by Sophie Hayes
Kas often told me, ‘Don’t think that any of these men are your friends. They’re not: all they want to do is fuck you and go home.’ But when I was with Marco and, to a lesser extent, some of the other men who were nice to me, I’d think, Kas is wrong. It isn’t true that none of them cares about me.
One night, I was picked up by an older, overweight man who told me he was a barrister. It seemed plausible, judging by the huge Bentley he was driving, and I recognised him immediately when he came back a week later with a friend. They both came again a few days after that, this time with a woman, and the barrister asked if I’d go back to his house with them.
‘I’ll give you 500 Euros,’ he told me, and because I viewed everything in terms of how pleased or otherwise it would make Kas, I agreed.
I sat at the back of the car, next to the woman – who was the barrister’s girlfriend – and as we drove to a very expensive and exclusive residential area just outside town, they all made polite conversation. After stopping to wait for a pair of wrought-iron electric gates to open, we drove into the driveway of an enormous house – the living room of which alone was bigger than the whole of Kas’s flat.
It was a cold night, and although I was wrapped up in several jumpers and a jacket, I had virtually no body fat at all and nothing was able to keep out the chill that seemed to penetrate through my skin and into my bones. So I was glad to be inside in the warmth for a while, even though it meant being in a house miles from anywhere I was familiar with, in the company of three people who were clearly freaks and who wanted me to take part in some sort of weird sex party. But at least they were polite freaks and I didn’t feel frightened or threatened by them, and I’d managed to text Kas to tell him where I was.
As soon as we walked into the house, the two men disappeared, and when they came back into the living room a few minutes later, wearing nothing but their socks, the barrister asked me if I’d like a drink. I was perched nervously on the edge of a very expensive-looking, cream-coloured leather sofa and I tried to look unfazed as I answered, ‘No, just water.’ So he poured wine for himself, his friend and his girlfriend and then she stripped down to her underwear and they all sat smoking and chatting as though everything was completely normal.
They spoke good English and when they asked me about myself, I told them my story – that I’d come to Italy from South Africa to earn money to send home to my family.
‘It must be very hard for you,’ the barrister’s friend nodded sympathetically. ‘But your family must be very grateful for what you’re doing for them.’
In any normal world, it would have been a very strange thing for an almost totally naked man who was just about to have sex with me for money – and with his friend’s girlfriend – to say. But in that world, everything was bizarre and yet nothing was extra-ordinary – because I was Jenna. In my mind, I actually was a young South African woman who was working as a prostitute so that her family wouldn’t have to live with poverty and hunger. And that’s how I got through all those nights – in people’s houses and in cars on the dirt track near the petrol station – by detaching myself from Sophie and becoming Jenna, who had to do what she was doing because other people’s lives depended on it. And that bit, at least, was true, because I had no doubt that if I didn’t do exactly what Kas told me to do, he would carry out his threat to hurt my little brothers.
‘And do you like doing what you’re doing?’ the barrister asked me, conversationally.
Are you out of your mind? I shouted at him, but only in my head.
‘Not really,’ I mumbled, looking down into my glass of water as I spoke.
‘No, well, that’s a shame,’ he said – in the sort of tone you might use if someone told you they’d applied for a job at Starbucks but had had to accept one at Costa Coffee instead. ‘But at least you have the satisfaction of knowing you’re helping your family. Do you like Italy? What do you do when you’re not working?’
If Alice in Wonderland had ever gone to a cocktail party, it would have been just like this, I thought, and for a moment I had to resist the urge to laugh. Three naked, or almost-naked, rich professional people were sitting in the elegant living room of a mansion in a suburb in Italy with a young woman they’d picked up on the streets, sipping wine from crystal glasses and asking her questions about her life and her ‘chosen’ line of work. And if that wasn’t crazy enough, the truth of the matter – of which they were completely unaware – was that the prostitute was actually an English girl who’d been lured to Italy by someone she’d thought was her friend, but who was in fact an Albanian drug and people trafficker who was forcing her to work on the streets.
Suddenly the thought struck me that this was my chance. It was probably the best opportunity I would ever have to be able to tell someone the truth and escape from Kas. The man sitting beside me in his socks was a barrister and – despite his unusual sexual preferences – clearly someone who was wealthy and influential. I could tell him what had happened and he’d help me. But Kas had brainwashed me too well and, as the moment passed, I knew that I was too frightened to say anything to anyone. Perhaps what was even worse than the fear, though, was knowing that there would never be anyone I could turn to for help because I wouldn’t ever be able to trust anyone.
Later, after the barrister, his girlfriend, his friend and I had all had sex in various combinations, I pushed the 500 Euros into my boots and sat in the Bentley beside the barrister while he drove me back to the petrol station. And I knew that nothing about any of it was really funny at all – in any case, I’d lost my sense of humour long ago. My life had been reduced to a handful of basic functions: I slept, got up, ate, had sex with strangers, tried to dodge the police and avoid getting attacked by anyone, went home, gave all the money I’d earned to Kas, and slept again. Above all, though, I did what Kas told me to do and tried to avoid making him angry with me. In some ways, it was all very simple and straightforward because I didn’t really have to think. I just had to make sure I followed Kas’s instructions – although that was never as easy as it might sound.
