn’t really matter who got the money: whoever it was, it wasn’t going to be me.

  ‘You can’t touch,’ I would say to all the men. Then I would lie on the bed and tell them, as the woman was always telling me, ‘Hurry up. Be quick.’ Twenty euros bought them five minutes, after which, whether they had finished or not, they had to pay again or go. When I insisted – and I was equally ruthless with all of them – some of them would start kicking off. So I would press the button beside the bed, which alerted the woman downstairs, who would call one of the Albanian ‘bouncers’ who always stood outside the house, and he would man-handle the guy out into the street – after beating him up if he was still resisting.

  When we were busy, men who decided to pay for extra time would often have to wait while I took the additional 20 euros down to the woman and got rid of the men in the other two rooms. Sometimes they got fed up with waiting and would open the door of the room they were in and start shouting, ‘Come on. Where are you?’ It took a great deal more to embarrass me than it had done just a few months earlier, but I did feel embarrassed for those men. A lot of the clients were dirty and ill-kempt, and clearly indifferent to what the rest of the world might think about them, while even well-off local businessmen didn’t seem to be bothered by the fact that there might be men in the waiting room who would recognise them.

  I had more than 50 clients that first night, and by the end of it I was in agony. Elek came to pick me up and dropped me at the hotel, and after I’d had just a few hours’ sleep, he took me back to the brothel again. I worked there night after night without a break for several weeks before he moved me on to another place, and after that to another one. Every new brothel was dingy and dirty and almost indistinguishable from the one I had just been working in. The only difference was that in some of them, despite having a consistent average of at least 50 clients every night, I would be told, ‘Try something different. You’re not doing enough.’

  One night, when business was slow, I heard a man tell the brothel owner, ‘I’ve brought my son. He’s fifteen and he’s a virgin.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ she said. ‘She does virgins. It’s forty euros.’ I could tell from her voice she was smiling, but I felt sick at the thought that a man would take his son to a place like that.

  A few minutes later, when I opened the door of one of the rooms upstairs and found an anxious-looking boy sitting on the edge of the filthy bed, I just wanted to cry. He was the same age as I was, although I felt much older. I tried my best to dissuade him, telling him, ‘You’re too young. I feel like a paedophile. Please, don’t do this. This isn’t the way to lose your virginity.’ But he was determined, and then angry and humiliated because he couldn’t do it.

  When I told Elek about it afterwards, how I had hated it and didn’t want to do it again, he shrugged and said, ‘You have to. It’s normal for some Greek men. It’s what they do. They bring their sons to brothels to make them into men and to make sure they don’t turn gay.’ I didn’t know much about anything, but even I knew that was ridiculous. After what I had already seen and experienced, however, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised or disgusted by anything ‘some men do’.

  When Elek picked me up from the brothels in the early hours of the morning, I would give him half of what
I had earned. Then, once a week, he would take me to a Western Union office, where I would send Jak the other half, minus 30 euros, which I was allowed to keep and spend on cigarettes and food. One night, Elek couldn’t come for some reason, so he told me to walk to the hotel where he would meet me later to collect his money. After he had been and gone, I stayed in the hotel bar and was just finishing drinking the coke he’d bought me when the Albanian hotel owner said, ‘We’ve got some girls coming in tonight,’ and winked at me as if we shared a secret. I had no idea what he meant, so I just nodded and said, ‘Oh, right.’ But I was interested enough – and certainly lonely enough – to decide that I would wait to see them.

  When eight girls came into the bar a little while later, I didn’t recognise the language they were speaking to each other. They were with a Greek man and woman, and as they all sat down, one of the girls smiled at me shyly. Another girl asked the man in English, ‘So what is the restaurant like? I haven’t worked as a waitress before. Will they teach us how to do it? Doesn’t it matter that we can’t speak Greek?’

  ‘It’s a very nice restaurant,’ the man answered. ‘And don’t worry about the language or about training for the work. You won’t have any problems, any of you.’