Trafficked: The Terrifying True Story of a British Girl Forced into the Sex Trade (11 page)

Some men asked me to be their girlfriend; some even went so far as to say they wanted to marry me; and one who came quite regularly would beg me to go out to dinner with him and would be upset when I always said
no. I was surprised by how completely divorced from reality they were, and by how easily they seemed to forget that the ‘relationship' between us was purely a business one, and one that I was involved in entirely against my will – although I suppose there wasn't any reason for them to have known that.

What was even more surreal, though, was the fact that, in my old life, I'd probably have been friends with a few of the guys of my age. I wondered why some of them were there at all, why they paid for sex when there didn't seem to be any reason for them not to be able to have any girl they wanted. And I'd love to go back now to tell some of them what had happened to me and to explain that I wasn't really Jenna – particularly Marco.

I was frightened of Marco the first time he came, which was on the very first night I was working on my own near the petrol station. He was driving a BMW and although he told me he was Italian, I was afraid that he might really be Albanian. But he was nice to me and I found that I was quite glad to see him when he came again a few days later.

I'd been telling Kas for days that I was hopeless at doing a Russian accent and that no one believed my story, and he'd eventually agreed to let me drop my Russian persona. ‘You can say you're from South Africa,' he told me, which was a huge relief, not least because it meant I could speak in my normal voice, as I knew that most people wouldn't be able to tell one English-speaking accent from another. And I was proved right, because once I became South African, no
one ever again questioned the story I told them – although there was one guy who threw me into a panic when he asked me what I thought about apartheid and about the changes that had occurred in South Africa under Nelson Mandela!

But it meant that although I'd been pretending to be Russian the first time Marco came, I'd become South African when he came back. We were sitting in his car, just talking, when he suddenly looked at me with a puzzled expression and asked, ‘Didn't you have a different accent last week? Aren't you Russian?'

‘No, South African,' I told him brightly. Then I turned away from him and pretended to be re-fastening my boot as I muttered, ‘
Always
South African.'

‘Oh, okay,' he said, and when I looked up at him again he shrugged his shoulders and grinned at me, and I had to laugh too.

Sometimes, Marco would come during the week just to check on me, and I always felt better when I saw his car and heard him call out ‘
Tutto bene?
[Is everything okay?]' Then, as he drove away again, he'd wave and say ‘
Ciao, bella
', and I'd really,
really
wish I could tell him the truth.

I had other regulars who did that too – just drove by from time to time to ask if I was okay – and I'd have to remind myself that they weren't my friends; they were men who paid me to have sex with them. Marco was different, though. I know it sounds silly, but he was respectful. He never tried to touch me and he treated me as though I was a girl he liked, rather than some sort of non-person.

We often just sat in his car and talked. He'd tell me about his work and about what he'd been doing since he last saw me and he'd try to get me to talk to him about myself. ‘You're not like the other girls,' he told me. ‘You're not cold and you talk to me like a friend. You look different too –
più elegante
[more elegant].' I laughed, and then tried to swallow the lump that had formed in my throat, because I really wanted to talk to him, but I knew I couldn't. I was already taking a huge risk, because if Kas ever happened to drive past and see us, he'd go crazy. But for a while, I'd sit in Marco's car and pretend that he really was my friend and that I was safe.

Kas often told me, ‘Don't think that any of these men are your friends. They're not: all they want to do is fuck you and go home.' But when I was with Marco and, to a lesser extent, some of the other men who were nice to me, I'd think,
Kas is wrong. It isn't true that none of them cares about me.

One night, I was picked up by an older, overweight man who told me he was a barrister. It seemed plausible, judging by the huge Bentley he was driving, and I recognised him immediately when he came back a week later with a friend. They both came again a few days after that, this time with a woman, and the barrister asked if I'd go back to his house with them.

‘I'll give you 500 Euros,' he told me, and because I viewed everything in terms of how pleased or otherwise it would make Kas, I agreed.

