Bought and Sold (Part 2 of 3)

by Stephens, Megan

  The girls all nodded and I realised that they must all speak English too. One of them said something in their own language and as they all leaned forward to listen to her, I heard the man say quietly in Greek, ‘You don’t need much training to be able to lie on your back and open your legs.’ And the woman laughed.

  I quickly looked away, pretending to cough to cover up the sound of my sharp intake of breath. ‘Just stay calm,’ I told myself. ‘Don’t give any sign that you heard what he said.’ The blood was pounding in my ears and even when I clutched the edge of the seat very tightly I couldn’t stop my body shaking, because I knew what was going to happen to those poor, unsuspecting girls.

  I was still struggling to control my rising panic when the Greek couple told the girls they were just going to have a word with the hotel owner – who was now out at the reception desk – and then they walked out of the bar. The girl who had smiled at me when they first came in, and who was sitting at the table nearest to mine, leaned across and said, ‘Hello. Do you work here?’

  ‘No,’ I answered, forcing myself to return her shy smile. ‘I’m … I’m just staying here for a while.’

  ‘We’re going to be staying here too,’ she said. ‘I’m Kasia. I’m from Poland. I go to college there. I’ve come here to work as a waitress for a while so that I can save some money for my studies. It’s the first time I’ve ever been away from my family. I miss them already, and my boyfriend too. But it’s a good job, I think. I can’t earn so much money in Poland.’

  Apart from a couple of my loneliest clients, it was more than anyone had told me about themselves in months. I suddenly felt desperately sad at the thought that this girl I didn’t know was the closest thing to a friend I’d had in all that time. She seemed to be a really sweet girl and I wanted to say something to her, to warn her to get out before it was too late. But I was frightened. Although I didn’t know anything about the Greek couple, I knew that the Albanian hotel owner could be violent – I had often seen him hit his wife when he was drunk. Despite my fear, however, I knew that, if there was any chance the girl could escape, I couldn’t just turn my back on her and walk away.

  I needed to think. So I said something polite to Kasia and went upstairs to my room, where I sat on the balcony smoking a cigarette, trying to clear my head of the white noise of confusion.

  Chapter 8

  I was still sitting on the balcony when Kasia appeared on the one next door. She seemed pleased to see me there and to have someone to talk to. She told me about her home, her studies in Poland and how she was already feeling homesick. And I explained how I had come to Greece on holiday with my mum and how we had both fallen in love and decided to stay. Then I told her what I had heard the Greek couple say in the bar downstairs.

  For a moment she just stared at me, as though her grasp of English had suddenly failed her, and then she burst into tears.

  ‘Hush,’ I whispered across the balcony railings. ‘Don’t let anyone hear you crying. Come round to my room. I’ll open the door. But be quiet, for heaven’s sake.’

  Her face was white and she was shaking when I let her into my room.

  ‘Where are the other girls?’ I asked her.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I think they’re still downstairs, talking about all the things we’re going to do while we’re here.’ A sob caught in the back of her throat and I put my hand on her arm. ‘I’m going to try to help you. It will be all right,’ I assured her, although I had no real reason to believe that it would be.

  ‘I’ve got my phone,’ she said, as if she had only just remembered it. ‘You can speak Greek. We’ll just call the police and …’

  ‘No, we can’t do that,’ I interrupted her. ‘I don’t know if we can trust the police.’ Jak had warned me many times that if I ever went to the police, he would know, and I was afraid that even if Kasia didn’t mention my name, he would find out somehow that I had been involved.

  ‘What am I going to do?’ she wailed. ‘I can’t stay here. I have to go home. I want my mum and my boyfriend. I came here to work as a waitress. I can’t do … that.’

  Suddenly, I remembered the phone number written on the screwed-up piece of paper I had hidden at the bottom of my bag. ‘There is someone who might help us,’ I told Kasia. ‘He’s a nice guy, and very rich. I’m sure he would buy you a plane ticket home if I tell him what’s happened.’ In fact, I didn’t even know if the bit of paper was still there. But it was, and I had a sense of elation as I smoothed it out and discovered that the numbers written on it were still just legible.

