Bought and Sold (Part 2 of 3)
Page 6
I would see girls out on the streets – students and girls who worked in shops and offices – and I would want to be one of them so badly it was almost like a physical pain. They were living the life I had imagined I would when I came to Athens with Jak. As I watched them laughing and talking to each other, sometimes walking arm in arm, I could feel their energy and confidence, and it would make me sad to realise that I was invisible to them.
When every day is the same and nothing changes, there’s no way of keeping track of the passage of time as the weeks become months. So I don’t know how long I had been in Athens when Christoph started taking me to different cities to live and work alone in brothels for a few weeks at a time. All the brothels were open for business 22 hours a day, 7 days a week. There were no days off, and it wasn’t long before I was completely shattered. They closed for a couple of hours in the early mornings so that the cleaners could come in, and that was when I was supposed to sleep. The problem was that I was usually so far beyond exhaustion, and so hyped up on iced coffee and the energy tablets the brothel owners gave me, that any sleep I did have was restless. Fortunately, there were few customers during siesta time and some of the brothels would close for two or three hours in the afternoons too – and then I would sleep as though I had been knocked unconscious.
The windows of all the brothels were barred and boarded up and I never knew whether it was day or night, which messed up my body clock even more. Apart from the exhaustion, it didn’t really make any difference to me though: I wasn’t going anywhere, so I had no need to know what time of day or even day of the week it was.
I had, on average, about 50 clients a night. On the worst night of all, 110 men paid to have sex with me. The owner of the brothel I was working in at the time was a man who was quite nice to me, and when I ran out of the back door after my 110th client and was violently sick, he closed up early. I thought that was decent of him – which shows just how distorted my sense of normality had become. But it was certainly more than the owners of most of the other brothels I had worked in would have done.
I was ill after that night – not because of it, as it turned out, but because I had a stomach bug. I was already so run down physically that after a few days of severe sickness and diarrhoea, which left me shivering and curled up in agony, I became very weak. Christoph was sympathetic. He called me ‘poor girl’ and on the days when I was too ill even to get out of bed, he brought me food (which I couldn’t eat). He still made me work some nights though, even after I had thrown up on a client, and his apparent concern for me didn’t stretch to getting me the hospital treatment I really needed.
After I had been ill for two weeks – by which time I was so painfully thin I looked like one of the walking dead – he moved me to another hotel in central Athens and, at last, took me to a hospital. When the doctor examined me, he said I had Salmonella poisoning and was seriously dehydrated. So they kept me there for a few hours while they put me on a drip. Christoph stayed with me, which I thought was nice of him and a sign that he really did care about me, as he always said he did. It was much later when I realised that what he had actually been doing was making sure I didn’t have any direct, one-to-one communication with hospital staff.
As soon as I recovered from the stomach bug, I started doing escort work during the day and working at night in one of the many brothels in the city centre. I would walk back to the hotel at around 6 a.m., sleep till 9, and be ready when Christoph came to pick me up – never later than 10 – to take me to the first of the day’s escorting jobs, most of which were in apartments in the nicer areas of the city.
Mum and I texted each other every day and sometimes she phoned me too. I had a special, cheerful voice I used as I described to her how well I was doing in my job as a waitress. It was obviously convincing, because she often said, ‘You sound so happy, Megan. I’m so pleased for you.’
‘I think Jak and I have split up,’ I told her one day, a long time after he had stopped answering even my texts. ‘But I’ve made new friends here and I’m fine about it. In fact, I’m thinking of going to college, to do a beauty course – you know, hair and nails.’ I was surprised by how easily the lies came and by the fact that, as I was telling them, I could almost believe I was living the life I was describing.
‘I can’t wait to see you any longer,’ Mum said when she phoned me a few days later. ‘You keep putting me off, saying you’re busy. And I can understand that you can’t spare the time to come here. But what if I came to Athens? Even if you can’t get any time off work, we could at least spend a few hours together.’
‘I’ll see if I can work something out,’ I told her.
It had been a long time since I had last seen her, and although it was what I wanted more than anything else in the world, the thought of her coming to Athens threw me into a state of panic.
Find out what happens next.
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Chapter 5
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