I sat at the back of the car, next to the woman – who was the barrister's girlfriend – and as we drove to a very expensive and exclusive residential area just outside town, they all made polite conversation. After stopping to wait for a pair of wrought-iron electric gates to open, we drove into the driveway of an enormous house – the living room of which alone was bigger than the whole of Kas's flat.

It was a cold night, and although I was wrapped up in several jumpers and a jacket, I had virtually no body fat at all and nothing was able to keep out the chill that seemed to penetrate through my skin and into my bones. So I was glad to be inside in the warmth for a while, even though it meant being in a house miles from anywhere I was familiar with, in the company of three people who were clearly freaks and who wanted me to take part in some sort of weird sex party. But at least they were polite freaks and I didn't feel frightened or threatened by them, and I'd managed to text Kas to tell him where I was.

As soon as we walked into the house, the two men disappeared, and when they came back into the living room a few minutes later, wearing nothing but their socks, the barrister asked me if I'd like a drink. I was perched nervously on the edge of a very expensive-looking, cream-coloured leather sofa and I tried to look unfazed as I answered, ‘No, just water.' So he poured wine for himself, his friend and his girlfriend and then she stripped down to her underwear and they all sat smoking and chatting as though everything was completely normal.

They spoke good English and when they asked me about myself, I told them my story – that I'd come to Italy from South Africa to earn money to send home to my family.

‘It must be very hard for you,' the barrister's friend nodded sympathetically. ‘But your family must be very grateful for what you're doing for them.'

In any normal world, it would have been a very strange thing for an almost totally naked man who was just about to have sex with me for money – and with his friend's girlfriend – to say. But in that world, everything was bizarre and yet nothing was extra-ordinary – because I
was
Jenna. In my mind, I actually
was
a young South African woman who was working as a prostitute so that her family wouldn't have to live with poverty and hunger. And that's how I got through all those nights – in people's houses and in cars on the dirt track near the petrol station – by detaching myself from Sophie and becoming Jenna, who
had
to do what she was doing because other people's lives depended on it. And that bit, at least, was true, because I had no doubt that if I didn't do exactly what Kas told me to do, he would carry out his threat to hurt my little brothers.

‘And do you like doing what you're doing?' the barrister asked me, conversationally.

Are you out of your mind?
I shouted at him, but only in my head.

‘Not really,' I mumbled, looking down into my glass of water as I spoke.

‘No, well, that's a shame,' he said – in the sort of tone you might use if someone told you they'd applied for a job at Starbucks but had had to accept one at Costa Coffee instead. ‘But at least you have the satisfaction of knowing you're helping your family. Do you like Italy? What do you do when you're not working?'

If Alice in Wonderland had ever gone to a cocktail party, it would have been just like this
, I thought, and for a moment I had to resist the urge to laugh. Three naked, or almost-naked, rich professional people were sitting in the elegant living room of a mansion in a suburb in Italy with a young woman they'd picked up on the streets, sipping wine from crystal glasses and asking her questions about her life and her ‘chosen' line of work. And if that wasn't crazy enough, the truth of the matter – of which they were completely unaware – was that the prostitute was actually an English girl who'd been lured to Italy by someone she'd thought was her friend, but who was in fact an Albanian drug and people trafficker who was forcing her to work on the streets.

Suddenly the thought struck me that this was my chance. It was probably the best opportunity I would ever have to be able to tell someone the truth and escape from Kas. The man sitting beside me in his socks was a barrister and – despite his unusual sexual preferences – clearly someone who was wealthy and influential. I could tell him what had happened and he'd help me. But Kas had brainwashed me too well and, as the moment passed, I knew
that I was too frightened to say anything to anyone. Perhaps what was even worse than the fear, though, was knowing that there would never be anyone I could turn to for help because I wouldn't ever be able to trust anyone.

