Bought and Sold. Megan Stephens
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 teenager part of my character so I shouted back at him. And when our neighbours complained to the landlord about the loud, full-scale argument that ensued, we were kicked out of the apartment the next day.
Jak was contrite about his jealousy, and I was flattered when he told me that the reason he was so upset was because he loved me so much he wanted me to be with him all the time. What I didn’t realise, of course, was that far from simply being a stupid row, it was actually the start of his determined efforts to separate me from my mother.
Not long after we had moved into another apartment – a few streets away in the same town – Mum told me she had booked seats for us on another flight back to England. Apparently, she hadn’t paid rent on our council house for the last six weeks and a friend of hers had phoned to say that the people from the council had been in, cleared everything out of it, dumped all our stuff in a skip and changed the locks.
‘I don’t want to leave,’ I told Mum. ‘There really is nothing for us to go back for now.’
But she was adamant. ‘I don’t want to go either,’ she said. ‘But we’ve got to. It’ll only be for a few weeks. Once we’ve sorted things out at home, we’ll come back again.’
Everything was going really well between Mum and Nikos, so I knew she had as many reasons to want to stay as I did. Even a few weeks seemed like a very long time to me though, particularly when I already knew from experience how quickly and irrevocably things can change.
Jak was really upset when I told him. ‘I don’t know how I’ll survive if you leave me,’ he said, in his now-excellent English.
The night before our flight, Jak drank quite a lot of whisky and cried as he told me, ‘I will suffer so much if I have to live without you even for a few weeks.’ Then, with tears streaming down his face, he stubbed out his cigarette on his arm. I was frightened by the passion of his distress, but I was thrilled by it too and by the thought that he really did love me and that he felt as miserable as I did at the prospect of us being apart.
Despite sleeping in the same bed during the weeks we had been together, Jak and I still hadn’t had sex, although we had come close to it a few times. That was something else I really liked about him – the fact that as soon as he sensed I was getting tense, he always backed off. I slept badly that night, and every time I woke up and felt his arms around me, I dreaded the prospect of being alone again.
The next morning, Mum and Nikos took my suitcase to the airport in Nikos’s car, and I went with Jak on the back of his motorbike. When he pulled up outside the terminal, I swung my leg over the seat and as I turned to give him a last kiss, I saw that he was crying.
‘Don’t go, Megan,’ he said, holding my face in his hands and looking deep into my own tear-filled eyes. ‘I love you so much. Please don’t go. Get back on the bike and we’ll drive away from here and go and live our lives together. Please, Megan. I love you.’ And that’s when I realised I couldn’t leave him.
We were already speeding along the road away from the airport when Jak’s phone started to ring. It kept on ringing until he stopped the bike and answered it. After listening impassively for a few seconds, he handed the phone to me, saying, ‘Speak to your mum. She’s very angry.’
I could hear Mum’s voice even before I held the phone to my ear and I could tell that she was upset too. ‘Where are you, Megan?’ she said. ‘People are starting to go the departure gate. We’re going to miss our flight if you don’t come now. What are you doing? Please, Megan.’
‘I’m not coming,’ I told her, unnerved by the fact that my resolve had started to crumble as soon as I heard her voice. But I knew it was already too late to change my mind. ‘I’m not coming back, Mum. I