by Rosie Lewis
‘I see,’ Peggy began. ‘Well –’
‘And when you think about it,’ I jumped in, only half-aware that I still wasn’t listening to Peggy, ‘that church is used by Muslims for worship anyway.’ I knew that the local minister, dismayed at Muslims having to pray in the street because their mosque was too small to accommodate their number, had offered use of the church during weekdays. ‘If the Islamic community leaders are happy with it I don’t see that just visiting the car park is that offensive and –’
Peggy reached out her hand and rested it heavily on my shoulder. ‘Rosie,’ she said, ‘if you’ll hold your horses for just one minute and let me speak.’
I had been so frantically defending myself that I hadn’t noticed Peggy’s mild manner. When I finally drew breath I registered that her lips were curled in a smile. ‘Rosie, my pet. I didn’t think for one minute that you would disrespect their faith. I know how dedicated you are.’
I let out a breath and gave her a sheepish smile. ‘Sorry. I wasn’t sure how far it would go.’ I knew that some complaints were blown out of all proportion and sometimes foster carers were made an example of.
Peggy held up her hands. ‘It stops here as far as I’m concerned. I’ll write a report and feed back what you’ve said, but that’s the last you’ll hear of it from me.’
I nodded gratefully. Peggy was turning out to be a gem.
‘So now that’s sorted, I just have one more piece of news.’ Peggy bit her bottom lip. ‘Mr Hassan is insisting on contact. And soon. I’ve had to arrange it for tomorrow, I’m afraid.’
I blew out some air.
Peggy tucked her hands deep into her armpits and hoisted up her chest, wheezing faintly. ‘Judging by Zadie’s reaction yesterday, it’s not going to be easy for her.’
I blew out my cheeks and looked at her. ‘Hmmm, that’s an understatement,’ I said.
That night I couldn’t sleep for worrying that Zadie might harm herself again. Deep down I was painfully alert to the likelihood that hurting herself was a coping mechanism she had come to depend on. I hadn’t actually seen any physical injuries as she kept herself so carefully hidden away but most of her clothes were lightly bloodstained so I knew some form of self-harm was going on, albeit mild. I had heard somewhere that a child in care was ten times more likely to die than those living with their own family, and knowing that Zadie was a self-harmer left me feeling even more fearful for her well-being.
Chapter 13
The next morning I waited until Zadie had finished her breakfast before I broke the news about contact. She had managed to finish a whole bowl of cereal and was helping herself to toast, something she hadn’t done before, and so I didn’t want anything to put her off. It was as she began clearing the table that I said, as gently as I could, ‘Zadie, Peggy said that your father is keen to talk to you as he didn’t get to see much of you at the review.’
She had been stacking our bowls into a pile and her hands froze around them as if she was afraid they might topple over, though her expression remained serene. ‘OK,’ she whispered quietly without meeting my gaze.
‘We need to be ready to leave the house around half past nine.’ I waited a moment and then said, ‘We’re meeting him at ten.’
She drew a sharp breath. ‘Today?!’ she exclaimed, clutching the bowls to her chest like armour and wrapping her arms around them. She was staring at me, her eyes wide in alarm. ‘Today?’ she repeated, quieter this time. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realise it would be so soon.’
‘I know. It was a surprise for me too.’
Zadie gave me a long look and then spent the next hour in her room while Emily and Jamie got themselves ready for school. I was about to call her when I heard a click as her bedroom door opened. Standing at the bottom of the stairs, I watched her make her way down with what I hoped was an encouraging smile on my face. She walked slowly, her rucksack draped over her shoulder and the fingers of one hand brushing against the wall in a thoughtful way. ‘I can’t go,’ she said as she reached the bottom stair. She flattened her hand against the wall as if the action would give more weight to her decision.
I looked at her, surprised by the boldness in her voice. I could tell her refusal had nothing to do with teenage defiance, though; her eyebrows were arched in panic and her bottom lip was quivering. My heart squeezed in sympathy. ‘I know you’re scared, honey, but I’ll be with you the whole time. There’s nothing your father can do but talk.’
