“Because you took me to my psychiatrist and she told my social worker and then they got me put on an emergency section claiming I was having psychotic paranoid delusions!”
“So how come you’re out of the hospital then?” I asked curiously.
“Because after a week Doctor Acharya said she couldn’t find any evidence of psychosis, so they let me go again.”
“Well there you are then, Doctor Acharya is clearly on your side!” I pointed out.
“And now you’ve gone and got me in trouble with them!” Her face twisted up. “Don’t you realise that they’ll be back tomorrow and then they’ll punish me for going off with you?”
“So why go off with them tomorrow? Why not just lock yourself in your bedroom and not answer the phone?”
“You don’t understand,” she said between her teeth. “Every time you disobey them makes it worse the next time. They just up the level of punishment!”
I took a deep breath in. “So what kind of punishment are we talking about?” I inquired.
She stared at the ground, stirred up the gravel with a foot. “One time I saw them poor petrol over this girl’s hand and they set it alight,” she muttered.
I stared at her and my skin crawled.
“Jessica,” I said carefully. “I really, really need to know if you’re telling the truth. Please tell me now if you’re making this up…”
She stared at me with such betrayal in her eyes that I felt she had to surely be telling the truth? Unless she had worked herself up into believing her own fantasies…
She must have seen the conflict and calculation in my eyes because she snarled at me, “I might have known you’d just be like all the rest!” And she turned and ran into the house.
I put my helmet back on, and started up the engine. But not before I heard an almighty row breaking out on the other side of the door. After a moment of hesitation I turned the engine off again and took my helmet off. Then I walked up the crunching gravel path and rang the bell.
It was wrenched open by a balding middle aged man. He stared at me like I wasn’t what he was expecting.
“Can I come in and talk to you about what’s going on with Jessica?” I asked politely.
“Are you from the social services?” He asked aggressively.
I shook my head. “Just a friend…”
He opened the door a bit wider and let me in.
There was no sign of Jessica. A middle aged woman with a resemblance to Jessica came out of the living room to see what was going on. She looked like she’d been recently crying.
“I feel like I know you,” the man said, frowning at me.
If Cody had been a Thrills and Spills addict, then probably Jessica would have watched it occasionally too, but since the documentary had delighted in emphasising my conviction for GBH and my consequent supervision order, I didn’t think it would do me much of a service to remind them of the series.
I sat down in the living room with my helmet on my lap.
“I’ve just found Jessica in a car with three older men,” I said.
“Pakis were they?” The father spat out viciously.
I bit my lip. “They were certainly of Asian origin,” I said cautiously.
He sat back in his chair with some violence and swore under his breath.
“What is your assessment of what’s going on?” I asked carefully. I didn’t want to put any ideas into their heads.
The wife looked anxiously at her husband, and then back at me. “We think it’s a grooming gang, but no-one wants to hear that. We went to the Police but they said that there was nothing illegal about a sixteen year old choosing to sleep with older men and when we said we thought they’d started with her when she was only thirteen they shrugged and said well then we should have come in earlier shouldn’t we?” She glanced at her husband for confirmation.
His face contorted with helpless hatred. “They accused me of racism! I only voted BNP this year because of what was happening to my daughter!”
“And what does her Social Worker say?”
“She says they’ve checked Jessica’s search history online when she’s been in hospital and she’s been constantly googling the Rotherham and Rochdale cases and she says that Jessica is just constructing a story to explain to us why she wants to sleep with older Asian men…” The mother filled in.
“But then I’m always constantly googling Rotherham as well!” The father exclaimed. “Because I’m trying to find out what this lot might be modelling themselves on!”
“And then the Social Worker says that we’re just putting it into Jessica’s head to tell us this story because we’re obviously communicating to her that we’d rather to believe that she’s being coerced than merely enjoying exploring her sexuality by being promiscuous!” Her mother sounded, not surprisingly, enraged.
“We keep trying to lock her in the house,” her Dad said despairingly, “or block her way. But the Social Worker says it’s illegal to do that!”
My head began to ache. I thought of Nasim being locked in her room because at the age of seventeen she wanted to go out with an Indian guy. I’d thought her parents were disgusting to try to control her like that. What if the Social Worker was right and that’s all that was going on here? A racist father objecting to his girl going out with a Pakistani, and the girl using it as a method of rebellion?
But there had been three of them in that car, and my instinct had told me they were bad news and that they were threatening her when she got out.
“Do you have the Social Worker’s name?” I asked. “I think I might try to go to see her and tell her what I saw…”
The mother looked hopeful, the father rolled his eyes and exploded impatiently, “Good luck to you is all I can say!”
But I left with one of the Social Worker’s business cards tucked into my chest pocket.
