Czytaj książkę: «I Know What You Are: Part 3 of 3: The true story of a lonely little girl abused by those she trusted most»

Chapter 11

If Diyan couldn’t give me a lift to somewhere I wanted to go, he used to give me money for the bus. One evening, I had popped home to Mum’s to get a change of clothes and was sitting on a bus heading back into town when I took a dislike to some girl and started staring at her. I thought I was so hard. But really I was being incredibly stupid. When I got off the bus, I decided to have the ‘last word’ and slammed my fist into the window right beside where the girl was sitting. Although it gave her a very satisfying fright, the glass didn’t break, of course. But one of my knuckles did.

I have always been wary of going to the doctor, so when I got to Diyan’s flat, he bandaged my hand for me, then rooted around in his first-aid box and found me something to take for the pain. In fact, Diyan was a bit of a hypochondriac, so his first-aid box was the size of a suitcase and contained what, for anyone else, would have been more than a lifetime’s supply of bandages, tablets, ointments and any other odds and ends that he might ever conceivably need.

I used to laugh at him about it, but it was actually quite fortunate for me, because I was accident prone, particularly during the periods when I was drinking heavily. I have broken toes – on two separate occasions – by kicking walls when I was in a bad mood. I have fallen down stairs and broken my wrist, which Diyan also bandaged up for me but which never set properly and is still misshapen and sometimes painful. And one night, when I was very drunk and making a cup of tea in Diyan’s little kitchenette, I dropped the kettle and spilled boiling water all over my feet.

He never said anything when I came home damaged and dejected. He simply examined my latest injury, dug around in his first-aid box, administered whatever pills and potions were required, and then put me to bed to sleep it off. Remarkably, the boiling water didn’t leave any scars on my feet, and I came through most of the other incidents relatively unscathed too – certainly a good deal better than I would have done without Diyan’s help. In fact, I don’t know whether I would have survived those three years without him.

During the last couple of years I was with Diyan, I was spending time with Saleem too. Because his flat was in the same house and they both worked at the same place, Diyan often gave him a lift in the mornings. But they didn’t actually like each other and didn’t ever socialise together. When they were working different shifts, I used to hang out in Saleem’s room sometimes, getting stoned, while Diyan was still at work. I wasn’t sleeping with Saleem. I was past my sell-by-date as far as he was concerned and he had other girls he was pimping for by that time, ‘new’ girls between the ages of 14 and 17, who were more easily cajoled and coerced.

Saleem still held parties, although they were much smaller events than they had been when I was involved, usually with just two or three guys and two or three girls and only the occasional threesome. To me, that was further proof of something I already suspected – that it was my fault the parties I went to turned out the way they did for me. I thought that the reason I had been so badly abused must have been because of something I was doing wrong, particularly in view of the fact that the parties had been presented to me as such a fun idea.

There was a large lounge upstairs in the house, where the girls used to hang out, and I started going up there too, hoping that I would get the chance to join in and have a drink with them. But I had never had any friends of my own age and I didn’t know how to act or what to say to the other girls. I used to stand there for half an hour, watching silently from the sidelines, feeling embarrassed and uncomfortable, then edge my way out of the door again, as inconspicuously as possible, and go back down to Diyan’s flat.

When I started projecting some of the anger I felt towards myself on to other people – like the perfectly innocent girl in the bus – I would sometimes pick fights with the other girls. One day, when there was a party in the house and some girl started mouthing off at me, calling me stupid and ugly, I pushed her down the stairs. I was drunk, which always made me even less able than usual to express myself verbally, and just gave her a shove, without having any real intention of hurting her. Fortunately, she was drunk too, and she wasn’t badly hurt. It wasn’t until much later that I realised how easily it could have ended in disaster – for both of us. But it was after that incident that I started avoiding everyone, although I did continue to smoke weed with Saleem.

My mental health was already precarious and the cannabis only made it worse, until eventually I was so paranoid I became convinced that everyone was laughing at me. The more paranoid I became, the more time I spent drinking with Dev and strutting around town looking for reasons to air my attitude problem. And when I wasn’t doing that, I was sitting alone in Diyan’s room, listening to music with a can of cider in my hand.

It was being alone that I found really difficult – just like my mum, I suppose. I hadn’t ever been on my own before. My earliest memories are of being surrounded by people when Mum and I lived in Cora’s flat, which became the doss-house. Then we moved in with Dan and his children. Then, for me, the parties and years of abuse began. Now, though, because of my paranoia, I didn’t want the company of other people and I began to isolate myself. I hated myself and everyone else. Eventually, I was so full of anger that I began to hate Diyan too. I treated him very badly at that time. But I didn’t really want to be without him. So I was shocked and upset when he told me one day that his British passport had come through and he was going to Iran for a few weeks to visit his family. When he left, I went back to live at Mum’s.

Diyan had been away for a couple of weeks when he phoned and told me, casually, ‘My family have found me a wife. I’m going to get married.’ He said it in the sort of voice you would use if you were telling someone an inconsequential bit of news you thought might be of passing interest to them. But I felt as though all the breath had been punched out of me. It took a huge effort of will to contain the sound, which was somewhere between a scream and a wail of pain, that exploded out of me as soon as I had hung up the phone. I had a bed in my room at Mum’s house by that time, and I had been lying on it while I listened to Diyan. Now, I buried my head in my pillow and sobbed.