Daddy laughed, and Emma did too. She was still holding the bottle of Glen’s, and held it out towards the guys in the car, whooping like she was at the best party ever.
I could only think, Is this real?
The lights were just changing when the chatty guy looked over at me, pale, and so obviously young, sitting in the back seat. ‘New girl, eh?’ he asked.
‘Yeah,’ said Daddy. ‘I’ll give you a ring.’
It was then that I dimly began to realise that my personal hell was only just beginning.
A few minutes later, we were picking Immy up from the fruit stall he worked on in a local market and heading off back to the Balti House. Immy was thin, in his twenties, with a pinched, mean-looking face. He sat in the front, and he and Daddy chatted in a language I had no way of understanding.
I wanted to run away screaming, but it felt as though I had nowhere to run to. And Emma made doubly sure I didn’t leave: she turned towards me and whispered, ‘So, what will your mum and dad think of their lovely little daughter now? Shagging a Paki, eh? They wouldn’t want to hear that, would they?’
For the rest of the journey I felt a relentless, creeping sense of self-loathing. I convinced myself that Mum and Dad wouldn’t want to know me. They’d see the fact that I had ‘allowed’ this to happen as the final straw. I knew – or at least thought I knew – exactly what they’d be like. In my mind’s eye, as we sped through that alien town, I could see them saying it: ‘You’ve brought it all on yourself. We told you, we kept telling you – and now this. People will just look at you and think, “Slag.” You shouldn’t have been there in the first place. They obviously wanted something from you, otherwise they wouldn’t have kept giving you free things. What did you expect them to do?’
In the emotional haze that engulfed me after the rape, I couldn’t see that I was the victim in all of this, and that for all their misgivings about my behaviour, Mum and Dad would have wanted to help me, to protect me. True, they’d come to despair of me, and it felt to me they were as happy as I was that I’d seemingly left home. But they were still the people who’d given me life; they were still my parents. I wanted to throw open the car door and run to them. But the shame of what had happened to me, and my growing sense of failure, wouldn’t let me. Instead, I closed my eyes, suppressing the sickness I felt in my stomach, crushed between the car door and Emma’s podgy, immoveable thigh.
I was trapped. I had nowhere to run.
In the space of a few hours, my whole life had become a surreal nightmare. I wanted to wake up. I wanted to know that it wasn’t the conscious me that was in such pain and fear.
I was still confused by the way Daddy and Emma were behaving. It made me wonder whether what had happened to me was normal. Everybody seemed to be acting like nothing had happened at all.
Back at the Balti House, Daddy – the new Daddy – told Emma to take me upstairs and to send Courtney home.
‘Please don’t go,’ I begged her, looking pleadingly at Courtney, just as I’d done in the car. ‘Please.’
Courtney bit her lip, nervously, looking from me to Emma. In that single, awful moment she looked desolate, but before she could speak, Emma started shouting, telling her to leave.
Courtney seemed terrified of Emma as well, so she took what she must have seen as her only opportunity to bolt, leaving me all alone. Emma turned to me and gave me that look she had.
‘You’re staying,’ she spat.
I wanted to run but I couldn’t move. I didn’t feel I could argue. By now, all the fight, all the spark, had gone out of me. I was numb, too confused and tired to even think straight.
We sat upstairs for what seemed like hours. At one point, Emma leaned her huge frame towards me and in a low, menacing whisper said: ‘You’ll do what I tell you from now on, OK? You know what they’ll think at home. It won’t be rape to them. They’ll think you loved it. They’ll think you loved being shagged by a guy even older than your dad.’ She paused, then said, ‘A bit like Courtney the other night. Remember? When she came back with cider all over her?’ My mind fought groggily to remember, and I nodded dumbly. ‘Stick with me now, though, and you’ll be fine. I’ll look after you. All you have to do is do what I say. You can carry on living at Harry’s; you’ll still get to eat and we won’t even make you pay rent. I might even give you some money.’
I was too frozen with fear to reply. Instead, I nodded slowly, my eyes lowered to the floor, avoiding the gaze I knew was bearing down on me. Inside, I shivered, and wondered about Courtney and what she, too, may have been through.
The takeaway opened at 5 p.m. and they gave us more food and more vodka. I drank it silently, just praying for this nightmare to end.
At about 11 p.m., Daddy came upstairs and told us to go to his car. ‘We’re going to a party,’ he said. His words reignited my fear. Why didn’t they just let me go?
They led me outside and I joined Emma on the back seat. What did they have in store for me now?
We headed off to a flat that I think was somewhere in Oldham, but in a different area to the one we’d been to before. We pulled up outside a nondescript-looking house, and an Asian man opened the door.
It seemed we were expected because as soon as we arrived, Daddy started pulling me into a bedroom.
I knew what was coming, or at least I thought I did, and I started trying to talk him out of it. ‘We did something earlier,’ I whispered. ‘We don’t need to do it again.’ I was so frightened I even said, ‘We’ll do it another day.’ Anything to try to keep him away.
But it wasn’t just Daddy I had to fend off this time. Emma joined in, persuading me, forcing me to do what he wanted. She said she’d come in with me, and then started pushing me through the doorway as he pulled. I tried to resist, but then she shouted: ‘Just get in the fucking bedroom and get it over with!’ For a few seconds the three of us were in the room together, but as soon as Daddy told Emma to get out she turned on her heel.
‘I thought you were going to stay,’ I said.
She shrugged and reached for the door handle. ‘Well, sorry, but I’m not,’ she said over her shoulder.
With Emma gone, and the door closed, Daddy took off his trousers, sat down on the bed and looked up at me. ‘It’s time to give Daddy a blow job, Hannah,’ he said matter-of-factly, like he was asking for a cigarette or something.
Instinct took over and I reverted to what I’d done previously. ‘No,’ I giggled, trying to make sure I didn’t make him angry. Maybe I could make him feel guilty; he’d remember how well we got on?
But it was no good.
I hated what he made me do then even more than earlier, because it somehow felt more intimate. I was choking and crying but still he didn’t seem bothered. He just kept a steel grip on my head. Eventually, he pushed me away and told me to lie down. Through the fear I sobbed. ‘But I’m only fifteen,’ I whimpered.
He wasn’t fazed at all. He just looked me in the eye and said, ‘It doesn’t matter. Where I come from, I can have sex with girls who are eleven.’
I didn’t know if that was true or not. But it horrified me. Instantly, my heart went out to any girl who had to endure what I was going through at such a young age.
I tried to get dressed again, tried to regain some dignity, but Daddy wasn’t done. ‘No, Mulla is coming in now,’ he revealed.
Mulla? Another man? My throat tightened. I couldn’t take any more.
‘No, please!’ I begged. ‘I’ve just done it with you.’ Daddy shook his head and stroked my head like I was a sleeping baby. ‘Shh,’ he breathed. My stomach churned as every inch of me trembled with fear.