At home I lay awake in bed feeling even more confused. The parents clearly believed Jessica was being coerced, and wanted to help her. So why wasn’t she letting them help her? Because the parents were unbearably controlling and she had some twisted need to punish them? Or because, like me when I was sixteen, she didn’t believe her father could manage to deal with a bunch of fit vicious young men? Why had I not let Dad go after Beck, Sy, Tino and Hussein? Because I was afraid he’d end up beaten up and stabbed. And Jessica had seen someone getting petrol poured over them and set alight. With the insouciance of youth I’d always assumed that when Beck and co had poured petrol over Quinn it had been a mere empty threat just to make us crumble. Now I shuddered. Maybe they had been prepared to actually carry through with it…
The mega racing commitment of the bumper Easter weekend was fast approaching. I’d already raced the first World Qualifier on shale. The next one would be on tarmac this weekend at the Mendips Raceway – but I’d have to find some excuse to miss it. Then the third would be back on shale, so that left a useful gap before I’d have to face Paul.
“So we’re avoiding being anywhere where your Dad is at all costs for as long as possible,” I explained to Jo.
She frowned. “Won’t he notice?”
“Of course he’ll notice!” I agreed. “But he’s playing mind games with me and Pete, so we’re going to give him a dose of his own medicine… We’ve often driven around the country on a separate schedule from Pete to stay away from the Superstars to help me boost my points, so now we’re going to pretend we’re making another attempt on the Silver and follow the same regime but even more rigorously.”
“So are we or aren’t we actually going for Silver?” Jo asked, confused.
“I hadn’t intended to bust a gut until I saw how Devlin and Horrocks and Patterson were getting on, but now I’m going to pretend I’m just after easy points…”
“So that means we won’t be doing our usual trek down to the South West in the Beast all together?” She queried.
“Nope, let’s go somewhere completely unexpected!”
“Ok,” she said cautiously. “We’d better st
udy the race schedules and do a bit of scratching and re-booking.”
I rang the Social Worker, but she was busy and then off for Easter. I arranged an appointment to see her the week after she got back. Not that I knew exactly what I was going to say.
“I doubt Dad’s going to really believe that we’d rather attend the Great Northern Qualifying Race at Barford, rather than a World Qualifier down at Bristol, especially when we’ve had to go all the way to Stoke the previous day for the World of Shale Qualifier!” Jo muttered as we unloaded the cars at Skegness on Good Friday which we pretended we were doing for Cody’s sake because she had family commitments earlier in the day, so couldn’t get down to Northampton for one pm where the two men were.
“We’re giving Cody a chance to get into the running for the Great Northern, rather than myself,” I explained facetiously, “and we’re going to Belle Vue instead of Smeatharpe because we want Cody to have done enough to qualify for the Whites and Yellows at her local track by the end of the year, and besides, we can’t get all the way to Devon if we’re all the way up in County Durham the day before!”
“Yeah, yeah,” Jo said cynically. “He’ll suspect us something rotten.”
“That’s the point Jo, we’re messing with him, playing mind games, keeping him guessing…”
At work the next week Jo called me into the shed. She’d appropriated my tablet. “Footage of Dad on YouTube at the World Qualifier,” she shouted.
I rushed in. We watched it in silence. “Shit he’s good,” I muttered.
Jo bit her lip. “He is, isn’t he? Second! He’s been out of it for ten years and a few races into the season and he’s bloody second!”
“Or maybe my car is just bloody brilliant,” I said hollowly.
She looked ironically at me.
“Well put it this way Jo,” I defended myself, “if the car was crap he’d be trailing along in the middle however good a driver he was. Remember how I went from terrible results when my car was playing up, to winning everything in sight once Tyler had passed on to me his top notch car?”
“Ye-e-s,” she agreed cautiously. We sat in silence for a minute. “I think he knew it was going to be a really good car,” she ventured. “I think he thought it would be wasted on me. A really good car needs a really good driver to win…”
“So he’s just doing it for my sake to prove how good my car is?” I said in a sarcastic tone. “Like a celebrity endorsement to get me lots of orders?”
She gave a sort of laugh. “Let’s put that spin on it shall we? To make ourselves feel better. Are you beginning to feel like he’s stolen your car?”
I pushed my hair back from my face. “A bit… I mean, he started out by reporting he’d thought of some adjustments and acting like he was going to collaborate, and now he’s made those adjustments without letting me know what they are, and he’s not telling me anything!”
“But you’re not asking…” She pointed out.
“I’m too scared to,” I admitted. “Because he’s eyeing me like he’s daring me to!”
We both sat with our chins on our hands. I sighed. “I used to go to Tyler when we were competing with your Dad via Pete, but now who do I go to?”
“How about that Rob Rudd?” she suggested.
I stared at her. “You’re a bloody genius! I’m not sure what he’ll be able to tell us about current F2 engines because he’s been so long in the F1s now, but he sure can advise us on how your Dad drives and what his weak points are!”
“I feel like a complete traitor now…” She groaned.
“Worth a try anyway,” I said, completely ignoring her imagined moral crisis.
The Social Worker was a complete cow. “So do you have a degree in Psychiatry?” She asked condescendingly.
“No,” I said.
“Psychology?”
“No.”
“Social Work?”
“No.”
“Any degrees at all?”
“No.”
