by Sophie Hayes
One night before I went out to work, he told me to iron his shirt. I hated having to do things like that because I was so nervous and so afraid of making a mistake that, however hard I tried not to, I’d always end up making one. But, to my relief, this time he barely glanced at me while I was ironing and he put the warm shirt on without comment.
Later, when he was dressed and smelling strongly of aftershave, he stood in the kitchen doorway and said, ‘Look at me! What a beauty! Everyone’s going to want to talk to me tonight. Do you wonder where I’m going? Go on, why don’t you ask me? I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, It isn’t fair that he’s out having fun while I’m working. But that’s just the way things are. I do what I have to do – I go out and see people and take care of my business – and you do what you have to do. It’s the way it is, that’s all.’
Yes, it is unfair, I thought. You’re absolutely fine. And while you’re out having a good time, I’ll be having sex with men I don’t know, who may or may not pay me and who may or may not let me get out of their cars unhurt. But I said nothing, because I’d learned not to react in any way. This time, though, even saying nothing turned out to be wrong, and he suddenly turned on me, shouting, ‘So you’re happy with this arrangement, are you? You think this is okay? Obviously you don’t want to know where I’m going because you don’t care about me.’
Sometimes, when Kas was in a good mood, I’d describe to him some of the men I’d been with, and one day he asked me, ‘Do you ever enjoy it? Tell me the truth.’ He said it with a smile and when I was shocked and said ‘No!’, he laughed and kept insisting, ‘Go on, you can tell me. Surely there must have been times when you enjoyed it.’
‘No, never,’ I said again.
‘You’re lying!’ he retorted, but he was still laughing. ‘You’re expecting me to believe that you have sex at least 20 times every night and you’ve never once enjoyed it?’
‘No, I haven’t,’ I told him, and I wondered how he could be so completely mistaken about what it was like to be forced to have sex with strangers. But I knew that his questions were leading somewhere, and as the hairs on the back of my neck stood up, I was instantly alert.
It seemed that, for whatever reason, he was determined not to let the matter drop. He kept asking me over and over again, and then he said, ‘Come on. You can tell me the truth. There must have been one. Of all those men, there must have been one who was different. Who was he?’ And eventually I decided to lie, just to make him stop his relentless probing, and I said, ‘Okay, there was just one time.’
It was as though a switch had been flipped in his brain. The smile disappeared from his face and he launched himself across the room at me, grabbing me by the hair and yanking my head back sharply as he shouted, ‘You fucking bitch. How weak are you? How fucking dare you disrespect me? You’re a disgrace. You’re disgusting.’ And even though I’d lied, I knew that he was right, not because I enjoyed having sex with strangers – I didn’t, ever – but because of what he was making me do.
One night, I was with quite an old, nice guy I’d been with a few times before when Kas rang. There were rules about answering the phone – as there were about everything: I was only allowed to answer calls from Kas’s number, and I had to answer after no more than three rings. This time, however, I didn’t get to my phone before he rang off, and although I called him back immediately, it was too late.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ he shrieked. ‘How dare you not answer the phone when I call you? You, woman, you wait till I get hold of you.’ And then he described in graphic detail what he would do to me, while the man I was with sat beside me in open-mouthed amazement, not able to make out what Kas was actually saying, but clearly shocked by the angry, shrieking voice he could hear.
When Kas finally rang off, I tried to pretend everything was all right, although in reality I was shaking and close to panic. The guy could obviously see that I was upset because he smiled, patted my hand and said, ‘Let’s just get out of here. Let’s go somewhere else.’
Kas told me repeatedly that I was never to go anywhere other than my usual places without telling him first, but suddenly I felt exhausted. I was weary of trying to remember all the things I was supposed to do and not do and, what the hell, I was in trouble anyway. So I tried to smile too as I said, ‘Okay, let’s just go.’
We hadn’t driven far along the main road when I glanced in the wing mirror and saw Kas’s car right behind us. My instinct was to turn my head, but even though I didn’t, and I kept staring straight ahead, Kas sent me a text message saying, ‘Don’t pretend you haven’t seen me. You’re cheating on me, aren’t you?’
It was ridiculous and I didn’t respond to it, or say anything to the man I was with, and after a while Kas stopped following us and I spent the rest of the night dreading the punishment I knew lay in store for me when I got back to the flat.
The man I was with was at least 40 years older than me, and the only reason I was with him at all was because I was earning money for Kas. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to be with that guy or any other; I didn’t want to be with Kas, and I didn’t want to be in Italy. I wanted to be at home with my family, doing normal things – sitting on the sofa between my mother and my sister watching television, or playing a computer game with my little brothers, or talking on the phone to a friend while I sat in a café during my lunch break from work, making arrangements for what we were going to do at the weekend. In fact, I wanted to be doing those things so badly I didn’t know how much longer I could go on living the way Kas was making me live.
Surprisingly perhaps, I didn’t ever consider taking my own life. In fact, I was so afraid that Kas – or someone who’d picked me up on the street – was going to kill me that keeping myself alive became almost a fixation. Every single night when I was in Italy, I would stand at the side of the road, press the palms of my hands together until my wrists ached and say the same words in my head: ‘Please God, don’t let anything happen to me. Please God, keep me safe.’ Then I’d look up at the moon and imagine my mother looking at it too, and for that moment I’d feel I was close to her. I’d tell myself all I had to do was believe that one day I was going to escape and be with her again, and then everything would be all right.