  I sent a text to Andreas saying, ‘It’s Megan. Please phone me urgently on this number.’ And my phone rang almost immediately.

  ‘It’s lovely to hear from you,’ Andreas said, in his quiet, competent-sounding voice. ‘I hope this means you’re going to come to see me.’

  ‘I need your help,’ I told him. ‘I’m with a girl who needs to get out of a really bad situation. Will you help us? Please.’

  ‘Come round.’ Andreas was instantly serious. ‘You know where I am. Get a taxi. I’ll pay for it when you get here.’

  ‘I really do think he’ll help you to get home,’ I said to Kasia. ‘First though, we have to get out of here without anyone seeing us.’

  I think I was even more scared than she was, because I knew what would happen if I got caught trying to help her escape. But I felt proud too, for daring to try to help her when I hadn’t ever dared to help myself. Ironically, perhaps, I was so focused on trying to save Kasia, so she wouldn’t have to go through what I was going through, that I didn’t really think about myself at all. So I didn’t consider the possibility that if Andreas could get Kasia out of the country and home, maybe he could do the same for me. In all the scenarios I might have imagined, I was an invisible presence. I suppose that was because in my mind, as well as in the minds of everyone I ever had anything to do with, I was a non-person. The only thing that concerned me at that moment, though, was how to get out of the hotel with Kasia and somehow find my way to Andreas’s house.

  ‘Just follow me,’ I told the pale, visibly shaking girl. ‘Stay close and don’t make a sound.’ Then I opened the bedroom door very slowly, held my breath and listened for a few seconds, before, very cautiously, putting my head out just far enough to be able to see in both directions along the almost-dark corridor.

  I had just stepped out of the room and was turning back to whisper to her to follow me when we heard a loud bellowing shout. Kasia made a whimpering sound and I pulled her out into the corridor, hissing at her, ‘Quick! Go into your room and lock the door.’ And then I did the same.

  It was the hotel owner’s voice we had heard; I could tell that he was very drunk and in a rage. Why he was screaming my name and threatening to kill me, I didn’t know, nor did I ever find out. Just a few seconds after I had darted back into my room and locked the door, he was hammering on it with his fists. As I stood, flattened against the wall, I could see through the small window above the door the knife he was waving above his head, and I began to pray. Like everything else in the hotel, the door of my room was flimsy and cheaply made, and I knew it wouldn’t take him long to bust it off its hinges. There was only one other way out. Shaking and telling myself, ‘It’ll be all right; just don’t look down,’ I climbed up on to the worn-stone parapet that surrounded my balcony, took a deep breath and stepped across the three-storey drop to the road below onto Kasia’s balcony.

  When she saw me appear in front of her, Kasia had to clamp her hand over her mouth to stop herself screaming. My legs were shaking so much I stumbled and nearly fell, and she put her arm round me to help me into her room, where we stood together, listening to the hotel owner ranting and raving and kicking my door. When the noise stopped abruptly, the whole world seemed to fall silent. A few seconds later, I heard the lift door opening and closing, followed by the distinctive whirring sound it made as it moved between floors.

  We waited and listened for a minute or two longe
r, in case it was a trick. Then we crept out into the corridor, ran down the stairs, through the open door of the hotel and out into the street. Luckily, no one saw us and once we were outside we just kept running, following the tramline to the next stop, where we jumped on a tram that would take us to the part of town where Andreas lived. It would probably have made more sense to do what he had suggested and get a taxi. But I was panicking and, fortunately, we didn’t encounter a ticket inspector before the tram reached our stop and we jumped off.

  When Andreas opened the front door of his expensive townhouse, we almost fell across the threshold. He ushered us into his elegantly furnished living room, and after I had calmed down enough to be able to tell him what had happened, he picked up the phone and booked Kasia a ticket on a flight to Poland.

  ‘Can she stay with you until it’s time for her to leave?’ I asked Andreas. ‘Will you look after her? I have to go back to the hotel.’ He promised he would, and I knew he would keep his word.

