Girl A

by Girl A

  This didn’t stop me being angry with them, however, because even though they didn’t know the full story, and obviously it wasn’t their fault, I wanted them to say, ‘You’re not going anywhere, you’re staying here.’

  They never did. To be fair to them, though, they didn’t know the full picture, and they couldn’t guess that Daddy may not even have been needed for what was going to happen to me next: Emma.

  To my parents, Emma was a supportive friend who was on my side. They even thought she was going to be giving evidence against the men who’d raped me.

  It was an ordinary taxi that called for us that afternoon; not one of the ones Emma would so often use when she was off with the gang.

  As the cab pulled away, the pair of us in the back, I kept hold of the thought that it would be all right because I’d spoken to the police and they knew what I’d been through. I’d be rescued. They wouldn’t let anything happen. And nor would Emma. With the police involved, she wouldn’t dare, would she? But we’d barely negotiated the first speed bump away from the estate when the mask dropped and she reverted to the monster they’d made her.

  ‘You bitch,’ she snarled. ‘Why did you grass on Daddy? It’ll do you no good, you know. If you take him to court, I’ll give evidence for him. Not you: him. And then how will it look?’

  I wanted to scream at the taxi driver to turn around, but he just kept going, lurching over the bumps, out onto the main road, and on, towards the house that had become my dungeon.

  * * *

  I should have stayed at home, of course, and perhaps someone should have made sure I did: my parents, the police, myself. But I didn’t.

  At that stage, all the people who could have rescued me still thought it was just Daddy and Immy who’d attacked me. They had no idea how deep I’d been taken in by the gang; how they’d infiltrated my mind, body and soul. Mum and Dad thought Emma could be a help to me after being raped. She was a mate, after all. Or, so they thought.

  That’s why they did nothing to stop me when I said I had to go back to Harry’s house – the last place on earth I should have been going to – and why they even waved me off in the taxi Emma had rung for.

  I didn’t want to go, but Emma still had a hold over me. Looking back, she must have been relieved to have me back. She’d have realised by then that she couldn’t use Daddy as the link to the men she liked to ‘chill’ with. So, while she looked around for someone else to act as her link, she wanted to make sure she kept her talons in me.

  Which is why, within twenty-four hours of first saying I’d been raped, and the same day I’d gone to retrieve the knickers that proved it, I was walking into Heywood with two other girls, one younger, one older, the latter of the trio for all the world looking like a honey monster.

  * * *

  It was a Thursday evening, and Emma, Roxanne and I were heading for the drop-in clinic on Taylor Street. It’s the place where they help girls like I was: the ones having under-age sex – whether willingly or not – the ones who might be risking STIs and pregnancy.

  Girls like these would call in at Taylor Street for advice, a bit of affection sometimes and, mostly, condoms. Certainly in Emma’s case, and Roxanne’s.

  Emma had effectively been abandoned by her family, and Roxanne too. She spent so much time at Harry’s because her mum didn’t give a damn about her. I suppose we were all, in our own way, looking for love; all of us listless and directionless. All of us, for whatever reason, were scraping along near the bottom of society. And, all of us were targets for men with no consciences.

  Even now, I find it really hard to sit here and write down the full truth, the absolute, cross-your-heart truth, even though it’s there in a dark corner of my mind, and probably always will be. But Jane knew, or at least, she came to know: Jane at Crisis Intervention. She was based at Taylor Street and, after every one of my visits, would jot down a page or two of notes and then write up a report.

  She’d been long enough in the job and was good enough to spot the signs. She’d tried in the past to help lots of other kids like me. She’d also tried to tell some of the people who had the power to intervene. Like Social Services. And the police. She made notes on my case and would be making notes for all the coming months in which I was in the grip of the gang; passing on the information to the powers-that-be if she thought it could help other people to help me: discreetly, of course, and on a completely confidential basis.

  Unlike me, she had no need either to cover things up or disguise things, or make things look not quite as bad as they were. What she wrote down was the truth as she saw it every time I turned up: a thin, waif-like girl with a troubled life, who, she suspected from very early on, was being abused by the most evil of men. Of course, Emma would never allow me to let on what was really going on, building up a smokescreen of us having fun with our boyfriends. But even so Jane was suspicious. She cared. And right from the start she tried her hardest to help me.

  This is her very first report on the young girl the media would come to know as ‘Girl A’:

  Crisis Intervention Team Report,

  August 7th, 2008

  Hannah came into Taylor St clinic with friends Emma and Roxanne. Hannah is going out with Jake who is nineteen. Hannah wanted to talk about contraception and asked to go on the pill. Advice given and Hannah went to see the nurse.

  You could be forgiven for thinking that that report might have applied to any one of a thousand under-age girls in Britain.

  But appearances can be deceptive.

  Jake was my other secret. He was one of Emma’s friends, and lived in Harry’s house too. In the middle of all the degrading sex I was having with the gang, I’d started to sleep with him, too.

  Ricky now had a girlfriend, so didn’t want me in his room. And I’d found out that Emma was now sleeping with Harry in his double bed, and I didn’t want anything to do with that.

