by Girl A
I still can’t understand how they could be turned on by a sobbing child who was indifferent to them. A prostitute will put on a show if she knows that if she does she may get more money. And she’ll play an active part in it, again because of the money. But when they attacked me, it was just a kid taking her leggings and knickers off with everything else still on, lying there on the bed and looking at the wall while they did it. No conversation, just Tariq having told them, ‘She’s young and tight,’ and giving them a price.
Where was the fun in that for these men? Maybe it’s the power, the control. There’s no power with a prostitute, but there is with a child, even if she could just as easily be your daughter.
It was one huge circle of activity, a bit like when you throw a stone into the middle of a lake and the ripples keep going out towards the edges. Obviously there are paedophiles from all races, but almost all those who attacked me were Pakistani. I’ve heard since that white paedophiles operate mostly on their own. To my knowledge they don’t usually do what these guys did: ring their mates and say, ‘We’ve got a fourteen-year-old here, come on round.’
It’s almost as if they don’t see it as wrong. There were so many of them, all friends, or friends of friends, all passing on numbers to each other so they could have sex with a young white girl. They’d think it was normal to go to someone else’s house, walk into a room where three schoolgirls were being plied with drink, and then a few minutes later force them to have sex.
Some of them, and men like them, had been going through the same vile ritual for years.
* * *
Through all this, it was Harry who’d been the one to distract me, however briefly, from the nightmare that I was living with Emma and the gang. For all his weirdness with Emma, he was like a father figure to me, friendly, happy, with a knack of taking me out of myself when things became too much. It was as if he understood.
But when he saw me getting into taxis, the same taxis with Emma, he must have put two and two together. Everyone else in the house seemed to know, so I suppose it was inevitable that he’d realise, too. And, of course, Emma would have been happy to give him all the lurid details.
There began to be a disturbing change in the way Harry behaved around me. He’d never talked about sex in front of me before, and I wouldn’t have expected him to – not an old guy in his fifties, who could have been my granddad. But now he did, whenever any of the girls were around.
Emma and Roxanne seemed to love it, and actually thought it funny when he pointed at the top of my legs and said, ‘You know what that’s for, don’t you? Make whatever you can out of it.’
I would go red and shrink away, mortified that someone like him, someone I looked up to, could have said such a thing. It got worse, though, as he started asking me weird questions when we were alone, maybe when Coronation Street was on, or EastEnders, which he loved. And they always seemed to have something to do with sex.
‘What’s your bra size, Hannah?’ he asked once.
‘Do you shave down there?’
And then, out of the blue: ‘Have you ever come?’
One day I’d gone to school without some of the books I needed. When I returned to the house at around 10 a.m. to pick them up, the other people in the house were asleep, but Harry obviously wasn’t: I could hear the television in his room was on.
At first I was glad. The door to my room was closed but it didn’t have a handle on the outside, so I knocked on Harry’s to ask him if he had anything I could use to open it.
He told me to come in. His room was painted red. The TV was in the corner and Harry’s double bed was opposite the window. Daylight was streaming in.
‘Come and sit down,’ he said, patting the side of the bed. I did, and he shifted towards me.
The things he said next took me back to the day my whole nightmare had started. The more he said, the sicker I felt.
Just like Daddy had done, he was saying how much he liked me. But then the twist.
‘You’ve been living here for free, haven’t you, my darling?’
‘Yes,’ I mumbled.
‘And you’ve had my food and my cider and all the other things for free too, haven’t you?’
I didn’t reply, but then, I hardly needed to. I knew where the conversation was headed, and no matter what I said, it wasn’t going to change anything. Unless I wanted to pay rent or else go back home, I’d have to ‘treat’ him.
‘I’ve always wanted to do things to you,’ he breathed, ‘right from the first day you came here. Don’t you think I deserve something?’
His words hung in the air. He knew I was trapped, knew I’d feel I had nowhere else I could go, and that no matter what he did to me no one would believe me.
It was another betrayal. I wanted to yell at him and scream: ‘You’re a pervert, get lost!’ But I knew that if I did he’d throw me out. And then what?
I was in my school uniform and I shuddered as his hand crept towards me, brushing my knee as it slid under my skirt. The tears were welling up, but I wouldn’t let them fall. I tried desperately to keep my legs crossed so he couldn’t get to me. Then he changed tack, withdrawing his hand and instead pushing back the quilt. I could see he was naked and had an erection. Slowly, he reached out to take my hand and put it on him.
‘I’ve been told you give good blow jobs,’ he said quietly, ‘so suck it, there’s a good girl, and then you can stay.’
I felt the same sense of hopelessness that engulfed me every time Emma took me to the men. I’d been so conditioned that I couldn’t fight them – any of them. It had got to the point that all I could ever think of by then was to get it over and done with as soon as possible, and cling to the idea that it wasn’t me doing it but some other girl, some other victim.
When it was over, Harry looked down at me and said, ‘Get a roll-up if you want. Then get your stuff and get off to school.’
I felt horrible. Doing that with Harry was worse than when I was with the other men because I was living with him. I had to see him every day. I’d trusted him. I thought he was a surrogate father in some ways. And now this. Another paedophile to ruin my life, and another layer of misery to try to shut out.
