Girl A

by Girl A

  She was also making her stay at Harry’s new house – one we’d all moved into a couple of weeks earlier. Later, I learnt that Paige’s sister was worried for her, but she hadn’t got the new address and so couldn’t rescue her.

  Both school and social services knew that Paige was massively at risk. Miss Crabtree and a social worker called Anne had even had a meeting about her, because there was talk of her and other girls meeting Eagle taxi drivers at the Lidl car park in Heywood.

  I looked Jane in the eye when I told her how firmly in Emma’s grip she was. ‘Paige won’t say no to her,’ I said.

  And I should know, of course.

  Eventually, the school bell rang and it was time for me to head away. Jane looked as though she wanted to carry on talking, but for me it was a welcome break.

  As I left the room, I caught sight of Paige walking away up the corridor, quicker than she would normally. Suddenly, I wondered whether she’d been listening at the door and had overheard our conversation: heard me talking to Jane like I was a grass.

  I decided I couldn’t face any more school that day, and ran out through the gates, terrified my cover was blown. I was thinking, Now Emma will know I’ve been talking to Jane. Paige will tell her.

  My conversation with Jane left me confused and more than a little scared: each day I wondered whether Paige would grass on me to Emma.

  It was December now, and I was missing yet more school. Despite telling Jane I wasn’t being taken to the gang any more, I was. Maybe she guessed as much, but she didn’t let on and I wasn’t about to tell her. I’d discovered that there’s only so much you can tell people, no matter how much they may be trying to help you.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Two Blue Lines

  Christmas was fast approaching. As if my life couldn’t get any worse, on 11 December – when the cheerful, festive Iceland and Asda adverts were running back-to-back on TV – came another event that threw me into an even deeper despair.

  I’d gone to Crisis Intervention in Taylor Street, though this time with Robyn rather than Emma because she’d gone off to see a ‘boyfriend’ on her own. I had a pregnancy test, and I remember Jane sitting there with the testing kit in her hand, her hand over the panel that gives the result. ‘What will you do if it’s positive?’ she asked, with a gentle smile. It was an innocent question, but in my mind I started to panic. It must have shown on my face.

  Slowly she opened her hand, looked for the tell-tale lines, and suddenly stopped smiling. She looked flustered, rising to her feet and saying, ‘I just need a second opinion on this.’

  As she left the room I thought, It will be fine. If she’s not sure, it must be all right.

  She came back a couple of minutes later and said, ‘Look Hannah, I think it’s positive, but I can’t be sure. We’ll have to do a second test in the morning.’

  The plan was for her to meet me at school the next day, and carry out the second test. I wasn’t to have a wee in the morning when I woke up, she said, because the first of the day was always strongest. That way there would be no doubt.

  I was back and forth between Harry’s place and home at that time (Emma must have realised I was in the gang’s grip so fast it didn’t matter if I went home occasionally) and a queasy feeling took hold of me as I walked home. I didn’t know what to think.

  When I woke up the next morning, Mum thought I looked a bit peaky and asked if I wanted to stay off school – I could help her with the shopping, if I wanted.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I need to go to school.’

  She looked astonished and exasperated all at once. ‘But normally we can’t get you there,’ she said. Then I told her I was seeing Jane, and she started to catch on. She knew who Jane was, and what her job involved, and she knew school wasn’t exactly my favourite place.

  Her face clouded. ‘You’re not pregnant, are you?’ she asked.

  ‘No, no,’ I said, but not with any real conviction.

  So she told Dad, and Dad sent Lizzie off to the local shops to buy a tester kit. She came back with two, in fact. Maybe she thought the second one would come in handy another time.

  Mum wasn’t taking any chances. A few weeks before I’d had another scare, but that time I had dipped it in the toilet bowl to make sure it said negative. Mum never said anything, but this time Dad said: ‘Make sure she does it properly.’ I was so wayward then, he knew he couldn’t trust me.

