He didn’t introduce himself or say my name at that point. Later I learned that this was because, if I was being watched by the police and it was obvious he knew who I was, it could be used as evidence that he was buying me.
I pulled my coat up around my neck; it was freezing.
‘No thanks, I’ll keep it on,’ I said.
He gestured for me to follow him and we walked out of the station to a parking bay, where he had a car waiting. I got into the warmth.
He tried to make conversation but I wasn’t talkative. He talked about the weather and the traffic; he didn’t tell me who he was and I didn’t offer anything about myself – we both knew why we were there. He took me to a very posh flat in a place called Elephant and Castle; it was very different to what I had been used to. He was perfectly polite and offered me food and a drink. I turned down the food but I had a drink to steady my nerves – I knew that I would be staying with him for the rest of the night because there was no way of getting back to Oxford until the following morning, and that’s what I did. The man had clothes for me to wear; I wore them and he abused me. The following morning he drove me back to the station.
On the way back to Oxford I told myself that it hadn’t been so bad – there was no violence, the man had been polite. Compared to what I’d come from, the guy who met me at the end of the platform seemed like a nice man. That was how warped my perception had become. In reality, every man who touched me was a disgusting paedophile, but in my head some were much nicer than others.
When I got back, I went straight to Mohammed and he sent me off to Cowley Road, where Spider met me and took me to another man. I must have been making them thousands of pounds – it cost them nothing except drugs and alcohol. It cost me my sanity, my innocence and my childhood.
The trafficking became as regular as the selling. I was sent backwards and forwards to London. It always followed the same pattern: I got the same train and waited outside McDonald’s at the end of the platform. I would be taken away by one man, and sometimes I would have to meet someone else after he had finished with me so he would either drop me off, or someone else would come and pick me up. I was kept topped up with drugs as I was passed between perverts. They usually had certain clothes and underwear they wanted me to wear, which was usually suggestive.
Sometimes they seemed remorseful. They knew what they were doing was wrong and they seemed sad about it. Some apologised and tried to ask me whether I was okay. Other men seemed lonely; they were not always after sex. Some just wanted to take me back to hotel rooms and talk to me. Mainly they were older men. Some were creepy, others desperate. One man told me he had recently been widowed and he wanted me to wear one of his dead wife’s tops. I shuddered at the thought and, while I felt sorry for him, this time I refused. He wasn’t violent, he was just a sad old man. I begged him not to tell Mohammed and he agreed.
Usually the ones who wanted me to change into a costume – such as school uniform – were the ones who didn’t want anything of a sexual nature from me. Some would even say sorry while they abused me.
On one occasion there was a younger man. I don’t know how he was involved but he took me to his mother’s house and told me not to go back to Oxford: he knew what a dangerous situation I was in.
‘You need to get away,’ he told me. He explained that I could stay in London with him, and that he would get me a flat. His concern seemed genuine but still he was an abuser who wanted me to be with him. At no point did he offer to take me home or to a police station. All the men would have known I was underage, even though none of them asked. Even with the clothes and make-up on I looked my age.
In London the men were not Asian, they were Mediterranean, black or Arab. Before each journey to the city, Mohammed would get me high and he would give me drugs to take while I was there. I was sent off with Class A drugs, like other children get sent on outings with packed lunches. One time he got me so high before I was trafficked I was found unconscious on the street near the station by a young man who took me to hospital. I don’t remember the journey or what happened when I got to the station. I woke in a hospital bed with Mum sitting next to me. I was questioned by police but told them nothing: my only concern was that I knew I was going to get a beating because I had messed up.
What made it worse was that, because I was so ill, Mum decided to take me to my uncle’s house in Somerset to recuperate. We were there a week and all I could think about was what was going to happen to me when I went back to Oxford – I was actually anxious to get back, just to get the beating out of the way.
The day I got home, he was there, the omnipresent voice on the end of my phone.
‘Get your arse round here!’ he snarled.
When I got to the flat, he seemed to have calmed down.
‘Have a seat,’ he ushered.
I sat down gingerly on the stained sofa. The chemical sting of crack smoke hung in the air.
‘I’m sorry, you gave me too much…’ I started.
He was behind me so I didn’t see the vodka bottle as he brought it down on the back of my head. There was a sickening thud and I was propelled onto the floor by the force of the blow to the back of my head.
‘Don’t ever, ever do that again, you little whore!’ he screamed. His face was contorted in an angry snarl and flecks of spit flew from his mouth. ‘I will slit your throat.’
I curled up into a ball and sobbed. My head was pounding. He had used the blunt end of the bottle and it hadn’t smashed so there was no blood. I held my head in my hands to try to protect myself and felt a hard lump where the bottle had made contact.
‘I won’t do it again,’ I promised through shuddering sobs.
Both Mohammed and Spider wouldn’t think twice about hitting and slapping me. They did it to keep me in line. Sometimes the beatings were sustained. Other times, when I was lucky, they would slap me once and that would be it.
I had no one to turn to and Mohammed’s violence left me feeling shaken and isolated. Part of me still wanted to believe that he was my friend and that I could trust him.
