by Sophie Hayes
I walked for a while to get away from the police station and then I sat on a bench next to a bus stop and faced the fact that there was only one person who could help me.
Kas answered his phone almost immediately and shouted, ‘Where the fuck are you?’
‘I got picked up by the police,’ I sobbed. ‘And I don’t know where I am.’
‘Don’t you fucking cry, woman.’ For a moment his voice was dangerously quiet, and then he was shouting again, ‘You wait! Just you wait and see what I’m going to do to you. How fucking stupid are you not to watch where you were being taken? And now you expect me to come and find you, with police everywhere. If I get picked up, it will be your fault and believe me, woman, then you’ll really have something to make you cry.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered. ‘I was frightened. I didn’t …’
‘What can you see?’ he snapped. ‘Look around you. Think, woman, think.’
I was already used to his two-second rule – when he gave me just two seconds to answer a question before hitting me – but the more he harassed and bullied me, the less able I was to focus my mind and think of an answer or do whatever it was he wanted me to do. Luckily, though, I managed to describe where I was well enough for Kas to find me, and half an hour later I was sitting beside him in his car while he shouted at me, first in Albanian and then in English, that I was a ‘mother-fucking bitch’.
‘How fucking stupid are you?’ he screamed. ‘Are you trying to get me into trouble with the police? Is that it? Is that what you want to do?’
‘No, no, of course not,’ I whimpered. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘I don’t know why I bother with you,’ he sneered. ‘Look at you! You’re useless. How much money has your stupidity cost me tonight? Well, you’re going back to work.’
I tried to cover up the sound of my indrawn breath by coughing, but Kas had heard it. Without turning his head, he lifted one hand from the steering wheel, reached across and slapped the side of my head as he said, ‘You’re such a frightened little mouse. You can’t even do this one simple thing. You’re a fucking waste of time. I know you’re going to get me into trouble. I should get rid of you and do this with someone else.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said again. ‘It’s just that I don’t know what I’m doing.’ And I prayed he couldn’t hear the voice in my head that was screaming, Please, please, please do it with someone else.
‘Do you think it’s hard, woman?’ Kas roared at me. ‘All you have to do is open your legs. Someone fucks you, you move on. It’s not fucking hard!’
Again, I wanted to shout at him, ‘It is hard. Even just standing on the street is hard.’ But all I said was, ‘I’m frightened. Please don’t make me go back tonight.’
‘Frightened?’ Kas’s laugh was scornful. ‘You’re frightened of some stupid policeman? You’re going to be scared off because of one policeman?’
‘There were two of them,’ I said. ‘And they told me I wasn’t to go back.’
‘Oh, I see. Now I understand.’ His voice was mocking. ‘You’re not going to go back because you’ve been told not to.’
‘But what if they come again?’ I said. ‘What will happen to me if they pick me up again?’
He was right on one count, though, because being told not to go back was, for me, a good enough reason to stay away. I felt as though I was completely out of my depth: I was being forced to do something that went against all my instincts – quite apart from my morals – and I was scared. I began to cry, and that was when Kas seemed to lose control of his temper completely. Grabbing a handful of my hair, he banged my head against the window beside me, slamming it again and again into the glass until I felt faint and thought my skull was going to splinter. Then, suddenly, he let go of my hair and seized my throat, crushing my windpipe with his fingers until I couldn’t breathe. I tried to pull his hand away, and just when I thought my lungs were going to burst, the world turned black.
The next thing I was aware of was Kas leaning over me, saying, ‘Breathe, woman. Breathe.’ He’d stopped the car at the side of the road and was holding my head in both his hands as he said, in a voice full of urgency, ‘What have I done? Wake up, little mouse. Please wake up. We’ll go to the hospital. We’ll do whatever you want – anything. Just don’t die. Please.’
