I Know What You Are: Part 2 of 3: The true story of a lonely little girl abused by those she trusted most. Jane Smith
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him quickly. ‘I’ll take them off. I’ll just walk down the stairs in my bare feet.’
‘No, keep them on.’ He sounded really angry. ‘There isn’t time for this.’
I am not the most co-ordinated of people at the best of times, and I’m even worse when I’m under pressure. So I stumbled as I followed him down the stairs, even though I was trying really hard not to trip over my shoelaces. When we got to the car, everyone laughed at me, because they knew what we had done and because one of them called me ‘a retard’ for not tying the laces on my shoes.
Rajan had sometimes pushed me around and often said unkind things to me, but he was never physically violent. Whereas Naseer was volatile and the first man I had been with who made me feel really nervous. He smoked a lot of weed, so his moods could change in the blink of an eye from cheerful to aggressive. It was a trait he shared with many of the other boys who had come to this country from refugee camps. I could always tell which of them had spent their childhood in the camps, because they were the ones who were quick-tempered and unpredictable.
It was often small things that gave it away. For example, if there was ever a sudden loud noise, there would be a split-second when you could see the paralysing fear in their eyes, and then they would go ballistic. They all had different triggers. For some, it was a door slamming or a pan being dropped on the floor. The earliest childhood memories for many of them were of the sound of bombs exploding and of waiting to see where the next one would fall. So it wasn’t surprising they reacted the way they did to anything unexpected. They might learn to live with the horrific memories of those childhood experiences, but they wouldn’t ever recover completely from the psychological damage that living in the refugee camps had caused.
Most of Naseer’s friends could be aggressive, and they were all paranoid about people making fun of them. Several of them were dealing in drugs – mostly weed and sometimes a bit of coke. So they were also paranoid about getting caught. So much so, in fact, that they seemed to believe there were coppers watching them on every street corner. I was with Naseer and his friends on more than one occasion when someone came to do a deal with them and they noticed a stranger glance in their direction as he walked past and beat the crap out of their would-be customer. It was because they thought he had brought someone with him, although I don’t know if they were more afraid of getting caught or of being stabbed in the back. So, despite the laughing and joking around, there was always an underlying tension and hostility, which smoking copious amounts of weed didn’t really help to control.
During the four years Naseer had lived in England, he had absorbed many aspects of the British way of life. But he still retained some of the more traditional ideas from his own culture that he had grown up with. And because he had very strict views about how women should behave, a lot of the things I did made him angry.
Naseer hated me showing my teeth when I laughed. The first time he noticed me doing it, his eyes narrowed and seemed to darken until they were almost black. Then he grabbed hold of me with one hand and shoved the fingers of his other hand into my mouth. He did it with so much aggressive force that he scratched the back of my throat and made me gag. He smiled and made a joke out of it afterwards, and although he had really hurt me, I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to make a fuss in front of his friends. I knew he was really angry and I was confused about what I had done wrong. After the same thing had happened a few more times, I learned to cover my mouth with my hand whenever I laughed.
Another thing that made Naseer angry was if I used my left hand when I was eating. Muslims use the left hand for doing things like cooking, cleaning and washing themselves after they’ve been to the loo. Whereas the right hand is reserved for ‘clean’ activities, like shaking hands and eating. It was a rule I often forgot, and whenever I picked up food with my left hand, he would snatch it and then smack me, hard.
Once, when we were going up in the lift to his flat, I said something that offended him and he banged my head against the metal wall. I hadn’t been intentionally rude. I think we had been joking around and I had failed to notice the line that was often invisible to me but always drawn somewhere in the sand that divided joke from insult. His sudden attack took me completely by surprise and I didn’t even have time to raise my hands to try to protect my head. Which was probably just as well, because he smashed my head so hard against the wall of the lift that my fingers might have been crushed if they had been in the way. He still slept with me though, when we got inside his flat – on the filthy sheet that always covered his bed and without using a condom. And I still did what he wanted me to do, even though my head was throbbing painfully, because the idea of doing anything else never crossed my mind.
Although Naseer’s friends didn’t speak much English, I knew when they were making jokes at my expense. They often laughed in my face and called me a retard, which was a word they had learned from the girls who hung out with them. It was a label I accepted, to some extent, because there was no denying in my mind that I was a bit fat and a bit slow. What they didn’t realise, however, was that I wasn’t slow because I was stupid. It was just that I was afraid of saying anything in case I had misjudged their mood and said something they didn’t like. So every time I opened my mouth to speak, I second-guessed myself, thinking, ‘I had better not say that. It might be the wrong thing.’ Then I would sit there with my mouth open while I ran through in my head all the possible negative consequences of whatever I had been about to say and end up, almost invariably, not saying nothing at all. But because they were the only people in my world, I took it for granted that they were right and that I was, if not completely stupid, certainly a bit intellectually inadequate.
They were always doing things to humiliate me and make me look and feel even more dim-witted. And I was always falling into the traps they set for me, like an unwitting participant in some sort of Groundhog Day. For example, they would offer me a can of beer, as if they were being casually friendly, and when I drank from it I would get a mouthful of cigarette ends. Or they would hide my shoes, then laugh at me when I searched for them and ask me if I had forgotten where I put them. Or they would open the bathroom when I was on the loo – the lock had been broken during a drunken party at the flat – so that everyone could see me sitting there with my knickers around my ankles.
Naseer often laughed at me too, and sometimes he was quite cruel. Although he had hurt me physically on several occasions, he hadn’t ever given me a proper beating. But I knew he was capable of doing it, and I soon learned to switch off my emotions and do whatever he told me to do. So, one day, when he told me to give him a blowjob in the front seat of his car in broad daylight, I slipped automatically into robot mode and didn’t even bother to object or try to argue with him. What he knew but I hadn’t noticed, however, was that his car was parked right next to a bus full of passengers. Naseer was off his head on speed or coke at the time and he thought it was hilarious when I looked up and saw the expression on the faces of the people sitting on the bus just a few feet away. But I was mortified, and very hurt that he thought it was funny to humiliate me like that.
Mum hadn’t ever done anything to build up my confidence, and after spending time with Naseer and his friends, I started to hate myself even more than I had done before. I would sometimes watch the other girls and wonder why they didn’t feel intimidated like I did. It was only later that I realised they were probably just better at hiding it. They were certainly better at learning the unspoken rules. Somehow, they were able to back-chat and flirt but always stopped before they got a punch in the mouth. They could obviously read the boys really well, which was something I was totally unable to do, however hard I tried.
Everyone was always laughing and joking around. But if I told a joke, the others would either not react at all because they didn’t understand it – sometimes because of the language barrier – or they would take it the wrong way and be angry. On one occasion, the other girls were messing about, calling one of the boys a ‘wanker’ and accusing another of ‘fucking his brother’, and everyone was laughing. Then I joined in and called one of them a ‘bastard’, which, to me, seemed far less insulting than what had already been said.