Away from the gang, my other life was equally messed up. As the trafficking escalated, I had what would be my last contact with Terri. It was arranged to be held in a shopping centre in Birmingham. She was high when we met and heavily pregnant – she looked worse and worse every time I saw her. At that point the relationship between her and Mum was strained because during one of her infrequent phone calls she’d started ranting at Mum, and Mum had put the phone down on her. Since then she had been frosty.
Kirsten was at the visit too and we went bowling. We ran off and didn’t go back until Terri had gone – we used to run off a lot together when we had contact visits. On one occasion, we had an overnight visit and had been booked into a hotel in a service station. We ran off so much that a social worker had to keep guard, with Mum outside the room we were in.
I found it very difficult to be with Mum and Terri at the same time. I wished I could just leave that part of my life behind: Terri belonged to Lauren, I was Lara and I had a mum. It must have been really hard for Mum – she knew what had happened to me because of Terri and to a large extent she was having to deal with the consequences of the damage done to me in those early years. Yet still she sat in those contacts being polite. She was doing it for me because she believed I should maintain contact. She told me that it was important to keep in contact with my birth family and has always encouraged me to keep them in my life, right from that first night when I moved in with her and we lit the candles on the cake to signify the important people in my life. That made me feel anger towards Terri because she would never have found it in herself to be that selfless.
Terri gave birth to a boy a few weeks after the contact. He was born with a range of life-limiting disabilities, which was presumably because of her lifestyle. He was immediately taken into care and now lives with a wonderful family who love him and take care of him.
Terri called soon after he was taken away; she
wanted a favour from me.
‘Go and see your dad – he’s got some money I need you to pick up and post to me,’ she said.
It was counterfeit money. During the call, I tried to confide in her again about drugs and what I’d been doing.
‘Crack is really good,’ she repeated. ‘What are you worried about, you Fat Jabba?’
That was her nickname for me: ‘Fat Jabba’. She’d started calling me it when I’d put on puppy fat at the age of six; she enjoyed putting me down. Years later, Kirsten showed me a letter Terri had written to her explaining that I had been a mistake and I was never wanted.
During the phone call I lost patience with her.
‘I wish you’d just leave me alone and die!’ I told her before hanging up. It was the last thing I ever said to her. After that I didn’t have contact with her and a year later, when I was 15, I found out she had died. I was by myself in the house, Mum was working. The phone rang: it was my sister (she was living in a care home at the time). She was hysterical.
‘Mum’s dead,’ she sobbed down the phone. But I only had one mum, the one who had said goodbye to me that morning when she left for work. That was whom I initially thought she meant and my stomach turned.
‘What…?’
‘Mum’s dead,’ she repeated.
Then the penny dropped – she meant Terri. Still, I didn’t believe her. She made a habit of saying dramatic things for attention.
‘I don’t believe you.’
Then she screamed down the phone at me and I heard the handset shift. A woman came on the line.
‘Hello, Lauren.’ I hated being called Lauren. ‘I work at the home where Kirsten lives. I’m so sorry to have to tell you this but it is true: your mother died last night. Is there someone there with you?’
I was on my own.
‘Someone will contact your adoptive parent and let her know the funeral details,’ the woman explained.
Slowly I replaced the handset. I’d never been told someone had died before and so I didn’t know how I was supposed to react. I felt upset and I felt angry; there was regret and relief. Then I started to cry and the sobs seemed to multiply in my throat like bacteria dividing until they were spewing out of me. I felt the urge to run away and bolted out the door into the street.
‘My mum is dead!’ I screamed over and over. I hadn’t called Terri ‘Mum’ for many years and people must have assumed I meant Elizabeth.
Panicking and trembling, I ran to a neighbour – Hayley, who was lovely. She calmed me down enough to find out from me what had happened. Then she hugged me and told me everything would be OK and rang Mum. I was still in a state of shock when she arrived.
The details of how Terri died remained sketchy. She was in a rehab centre and had been found dead in her room; there were drugs there. I assume she overdosed.
Her funeral was held in a grey town in the Northwest; it was awful. I went with Mum and our au pair at the time, a lady called Sally. Mum employed her to help out around the house. Kirsten, Jayden, Nan and Granddad were also there. Harry and Jamie were not there. They were not told about her death until later; their adoptive family felt they were settled in their new lives and did not want to disrupt them. By this time, I had got over my initial emotional outburst: Terri wasn’t my mum, she was just a person who had died. I was more concerned about being away from the gang and I couldn’t wait to get back home in case my absence earned me another beating. Most of the other guests were a collection of alcoholics and addicts. Some people were drinking bottles of vodka behind the gravestones in the cemetery next to the chapel where the service was being held; they all wandered into the service at different times. Most of them looked half-dead themselves. Someone told me I looked just like her – I was on drugs myself at the time so I suppose I probably did. I got the impression that most of the people there were attending because it gave them somewhere warm to go and something to do. Apart from the screaming baby someone had brought along there was no real outpouring of emotion. Sad and surreal, it was what Terri had become: she was among her own.
The vicar said a few words – it was a load of crap.
‘She was a devoted mother who tried her best.’
As the curtains closed around the casket and Terri’s earthly remains were wheeled away to the fiery chamber inside the crematorium, his words rang hollow.
