Trafficked: The Terrifying True Story of a British Girl Forced into the Sex Trade (7 page)

I cried again, silently, as I put on the clothes he'd given me – the black skirt made of shiny, cheap material that was too short and flared out too much at the bottom, the ugly top and the hold-up stockings under knee-high boots. Then I applied make-up in exactly the way Kas told me to
do it, brushed my hair until it was as sleek and neat as he liked it to be, and looked in the mirror in the bathroom at someone else's reflection.

I felt stupid, like a child trying on dressing-up clothes, but when I walked into the living room, Kas put his hand on my shoulder, turned me round slowly and, using the first nice words he'd spoken to me all day, said, ‘My little mouse. How frightened you are and how beautiful you look now.' For a moment, I felt almost a sense of pleasure, because instead of shouting at me or hitting me, or looking at me with cold, cruel disgust as he'd done so many times during the last 24 hours, he'd praised me, which meant that I'd finally managed to do something right – even if it didn't feel right to me at all.

It was dark and getting cold by the time we drove down the hill to the main road. Kas stopped the car beside an area of broken concrete that ran along the edge of the road in front of some derelict buildings, and a girl stepped forward from the shadows. She smiled at Kas as she leaned in through the open window of the car to kiss him on both cheeks. Then she looked at me appraisingly, said something to him in Italian and they both laughed.

‘Cara will show you what to do,' Kas told me, ‘but just for a couple of nights. So pay attention, because after that you'll be on your own.'

I followed the girl to her car, which was parked down the side of one of the dark, broken-windowed buildings, and a few minutes later we were driving down the road as
she added her instructions to the multitude Kas had already given me.

‘You are here sometimes,' she said, in stilted English, pointing to a patch of grass under a single, leafless tree. ‘If the
Carabinieri
see you at your other place, you go here.'

For a moment, my heart stopped beating and I thought I was going to faint. ‘The
police
?' I said. ‘But what will
happen
if the police see me?'

‘It's normal,' she told me, lifting her hands off the steering wheel as she shrugged. ‘They tell you “
Vai!
Go!” Or they take you to the
stazione
for a few hours. But it's not a problem.'

Tears had started to roll down my cheeks and when Cara noticed them, she shrugged again. Clearly, the prospect of being taken to a police station held no shame or dread for her. Later that evening, she told me that she used to work in a bakery, but had given up her job to work on the streets voluntarily to earn the money to pay her boyfriend's legal fees when he'd been sent to prison for kidnapping a girl and forcing her into prostitution. And she laughed as she told me, ‘It's better money than selling bread, and more exciting.'

She made me memorise her phone number, as Kas had done, telling me, ‘Call me if you have problems.' And then she took me to the spot where she would wait with me for customers that night.

After parking her car on a narrow dirt track, out of sight of passing motorists, she led the way back to the main
road, where she stood, calmly confident, beside me while I tried to concentrate on not being sick. The temperature had dropped abruptly in the last hour or so, and although I was wearing a jumper over the hideous top, I was shivering violently – both with cold and with fear. Suddenly, Cara turned and started walking back towards the car, ignoring me when I called frantically after her and then disappearing into the darkness.

I stood alone under the single streetlight at the side of the busy main road, trying to control the panic rising up inside me and praying that no car would stop, and I almost cried with relief when I saw her running up the track towards me again. In her hand, she was holding a white tracksuit top, which she told me to put on. Then she placed her hands on my shoulders, turned me round so that I was facing her and pulled up the zip, just like my mother used to do when I was a child. My eyes filled with tears, and at that moment, a car drew up beside us and Cara pushed me towards it. ‘I
can't
. Please Cara,' I whispered to her. But she'd already turned away.

As I bent down to look in through the car's open window, I felt as though I was outside my own body, watching myself, and all I could think was,
How is this going to happen? How am I going to do this? I can't.
And then, just as I felt Cara's finger poking me sharply in the back, the stranger asked me ‘
Quanto?
' I took a deep breath and answered ‘
Trenta Euros
', and to my horror, he shrugged his shoulders and said ‘Okay.'

