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. In some ways, that almost makes them worse than human traffickers and drug dealers, for whom ruining other people’s lives is simply a by-product of businesses that earn them vast sums of money.
When Jak came to pick me up from the apartment one day, not long after Dean had returned to England, he handed me a carrier bag and said solemnly, ‘For you.’ Inside the bag there was a blue vest top and a pair of cut-off cotton trousers.
‘They’re very nice,’ I said. ‘But why are you giving me clothes?’
‘You need them,’ he answered, and then shrugged. ‘My mother, she buys them for you. She says you need them.’
‘Your English is getting good,’ I laughed. But I was embarrassed, because I knew his family was poor.
Jak took me to a café, where he pointed to the toilet and told me to go and try on my new outfit. I was surprised to find that the clothes fitted me really well, and I was pleased by his reaction when I walked back into the café wearing them. After we’d had a cup of coffee, he took me on his motorbike to his house, where his mother made me turn around while she adjusted the top to make it sit perfectly on my shoulders. Then she said something that Jak translated for me as, ‘You look just like Albanian girl.’ I blushed, because I was embarrassed by his mother’s attention and because it felt as though, despite the goat’s head incident, she had decided after all to accept me into her family, and that seemed like something very special and comforting.
I think it was on that day that I considered for perhaps the first time the possibility that my life might actually turn out to be different from what I had begun to believe it would be. I hardly dared believe it when Jak kissed me and told me he loved me as he dropped me back at the apartment every night. I was grateful to him for being patient and gentle with me, and for the fact that he never pressured me to have sex. I had already fallen head over heels for him, and on the day when his mother bought me clothes and seemed to be giving me her seal of approval, I looked at him and thought, ‘This is the man I want to be with. This is what I want for the rest of my life.’
So it was an easy decision to make when, a few days later, he asked me to leave the apartment I had been sharing with Mum and move in with him and his family for the rest of our stay in Greece.
Although Mum still didn’t like or trust Jak, she didn’t have any real objections to my going to live with him and his family – I suppose because she knew his parents would be there. She was spending most of her time with Nikos, but I continued to see or talk to her almost every day after I moved out of the apartment.
Jak was working as a gardener and I was able to go with him, to sit in the sun and talk to him while he did his jobs. It was about two weeks after Mum and I had not taken our flight home that I began to notice how much better his English was. ‘I learn really quick,’ he told me when I remarked on his rapid improvement. And I had no reason to doubt what he said.
He often told me: ‘I don’t want you ever to go home. I want you to stay here with me for ever. I love you.’ And I believed that too. I really wanted it to be true, because I knew that I loved him. At the age of 14, I think the only ambition I had ever had was to know that someone had chosen to love me.
I only stayed with Jak’s family for a few days before Jak and I moved into a small apartment in a town a bit further along the coast. I didn’t tell Mum though. I let her go on believing that we were still living with his parents. Jak and I had been in the new place for just a couple of days when we had a huge row. I had told him I wasn’t going to go to work with him that morning because I wanted to spend some time with my mum, and he looked really hurt and asked, ‘Why don’t you want to spend the day with me?’
‘I’ve spent every day with you,’ I said, ‘and I’ll see you this evening. But today I want to see my mum.’
I was completely taken by surprise when he suddenly started shouting at me. I didn’t understand everything he was saying, because the angrier he got the more he seemed to lose his grasp of English. And then he bellowed into my face, ‘You don’t love me! I want to spend all the time with you, but you don’t want that.’
I might have been pleased to think he felt jealous if I had been planning to spend the day with someone else. But it was my mother I wanted to see, and his aggressive reaction startled me. I hadn’t entirely lost the stroppy
