by Sophie Hayes
But he’d already pulled across the road into the traffic and when he reached towards me with one hand I thought for a horrible moment that he was going to open the door and push me out. Instead, though, he grabbed me by the throat and said, ‘No. Come. Come with me. It’s okay.’
Just stay calm, I told myself. Don’t struggle. It’ll be fine.
Although he loosened his grip, he kept his hand on my throat as he drove and then stopped the car in an alleyway a short distance along the main road.
‘Let me out,’ I demanded angrily again. ‘Open the door. Vai via! No scopare.’
And, suddenly, both his hands were around my throat, his fingernails digging into my neck, and he was screaming into my face in Italian. I tried to push him away and shouted back at him, ‘Vai via! Go!’ But I could barely breathe and the words came out in a strangled croak. ‘Mio ragazzo è albanese,’ I stuttered. But he just laughed as he said, ‘Dove è il vostro denaro? Your money – where is it?’
I didn’t have much money with me at the time – most of that night’s earnings were buried in the soil behind the petrol station – and my first instinct was to give him what I had. But I knew that even if I gave him money, there was nothing to stop him killing me – and if he didn’t, Kas probably would when I arrived home again without the full amount.
When I’d realised earlier that he’d locked the doors of the car, I’d slipped my hand into my pocket and curled my fingers around my phone. Now I began to press Kas’s number. I waited a few seconds to give him time to answer and then pulled the phone out of my pocket and shouted into it, ‘You’ve got to come. The alleyway by the dead tree. He’s a psychopath.’ The man reached out to try to knock the phone out of my hand, but I snatched it away, so he grabbed me around the throat again and started banging my head against the headrest.
I don’t know where Kas was when he got my phone call, but it seemed to be only seconds later that his car came screeching into the alleyway behind us and, before the man had a chance to react, Kas was thumping with his fists on the window beside him. Still startled and bemused, the guy turned to look at Kas and I reached across and unlocked the doors. Immediately, the driver’s door flew open and Kas dragged the man out of his seat and started kicking him. Then he pushed him, face-down, on to the bonnet of the car and punched him repeatedly on the back of his head so that his face smashed again and again on to the metal and I was certain Kas was going to kill him.
There was blood pouring from the man’s face when Kas eventually lifted him up by the scruff of his neck, pulling him to his feet and half-dragging, half-carrying him around the car to where I was standing, frozen to the spot by cold and fear.
‘Now tell her you’re sorry,’ Kas shouted, his fingers clamping on to the man’s jaw as he forced him to look at me.
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry,’ the guy mumbled.
‘Now fuck off. Go!’ Kas released his grip on him abruptly and the man stumbled back around his car and threw himself into the driver’s seat. Then he locked the doors, started the engine and swerved sharply around Kas’s car as he pulled out on to the main road.
I sat in the car beside Kas, waiting for the tirade of verbal abuse and the physical assault I knew was coming, but he just patted my knee and said, ‘Well done. You did the right thing – you didn’t show him that you were frightened. You did really well.’ And suddenly I felt as though the ordeal I’d just been through had been worth it for the reward of knowing that, for once, I’d got something right and Kas was pleased with me.
One of my main concerns as I stood on the street every night was trying to dodge the Carabinieri, who were always on the lookout for me. Sometimes, I’d see them coming and I’d have time to hide in the trees behind the petrol station. But often they’d pull up beside me before I could get away and tell me, ‘You can’t stay here. Go!’ So I’d walk along the road for a few minutes, waiting for them to drive away, and then go back to my spot.
On the nights when they picked me up and took me to the police station, they’d keep me there until about 5 o’clock in the morning and then let me go. In fact, once I’d got over my initial humiliation at being picked up by the police at all, it wasn’t such a bad thing – at least it meant I could spend the night inside in the warmth and then have a good excuse to give Kas for not having earned any money. And the Carabinieri were usually all right with me.
