Mulla, in his forties, with a black moustache, smiled as he entered the room. He could see that I was crying, that mascara had left smudges on my cheeks, but the smile stayed in place. He just didn’t care either. He and Daddy laughed and joked for about thirty seconds, before Daddy walked out. I could tell roughly what it was about because of the smutty looks on their faces and the way they both kept glancing towards me. But the detail passed me by because it was all in their own language – Mirpuri, I discovered later on. Much later.
My jeans were still on the floor because I’d had no time to retrieve them. In Mulla’s sick mind it just made it easier. This time, I didn’t do anything to resist the attack because I felt it would make no difference: he’d get what he wanted one way or another and it would just prolong my agony. Instead, I bit my lip and turned my face away from his leering smile.
As he raped me I could feel him touching my chest, my still-flat chest.
When he finally allowed me out of the bedroom, Emma looked up, then glanced over to Daddy and asked: ‘Right, are you finished now? Are we going?’
‘Yeah,’ he replied and, within moments, me in a daze, we were heading towards the car. Once inside, Daddy gave Emma £30 and she turned towards me, handing me a £10 note.
‘Get yourself some fags,’ she said, breezily.
So that was it: Emma had given me to two paedophiles, and now she was handing me money as some sick kind of compensation. In the front of the car, on the way home, the two of them – Emma and Daddy – chatted away as if nothing had happened. I spent the journey wiping away tears with the back of my hand.
Back at Harry’s place, she closed the front door and headed off to bed, telling me she’d see me in the morning. I stood in the hallway, still in shock. It was gone one o’clock in the morning and I felt broken and dirty beyond anything I had ever known. I wanted to have a shower, to scrub the filth of those two men away from my body. But my strength, my will, had gone, and instead I just slipped into bed beside the girl I was sharing with.
She was only about eight, and part of me wanted to snuggle up next to her. But I felt too dirty. I just lay there, gripping the very edge of my side of the bed, the duvet up to my shoulders, my body aching, looking at the darkening shadows on the wall.
I knew that life would never be the same again. My spirit had been shattered. Somehow, a girl just a few months older than me had sold me to perverts who wanted to have some depraved version of sex with me. I couldn’t understand the motives of either. I couldn’t work out how to escape. All I knew was that I felt exhausted and unclean.
A temporary escape finally came to me: sleep. I dreamed I was caught in a spider’s web, held in the middle of it by threads, each silky and thin but with a grip like steel. Every time I tried to break free, I was pulled back, slowly, reluctantly, inevitably, by the spider that wanted to consume me.
Lying in bed the following morning, sore, aching, the images from the night before wouldn’t leave me. As I watched a lone flea negotiate its way along the coverless duvet, I realised that, just as in the dream, I was trapped, and there was nowhere for me to hide.
Trying to go home wasn’t an option now. Until I’d been raped, first by Daddy, then by Mulla, I’d hated home, I’d wanted to be a rebel, and I’d wanted to be free. But was this freedom? No, it was a trap – a spider’s web in which I was the fly. I couldn’t go home, I realised, not ever, and least of all now that Emma held this sick secret over me. Oh, I might still be able to pop back to see Mum and Dad and my brothers and sisters, but never again with the freedom of knowing I could actually stay. I could never now fit back into normal family life. I felt I was tainted, that I was an outcast, different. Instead, I would be for ever linked to Harry’s place, and to Daddy, by the near-invisible threads being pulled by Emma. Hannah, the free spirit, the teenage rebel, was now a prisoner. Lying there, reluctant to face the day, I suddenly realised that with Emma controlling my life, Harry’s house was going to become a hell of its own.
I had, perhaps, one hope. Over my first couple of weeks there, Harry had become a real father figure to me. With my own dad suddenly out of my life, I felt I could get on with him. In the early days he didn’t say much, but gradually he’d include me in conversation and I came to feel part of the household. I thought it was really cool that he bought vodka and cider for us, and let us come in and go out whenever we wanted.
There were times, usually in the day, when he’d have long chats with me and maybe Emma. By then, Courtney had stopped coming by. It didn’t feel like she was my friend any more; we’d drifted apart. Instead, at least at weekends, there was another of Emma’s friends, Roxanne, who was thirteen. Roxanne had been coming to the house for ages so they all knew her.
Part of me wanted to tell Harry what had happened to me, but I didn’t dare because of Emma. She warned me the morning after those first rapes not to say anything. It would be our secret, she said, and, anyway, Harry was never going to believe me if I said I’d been raped.
So for all that I’d speak to Harry, and try to take comfort just from him being there, I didn’t dare confide in him.
Chapter Eight
Emma’s Lying
Daddy had moved quickly in taking me to Mulla, and now Emma did likewise. Within a couple of days, my rapist’s little blue car pulled up outside Harry’s just before 7 p.m. and she led me out to it. Afraid, I did as I was told and squeezed into the back, while she sat next to Daddy in the front.
He dropped us off outside the Balti House, telling us to go round the back while he collected some curries from the kitchen and delivered them.
We were sitting on the stairs when he returned ten minutes later. Smiling benignly, as if the last few days had never happened, he held out another bottle of vodka, some cola and a couple of glasses.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Don’t look so sad, Hannah. This will cheer you up.’
It didn’t, of course. It couldn’t. But sitting there, one step below Emma, I put the glass she’d poured for me to my lips and sipped. I’d never liked the taste. Now I liked it even less.
He brought us some food, too. Immy had been working front of house when we’d arrived, but the takeaway was quiet enough for him to join us, and for a few minutes Daddy and he were talking to each other. I’m guessing now that they were deciding what to do with us. All the time, I was nervously sipping the vodka, Emma refilling my glass every time.
It was a litre bottle and we’d had about half each by the time Immy came up to us. He started trying to hold me, his hands roaming around my top and leggings. Everything was getting a bit hazy when Daddy came up onto the staircase to join us.
Once again, he started to talk about the treats he’d given us, meaning the vodka, and that I should give Immy a treat in return. He kept saying it was his birthday present. He said we’d just go upstairs and chill for a bit.
I should have tried to push my way past them and headed to the front of the takeaway and out of the door past the customers I guessed would be there, ordering or collecting their takeaways, oblivious to the sort of place this was. But I didn’t. I just did what Daddy told me. I was too frightened.
Emma and I went upstairs and into a different room from the one when Daddy had first violated me. There was a mattress on the floor in this room, covered with an orange quilt; a table and two chairs; and a window with scruffy beige curtains that were hanging from nails.