Despite the fact that Kas was a drug dealer and occasionally used cocaine himself, he was adamant when he told me, ‘If I ever find out you’ve done any drugs, I’ll cut your nose off. No one wants to fuck a junkie.’ But no one ever did offer me drugs, and only one person ever asked to buy some off me, and then apparently found it hard to believe when I said I didn’t sell them. It seemed odd to me – and strangely contradictory, as so many things were about Kas – that although he was quite happy to be a dealer, he would wind himself up into a fury at the very thought of my taking drugs. And then, one day, he told me he wanted me to sell wraps of cocaine.
‘It’s a missed opportunity,’ he said, as though he was talking about some run-of-the-mill business venture rather than the serious criminal offence of drug dealing. ‘All the men you’re seeing want some pussy and they want some coke. You’ll never be picked up for it because you won’t be carrying enough to be viewed as a dealer. You just say it’s for your own use.’
Until that moment, I’d believed things couldn’t be any worse, but I knew that although I probably wouldn’t get arrested for prostitution, I would go to prison if I got caught with drugs. And the fear must have been written on my face because Kas suddenly shouted at me, ‘You’re pathetic! I can see how frightened you are, and all because people tell you that you’re not allowed to do something.’ I knew there was no point pleading with him: he’d made up his mind and there was nothing I could do about it, but I dreaded going out to work that evening even more than I’d dreaded it before.
When I was dressed in my hideous work clothes, Kas called me into the living room, where the table was covered with little packages. I felt sick: I knew I couldn’t do it; I’d mess it up – like I messed everything up – and I’d get caught, and then my mother would have to come and visit me in an Italian prison.
I began to cry and to beg Kas not to make me do it. ‘I’m frightened,’ I told h
im. ‘Please, Kas. I don’t know how to do this. I don’t want to. Please, please don’t make me.’ Suddenly, he spun round, slapped me hard across the face and yelled, ‘You haven’t got the guts to do it, or the brains. Get out of my sight. You’re an embarrassment – to me and to yourself. You’re pointless. You’ll only end up getting me into trouble because you’re so stupid.’ Then he rapped with his knuckles on the side of my head and said, ‘There’s nothing inside here except sawdust. That’s why you can’t think. Forget it. Go on, get out of my sight.’
And for once I was glad that I was stupid, if it meant not having to do something that, in my mind, was even worse than the things I was already doing.
One evening, when I was about to start getting ready to go out to work, someone banged on the front door of the flat. Kas was dealing a lot of drugs at that time and there were dozens of little wraps of cocaine on the table in the living room, which he started snatching up and pushing into a plastic bag, while I just stood there, frozen to the spot. Clearly, he wasn’t expecting anyone, and the knock hadn’t sounded friendly.
Kas had told me – repeatedly, as he told me everything – that if the police ever came, I was to say we didn’t know each other and that I was a friend of a friend of his who he was allowing to stay at his place for a while. I wondered if this was the moment when I’d have to tell that story, and I was terrified at the thought of getting it wrong, of saying the wrong thing and getting Kas – and myself – into trouble.
Kas spun the top of the plastic bag into a tight spiral and tried to shove it into my hands, but I jumped back instinctively, dropping my arms to my sides, and he grabbed me roughly by the shoulders and snapped, ‘Take it! Hide it. Go on. Move, woman!’
‘Hide it where?’ I whispered, closing my fingers around the bag and glancing nervously towards the door.
‘Shove it inside you.’ He pushed me towards the bedroom. ‘And lock the fucking door.’
At that moment, a voice shouted ‘Carabinieri!’ and I fled into the bedroom, closing the door silently behind me.
Fortunately, the two policemen didn’t come into the flat, and for the next 10 minutes I sat, uncomfortably, on the bed, listening to the muffled sound of their voices and longing to light a cigarette. I couldn’t make out what they were saying and Kas wouldn’t tell me afterwards why they’d come. But when he eventually kicked the bedroom door and told me to come out, he was laughing, although his voice sounded contemptuous as he said, ‘Fucking stupid bastards. Who do they think they are? Do they think they’re going to catch me? They’re never going to catch me! Fucking peasants, riding around in their police cars thinking they’re so important.’
On another night, he made me sit in the kitchen and cut out little squares of plastic to wrap up a huge batch of cocaine. He reminded me – unnecessarily – about cutting off my nose if I even so much as sniffed in its general direction, and then he went into the living room to watch television.
Although it was a simple enough task, my palms were sweating and I was in a state of high anxiety, as I always was whenever Kas told me to do anything. But I was still taken by surprise when he came into the kitchen, snatched the scissors out of my hand and, pressing the tips into my cheek, shouted in my face, ‘How stupid are you? Have you got sawdust in your head?’
I blinked and cringed away from him. But instead of hitting me, he picked up a piece of plastic paper from the table and cut out a square – which was almost identical to the ones I’d been making, except just a little larger. Then he grabbed me by the hair, wrenching my head back so that my neck twisted painfully, and held the square a couple of inches in front of my eyes as he said, angrily, ‘This is how you do it. This is not hard. How can you not be able to do this? Were you brought up by peasants?’