My whole body seemed to be on fire, but as the air rushed into my lungs, I looked up into Kas’s face and thought, He does care about me. Everything is going to be all right now. My head was pounding, but when I tried to speak he pushed me away, shouting, ‘Don’t you fucking scare me like that again! Don’t you test me, woman.’ And as I cringed back against the car door, trying not to cry, he started the engine and said, ‘You’re no fucking good tonight. But you better sort yourself out by tomorrow. I’m not going through this again with you – you need to shape up.’
Later, as I lay in bed, sobbing silently, it felt as though someone was banging a drum inside my head, each beat sending a pulse of pain flooding across my skull. As the hours ticked by and I lay there, exhausted but unable to sleep, the thought suddenly struck me that maybe the two policemen were friends of Kas’s who he’d sent to test me, to see if I’d take the opportunity to try to escape. The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed that it was true, and, in fact, although I was picked up by different policemen on other nights, I was always taken to a police station just a few minutes’ drive away rather than in another town, as happened on that first occasion.
Kas told me repeatedly, ‘Don’t think that the police are there to help you. Don’t believe for one minute they’re your friends. No one is your friend and no one you ever meet – not the police, other girls or any man – will ever help you.’ And I knew he was right and that I could never trust anyone.
Sometimes, Kas would drop me off a short distance from ‘my spot’ and as I walked along the road I’d think, Pull yourself together. Take it one day at a time and just concentrate on getting through this. Then, as I stood waiting for cars to pull up beside me, I’d pray silently, Please, please, please God, don’t let anything happen to me. Just let me get through this night. And every night I survived felt like another night when I’d somehow managed to dodge a bullet.
I think I’d almost forgotten that the reason I was working on the streets was, ostensibly, to pay off Kas’s debt. I tried never to think about what might happen to me tomorrow, or the day after that, because when I did, all I could see was the same life stretching out endlessly ahead of me into darkness. Thinking about the future just made it harder to get through the day I was living at that moment. So I didn’t know – or dare wonder – whether the time would ever come when I’d have had sex with enough men to have earned the money Kas owed.
By the time I finished working at around 5 o’clock every morning and walked to where Kas picked me up, the road would be almost empty of cars. He was forever telling me how important it was that I should keep checking to make sure I wasn’t being followed, and how dangerous it was for him to risk being seen with me – which was ironic, considering I’d just spent the night standing alone in the dark waiting to have sex with total strangers. He’d often remind me, too, that if we were ever seen together, I must say I didn’t know him and that he was just someone who was giving me a lift. But after the first couple of weeks he stopped picking me up at all, except very rarely – I suppose he was satisfied by then that I was so cowed and afraid of him I wouldn’t try to escape – and I’d have to hitchhike, or ask my last customer to drop me off near the bottom of the hill that wound up to Kas’s flat.
At home in England I wouldn’t have dreamed of hitchhiking under any circumstances, even in broad daylight, let alone on almost deserted roads in the early hours of the morning. But, then, never in my worst nightmares would I ever have imagined I might one day work as a prostitute, and it was surprising how quickly I adapted to taking risks, especially when it was a case of either hitchhiking or walking miles when I was already cold and exhausted. And sometimes I�
��d think, It doesn’t really matter if someone does attack me. At least if I’m dead I won’t have to do this anymore.
As I was standing at the side of the road, I’d often think about my mother and wonder what she’d say if she could see what I was doing. To begin with, I still felt very much connected to her, but gradually, as my world contracted until it encompassed only Kas’s flat and the streets where I worked, everything outside it lost its focus.
Surviving meant separating my mind from my body and trying to believe that I wasn’t Sophie anymore; I was a Russian girl who was doing what she had to do to support her family and keep out of trouble. If I thought about anything else, I just got upset, and that made it harder for me to detach myself from what used to be my reality but was now my past. What I wanted and what I felt didn’t matter anymore, because my sole purpose had become to earn money for Kas.
