Bought and Sold by Megan Stephens

Author:Megan Stephens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-12-16T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

When I was in the kitchen earlier in the night getting water, I had seen a loaf of bread on the work surface. It was hard and stale and splattered with blue patches of mould. But there was nothing else to eat and at intervals throughout the rest of the following day we went into the kitchen one by one and picked bits off it. It didn’t make any difference to how hungry I was, but at least it gave me a reason to stand up and move around.

It was starting to get dark on the second night when the door of the apartment opened again. This time, it was Christoph who came in, followed by a short, heavily built man wearing a crumpled shirt and oily jeans. No one said anything; the man just looked at us and then he pointed at me.

‘Right, get up,’ Christoph said. ‘This is a job for you.’ Even when he nodded towards the narrow bed in the corner, I didn’t understand what he meant. Then the man began to unzip his jeans and it finally dawned on me that Christoph expected me to have sex with him right there, in the room where all the other girls were sitting.

Bizarrely, one of the first thoughts that came to me was that I hadn’t had a shower for two days. It wasn’t something I needed to worry about on the man’s behalf, however. I think I could have been caked in mud from a pigpen before he’d have noticed, or cared, as he climbed on top of me, had sex with me – without using a condom – and then zipped up his jeans and followed Christoph out of the apartment.

I had long ago lost count of the disgusting things I had done – and that had been done to me – since I had been in Athens. Many of them were things I hadn’t previously known anyone did, and that I wouldn’t have believed I would ever do. By comparison with some of them, having sex with a man in a room full of people was relatively mundane, but it still made me feel physically sick.

Christoph came back again that evening, this time with a different man who chose a different girl. And then no one came at all.

I had been in the room for four days, without any food and surviving only on water from the tap, by the time Christoph did come back. In just those four days I seemed to have gone from thin to emaciated, so that the dirty, creased skirt I was wearing was falling off me, and there was a persistent throbbing pain in my head that felt as if someone was beating the inside of it with a hammer.

According to the clock in Christoph’s car, it was mid-morning when he drove me to a hotel, where he told me to have a shower, get dressed and do my make-up. ‘Make yourself look really nice,’ he said, in his old friendly voice.

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