Running Away

By V.M. Frost

Many of us imagine running away from our problems but few of us do. The grass is rarely greener on the other side after all.

This true story is about a woman that made a bid to escape all that had boxed her into a corner at home, and whose desperate flight took her many miles from all that she held dear.

It's a story of exploitation and loneliness, sweetened with romance and sprinkled with moments of pure comedy.

Even from the depths of despair, fragile green shoots of hope can sprout and take root in the most unlikely of gardens...

• Language: English
• Publisher: V.M. Frost
• Release date: Apr 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224371761

Book preview

Prologue

waitress.jpg

February 2015

My name is Maya. I’m thirty years old, but already feel like I have crammed a lifetime of difficult experiences into those three decades. Failed businesses, a failed marriage, and working for little or no pay. I’m about to add being a migrant worker to that list...

I’ve been on the island for nine months – the last six of which, I have been an over-stayer. I have become a skeletal version of my former self, furtively emerging from my apartment block, my heart in my mouth every time I see a police car, or a ticket inspector climbs aboard my bus to work. I’m worried sick that I might be caught, deported and worse still, be handed a ban from entering the European Union for several years. I’m not eating, being run ragged for sometimes up to fourteen hours a day. I desperately miss my home and family.

Last November brought rain to the island for the first time since I arrived in May that year. I remember dashing out onto the terrace to greet the fat raindrops as they spattered noisily onto the dusty street far below and pinged metallically off balcony guard rails. Joyously, I’d upturned my face to the leaden skies to welcome the sudden downpour. It hadn’t mattered that the rain, as ever, was stained rusty brown by Saharan sand. It’s raining today too, but I am totally devoid of any welcoming feeling for it this time.

The day has started like any other. I greet the glum-faced manager; drink a quick coffee before I’ll need to set about clearing last night’s dirty plates and glasses from the covered seating area. I drink my coffee at the bottom of the short flight of steps that lead to the water. It’s only there that I know I will be safe from the prying electronic eyes of the multiple cameras, placed outside the restaurant by the owner. From his eyrie in another of his restaurants several miles away, he tirelessly surveils us all, watching for infractions, such as fraternizing with one another, or sneaking off for a smoke. Spotting something, he is known to call the manager to check on perceived misdemeanors, such as drinking coffee that we haven’t paid for, or discount wrongly applied to a customer’s bill. Through his endless scanning with the cameras, he is omnipresent.

I’m joined by a fellow ex-pat. We attempt to chat, but although kindred spirits in this land far from home, we manage little other than to lapse into the restaurant vernacular of waiting staff. It was busy last night, another late finish, talk of tips or lack of and ungrateful customers. We grimly express the possibilities of yet another day, rushed off our feet with nowhere near enough staff to cover the numbers. We moan about our paltry hourly pay and the half-hour break that we will have docked from our pay, even though none of us ever manage to take that break. We talk of our countries and the hope of one day soon, slipping past eagle-eyed immigration officials at the airport to fly back home, away from this ungrateful land, the inhabitants of which never tire of telling us to, go back to your country.

Inside the restaurant, everyone is on their guard and on the look out for fiscal inspectors, sometimes in the company of immigration officials. The boss is often tipped off prior to their arrival, but you can never tell. We all have cause to be wary – expats and local workers alike. While we face the threat of being discovered as over-stayers, the few locals that work here are claiming state handouts for the unemployed, while working for extra cash.

The inspectors normally leave us alone during the summer months. As part of an unwritten rule acknowledging the lack of local workers happy to do this kind of work, they know that should we all be expelled today, a lot of businesses will quite literally have to close. It’s still early though, and the trickle of tourists has yet to become a flood, so you never know.

It’s a Sunday, my least favourite day to work, and to make matters worse, it’s a Sunday afternoon in late winter. Had it been summer, families with their uncontrollable children, would have been spending the day at the beach instead of coming here for lunch and running me ragged.

The rain has eased slightly and the more adventurous among the diners have opted to eat their lunch under cover of the tents outside. Puddles of water still lay all around and a group of kids at one particular table have hit upon an idea of deliberately ordering drinks one by one just to watch me wade through puddles with every drink that they order. My worn out sneakers are soaking wet and my feet as cold as ice. With every puddle that I splash miserably through, the little bastards roar with laughter, encouraging one another to order more drinks.

As is usual, the parents, glued to their phone screens, make no attempt at controlling their offspring and don’t scold them for giving me the runaround. I’m foreign you see and if I don’t like it, I can always go back to my country – as the mantra goes for those hard working immigrants that have the temerity to complain. That locals have long since given up working in catering and a host of other jobs, now being filled by hard working foreigners, doesn’t enter their feeble minds. Soaking wet, I squelch back across the rain soaked concrete, lock myself in the bathroom and weep.

