Bought and Sold (Part 2 of 3) Read online

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  HarperElement

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  First published by HarperElement 2015

  FIRST EDITION

  © Megan Stephens and Jane Smith 2015

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  Source ISBN: 9780007594078

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Moving Memoirs eNewsletter

  Write for Us

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 5

  I had no phone, no money and no one to turn to for help except Jak. So all the time I was sitting on the rock, which must have been a couple of hours, I kept telling myself, ‘He will come back.’ The light had begun to fade and it had started getting cold by the time I heard the sound of a motorbike in the distance. Then I told myself instead, ‘It will be Jak and not some stranger who’ll find me here in the darkness on my own.’

  I was so relieved when Jak’s motorbike appeared around a bend in the road that I’d have forgiven him for assaulting me even if he hadn’t kept saying how sorry he was and that he loved me. ‘It’s all right,’ I told him, a dozen times. And I truly did believe that what had happened must have been my fault.

  Despite his apparent remorse, that incident marked a change in Jak’s attitude towards me. Looking back on it now, I suppose he had begun the process of breaking me down. Suddenly, it seemed that everything about me was wrong – the clothes I wore, the way I looked, the way I did my hair, the things I said. I became afraid of upsetting him, partly because I was frightened of being physically attacked again and partly because I thought that if I kept getting things wrong, he would leave me. The reality was that I was becoming dependent on him, practically and emotionally. So, mostly, I did whatever he told me to do.

  When I was a child and my mother’s relationship with John began to fall apart, she became overwhelmed by her own problems. In my early teens, I argued with her about things that didn’t matter, because what I believed mattered least of all was me. As I imagine many children do in similar situations, I thought it was my fault my father had left us and that he didn’t love me. Now I felt the same way about my relationship with Jak: I believed that when he was angry with me, it was because I wasn’t good enough.

  Two days after I was raped by the lawyer, Jak and I moved into a hotel and I started working as an escort. For the next six months, we moved from one dingy, cheap hotel to another, and every day I had sex with between six and eight men. Jak always went with me in a taxi to drop me off at their homes or hotel rooms. Then he would wait for me in a café to take me to the next job. I wore the clothes he bought for me and had sex with the men he told me to have sex with. To say I hated it would be a ridiculous understatement. I don’t know why I didn’t scream and shout and refuse to do it. I think perhaps it was because some part of me that might have resisted it had already started to shrivel up, and it just kept on getting smaller and smaller every day until it disappeared.

  It wasn’t until after I had started doing the escort work that Jak and I had sex for the first time. He didn’t force me to do it with him, but I didn’t like it. Maybe becoming a prostitute had made it impossible for me to enjoy having sex with anyone, even the man I still thought I loved. After the first time, he did it with me every morning and every night, even when he was angry with me.

  What happened during the daytime was mostly predictable. What I couldn’t ever predict, however, was what sort of mood Jak would be in at night. Sometimes, he would order a takeaway and we’d sit together in whatever dismal hotel room we were staying in and watch a film on the TV. On those occasions, I shut my mind to what I had been doing during the day and felt almost contented. Far more common, however, were the evenings when he’d fly into a rage for no apparent reason and hit me.

  He would sometimes humiliate and embarrass me in public, too. For example, one day we were having coffee at a café when I said something that made him angry. Without any warning, he stood up, almost knocking over the table, and poured a jug of water over my head, spat on me and walked away, leaving me sitting there with everyone staring at me.

  I hated the way he put my mum down too. He didn’t know anything about her, yet he always insisted on telling me that ‘No Albanian mother would behave like she does.’ Which was pretty rich coming from someone whose mother, I suspect now, didn’t have entirely clean hands and who, at the very least, knew about the crimes her son was involved in. I didn’t know any of that at the time, though. It just upset me when he talked that way about my mum, because I really loved her. What was almost worse than Jak’s criticism, however, was when he said that my mum was sexy and he insisted on describing all the things he would like to do to her, even when I cried and begged him to stop.

  Whenever I told him that it really upset me when he talked about my mum like that, he just laughed. I realise now, of course, that it wasn’t insensitivity or random unpleasantness that made him do it. Everything he said about my mum was calculated and quite deliberate, because what he was trying to do was drive a wedge between us. If he could separate us – emotionally as well as physically – I would be entirely dependent on him, and therefore much easier to control and manipulate.

  I had been doing the escort work for a few weeks when I started feeling ill. Eventually, after I had thrown up a few times, Jak took me to the hospital, where they did a scan and told me I was ten weeks’ pregnant. I was ecstatic, particularly when Jak seemed to be pleased about it too. I phoned my mum as soon as we came out of the hospital, and although I could tell she wasn’t very happy about the news, I was relieved that she didn’t raise the subject of abortion, as I had half-expected her to do. I didn’t see being pregnant at 14 as any kind of problem. In fact, quite the opposite, because it would mean that I would be able to stop doing the escort work and then Jak and I, and our children, would live happily ever after.