I stood with my fingers still resting on his open window, swallowing the sour bile that was flooding into my mouth, and prayed that I wasn't actually going to vomit. My legs felt like leaden weights and I could hear a voice inside my head screaming
No!
And then Cara said ‘
Vai.
Go!' and I walked around the car, opened the door on the passenger's side and got in beside a man I didn't know.

As I pressed my body against the door and gripped the armrest so tightly my fingers ached, he must have wondered what was wrong with me. But he just shot me a quizzical glance and then asked in Italian, ‘Where? Where do we go?' With my heart pounding, I tried to remember what Cara had told me just a few minutes earlier. ‘Go straight,' I said, hoping I'd pronounced the Italian word correctly. ‘Then left.' I sounded like a terrified, timid robot, and perhaps he was beginning to wonder why he'd agreed to pay 30 Euros to have sex with someone who was obviously crazy.

He was young – probably not much older than me – and as he drove he asked my name and where I was from. Kas had created a persona for me, a ridiculous story I was supposed to tell anyone who asked any questions. So I told the man I was Russian, my name was Jenna and I was working as a prostitute because I needed to send money home to my family in Russia. I spoke in broken English, in what was supposed to be a Russian accent, although it sounded nothing like one. As the words tumbled out of me, I began to think that if I could make this man believe I was Jenna, perhaps I could believe it too – if only just
enough to be able to detach myself from the reality of what was happening.

When he stopped the car at the spot I directed him to – the one that Cara had pointed out to me earlier – the voice in my head began to shriek,
I can't do this. Oh God, what am I going to do?
For a few horrible seconds, I sat there in total silence, and then I started to fumble in my pocket for a condom. I'd never put a condom on anyone before and I didn't have any idea how to do it. The worst part of it all, though, was asking, ‘
Bocca
or
fica
?' And as I whispered the words, the sour taste filled my mouth again.

‘
Bocca
,' the man answered, and I felt a surge of relief – until I realised that the moment had really come and I was going to have to do what he was expecting me to do. The thought flashed through my mind to tell him I wasn't what I seemed to be. I wasn't Russian and I didn't have a poor family dependent on my ability to trade sex for money. I was a ‘nice' girl from England, who'd come to Italy to visit a man she thought was her friend but who had threatened her family and forced her to work as a prostitute. Then, as I remembered what Kas had told me about sending people to check up on me, so that I would never know whether a man who stopped his car beside me was really a client, I could see in my mind the look that had been on his face when he'd said, ‘And you wouldn't want to be responsible for what would happen to your precious brothers then.'

So, instead of bursting into tears and begging, ‘Please,
please
help me. I've been kidnapped and I can't do this,' I
took the condom out of its packet, explained my awkward fumbling by telling the man ‘It's my first time', and then did what he'd paid me 30 Euros to do.

As I tugged – awkwardly and with shaking fingers – at the zip in the man's trousers, I felt a surge of almost overpowering disgust at the thought of the intimate and very private act I was about to perform on the total stranger sitting beside me in his car. Then I closed my eyes and forced my mind to focus on the dark, empty space that seemed suddenly to surround me.

Afterwards, I handed him some tissues and while he cleaned himself up and refastened his trousers, I turned away so that he wouldn't see my tears. Slowly, I could feel my fear and self-disgust being replaced by a heavy, dull sense of shame – and that's when I realised with a sick feeling of horror that he hadn't actually paid me at all. I'd been so anxious to remember everything I was supposed to do, and so frightened by the thought of what Kas would say and do to me if I got anything wrong, I'd forgotten the most important thing of all – to make sure I got the money first. Luckily, though, when I asked him for my money, the man reached into his pocket, opened his wallet and handed me some notes, which I stuffed inside my boots, as Kas had told me to do. Then I sat in the car, numb and mute, while he drove me back to where Cara was waiting for me.