  Mum came into the bathroom with me and made me wee into a cup, and then she dipped the tester in the cup. Then she dipped the second one in. They both said positive.

  So there I was: chaotic, exploited and abused – and now pregnant. It was a fact, proved twice over.

  It was just the identity of the father that was unknown.

  Given the abuse I’d suffered, and was still going through, a nightmare scenario seared through my mind: the thought that this baby was one of theirs; was one of the men who’d been abusing me over these past months. Billy’s? It could be. He didn’t use condoms. Oh God, it could be.

  Mum broke down as we came downstairs, but I was in too much shock to cry. Dad had been waiting in the living room. The TV was on, but someone – I’ve no idea who, as I was out of it by then – switched it off. The rest of the family were sent upstairs, confused, upset, and then Dad gave Mum a hug and told her everything would work out fine.

  All I could think was, Please, God, don’t let it be one of theirs.

  I knew there were two possibilities. Either it was the offspring of one or other of maybe four middle-aged paedophiles, or else Jake’s. The first was unbearable; the second an indicator that I’d let my mum down, despite all her strictures about saving myself for the right sort of lad. If the lad was the father, it had been less a seduction and more of a mauling. But at least it was more ‘normal’, because he was at least around the same age as me.

  There were no hugs for me; instead, a cold anger that I could have done this, that I could have got myself pregnant by someone, anyone, at the age of fifteen. And, equal to that, the shame of it. My parents still didn’t know about the gang. They just thought I’d been stupid and careless.

  Upstairs in my bedroom I broke down, holding my stomach, wanting to love the tiny life inside me but not daring to. At least not until I knew the identity of his or her father.

  In amongst the rows of the next few days, I told Mum and Dad the baby’s father was the teenage lad, because to tell them anything else would have aroused suspicion about what was still happening to me. That was torture as well. I thought, I can’t even tell them. They think it’s this boy’s, but it might not be. It was another worry I would carry all the way through the pregnancy, right up until the baby’s birth. I tried desperately to convince myself that it was his; that of these two possibilities, this was by far the best. I couldn’t face the thought that it might be one of theirs.

  I know you’re supposed to know the identity of your baby’s dad, along with his favourite football team, the way he’d hold you, his favourite drink, and all the other things about him, but I didn’t. I might not even know his name.

  Over the previous few days, Lizzie had started calling me a ‘Paki-shagger’ – she was at the same school as me and had picked up on the rumours that I was sleeping with Asian men: old Asian men. I’d tried to shut her up, but she’d told Mum and Dad. Now that I was pregnant, things started clicking into place. I could tell from their faces that they were both wondering just how wayward their daughter had become.

  Dad now started asking difficult questions, his face reddening with fury as each of them left his lips.

  ‘This baby’s nothing to do with any Asian men, is it?’ he asked. ‘We’ve heard some of the rumours.’ Despite knowing about Daddy and Immy, like the kids in the playground he must have thought that if I’d done it, it was out of choice.

  I felt trapped. I kept on denying it, of course. I just stuck to the story that the baby was my ‘boyfriend’s’. Inside I was in turmoil. I had no idea who the father wa
s, and as Dad shouted and Mum joined in, I was eaten up by the feeling that I’d let them down; that my whole family was ashamed of me.

  And I had no idea how Emma would react. The thought of that made me feel sick.

  At my next meeting with Jane I told her I desperately hoped it would be the lad’s baby. If the dad turned out to be one of my abusers I’d still have it, I’d still give it that chance of life; I’d just never be able to keep it. It was a total, total nightmare – another example of the chaotic hell my life had become.

  Worse than all this, however, was the news that my being pregnant hadn’t gone down well with Rochdale Social Services.

  * * *

  Christmas was barely a fortnight away when two social workers called at home, having made an appointment to see me and my family. I’d just got home and changed out of my school uniform and was sitting in the living room with Mum and Dad, when we heard them walking up the path.