“Then what makes you think you can come in here and tell me how to do my job?” She sneered. “The whole clinical team is in agreement that Jessica, for whatever reason, is using the whole Rotherham scandal as a useful hook to excuse her own behaviour. Just because the whole world has gone abuse crazy what with the Jimmy Saville affair and Operation Yew Tree and celebs being accused left, right and centre, it doesn’t mean that every naughty disturbed teenager is being abused when she sleeps around with older men! The same sort of hysteria happened in the late eighties and early nineties with all that Ritual Sexual Abuse rubbish and those highly suggestive books like ‘the Courage to Heal’ which encouraged people to believe in ‘recovered memories’ and there was a positive epidemic of False Memory Syndrome! All completely discredited now… No I think you’ll find,” she eyed me in a superior fashion, “That with all this unseemly rush in the County Councils to put on Safe Guarding Awareness courses telling professionals to look out for gang grooming, that there’s a positive rash of people dashing around looking to find abuse that isn’t actually there!”
I opened my mouth to defend Jessica, but found I had absolutely nothing to say. I had no idea what the woman was going on about with most of it. I left completely humiliated. Blasted woman! What a condescending cow!
I got Jessica’s mobile number off Cody and rang her. “Are you in a safe place right now?” I asked.
“No,” she said abruptly.
Oh God. “Well I can’t help you just now, but could you ring me back on this number when you’re somewhere safe and private and can talk?”
She ended the call.
My stomach clenched. That meant she was with them again. Poor kid. And then it clenched again. And I bet they controlled her phone and now my number was on it. What an idiot I was!
When I wandered into Rob’s workshop he was bent over his car.
“Are you on your own?” I established.
He straightened up and raised his eyebrows on seeing me standing there. “That’s sounds promising,” he said in a suggestive tone.
“Oh shut up,” I said. “I’m here to talk.”
“That’s disappointing,” he murmured with a still suggestive smile.
I stalked around his workshop looking at everything with a sharp eye. “I hope you haven’t still got that ‘Top Totty’ photo up of me,” I said acerbically.
He bared his teeth. “Better photos of you than that one out there these days.”
I stared at him. How dare he! “Ok, I’m going,” I said sharply, and turned on my heel.
“No wait,” he intervened. “I’m sorry! I’d forgotten all about that newspaper photos debacle, I was just meaning to tease you.”
I stood motionless, feeling my cheeks go hot. Dammit, I hadn’t meant it to get off to this sort of start!
“I only stuck that photo up in the first place to annoy Quinn,” Rob said.
“It’s so easy to annoy Quinn,” I agreed.
“And so much fun…” Rob proffered.
“And then, no doubt he came and told me about it just to annoy me,” I added. “Because he finds that so much fun…”
Rob smiled. “So what brings you here?”
I trailed my finger in the dust that lay along a work bench. “Hmm. Thing is… When I needed advice outside the Satterthwaite circle, I used to go to Tyler only now…” I glanced at him.
“Now you can’t,” he agreed.
“Only I’m not really sure what I want to ask you…”
“Is this about Paul?” Rob divined with a wry twist of the lips.
“Yes it bloody well is!” I said crossly. “He’s gone and appropriated my car and now he’s bloody winning everything with it! And I want to know how to keep one step ahead with the car I’ve got…”
“You must have built an extremely good car,” Rob commented. “If that’s any consolation?”
I made a low growling noise in my throat.
He grinned. “And you want to get your car to peak performance before you
face him huh?” He laughed. “Barford?” He challenged mockingly. “The Great Northern? Pull the other one!”
I grinned back. “It’s for Cody of course, not me…”
“Is that your latest little duckling?”
I sighed. “God, Rob, this year that’s a brilliant description of how it feels! At the moment I seem to be part Social Worker, part kids’ club!”
“You’re doing well to win anything at the moment from what I see,” he observed. “Hanging around every lap for her to catch up and follow you!”
“Is it that obvious?” I said with a grimace.
He looked ironically at me. “You women, you’re just too soft, that’s your problem… I reckon that’s why Paul’s doing this…”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“First of all you get Pete his Gold roof- ” He stopped and waited me to say something.
I didn’t, I just folded my arms and looked challengingly at him.
“Oh whoops I took just a bit too long to deal with Tyler and make sure he was so off course he couldn’t come back,” he mocked, “and then whoops, where’s the accelerator..? I seem to have mislaid it!”
I eyed him.
“And then you were too soft to take it off him the next year, so dropped out…”
“Well at least he proved he could get it for himself!” I defended.
“And I just have a sense that you’re not going to feel able to challenge him for it, for whatever reason, until someone else has taken it off him first…”
I was silent. Maybe he was right?
“You women like everything to be harmonious in the home, and you don’t want to rock the team boat…”
I continued to say nothing, trying to assess whether he was right or not.
“So Paul is going to slap you around the face until you’re forced to race so bloody hard that you forget about all the niceties and beat that son of his.”
I folded my arms for the second time. “You think?”
“Yep. He wants you to go for it.”
I digested that.
“He knows he can beat Pete with his eyes closed.”
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