Читать книгу Bought and Sold - Megan Stephens, Megan Stephens - Страница 10

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 can’t leave Jak. I love him and he loves me. We’re going to make a life together.’

‘For God’s sake, Megan …’ Her voice was drowned out for a moment by the tinny echo of a flight announcement. When she spoke again I could tell that she was crying. ‘Please, Megan, don’t do this,’ she pleaded. ‘Come home with me now. We’ll come back, I promise.’

‘I love him, Mum,’ I said again, wiping the tears from my cheeks with the back of my hand.

‘I don’t think you understand.’ Mum sounded angry now. ‘For God’s sake, Megan, you’re 14 years old. This isn’t a decision you can make. If you don’t come back to the airport right now and catch this flight with me, I’m going to have to go to the police.’

I didn’t know how to respond, how to make her understand there was no way that I was going back.

‘Megan, listen to me, you need to come home. You cannot stay here by yourself!’ I could tell that she was starting to panic. ‘Megan, please. They’re calling our flight!’

‘I can’t come home,’ I said, tears now streaming down my cheeks. ‘I’ll kill myself if you try to make me go home. I mean it, Mum. I want to be with Jak.’ I didn’t hear what she said after that, because I turned off the phone.

It still makes me cry when I think about that phone call. I don’t blame my mum for leaving without me. My decision to stay in Greece took her (and me) completely by surprise, and my heartfelt threat to kill myself must have sent her into such a tailspin of panic that she didn’t know what else to do.

After Jak had taken the phone out of my shaking hands, he drove to a block of apartments where a friend of his called Vasos lived. As soon as we were inside, I began to sob. Jak kept hugging me and telling me everything would be all right. But suddenly I couldn’t imagine how I was going to live without my mum. I felt terrible for having upset her so much, and although just a few minutes earlier I had believed that if I had to leave Jak I would never be happy again, I now felt scared and was already regretting the decision I had made.

‘I just need a minute,’ I told Jak, and as I stepped out on to the balcony, I saw the plane. It seemed to be ascending very slowly into the sky above a distant row of rooftops, and as it came closer I could see the distinctive colours of the airline on its tail and I knew it was the plane I should have been on with my mother. Plummeting from distress into hysteria, I began to wave frantically and shout, ‘Mum, I’m here. Can you see me? Come back. Don’t leave me here. Please, Mum. I’m sorry. Don’t go home without me.’

For a moment, I almost believed I could see her face looking out of one of the windows of the plane, and that she could see me standing on the balcony. Then a wave of panic washed over me and I couldn’t breathe. I tugged at the handle of the balcony door, shouting, ‘I want my mum,’ and ran out of the apartment, down the stairs and on to the street. I kept on running until I reached the end of the road, where I sank to my knees on the hot, stony pavement, sobbing, ‘I’m sorry, Mum. Please come back.’

When Jak caught up with me, I was still waving frantically at what was now an empty sky. ‘Come on. Come back inside. You’ll be okay,’ he told me, putting his arms around my shaking body and lifting me on to my feet before half-carrying me back up the road.

When we were inside the apartment again, Jak handed me a mug of hot chocolate and said, ‘Drink this. Then go and have a shower. It will make you feel better.’ It didn’t, though, and for the rest of day I sat staring at the wall of the living room while the two men watched television.

My suitcase had been loaded on to the plane with Mum’s this time, so I had nothing except my handbag and the clothes I was wearing. ‘I’ll buy you something tomorrow,’ Jak said when we were lying beside each other in bed that night. But even though I knew what I had done wasn’t his fault, I felt sick and pulled away from him when he tried to touch me.

‘I’m not ready,’ I told him.

‘I understand,’ he said. ‘I love you.’

When I woke up the next morning, no less exhausted than I had been the night before, Jak and Vasos were getting ready for work.

‘You stay here,’ Jak said. ‘You can clean up the apartment.’ I felt numb and the day passed incredibly slowly. I couldn’t eat or think about anything except my mum. Where would she be now? What would she be doing? How would she be feeling?

‘She’s coming back,’ I kept telling myself. ‘I’ll see her again very soon.’ Even though I knew it was true, it didn’t make me feel any better, and as the hours dragged by, I became increasingly anxious to talk to her. So when Jak got back from work that evening and told me he’d had a text from her and that I should call, I almost snatched the phone out of his hand.

‘I’ve been so worried about you,’ Mum said. ‘Just take care of yourself. I’ll be back as soon as possible, I promise.’

