Array Girl A - Girl A - My Story

At that stage I couldn’t engage with anyone. All I could do was try to beat back the pressure and pain I was in.

On those Thursday nights we’d come away from Taylor Street with a bag of condoms, usually around ten of them, always in a white bag. Emma would get them for herself or she’d get a bag for me as well. Out we’d go onto the street – her singing or whistling, me silent and shuffling beside her.

Emma never rested in her quest to find more and more men for us – obviously, the more men I slept with, the more money she got. Over those next few weeks she found lots of new faces that I’d never seen before. I first met Billy at Aarif’s. He was a skinny Asian man with short hair and, according to Emma, he was good looking.

‘So it’ll be easier with him,’ she said one day, me in the bath, her sitting on the loo seat so she could keep an eye on me and make sure I’d shaved.

Actually, it wasn’t easier with him because rather than just get on with it, he’d always want to touch me, like I meant something to him. I told him if he was going to have sex with me then just to do it and not touch me.

He’d have sex with Roxanne, too, and one night she told me she loved him. I couldn’t believe it – and one day nor will she, hopefully. How could she decide she loved someone who’d do that to her and all the other under-age girls? It was sick. But at the same time, I guess it was the ultimate clue as to just how brainwashed we girls had become by these monsters.

We’d been seeing Cassie for a few weeks at Aarif’s when he started to ring Emma and say he wanted to take us somewhere else. Maybe he got us cheaper that way, I don’t know.

He’d turn up in his people-carrier, a VW Sharan, before driving us out to Ashworth Valley. It’s all open moorland there, but it was still quite public – we were close to Rossendale School – but he’d park up on a track away from the main road.

He always wanted to have the two of us together, one after the other. Usually he didn’t mind which way round it was, so we’d have to make the choice. Some choice. I always wanted to go first because it was quicker and cleaner – and easier, because the second time always took him longer to get through it.

Emma usually had her way, though, and would go first, while I sat in the front trying to ignore the sound of cheap sex and him groaning. Then it would be my turn to get out of the front passenger seat and swap places with Emma in the back of his car. It’s shaming to say it, I know, but I didn’t care any more that he’d just been with someone else, with Emma. I was past that point; I felt disgusted enough without analysing every sordid thing that was happening to me. Sitting in the front, dreading my turn, I would try to concentrate on the hum of the huge wind turbines looking down on us. I often wondered what the local dog walkers and runners made of this taxi parking up on the moors in the early morning.

I know that he knew our ages because Emma once told him when we were in his taxi. Instead of being shamed by this, straight away he had asked if she knew any girls who were younger, and Emma had told him about Roxanne and Paige. He asked her to bring them next time.

I thought he was beyond perverted for saying that, though part of me was relieved, thinking that if they came it would mean I’d not have to have sex with him. I know it sounds awful, but that’s what I was thinking – what I had been reduced to.

Tariq was all right about him picking us up and, anyway, Emma used to give him some of the money that Cassie gave her. Cassie would give her £30 or £40 after he’d had sex with us. Sometimes he said he was too tired to sleep with Emma, so then it would be just £20. But Emma would always give some of it to Tariq. Then she’d give me £5 or £10 or buy me a beer out of it.

The money didn’t always go to Tariq and Emma, however. By now, Harry was having trouble paying his mortgage, and one night I saw the two of them talking. A while later Emma came over to me and said, ‘Go and get ready. I need to make some money for Harry.’ That night, I remember I had to sleep with five men. They all paid Emma and when we got back, she gave all the money to Harry. I think it was a couple of hundred quid.

After a while, Billy started taking us to a flat in the Falinge area of Rochdale. It belonged to a guy called Jamal, who said he owned the franchise of a big shop somewhere in town. One night, after the men there had had sex with us, they were then going to throw us out. For some reason, Emma started to kick off – perhaps they hadn’t paid? Jamal hit her and she punched him back. We ended up having to walk home.

Billy would also take us to the home of a guy called Safeer. It would be just Safeer there with another of the men, Tiger. Billy and Tiger would sleep with us, but never Safeer.

On one occasion, there were four men there. Emma slept with two of them and wanted me to sleep with the other two, but I said I wasn’t going to do it. So she started telling me, ‘Just do it, just do it, because if I have to you’re not getting into my taxi.’

I slept with one of them, but point-blank refused to do it with the other. He called me a white bitch and I called him a bastard. But I wasn’t going to sleep with him.

Sometimes it felt as though there were gangs within gangs, or maybe splinter groups of men who’d then fall out with each other. I know that every time Billy took us out, Tariq used to get mad and threaten Emma.

He and Emma fell out over Juicy too, when he started picking us up in September. Juicy would pick us up in Peel Lane, near the Britannia Mill Industrial Estate in Heywood. He drove a light blue BMW and would take us into Ashworth Valley, though not as far into the lanes as Cassie did.

The first time he was on his own, the next with a man he called Boss. Juicy was in his fifties, fat, balding, with a big, bent nose and a moustache, while Boss was younger, in his thirties, tall with short black hair. He usually wore Western clothes, and Juicy was always in Asian ones.

We both had to have sex with them, one at a time. Whichever one wasn’t having sex would get out of the car and wait. It was mostly me with Boss and Emma with Juicy. I’d tell her I didn’t like it and she’d say, ‘So?’ Just like all the others, I felt I didn’t have a choice.

I was with Juicy three or four times, with Boss six or seven times. Emma would get paid.

After a while we started going to another flat in Falinge. Juicy said it was his auntie’s. It had one bedroom and they’d have sex with both of us.

One time, Boss was having sex with me and said he’d give me £40 if I’d take all my clothes off, but I wouldn’t. He said, ‘Come on, come on, take your top off, and your bra.’ He started trying to lift the top off and I was saying no.

I pretended I needed to go to the toilet, and when I came back Emma was having sex with him instead.

The next time we saw Tariq, he hit Emma because he’d found out about Juicy and Boss. He was mad with her, saying to never do it again, because she was only supposed to meet the men he knew. I guess it was an issue over money – Tariq wouldn’t get his cut if Emma, and not him, started finding men for us to sleep with.

It was late October that something that chills me to the bone happened.

Emma tried to get one of my sisters involved.

Every time I’d go back home with her, Emma would ask Lizzie if she wanted to come out with her one night, making it sound like just a few drinks and some fun. But I knew it would be more than that.

I was so deeply traumatised by then, I just couldn’t find a way to warn Lizzie, to tell her: ‘You can’t come, sis. If you do, you’ll be raped.’ Instead, I just played the role of older sister, telling my parents there was no way she was coming out with me because she’d spoil all my fun.