Later, after the barrister, his girlfriend, his friend and I had all had sex in various combinations, I pushed the 500 Euros into my boots and sat in the Bentley beside the barrister while he drove me back to the petrol station. And I knew that nothing about any of it was really funny at all – in any case, I'd lost my sense of humour long ago. My life had been reduced to a handful of basic functions: I slept, got up, ate, had sex with strangers, tried to dodge the police and avoid getting attacked by anyone, went home, gave all the money I'd earned to Kas, and slept again. Above all, though, I did what Kas told me to do and tried to avoid making him angry with me. In some ways, it was all very simple and straightforward because I didn't really have to think. I just had to make sure I followed Kas's instructions – although that was never as easy as it might sound.

Despite the fact that Kas was a drug dealer and occasionally used cocaine himself, he was adamant when he told me, ‘If I ever find out you've done any drugs, I'll cut your nose off. No one wants to fuck a junkie.' But no one ever did offer me drugs, and only one person ever asked to buy some off me, and then apparently found it hard to believe when I said I didn't sell them. It seemed odd to me – and strangely contradictory, as so many things were
about Kas – that although he was quite happy to be a dealer, he would wind himself up into a fury at the very thought of my taking drugs. And then, one day, he told me he wanted me to sell wraps of cocaine.

‘It's a missed opportunity,' he said, as though he was talking about some run-of-the-mill business venture rather than the serious criminal offence of drug dealing. ‘All the men you're seeing want some pussy and they want some coke. You'll never be picked up for it because you won't be carrying enough to be viewed as a dealer. You just say it's for your own use.'

Until that moment, I'd believed things couldn't be any worse, but I knew that although I probably wouldn't get arrested for prostitution, I
would
go to prison if I got caught with drugs. And the fear must have been written on my face because Kas suddenly shouted at me, ‘You're pathetic! I can see how frightened you are, and all because people tell you that you're not allowed to do something.' I knew there was no point pleading with him: he'd made up his mind and there was nothing I could do about it, but I dreaded going out to work that evening even more than I'd dreaded it before.

When I was dressed in my hideous work clothes, Kas called me into the living room, where the table was covered with little packages. I felt sick: I knew I couldn't do it; I'd mess it up – like I messed everything up – and I'd get caught, and then my mother would have to come and visit me in an Italian prison.

I began to cry and to beg Kas not to make me do it. ‘I'm frightened,' I told him. ‘Please, Kas. I don't know how to do this. I don't want to. Please,
please
don't make me.' Suddenly, he spun round, slapped me hard across the face and yelled, ‘You haven't got the guts to do it, or the brains. Get out of my sight. You're an embarrassment – to me and to yourself. You're pointless. You'll only end up getting me into trouble because you're so stupid.' Then he rapped with his knuckles on the side of my head and said, ‘There's nothing inside here except sawdust. That's why you can't think. Forget it. Go on, get out of my sight.'

And for once I was glad that I was stupid, if it meant not having to do something that, in my mind, was even worse than the things I was already doing.

One evening, when I was about to start getting ready to go out to work, someone banged on the front door of the flat. Kas was dealing a lot of drugs at that time and there were dozens of little wraps of cocaine on the table in the living room, which he started snatching up and pushing into a plastic bag, while I just stood there, frozen to the spot. Clearly, he wasn't expecting anyone, and the knock hadn't sounded friendly.

Kas had told me – repeatedly, as he told me everything – that if the police ever came, I was to say we didn't know each other and that I was a friend of a friend of his who he was allowing to stay at his place for a while. I wondered if this was the moment when I'd have to tell that story, and I was terrified at the thought of getting it wrong, of saying
the wrong thing and getting Kas – and myself – into trouble.

Kas spun the top of the plastic bag into a tight spiral and tried to shove it into my hands, but I jumped back instinctively, dropping my arms to my sides, and he grabbed me roughly by the shoulders and snapped, ‘Take it! Hide it. Go on.
Move
, woman!'