‘How is it?' she asked me. ‘It's okay?'

‘Yeah, okay,' I told her. And in some ways it was, because the first time was over and I knew that, in future, ‘okay' was
going to mean something completely different from what it had ever meant before.

More cars came after that, and more men gave me more money, which I pushed down into my boots as I directed them to ‘my spot'. And each time I performed the same horrible, disgusting act with a stranger, I felt a little more like Jenna – who was doing what she had to do to help her family – and a little less like Sophie, who lived in a nice flat in the centre of Leeds, had a good job and a mother, stepfather, sister and brothers who loved her and who would not in a million years have believed it if someone had told them what she was doing.

I'd been with four men by the time a silver-coloured Mercedes pulled up beside us, and I was just about to walk round to the open window when Cara put a hand on my arm and said, ‘We can't go with him. Say no.'

‘What do you mean? Why not?' I asked her, my heart beginning to race.

‘Just say no,' she hissed at me, and when I still hesitated, she stepped towards the car herself and said firmly, ‘No!
Vai via!
'

I felt myself blushing with embarrassment because she'd spoken to him so rudely – a reaction that didn't strike me as ironic until much later – and then I held my breath and waited to see what the man would do. But in the end he just swore at her and drove away.

‘What was wrong?' I asked Cara. ‘Why did you tell him to go?'

‘He's bad,' she answered, shrugging and pulling a face. ‘He's a bad man. Remember this car and this face. Do not go with him –
ever
.' And the warning I could hear in her voice made me afraid in case I didn't recognise him if he came again.

Some of the men who stopped their cars beside us drove off when I told them the price, and then – eventually, inevitably – one of them said he wanted full sex. I hesitated, but when I looked at Cara she just nodded irritably. So I walked round to the passenger door and got into the car.

As the man drove down the road, following my directions, all I could think was,
This is it. Oh my God. This isn't pretend. I'm not Jenna, I'm Sophie, and this is really happening to me.
I turned to look out of the window beside me, hiding my tears while I prayed that
something
would happen so that I didn't have to go through with it. I knew, though, that I mustn't let him see my fear or realise I didn't know what I was doing and, with the voice in my head still repeating the words
You
have
to get a grip on yourself
, I wiped my hand across my face just as he asked me my name.

When he stopped the car and I couldn't push my seat back, so that he had to do it for me, I almost gave in to the panic that was building up like a tidal wave inside me. Somehow, though, I managed to detach myself just enough to be able to shut my mind to what I was doing – until he tried to touch me. I could pretend – almost – that I couldn't feel the weight of his body as he lay on top of me, pushing
me down on to the seat and crushing my thighs painfully with his knees. And I could turn my head away so that the acrid smell of his breath didn't make me gag. But I knew I wouldn't be able to bear it if he touched me. I hated the thought of anyone putting their hands on my body and I could see he was startled when I almost shouted at him, ‘It's not allowed. You can't do that.'

Afterwards, I gave him the tissues and lay there for a moment, thinking,
This is what I am now. This is what I'm going to have to do. I can't get away from it. I can't escape. Where would I go? Who could I tell?
I felt almost sullen, like a petulant child who'd been made to do something she didn't want to do, although without any simple, child-like sense of resentment or injustice. Instead, I was completely numb – both mentally and physically – and I was barely aware of what I was doing as I pulled up my pants and straightened my clothes. Then, as the stranger I'd had sex with drove me back to the place where, just a few minutes earlier, he'd picked me up, I stared miserably out of the window of his car and saw nothing but darkness.

From 8 o'clock in the evening until 5 the next morning, I was almost literally going round in circles: waiting with Cara at the side of the road, being picked up by someone and driven to ‘my spot', then back again to the pick-up point, where I'd start the whole process all over again. And, gradually, as the minutes and then the hours ticked by, my mind shut down and the numbness almost obliterated the fear and revulsion.