As I picked my way through the subterranean parking lot, my satchel banging against my knees, I felt a prickle of fear on my skin. There were no lights and I couldn’t see if anyone might be hiding in the shadows, ready to jump out at me.
Should I go back? I wondered. No, I can’t. I promised I would come. But what’s that smell? Eurgh – urine!
The stairs were filthy and littered with cigarette ends and cans of Special Brew. Do people really have parties here? I thought in disgust.
As I came up into the main stairwell of the building, I spotted a door to the left which opened onto a large room with graffiti on the walls. This can’t be it, surely? It was less like a party place and more like the beer cellar in our hotel: dirty and grim, with a pervasive musty smell.
A neon strip light illuminated a pool table in the centre of the room and I could see an old television on a wall bracket. The minimal furnishings consisted of a couple of battered lamps on upturned beer crates and three mismatched sofas. I was just about to turn around and leave when I heard Stuart’s voice cutting through the gloom.
‘So you made it then? Fancy a drink, Dawn?’
‘Erm, okay. Coke or Fanta if you’ve got it.’
‘Don’t be silly. I mean a proper drink.’
‘Oh no, I don’t like alcohol,’ I replied.
‘That’s because you’re drinking the wrong drink,’ he said, grinning, as he handed me a brimming glass.
‘What’s this?’
‘Cointreau. Try it.’
The sickly sweet liqueur tasted like oranges. I was so nervous I knocked the whole lot back in one go and he quickly refilled my glass from a dusty bottle. I started to giggle apprehensively as he pulled me close to him.
‘Don’t worry, Dawn. I’ll drive you home if you’re a little tipsy. I can’t drink myself or I’ll get done for drink-driving. Now, come here, gorgeous!’
Suddenly my stomach lurched. A wave of nausea slid up my throat. If this is what being drunk is, forget it! It’s terrible. Why would anyone want to make themselves feel sick?
‘Can you take me home now, please?’ I asked in a small voice, but Stuart didn’t hear me because he was kissing my neck and exploring my body with his hands – or maybe he chose not to hear me.
‘I feel a bit sick. And dizzy,’ I went on. I felt so ill my head was spinning, and the last thing I was thinking about was being amorous. I was trying to compose myself and not vomit all over Stuart, to save myself from further embarrassment.
‘Shhh!’ he said as he eased off my Clarks shoes and pulled down my thick black tights, leaving me standing there in just my pants and my school uniform.
‘You’re very hairy down there,’ he remarked as he put his hands inside my underwear and groped me. ‘You should get waxed. My wife always gets waxed.’
What does he mean? What is that? What is waxing? Strange, disjointed thoughts chased themselves round my head as Stuart unzipped his trousers and took his penis out. My stomach heaved again. His penis was really big and hard. He has more hair than me. Maybe he should get waxed, I thought dreamily. Now my head felt thick and fuzzy.
‘Go on. Touch it, Dawn,’ he urged in a low voice. I took the penis in my hand. It was very fat, as if it was swollen, and in my hand it seemed to throb. Then he forced my head down and made me suck it, thrusting his pelvis with rhythmical movements, his pace quickening, his grip hardening around my head. I did my best not to gag as he stroked my long blonde hair.
‘Yeah, that’s it. Suck harder,’ he murmured. ‘Good girl! Doesn’t that feel good? This is really good. My friends want to do this to you but I won’t let them, I’m keeping you all to myself. Good girl, good girl. Oh my God! And that school uniform . . .’
‘I’m going to be sick.’
I gasped as I stood up. Somehow, I managed not to retch but it took every effort to stop myself from throwing up.
‘Don’t worry,’ he soothed as his hands roamed over my breasts and down into my pants again. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to hurt you. Only people that love each other do this. It’s a special bond between us. Now, turn around.’
Stuart spun me round then hitched my skirt up over my hips. I felt so ill I couldn’t do anything to resist. His breath quickened as he yanked down my pants, exposing me. I felt like a rag doll as he bent me forwards. Taking a deep breath, I braced myself, knowing from what John had done to me that what was coming would be painful.
