Girl A

by Girl A

  Actually, it wasn’t easier with him because rather than just get on with it, he’d always want to touch me, like I meant something to him. I told him if he was going to have sex with me then just to do it and not touch me.

  He’d have sex with Roxanne, too, and one night she told me she loved him. I couldn’t believe it – and one day nor will she, hopefully. How could she decide she loved someone who’d do that to her and all the other under-age girls? It was sick. But at the same time, I guess it was the ultimate clue as to just how brainwashed we girls had become by these monsters.

  We’d been seeing Cassie for a few weeks at Aarif’s when he started to ring Emma and say he wanted to take us somewhere else. Maybe he got us cheaper that way, I don’t know.

  He’d turn up in his people-carrier, a VW Sharan, before driving us out to Ashworth Valley. It’s all open moorland there, but it was still quite public – we were close to Rossendale School – but he’d park up on a track away from the main road.

  He always wanted to have the two of us together, one after the other. Usually he didn’t mind which way round it was, so we’d have to make the choice. Some choice. I always wanted to go first because it was quicker and cleaner – and easier, because the second time always took him longer to get through it.

  Emma usually had her way, though, and would go first, while I sat in the front trying to ignore the sound of cheap sex and him groaning. Then it would be my turn to get out of the front passenger seat and swap places with Emma in the back of his car. It’s shaming to say it, I know, but I didn’t care any more that he’d just been with someone else, with Emma. I was past that point; I felt disgusted enough without analysing every sordid thing that was happening to me. Sitting in the front, dreading my turn, I would try to concentrate on the hum of the huge wind turbines looking down on us. I often wondered what the local dog walkers and runners made of this taxi parking up on the moors in the early morning.

  I know that he knew our ages because Emma once told him when we were in his taxi. Instead of being shamed by this, straight away he had asked if she knew any girls who were younger, and Emma had told him about Roxanne and Paige. He asked her to bring them next time.

  I thought he was beyond perverted for saying that, though part of me was relieved, thinking that if they came it would mean I’d not have to have sex with him. I know it sounds awful, but that’s what I was thinking – what I had been reduced to.

  Tariq was all right about him picking us up and, anyway, Emma used to give him some of the money that Cassie gave her. Cassie would give her £30 or £40 after he’d had sex with us. Sometimes he said he was too tired to sleep with Emma, so then it would be just £20. But Emma would always give some of it to Tariq. Then she’d give me £5 or £10 or buy me a beer out of it.

  The money didn’t always go to Tariq and Emma, however. By now, Harry was having trouble paying his mortgage, and one night I saw the two of them talking. A while later Emma came over to me and said, ‘Go and get ready. I need to make some money for Harry.’ That night, I remember I had to sleep with five men. They all paid Emma and when we got back, she gave all the money to Harry. I think it was a couple of hundred quid.

  After a while, Billy started taking us to a flat in the Falinge area of Rochdale. It belonged to a guy called Jamal, who said he owned the franchise of a big shop somewhere in town. One night, after the men there had had sex with us, they were then going to throw us out. For some reason, Emma started to kick off – perhaps they hadn’t paid? Jamal hit her and she punched him back. We ended up having to walk home.

  Billy would also take us to the home of a guy called Safeer. It would be just Safeer there with another of the men, Tiger. Billy and Tiger would sleep with us, but never Safeer.

  On one occasion, there were four men there. Emma slept with two of them and wanted me to sleep with the other two, but I said I wasn’t going to do it. So she started telling me, ‘Just do it, just do it, because if I have to you’re not getting into my taxi.’

  I slept with one of them, but point-blank refused to do it with the other. He called me a white bitch and I called him a bastard. But I wasn’t going to sleep with him.

  * * *

  Sometimes it felt as though there were gangs within gangs, or maybe splinter groups of men who’d then fall out with each other. I know that every time Billy took us out, Tariq used to get mad and threaten Emma.

  He and Emma fell out over Juicy too, when he started picking us up in September. Juicy would pick us up in Peel Lane, near the Britannia Mill Industrial Estate in Heywood. He drove a light blue BMW and would take us into Ashworth Valley, though not as far into the lanes as Cassie did.

