by Girl A
A couple of days after the police interview, detectives drove me around so I could show them the flats and houses Daddy had taken me to. They told me the knickers had finally gone off to a forensic lab to be tested. Once that had been done, they’d really start making progress. Soon, they said, they’d be able to get a file sent to the Crown Prosecution Service.
‘If the DNA matches, it will be proof enough,’ said one of the detectives. At that point, they would bring charges and it would go to court. They also told me that in cases involving children, defendants are brought to trial as quickly as possible because everyone in the legal system, from the police and the CPS to the barristers and the judges, all want to save kids the trauma of a long wait for justice.
So in my case – a case of multiple rapes and being passed around, trafficked, by Daddy – it shouldn’t take too long. It was easy, simple and it would mean I could get on with my life.
* * *
In the end it was me, rather than my abusers, who appeared in a courtroom first.
I went with my dad to Rochdale Magistrates’ Court, where we sat on a hard wooden bench for ten minutes, me half terrified, half angry, hauled up on the charge of criminal damage. At the end of it, the magistrates decided to adjourn the case because of the allegations I’d made.
Meanwhile, Daddy and Immy were still out there. Daddy had been given bail the same day he was arrested. In Immy’s case, the police didn’t even arrest him until the October. It seemed astonishing that they were still free to roam the streets. And always in the back of my mind was the thought, What if they come for me?
Fatally, Mum and Dad were still happy for me to stay at Harry’s house with Emma. They thought it was all about the Balti House and nothing remotely to do with her. And she, cunning as ever, made out as if her new best friend had been raped and she’d be there to support her. So, she came to collect me not long afterwards, watched as my parents gave me a hug and off we went – me and Emma – back to the last place in the world I should be.
I don’t know to this day how Emma held her nerve about being my ever-caring friend, but somehow she did. I’m sure that most normal people, even criminals, would have laid low to see if the coast was clear, but not Emma. Maybe she had some sixth sense that regardless of Daddy’s arrest, she was safe from the police. But, whatever the reason, her phone was crammed with the numbers of the Asian men she’d met in Heywood, Rochdale and far beyond. And she wasn’t slow to start ringing some of them.
I knew nothing of this, of course, but what I did know, from the moment I stepped back over the threshold at Harry’s place, was that she still wanted to control me. And, as usual, she had a plan.
‘Time for a bath,’ she announced. ‘And make sure you shave. I can’t have them seeing you like that.’
Them seeing me? I shrank back in fear. The police involvement had made no difference to her. She was still determined to control me, and I, submissive, broken, couldn’t fight back. I know I should have done, but I always felt so incredibly weak when I was with her – and even when I wasn’t.
I never, ever had a real heart-to-heart with her, and I always felt she was on the verge of laughing or sneering at me. Her reputation as the hardest girl in the area made even lads tremble and I knew that if she ever battered me, I’d be pulp. I made it a rule right then to try as hard as I could never to show any weakness in front of her. All the time I tried to put on a front to make her think I could take it – and also so that she wouldn’t get any pleasure out of whatever was happening to me.
The police interview had been on the Friday. That very weekend, Emma was taking me into Heywood. Depressed, fearful, I clung to the hope that maybe I’d read things the wrong way: that it was all over, and she wouldn’t dare do what she’d done with me before.
It was a forlorn hope because we ended up at the front door of Tasty Bites. I had a shock when Emma and I walked in because there was a girl I recognised – Paige, a dizzy blonde from my school. She was two years younger than me, incredibly naïve, and still very much a girl. I shuddered. Could she have been caught up in this as well?
We barely acknowledged each other as the three of us climbed the stairs. I’d been here before, of course, but had Paige? Maybe after I’d stopped going all those months ago? I could barely lift my feet as we made our way upstairs.
So, there we were, back at the place where, a lifetime ago – or so it seemed – I’d had such a great time. Climbing the stairs this time, though, was a totally different experience. Whereas in my old life I’d have almost skipped up the stairs, this time, recalling the almost identical staircase of the Balti, and what had happened once I’d got to the top, I could barely lift my feet.