  Although I had two regular clients who didn’t use condoms, only Jak ever came inside me. So there was no question about whether the baby was his. Just a few weeks earlier, my mum had been the only person in the world who cared about me at all. Now I had Jak and soon I would have a baby to love and take care of, and to love me too.

  That night, Jak phoned his mother, and after he had spoken to her he told me, ‘My mum says you shouldn’t keep the baby. She thinks it’s too early and it will ruin everything.’ The bubble of happiness I had been bo
uncing around in all day had been pricked and I was devastated. I couldn’t imagine what it was that his mother thought a baby would ruin – but then I didn’t know anything about what Jak was really planning for my future. When I told him how upset I was that his mother had even suggested I should have an abortion, we had a huge row and he stormed out of the hotel, leaving me sitting on the bed crying.

  When he came back a couple of hours later, we had something to eat, watched TV and went to bed, without either of us having said very much. Since I had started feeling sick, I had been finding it difficult to sleep at night, so for the last few nights I had slept on a sort of rubber mat on the floor. I lay down on it again that night and after Jak got into the bed we started to talk. I told him I thought the fact that we were going to have a baby should be making us happy and then I tried to explain why I had been upset by what his mother had said. I think that’s when we started arguing again.

  Suddenly, I couldn’t bear it any longer. I got up, went over to the bed and said, ‘Please, Jak, don’t let’s argue.’ Then I bent down to hug him, just as his foot shot out from under the bedclothes and he kicked me in the stomach with such force I fell backwards and slid across the tiled floor to the other side of the room. For a moment, I just lay there, slumped against the wall, shocked and bewildered. Then the pain started – somewhere deep in my stomach at first and then spreading like fire throughout my body. I was still leaning against the wall sobbing when Jak turned over and went to sleep.

  The next morning, when I started bleeding clots of blood, I was very frightened. Jak took me to the pharmacy and bought me some painkillers for period pains. But although I was in almost constant pain for the next two weeks, he didn’t ever suggest I should go to the hospital, and I didn’t dare ask him to take me.

  I didn’t understand that I was having a miscarriage. When I did realise that I had lost the baby, it seemed like a tragedy; whereas, in fact, it was a blessing – certainly for the child, because God knows what would have happened to it if it had been born.

  It was a long time before I allowed myself to accept the fact that Jak hadn’t simply lashed out at me with his foot in a thoughtless fit of temper. I may not have understood about abortions and miscarriages or about what would really have been involved in having a baby in the situation I was in. I realise now that Jak did, and that he knew exactly what he was doing when he kicked me. By that time, rarely a day passed when he didn’t slap me, punch me in the head or drag me around the room by my hair. But he was always careful not to leave marks on any part of my body that could be seen by anyone else. And he never kicked me in the stomach again.

  As he systematically took control of every aspect of my life, I was learning to be afraid of him. He would fly into rages, which often seemed to be prompted by jealousy that, even as I became increasingly confused and disorientated, seemed to me to be bizarre in the circumstances. Sometimes, he would ask me about one of the men who had paid to have sex with me that day. ‘Tell me what you did with him,’ he would say. ‘Go on, tell me. You liked it, didn’t you?’ I wanted to shout that I had hated it and that I couldn’t bear even to talk about it. But if I didn’t answer his questions, he would only get angrier. So I would describe the disgusting, depraved things the man had done to me and then Jak would have sex with me too. And although it was just another ordeal I had to pretend I enjoyed, I did still love him, ridiculous as that sounds when I say it now.

  Sometimes he would drop me off at people’s houses, but more often I went to hotel rooms. Fortunately, most of the men just wanted ‘normal sex’ and after they had done it they were almost as keen for me to leave as I was. Some simply wanted company, and some wanted to do things I had had no idea anyone ever wanted to do.

  One of my regular clients was a businessman called Andreas who had a nice house in a wealthy part of Athens. He usually booked me for an hour, so Jak would drop me off and then go and wait for me at a café in a nearby square. Andreas didn’t ever want sex. Sometimes he would order a takeaway and we would sit and watch TV, and sometimes he would talk to me – in fluent English – about politics and all the other things that interested him. He must have been lonely, but he was kind and cheerful and I got on really well with him and used to look forward to going to his house to see him.

  Although Andreas seemed to be the sort of person you might be able to trust, I was wary about what I said to him, in case he repeated it to Jak. I did tell him about Jak though – that he was my boyfriend and that we were going to build a house and start a family. I didn’t know how the system of prostitution worked; in fact, I didn’t even know there was a system, or that I was part of it. So I told Andreas that I was a ‘willing prostitute’, working for myself, and he always gave me an extra 50 euros as I was leaving – which I always gave immediately to Jak.