So although I was always annoyed with myself for having been stupid enough to get caught, I wasn’t actually worried when a police car pulled in beside me one night and I was told, ‘Not tonight. Get in the car. You have to come with us.’
This time, though, when we arrived at the police station, the two policemen started to ask me questions, insisting that they didn’t believe my story about being South African and demanding to know where I really came from, until eventually it seemed pointless to keep up the pretence.
‘Were you doing this in England?’ one of the policemen asked me. ‘What is your address there?’
For a moment, I thought about telling them, ‘I’m not what you think I am. I’m not Jenna. My name is Sophie and I don’t do things like this. I had a good job in England and I’ve got a mum and a family and they love me.’ But there was no point. Even if they believed me, even if they hadn’t been sent by Kas to find out if I’d break under pressure and give him away, they couldn’t really help me because eventually he would know what I’d done and he’d hurt my family and then kill me.
So I gave them the alternative story Kas had told me to tell – that I’d been a pole dancer in England and had come to Italy to earn better money – and eventually they shrugged and said I could leave. But it was only midnight, I was tired and there was a small part of me that wanted to fight back against Kas for the way he treated me and for always being so worried about protecting himself and so indifferent to what might happen to me. Whenever I was picked up and asked where I lived, I had to give an address in the city. So I asked the policemen, ‘Can I wait here until I can catch a train back to town? I was supposed to meet someone, but it’s too late now.’ And they shrugged again and let me stay in the warmth of the reception area.
So I sat there for the rest of the night, praying Kas wouldn’t drive past and see me through the window, and then, at 5 o’clock in the morning, I walked home and told Kas that the police had kept me at the station. And although I was terrified in case he ever discovered the truth, the fear was almost worth it for the sense that, for once, I hadn’t been completely under his control.
One night not long afterwards, a people-carrier pulled off the road beside me and I bent down beside the open passenger window. Normally, I only ever approached cars on the driver’s side, but it had stopped at an odd angle, and it was only as I looked in through the window that I realised that although the car was unmarked, the guy was wearing the uniform of the Guardia di Finanza, the police force that deals with smuggling and drugs. I took a step backwards and then froze as he pointed a gun directly into my face and shouted, ‘Vai! Vai! Vai! Vai via!’
I knew my life meant nothing to many of the men who stopped their cars on the road beside me at night, and less than nothing to most of the policemen, who saw me not as a person but as a low-life irritation. And I knew, too, that there was nothing to stop this man shooting me if he wanted to.
I ran behind the car, but he’d already opened the door and jumped out, and when I stumbled, he stood over me, pointing his gun into my face again and shouting at me to go away. The temptation to run was almost overwhelming, but I forced myself not to because I was afraid he might shoot me in the back and then make up some story about what had happened, which no one would ever bother to question. So I got to my feet and began to back away slowly from the car. And then suddenly, for no obvious reason, he lowered the gun, got back behind the wheel and drove away.
I was shaking violently and my mind was so numbed by shock that for a moment I couldn’t remember Kas’s number, and all I could do when he answered the phone was
keep repeating the words, ‘Oh my God’. Eventually, though, I managed to calm down enough to tell him, ‘Someone’s just pulled a gun on me.’
‘Stay there,’ Kas told me, and I was sobbing as I walked to the back of the petrol station and crouched down on the grass behind the low wall separating it from the patch of woodland to wait for him.
A few minutes later, as I sat beside Kas in his car, he asked me, ‘What was the number plate?’ and I tried to remember.
‘I think it had a two in it,’ I told him. ‘Or … Or it might have been a three. I can’t remember. I was so scared.’
Instantly he was angry and shouting at me, ‘How many times have I told you always memorise the number plate? Can’t you even do that one simple thing? You’re wasting my time, and what if someone saw me coming here to pick you up? Do you want to get me into trouble? What if he comes again, on another night? What if he ends up shooting you dead? Then what do I do? How am I going to know what’s happened to you if you don’t know the registration number of his car?’ For some reason, though, there was little force behind his single punch and he never mentioned the incident again.
