Array Girl A - Girl A - My Story

It was always weird. Tariq usually had a smile on his face, as if he was hugely chuffed about something. As soon as I was in the taxi he’d say, ‘Hello, Hannah, how are you today? You’re coming to see me later and I’ll pick you up.’ As if it was all a laugh. ‘I’ll pick you up at seven o’clock. Be ready. Be a good girl for me tonight.’ Back at home, my parents were receiving letters from school about my behaviour, most of it about unauthorised absences, others about turning up still drunk from the gang’s vodka.

Sometimes the teachers would take me to Food Tech and give me toast and a cup of tea because they realised I needed it. I was always dead tired because I was so often out late, getting to bed at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. and getting up again at 8 a.m. so I could pretend to be a vaguely normal schoolgirl.

I think it was Miss Nuttall, the Food Tech teacher, who grassed to Miss Crabtree about me. I actually felt OK that day, but she must have smelled the alcohol, left the class, and gone off to fetch Miss Crabtree.

‘Hannah,’ she said, when she arrived, ‘I can smell alcohol on you. Are you drunk?’

‘No, Miss,’ I said. I admitted to having had a couple of drinks, but no, I wasn’t drunk.

‘I think you are, young lady,’ said Miss Crabtree, quietly, not cross, almost sympathetic, it seemed. Then, ‘How much sleep have you had?’

‘I had an early night!’

She looked at my sunken eyes, my pallid skin, and must have known it was another lie.

‘And where did you sleep?’

‘At my dad’s house,’ I said.

‘Well, I’m going to ring your dad now and ask him to collect you, because we both know you’re drunk and we also both know you can’t come into school in that state.’

So my dad came and that time I went home to safety. I still got texts from Emma later on, though, and I think I climbed out of a window and out over the porch roof again so I could head back to Harry’s house. Maybe that was the time that Dad threatened to superglue my bedroom door shut.

At school, I did occasionally tell teachers I was hungry, and maybe that’s why they’d feed me. But I think they knew: knew something, at least. In Food Tech there was a jar of one pound coins that was used to pay for the ingredients of dishes they wanted us to cook. Sometimes they’d give me a a pound coin and say, ‘Go on, quick, get yourself something from the shop.’

Miss Crabtree was one of those who kept trying with me. I think it was in November that she took me to one side after hearing me rowing with another girl who’d called me a ‘Paki-shagger’. Miss Crabtree had overheard it and called me into her office.

She sat me down across the desk from her, saying she wanted to know if I was OK. She said she’d heard what the other girl had called me, and wanted to know why, wanted me to open up to her.

I didn’t, though. I just couldn’t. Up to then I’d just explained the ‘Paki-shagger’ thing as a rumour because my mate had an Asian boyfriend, but now, in Miss Crabtree’s office, I was too frightened to tell her.

I was crying, sitting there in that school chair, but for all that she tried to coax me into talking to her, I couldn’t. All the time, in my pocket, I could feel my phone vibrating because it was on silent. Even without looking I knew it was Emma ringing me. I guessed she’d be close by, wanting to go somewhere with the gang.

In front of me, Miss Crabtree was saying something about a Pandora’s box. How it needed to be opened, and how, for all that it might be scary, it needed to be opened so she could help me.

It didn’t work. In the end she said, ‘Look, I’ll go and buy you a big bag of Haribo and leave them in my office. You come and pick them up at the end of the day and go home, and share them with your family.’ She paused and looked at me. ‘Have a proper chat with your parents, Hannah. You need to – and everyone wants to help you.’

I wanted so desperately to say, ‘Yes, I’ll do that, I really will.’ But of course I couldn’t – not then. I’m so sorry, Miss Crabtree.

And all the time she’d been talking to me, being nice, my phone – the new one Emma had ‘allowed’ me – had kept on vibrating in my pocket.

I was still in tears as I fled Miss Crabtree’s office, heading for the exit and taking the phone out of my pocket as I ran. I could see I had loads of missed calls, all from Emma. When she rang again, I answered.

‘We’re outside,’ she said. ‘Come to the front.’

It was Tariq’s taxi. I sat in the back as he drove to Harry’s so I could get changed. Half an hour later, we were on our way to some disgusting flat that didn’t know the world of Haribos and kindness.

When I next saw Miss Crabtree she asked me why I hadn’t collected the sweets.

‘Sorry, I forgot,’ I said. Just deadpan.

By now I’d come to know every yard of the journey to Aarif’s flat. If the condoms weren’t already there, Emma would always have her supply from the Taylor Street clinic to fall back on. Billy was the only one who didn’t use a condom, but I wouldn’t dare object; and usually, if I was lucky, I was too drunk to realise, anyway.

Apart from Billy, there wasn’t any pawing, not really. It was usually just quick, as if it was nothing – which, really, it was, I told myself. All I had to do was go into a bedroom with whomever – someone I’d never even spoken to – and let him do things to me until he was finished.

Normally, as I say, it was in twos or threes. Sometimes it was up to five at a time, one after the other. They’d slap me and grab me sometimes. Once, at Safeer’s place, I got grabbed by the throat. I’d already slept with three of them and I told the next guy that I wouldn’t sleep with him. So he got me by the throat and threatened me and called me a ‘white bitch’ and a slag.

I came to learn not to aggravate them. I knew they were going to have sex with me anyway, so it was best if I just let them. That way it would be easier. But even now I panic if someone shouts near me, especially if it’s a man.

You never know what goes on behind closed doors, but I got the impression Asian girls are safe from them. Maybe it’s because they wanted them to be pure so they could marry them off, and maybe it’s partly about availability. Their girls are different because they’re generally so covered up. They don’t drink, they don’t go out walking the streets at night; they’re protected to the nth degree.

Safeer was in his forties, but he had a much younger ‘girlfriend’; a half-white, half-black girl who looked the same age as me. Like the other mixed-race girl I’d seen, the one at Aarif’s flat, she was something of an exception, because in the time I was being passed around by the gang it was usually just white girls. We were the ones who were available. It might have been black girls or Chinese girls, or girls of any other race, but around our way, we were the ones who were available.

I first met this particular girl on an evening when I’d already been raped, at a house in Nelson. Emma, Roxanne and I had walked to Morrison’s car park in Heywood, and been picked up by Saj and Aarif. We headed off to the motorway and then up into Lancashire, where we ended up at Saj’s place. As soon as we got there he gave us some gin. I wanted to get drunk because I knew what was coming, but I’d only managed two glasses before Emma told me to go upstairs. As usual, I didn’t want to, but as usual she just said, ‘You’re already here now, and if you don’t, how the fuck do you think you’re going to get home?’

The sheets on the bed were brown and smelt of grease and sweat. There were Asian-style pictures on the walls; one of them with what looked like a poem and a scroll.