For the first couple of weeks, I wasn’t making enough and I’d dread the moment every night when I had to stand beside Kas while he counted out what I’d given him. Every night he was angry with me, but I was going with every man who stopped and accepted the price I told him, and I just didn’t know how I could do any more than I was doing. I began to think that maybe I just wasn’t pretty enough for men to want to have sex with me. I certainly didn’t feel pretty, standing at the side of the road shivering and nervous, like a skinny, timid little girl, and I knew I looked stupid in the clothes Kas made me wear. But nothing I could tell him made any difference, and he kept insisting I must be stealing from him and cheating on him with other men. I don’t know if he really believed that, or whether it was just a way of making me try to do better, but he’d hit me when I cried and said, ‘How could I steal money from you? I’m giving you everything. How could I cheat? And why would I? These men are paying me to have sex with them – they don’t want to have a relationship with me.’
Every night, as I stood at the side of the road waiting for my next customer, my mind would be torn completely in two: I’d be praying no cars would stop, so that I didn’t have to have sex with anyone, and, at the same time, I’d be wishing more of them would, so that I could earn enough money to make Kas happy. Because if he was happy, he might not hit me and shout at me, ‘How stupid are you? You can’t even do one simple little thing.’
Another thing that enraged Kas was the fact that I found it so difficult to eat. I’ve never been a big eater, but I think part of the reason I lost my appetite then was because I was exhausted. Perhaps, too, not eating was a form of self-harming. Maybe I was punishing myself for doing the disgusting, horrible things I was doing every night. And maybe also it was a way of having autonomy over just one aspect of my life, which was otherwise entirely under Kas’s control. At the time, though, I didn’t think about the reasons why I couldn’t eat, and even on the many occasions when Kas tried to force food into my mouth and shouted at me, I couldn’t swallow more than a couple of mouthfuls without retching.
One day, he’d been out while I was asleep in the afternoon and when he came back he’d bought me a panini stuffed full of thick Parma ham and glutinous mayonnaise. ‘Eat it!’ he roared at me, as he always did, and my stomach immediately began to churn. It felt as though something solid was blocking my throat and as I took a bite and started to chew, I had to fight back the nausea rising up inside me. I could feel Kas watching me from the doorway of the kitchen, and suddenly he shouted, ‘Eat it! You are disgusting. Do you not realise that there are people in this world who have nothing? Millions of people are literally starving to death and yet you refuse to eat good food that’s put in front of you. You are a disgrace, woman.’
‘I’m trying to eat it,’ I told him, and as the tears spilled out on to my cheeks, he took two angry strides across the room, snatched the panini from my hands and started pushing it into my mouth, twisting the fingers of his other hand into my hair and wrenching my head backwards until I thought my neck was going to break. I began to retch and when he hit me across the side of my head, I pushed my chair away from the table and ran into the bathroom. After I’d been sick, I just wanted to lay my head on the cool tiles of the bathroom floor and go to sleep. But I knew Kas would be waiting for me.
He looked at me with an expression of contempt as I walked back into the kitchen. Then he pointed to the kitchen table, said ‘Eat it’ and left the room, and a few seconds later I could hear the sound of the television in the living room. Alone in the kitchen, I chewed and tried to swallow as much of the food as I could, and then I broke the rest into small pieces and hid them up my sleeves, before going back into the bathroom to vomit and flush away what I’d managed to secrete.
Perhaps by not eating I was trying to control just one aspect of my life, although if that was the case, it was subconscious and I certainly didn’t realise it at the time. Inevitably, though, as I became thinner and more malnourished, I began to get one cold after another. Kas would just look at my puffy eyes and red nose with an expression of disgust and send me out to work as usual, although he did start making me eat bananas and spoonfuls of honey every day – both of which I’ve always hated and made me retch and throw up, so that he had to spoon in more.
One day, I was nibbling the end of a banana he’d just given me, trying to ignore my growing sense of nausea and think about something else, when he suddenly snatched it out of my hand and squashed it into my face and hair, shouting, ‘Just look at you! You’re like an animal. Do I have to do everything for you, woman? Can you do nothing for yourself? Are you so stupid you can’t even eat a banana unless I help you?’