So, once again, I was left feeling confused and bemused about what made Kas angry and wondering whether the policeman who’d just threatened to shoot me was actually one of his friends whom he’d sent to make sure I never forgot to be afraid.
Chapter 10
After a while I became quite good at identifying different nationalities – by physical features, such as the shape of their head, as well as the way they spoke Italian. Some of them were angry when I told them I could only go with Italians, and I didn’t dare say why. Luckily, few of them asked for reasons, and most would just swear at me and spin the wheels of their cars as they pulled out into the traffic again. But I didn’t always get it right, and after I told one man ‘No Moroccans’, despite his insistence that he was Italian, he came back a couple of nights later with his identity card!
Sometimes, though, I didn’t pay careful enough attention until it was almost too late and one night it was only as I was just about to get into a car that I noticed the guy looked Macedonian. When I asked him, he said he was Italian, but the music playing on his car stereo was definitely Eastern European and so I told him ‘No’. I was expecting him to swear at me, but my heart almost stopped beating when he leapt out of his car and went completely crazy, shouting at me and waving his hands in my face.
I knew I mustn’t let him see my fear, so I shouted back at him and told him he’d better go, because my boyfriend was Albanian. As I said the words, a car turned off the main road and pulled in beside his, and when we both looked towards it, I almost burst into tears of relief when I saw that it was Kas. Pretending not to know me, he leaned out of the window and asked ‘How much?’ and I edged away from the guy as I told him a price. ‘Okay. Andiamo,’ Kas said, opening the passenger-side door, and I jumped into his car and we sped away.
He dropped me off further down the road and told me to walk back to ‘my spot’ while he followed the man to make sure he didn’t return. I felt a rush of gratitude to him for being there when I needed someone, but at the same time I felt uneasy because I couldn’t help wondering how he’d just happened to turn up when he did. Was it chance that he’d been close by, or did he often watch me when I didn’t know he was there, to make sure I was doing what I was supposed to be doing?
It was just another uncertainty among all the doubts and insecurities I was living with. There seemed to be no one I could trust and nothing I could rely on – even Kas’s anger. It was impossible to guess at his reaction to anything. He seemed to have a split personality, although he was 10 different people rather than just two. Sometimes he’d drive past the petrol station and wave to me, or even open his car window and shout ‘I love you’, and one night he beeped his horn and threw me a rose. Most of the time, however, he was either in a rage or on the verge of one, and his sudden violent outbursts and loss of control were often triggered by something completely trivial or imagined.
One night, when I hadn’t made enough money, he went from angry to crazy within just a fraction of a second, hurling his mobile phone across the room at me so that it smashed against the wall and sent out an explosion of plastic splinters. ‘You’ve got five seconds,’ he shouted. ‘Just five seconds to clear that up.’ I began to scrabble around on the floor, making little moaning, whimpering noises as I searched under the furniture for bits of debris. But I was so shocked and frightened that my hands were clumsy and as I fumbled, dropping the fragments I’d already picked up, Kas started to count, slowly, ‘One. Two …’
At that moment, his other phone rang and he walked into the bedroom to answer it. I could hear him pacing backwards and forwards across the bedroom floor, and every so often I heard snatches of what he was saying. Although he was speaking in Albanian, I realised he was talking to his mother. Then he shouted the word ‘schizophrenia’ and it sounded as though he’d kicked a chair against the bedroom door. But when he came back into the living room a few minutes later, his anger had completely evaporated and he spoke calmly as he told me, ‘I’m sorry. I’ve told my mother what happened tonight and she says that I mustn’t hurt you anymore.’
I didn’t know if it was true, and, if not, what else might have caused his abrupt change of mood. He’d told me before that his mother wanted us to get married – although that seemed very unlikely, not least because she’d never even met me. And it wasn’t the first time I’d wondered whether it might not be Kas who ran his own operation after all.
One day, when he was in one of his rare good moods, he told me he’d fallen in love with me the first time he saw me.