  ‘And you?’ he asked me. ‘Are you all right? Don’t you want me to book a flight to somewhere for you too?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I lied. ‘Just take care of Kasia. You don’t have to worry about me.’ After all, where would I have gone? Kasia had a mother, a boyfriend and a home in Poland; whereas my mother was living in Greece – not far enough away for me, or her, to be safe from danger – and there was no one waiting for me back in England.

  It was fear that was really imprisoning me and preventing me from trying to escape. Elek rarely used violence to control me, as Jak had done. His methods were more subtle – I had seen the gun he kept under the seat of his motorcycle – and I believed him when he told me that someone was always watching me and when he threatened, in the same calm, matter-of-fact voice, that there would be ‘massive trouble’ if I ever tried to run away.

  I didn’t want to think about what was going to happen to the other Polish girls. I knew I couldn’t help them all. Although the risk I had already taken in leaving the hotel had been worth it for Kasia’s sake, I didn’t know what would happen when I went back. Any potentially plausible excuse I might be able to come up with – that I had been frightened by the hotel owner, for example – would only be believed if I didn’t stay away too long. I had become very paranoid; I was even convinced that my phone was being tracked. So I was also anxious to get away from Andreas’s house as quickly as possible in case someone did come after me and found Kaisa there too. The trouble was, the prospect of going back to the hotel was every bit as frightening as not going back. When I think about it now, it seems incredible that I had an opportunity to escape and didn’t take it.

  Kasia hugged me and thanked me and said she would get in touch as soon as she was safely out of the country. Then Andreas put me in a taxi and I sat on the back seat, praying no one had discovered that both Kasia and I were missing and, if they had, that they wouldn’t connect her disappearance with mine.

  Andreas had given the taxi driver money and I asked him to drop me off a short distance from the hotel. As I walked quickly along the road with my heart thudding, I kept my head down, hiding my face from anyone who might see and recognise me. Rounding the corner into the road where the hotel was, I heard the sound of voices before I saw the police cars. When I looked up, the hotel seemed to be swarming with police.

  My first, excited, thought was that the other girls had somehow found out what was really planned for them and had phoned the police for help. It was only later that I discovered what had actually happened was that when the hotel owner hadn’t been able to find me, he had directed his drunken aggression towards his wife. It was someone who had seen him attacking her that had called the police. When they arrived – by the carload – they’d arrested the hotel owner and closed the hotel.

  Somehow, Elek had already heard what had happened and my phone started ringing while I was still standing outside, trying to persuade one of the policemen to let me go in.

  ‘Pack up all your stuff,’ Elek told me. ‘I’ll come and get you as soon as I can.’

  I didn’t know why the hotel owner had been threatening to kill me. At the time I thought it might have been because he had found out I had spoken to Kasia, and therefore he might already have told Elek. So although Elek didn’t sound angry when he spoke to me on the phone, I felt sick with anxiety as I waited for him.

  Fortunately, the policeman let me go into the hotel to collect my things, and when Elek arrived he was more concerned with other potential problems than with anything I might have been doing before he got there. ‘If anyone asks you any questions,’ he warned me, ‘say you’re in Greece on holiday.’ By some miracle, I had got away with it. The hotel owner was sent to prison for assaulting his wife and the hotel was shut down. I don’t know what happened to the other girls. I hope with all my heart that they went home to their families in Poland.

  When he came to pick me up, Elek drove me to another hotel, where he told me to wait until he came back for me. All the places I stayed while I was in Athens were more like doss-houses than hotels; this one was the dirtiest, most cockroach-infested of them all.

  The following day, I had a text from Andreas asking if it was okay for him to phone me. After I had texted him back to say that it was, he told me, ‘It’s good news. Everything went according to plan. Kasia is safely back in Poland. She sent me an email when she got home and she asked me to tell you, “Thank you very much for saving my life.” She says she hopes you do well and that she would like to keep in touch with you.’

  ‘Thank you for getting her out, Andreas,’ I said. ‘I knew you would. I’m really grateful to you.’