Emerging, I appeal to the manageress’s better nature and ask permission to go home and change my sopping clothes. Receiving her blessing, I call Jack who picks me up. Even with the heater of his car turned up full, I sit shivering in my seat, seriously contemplating not returning to my place of torture, but after changing into a warm, dry set of clothes, I perk up just enough to go back to face the rest of my shift.

Halcyon Days

I think that I am a product of all the time that I spent in the company of my grandparents – or as we affectionately refer to them in Serbia – Baba and Deda. Between the ages of one and twelve, I lived with my maternal grandparents, sharing their Belgrade apartment with my parents and two younger sisters.

Baba had worked for the police, and with the generous retirement packages of old, had been able to retire in her forties, meaning that she had had the time to look after us kids while my parents were at work. With my parents being away for most of the day, Baba and Deda were often left in loco parentis. As such, Baba had been an influence when it had come to pushing me hard on my education, while Deda had been the disciplinarian of the house. My grandparent’s efforts and involvement during those formative years would go on to help shape my character and enshrine the values that I still utilize today.

She had been brought up in the tiny hilltop village of Orovac in Herzogovina, and came from a family, some of which, would go on to become academics. The nearest town was, and still is, Trebinja and that was where she met my grandfather. Deda had been a military man working in dentistry and had, at the time, been stationed there. The closest thing Baba had got to the military was when she went parachuting. She has that parachute to this day and when I think about her diminutive size, I find it hard to imagine her bailing out of an aircraft!

Deda’s family were from central Serbia in the Sumadija district in the small village of Grivac, and during the time that I lived with them, we often went to stay there in his ancestral house. Grivac isn’t a village in the way that more affluent European villages are. Barely serviced by a dirt track, it’s little more than scattered clutches of small farms and often, self-built houses. Westerners might refer to it as a hamlet. I remember with fondness staying in the village tramping through seemingly endless countryside, feeding the livestock that they kept and hanging out with the village kids. Deda sometimes came looking for me and if he disapproved of the company I was keeping – particularly local boys, he’d whisk me off back to the house. Luckily, he never saw me having a sneaky teenage smoke with the other kids, but he did come close to catching me on occasion!

My Paternal grandparents were just as much as an influence on me as my other set of grandparents, but in a different way. Where with my maternal Baba, it had been all about studying for my future, when it had come to spending time with my other grandparents, it had been all about staying up late and watching as much television as I had wanted.

I remember with fondness the trips that Baba and Deda took me on to the Croatian and Montenegrin seaside. Sometimes we stayed in holiday camps made up of small huts in the middle of the woods. Although basic, the communal camps hummed with activities, laughter and family gatherings. One of the camps was right on the coast and the sea was accessible by steep steps. In the evenings, the air was filled with music and I can remember Deda twirling me around on the outside dance floor, the hem of my little dress swishing around like a ballerina.

Baba lived frugally and I’ll never know, how on her pension alone, she managed to save enough money to travel the world – and I mean the world. When she wasn’t travelling, she broadened my cultural horizons, taking me to the theatre, museums and the cinema. For Deda’s part, he got me involved in sport and team games. One of his hobbies was the collecting of autographs and whenever the opportunity arose, he’d literally push me into the path of the celebrities of the day. When I say celebrities, I don’t mean pop or film stars, but rather – for me at the time – obscure, but famous people of the period, like international chess players.

One time, Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky, played a twentieth anniversary rematch, in Belgrade, of their classic chess game of 1972. Deda took me to watch the match and then later, true to form, somehow ushered me backstage to collect autographs for his beloved album. Fischer was later arrested in Japan for having defied sanctions on Yugoslavia to play the match in Belgrade.

Speaking of sanctions, when I was just eight years old, my country was in the grip of western imposed sanctions because of the wars in Yugoslavia. This first round of sanctions lasted from 1992 to 1995. Such were the severity of those sanctions; inflation soared to the point that a single egg cost a month’s wage. Nothing was coming in and nothing was going out.

My mother, ever hardy and inventive, joined her fellow compatriots and went off to sanction bust in order to feed her family. She boarded buses on long journeys to Hungary in search of food long since unavailable in her own country. She jumped on buses on equally long and arduous trips to Bulgaria in search of fuel for both the family car, and to sell on the black market. On her return trip, she shared the cramped space with equally determined and like-minded people, sat among all manner of containers filled with precious fuel that reeked toxic fumes throughout the ancient and accident-waiting-to-happen bus.

