Girl A

by Girl A

  I cradled my bump, wondering if it would be the one thing that changed her mind – that I was now no use to her, and she would just let me go.

  The next morning, the strains of ‘Disturbia’ ringing out from Emma’s room woke me up. A few minutes later, she was banging on my door, telling me to get up.

  ‘Quick,’ she shouted. ‘We’ve got to meet Cassie. Get up.’

  It was 17 February 2009, the day of my three-month scan, and yet I was beginning it with my customary feelings of dread and despair. But this time I was determined to somehow get away.

  It would prove to be a hopeless thought.

  Once I was dressed, Emma walked me down to Morrison’s to meet Cassie. He was meant to be on a shift for Castleton Taxis, but just after 9 a.m. his black people-carrier pulled into the supermarket car park and we climbed in so he could take us to his favourite lane in Ashworth Park.

  Cassie was even more disgusting than the others: he liked to kiss the whole of my face, and I hated that. With just sex I could manage to detach myself from it, but all his touching and kissing just made me feel even more sick.

  This last time, in fact, Cassie’s fun was interrupted by a couple driving down the lane towards us in a Ford Focus. Emma saw them first and shouted, ‘Someone’s coming.’ Cassie got up, with no trousers on, and climbed into the front, pretending nothing was happening. The couple must have seen us but they didn’t stop or say anything. As soon as they were gone, he climbed over onto the back seat and just carried on.

  That time Emma had gone first. When it was my turn, I just kept thinking, This is the last time. After this it will be over and you’ll be going home. So just get through it, just get through it.

  Somehow I did.

  Emma had a plan as well as me that day. Hers was to go into the college she’d been referred to because of her appalling attendance record at school, and then to go with me to the scan.

  ‘It’ll be the two of us together,’ she’d said, sounding as sincere as I’d ever heard her. ‘Seeing the baby.’

  I pretended to agree.

  So, after the early-morning encounter with Cassie, he dropped her off at a bus stop in Heywood and then carried on to Harry’s place with me.

  I got back at around 10.30 a.m., slipping quietly into the house, taking a shower, and then going into the still-empty living room to wait for Mum.

  It seemed I was waiting there for ages, every now and then glancing at the bin bags tucked just inside the doorway, and all the time feeling a growing sense of excitement.

  I was going to do this. I was finally going to be free!

  Finally, Mum’s car drew up outside and I bounded out of the house, grabbing the bags as I left and piling them onto the back seat. Then I ran round to the passenger side, climbed in, and said, ‘Go, Mum. Let’s go.’

  I kept looking back at the house, wondering if any of them had seen us leave, and then feeling the finality of it all. Soon, I knew, Emma would be getting back. When would she notice the bin bags gone? When would she realise that this really was the end? That finally I’d left her world behind?

  We stopped off at a chippy on the way home to pick up an order – chips and curry sauce for me, fish and chips for Mum and Dad. Back at the house, it felt so deliciously normal to be eating soggy chips and looking forward to the scan.

  There was still time for a lecture from Mum and Dad about this being my absolutely last chance – understandably – but then Mum and I were off again in the car, heading to the hospital.

  * * *

  As I lay back on the hospital bed ready for my scan, my breath caught as a tiny black and white image flickered onto the screen. I stared in disbelief at the tiny little form. I could see little limbs, a beating heart. Suddenly, a delicious warm feeling spread through my weary body.

  It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

  I looked at Mum with tears in my eyes and she reached for my hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. ‘It’s time to come home, Hannah,’ she said, tearfully.

  It was a moment I’ll never forget; the moment I felt I was finally being dragged out of the dark and murky world I’d been living in for seven months and back into the real world. This tiny life gave me the connection I needed.

  The intense fear that had gripped me during every waking moment of the day for seven months drained away. Suddenly, it didn’t matter who the father of my baby was, or about the gang or Emma. What they could do to me didn’t scare me any more. There was only one thing I needed to do – I had to get out and stay out whatever the cost. If this baby stood any chance at all, I had to use every last part of energy I had to fight; to make sure it had a good start in life and protect it from any wrong-doing in the world.

  I realised, too, just how hideous those seven months must have been for Mum and Dad: to be worried all day, every day, about what their own baby girl was doing and what harm she was coming to. The confusion over why I was doing it in the first place. None of it must have made any sense to them.

  Mum was so right. It was time to go home. I just had to figure out a way to make that happen for good.

  As we stared at the screen, a nurse approached, smiling, and asked, ‘Would you like to know the baby’s sex? Whether it’s a boy or a girl?’

  I wasn’t sure, and looked at Mum.

  ‘It’s up to you, Hannah,’ she said.

  Maybe I should know, I thought, maybe it will help. Even if I don’t know the baby’s colour, at least I’d know something about it that might bring it closer.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Tell me.’

  The nurse, tall, in her late thirties, must have had the same conversation a thousand times, but she wiped a tear from her eye as she said, ‘You’re carrying a little girl.’

  A girl! Instantly I felt a flood of happiness…a girl … but then suddenly, I became fearful. How would life go for her? Would she be used by men, as I’d been? Or would she be safe and free? Would she be happy?