‘How can you love me?’ I asked him. ‘What is there to love about me? Look at me. I’m like a zombie – I don’t speak except when I’m spoken to; I only smile when you tell me to smile. How can you say you love someone like that?’
But he just laughed and said, ‘You’re crazy, woman. This is all in your head.’
And, for a moment, I wondered if perhaps he really did love me and I just couldn’t see it because I was so used to believing I was unlovable. I’d wanted for as long as I could remember to be swept off my feet by someone who would take charge of everything and create an amazing life for us to live together. The problem was that whenever anyone told me they loved me, I’d always push them away – or let them down, like I’d let Erion down. It was as though I couldn’t help myself. I simply didn’t believe them. In my mind, they were either lying or mistaken. Because how could someone whose own father doesn’t even like her be worthy of anyone’s love? So I was already confused and bewildered even before Kas made me unsure about almost everything.
It sounds strange, I know, when, after everything he’d done and the way he treated me, I say that I wondered if Kas loved me, and it’s difficult to describe how I felt. Although I hated him, I wanted to believe that there was some explanation I could understand for what he was doing to me. And the only explanation that seemed to make any sense at the time was that it was somehow all my fault.
Kas and I had been friends and had talked regularly on the phone for four years before I’d arrived in Italy, so he knew almost as much about my fears, anxieties and psychological hang-ups as I knew myself – or perhaps even more. And he was clever enough to be able to use what he knew to his advantage. Put simplistically, perhaps the fact that he frightened and bullied me and criticised everything I did, just like my father had done throughout my childhood, meant that I wanted him to love me – in the same way that I’d always wanted my father to do.
One evening, when he was about to drop me off at the bottom of the hill, he suddenly said, ‘Oh my God, you’re like an angel. I get goose bumps when I look at you. You drive me crazy. I can’t control myself when I see you.’
Immediately I was wary, uncertain whether he was serious or his words were sarcastic and the prelude to an eruption of anger, because sometimes he appeared to be saying something nice to me when actuall
y he was about to criticise and shout at me. This time, though, his good humour seemed to be genuine and he drove along the main road, turned the car on to a lane, told me to take off my leggings and had sex with me. He didn’t use a condom and I was so pathetically grateful for those few minutes when he was being nice to me that it didn’t even cross my mind to ask him to – not that I’d have dared to do so anyway.
Sex with Kas didn’t occur very often, but when it did it was just like having sex with all the other men – there was no emotion involved; it was just something that was being done to me. Sometimes, he’d wake me up in the morning by calling ‘Come and give me a hug and a kiss’ and I’d get out of bed instantly – even when I was asleep, there must have been part of my mind that was alert and ready to respond to anything he told me to do – and would pad across the bedroom floor and into the living room to lie with him on the sofa.
One day he hugged me and stroked my hair as he told me, ‘You know I’ll always look after you, don’t you, little mouse? I’ve never cared for anyone the way I care about you. I’m sorry you have to do the things you have to do, but you won’t have to do them forever. One day we’ll go travelling. We’ll be able to go wherever we want and do whatever we want to do.’ But although I was grateful because he was being nice to me, I knew he was lying and that it would never be over. Whatever I did would never be enough, because Kas would always want more money.
Moments like that were rare, though, and although at one time I might have been beguiled by the thought of sharing a life with Kas, it now just filled me with dread. But I put my arms around him and clung to him like a child, focusing on the pleasure of being comforted and on the relief I felt because, for a while at least, he wasn’t being crazy.
He never let me spend the whole night with him and sometimes I’d ask, ‘Why are you so mean to me? I’m never allowed to come to you; I have to wait until you give me permission. Why won’t you let me get near you?’ And, if he was in a good mood, he’d say, ‘Sometimes it’s just not right and you need to learn that you have to wait. You can’t have things simply because you want them.’ So I would wait – like a little dog – trying not to get things wrong and trying to be good enough to be worthy of his notice.