But Stuart had something different in mind. To my shock, he stuck his penis in my bottom.
‘Ow!’ I cried out with the sudden and unexpected pain. This can’t be right! I thought, as tears stung my eyes. This can’t be right! This is horrible!
‘I have to do it this way so you don’t get pregnant,’ he whispered from behind as he thrust himself inside me. My body was now jammed up against the brick wall and the smell of urine was worse than ever. Stuart grunted as he slammed me against the wall over and over again: ‘This is our secret. I love you, Dawn. I love you.’
I was sick into a plastic bag all the way home. As we pulled up in front of my house, I was overcome with fear. Will Mum notice something is wrong? How on earth am I going to hide this from her?
I stumbled in the front door that evening, hoping she wouldn’t smell the alcohol on my breath or notice that I could barely walk. But Mum was too busy cooking to notice anything. I went straight to my room and curled up in bed.
Is this what it’s going to be like with Stuart? I wondered. Though he had hurt me, I still trusted him; he loved me, after all. God, I hope it gets better, ran the scattered thoughts in my head, because this will kill me.
I guess you could say it got better. From that point on Stuart wanted sex with me all the time but, to my relief, he used condoms – which meant that he didn’t try to have sex with me in the bottom again. We did it in his car, in his empty properties and in various car parks around town. He couldn’t get enough of my body – and I thought that meant he really loved me. I was giving him what he wanted and so we had a good relationship. I hung on his every word, besotted with this older man who had promised to spoil me for the rest of my life. But, as he warned me time and again, we had to be careful.
‘Your mother is an old woman. She’s losing her looks and she’s probably very jealous of you, jealous of your beauty and your youth,’ he’d tell me. ‘You can’t let her find out about us or she’d probably put an end to it.’
I was his special girl, he said, and one day we would be together forever. My head was filled with dreams of the wonderful life I’d have when we finally ran away together.
If it wasn’t for his stupid wife, I could have it all right now, I reasoned. But there she was – Maria Kelly – standing in the way of what I believed was true love. They aren’t in love, so why does she insist on staying together? If only she’d just let Stuart leave to get on with his life . . .
But no: according to him, she had threatened to ruin him financially if they ever split up and he needed time to ‘secure the businesses’ before we went public. Besides, there was that small matter of my age. At fifteen years old, I was still a minor, not that it was a big deal to me at the time. In 1984 no one had heard of ‘grooming’. There were dirty old men, sure, but then there were sexy older men like Rolling Stone Bill Wyman, who was dating teenager Mandy Smith. She was fourteen, and he was thirty-four years older than her but nobody batted an eyelid. Those were ‘wild girls’, young teens who went out and took what they wanted from life. I imagined myself as another Mandy Smith. I felt that Stuart was giving me my freedom. It was the freedom to do what I wanted without my having to ask permission for every little goddammed thing, or so it seemed.
He would let me drink – encourage it, even. My friends were saving up to buy a bottle of Diamond White to share before the school disco whereas I had an endless supply of anything I wanted. I was soon taking their orders for Sweet Martini, Peach Schnapps and the newest liquor on the shelves, Midori.
It was great. I was no lo
nger one of the geeky girls but the one everyone wanted to hang with. The cool boys and the grade-A girls soon welcomed me into their group. I was invited to every party. A space was reserved for me at the top table in the dining hall. I started to realize that money talked, and was all people were really interested in. Money had the power to make you popular, to buy you friends, to buy you freedom, to buy you anything, and Stuart was now moulding me into someone who would not want to lose the power that came from money.
As the weeks passed, Stuart and I had to think of new places to meet, away from prying eyes. As such, he arranged a few get-togethers for us in The Schoolhouse, which suited me because I’d been so desperately curious about what went on there for months.