  I had known Jake would come on to me at some point, but when it happened, it didn’t really seem to matter. The way I had seen it, my life was filled with abuse, and one more man using me wasn’t going to change anything. He wasn’t actually my boyfriend, as I’d told Jane, but at least he was more my age. And it gave me another smokescreen to hide behind at Crisis Intervention.

  Emma would take me to Taylor Street most weeks. The teenage part was always open between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. on Thursdays. She’d been a regular for years, having pregnancy tests, being checked for STIs and eventually walking back into the night with a smug smile and a bag full of condoms. She wanted her new recruit, her new meal ticket, to be looked after in the same way. She was taking care of her goods.

  That first time I joined her, just after talking to the police, I didn’t know where to look. There was a front desk, and the receptionist gave each of us a form with little boxes so we could tick the things we wanted. The form was then given to the relevant sexual health worker. In Emma’s case it was Jane, and when it was her turn, we both went in.

  It was another chance to escape, another chance to get help. But I’d already gone to the police, and it seemed pointless to involve this woman as well. Plus, I had Emma with me, so I knew I had to stay silent.

  Emma set off the same way she would do on every other occasion: talking nineteen-to-the-dozen, making up lies about her boyfriends, my boyfriends, everything. She’d describe the men we knew, but give them different names. She couldn’t stop herself showing off. She never let on about what was actually going on, but talk about the sex she’d have with them like it was the best ever. ‘I love shagging Pakis,’ she said that first time. ‘They’ve got bigger dicks.’

  Looking back, Jane must have seen a few girls like Emma in her time. She’d heard it all, I suppose, and wasn’t easily shocked. All she could do was to listen to all the girls she saw, to reach out to them, to try to ‘save’ as many of them as she could.

  Chapter Ten

  A New Master

  The local police do their video interviews in a specialist police sui
te in Manchester.

  I did my first one there within twenty-four hours of my arrest at the Balti House, but they had to abandon it. They’d run out of time, they said; the room was needed for someone else.

  My rescheduled video interview was held on 15 August. Thankfully, Emma was asleep as I crept away from Harry’s house and back home, so Dad could get me to the station by 10 a.m.

  We drove into the city in silence, but as we walked in towards the interview suite Dad took my hand and squeezed it. I responded with the faintest of smiles.

  I certainly didn’t look like a girl who was being abused, but then, I suppose I wouldn’t. I’d gone along in the same sort of clothes any other local teenager might have worn at that time: a light grey tracksuit and black T-shirt, my hair pulled to one side, my favourite, huge, heart-shaped earrings swinging every time I moved my head.

  The interview was carried out by a detective constable from the local CID called John with a colleague, Tim, in the monitoring room checking the recording equipment that would capture my words of evidence. My dad was in the waiting room.

  As I say, it was a specialist unit. The room itself was bare but for two cream sofas and a round table. John sat on one of the sofas; I was on the other. One camera recorded the whole of the room, the other just me.

  I started fidgeting pretty much straight away. I was nervous – understandably, I reckon, given what I’d told them, and what I thought they’d be thinking about me.

  John asked about Daddy, and then moved on to Immy. How had I become his ‘treat’, he wondered.

  I went through the story once, and the detective, pen in hand, a pad resting on his knee, went through it for a second time. Slowly.

  ‘Why go upstairs?’ he asked.

  ‘Daddy kept telling me he’d given me a treat, so I’d got to give his nephew a treat. He said, “We’ll just go upstairs and chill for a bit.”’

  ‘Why not just leave?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  I was looking down, desperate to avoid the camera and its inquisitive gaze. ‘We could have walked out of the front, but the customers and everything were there.’

  ‘Was there anything to stop you walking out the front or the back?’

  ‘Daddy said we couldn’t leave. There was nothing apart from that.’

  I told him about the room where Immy attacked me: the window with its tatty, dirty curtains that were held on by nails, the orange quilt on the mattress. It also made me think about the children’s clock with the little angel on it, in the other room.

  At first there had been four of us in the room, I said: Daddy, me, Immy and Emma. Then it was just me and Daddy’s nephew.

  John asked me what each of the men was wearing, but I couldn’t remember. ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘What was going through your mind?’

  ‘That I’m going to have to do it.’ I told him how he’d bent over me and pulled down both my leggings and my knickers. How I could see his erection and hear him saying, ‘Come on, please, you’ve got to do it now.’

  ‘How did you feel?’

  I was suddenly aware that my right hand was pressed against my face, resting against my cheek. How did I feel? ‘A bit scared, I just lay there with my legs open. He put it in with his hand.’

  ‘Was he wearing a condom?’

  I shook my head. ‘No.’ It had hurt, I said, and at the last moment he’d withdrawn and ejaculated over the grubby sheet I was lying on. I told him about him leaving and about Emma coming back with some money.

  Then John asked me about the time – less than a fortnight earlier – when Daddy had met Emma and me outside the Balti House and he’d taken us to a flat in Rochdale.

  I told him that Daddy had taken me into a room and ordered me to have sex with him. I’d protested, I said, telling Daddy that Emma had said it would be her he had sex with that night.