  One day, Andreas said he would like to be able to see me without having to go through Leon or Jak first.

  ‘I can’t do that,’ I told him. ‘I would lose my job. And anyway, I love Jak.’

  ‘Well, if you ever do get the chance,’ he said, ‘if you’re ever on your own, come and see me.’ He wrote his phone number on a scrap of paper and gave it to me, and before I left his house, I screwed it up into a tiny ball, put it at the bottom of my handbag and prayed that Jak would never find it.

  At the opposite end of the spectrum of customers I had at that time was a man who had a whipping fetish. I begged Jak not to make me go back there after the first time, but the guy was paying 1,000 euros an hour. He became a regular client and I saw him at least once every two weeks, always at the same ‘love hotel’ in the city centre, where people rented rooms by the hour.

  He had a big bag, like the sort of thing you’d take to the gym, except that it was stuffed full of whips and canes. Sometimes, he would whip me so hard my skin would feel as though it was on fire and every inch of my back would be covered in swollen, bleeding welts. He would film it all on a video camera that was always set up on a tripod, and when I cried and begged him to stop, he just told me to shut up.

  As well as the whipping, he was into anal sex, which was also incredibly painful. When he had finished, he would drag me off the bed and say, ‘Get on your knees and open your mouth.’ Then he would urinate on my face. I always tried to keep my mouth shut, which was difficult because I was usually crying, and he’d get really angry and shout at me, ‘Next time you’re going to swallow it.’

  If you had any self-esteem, you wouldn’t let anyone do that to you. But I already felt like a piece of crap, so it was almost as though I thought being degraded and humiliated was all I deserved. He was another one who spoke good English and I did try to talk to him. I had some idea that if I could make him see me as more than just some object he was filming, he might feel sorry for me. I didn’t push it though, because I was afraid of annoying him and getting into really big trouble with Jak. I needn’t have worried because he wasn’t listening anyway: he wasn’t paying a substantial sum of money to hear anything I might have to say. However, he did stop urinating on my face after a while and he didn’t whip me quite so hard.

  The last time I saw him, I had just had a massive row with Jak. I had a stomach bug, which was making me feel really ill, and when I told Jak I wasn’t well enough to go out that day, he flew into a rage and shouted at me, ‘You’re pathetic. You’ve got an upset stomach and suddenly you can’t cope. I can’t decide if the worst thing about you is how weak you are or that you’re stupid. Don’t you ever think about anyone except yourself? You’ll have to go. I need the money.’

  Even though I was frightened of Jak by that time, I did sometimes argue with him. I think what made me brave on those occasions was the fact that I still clung to the belief that we were a couple and all the unspeakably horrible things I was doing were for our future together. So perhaps he was right, at least, about my being stupid. What upset me that day was that he had said he needed the money, not ‘we’, although I had just enough sense to know that it wouldn’t be a goo
d idea to make a big deal about it. So I got dressed, put on my make-up and went with him in a taxi to the ‘love hotel’.

  I had been crying silently in the taxi on the way there, and by the time I knocked on the door of the hotel room, I must have looked a bit of a mess. I was sitting on the bed, trying to tidy up my make-up, when the man asked me, ‘What’s wrong? Has something happened? Tell me what’s up.’

  There seemed to be genuine sympathy in his voice, and I was feeling very low. So I told him, ‘I don’t know how I feel about doing this work. I have sex with all these people and it’s … it’s not really me.’ It was a pathetic explanation, particularly in view of what I was actually talking about. But I didn’t know any other of way of describing it. What I was doing was something I had never even imagined anyone did, and the way it made me feel was something I couldn’t put into words.

  The man sat down on the bed beside me and started asking me questions. How many men did I have sex with every day? How much money was I getting? I told him I wasn’t getting any money at all. ‘My boyfriend keeps it,’ I said. Then – not wanting to admit, to either of us, the possibility that Jak might be a bad person – I added quickly, ‘But he does pay for all our food, and things like that.’

  It sounds crazy now, the idea of sitting in a hotel room and confiding in a man who paid 1,000 euros an hour to film himself whipping me and having anal sex with me. I had hit rock bottom – or thought I had, because I didn’t know then that things could get any worse – and it seemed better to have him to talk to than no one at all. And he did seem to be listening to me. So when he started telling me about all his important, influential contacts in the international film industry, I almost dared to believe he was going to offer to help me.

  ‘Do you know what?’ he said suddenly, leaning down and taking a gun out of his bag. ‘I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve looked at this gun and thought about ending it all.’ He turned it over in his hands. ‘Is that the way you feel today? Do you feel like you want to end it all?’