Bought and Sold. Megan Stephens

which was on the same road as Nikos’s bar. When we got out of his car, Mum straightened her skirt, took a deep breath and said, ‘I feel so nervous. What am I going to say to him?’ I had hardly said anything all the time we had been in the car because I felt so bad about what I had done. Now, I started to cry. ‘I’m sorry,’ I told Mum. ‘I lied. Nikos didn’t actually say he loved you.’ She just stood there for a moment, completely still, as if her whole body had frozen. ‘But I really think he does,’ I added hastily. ‘I could see how upset he was whenever you talked about leaving.’

      When she did finally look at me, she had an expression on her face as if she didn’t recognise me. She burst into tears and sat down heavily on a chair outside the restaurant, and still didn’t say anything until she had ordered a drink and swallowed a large mouthful of it. Then she said, ‘Oh Megan, what have you done?’

      ‘I’m so sorry, Mum. I just panicked at the thought of going back to England. Everything’s been so different – for both of us – since we came here. I’ve had the best time I’ve had for years. And I know you have too. I know Nikos really likes you, and he’s such a nice guy. So why go home to nothing when you’ve got someone like him here? I’m sure it’ll be okay.’ I sounded certain, but in reality the doubts had already crept in and I wasn’t at all sure that things would turn out well for either of us. Fortunately, Mum was too shocked to be angry with me, and after we had finished our drinks, we walked together down the road to Nikos’s bar.

      Mum stopped outside the bar and stood for a few seconds, just breathing. Then she made a sort of gulping-sob sound and walked through the beaded curtain that hung in the open doorway. Nikos was setting up the bar ready for the customers who would come that evening. When he heard the rattle of the curtain, he turned towards the door with a bland smile and I think my heart stopped beating. Then suddenly, as he realised it was us, he threw down the cloth he was holding and almost ran towards us, enveloping first my mother and then me in a huge hug.

      ‘We decided to stay another week,’ Mum said nervously when she could breathe again.

      ‘I’m so happy,’ Nikos kept saying. ‘I’m working in my bar wishing you hadn’t had to leave and now here you are! Where are you staying?’

      ‘We haven’t got anywhere yet, but …’ Mum sounded embarrassed.

      ‘It’s no problem,’ Nikos interrupted her. ‘I will sort it out.’

      He poured a drink for Mum, flipped the top off a bottle of coke for me and then made a phone call. Within minutes, everything was arranged. Mum and I would be staying in an apartment that was owned by one of his friends – and which turned out to be large and spacious with a sea view. When Mum told him what we had done with our suitcases, Nikos laughed and then he drove us back to the airport to retrieve them from the bushes. For the next few days, until Mum’s wages were in her bank account in England, he also fed us and paid the rent on our apartment.

      Having seen Nikos’s reaction to Mum’s return, I was very nervous, as well as excited, at the prospect of seeing Jak again. I didn’t have to wait long: he came into the bar that evening and was as surprised and happy to see me as I could have hoped.

      Over the next few days, Mum’s relationship with Nikos and mine with Jak developed so well that she didn’t book a flight back to England for us the following week, as she had intended. In fact, it was another six weeks before she made any plans for us to go home.

      A couple of days after we had hitch-hiked back from the airport, Jak picked me up from the apartment and took me to meet his family, who lived in a small house in the countryside. None of them spoke any English, but as his mother fussed around me, clicking her tongue and poking me with her bony fingers, I learned the Albanian words for ‘too thin’. What I hadn’t understood, however, was that she intended to set about the task of fattening me up immediately.

      It had already been agreed that Jak and I would stay for lunch, and we had just sat down at the table when his mother came out of the kitchen carrying a large plate. She stood beside me and held it up close to my face, and as I turned my head to look at it, she pushed her fingers into the mouth of the boiled goat’s head and pulled out its tongue, nodding her own head as she did so and making an appreciative sort of humming noise. I think being in such close proximity to the head of a dead goat would have been repulsive even if I hadn’t been brought up as a vegetarian. Fortunately, I just managed to turn my head away from the plate as I was violently sick.

      The embarrassment I already felt at being the object of everyone’s close scrutiny was nothing compared with my mortification at having emptied the contents of my stomach all over the floor. I had desperately wanted Jak’s family to like me. But by the time I had finished vomiting and retching, his sister didn’t even try to hide her irritation as she clicked her tongue impatiently and pushed me towards the bathroom.

      ‘I’m sorry,’ I kept saying. ‘I’m so sorry.’ But his mother had already fetched a mop and bucket from the kitchen to clear up the mess I had made and I don’t know if she even heard me.

      After lunch – none of which I was able to eat – they seemed to get over the worst of their annoyance and we sat outside the house, drinking juice and listening to Albanian music. They spoke to me in Albanian, and as Jak could only translate the odd word into English, we communicated mostly using mime and drawings. I’m shy and quite easily intimidated, whereas they were noisily dramatic. So I was relieved when Jak said it was time to go, and took me back to the apartment on his motorbike.

      A few days after I had visited Jak’s family, Mum talked to me about sex. I can’t remember exactly what she said, except that she wanted me to wait. ‘Just leave it for now, Megan,’ she told me. ‘But when you do do it, make sure you use a condom.’ I can understand why it was a discussion she thought we needed to have, but I wasn’t planning to ‘do it’ at all. I could be stubborn and stroppy as a teenager, but I was very naïve. I was a virgin when I went with Mum to Greece, and the idea of having sex with anyone had never even crossed my mind. It was love not sex that I was so desperate for, although of course I didn’t realise that at the time.

      In fact, I had been put off the whole idea of sex when I was 12. I had visited someone’s house and they had shown me a porn video. I had only watched a few minutes of it; it was violent and completely alien to anything I had imagined was involved in falling in love, and I found it very disturbing. After that, sex became inextricably linked in my mind to things that were traumatic and disgusting. So by the time I went to stay at my dad’s and he started saying vulgar, horrible things to me and trying to get me to sleep with his friends, I had made an almost subconscious decision to avoid having sex for as long as I possibly could.

      It was during the third week of our extended stay that Dean, my friend and our next-door neighbour in England, came out to stay at the apartment with Mum and me for a few days. I was really excited when he said he was coming and to begin with I loved having him there. Late at night, after the bars had closed, we would all go down to the beach together – me, Dean, Jak and his friends – and talk until the sun came up.

      Dean got on really well with Zef and after a couple of days he asked me, as Mum had done, ‘Why do you like Jak more than Zef? I don’t understand your attraction to him at all. He never smiles and he’s got this really hard look in his eyes. I don’t like him, and I certainly wouldn’t trust him.’ I don’t think I would have listened to anyone by that point, because I was already hooked. What was really sad, though, was that what Dean said that day affected our previously easy, relaxed relationship, and we didn’t get on so well for the rest of the week he was there. I lost touch with him after he returned to England, which is something I now deeply regret, because it meant that I didn’t see him again before he killed himself a couple of years ago.

      What human traffickers do is evil and despicable, but I suppose it makes cold, hard, financial sense to the criminals involved to trade the lives of people they don’t know or care about in exchange for monetary gain. What I really don’t understand is what the pay-off is for bullies. It seems that, for people like the ones who persecuted and tormented Dean and ultimately destroyed his life, the goal is, purely and simply, to cause distress.