On the landing we could hear the sound of muffled laughter coming from a bedroom. It turned to silence as soon as Emma twisted the door knob and pushed her heavy frame into the room. Following on behind Paige, I was confronted by half a dozen Asian men – all of them old, in their thirties, forties, maybe even fifties, like Daddy.
One of them, a thickset man with tousled black hair and dense eyebrows, broke the silence, leaning across with a bottle of vodka and saying: ‘Here, you can have this … Saj, give them some glasses. The cola’s over there.’
The man’s voice, low and hard, carried an unmistakable authority and menace. It was Emma, of course, who poured the drinks and handed one each to me and Paige. As she did so, she glanced up at the man with the tousled hair and said: ‘This is Tariq’.
Tariq. Emma’s new sinister ‘boyfriend.’ The same man I had been too afraid of telling John about in the police interview.
The men, Tariq included, had been leering at us before, but now, as we sipped the vodka – me scared, Paige scared, Emma her normal, impassive self – some of the men started pointing at us. Mostly they were speaking in their own language, but occasionally I’d catch the odd word in English: like ‘fat’ when they looked at Emma, and ‘young’, ‘tight’ and ‘pretty’ when they looked at Paige or me. I felt like a piece of meat.
Then one of them asked me if I’d have sex with him, then another. I said no. They were asking Paige too.
‘You do sex,’ said one, his eyes burning first into mine, then into Paige’s. It was an instruction. Another pressed close by. ‘Do it, do it, do it,’ he said. Others took up the chant. ‘Do it, do it, do it!’
That was it for me. It was a small room, scarily so with all these men in it, and as they herded around us I started to panic. I looked around wildly for Emma. For all my new-found intentions never to show weakness in front of her, I clutched at her, begging her to let me leave.
‘I’ve got to go, Emma. You’ve got to let me go!’
Maybe she did have a lingering concern about the police, because rather than batter me she just shrugged, reached into her purse and handed me a two pound coin. It felt like a miracle.
‘Go on, then,’ she sneered. ‘Get a taxi back to Harry’s. But don’t do anything stupid. Understand?’
I nodded and headed for the door, brushing away the alien hands that grabbed at me as I fled. I tried to catch Paige’s eye so she’d come with me, but by then Emma was already putting a chubby arm around her to head off any possible escape.
One of the men followed me out, trying to grope me as I headed downstairs, but Tariq pulled him away. ‘Sorry, master,’ said my would-be groper.
I got a taxi outside Morrison’s and, in the darkness, me quivering on the back seat, the car headed back to Harry’s.
Harry was still up when I got back, watching a late-night show on TV. ‘You all right, pet?’ he asked as I walked in, mascara down my face, still shaking.
‘Fine, thanks, Harry … well, almost. Though I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Fine by me,’ he said. ‘But come over here if you need a hug.’ And so I did, falling into his arms, feeling suddenly safe after the trauma and fear of the evening.
‘There, there,’ he smiled, looking down into my eyes. ‘Things are never as bad as they
seem. Everything just seems tougher when you’re a kid. I’ll always be here for you – Harry will always be here.’
It helped, it really did.
* * *
The next morning, I asked Emma what had happened after I’d left, but all she would say, with typical sarcasm, was, ‘Poor Hannah, you missed all the fun.’
I saw Paige the next day but didn’t get a chance to speak to her. Maybe Emma deliberately kept us apart. To this day I still don’t know what happened to her that evening, though I heard later that because she was so young the gang just used her for blow jobs.
The next night, Emma took me for a drive with Tariq.
I mumbled a greeting before climbing into the back of the silver minibus he drove for Eagle Taxis. As we sped away, his two-way radio crackled into life. ‘Car 40,’ said a remote voice, ‘Car 40.’