Sometimes I’d see the warning signs that meant his anger was about to erupt, and sometimes, as on that occasion, it flared up so abruptly and unexpectedly that it took me completely by surprise. And because it was so unpredictable, I was always on edge, like a frightened little dog waiting for its master to lash out and kick it across the room with the toe of his boot.
On another night, Kas told me to make pasta and tomato sauce for his dinner. I hated having to do anything like that. Because I was so afraid of getting even the smallest part of it wrong, I was constantly checking and double-checking until I was a twitching, miserable, nervous wreck. Although I thought I’d been able to cook perfectly well when I was at home, Kas had one day shown me, angrily, how to make this meal ‘properly’. So, while the pasta was cooking in a pan of what I hoped was just the right amount of water boiling with just the right degree of vigour, I stirred the sauce and went over again in my head a list of all the ingredients I’d put into it, to make sure I hadn’t forgotten to add anything.
Kas came into the kitchen just as I was straining the water from the pasta into the sink, and immediately my mind was buzzing with doubt. Was I using the right pan? Was I holding the strainer properly? Could I hear the sauce bubbling too vigorously on the stove behind me? If I turned my head to check, would some of the pasta slide out of the strainer and into the sink? What if didn’t check and the sauce started to burn? Could I already smell burning?
With shaking hands, I put the strainer full of pasta on top of the empty pan on the stove, knocking the lid as I did so, so that it clattered on the work surface. I glanced quickly at Kas and whispered, ‘I’m sorry.’ But, to my relief, he just shrugged and sat down at the kitchen table. It’s going to be all right, I told myself. He’s in a good mood, otherwise he’d have shouted at me because of the noise. Even so, as I walked very slowly and carefully across the kitchen carrying the plate of pasta and freshly made tomato sauce and put it down on the table in front of Kas, I still held my breath and prayed, Please, please don’t let me have done this wrong.
My heart was thumping as I watched him pick up his fork and take a mouthful of the food. When he raised his eyes to look at me, I couldn’t read his expression. Was he pleased? Did he like it? Had I added too much salt? Had I overcooked the pasta?
Suddenly the room was filled with the sound of his anger, and I heard myself whimper like a frightened animal as he pushed the table away and stood up.
‘You motherfucker!’ he bellowed at me. ‘Are you trying to fucking kill me? What is this? I wouldn’t give this disgusting slop to a dog! How many times do I have to tell you? Do you do this on purpose? Do you like to make me angry? What kind of person puts so much sauce on pasta?’
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry,’ I snivelled.
‘Sorry?’ Kas roared. ‘You will be fucking sorry!’ And as he spoke he reached out his hand, lifted the plate off the table and hurled it at me.
Instinctively, I took a step backwards and as the plate smashed against the wall beside me, it sent out an explosion of broken china, pasta and thick tomato sauce. I was covered in it – it was in my hair and all over my clothes – and as I cringed and cowered against the wall, sobbing and trying to protect my head with my hands, Kas flew across the kitchen and grabbed me by my hair. He seemed to be completely out of control, kicking and punching wildly, like a large, violent child in the throes of a terrible temper tantrum. He shoved me up against the wall, grasping my throat so tightly with his fingers that I thought he was going to choke and kill me. But, instead, he started bashing my head against the tiles and screaming into my face, ‘How fucking stupid are you?’
I thought my skull was going to explode and as my knees gave way, Kas lifted me off the floor by my neck and threw me down at his feet, kicking me again as he shouted, ‘You fucking clean that up, you mother-fucking bitch!’ He pushed the back of my head so that my face was pressed against the floor and began to wipe the tiles with my hair, before dragging me to my feet again and roaring, ‘Look at your fucking hair. Do you take no pride in yourself, woman?’ Then, suddenly, he let go of me and walked out of the room.