Array Girl A - Girl A - My Story

Harry was still up when I got back, watching a late-night show on TV. ‘You all right, pet?’ he asked as I walked in, mascara down my face, still shaking.

‘Fine, thanks, Harry… well, almost. Though I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘Fine by me,’ he said. ‘But come over here if you need a hug.’ And so I did, falling into his arms, feeling suddenly safe after the trauma and fear of the evening.

‘There, there,’ he smiled, looking down into my eyes. ‘Things are never as bad as they seem. Everything just seems tougher when you’re a kid. I’ll always be here for you – Harry will always be here.’

It helped, it really did.

The next morning, I asked Emma what had happened after I’d left, but all she would say, with typical sarcasm, was, ‘Poor Hannah, you missed all the fun.’

I saw Paige the next day but didn’t get a chance to speak to her. Maybe Emma deliberately kept us apart. To this day I still don’t know what happened to her that evening, though I heard later that because she was so young the gang just used her for blow jobs.

The next night, Emma took me for a drive with Tariq.

I mumbled a greeting before climbing into the back of the silver minibus he drove for Eagle Taxis. As we sped away, his two-way radio crackled into life. ‘Car 40,’ said a remote voice, ‘Car 40.’

‘Yes, this is Car 40,’ said Tariq, and the two of them then carried on a conversation in their first language, so I couldn’t understand. That night we just drove around Heywood and Rochdale for half an hour. Emma spent most of the time in the front with him, chatting inanely, while I sat in the back wondering where my life had gone.

At one point he got out briefly to go into a takeaway. While he was gone, Emma turned round in her seat, saying to me, ‘He’s great, isn’t he?’

Yes, brilliant , I thought. A forty-year-old boyfriend for a girl of fifteen . Even I, for all that my mind was skewed, guessed that to Tariq, Emma was no more than a meal ticket, a way to make money by providing ‘free’ young girls for him to sell sexual access to.

At least he never touched me, not that day, not any day. He still frightened me, though, because he looked so moody and so menacing. His nickname – Master – seemed entirely appropriate.

That first drive with Tariq proved to be the first of several that week. Slowly at first, then more so, I began to relax – even when we went back to Tasty Bites.

I felt even better when, with one of her rare smiles, Emma said: ‘Now that Daddy’s out of the way, it won’t ever happen again, OK?’

Did she mean it? I desperately hoped so.

Regardless of my own fate, Emma still wanted what she called shagging – and not just with her ‘boyfriend’. Late at night, once the place had closed, I’d be left downstairs while she clambered up the steps with Tariq and a few other men he’d obviously arranged to meet there.

Pino was one of the guys Emma slept with on those nights; Saj another of them. I guess that whatever Emma thought, Tariq, like a true entrepreneur, was just happy to get paid.

One night, towards the end of August, there was a variation to this new routine – the routine my fear had led me to become part of again despite going to the police. We stopped off briefly at Tasty Bites with Tariq, but then he drove us to a scruffy, depressing flat just off the Whitworth Road in Rochdale.

I’ve forgotten the address, but I could take you there. We’d always go round the back and up the stairs to get in.

It belonged to Saj, but he was renting it out to his cousin, a guy called Aarif. He had designer stubble and his hair was always cut in a short-back-and-sides. He worked as a wedding photographer: sometimes he’d leave his work on one of the two computers he kept in the lounge. He never took pictures of us, though. And, oddly, I thought, he didn’t have a TV.

Aarif wasn’t the sort to tell us much about himself, but I know he had kids because sometimes he’d speak to them on the phone, saying it was his son or daughter. Some of his friends called him Khan.

The flat had just the one bedroom that you got into by taking a step up. There was a double bed in there. The bathroom had a shower but no bath.

Aarif was there on his own.

As soon as we arrived, Emma told me I had to go and sleep with him. I said, ‘No, you promised this wouldn’t happen again.’ So she actually went into the bedroom with him herself, ‘… to show that it’s OK.’

I stayed in the living room, feeling glad that I’d not had to sleep with him. But while we waited, Tariq started complaining that ‘it wasn’t fair’ on Emma. Next time, he said, I should do what I was told.

Emma came out a few minutes later and we went home. We’d been in the flat for no more than a quarter of an hour.

The next night it really was my turn. There were four of them there this time: Aarif, Saj, a guy from Jo Baxi’s Taxis who told us to call him Joe. I have no idea what his real name was. There was another man too who I never got a name for.

Emma made me go with the first three, one after the other.

I remember there were clothes hanging on the handles of the wardrobe, and a table next to the bed with a drawer. There were condoms inside it and they all got one out before they attacked the sobbing girl at their mercy on the bed: one by one, turn by turn.

I assume Tariq, or maybe Aarif, had told them about the condoms before each of them came in. Either way, I got the impression they’d been to the flat before, with other girls. It seemed normal to them. They all knew each other; they were friendly with each other.

I knew I was trapped and that I couldn’t stop them. If I had, I think they would have attacked me in a different way. Aarif came in first, then Saj, then Joe, while Emma just sat in the lounge.

It was sick. How can a man get any pleasure from something like that? As far as I know they all had wives, so why do that to a kid? All I could wonder was what they could find attractive about me? An under-age girl who just lay there, sobbing, looking up at them… as they come to her one by one.

I don’t know whether all the men knew my age, but Tariq certainly did, and I’m sure the fact that I was under age was the main reason they wanted me.

That night, Aarif handed Emma the money for having raped me: I don’t know how much it was. Afterwards, they all went for a meal with Tariq. When they got back, Emma gave the money to him and he gave her £10 of it back.

On the way home, Tariq kept saying: ‘Hannah, you’re a good girl.’ While I sobbed in the back, Emma was just laughing.

I felt numb. Why hadn’t I just run out into the street, anywhere? Just to get away from them. Looking back, I know that’s what I should have done. But the kid I was then was frozen with fear and just kept on thinking that they would make things even worse for me if I resisted. And I also thought just what Emma had hoped I’d think: that it was hopeless, that no one would believe me. ‘What, that you’ve been raped dozens of times?’ she scoffed. ‘They’ll just laugh at you.’

They would , I thought. A girl who goes to the police about being raped, and a few days later is going in cars to be abused again by loads of other men? They’d fall about laughing and then kick me out. And to go where? The gang would have just picked me up again. In my mind, they were just too strong and too ruthless to resist. I thought it would be me who’d be blamed, not them, and that afterwards they’d want their revenge.

I couldn’t believe what was happening to me – all within a few days of going to the police. In the police station I thought I was saved, that it would end. Now I was thinking, It’s never going to go away. Not even the police can protect me. It’s just happening again .