  I blinked back tears, trying to focus on the ultrasound image again, looking at the tiny arms and legs, trying to imagine my growing baby as a girl. Gently, I touched the bump and smiled up at my mum.

  She drove me straight home, with no thought of going to Harry’s: I was still so programmed into being with Emma that that had worried me – that I’d want to go over to hers and ‘impress’ her with my baby news.

  I’d like to say it was a happy homecoming, but it wasn’t – the topsy-turvy relationship I had at home saw to that. For all that Mum and Dad tried their best to reach out to me, I was still a mess. I’d hit rock bottom by then, a feral creature living a half-life, abused by the gang, abandoned by both the police and Social Services. My parents had also been let down, and they were both confused and incredibly angry.

  Mum had given my room a spring clean in the hope that I’d finally be coming back to stay for good but, as usual, we ended up rowing. She threw a cup of lukewarm tea in my face and I tipped the bed over. She then kicked me out of the house. I sat on the steps at the back for a while, but went back inside when Dad rang me on my sister’s phone. He told me to go in but to stay upstairs away from Mum.

  When it had all kicked off again, Mum had rung Jane in tears to say – not for the first time – that she’d had enough. She and Dad had seen going to the scan of the baby as a pivotal moment for me, a wake-up call I suppose, to finally take charge of my life. Jane told her to ring Social Services and said she’d do the same.

  If they were looking for help, it was a waste of time because now that I’d reached sixteen, Social Services were able to completely cast me adrift.

  I had always felt as though Social Services were always trying to make me look like the one in the wrong: the prostitute, the silly, drunk schoolgirl who was messing everyone about. In some of their reports they talked about drugs, making it look as though I took them. But I never did – not beyond trying them and deciding I didn’t like them. But it felt as though in their eyes I was always the bad person. I know that I drank, and
I’d drunk in the early months of the pregnancy, but I only started drinking when it was all going on with the gang. To block it out.

  The girl who’d become the bane of their lives – they had never understood the hold Emma had over me, and had never seen why I kept going back to Harry’s place – was legally over the age of consent, and so they closed the file on me. Despite still being a child in need, from now on, in their eyes, I would just be another wayward, dysfunctional girl making the wrong life choices and ‘hanging around with the wrong crowd’.

  So when Jane put the call in to Social Services on 17 February, Anne, my social worker, wouldn’t even speak to her. The case was closed, she told a colleague, and Jane would have to contact the referral officer. My dad got the same treatment a bit later on. ‘I rang her, but she wouldn’t accept my call,’ he said. Rochdale Council had officially washed its hands of me.

  For days after my return home, to my shame, the house was filled with the sound of terrible rows; most of them between me and my mum. She still didn’t see me as a victim, and nor did Dad, because Social Services had never told them what was really going on. And, of course, I hadn’t either. So in all those rows I was told time after time that I was a slag and that I disgusted them.

  * * *

  I still felt I was living a nightmare, but coming home did at least one huge thing for me: it finally ended the long cycle of abuse. From that point on, I never went back to the gang, and, instead, my mind focused – or tried to focus – on one day bringing them all to justice.

  For Emma, too, there was a change, because although she didn’t know it yet, she had lost the girl she’d recruited for the gang seven months earlier. She would have to use other victims. At the time, I didn’t actually realise that would be the case – I was still just relieved to be away from her. It was only later that I would come to realise what my escape meant – another girl’s imprisonment.

  I’d never speak to Emma again and yet, bizarrely, in those final weeks with her at Harry’s house, and sometimes later, much later, I felt a connection with her in some sick, weird sort of a way.

  For all that she was evil and skewed, she was perhaps the only person in the world who knew the hell that I’d been through: I can only guess she had been through it herself when Carla had first taken her on. The twist was that I think she got a buzz from then doing it to me. And, once I’d escaped, girls like Paige – who wouldn’t, or couldn’t break away – and Nadine.

  After a couple of weeks, things became a bit easier at home. In fact, the house itself became a bit of a sanctuary. For a time, Emma and Tariq would come up onto the estate and drive around. They’d park up behind my parents’ house and try to get me to go out. But I resisted. Finally, in my own head, it was over.

  My parents never knew, but Tariq even kept the house under surveillance for a while. There were many times I’d peek out from my bedroom window and see his taxi, car 40, parked outside. Sometimes Emma would be with him; she’d even call my mobile. I’d keep changing my sim card, but each time, somehow, she’d find me.

  They also followed me when I was out of the house. The first time it happened I’d been out shopping and was on my way home. Tariq shouted, ‘Hannah!’ and I recognised his voice straight away. I thought, Oh my God, I’m going to get shot or something. I got back to the house as quickly as I could, my heart beating. Mum and Dad were at home, completely oblivious to it. For a long time I wouldn’t go out on my own.

  Time went on and we were into March. I was about to set off for school one morning when Dad took a call on his mobile.

  I could hear a man’s voice at the other end of the line. It sounded like one of the detectives I’d spoken to.

  ‘Wow,’ said Dad, then, ‘that’s great news.’ He broke off for a moment. ‘Hannah,’ he said. ‘They’ve arrested Harry.’