There would be other times with Harry, of course. And I always did it because Harry, just like Emma, knew everything … including where I lived.
That night, when I told Emma about it, she said she did it to him, too, when she was skint, and he’d give her £10. Roxanne did it as well. To them it was just normal. Normal.
I dreaded the thought that one day it might seem normal to me.
* * *
I now had no sanctuary, only differing levels of pain and misery. Harry’s place was a prison filled with hopeless, feral creatures I knew cared less for me than for the fleas that infested their mangy dogs – some nights, after that first time with Harry, I would sit down with a glass of water, picking up scores of fleas and drowning them. I wanted to drown, too.
I was full of self-loathing. I hated myself for letting it all happen, but I didn’t know how to stop it. All the time Emma was telling me my parents would be ashamed of me so I could never go back home, and all the time I was having to do things that would make it even more difficult to return.
I knew that I needed protecting from myself because I’d been making the wrong decisions. I was like a different person. I didn’t have a life any more. It was all a blur, a different world. I didn’t really know how to cope with anything and just blanked everything out. I didn’t have the power to resist the men because they were so intimidating. I needed someone to do it for me – to stop it for me.
I became increasingly unkempt: I smelt, and my hair was always dirty and lank. I was almost feral myself. The men who were abusing me didn’t care what I was wearing, and I didn’t care what I was wearing, so I’d generally just keep on the same tracksuit day after day. I’d go around stinking of alcohol and with wee on my jacket, but not having a clue how it had got there. Sometimes I’d wear boys�
� clothes, but it still didn’t bother them – just so long as they could do what they wanted with me.
* * *
Aarif’s flat was the gang’s favourite haunt. I was taken there about four times a week from August, through September and October and into November.
The arrangements would be made by Tariq, who would tell Emma what time to get there and how many men were likely to be waiting. He’d then come and pick us up from Harry’s house.
We’d arrive at the flat at about 8 p.m. or 9 p.m. There would usually be food and always vodka. Because I knew what was coming I’d drink as much as I could – usually about half a litre. Once I was drunk, either Tariq or Emma would tell me who I’d be sleeping with and send me into the bedroom.
I had to have sex with Aarif every time. There would usually be three or four others, sometimes five, but he would always go first. Tariq never said why it had to be that way, he’d just tell me to go and have sex with him.
It was the same routine. I’d go into the bedroom and lie on the bed. Aarif, and then the others, would come in, get naked and climb on top of me. I’d just lie there. Afterwards the man who’d just raped me would go back into the living room and the next one would come in.
Usually Saj was there, and Cassie from Castleton Taxis, Joe from Jo Baxi’s Taxis, and another of the drivers, who, for some reason – that I never wanted to know – was called Megamuncher. Sometimes there were other girls there too: Roxanne, Paige, a third girl who was introduced to me as Darcy, and a fourth I didn’t know who was half-Asian, half-white. I only saw her that one time.
Roxanne only came to Aarif’s flat at weekends that winter, because during the week she was away from Harry’s. She was thirteen but looked younger. She was with us about a dozen times.
I know she slept with Megamuncher, and I think with Cassie as well. I never actually saw her have proper sex, but I’d seen her give Aarif a blow job. It was on a night that Tariq wouldn’t take us home because he’d been arguing with Emma. He threw us out of his car at a garage near Aarif’s flat. So we walked there and rang the buzzer. Emma asked Aarif: ‘If one of them gives you a blow job, will you give us the taxi money to get home?’
He said, ‘Yeah.’
I don’t know why it ended up being Roxanne, but I remember Emma telling her she’d batter her if she didn’t do it. Roxanne just did it, while Emma and I sat there on the other sofa. Nothing was said, though I was squirming. I felt tight about Roxanne having to do it, but at the same time I was so relieved it wasn’t me.
For all that I’d been through myself, the sight of that thirteen-year-old girl giving a middle-aged man a blow job will haunt me for ever. She’d barely taken on a woman’s body, and yet there she was, leaning over him with a smile, giving the sort of performance that would have made you think she was a porn star.
At thirteen.
I shuddered when I thought about how much practice, how many encounters, she must have been through to become so proficient, so convincing. As if it was something she’d been doing since she was a kid. And would there ever have been any love?
All Emma could do was laugh at her, and him, as they went through the whole horrific pantomime.
To Roxanne, it was absolutely, entirely normal: just something she did, a trick in the repertoire, that she was happy to do for any bloke at all, just so long as she could have a few swigs of vodka and end up with a fiver or a taxi home. What did she get from it? A feeling that she was being appreciated? Valued? Loved? What was her life normally that she had to come here to get that? At the time, though, I never stopped to ask those questions of myself.
Most of the time at Aarif’s, though, it was just me and Emma, both of us lying there, in turns, being abused by however many of them had paid. Whenever it was all over for me I’d put my leggings on again and go back into the living room. Without fail I’d feel ashamed and dead inside. If ever I refused to lie there for them they’d throw me out and I’d have to make my own way home. But I was usually too numb, too cowed, to refuse.