I felt much calmer after I had spoken to her. I knew I was really going to miss her, but it was stupid of me to have got into such a state about it all, particularly when I had Jak to look after me until she came back. And I really was all right, once I knew Mum wasn’t worried to death about me and that I would be able to text and speak to her on Jak’s phone every day.

For the next couple of weeks, our lives fell into an easy pattern. I would either go with Jak to work or stay at Vasos’s apartment during the day. Then, in the evening, after we’d had something to eat, we would go out for a coffee. I would often tell Jak how impressed I was by the extraordinarily rapid improvement in his English, and he’d respond by teaching me some more words in Albanian and telling me how proud he was of me when I repeated them back to him.

One evening, as we were sitting outside a café in a square in the centre of town, Jak’s phone rang. He listened before speaking rapidly in Albanian for a few seconds. Then he put the phone down on the table and sighed.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked him, touching the warm skin of his arm with my fingers. ‘Has something happened? Are you all right?’

‘I’ve just had some bad news,’ he said. ‘My mother is very ill.’ His eyes filled with tears.

‘Oh no, I’m so sorry.’ I gripped his arm tightly. ‘What’s wrong with her?’

‘It’s cancer.’ He spread out his hands with their palms turned upwards in a gesture of helplessness. ‘It’s in her throat. The doctor thought it was … How do you call it?’ He touched his neck. ‘Tiroide?’

‘Thyroid?’ I said.

He nodded miserably. ‘They did some tests and now they’ve told her today that it is cancer.’

‘Oh, Jak, that’s terrible! Can it be treated?’

The sound he made was like a burst of angry laughter. ‘Yes, it can be treated, for someone who can afford to have an operation. This isn’t England, you know. Just visiting a doctor here costs fifty euros. I can’t even imagine what the operation would cost.’ He rubbed his face with his hand and wiped away the tears that were falling openly now. ‘My parents don’t have any money. You know that. And it takes me a whole day to earn fifty euros, even though I work very hard.’ He sighed again and I tried to think of something comforting to say, but couldn’t. ‘Well, I’m just going to have to get a second job,’ he said at last. ‘I just hope I can earn enough money to pay for the treatment my mother needs before … before it’s too late. I don’t have any choice: you can’t just stand by and watch someone you love suffer and then die.’

I was crying too by that time. I had always had the sense that Jak’s mother didn’t really like me, but that didn’t affect the fact that I felt incredibly sorry for her, and for Jak too. I knew he was very fond of his mother, and I couldn’t even begin to imagine how I would feel if my mum was ever seriously ill. What I didn’t know until a long time later was that Jak could have won an Oscar for his performance that evening.

I think he had already decided we were going to move back in with his family. So that’s what we did a couple of days later. It wasn’t what I wanted to do, but I certainly wasn’t going to argue about it, given the circumstances. Sometimes, I would see him touch his mum’s throat as he was talking to her. Otherwise, neither she nor anyone else in the family gave any indication that she was ill.

I didn’t go to work with Jak anymore. I stayed in the house and helped his mum and sister do the heavy-duty housework that they taught me to do their way, with often unconcealed disdain for my lack of knowledge.

Jak’s parents slept in the only proper bed in the house, and every day the mattress had to be lifted off it, carried outside and beaten with a sort of carpet beater made out of cane and shaped like a tennis racquet. Then the mattress was left to air before being put back on the bed again, topside down. On most days, all the sheets and bed covers were hung out to air too, except on wash days, when they had to be taken out into the garden to be scrubbed and rubbed in freezing cold water in a metal tub until your knuckles were raw and bleeding.

However hard I worked, it seemed that I could never do anything the way some unwritten law stated that it must be done. One day, after I had struggled to lift something that was way beyond the limits of my strength, Jak’s mother clicked her tongue and said something to Jak, which he translated for me as, ‘English girls are very dirty.’ It seemed unfair, as well as irrelevant to the current task. What hurt me most of all was the fact that Jak’s tone of voice suggested he might agree with what his mother said.

Ever since I was a very small child, the thing I think I wanted more than almost anything else was for people to like me. So I particularly hated being around Jak’s dad, because he made no attempt at all to hide his impatient dislike of me. Whenever he walked into a room and found me there, he would glare at me, make angry clicking noises with his tongue and then say something unmistakably nasty in Albanian before walking out again. It might not have been because he was irritated with me personally, however. He wasn’t much nicer to his wife, who he continued to bully even now that she was ill.