She sank down on the second stair and rubbed her forehead roughly with a clenched hand. ‘Oh, you don’t understand, Rosie. They’ll take me. I’ll never be found again.’ She leaned her elbows on her knees and dropped her head onto tight fists. Her shoulders twitched as she began to cry.
I sat down beside her and rubbed her back. She was trembling. ‘What do you mean, you’d never be found? How could they take you anywhere, if I’m right beside you?’ I stared at her headscarf; it was all I could see of her. My thoughts were swirling and I took a moment to try and make sense of what she was saying. Tentatively, I reached out and touched her headscarf, gently drawing it to the side so that I could catch a glimpse of her expression. She raised her face but the shutters were already down, her face closed up.
‘Who do you mean when you say “they”?’
She rolled her lips inwards and clamped them shut as if she thought they might break ranks and give up secrets without her permission. With a little hiccup, she lowered her head again.
‘I’m sorry, Zadie, but this has gone on long enough. You can’t keep me in the dark any longer.’ I could hear that my voice had lost its usual softness, but I was beginning to feel rattled. I reached for her hands and gave them a gentle squeeze. ‘If I’m to keep us safe you must tell me what’s going on. And I mean everything.’
The change in my tone had an effect on her. At first she stared at me in surprise, then she began picking at invisible threads on her sleeve and then moving on to the bands on her wrist. Her fingers plucked at them agitatedly. It was difficult to watch her so tormented and the last thing I wanted to do was cause her more stress but I had let things drift long enough and so I stayed firm, silencing the ache for her in my chest by biting down on my lower lip. After a moment or so she cleared her throat and I clenched my own nervous hands between my knees in anticipation of what she was going to tell me. What followed took me completely by surprise.
‘My father, my uncles, the whole family. They want to cut me. It’s time, you see. That’s why I ran away. That and …’ her voice trailed off into silence and she sat motionless, as if movement might encourage more words to stream from her mouth. She seemed to consider everything so carefully before she spoke. You’re worried about getting caught out again, I thought silently, wondering just what else she might have to hide.
‘Cut?’ I repeated, buying some time to process what she had said. I assumed she was referring to FGM, female genital mutilation. ‘Circumcision? Is that what you mean?’ I asked, couching the question in softer terms. Mutilation was such a shocking word and I didn’t want her to clam up on me, just when she was beginning to open up.
She nodded but angled herself away so that I couldn’t see her face. Being such a private person, I knew how embarrassed she must feel discussing something so intimate, poor girl. ‘Did they tell you that’s what they were going to do?’ I asked. I couldn’t imagine the terror a child must feel knowing that they were going to go through something like that. My own children made enough fuss about routine vaccinations; so much so that I would wait until the day they were due before mentioning anything about it.
‘No. I overheard my brother talking with Papa. And Nady was a bit younger than me when she had it done so I knew it was coming.’
‘Your sister?’
Zadie nodded and gave a hiccuping sob. She half-stood but I grabbed her arm. ‘No,’ I said, surprised by the brittle edge to my tone. ‘Sit down. We’re not finished.’ Contrite, she quickly sat down again and drew a shaky breath.
/> ‘How do you know Nadeen had,’ I paused, clearing my throat, ‘the procedure? Did she tell you?’
Her brow furrowed and a shadow crossed her face. ‘I heard it going on,’ she said, her voice trailing off with a wail. And then through her tears she told me the whole dreadful business. It seemed that when her sister was about 12 a man known locally as ‘the dentist’ came late one night and ‘cut’ her. Zadie heard her screams from upstairs but was powerless to do anything to help. ‘Nady was ill for a couple of weeks afterwards, too weak to get out of bed. One minute she would shiver and the next she was burning hot.’
‘I expect she had a nasty infection,’ I said, deciding not to voice the thought that her sister was probably lucky to have survived. ‘It must have been very hard for you to see her suffering like that.’
Zadie nodded. ‘Papa wouldn’t fetch the doctor. The dentist came back and gave her some pills but they didn’t help. Mostly I took care of her myself.’