  The first time he was on his own, the next with a man he called Boss. Juicy was in his fifties, fat, balding, with a big, bent nose and a moustache, while Boss was younger, in his thirties, tall with short black hair. He usually wore Western clothes, and Juicy was always in Asian ones.

  We both had to have sex with them, one at a time. Whichever one wasn’t having sex would get out of the car and wait. It was mostly me with Boss and Emma with Juicy. I’d tell her I didn’t like it and she’d say, ‘So?’ Just like all the others, I felt I didn’t have a choice.

  I was with Juicy three or four times, with Boss six or seven times. Emma would get paid.

  After a while we started going to another flat in Falinge. Juicy said it was his auntie’s. It had one bedroom and they’d have sex with both of us.

  One time, Boss was having sex with me and said he’d give me £40 if I’d take all my clothes off, but I wouldn’t. He said, ‘Come on, come on, take your top off, and your bra.’ He started trying to lift the top off and I was saying no.

  I pretended I needed to go to the toilet, and when I came back Emma was having sex with him instead.

  The next time we saw Tariq, he hit Emma because he’d found out about Juicy and Boss. He was mad with her, saying to never do it again, because she was only supposed to meet the men he knew. I guess it was an issue over money – Tariq wouldn’t get his cut if Emma, and not him, started finding men for us to sleep with.

  * * *

  It was late October that something that chills me to the bone happened.

  Emma tried to get one of my sisters involved.

  Every time I’d go back home with her, Emma would ask Lizzie if she wanted to come out with her one night, making it sound like just a few drinks and some fun. But I knew it would be more than that.

  I was so deeply traumatised by then, I just couldn’t find a way to warn Lizzie, to tell her: ‘You can’t come, sis. If you do, you’ll be raped.’ Instead, I just played the role of older sister, telling my parents there was no way she was coming out with me because she’d spoil all my fun.

  Fun. A good joke, eh? Though at least it saved my little sister.

  Emma really knew no bounds. She seemed to have saturated every part of my life. The sight of her made me shudder, but it was the sound of the ring tone of her phone that became a thing of real terror for me. Typically for her, and fittingly for the situation I now found myself in, she’d chosen a song filled with dark piano chords and even darker lyrics.

  In other circumstances, Rihanna’s ‘Disturbia’ might have become an anthem to my teenage years. But here, in this shadow world, it served as the calling card of pain, violence and degradation.

  Bum-bum, be-dum, bum-bum be dum-dum …

  Day or night, her phone would come to life: the discordant sound of piano as someone runs their fingers along the keys, then Rihanna’s moody vocal filling me with dread as I began to visualise the darkness that lay ahead. As Rihanna sang about going crazy, I’d feel my mind begin to whir as Emma took the call.

  I knew we’d be climbing into Tariq’s taxi within minutes, Emma in the front, me, as usual, in the back; heading into a scene that in my imagination was a mirror image of the one portrayed in the music video. For Rihanna’s act, it was a prison cell and a gas chamber: a girl tied to a burning stake, or caressing a manne
quin on a steel-framed bed, or else trying to break free of the chains that held her fast. But that was all it was: an act.

  For me, it was rape in the feral, urban landscape that neither the police nor the local social workers seemed prepared to acknowledge even existed.

  Disturbia.

  And so I’d hear that brilliant, awful song on so many occasions as I set off to be raped, hunched up in the back of a people-carrier that looked for all the world like just another taxi.

  Even when we’d returned to Emma’s house there would be no let-up. Emma loved the song so much that she’d play it endlessly on her phone.

  Disturbia.

  * * *

  Mixed in with the hell of Aarif’s flat and all the other places I’d be taken to, there were occasional times I could feel almost human. It still wasn’t the sort of stuff Mum and Dad would have approved of, but it just about kept me together.

  One Friday in October, Emma hurried me out of the bathroom and said we were going to meet a new guy. We left the house, me thinking the worst, Emma swaggering towards the black Toyota Lucida that had pulled up outside, carrying the name ‘Eagle Taxis’ on the side. The same firm as Tariq’s.