On another night, a man gave me 150 Euros to go back to his house with him for an hour. I was rake thin and, although I didn’t realise it at the time, I looked like a child – and maybe, creepily, that was part of my appeal to some of the men. But this man just seemed lonely and he was kind to me. He took me into his small, warm kitchen, told me to sit down at the table and made me the best omelette I’ve ever tasted in my life. Then he handed me a mug of steaming hot coffee and urged me, ‘Eat! Drink! You look so cold. This will warm you up.’ When I’d eaten, he showed me pictures of his family and I tried not to cry, and afterwards he put handfuls of sweets in my pockets, as if I really were a child, and then he dropped me off near the petrol station, patted my shoulder like a benevolent uncle and said ‘Stai attenta. [Be careful.]’
I had one regular customer who was really good-looking, although very shy, and despite the fact that he didn’t speak much English, he always wanted to talk to me. He used to bring a blanket to put on the seat of the car and every time he dropped me back at my spot afterwards, he’d say, ‘God bless. I will pray for you.’ One night when he came, he told me his mother had found a condom wrapper in the car and that she’d been very angry with him. I laughed, because he must have been at least 30, but I felt sad, too, because I missed my mother desperately.
Every night before I went out, I’d stand in the bathroom and whisper, ‘Please, please, don’t let anything happen to me tonight,’ and as I waited at the side of the road for customers, I’d look up at the sky and think, Mum is out there somewhere and she can see the same stars and the same moon. And although it was a comforting thought in some ways, because it made me feel closer to her, I couldn’t bear to think that despite the fact we could be
looking at the same sky at exactly the same moment, we might just as well be in completely different worlds. In my heart, I’ve always felt that no matter how bad things get, I’ll be okay; something will happen to make everything all right again. And on all those nights in Italy, I had to believe that was true, but I’d never imagined it was possible to feel so lost and so alone.
The way my father had treated me and the rest of my family had made me unwilling – if not unable – to trust anyone, and it had taken me a long time after I’d first met Kas to accept his friendship. And now he’d destroyed my trust completely. But maybe, however bad our experiences, we never give up hope of finding someone we can confide in, because there was one guy to whom I came close to telling the truth. He was in the Polizia – yet another of the Italian police forces – and the first time I saw him he was in a police car with a colleague and he asked me what my name was.
‘Jenna,’ I told him.
‘No, I want to know your real name,’ he said, and he smiled at me.
‘I’ve told you, it’s Jenna.’ I felt in my pocket for a cigarette, looking away from him as I lit it to try to hide my discomfort.
‘It’s okay. You’re not in any trouble,’ he laughed. ‘I just want to know what you’re really called.’
And, for some reason, I told him.
‘Ah Soffeea,’ he said, and it sounded so much nicer than Sophie that I didn’t correct him.
‘Alora, Soffeea, are you okay?’ he asked, and when I assured him that I was, he smiled again and called ‘Ciao’ as they drove away.
He came back a couple of nights later, but this time he was on his own and driving a BMW. I didn’t recognise him until I bent down to look in through the window and he said, cheerfully, ‘Ciao, Soffeea. Come stai? Tutta bene? [How are you? Is everything okay?]’
‘La Polizia?’ I asked him.
‘Si, si. Andiamo. Let’s go,’ he said, reaching across to open the passenger door.
When I got into the car, he told me, ‘My name is Angelo,’ and I suddenly had an overwhelming feeling of sadness because I knew that, in another life, he might be someone who could have been my boyfriend, but I was so completely separated from that life that there was no way I could ever cross over to it from the twilight zone in which I was living.
Angelo was gorgeous, as well as very sweet. He didn’t want sex; he just wanted to talk. I felt comfortable with him and I really wanted to be able to trust him, but I knew I couldn’t risk it. I kept asking him, ‘Who are you really? Are you trying to trick me? Why have you come here just to talk to me?’ And he told me that when he’d come last time, with his colleague, he’d seen something in my eyes that made him sad and he’d decided he wanted to get to know me.
He came again a few nights later, and again we just talked. And then, the next time, he said he wanted to take me back to his house. ‘Here, take this,’ he said, trying to drop a wad of Euros into my hands. I pushed it away and told him it would feel wrong to take his money, but he insisted – maybe because he suspected I’d get into trouble if I didn’t take it – and eventually I accepted it.
Angelo was the only guy with whom it had ever felt as though it was more than just ‘having sex’, and when I’d been to his house with him a few times, he said, ‘Come and be with me.’ He asked how much I thought a policeman would earn in England and talked about us living there together, and for just one brief moment I allowed myself to believe that running away with him might actually be possible. When he asked again for my phone number, though, I told him I couldn’t give it to him.
‘Well then, at least take mine,’ he said. But I was too frightened in case Kas found out. And at that moment my phone rang and Kas asked ‘Where are you?’
