No way," she tells me, as her sisters press glasses of raki on their English visitor. They can tell I've been abroad. They know what I've done. Since she was deported from Britain earlier this year without any papers, Janie that's what she likes to be called has not even managed to tell her family that she was forced to be a prostitute. They would have to throw me out," she tells me, in the assurance that her mother and sisters, squeezed next to us on a sagging sofa, cannot understand a word she's saying.
Her family are proud. She is the closest they have ever come to success. Janie is just one of hundreds of confused, traumatised Albanian girls trickling back to their jobless, unforgiving country after having been forced to service hundreds of men in western European cities before eventually being deported.
Later, her hands tremble and her eyes water as she tells me, away from the gazing family eyes and helped by a glass of Albanian red wine, what really happened. At 15, Janie, one of seven whose father had been shot dead by a neighbour in a row over a patch of land, had moved with her mother into her older sister's house. But her sister's husband, strained by the extra mouths to feed, began beating the young girl. Neighbours could see the bruises and often she was so battered she could not make it to school.
A failed attempt to take an overdose only increased her brother-in-law's rage. Then one day a neighbour came to her rescue, declaring he had fallen in love with her and wanted to help.
He paid for a "taxi" which smuggled them across the border to Greece, where he promised her they would find work and a better life. But when we got to Greece, he stopped saying that," she says. He paid for everything. I loved him. In Italy, Janie's "boyfriend" - whom she refuses to name for fear he may one day track her down - hooked up with some friends in a flat in Turin. They began beating the terrified teenager until she agreed to work the streets.
