Trafficked Girl: Abused. Abandoned. Exploited. This Is My Story of Fighting Back.. Jane Smith
it out and insist on some child who’d had been naughty eating it. Ben would laugh at the expression on my face when he told me things like that, and I’d laugh too, because I liked the feeling of having even that brief point of contact, which was something we hadn’t ever really had before. It was just a shame that the year I spent in Miss Heston’s class made it even more difficult for me to distinguish between normal and abnormal behaviour, and that I ended the year with even lower self-esteem than I’d had when I started it.
Fortunately, most of my other teachers were more balanced and encouraging, and when I was nine I had a really nice one, who encouraged me and gave me work for science that the older children were doing and that I found really interesting. It was when I was in his class that I was sitting in the garden at home one day working on some homework he’d set me when Mum came out and asked what I was doing.
‘I have to write down what time I see the moon,’ I told her. ‘My teacher said you can see it in the daytime as well as when it’s dark.’
‘You’re fucking stupid,’ Mum told me scornfully. ‘The moon doesn’t come out in the day. Everyone knows that. Except you and your stupid teacher apparently.’ Then she stomped back into the house, muttering her contempt.
But the moon did come out while it was still light. I saw it. And I was glad that Mum had been wrong and my teacher was right. It felt like a small triumph, and I think it might also have sown a seed of doubt in my mind about some of Mum’s other ‘facts’ and made me think that if she was wrong about the moon, maybe there were other things she was wrong about too.
During that year when I was nine, Jake was 18 and had left school, Ben was 16 and doing his GCSEs, and Michael must have been five. The three of them still slept in the same room, and one night Jake came home drunk and put the stereo on loudly so that it woke everyone up. Ben was a bit shorter than Jake and quite skinny, and the reason I remember it particularly is because it was the first time I’d ever seen him stand up to his older brother. I suppose it was because he was in the middle of taking his exams, which he worked hard for because he wanted to do well and go to university. And after he’d put his fist through the speaker in their bedroom, he and Jake went outside – at my parents’ insistence – and fought it out.
It must have been around that same time that I was doing my homework one evening when Ben told me I could borrow his pen. ‘It’s on the desk in our room,’ he said. ‘Just go up and get it.’
I’d just picked it up and was turning away from the desk when Jake came in and shouted at me, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ He’d already taken a few steps into the bedroom before he realised I was there, and there was a clear but narrow passage between me and the open door. So, before he could stop me, I darted past him, across the landing and into my bedroom, where I just managed to shut the door before he started thumping on it with his fists.
Although Jake isn’t very tall, he was always quite chunky, and certainly much bigger and heavier at 18 than I was at nine. And he was angry. So although I threw all my weight against the door and tried desperately to hold it shut, it wasn’t very difficult for him to force it open, and send me flying across the room. I was still trying to scramble to my feet when he picked me up by my hair and punched me in the face, splitting my lip and filling my mouth with blood.
Ben came upstairs a few minutes later and when he saw me standing in the bathroom with a blood-stained wad of toilet paper pressed against my mouth, he told me, ‘It’ll be all right. Just go back to your room and close the door.’ And that was the only thing that was said by anyone about what Jake had done to me.
The following year, when I was ten, Dad was made redundant, and it wasn’t long before my life at home had become even more miserable and difficult to cope with.
I can’t remember when Dad first started saying peculiar things to me. I always hated it, even when I didn’t know what he meant when he said things like, ‘You shouldn’t wear any clothes when you’re in bed,’ or pointed to my private parts and asked, ‘Do you know what that is?’ What I hated even more, however, were the creepy gestures he made and the way he flicked his tongue in and out of his mouth while sticking his chin out and looking at me sideways.
Mum thought his comments and gestures were funny – when they were directed at me – and she’d warned me almost every night for as long as I could remember, ‘Be careful of wandering hands in your bed tonight. You don’t want to wake up and feel them touching you.’ She’d smile her nasty smile when she said it, then switch immediately back to being angry as she added, ‘Just you remember though: you stay in your bed until I say you can get out.’
She always laughed when she knew she’d frightened me, and I was always frightened when I was in bed, even before I knew that the wandering hands she was warning me about were my dad’s.
Dad had been making lewd gestures and saying inappropriate things to me for years. I didn’t understand their sexual connotations when I was younger, I just found them creepy and disturbing. But it got worse after he had to give up work and was at home – or at the pub – all the time, and he started doing things like sitting in the living room with his flies undone and asking me to sit on his knee, which I always refused to do.
Ironically, after spending so many hours of my childhood alone in my bedroom wishing I could be part of the family, I longed to go up to my room when he was being like that, but Mum wouldn’t let me. Sometimes, there’d be something on TV to do with sex that I didn’t want to see, and while I tried to block the screen so that my little brother couldn’t see it either, Dad would keep asking me if I knew what the people were doing. Then he’d blow kisses at me and gesture with his fingers and tongue in a way that made me feel dirty and vulnerable.
Mum started sleeping on the sofa every night after Dad was made redundant, so he slept alone in their bedroom, which was next to mine, and I could hear him masturbating at night, which really frightened me, because although I didn’t know what he was doing, I thought he was going to do something to hurt me.
He drank more than ever after he was made redundant, and I can remember being really scared every time I had a bath in case he came home from the pub while I was in it and insisted on coming into the bathroom to use the toilet. I would have my back to the toilet when I was in the bathtub, and however long he took to have his pee or however loudly he grunted and groaned, I didn’t ever turn around.
The one time Mum did try to get him out, she came in when he was using the toilet and started shouting at him, and it ended up with them screaming at each other, then having what sounded like a physical fight at the top of the stairs. Even then I didn’t turn around, and as I wouldn’t have dreamed of getting out of the bath without Mum’s permission, I just had to sit there as the water got colder and colder, waiting for them to stop yelling and hitting each other.
What made everything even worse was that while Dad’s behaviour towards me was becoming weirder and more suggestive, Mum continued to warn me to ‘Watch out for hands in your bed’. Then Dad started hitting me too, which he’d never really done before, and although he didn’t ever do it as regularly as Mum had always done, he did sometimes bruise and hurt me, like the time he used a plastic pool cue from my brother’s mini pool table to beat the back of my thighs and calves, injuring me so severely I couldn’t walk properly for a week. I can’t remember why he did it; probably just because he was drunk.
Later that same year when Dad was made redundant, Granddad died of a sudden heart attack and Mum started sending me to Nan’s every Saturday. I hated having to spend the day with my nan, not least because she never spoke to me and wouldn’t let me speak either. She used to chatter away to my brothers all the time, and even took them on holidays with her, so I thought it must be my fault that she didn’t like me.
There was one good thing about those Saturdays, however, which was that Nan would take me to the library. Even then she wasn’t actually nice to me, and if I started to say something to her while we were on the bus, she would cut across me and snap, ‘No! You are not to talk.’ She always said it loud enough for people to hear, which was really embarrassing and made me feel stupid, so then I’d spend the rest of