  Yes, it was great news. It turned out that Harry, once a father figure to me, later a disgusting paedophile, had opened his front door in his boxer shorts to find two plainclothes officers standing there. By all accounts, he had gone quietly, knowing, I hope, that his days of sick perversion were over. While I was walking to school that frosty March morning, Harry, finally dressed in crumpled jeans, a cheap checked shirt and off-white, slip-on shoes, was being led into a police station by a detective trying desperately to hide her smile.

  He would be there a long time because he had a lot of questions to answer. And this time he wasn’t dealing with kids.

  I had to eat dinner on my own that day because I couldn’t see any of my friends around, like Robyn or Hayley – the Hayley I suspected had been abused by the gang along with me. But it didn’t matter because I still felt good. I felt safer than I’d done for ages.

  And it got better – some time after that, the police moved in to question Emma.

  Knowing this was strangely difficult for me. How could I explain to myself, let alone them, that in the darkest days I’d begun to see her as my only friend, as if I was bound to her by the secret we shared about the men she took me to? But the ties between us had loosened, and now, realising this, and knowing that she was being interviewed, I actually felt a new wave of freedom wash over me.

  It made me feel as good as the day Harry was arrested.

  There was yet more news. The police called to ask me to identify someone who knew Daddy from the Balti House – this was on the same day I heard they were questioning people from the halal meat shop. I’d been taken there with Emma, Roxanne and sometimes Paige. It was suddenly all coming together, and I felt great that it seemed they were all being rounded up.

  The forensic tests, however, weren’t as simple as the police had first thought. They’d sent away my knickers for testing back in August, but then asked for a second test – and these weren’t finished until 18 March.

  The results blew away Daddy’s alibi. All this time he had been saying that the only reason they’d found his DNA on my knickers was that Emma and I had swapped after the two of them had had sex and that she had consented to the sex. But they never did have sex – at least, not as far as I know.

  The second test proved beyond doubt that Emma hadn’t worn those knickers. When the police put this new evidence to him, Daddy couldn’t give them an answer. He just told them he had nothing else to say.

  It seemed that, just like me over all those months, he had nowhere else to run. I thought a date for his trial would be just around the corner.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chloe

  My parents were really supporting me now, and I began to daydream about the sort of future that other sixteen-year-olds take for granted: going to college and maybe, just maybe, university. Except that I would soon have a baby to look after. Despite that, I decided to make a real effort with school now. Miss Crabtree will be shocked, I thought.

  Emma remained a threat, though, as she still sometimes came onto the estate and, one time, to the back of the house with a girl who’d started coming to the house, Taliah. She had tried to get my sister to get me to go out, but I wouldn’t. Sometimes, when I looked out of my bedroom window, I could see Emma standing at the corner and Taliah a bit further down the street. It was chilling.

  Unfortunately, just when the bond between me and Jane seemed to be at its best, it began to unravel.

  ‘We’re going on a family day out to a theme park,’ I told her one day, oblivious to the fact that I was about to cross a line with my rescuer. ‘The BNP have organised it.’

  She looked at me, aghast. ‘Sorry, Hannah,’ she said, as if she hadn’t quite heard properly. ‘The BNP?’

  Sadly, Dad’s bitterness about what had happened to me had turned into an irrational – and, thankfully, temporary – hatred of all things Asian.

  ‘Yes, I said. ‘Dad’s joined. He reckons that if the BNP get in to Parliament, they’ll give all the foreigners money to go back to their own country.’

  Jane, gentle, lovely Jane, had a face like thunder.

  ‘That’s racism, Hannah,’ she said, as l
evelly as she could. ‘I think you need to think very, very seriously about what you’re saying here. Your own baby may be half-Asian, mightn’t she? And would you like her to grow up facing any sort of racial abuse?’ She paused and looked at me. ‘And, honestly, do you really think that what your dad seems to want is even possible? That people should be given money to go to a country they may never even have seen? This is their country!’

  I think we both felt uncomfortable when we parted that day, When I got home I told Dad about it and he was livid, telling me I mustn’t see Jane again.

  The summer would be over by the time the drip-drip of this BNP-fuelled poison between me and Jane would take full effect, but in the meantime I was feeling strong enough to push really hard with my GCSEs. I wanted to show the world, but especially myself and my parents, that I still had some kind of worth and could make some kind of contribution to the normal society I’d been locked away from. That I wasn’t just going to be a victim for the rest of my life.

  So I put up with the sidelong glances and the ribbings and name-calling in the classrooms and corridors, and tried my damnedest to re-engage with education.

  English lessons had never been a pleasure, but Maths was good, and I even started looking forward to Resistant Materials class. School as a whole was still a war zone but it was my war zone, and suddenly I began to feel I belonged.

  There were still moments of terror that summer, though, as the gang’s taxis weaved their way through the streets of Heywood, Rochdale, Nelson, Bradford, and all the other towns where they had friends and relatives. I’d feel a sense of foreboding every time a taxi came into view or pulled up suddenly close by.

  I’d wonder whether this was the moment they’d chosen to come back for me.