‘Yes, this is Car 40,’ said Tariq, and the two of them then carried on a conversation in their first language, so I couldn’t understand. That night we just drove around Heywood and Rochdale for half an hour. Emma spent most of the time in the front with him, chatting inanely, while I sat in the back wondering where my life had gone.
At one point he got out briefly to go into a takeaway. While he was gone, Emma turned round in her seat, saying to me, ‘He’s great, isn’t he?’
Yes, brilliant, I thought. A forty-year-old boyfriend for a girl of fifteen. Even I, for all that my mind was skewed, guessed that to Tariq, Emma was no more than a meal ticket, a way to make money by providing ‘free’ young girls for him to sell sexual access to.
At least he never touched me, not that day, not any day. He still frightened me, though, because he looked so moody and so menacing. His nickname – Master – seemed entirely appropriate.
That first drive with Tariq proved to be the first of several that week. Slowly at first, then more so, I began to relax – even when we went back to Tasty Bites.
I felt even better when, with one of her rare smiles, Emma said: ‘Now that Daddy’s out of the way, it won’t ever happen again, OK?’
Did she mean it? I desperately hoped so.
Regardless of my own fate, Emma still wanted what she called shagging – and not just with her ‘boyfriend’. Late at night, once the place had closed, I’d be left downstairs while she clambered up the steps with Tariq and a few other men he’d obviously arranged to meet there.
Pino was one of the guys Emma slept with on those nights; Saj another of them. I guess that whatever Emma thought, Tariq, like a true entrepreneur, was just happy to get paid.
One night, towards the end of August, there was a variation to this new routine – the routine my fear had led me to become part of again despite going to the police. We stopped off briefly at Tasty Bites with Tariq, but then he drove us to a scruffy, depressing flat just off the Whitworth Road in Rochdale.
I’ve forgotten the address, but I could take you there. We’d always go round the back and up the stairs to get in.
It belonged to Saj, but he was renting it out to his cousin, a guy called Aarif. He had designer stubble and his hair was always cut in a short-back-and-sides. He worked as a wedding photographer: sometimes he’d leave his work on one of the two computers he kept in the lounge. He never took pictures of us, though. And, oddly, I thought, he didn’t have a TV.
Aarif wasn’t the sort to tell us much about himself, but I know he had kids because sometimes he’d speak to them on the phone, saying it was his son or daughter. Some of his friends called him Khan.
The flat had just the one bedroom that you got into by taking a step up. There was a double bed in there. The bathroom had a shower but no bath.
Aarif was there on his own.
As soon as we arrived, Emma told me I had to go and sleep with him. I said, ‘No, you promised this wouldn’t happen again.’ So she actually went into the bedroom with him herself, ‘… to show that it’s OK.’
I stayed in the living room, feeling glad that I’d not had to sleep with him. But while we waited, Tariq started complaining that ‘it wasn’t fair’ on Emma. Next time, he said, I should do what I was told.
Emma came out a few minutes later and we went home. We’d been in the flat for no more than a quarter of an hour.
The next night it really was my turn. There were four of them there this time: Aarif, Saj, a guy from Jo Baxi’s Taxis who told us to call him Joe. I have no idea what his real name was. There was another man too who I never got a name for.
Emma made me go with the first three, one after the other.
I remember there were clothes hanging on the handles of the wardrobe, and a table next to the bed with a drawer. There were condoms inside it and they all got one out before they attacked the sobbing girl at their mercy on the bed: one by one, turn by turn.
I assume Tariq, or maybe Aarif, had told them about the condoms before each of them came in. Either way, I got the impression they’d been to the flat before, with other girls. It seemed normal to them. They all knew each other; they were friendly with each other.
I knew I was trapped and that I couldn’t stop them. If I had, I think they would have attacked me in a different way. Aarif came in first, then Saj, then Joe, while Emma just sat in the lounge.
It was sick. How can a man get any pleasure from something like that? As far as I know they all had wives, so why do that to a kid? All I could wonder was what they could find attractive about me? An under-age girl who just lay there, sobbing, looking up at them … as they come to her one by one.
