Deliver Me From Evil (24 page)

Around me there was a crush of young people, drinking and dancing, all having a great time. They were clearly used to clubbing – they had the gear, the money to buy drinks and they were flirting and chatting, like they belonged. I thought of how all these people had been free to come and go, drink and dance, laugh and have fun, all that time when I’d been imprisoned by Eunice, made to eat vomit, been kicked in the shins, beaten, throttled and had a stick rammed down my throat. Everything I had experienced so far had been horrible and humiliating. Had any of these young people around me been through anything like that? If I told anyone, would they believe me or would they think I was mad?

As I danced, and felt others moving to the beat around me, I felt ‘normal’ at last, doing something that any other teenager would do, any night of the week. But if people asked me, ‘Where do you come from?’ or, ‘Who are your parents?’ what would I say? It would take me a long time to work out how to talk about my life, having learned to keep my mouth shut and to be careful about every single word I uttered. I wouldn’t know who to trust or what to tell, but for now, all I knew was that I was enjoying myself, feeling free to join in, unbridled and uninhibited, in a way that I had never believed possible.

Then I began to catch men’s eyes and I to experience something else totally new: I was flirting. I’d been made to feel I was of less value than a piece of pig muck on the sole of Eunices shoe, and that I was ugly (my hair had grown back a bit now, but was still far too short, and I hated it). For years, Eunice had made me feel hideous and despicable, and suddenly, as I danced, smiled and enjoyed myself, I noticed I was catching attention. So I flirted, and I enjoyed it. I moved my young body around and felt sexy – and it was great to see admiration in their eyes. I exchanged smiles with some men, and it felt wonderful. I felt attractive that night for the first time in my life, and it all felt innocent enough. The young men around me smiled – and I smiled back It was simple, it was fun, and I was having the time of my life.

As I had no money, I couldn’t buy any drinks, and anyway, I’d never drunk anything alcoholic before. I was just happy to groove in the clubby atmosphere and I was certainly in no hurry to go rushing back to my dingy little hostel room. After hours of dancing I finally sat down at a table, tired but happy, and watched people writhing about on the dance floor, getting more and more out of it as the night wore on. I was amused to watch everyone having such a good time. If things had stayed that way, I would have been content just to go home, exhausted, when everyone finally drifted away at dawn.

It’s clear to me now that I must have been a bit of a soft target – a naive, young girl, out on her own, unused to the rituals and unspoken rules of club life. I guess I should have gone out with another girl from the hostel, or the Chinese girls I met on the way that night, and we could have looked out for each other – a lesson I learned the hard way.

I’ve had to piece together what happened next and my memory is still shaky. However I am absolutely sure, and would swear on my beautiful daughters golden head, that what I can remember about that night did actually happen to me. As I sat watching everyone raving, a couple of Mediterranean-looking men in leather jackets and jeans sat down next to me and started chatting. They were then joined by another guy.

They bought me a drink, a bottle of blue Wicked, which I’d never tasted before. It had a weird, sweet flavour with a bitter aftertaste, but I swigged from the bottle, like I saw others doing, and felt very sophisticated chatting with these guys.

I learned that they were all Turkish, with dark hair, olive complexions and unpronounceable names. One of them had a little goatee beard, one looked like he hadn’t shaved for a week (which I now know is fashionable stubble!), and one was pretty smooth-faced. They were all somewhere between twenty and twenty-five, and they were kind enough to buy me a second drink I could now feel my head getting a bit woozy, but I carried on drinking, although I think I probably only drank about one bottle completely, as I wasn’t used to it. They pressed me to drink the next one, but after a swig, everything went black.

The next thing I can remember is waking up in a strange bed with the biggest headache in the world. As I opened my eyes, I had no idea at all where I was or how I had got there. There was a naked bloke on the mattress, which had no sheet, with his back towards me. He seemed to be the man with the unshaved face that I’d first chatted to in the club. I lay for a few minutes, focusing with difficulty, trying to remember what the hell had happened, or how I’d got here. Blank. It was like looking into a black hole. There was nothing where my memory should have been. Suddenly, a fuzzy image flashed into my mind: I was sitting on some bloke’s lap somewhere and being given a cup of neat vodka, which I tasted, and said, ‘Yuk, I don’t want that’. Then blank again. My mind wasn’t working, and I couldn’t link things up together logically. What had happened after I drank the blue drink? Where did I go? Who did I go with? Why couldn’t I remember anything? It was like I’d been knocked over the head with a mallet or something.

As I began to come to, my head throbbing like a hammer, I realized that I was sore ‘down there’, but I was afraid to look The bloke beside me was fast asleep so I started to sit up carefully. I was naked under a dirty old duvet with no proper cover on it. What was worse, the insides of my thighs were caked with dried blood. When I looked around, on the floor next to the bed I was horrified to see a bloodied condom discarded there. A used condom! I had no memory of anything at all, no memory of being kissed, of being naked or of being seduced. Did the condom and the blood on my thighs mean that I’d had sex? Had I lost my virginity? If so, who with? Was it the man beside me? Had I been forced? Raped? And what about the other men? Blank, blank, blank.

I shuddered, disgusted and fearful. I felt sick, not only at the thought of what might have happened to me, but from the alcohol. I had only had one drink, but having never drunk alcohol before I’d got woozy very quickly. Still, surely one drink wouldn’t do that to me, even if I wasn’t a hardened drinker? It wouldn’t give me a total blackout, would it? One minute I was sitting chatting to the Turkish guys in the club, the next it was as if someone had pulled down the shutter on that happy scene and I’d woken up in a nightmare, in another completely different one. Blank.

