that it was a wad of folded banknotes. I don’t think it even crossed my mind to wonder why Leon was giving him money. I didn’t understand Greek, so I didn’t know what they had been saying to each other. But I trusted Jak. And, after all, he’d had a life before he met me.
‘So, you know what you’re going to be doing, don’t you?’ Leon spoke to me in English. ‘And you’re happy with it?’
I glanced at Jak and he murmured, ‘I love you. It’s all right.’
‘Yes, I’m fine with it,’ I told Leon.
I’ve often wondered what would have happened if I had asked, ‘Happy with what? What is the job you’re offering me?’ But I didn’t. Jak told me it would be ‘all right’ and I believed him. So Leon stood up, shook Jak’s hand, nodded at me, and then walked down the stairs and out of the restaurant. Jak and I followed him a little while later and took a taxi to another part of the city centre.
On almost every street corner in Athens, there are kiosks selling newspapers and magazines, postcards, sweets, chocolate, cigarettes, even souvenirs and clothes. When we got out of the taxi, Jak told me to wait while he went to one of them. When he came back, he handed me what felt like a flimsy cardboard box in a brown paper bag, pointed to an office building on the other side of the road and said, ‘Go up the stairs to the top floor. Knock on the glass door and give this to the guy who opens it.’
‘What is it?’ I asked him.
‘Just do it,’ he snapped.
Although Jak’s anger always took me by surprise and shocked me, I wasn’t really frightened of him. But I hated it when he was annoyed with me. So I took the package and turned to cross the road.
‘I’ll wait for you here,’ he called after me, pleasant again now that I was doing what he had wanted me to do.
The woman at the reception desk glanced up when I pushed open the door from the street, and then looked away again as I started to walk up the stairs. The shoes I was wearing had pointed toes and stiletto heels, and long before I had reached the top floor my feet were sore and my legs were shaking. As I stumbled up the last two flights of stairs, I was breathless and, for some reason, had begun to feel uneasy.
The brass plaque on the wall beside the glass doors at the top of the building announced – in both English and Greek – that it was the office of a lawyer. The man who opened the door when I rang the bell was fat and old – at least, he looked old to me.
Snatching the package out of my hands, he told me, in English, to ‘Come in and stand over there.’ I wished I had the confidence to tell him I had done what I’d been asked to do and now I was going to leave. Instead, I did a sort of nervous side-step across the marble-tiled floor and said nothing.
When he locked the glass doors, I felt a sudden rush of fear. But before I could react in any way, he had opened another door and pushed me through it. In the middle of the small, windowless room he had thrust me into there was a single bed and, at the foot of it, a video camera on a tripod. The only other bit of furniture in the room was a television, playing silently in a corner.
I was so frightened and convinced that he was going to murder me, that I just stood there making little whimpering noises like a defeated and submissive animal. When the man grabbed hold of my vest top and shoved me down on to the bed, I was so shocked my mind went completely blank and I think I barely struggled as he flipped me over on to my back, pulled up my skirt, ripped off my pants and forced himself inside me. The pain was excruciating, but I was too traumatised even to cry.
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