‘I’m on my way,’ I told him, hoping he couldn’t hear the guilt in my voice.
‘What’s the matter?’ he snapped immediately. ‘Why do you sound strange? Where have you been?’ And then, speaking more quietly, he asked, ‘Are you with the flic [cops]?’
I’d been desperately trying to think of something to tell him, but my mind had frozen and I almost cried with relief at being given this way out.
‘Yes. Yes, that’s right,’ I told him.
‘Working?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Okay. Well, you should have fucking told me. The phone could be bugged and I could have been recorded by now.’ And, abruptly, the line went dead.
Angelo was watching me and as I put the phone back in my pocket he asked, ‘Is everything okay?’
‘Yes,’ I answered, trying to smile. ‘It’s just a friend, making sure I can get home.’
He tried again to make me take his phone number, and again I refused, although there were many times later when I wished I hadn’t and that I’d asked Angelo for his help, because I really liked him and I know he would have helped me. But, because of Kas’s erratic, violent behaviour, I’d lost any confidence I’d ever had in my own judgement, as well as the ability to think things through clearly, and I didn’t dare trust Angelo. Instead, I turned away from him so that I didn’t have to see the hurt in his eyes, and I never saw him again.
One night when a customer dropped me off, there was a dark-haired girl standing in my spot. Although I knew other girls sometimes worked further down the road and on some of the surrounding streets, no one had ever come near my spot before and I was surprised by how territorial I felt.
‘Excuse me, but this is my place,’ I told her firmly, in good enough Italian for her to understand me. But she just waved her arms and made a little run at me, shouting ‘No, no, no’, and that was when I noticed how hard she looked.
My immediate instinct was to scuttle away because I knew that some of the girls who worked in the area had a reputation for being quite crazy, and the last thing I wanted was to get into an argument with one of them. But then I heard Kas’s voice in my head saying, ‘Fear is weakness, and as soon as someone sees it in you, you’ve lost.’ So I clenched my fists to stop my hands shaking and told her again she’d have to go. And again she shouted at me and stood her ground.
I didn’t want to go round to the back of the petrol station in case she cornered me there. So, watching her carefully, I walked a few metres further along the road to phone Kas and, just minutes later, his car turned on to the dirt track.
Yeah, well, now we’ll see who has to move on, I thought, triumphantly. To my astonishment, however, Kas greeted the girl in Albanian and chatted to her for a while before telling me, ‘It’s okay. She’s my friend’s girl. I’m going to take her down the road and put her somewhere else.’
She pushed me out of the way as she walked around his car to the passenger door and then smirked at me as she got in, and I was annoyed because she seemed to think she’d somehow ‘won’. And then I realised that I saw her as a rival – which meant I’d accepted, on some level at least, that I was a prostitute and this was my life, and suddenly I felt very miserable and very frightened.
Over the next few weeks, several things happened that made me increasingly nervous and I began to have a sense of foreboding. Perhaps it was just because what I was doing was dangerous – in many ways – and so it seemed likely that the longer I did it, the more often I was tempting fate and eventually I was going to get hurt.
There was one man who’d come a couple of times and who I didn’t like, and my heart sank when his car pulled up beside me again one night. I didn’t know why he made me feel so uncomfortable; there was just something creepy about him I couldn’t identify, and I’d found that the best way of dealing with it was to make my mind go blank when I was with him. Later, as he was driving me back to the petrol station and I was breathing a sigh of relief because it was over, the darkness was suddenly lit by blue flashing lights and I could see that the whole place was swarming with Carabinieri, their cars blocking off both entrances to the dirt track.
‘Don’t stop,’ I told the man. ‘There’s somewhere else you can drop me off.’ I began to direct him to the place
I’d worked with Cara on my first couple of nights, but when I told him ‘Turn left here’, he drove straight past the turning. ‘Left!’ I said again. ‘You’ve missed it. We have to go back.’ And then I looked at him and it was clear from the expression on his face that he hadn’t made a mistake; he was ignoring me.
One of the most important of Kas’s many rules was that I was never to let a man take me somewhere I didn’t know. ‘You must always be the one who gives directions,’ he told me. ‘You must say where to stop and where he must drop you off afterwards.’ I knew that not knowing where I was meant I couldn’t phone Kas for help, which meant that if some man decided to kill me and dump my body, it might not be found for weeks or months, or maybe ever.
A few seconds later, the man turned his car off the road onto a track I didn’t know and demanded that I had sex with him again. I tried not to sound frightened when I refused, but I’m small and at the time weighed just 6½ stone, so I was no match for a heavily built, six-foot man – although at least, despite being scary and creepy, he hadn’t previously shown any signs of being violent or aggressive.
While we were having sex, I tried to think what I could do if he turned on me afterwards – and I tried to close my mind to the thought that whatever happened was actually completely out of my hands. So I was astounded when he gave me some more money, started the engine of his car and drove back onto the main road. But then, as he was driving, he opened his trousers, took hold of my hand and told me to touch him. When I snatched my hand away, he reached for it again, and said, patiently, ‘Do you want me to drop you off somewhere else? If you want me to do this favour for you, then you must do a favour for me.’ And I knew I had no choice.