  Once they were inside, and sitting down with a cup of tea, one of them, Anne – the same social worker who’d been dealing with Paige – looked over at me and said, ‘You know why we’re here, don’t you, Hannah?’

  ‘About the baby?’ I asked nervously, fearful of how the meeting was going to go. ‘And about me being at Harry’s place?’

  But it wasn’t that simple. They were also there because they knew I was sleeping with lots of men. Right there in front of my mum and dad, she talked about me being a prostitute, saying I was sleeping with men for money.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s nothing like that. They’re raping me. Just like Daddy did.’

  Beside me on the sofa, I could sense my dad getting angry. Mum was wiping away tears, doing everything she could to avoid looking at me.

  The social worker carried on. ‘Hannah, this is really serious. Our main priority has to be the baby, and we have to warn you that if you carry on staying at Harry’s place, we’ll have to do a pre-birth assessment. And that could mean us taking your baby into care as soon as it’s born.’

  I was sobbing now, scared at what might happen to the baby and mortified that my parents were hearing all this from a social worker.

  Anne didn’t seem interested in what I was going through: when I talked about the video interview I’d done for the police and the evidence I’d given about the situation I was in, she said it had nothing to do with Social Services. The police investigation was separate; she was here to see me about the baby.

  I felt so helpless that some of the detail I’d hidden for so long started to spill out. I told them frantically that it was specifically Asian men from takeaways and taxi firms who were either organising it or attacking me. I went on desperately, trying to convince them, convince my parents, that it was not my fault.

  To this day I am convinced that Social Services knew full well what was going on. They knew about Emma because she’d had a social worker from the age of about ten. And they knew about Roxanne being with the Asian men as well.

  The pair of them were only in the house for half an hour, but it felt like a lifetime.

  Once they’d gone Dad’s rage – and Mum’s – erupted. For ten minutes they just ranted at me, saying how ashamed they were of me, how I’d let the whole family down, and how none of their other kids would ever have behaved like this.

  It seemed they trusted the ‘professional’ social worker’s opinion over mine. They’d been led into thinking I was a prostitute. Even though I was only fifteen.

  Weirdly, rather than that making me angry, it made me sad. I felt like I had let them down, but I just couldn’t get them to understand how trapped I’d been – and how I still was. The underworld I’d fallen into had a grip so strong that not even they would have been able to rescue me, or so I thought.

  Right at the peak of his rage, Dad said something that cut me to the core. ‘You’re a fucking Paki prostitute,’ he said coldly.

  He deeply regrets it now, I know. But whatever his reaction, in the heat of the moment, all my fears about how my parents would react seemed to have come true: they were sickened by me, ashamed of me.

  I fled to my room, totally distraught. I now felt there was no one out there for me: not my family, not the police, not Social Services.

  The social workers must have known from the police that I’d done video interviews about being raped back in August. But it had only been now, in December, that they had come to see me; and that was only because Crisis Intervention had told them I was pregnant. They weren’t worried about me – just the baby. Once again, I’d learn later that they thought I was making a ‘lifestyle choice’ to sleep specifically with Asian men.

  Anne even complained to Jane about her huge workload, saying she needed to focus more on other girls. True, there were younger girls being abused, but I was a kid too, still only fifteen, still under the age of consent. Yet Social Services did nothing to help me, and certainly nothing to help me get away from Harry’s place. They did ask what I’d do if the baby was half-Asian, and when I said I didn’t know, they told me to give them a call once it was born if I decided I didn’t want it. That was it. They just didn’t seem interested.

  * * *

  Over the next few days, feelings of despair washed over me like waves over a shipwreck: one wave fear, one wave guilt, and every now and again a swell of panic and revulsion as I realised I might be carrying the baby of a paedophile who had paid money to attack me.

