He was tall and skinny, with long, swept-back black hair, aged about thirty. There was another man there, again Asian, tall and big, in his late twenties or so.
I knew they’d want sex because they always did. Wherever Daddy took us, I’d know that that was what was going to happen. That night, while we were driving over, Emma had actually been saying how much she was looking forward to it. How she was going to sleep with them. How much she really wanted it. Stuff like that. She loved it; I hated it. But it had somehow become my life.
Daddy had driven away as soon as he’d dropped us off. The house was in a big block in a scruffy part of town. It had an overgrown garden.
Pino let us in. There was vodka for us as usual, and we sat there talking to each other while the two men chatted in their own language. They were obviously deciding what was going to happen next.
After a while, Pino told me to go upstairs. He said it as though it was a request, but I knew what was on his mind. I was used to it by then, and just tried to block it out because I knew it was going to happen anyway.
Emma started to come with us but he said he didn’t want her, and sent her back downstairs.
The walls of the main bedroom had been painted a garish red. You could tell there had been patterned wallpaper underneath that had just been painted over. There was a double bed, along with a sofa, a big mirror, a wardrobe and a stereo.
I was on the bed and Pino was telling me how pretty I was and that I should relax. He was trying to kiss me, pulling at my top and trying to pull my leggings down. It felt horrible. My head was spinning and he just kept on touching me.
I started to cry. I was saying, ‘I don’t want to do it. I’ve got a boyfriend.’ I didn’t, but I thought it might persuade him to leave me alone. It didn’t, though; it just made him angry. He kept shouting at me, saying I knew why I was there and that I should bloody well get undressed and do it. Then he was on the phone to Daddy, shouting at him too, complaining about me. I could hear Daddy trying to smooth things out with him, but he wasn’t having it.
One of them slammed the phone down; I think it was Pino. He turned towards me, pulling at my clothes again. Something inside me snapped. I couldn’t stand it and screamed at him to get off me. Then I was shouting for Emma. A few moments later, there was a banging on the door and we heard someone shouting, ‘Police!’
The fight suddenly went out of Pino, and a look of panic came over his face. He told us to hide and so Emma and I ran into the other bedroom. When we came out and crept downstairs a few minutes later, neither of the men was there and the kitchen window was wide open. The police had gone too.
I was glad the police had turned up, but scared as well. I thought of the trouble it might bring: the questions, the shame, the recriminations from Daddy and Emma if I dared say anything. And, of course, if the police got involved they’d get in touch with Mum and Dad. And they couldn’t know.
They must never get to know what I’d got myself into.
We were still worried we’d get done by the police so we climbed out of the same window. Once we were outside, we needed to climb over a fence, and the man next door moved his wheelie bin so we could clamber up and away. I’ve wondered since whether it was him who’d heard all the shouting and called the police.
I didn’t have a phone, of course, and Emma’s was out of credit, so we walked to a local community centre where she asked to use the phone so she could call Daddy.
When he drove up he went mad at me. He kept screaming at me for supposedly betraying him by not letting Pino sleep with me. I’d defied him and I was going to pay for it.
‘I’ll have to pay him back,’ he shouted. ‘Am I really going to have to stay with you every time to make sure you do what you’re supposed to do?’
When he dropped us back at Emma’s he said he’d see me again soon. He said it with such menace that as I went inside, I knew I was as trapped and as helpless as ever. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I’d tried to stand up for myself, but nothing had changed.
In just a few days I’d fallen into a depraved world I’d never known existed. Now, with my wish for rebellion crushed, I was reduced to thinking that the only way to survive was to just give in and try to close my mind to the horror of what they were doing to me.
At fifteen, and still a kid despite my pretence at being grown-up and worldly, I really couldn’t escape. Daddy and his friends knew exactly where I lived, and kept making it clear that they knew. He’d already threatened me with all sorts of violence: to kill me, to rape my sisters, to burn down our family home. I convinced myself they could do all of those things because of what they’d already done. If they could rape a sobbing teenager without a pang of conscience, murder was only a small step away.
I couldn’t believe that all this had happened to me in just a few weeks.
To Mum and Dad it must have just seemed like I was off on an act of teenage rebellion, using the start of the summer holidays to stay at a friend’s house in defiance of them. They thought it best to back off and leave me to it. They had no idea of the misery I was going through each and every day I spent away from them.
Maybe they were reassured when I kept popping back, even if it was mostly only to have my washing done. Mum must have thought it a sign that her eldest hadn’t completely abandoned the family, that there were still ties between us.
Emma, though, usually came with me, not wanting me to go there alone. She’d always be careful to come across as my big buddy, chatting with my parents as if everything was fine and normal. On the days she didn’t come, she’d warn me not to say anything.
I wanted to tell Mum and Dad the truth, that I was a prisoner. They could see that I was dirty and dishevelled, angry, and they came to hate the increasingly foul language I’d come out with whenever I saw them, but they didn’t know why. They had no idea. When I got mad at them, they didn’t know to look behind the shouting to wonder what was making me that way.
Those times at home should have been brief moments of respite, but they weren’t. Rather than trusting my parents to help me, I was taking everything out on them, so much so that by the time I’d leave they were, unsurprisingly, sick of the sight of me.
Usually, we’d just bicker, with me screaming such vile abuse they’d come close to throwing me out of the door. Most times, though, I’d storm out and head, like a lemming over a cliff, back to the house that had once promised freedom, but was now just a staging post for degradation and violence.
I was desperate to tell them what was happening to me.
What held me back was my fear of what the gang might do to them if they found out I’d told them. And, if I’m honest, part of me blamed Mum and Dad for not realising there was something terribly, terribly wrong in their daughter’s life. I couldn’t understand why they couldn’t see the hold Emma had over me. They didn’t seem to suspect anything. Now, I realise that she’d managed to pull the wool over their eyes too. She could convince anyone of anything.
Chapter Nine
Nowhere to Turn
It was around this time that I realised that the Glen’s Vodka Daddy gave me was becoming my only friend. I’d drink it either neat or with cola. I came to hate the taste so much that I’d want to be sick even before it was poured, but I knew that if I drank it, drank it quickly, things wouldn’t be so bad. I wouldn’t be so scared, not quite so hurt.
The vodka meant I could at least forget. Even when it was happening, if I was drunk it felt somehow as if it wasn’t real, that I wasn’t actually being raped, that the body being violated was someone else’s, and that I, Hannah, wasn’t actually there.