I don’t know whether all the men knew my age, but Tariq certainly did, and I’m sure the fact that I was under age was the main reason they wanted me.
That night, Aarif handed Emma the money for having raped me: I don’t know how much it was. Afterwards, they all went for a meal with Tariq. When they got back, Emma gave the money to him and he gave her £10 of it back.
On the way home, Tariq kept saying: ‘Hannah, you’re a good girl.’ While I sobbed in the back, Emma was just laughing.
I felt numb. Why hadn’t I just run out into the street, anywhere? Just to get away from them. Looking back, I know that’s what I should have done. But the kid I was then was frozen with fear and just kept on thinking that they would make things even worse for me if I resisted. And I also thought just what Emma had hoped I’d think: that it was hopeless, that no one would believe me. ‘What, that you’ve been raped dozens of times?’ she scoffed. ‘They’ll just laugh at you.’
They would, I thought. A girl who goes to the police about being raped, and a few days later is going in cars to be abused again by loads of other men? They’d fall about laughing and then kick me out. And to go where? The gang would have just picked me up again. In my mind, they were just too strong and too ruthless to resist. I thought it would be me who’d be blamed, not them, and that afterwards they’d want their revenge.
Chapter Eleven
You’ve Got To Get Away
I couldn’t believe what was happening to me – all within a few days of going to the police. In the police station I thought I was saved, that it would end. Now I was thinking, It’s never going to go away. Not even the police can protect me. It’s just happening again.
I’d told the police about Emma and how she’d organised it all with Daddy and Immy, so I thought they’d investigate her. But as far as I know they didn’t – and that meant she could just go on doing what she’d been doing, only with different men instead of Daddy, and with Tariq now mostly pulling the strings.
From that point on, it just got worse. It would happen most days, with up to five different men in a day. And not even just in one house or one flat: I’d be taken to one house, then another, then a third. It might be Rochdale one night, Bradford the next, or Nelson or Oldham.
Wherever I was taken, there was a set routine, in which they’d give me alcohol to get me drunk and then come at me, one after the other, until they’d had enough of me. Then I’d be taken back to Harry’s to await the next call.
In the flats and houses where I’d be taken, I’d feel I was looking down on myself: lying there, huddled and crying, naked from the waist down, with Emma bringing in a new man every time the previous one had finished with me. She would be laughing. It was still all just a joke to her.
Maybe it was the trauma of it all, but I felt myself losing track of what was normal. Lying spread-eagled on a bed so a succession of men could abuse me just became routine. I became used to it, I suppose. I stopped feeling disgusted, and felt it was almost a challenge – a challenge to see if I could somehow cope with the pain and humiliation, no matter how many men Emma made me sleep with. I tried to convince myself that just by coping with the sheer numbers I was becoming stronger. It was a way to make things seem better than they were: I could feel my mind and all my thought processes distorting. It was like an illness.
With Emma around me 24/7, I began to sense I was being brainwashed. At Harry’s place, she’d even use her hold over me to get me to do chores. Whereas at home with Mum and Dad, I’d resisted, here I felt I had to do as she told me. She knew I had no money to pay rent, or to buy food, so she’d come down in the mornings and tell me what to do. If I didn’t, she said she’d get Harry to chuck me out.
The softest she ever appeared were the times she’d sit on the loo seat while I was bathing and chat about some of the men she planned to take me to later.
‘You’ll be OK with him cos he’s good looking,’ she might say. ‘So it won’t be as bad and you won’t have to mess up by being a mard ass.’
The fifteen-year-old me didn’t even know that what she was doing was a crime. All the time it was happening, I never thought of it as such. I didn’t know about ‘grooming’ – where grown-ups become friends with children so they can have sex with them. I knew it was wrong, but I didn’t know that what the men were doing to me, and what Emma was arranging for them to do to me, was against the law. I didn’t know there was a name for it. I just knew that if I resisted, they would come and get me. I could see Tariq and Emma getting money for what was happening to me, but I couldn’t see a way of stopping it.