My heart was speared with a sudden grief for Zadie, her poor sister and all the other girls who had ever experienced the trauma of being cut. I rubbed my hands briskly through my hair, unsettled by the thought that, somewhere in the world, that sort of violation was undoubtedly happening right at that very moment. What a heavy responsibility Zadie must have felt, caring for a dangerously ill child at such a tender age herself. ‘That’s just awful,’ I said out loud, unable to keep my feelings to myself.
‘It is,’ Zadie agreed, her voice tremulous. ‘I just kept hearing the sound that the girls make when they have it done. They all sound the same, like a wolf crying out.’
Slowly lowering my hands to my lap, I turned towards her. ‘How do you know that?’
Her eyes flitted from me to the wall.
‘Zadie,’ I said with a warning tone, strong and purposeful. I had had enough of secrets.
She chewed her lip and turned back, a worried look on her face. I locked my eyes on hers, refusing to allow my expression to soften. She tugged on her headscarf, fidgeted on the stair, ran her hands one over the other. ‘I’ve seen clips of it online,’ she said eventually.
I tried to disguise my shock but I’m not sure I did it skilfully. ‘Why would you watch something like that?’
Again she looked anguished. ‘Chit said it would be a good idea for me to see how it was done.’
‘A good idea,’ I repeated flatly, lost for words. Chit again. I was beginning to form a firmer picture of Zadie’s brother in my mind, and so far he wasn’t looking too good. Something wasn’t right there, not right at all. ‘Why on earth would he do that?’
Zadie looked at me warily. I tried to smooth the frown from my forehead and said gently, ‘It’s all right, Zadie. I’m not cross with you. I’m sorry I sounded sharp, I’m just trying to make sense of it all.’
She gave a little nod of understanding. ‘He was trying to prepare me.’
I looked at her doubtfully, pincering my lips together to hold back a harsh snort. Zadie moved her mouth to speak and I wondered whether she would try to defend him, but instead she shut it again. After a moment or two she spoke without further prompting, her words tumbling out in a flurry. ‘Sometimes they do it with scissors or glass. I think my father had arranged for the dentist to come and see me, but then he was arrested. I was so relieved, but then I overheard one of my aunties saying she would do it instead.’
I gasped out loud at that. It was shocking enough that her male relatives were involved, but that a woman would be complicit in causing such harm was beyond belief. ‘Your auntie?’
She nodded. ‘My dad’s sister. I was so frightened, Rosie.’
‘Of course you were.’ I rested my hand firmly on her leg. ‘You did the right thing, running away.’ My voice was grainy with emotion, mostly anger. There was so much more I wanted to say but I forced myself to stay silent. Instead I reached out and put my arm around her. She cuddled into me and wept in silence, her shoulders hunched over, trying to make herself as small as possible. Every so often she gulped down a sob and held her breath, caught herself under control, then apologised, as if comforting her was such a hardship for me.
As soon as Zadie had retreated to her room, swollen-eyed and exhausted, I telephoned Peggy. She answered her mobile after the first ring and when I explained why contact needed to be cancelled she gave a weary sigh instead of the shocked gasp I was expecting. ‘I’ve checked around and we have absolutely no record of the sister,’ she said mildly, ‘but at least that sheds a bit more light on the matter, though it doesn’t explain where she is now.’
I grasped a handful of hair from my forehead and held it in a bunch at the top of my head. The mystery surrounding Zadie’s missing sister was now firmly in the back of my mind. ‘No it doesn’t, but anyway, I can’t believe her father would do such a thing, can you?’
Peggy heaved a doubtful sigh. ‘If it’s part of his culture he’s unlikely to want anything different for his own daughter. He would naturally want Zadie to fit in and be accepted. To find a husband one day.’
‘So you’re not shocked?’ I asked, incredulous. ‘Am I overreacting here?’
I could hear a light tapping, as if Peggy’s fingernails were strumming the handset. ‘Shocked? No, Rosie, sorry but I’m not shocked. We have a number of similar cases. Teachers report it, you see, when girls return to school after the summer holidays. Often their families take them back to their own birth country for the procedure and when the girls return to school they show signs of discomfort. Sometimes they can’t sit down for weeks.’