It was easy enough to sneak out of my bedroom window and creep into the basement through the fire exit. And there my eyes were opened to a truly depraved way of life. The girls who rented rooms were all addicts and prostitutes, ‘lost girls’ with vacant expressions who would do anything for their next hit. Jim’s friends and business associates all flocked there for the wheeling and dealing, the drugs, but most of all for the sex on tap.
At first, I felt very different from these girls; superior, even. I wasn’t an addict or a prostitute, I had a good home and I was still at school. Besides, Stuart said he’d never let any of the other men do anything to me, but the way they talked about these girls! And the things they did to them . . . it was like they were less than human.
‘What can I do with this one, Jim?’
It was a Thursday afternoon and four middle-aged men were sitting round the reception, drinking whisky and coke, while Jim held forth in a half-open bathrobe. I’d refused his offer of a ‘hit’ of cocaine, but the others had snorted it up their noses in powdery white lines. Drugs didn’t interest me at all.
The man who’d asked the question was known to everyone as Wolfie because he had wiry black hair all over his body, even on the backs of his hands. Now, he was drooling over a girl standing at reception.
‘Well, Wolfie, this one likes it up the arse, don’t you, darling?’ said Jim, gesturing towards the girl who wore a tiny red miniskirt, cream vest top and no underwear. She looked about seventeen and was clearly high on drugs. She barely noticed when Jim slapped her hard on the behind.
‘She likes to be tied down, don’t you, honey?’
She didn’t say anything, just smiled absently.
‘It’s only fifty quid and you can do what you want. Tie her up, put her against that door and all three of you can fuck her up the arse and she won’t mind. Might be an extra tenner each. Is that not right, honey?’
‘Yeah, that’s right.’
I recoiled inside.
These girls were so desperate for money they would do anything for cash. It scared me.
One time I met Stuart at The Schoolhouse, I passed a girl being fucked in a corridor. The girl’s empty hollow eyes fixed on mine as she bobbed up against the wall, her legs lifted around the bloke’s waist whilst two other men stood waiting for their turn. Drugged up to the eyeballs, she looked about the same age as me, with straggly bleached blonde hair hanging limply over her shoulders.
Could that be me one day? I felt a shiver run down my spine. I had to get out of there.
‘I don’t want to meet you at The Schoolhouse again,’ I told Stuart later that day. Something about Jim’s world felt very wrong and I was frightened that if I spent any more time there I would become corrupted by it. I was convinced my love for Stuart was different from the ugliness I’d witnessed at The Schoolhouse. That was real and pure.
With the change of venue, my meetings with Stuart were now mostly in the mornings and afternoons, before and after class. The rest of the time, I filled my hours daydreaming about him. I confided in my friend Simone about our ‘affair’ because I was desperate to share my excitement at the new life that we had planned together. It was always on my mind, day and night. Nothing else mattered; not even my education anymore.
‘You don’t have to do that stupid homework,’ Stuart had insisted one night when I told him I was too busy working on an essay to meet him for sex. ‘A girl like you can get anything you want. You’re bright, you’re beautiful and you can use your looks and charm in life. You’ll never go without.’
‘But what about art school?’ It had been drummed into me that I had no option but to study hard if I wanted to get on in life.
‘Look at your mother!’ Stuart had reasoned. ‘Your mother had a good education and where is she now? Slaving behind a stove in a hotel kitchen fourteen hours a day. What kind of life is that? She’s miserable and, frankly, I don’t blame her. You’re not going to end up like that because you’re going to have it all. Don’t be a mug, Dawn. Trust me, you don’t need school to get on in life.’
Stuart frequently made disparaging remarks about my family. He said that my sister was jealous of me, my mum was bitter about losing her looks and my brother would disapprove because he had lost me. He even managed to slip in some insults about my father. He said my dad would feel inferior that a man more successful than him could show his daughter a real life, one he should have given his own wife but could never afford. Little by little, I began to feel isolated from my family, and Stuart encouraged this. I didn’t need them, he insisted. I didn’t need to work hard at school. I didn’t need anything or anybody apart from him.