Another Yugoslav war, this time in Kosovo brought fresh sanctions to my country, during 1998 and 1999. By now, I was fifteen years old and sanctions weren’t the only thing to have been inflicted on us citizens. NATO, without mandate and without any of it’s allied countries being attacked, decided in their wisdom, that in order to stop our government in its attempts to prevent so called liberation armies from carving out their own territory from what is historically and undisputedly our land; they would embark upon a bombing campaign of Serbia and Montenegro, to make my country stop fighting the terrorists that wanted our land for their own.

Still just a kid, I remember joining hundreds of others, thronging arterial city bridges in defiance of NATO. It was a case of bomb us if you dare and we even wore tee shirts with specially designed targets printed on them. I still remember the terrorizing thunder of exploding bombs and missiles and the crumping noise that followed. I particularly recall the strange crackling sound of innocuous-looking foil ribbons being dropped over the city, designed to short out and disable our power grid. To this day, I still can’t help but panic whenever I hear a loud, but harmless passenger plane pass overhead.

Deda, during those times remained stoic. Eschewing our neighbourhood air raid shelter for his fifth floor apartment, he preferred to stay at home and as he put it, enjoy the show from his terrace.

Despite the hardship – often hidden from us by our elders – I still think fondly of my childhood and so yes, despite the mental scars of war, they remain my halcyon days.

Part One

Chapter One

Running Away

May 2014

My Wizz Air flight emerged from the clouds and looking out of the window, after a brief flash of sun kissed sea, I saw the tiny island below in its entirety. As we skimmed flat rooftops, I couldn’t help but compare my new world to somewhere like Kabul. A jumble of drab sandstone blocks crowded together on what looked like arid earth. Cranes and church spires rose above untidy dwellings that still sprouted TV antennas of old and my eyes searched for the relief of greenery. It was down there, but dusty and stunted it hardly grew in profusion. What plant life existed below was a million miles away from the lush green countryside of the country I had not long since left.

Just a few hours earlier, I’d shared a crowded minibus from Belgrade to Budapest. Morale had been high, a few people, their tongues loosened by alcohol, chattered incessantly about the land to which we were all heading. The more optimistic among them, shared their dreams of making a fortune in the sun. Not long after setting off, a drunk had flagged down our minibus and been dropped off in another town and I remember smiling as the unofficial passenger had poured out of the doors and staggered off into the night. At Budapest airport, we were shepherded into a cold and very basic aircraft hangar, and if I’d expected luxury or glamorous duty free shopping, I’d been mistaken.

My fellow minibus passengers and me had chosen to travel to the island via Hungary, because both countries are part of the Schengen agreement and as such do not have passport control. My own country is also part of Schengen, but only in as much as we don’t require a visa to visit the EU. Had I been arriving directly from Serbia, I’d have been subjected to passport control and a certain grilling by immigration officers. I would witness this later, but for the moment, I was free to seek my fortunes without hindrance and could remain in the country for up to three months.

The aircraft’s wheels were lowered with a muted thump and the sun-polished tarmac of the runway rushed up to meet us. After a surprisingly gentle bump, I was in Malta. This small rock is surrounded by the glittering Mediterranean. I love the sea, but I don’t remember experiencing any of the holiday excitement that I’d always felt when, after a long car journey from Belgrade to Montenegro or Croatia, the car or bus climbed a hill to reveal a tantalising glimpse of the sea. I wasn’t here on holiday; I was running away. I suddenly felt lonely and wondered if I’d made a dreadful mistake...

I was married and had a mortgage and other debts to pay, and so to make ends meet, the minute I finished studying law at university, I opened a mini-market. For the best part of eighteen months, I struggled to keep my head above water. The final nail in the coffin was the opening of a supermarket chain on my patch. Overnight, all but my loyal customers deserted me and it hadn’t been long before I could no longer buy stock to replace the few items that I had sold. A drinks company still hounds me to this day, demanding that I pay for mythical empty bottle crates that they claim I still possess.

With the failure of the mini-market, I found work with a tourist agency, taking schoolchildren on educational excursions. After some time, I transferred to their legal department. Criss-crossing Serbia in rickety old buses, to cover court cases up and down the country, I was sometimes so far from home that I would need to spend the night in a run-down, company owned hotel. Even from the beginning, I would often go for months without being paid. One day, despite me having still been expected to work, the pay dried up completely. To this day, I am still owed wage arrears that, if I’m lucky, are sporadically