  Fortunately, as Elek didn’t really care what I did as long as he got his money, he rarely checked my phone, so he didn’t find out about the call from Andreas. I erased the text messages though, and then I threw myself across the dirty, stained sheet on the bed and cried until I couldn’t cry any more. Why hadn’t I admitted to Andreas that I wasn’t the ‘willing’ prostitute I pretended to be? Why hadn’t I asked him to help me, too? I was glad Kasia had escaped and I was proud of the role I had played in helping her to do so. But I was filled with despair at the realisation that I had missed what might be the only opportunity I would ever have to break the invisible bonds that bound me to a life of unremitting loneliness and humiliation.

  When Elek came to pick me up the next day, he took me to a café, where he introduced me to a Greek man, probably in his fifties, called Christoph. After they had spoken to each other briefly, Christoph handed Elek a wad of notes.

  ‘He’ll look after you now,’ Elek told me. ‘I’ll see you around.’ Then he stood up, shook the other man’s hand, and walked away.

  I don’t know if it’s possible to feel any more mortified and ashamed than I did as I sat in the café that day trying to make sense of the fact that I had just been sold. It had happened before, of course, when Leon had bought a ‘half-share’ in me from Jak, and when he had sold his share on again to Elek. I hadn’t understood what was happening then, and I don’t think I really even understood it now. As long as I clung to the belief that everything I did was for Jak and me, I could stop my brain trying to process the facts I didn’t want to accept. In reality, though, after he had left me in Athens, Jak had never phoned me or answered my calls. He had just sent me a text every few days – no words, just a kiss or a love heart. And then, after a while, I had stopped hearing anything from him at all. The truth I was refusing to face was that his only remaining interest in me was financial.

  I’m a stronger person now than I was then, although I still need to work on my confidence and self-esteem. When I look back on that time, I feel angry with myself and incredibly sad. When you truly believe that you’re nothing, you don’t even consider the possibility that you have a choice about anything. You’re like a puppet, waiting for someone to pick up your strings and control your actions. And when the puppeteer puts you down, you don’t do anything, because you’ve got so used to being a puppet you’ve f
orgotten that you were ever able to think and act for yourself.

  Now that Elek had handed the strings to Christoph, the only thing that changed for me immediately was that it was Christoph who picked me up every morning from the hotel room I shared with a whole army of cockroaches. For the next few months, I continued to work in different brothels around the city, sometimes during the day and sometimes at night. I did some escorting jobs as well, in hotel rooms and in the homes of people who had never even heard the nocturnal sound of an insect’s scuttling feet.

  I worked alone in some of the brothels; others were studios, where I would be one of two girls working at any particular time and where men would come in, look at us both and then choose between us. For someone with already barely measurable self-confidence, not being picked might have been difficult to process – even when the person doing the picking was just some sleaze-ball who had wandered in off the street. But, by that time, I didn’t feel anything at all.

  Christoph didn’t hit me. In fact, he often praised me. ‘Look at you!’ he would say. ‘You’re stunning. You must be proud. You must tell yourself, “I am a good and special person.” Go on, say it.’ And I was so lonely and so starved of affection that for a moment I did feel special, simply because he said I was.

  One day he told me, ‘You shouldn’t be doing this. Why are you doing this?’

  ‘So that my boyfriend and I can build our own house and have a family,’ I answered.

  ‘Ah, you will have a lovely place!’ Christoph looked into the distance and smiled, as if he, too, could see the image I still clung to. For a while, his words brought definition again to the dream that had begun to fade, and I could almost believe that one day it would become a reality.

  Most of the girls who worked in the brothels were Albanian and Romanian, a few were Greek, others were Polish, Russian, Lithuanian and Moldovan. Although I didn’t really talk to any of them, I began to suspect that most of them weren’t doing the work any more willingly than I was. Even when I worked with other girls in the studios, we rarely spoke to each other. I wanted to talk to them, but when I tried to do so, I think I came across as being needy and a bit weird. The dehumanising effect of what I was doing seemed to have damaged my ability to communicate with other people.