It worked. I became completely convinced that Stuart was my destiny, my true love and my salvation from a predictable and boring life of misery. Before long my grades began to slip and I started to flunk all my tests. So, when I was called in to see the head of the girls’ department at my school in early October 1984, I thought I knew what it was about.
Oh flip, I thought, as I knocked on Mrs Crowthorne’s door. I’d managed to conceal my falling grades from my parents but there was no disguising it from the school and now I was in for a real ear-bashing.
Mrs Crowthorne was sat behind her large mahogany desk when I came in, a look of intense concern on her pinched features. She pushed up her reading glasses and leaned back in her creaky wooden chair as I shuffled into her office, pressing her hands together and resting her chin on her fingertips.
She studied me for a moment, then she drew in a deep breath and began. ‘Dawn, I want to talk to you about a very delicate matter. The fact is, you have been seen having dinner in a restaurant with an older gentleman, Stuart Kelly, and another man. It was brought to our attention by another guest in the restaurant because there were just the three of you there.’
I was taken aback. Stuart had indeed taken me for a Chinese meal the week before; it was a special occasion because I was meeting his cousin Adam Kelly. The two men were best friends and business partners and, to me, this was the first step on the road to becoming the next Mrs Kelly.
‘Oh aye, she’s stunning alright!’ Adam had nodded admiringly when we were introduced. ‘You’ve landed yourself a right catch there. Good on you, Stuart. I’m really happy for you both.’
At that moment, I had felt honoured to be accepted into Stuart’s inner circle and simply sat quietly for the rest of the meal, eating my chicken in black bean sauce as the pair discussed business. Why did the school care if I went out for dinner with them?
‘I was only out with Fergus’s dad and his cousin,’ I said innocently.
‘Yes, we know who he is, Dawn, but why were you with these men?’
‘It was only a meal!’ I shot back defensively. ‘Where’s the harm in that?’
‘Well, Dawn, we don’t understand why a girl of fifteen is going out for dinner with two older married men on her own. It’s not like you were with your parents or Fergus. It was just you. From the school’s point of view, this looks like an unhealthy relationship. Is there anything you want to tell me about this, Dawn?’
I shook my head vehemently.
‘Right, well, if you’re seen with him again, we’ll have to call your mother.’
I was outraged by this intrusion by the school into
my private life and I ranted at Stuart when I saw him later that day.
‘I mean, what right have they got to go poking their noses in?’ I seethed.
‘It’s because of your age,’ Stuart muttered, looking far more worried than I felt. ‘We’ve just got to get you to sixteen, then everything’s going to be okay. I’m going to divorce Maria and we’re going to get married but none of this can happen, none of it, if we get caught and I go to prison. So look, if anything happens, you have to remember this: you are entitled to one phone call. Got it?’
I nodded.
‘You’re a bright girl, Dawn, you know what I’m saying, don’t you? If you get nicked, you call me. Don’t say anything to the police. Nothing! Because if they find out we’re having sex before you’re sixteen they’ll put you in care and I’ll be locked up. And it won’t be me responsible for getting us into trouble because I know how to keep my mouth shut. It’s your own mouth that will get you in trouble so you have to deny it. If you don’t admit anything, they can’t prove anything.’
So we carried on as before, only this time we tried to be more discreet. I slowly dropped out of all of my after-school sports clubs and spent more and more time at one of the flats Stuart owned opposite my school. I thought we were being really clever, outwitting my parents, the school and the authorities.
Only I hadn’t banked on Mrs Maria Kelly. I was so wrapped up in my own little world that I completely failed to take account of the fact that Stuart was now spending all his time with me, and not at home. As any wife would, she started to wonder about his long absences.
It was just before 9 a.m. one morning in March 1985 when a pupil from another class came to the door of my classroom and spoke to the teacher.
‘It’s Dawn McConnell,’ she announced. ‘She needs to come to Mrs Crowthorne’s office straight away.’
I Own You Page 7