They didn’t bother talking to us. Every night it happened, they would just chat among themselves in their own language until they’d finished and it was time for us to go home. We never stayed the night; we were always back home by sunrise and usually much earlier.
The worst times with Aarif were when he wanted me ‘the other way’. When he did it the first time, he promised me he wouldn’t but, of course, he did, suddenly and without warning, and the pain of it shot right through my body.
The first time it happened, Emma had just been with him and had then shouted me into the bedroom to sleep with him. They ended up dragging me in.
At first I lay on my back, but then he told me to turn over. When it happened I tried to arch away from him as the first sobs welled up deep within me. I was screaming and shouting at him to get off me. I shouted for Emma, too, and she came in, followed by Darcy, who’d seen me being dragged into the bedroom and who was asking if I was all right.
Aarif had just carried on the attack until they came in, me sobbing from the searing pain and humiliation, trying desperately to fend him off. Darcy had a friend there that night and because I was crying so much she was saying, ‘Should I stay for her?’ Emma was telling them to go, that’d I’d be all right. She was laughing. I think she got a buzz from knowing I’d been attacked that way.
Slowly, painfully, I put my clothes back on and a few minutes later Tariq arrived to pick us up. When Emma told him what had happened, he showed not an ounce of sympathy.
In his mind it was all about practicalities. ‘If it’s your period, you have to do it that way because otherwise it’s unclean for the man,’ he said. ‘There’s no point crying about it.’
Most of the other men liked to do that to me as well, especially if I was on my period. As Tariq had made clear, it meant they stayed ‘clean’ while they were raping me. Lucky them.
There were lots of times I had to sleep with Megamuncher, who was in his thirties, with long hair swept back over his shoulders. He sometimes used a silver BMW. I think he worked part-time in an Asian clothes shop. We went past it once, on a big road with a lot of takeaways, and Emma pointed it out.
Megamuncher had sex with Emma more times than with me, but for me it was still so often I can’t add them all up. It’s the same with most of them.
I think Joe from Jo Baxi’s and Cassie from Castleton Taxis were friends, because they’d usually turn up at the flat together. Usually I was dead drunk, but I remember the first time with Joe. Aarif just told me to sleep with him and I did because I was used to it. I didn’t want to, and I didn’t like it, but I was used to having sex with all these men. I knew it was wrong because they were old and I was only young – and because I didn’t want them to do it. Every time I’d just want them to hurry up, hurry up, for God’s sake, hurry up and get it over with.
That first time with Joe, and all the other times, I’d just turn my head away from him and towards the wall. He must have known – they all must have known – that I didn’t like doing it, because why else would I have just lain there and stared at the wall?
I tried not to think about anything any more. It was better that way. I was there in that world, I was living it, but I wasn’t thinking. I’d walk down the street like a zombie, emotionally shut down, with everything in my vision moving in slow motion. I could hear things going on around me, but I couldn’t distinguish what they were, and I couldn’t respond, because I wasn’t actually listening.
It was like a dream state. I didn’t want to contribute to the world around me any more, and even if I had, I wouldn’t have been capable of doing so. My dignity and self-respect had both been ripped away, leaving me an emotionally empty shell. I could feel my brain and all my senses shutting down, leaving just numbness.
And I welcomed it.
Gradually, I had come to feel that the worst things were happening not to me but to someone else. I wasn’t sad any more, I wasn’t angry any more, and I wasn’t happy. Ever.<
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* * *
Thankfully, however, I had the occasional respite, as well as school. Most Thursdays would mean the walk into the Crisis Intervention place in Taylor Street with Emma. I’d always try to just sit there, hoping not to have to speak. I think Jane could tell I was intimidated by the huge girl next to me. Right from the start, Emma had done the talking for me, trying to lay a smokescreen, making up stories about men I supposedly loved to sleep with, saying, ‘Yeah, she’s a slag,’ and things like that.
But soon I wasn’t even embarrassed. I’d gone past that. I had other things to worry about, so what was the point?
As I say, Jane sensed that Emma had a hold over me – though at that time she had no idea quite how strong that was or how deep it went. Sometimes, if Emma had gone out to do a test or do a wee, Jane would ask: ‘Is there anything you’d like to tell me while she’s not here?’ I always said no. Jane would then suggest I could see her alone. I wanted to, but again I would say no.
At that stage I couldn’t engage with anyone. All I could do was try to beat back the pressure and pain I was in.
On those Thursday nights we’d come away from Taylor Street with a bag of condoms, usually around ten of them, always in a white bag. Emma would get them for herself or she’d get a bag for me as well. Out we’d go onto the street – her singing or whistling, me silent and shuffling beside her.
Chapter Thirteen
Disturbia
Emma never rested in her quest to find more and more men for us – obviously, the more men I slept with, the more money she got. Over those next few weeks she found lots of new faces that I’d never seen before. I first met Billy at Aarif’s. He was a skinny Asian man with short hair and, according to Emma, he was good looking.
‘So it’ll be easier with him,’ she said one day, me in the bath, her sitting on the loo seat so she could keep an eye on me and make sure I’d shaved.