Then another memory pops into my aching head: a room with wooden floors and plastic furniture – sort of blow-up chairs, blue blow-up chairs and a sofa. Again, I get the feeling I was sitting on some bloke’s lap, but there’s no face, no dialogue, no sense of who he is or what is happening. It’s like watching a flickering film or half remembering something from a dream, where you can’t quite piece the images together.

I kept staring at the condom in horror, completely mortified by it. I didn’t want to pick it up, and pulled the duvet up round my neck, protectively. If only I could think, but my head hurt too much, and my empty stomach was churning. Then the man turned his head on the pillow, opened his eyes and looked at me. He was definitely one of the guys from the club last night. In fact, he was the one who bought me the drink, but I couldn’t remember his name. He looked at me blankly and all I could think to say was, ‘Do you have a car?’ He said, in a heavy accent, that, yes, he had a car. I asked him if he could take me back to the hostel as I had no idea where I was or how to get back to the Waterfront. He said ‘No’ and closed his eyes, ignoring me.

I now noticed that the walls next to the bed were plastered with gruesome porn pictures of women’s vaginas, spread out for all to see. I was somewhat surprised to see so many fannies stuck up there on the wall, obviously ripped from magazines. They were very graphic pictures, leaving nothing to the imagination. I’d never seen anything like it before, and found it very disturbing. It obviously showed what he thought about women. What a nightmare.

I began to scrabble about, trying to find my discarded clothes, which had been tossed all over the place. My tights were ripped, which was strange, unless someone had tried to get them off in a hurry. I never would have done that, as I didn’t have many pairs of tights – I would never just rip them to pieces. In any case, I couldn’t wear them now, that was for sure, so I left them, shredded, on the floor. Once I was dressed, I asked the man where the bus stop was and he just pointed to some money strewn on the floor. I took about £2.50, then asked him again, now somewhat desperate, if he could take me home, but he just said no and went back to sleep, turning his back on me.

I made my way down the stairs of what seemed to be a dingy shared house. I must have looked a sorry sight indeed. I had never had a headache like the one I had that morning. My vision was blurred and I could hardly stand, let alone walk Plus, I felt terribly nauseous. I staggered down the stairs to the next landing where a young man was tidying his room with his door open. When he saw me, dishevelled and confused, he said, ‘Are you all right?’

I nearly burst into tears because someone was finally being kind to me. ‘No,’ I said, my voice wobbling, ‘I don’t know how I got here and I’ve got the worst headache ever and I don’t know how to get home.’

He looked straight at me and said, ‘They’re trouble, that lot. You be careful.’

It was a bit late for that, as something horrible had already happened to me, obviously. At the time I had no idea there was a date-rape drug called Rohypnol which could be used to knock out and then seduce young, unsuspecting women and even men. However, I’ve since read articles about date rape, written by victims, and I believe that that’s what happened to me that night. The fact that after one drink, I had absolutely no memory of what happened next until I woke up having been violated, with no sense of how it took place, seems to point to date rape. The terrible headache and memory blackout are also symptoms reported by a lot of victims as typical of the drugs after effects.

I found a bus stop and stood there, feeling utterly awful, my head hammering, trying to work out how to get back to the Waterfront. I had to keep asking people where the buses went to when what I really wanted to do was hide. I was sure my make-up was smudged all over my face, I had no tights and I looked like a whore who had been out on the game. I hated waiting there, looking so dreadful. When the bus arrived, I asked the driver if it went to the centre of town. Luckily he said ‘Yes’. But as I teetered onto the bus I was sure that he and everyone else was judging me, criticizing me for being a loose woman. I felt like the lowest of the low.

Once back at the hostel, I crawled into bed and pulled the covers over my head. I had only eaten one plate of noodles the day before and I felt sick and weak after my ordeal. I couldn’t work out how something that had started off so promising, such fun, had descended into something so sordid. I had loved the dancing, but somehow it had all gone horribly wrong. Perhaps Eunice was right. Perhaps I was bad and evil and terrible things happened to me because I simply deserved no better.

CHAPTER 19:

I never went to the police, or told anyone about what I’d gone through that night. I hid under the covers for a few days, trying to piece together what had happened to me, and trying to heal from the humiliation and pain. I knew it was pointless to borrow money to phone Eunice as she would say I’d brought it on myself. I couldn’t call Thomas or Sarah either – not only would Eunice not let me talk to them as they were still imprisoned on the farm, but also they were young, so what could they do? I couldn’t contact any Jehovah’s Witnesses because they would have disapproved of my behaviour. I had no idea where my parents were, and anyway, they had handed me over to Eunice years ago. So who was there in the world that really cared about me?

When I examined myself, I didn’t think my attacker had managed to penetrate me fully, but I was definitely bruised and sore so he’d probably had a jolly good try. Perhaps he’d managed to satisfy himself while I was unconscious. Who knows? Maybe he and his friends all had a go while I was out for the count on the bed and they had fun stripping me off. The very thought of me being prone and naked, with him and maybe his friends attempting to have sex with me while I was unconscious was utterly revolting. I would never find out what happened exactly and as I never reported it (how could I have proved anything in a court of law?) nor would anyone else. But I did worry that they would go and do it again to some other poor unsuspecting girl.

Some time later, I did see them again in a club; when they looked at me it was as if it was I who had done something wrong to them. It was bizarre. Yet they were clearly preying on other young women that night as I watched them operate. I didn’t speak to them, but one girl I spoke to said they’d been trying to chat her up, but she’d pushed them off. ‘They’re only after one thing, those guys,’ she’d told me, with some insight. Luckily she was more aware than I had been that first night out on the town alone.