  You could hear the music pumping out of the stereo even before you got into the car. Pop music, chart stuff. The taxi’s driver leaned back and introduced himself. ‘Hi,’ he beamed. ‘I’m Car Zero.’

  Another guy, another nickname, I thought. And then there were the drinks he’d brought: whisky for him, vodka for us, and two mixers, one of cola, the other lemonade. ‘So you can pick,’ he said, smiling.

  He’d take us out, usually on a Friday or a Saturday. This went on for weeks, through into November. It seems so weird, but I grew to like him. Sometimes we’d go to Ashworth Valley, other times he’d just park up in an empty car park or industrial site. He’d drink his whisky and cola in the front, while we had the vodka – Glen’s, of course – in a litre bottle.

  Everything seemed just as it did with all the other men, the paedos who’d attack me; everything except the end result. All Car Zero wanted to do was party. He loved the same sort of music we did, and he also loved to drink. He even brought little plastic cups each time for us to drink out of.

  While he drank, he’d talk to us about normal things – as if he was one of us. It meant that whenever Emma said, ‘We’re going out with Car Zero tonight,’ I’d be relieved because unlike all the other nights, with all those other men, I knew I wasn’t going to be attacked. I felt safe. It might even be fun.

  He didn’t get drunk the way we did in the back, but even so I knew he must still have been way over the limit. In the old days it would have worried me. Now I couldn’t care less: if we crashed, we crashed.

  The last night I saw Car Zero he picked us up from Harry’s house as normal, before heading out to Ashworth Valley close to where Cassie would take us.

  We’d been drinking for about an hour, laughing, being stupid, when Emma said she needed a wee.

  ‘Will you come with me?’ she asked.

  I got out of the car and we both had a wee.

  As I headed back to the car she pulled at my sleeve and said, ‘Are you going to sleep with him, then?’

  ‘No,’ I said, almost laughing. ‘We’ve never had to sleep with him. He’s not like the others.’

  Emma gave me her look, the controlling look; the look that tells you you’ve got to do something.

  ‘But, Emma, he never tries to sleep with us. He doesn’t want to. He just wants to drink and chill with us.’ I could hear my voice starting to sound panicky.

  It was no good. ‘He’s bought all this stuff for us, Hannah. You can’t just expect never to do anything for him. So get back in the car and do it.’

  So he really was just like all the others. The penny dropped, and I suddenly realised she must have struck a deal with him. It made me feel worse than I’d felt in a long time. With the others, I’d just got used to it. With him, I thought I’d found someone in Emma’s world who was normal and safe. But it was just another betrayal. Stupid, I thought, I should have expected it. I knew I had no option.

  It had started to rain as I climbed into the front passenger seat. Car Zero knew full well what our conversation outside had been about, and he just said, quietly, and a bit sheepishly, ‘Get in the back.’

  As I did what I was told I could see Emma outside, drawing on a cigarette and pulling up the hood of her tracksuit to keep out the rain. She didn’t have long to wait. Once he’d joined me in the back he told me to take my pants off and lie down, so that’s what I did.

  The music was still blaring out of the speakers as he drove us home, but no one was talking. Once we were at Harry’s place, the two of us got out and he drove away.

  I never saw him again because Emma deleted his details from her phone. ‘The bastard wouldn’t pay me cos of all the beer he’d bought,’ she explained.

  I went upstairs to the bathroom, feeling sick.

  * * *

  So there I was, this poor, stupid teenager, locked in a world I’d walked into and now wanted more than anything to escape.

  Maybe I was naïve to think I’d be rescued; that the police would do everything they could to protect me.

  What I needed most was to be protected from myself: however anyone might judge me, I was still only fifteen. A child. The police must have suspected from the interview I’d done that it was still going on, and knowing that still makes me feel gutted.

  I know they couldn’t have stopped Daddy from raping me those four times, and Immy, with his ‘treat’, but, once I’d told them, surely they could have done something to protect me? Surely they could have made sure I went home, and stayed home, and kept me away from the gang?