At every mealtime, everyone would sit down at the table while Jak’s mum served the food and then stood up to eat hers. When it happened the first time, I jumped up and offered her my chair. She glared at me as though I had done something contemptible, and glanced anxiously at her husband, who muttered something angry, and Jak almost shouted at me, ‘What do you think you’re doing? She stands up.’ I seemed to have done something insulting in some way I didn’t understand and I felt really embarrassed. So I asked Jak later, ‘Why do you let your dad treat your mum like that? I don’t understand why a man would make a woman stand up to eat. That doesn’t happen in England. Everyone sits at the table together.’

‘It’s the Albanian culture,’ he snapped at me. ‘In Albania, wives love their husbands and husbands love their wives. Perhaps that’s something that doesn’t happen in England either. In Albania women do everything for their men. That’s what we call family.’ I realised I didn’t have enough normal family experience to be able to argue with him. But it seemed to me to be a very strange way to treat someone you loved.

As the days passed, I became more and more miserable, until eventually I told Jak I was unhappy living with his family and asked him if we could get a place of our own. It felt like proof of his love for me when he agreed, and a couple of days later we moved out. The one-room apartment Jak rented for us was tiny, although I think by that time I would have been happy living in a shed or a tent as long as it meant not having to put up with his family’s disapproval and the constant feeling that I wasn’t good enough in almost every way.

It was shortly after we moved into the apartment that I began to see the first glimpses of another side of Jak. Perhaps it was the side of him my mum had thought she could see in his face and in the ‘hardness’ in his eyes that prompted her – and Dean – to try to persuade me not to fall for him.

Jak and I had had some loud, shouted arguments, but nothing worse than the sort of rows I used to have with my mum and sister. After we moved into the apartment, however, he would sometimes be moody when he got home from work and would get angry about apparently trivial things – for example, if his dinner wasn’t on the table as soon as he walked through the door. ‘That’s the Albanian way,’ he would tell me. So, because I loved him and because I wanted him to love and approve of me, I told myself he was right and that ‘the Albanian way’ was indeed the best way of doing things.

During the time we were living with his family, Jak’s mum used to tell me to ‘watch and learn’ while she cooked, and after we moved out I tried to remember how to make the meals she made. One day, I decided to make a sort of soup-stew she used to make out of rice, spinach, boiled chicken and lemon. There was no kitchen in the apartment, just a sink and a small, two-ring electric hob in one corner of the room that was also our living-room/bedroom.

I was stirring the food in a pot on the hob when Jak got home from work. I could see he was tired and hungry. But nothing could have prepared me for what happened next. I had just picked up a ladle and was about to transfer the soupy stew into two bowls when he said, with a terseness that took me by surprise, ‘Leave it. I’ll do it myself.’ Dipping a spoon into the pot, he tasted the food and then stood there for a moment, still holding the spoon to his lips. It was as if every muscle in his body had frozen and when he did finally turn his head to look at me, there was a horrible expression on his face I had never seen before and couldn’t interpret. I had expected him to be pleased because I’d tried to make something his mother used to make, something I knew he really liked. I couldn’t think of any reason at all why he might be as angry as he clearly was. But suddenly my palms were sweating and I felt sick.

Turning very slowly away from the little stove, Jak shouted, ‘You don’t even know how to cook! Have you learned nothing from my mother?’ And he picked up the pot and hurled it across the room.

It smashed against the wall just above my head, its boiling contents spewed out in every direction. As I pulled off the stew-spattered cotton top I was wearing, I screamed at him, ‘What are you doing? Are you crazy?’ I was so shocked that although my whole body was shaking, I didn’t cry at first. Then, like a child suddenly realising she’s out of her depth in some way she doesn’t understand, I began to wail, ‘I want to go home. I want my mum.’

It was as if a switch had been flipped inside Jak, shutting off his fury and turning on his anguished tears. ‘I’m sorry,’ he kept saying. ‘I’m so sorry. I don’t know what came over me.’

‘I don’t care,’ I shouted at him. ‘I want my mum.’

‘No, please, I’m sorry.’ He took a step towards me with his arms outstretched. ‘I will teach you how to cook. It’s all right. I’m not like that. It’s just that I’m so worried about my mother. I’m upset because I can’t do anything to help her.’

Fortunately, apart from a few patches on my back, I wasn’t badly burned. After I had washed all the chicken, rice and spinach out of my hair and changed my clothes, Jak took me out for a meal. When we had eaten, we drove up into the mountains on his motorbike, where we sat together on a rock at the side of the road, talking and looking down on the flickering lights along the coast. Jak pointed at a cluster of stars and said, ‘Those are our stars. Whatever happens in the future, wherever you are, you can look up at those stars and know that I am looking at them too, and that I’m thinking about you.’ And by the time we drove back down the mountain in the darkness, he had soothed my anxieties and reclaimed my trust.