  Feeling the same shudder go through me as it had those two awful weeks ago, I recalled Daddy’s answer: ‘Emma’s lying,’ he’d said. ‘You have to do it.’

  I told the police officer I’d not wanted to go to the Balti House that night. The expression on his face gave nothing away. ‘Why did you go, then?’ he asked.

  ‘Emma wanted to,’ I said.

  ‘Didn’t you think you were putting yourself in a compromising position, bearing in mind what’d happened previously?’

  I knew the answer, of course I knew the answer, but I didn’t want to say it. But I did.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. And then added: ‘Emma was telling me to go, so I just did.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say “No” to her?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  As I said it, I realised I had unconsciously slipped my hands into the sleeves of my tracksuit, as if I wanted to hide, hide all of me, from these questions.

  Then I was recalling how Daddy said I had to have sex with him again, and that I felt I had no choice but to go into the bedroom with him. There was a mattress on the floor, I said, and I was trying to finish the vodka they’d given me when Daddy had come up behind me.

  I’d moved away from him at first, but eventually pulled my leggings down so he could get it over with.

  I was so embarrassed at admitting to that that my stomach was twisting into knots. But I tried to keep going.

  ‘He had to play with himself to get an erection,’ I said. ‘I told him to get off me, and I was crying. But he was just ignoring me. I felt dirty, and I was worried because he didn’t wear a johnny. Afterwards, I went into the bathroom to wipe myself with a tissue and put my knickers back on.’

  ‘Had he come inside you before?’ the detective asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  When we moved on to the time Daddy raped me in his car, John had to ask me to take my hand away from my mouth. Instead, I locked my arms in my lap. By the time we’d gone through my rapist’s entire repertoire of abuse, I realised I was running my fingernails back and forth across my mouth, as if I wanted to block the words that were coming from it.

  I told John how afterwards, Daddy had driven me back to Emma, who’d waited for me in Morrison’s car park, and she had asked where he’d taken me. I also told him that she’d said she’d been there too.

  John asked how long the whole business had taken, from start to finish.

  ‘Twenty minutes,’ I said.

  We were getting towards the end of the interview and I was telling him how Emma liked all the free food and the beer. And how she liked having sex with all these men.

  ‘How come you’d gone with her?’ he asked.

  I was still too frightened of Emma to tell this policeman everything. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘If I don’t go with her, she’ll fall out with me.’

  Perhaps the strain of the interview had taken its toll on him as well as me, but as he asked his next question, about an address we’d been taken to, he suppressed a yawn. I heard it, and it must be on the tape.

  John went on to ask what happened at this address, a place I didn’t know but which was about a twenty-minute drive from the Balti House.

  ‘What did you think was going to happen?’ asked the detective.

  ‘I don’t know. I had an idea they were going to want sex.’

  ‘What made you think that?’

  ‘Because they always did. Everywhere he takes us.’

  Then John asked whether anything had happened in the eight days since I’d first made my allegations to the police.

  So I told him how the day before I’d overheard Emma taking a call from Daddy, who was asking where I was, and then, knowing I was in the background, screaming: ‘She’s a bitch! Tell that Hannah she’s a bitch! I know people in Oldham. They’re going to get her!’

  As I spoke, the fear I’d felt at hearing his voice again came back to me, seeping through the walls of the police station and into the interview room.

  But there was something I didn’t tell him; something I was holding back, which I’ll explain later. Yes, Daddy had rung
Emma, and he had screamed abuse at me down the phone. But what I couldn’t tell the detective sitting patiently in front of me now was that at the time of the call, Emma and I were in someone else’s car; the car of a man even more sinister than Daddy, and someone – even in the few hours I’d spent with him – I was even more frightened of betraying.

  Worried that John might guess that I was holding back on him, I kept my head down and began playing with my nails. He took it as a sign I had nothing else to say, and a moment later was asking if I was happy to finish the interview there.

  ‘Has anyone else given a statement?’ I blurted out.

  John said something about things being under control, but I wasn’t really taking it in. I wanted to know whether they’d spoken to Emma by then, but I didn’t dare ask.

  The interview was over, the recording ended. As I stood up from the sofa, John glanced up at me and said, ‘Look, the tapes are off now. Did you just do this for a bit of money? You might as well admit it if you did, because why would you have kept going back?’

  I could hardly believe what he had just said. It made me feel sick and angry at the same time: as though I had been violated all over again. Why on earth would I have sat through all this if it wasn’t true? Why, for nearly three hours, would I have given him the sickening detail of what Daddy and his gang had done to me?

  Through gritted teeth I told him as much. ‘Every word I’ve told you is the truth,’ I said.

  ‘OK, let’s leave it there for now.’ And with that, he led me out of the room.

  Dad was waiting near the front desk when I emerged. As we left, he told me of a conversation he’d had with one of the investigators. ‘This happens all the time,’ the officer had told him. ‘We get lots of it around here, and it’s always Asian men and it’s always young white girls. Never Asian girls.’

  On the surface everything seemed to be vaguely normal. Mum and Dad at least knew of the rapes by Daddy and Immy and were trying to be supportive; the police were investigating; and Emma hadn’t battered me, despite both Daddy and Immy being taken in for questioning.