I winced, feeling a little sick in my stomach. ‘So what do you do about it?’
‘Very little, I’m afraid. It’s a dilemma, weighing up what will do the most damage. If the child is in an otherwise loving home and we remove them, they end up being cast out by their entire community. What would you do?’
‘But surely it’s against the law?’ I pressed, ignoring her question with one of my own.
‘There’s nothing British police can do if the procedure is done abroad. Although things are changing, so I believe.’
‘Ah-ha,’ I said, grasping onto the possibility that social services might now have enough concerns about the family to secure an interim care order, ‘but if you knew that plans were being made for FGM to be done in this country …’ I let the words float in the air. It was shocking to think that families were still getting away with committing such an abuse on young girls, but what mattered more to me at the moment was protecting Zadie.
There was silence. All I could hear was the soft whirring of computers and a low hum of distant voices.
‘Peggy?’
‘As I say, I’m sorry, Rosie,’ Peggy said. ‘We’ve been told to keep meticulous records of any girl we believe has been cut. Apparently the police are clamping down on anyone who has helped to organise it, but, as far as I know, no child has ever been removed from home to prevent FGM.’
That night after the children had gone to bed I sat in the dining room and did some online research. It seemed that FGM began as an African tribal practice but was later adopted by Muslims. One site even suggested that the procedure was becoming popular with Western women.
What Peggy had said about other girls in similar circumstances resonated with me and my mind drifted to think of the women all over the world who suffered because of the dictates of male preferences, like those poor Chinese women from years ago with their feet bound so tightly that they were left disabled. And then I thought about women in the West – with so much freedom and all of the choices available to them, some still felt the need to subject themselves to surgery as if fettered to pleasing a man and keeping him happy. I sat strumming my fingers on the desk, silently ranting against the unfairness of it all. I suddenly imagined how furious Rachel would be if she knew. If she was caring for Zadie I wasn’t sure she would be able to contain her wrath.
While I understood the importance of recognising the strengths of other cultures and the danger of dismissing traditions just because t
hey were outside of my own experience, I couldn’t see how cutting a young girl in such an intimate place was anything other than a brutal violation.
One positive out of it all was that Zadie’s actions seemed to make a lot more sense and I could see that the fear of what was about to happen was enough to drive such a gentle, peace-loving girl into rebelling and running away. Some things still didn’t add up, though: the manic exercising, the sudden affection for her robe, the domineering actions of her older brother. I would have expected the disappearance of their mother to bring out his protective side. Instead he seemed to want to torment her. I could hardly believe that Chit had shown her videos of such a disturbing procedure, knowing that she would one day have to endure it herself.
And in that instant it occurred to me – it was her brother who had emailed the link to the pornographic video to Zadie. There was no doubt about it in my mind. Chit Hassan had form.
Chapter 14
In the morning Peggy called. ‘I’ve spoken to the father,’ she said, in that distancing way of hers. The father, the mother, the sister. It made Zadie’s relatives sound anonymous, like faceless cardboard cut-outs from a report rather than living, breathing people sharing the closest of blood ties. I wondered if it was her way of dehumanising them, perhaps making it easier for her to do her job. ‘He wouldn’t admit to making plans for Zadie to be cut, although when I pushed him he told me that a small procedure for girls is considered necessary for their own well-being in his culture. According to him, cutting girls is seen as the duty of loving parents and part of the job of raising a girl properly. Islamic law forbids brutal behaviour of any kind, apparently. British people know the practice as clitoridotomy, he tells me. All perfectly legal, so he says.
‘I’ve had a little look online and the thing is, he seems to be correct on that, Rosie.’ There was a pause, a rustling of papers. ‘Yes, here we are,’ she said, sounding satisfied, like she’d just solved the last clue in a particularly tricky crossword. ‘There are doctors on here describing the procedure. It sounds to me like circumcision, only under a more palatable guise.’ Peggy snorted. ‘I’ve even downloaded a price list from Harley Street.’