  Physically, the pregnancy was fine. No morning sickness, no cramps, just a craving for fried tomatoes and Philadelphia cheese. Together! But, emotionally, as the infant grew, I was in turmoil, bound to a nine-month purgatory that might yet condemn me to the hell of raising my abuser’s offspring.

  I know that some mums, some parents, have a pet name for their baby until they decide what they’ll call it once it’s born. But I had none of that. For me it was just there, inside me, and I didn’t want it to be. I had no interaction with it because I didn’t want to be pregnant at all. I wasn’t interested in it.

  I didn’t want to harm it, but why would I want a baby, at fifteen, with my life in a mess and all the time being raped by this paedophile gang? In my mixed-up head, part of me wanted to have a miscarriage, and yet … and yet … something held me back from asking for a termination. It was offered, of course, but for all that I hated myself, and hated my abusers, I couldn’t bring myself to condemn the unborn child inside me. It wasn’t its fault that its life had begun in a moment of sickening depravity.

  And that depravity hadn’t ended. Emma still had her sickening hold over me and so, for all that Mum and Dad tried desperately to keep me at home, I would still break away and end up at back at Harry’s place.

  I told Emma about it one tea time. In fact, I told Harry first. He was sitting doing his crossword in the kitchen and I sat at the table with him to have one of the cigarettes I’d vowed to give up for the sake of the baby, but was struggling to with all of the pressure.

  ‘Well, aren’t you daft?’ he said, after I’d told him. He wasn’t nasty, but he wasn’t sympathetic either. When he asked me what I was going to do with it, I said, ‘I don’t know yet.’

  Emma came in and asked what we were talking about. I just told her straight off: ‘I’m pregnant.’

  At first she starting saying, ‘You’re lying, you’re lying,’ and then she was having a go at me: ‘You little slag, you won’t even know who the dad is. You’ll have to get rid of it.’

  She was the one who’d been touting me around, and yet here she was getting angry with me. Maybe she was worried she wouldn’t be able to sell me to the men any more. Whatever it was, she picked up a plate of chips that had been lying there and threw them at me. I just sat there, blank, while Harry told her to calm down.

  Emma stormed out, but came back a few minutes later and said something that chilled me to the core: ‘Well, you can’t tell you’re pregnant, so you can still go out.’

  * * *

  The phone calls from the gang kept coming all the way up to Christmas a
nd, as usual, I’d be forced to go with her. Then, more than ever, it felt as though they were doing those things to someone other than me; that it wasn’t my body they were abusing, but someone else’s. I was in no state to defend myself. My will had gone. I was living inside a body that didn’t seem able to reach out.

  Mum and Dad would try to keep me at home, but I’d still either escape or just lie by saying I was going to see one of my old friends. I knew they were suspicious, and sometimes they’d check up on me and catch me out. But the bottom line was that they couldn’t watch me 24/7 and I was too brainwashed to resist Emma’s hold over me.

  I carried on drinking in those early weeks – to start with because I didn’t know I was pregnant, and later on because I didn’t care. Everything was still going on with the gang and it helped to make me forget.

  I felt disgusted with myself and so ashamed. I hated myself all through the pregnancy, and spent hour after hour wondering who the father could be. It would be worse if it was a boy, I reasoned, because then the thought loomed, What if he turns out to be like them?

  So for all those months, I never felt any excitement or elation. I didn’t want it at all. I hated the baby, and I hated seeing people putting pictures of their bumps on Facebook and writing about how excited they were and how they were buying this and that for their babies. When my baby kicked, I loathed it. The hospital did give me some ultrasound pictures, but I lost those. Looking back, I just think that shows how desolate I’d become. It seems so tragic now to know that I didn’t really care for the baby. I feel ashamed now, but that’s the way I felt. That’s the truth.

  In the meantime, I still had school to cope with and, as soon as term ended, Christmas to get through. By the time school broke up, I was taking more and more time away from lessons: partly because of the gang, partly because education seemed totally irrelevant to me. What future did I have?