Chapter fourteen
SAM THE RAPIST
Each man I was forced to go with was a rapist but I didn’t see it that way; I had a distorted value system. In fact I was sold so often that I placed no value on what was being sold, believing I was worthless. Abuse was a part of life, I managed to convince myself of that. I was more scared of the violence that would happen if I didn’t comply than of the men who bought me.
The true implications of the life I was leading became horrifically apparent to me one day in 2006 after I’d spent a night on Cowley Road. I had gone there after being summoned by Spider. I’d been drinking; I was high. Out of my face, I was on my own. It was some time in the morning and I was walking around aimlessly, trying to clear my head before I faced Mum and lied about where I’d been. Someone behind me called out my name. I looked round and a man approached me. I couldn’t place his face or remember whether I’d seen him before. I thought he was good-looking.
‘How’s Mo?’ he asked.
‘He’s OK,’ I answered.
‘No, he’s not, he’s a dick,’ he laughed.
I agreed with him, and laughed too.
He introduced himself as Bassam and asked if I wanted to go for a drink with him some time.
‘Why not?’ I said. He seemed like a nice man and we exchanged numbers.
But he didn’t pester me. He sent texts every now and then asking how I was and what I was up to, and a couple of weeks after we first met, we agreed to meet up. I didn’t think he was involved in the gang, even though he knew Mohammed.
Better-looking than Mohammed, he looked younger and fresh, clean-shaven. He did not look as though he was on drugs – he was well groomed, nicely dressed and he smelled clean.
He arranged to take me for a drink and by then I knew this didn’t mean going to a bar or a pub. Unsurprisingly, we met in a house in Wood Farm. There were two other men there. I knew one – his name was Ali – but I didn’t know the other one. They were obviously part of the drug side of the gang and I assumed Bassam was somehow linked in. While there, I drank a couple of cans of Stella and Ali and Bassam snorted cocaine. I didn’t take any.
In the early evening Bassam suggested we go to a nearby guesthouse called the Nanford for more drinks. I agreed. I’d been there before – I’d been sent there to meet men. A flea pit, it had been highlighted in the national newspapers as being the worst hotel in Britain. It was described as a hellhole and rightly deserved the accolade. Rooms were around £20 a night. Spread out over four different properties, the rooms were dark, dingy and dirty. It looked as though the last time it was decorated was in the 1970s. There was a creepy man who worked there and didn’t ask questions the times I had been taken there by men.
From the outside, it didn’t look too bad but inside was grotty, rundown and the smell of damp pervaded everything; it was seedy. It was notorious in the town and the owners had been prosecuted years before for providing false addresses for benefit claimants and illegal immigrants. For years the local people had tried to get it closed.
This was where I ended up with Bassam. We travelled there from Wood Farm in a black cab that arrived to pick us up. On the way Bassam chatted to the driver in another language. I didn’t know what language it was and didn’t understand what they were saying. When we pulled up outside he told me to wait while he went in and got a key. A few minutes later, he came back out and ushered me round to one of the buildings at the side.
He took me to room number eight and he had drink and drugs with him. We both had a drink and Bassam had more cocaine. I didn’t have any. The room was big, but grim. There were three beds in it, all covered
with matching brown sheets. The carpet was spotted with stains and there were patches of damp on the walls.
I knew why we were there and, after more drinks, in the early hours I had sex willingly with Bassam. After that I’d had enough and that’s when things changed.
Bassam carried on drinking and taking drugs and was becoming crazy – weird, forceful and aggressive. He kept telling he wanted sex again; he started pushing himself on me and he was stocky and powerful. I was scared and I told him to stop. He began grabbing at my breasts and throat.
‘I don’t want to,’ I pleaded with him. ‘If you do it, you will be raping me.’
But that made him mad and he punched me hard in the face. I screamed and started flailing at him in an effort to get him off me. It only made him more aggressive. He smashed me repeatedly in the face and the head. Screaming for him to stop, I lied and said that I was pregnant. He knew I wasn’t, stood up, grabbed my hair and pulled me across the room.
As I struggled on the floor, he raped me while he continued to hit me. He was in a rage, screaming at me. All I could do was cower and pray the onslaught would stop. At one stage he was so forceful I cried out and he said he was going to make sure I never had children. I kept telling him he was a rapist and he clenched his teeth down on my breast. I tried to get out, but he dragged me back and beat me harder. He told me he was going to kill me.
Just when I thought it was all over he raped me again and continued to beat, punch and kick me. I tried to scramble away and he grabbed my leg and started beating me with a glass ashtray. Then he head-butted me; he was possessed. After that he dragged me into the bathroom and threw me down into the shower cubicle. I smashed my head on the porcelain and as I lay there, dazed and sobbing, he urinated on me. The onslaught went on for several hours and I was terrified I would die in that room – I couldn’t get him off me.
He must have run out of energy because eventually the physical attacks stopped and he became verbally abusive.
‘You’re a whore and I’m going to kill you!’ he shouted. I stayed still and tried to stop myself from crying in case the sound of my sobs antagonised him.
Girl for Sale Page 15