‘No!’ I wanted to shout back at him. ‘I was brought up by people who weren’t drug dealers and so never asked me to cut out little squares of plastic paper to wrap up cocaine.’ But instead, I said quietly, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I haven’t done this before.’
Kas’s erratic, volatile temper was one of the most frightening things about him, and I was constantly trying – almost always unsuccessfully – to anticipate when and why he might fly into a rage, which meant that I was in a permanent state of anxiety. One minute he’d be okay – although it was rare for him to be actually calm and uncritical – and the next he’d be out of control, hitting me and shouting at me that I was stupid and that he didn’t know why he bothered with me at all.
I still don’t know if it was all a carefully calculated act to make me frightened of him – which it did – or whether he was actually mentally unstable. But it certainly seemed that almost everything I did was wrong, and even really minor mistakes – things that most other people would have considered too unimportant even to bother commenting on – seemed to send Kas into a frenzy of fury.
One day, he told me to pack away in a suitcase some clothes I didn’t need, and as I knelt on the floor folding T-shirts and sweaters, he sat on the bed talking in Albanian on the telephone and watching me. There was always a knot of fear in my stomach and I was constantly checking and double-checking everything I did, trying to deflect his next explosion of anger. But I was most nervous of all when he was watching me, although, on this occasion, there didn’t seem to be much to worry about when all I was doing was putting clothes in a suitcase. I was wrong, though, and he suddenly came flying across the room, shouting, ‘Is that how you pack a suitcase? What kind of woman are you? How are you ever going to have a family? How could you have children and be a wife? You can’t clean properly, you can’t cook properly, you can’t even fold clothes and pack a suitcase properly. Do you think it’s all right just to push socks down the sides like that? Well, do you?’
It felt as though my whole body was shrinking and as I cowered away from him, I glanced up just as he reached out his hand, grabbed a fistful of my hair and pulled me to my feet, screaming at me, ‘You fucking snake! How dare you look at me sideways like that with your sly, disrespectful eyes? That’s the way Albanian peasants look at people. How dare you disrespect me? How fucking dare you?’
Then he dropped me abruptly on to the floor and as I tried to cover my head with my arms and curl my body into a protective ball, he started kicking me viciously. He was like a furious, snarling animal – and all because he didn’t approve of the way I’d pushed a pair of socks into a suitcase and then looked up at him as he approached me from the side.
They say that just before people drown, they stop struggling to keep their heads above water and become almost calm, and that was how I felt at that moment. Whatever I did, however hard I tried, it seemed to make no difference and I was completely weary. Kick me, I thought. Kick me as much as you want if it makes you happy – because I knew that Kas had finally broken my spirit and I’d given up.
But, instead of kicking me again, he almost ran out of the room, and I was still lying on the floor with my eyes closed and pain radiating into every part of my body when he came back a few seconds later, carrying a gun. Dragging me up by my hair, he shoved the barrel of the gun into my mouth, crushing my lips painfully against my teeth, and said, in a quiet, cold voice that frightened me even more than his shouting, ‘Never, ever, look at me in that way again.’
I was whimpering and terrified, although part of me wanted to shout back at him, ‘Go on then, just do it. Pull the trigger. Why would I care?’
And then he took the gun out of my mouth, pushed me towards the bathroom with a force that sent me sprawling across the floor, and said, ‘Now go and clean yourself up.’
Kas always told me what to wear every day, and that night he’d chosen a white mini-skirt, skimpy pink top, short zip-up jacket and shoes with stiletto heels. And by the time I was dressed and went into the living room, his mood had changed completely. Putting his hand on my shoulder, he turned me round and said, ‘Look at you! You are so beautiful, woman! All the men queue up to be with you because you are so amazing. Everybo
dy wants to know you. Let me take your photograph.’
So I stood there, confused and disorientated, while he took pictures of me and told me, ‘You are my girl, my special little mouse.’ And then he sat down on the sofa, pulled me on to his knee and stroked my hair as he said, ‘You are my special girl and I shouldn’t have done that to you. I’m sorry, but you make me so angry. If you just learned to do what I tell you and didn’t disrespect me, you wouldn’t ever be in trouble. But you always make mistakes.’ Again, he knocked the side of my head with his knuckles as he added, ‘I don’t want you to make mistakes. I want you to be a good girl, so that I don’t have to be angry with you. I want you to do things properly, and then I won’t have to shout at you anymore.’
I sat on his knee, crying and wishing with all my heart that I wasn’t so stupid and that I could learn not to get things wrong all the time, while he stroked my hair again, wiped the tears from my cheeks and said, ‘Ah, you’re like a little dog, with your big, sad eyes. I don’t want to see tears in your eyes anymore. I don’t want you to cry.’ I put my arms around his neck as I whispered, ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I don’t mean to be bad. I don’t know why I’m so stupid or why I always make mistakes, but I promise I’ll be better. I won’t get things wrong anymore.’
Chapter 9