  Instead, the taxis kept on coming to Harry’s place, turning up, bang on cue, within minutes of me hearing the Rihanna ring tone chime out from Emma’s phone. Usually it was Tariq’s car 40. There were many other men in this sick conspiracy, but so often I couldn’t remember their names. Either that or the descriptions I gave police – the nicknames they’d told me, or that I’d made up for them, and the detail of how they looked and how they behaved – led to a blind alley, a cold trail.

  In the days of my long-forgotten innocence Dad used to give me a lift to school and collect me when he could. Once I’d moved in to Harry’s place, my attendance at school dropped, but whenever I did go I’d either walk or get a taxi. Tariq’s taxi, usually. If I somehow persuaded Emma to let me go to school, she would ring up Eagle Taxis and ask for a cab, saying ‘Can you make sure it’s car 40?’ And he’d come, and I’d get in and we’d head off to school.

  It was always weird. Tariq usually had a smile on his face, as if he was hugely chuffed about something. As soon as I was in the taxi he’d say, ‘Hello, Hannah, how are you today? You’re coming to see me later and I’ll pick you up.’ As if it was all a laugh. ‘I’ll pick you up at seven o’clock. Be ready. Be a good girl for me tonight.’ Back at home, my parents were receiving letters from school about my behaviour, most of it about unauthorised absences, others about turning up still drunk from the gang’s vodka.

  Sometimes the teachers would take me to Food Tech and give me toast and a cup of tea because they realised I needed it. I was always dead tired because I was so often out late, getting to bed at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. and getting up again at 8 a.m. so I could pretend to be a vaguely normal schoolgirl.

  I think it was Miss Nuttall, the Food Tech teacher, who grassed to Miss Crabtree about me. I actually felt OK that day, but she must have smelled the alcohol, left the class, and gone off to fetch Miss Crabtree.

  ‘Hannah,’ she said, when she arrived, ‘I can smell alcohol on you. Are you drunk?’

  ‘No, Miss,’ I said. I admitted to having had a couple of drinks, but no, I wasn’t drunk.

  ‘I think you are, young lady,’ said Miss Crabtree, quietly, not cross, almost sympathetic, it seemed. Then, ‘How much sleep have you had?’

  ‘I had an early night!’

/>   She looked at my sunken eyes, my pallid skin, and must have known it was another lie.

  ‘And where did you sleep?’

  ‘At my dad’s house,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I’m going to ring your dad now and ask him to collect you, because we both know you’re drunk and we also both know you can’t come into school in that state.’

  So my dad came and that time I went home to safety. I still got texts from Emma later on, though, and I think I climbed out of a window and out over the porch roof again so I could head back to Harry’s house. Maybe that was the time that Dad threatened to superglue my bedroom door shut.

  At school, I did occasionally tell teachers I was hungry, and maybe that’s why they’d feed me. But I think they knew: knew something, at least. In Food Tech there was a jar of one pound coins that was used to pay for the ingredients of dishes they wanted us to cook. Sometimes they’d give me a a pound coin and say, ‘Go on, quick, get yourself something from the shop.’

  Miss Crabtree was one of those who kept trying with me. I think it was in November that she took me to one side after hearing me rowing with another girl who’d called me a ‘Paki-shagger’. Miss Crabtree had overheard it and called me into her office.

  She sat me down across the desk from her, saying she wanted to know if I was OK. She said she’d heard what the other girl had called me, and wanted to know why, wanted me to open up to her.

  I didn’t, though. I just couldn’t. Up to then I’d just explained the ‘Paki-shagger’ thing as a rumour because my mate had an Asian boyfriend, but now, in Miss Crabtree’s office, I was too frightened to tell her.

  I was crying, sitting there in that school chair, but for all that she tried to coax me into talking to her, I couldn’t. All the time, in my pocket, I could feel my phone vibrating because it was on silent. Even without looking I knew it was Emma ringing me. I guessed she’d be close by, wanting to go somewhere with the gang.

  In front of me, Miss Crabtree was saying something about a Pandora’s box. How it needed to be opened, and how, for all that it might be scary, it needed to be opened so she could help me.