Violated: A Shocking and Harrowing Survival Story From the Notorious Rotherham Abuse Scandal. Sarah Wilson
Читать онлайн книгу.
giving me a hard time, and some of the people who used to bully me wanted to be my mate. Even Jenny, Carolyn and Anna stopped being really mean to me. I was glad they didn’t want to tease me any more, but I couldn’t be bothered being mates with them. Even at the age of eleven, I knew it was all a bit fake. Ever since the row with Mrs Cunningham that led to me being excluded, I was determined that I wasn’t taking any more shit from them.
For a girl who was once so desperate to blend into the background, I was now the talk of the school. It didn’t help that I was almost always hungover or on some sort of comedown from all the weed I’d been smoking. I wouldn’t let anyone cross me – teachers or pupils – and I was soon getting excluded every other week for fighting or disrupting the class. If someone so much as breathed a wrong word to me, I’d batter them.
Mum was really angry and she soon began to suspect I’d been up to no good. She started quizzing me about who I’d been hanging around with and what I’d been doing, but it didn’t make me stop. She later told me that she feared I was still being bullied and begged the school to investigate, but they weren’t really interested. I think by that point I’d just become a bit of a nuisance to them and they couldn’t wait for me to leave to go to secondary school.
For Mum, alarm bells really started ringing when Laura began to pick up on my bad behaviour. By this point, Laura was starting to show the signs of having mild learning difficulties. She wasn’t as much trouble as I was, far from it, but she was always a little bit behind the others in her class when it came to reading and numbers, and she could never concentrate on her work because she was constantly hyper. Looking back, Mum thinks she had some form of ADHD, but those things weren’t talked about so much back then and she was never diagnosed.
One lunchbreak, I got into a fight with a girl in my class and, spying me across the playground, Laura ran over and tried to join in. She didn’t get very far – I would never let my little sister fight my battles – but the damage had been done, as one of the dinner ladies had come out of the canteen to see what all the commotion was. She told the headteacher and all three of us were excluded for a few days.
Poor Mum was at the end of her tether and made us stay in our room for ages. She was so mad she wouldn’t even let us watch The Powerpuff Girls, our favourite cartoon, never mind go out and play with our mates.
‘You used to be a lovely little girl,’ she told me, over and over, despair in her eyes. ‘What’s happening to you?’
I think Mum hoped my bad behaviour was just a phase, but I was careering off the rails by now and no one could stop me. I don’t know if I was really happy, but I know that I was glad I wasn’t being bullied and I felt relieved that I had a group of mates who could look out for me and I could have a laugh with. In my young eyes, Mum wasn’t protecting me – she was just trying to stop my fun.
Chapter Three
It was in early 2003, a few months before I left the primary school I hated so much, that I first met Nadine.
With four of us to support on her own, Mum was taking all the hours she could get at the pub and was soon doing double shifts. This meant she often worked from the early afternoon right through until closing time, and sometimes she couldn’t find anyone to babysit us. By this point, the boys were old enough to fend for themselves, but Laura and I would have to go and sit in the pub after school while we waited for Mark or one of my aunties to pick us up and take us home for dinner. No one seemed to mind; it was a pretty relaxed place and most of the staff brought their kids along. I can’t deny that we were bored out of our minds. We were desperate to be out with our mates, but Mum insisted on keeping an eye on us as we were so young. Given my recent behaviour, I suspected it was also because she didn’t want to let me out of her sight.
The pub was around half an hour’s walk from our primary school. It was owned by a woman called Carole, who had a right mouth on her. It had been there for as long as I could remember, but Carole and her husband had only owned it for a few years. They gave it the odd lick of paint but it still looked a bit shabby. Back then, everyone smoked in pubs and the white walls quickly became yellow and stained. Not that anyone minded – it was hardly like there were loads of better places to go round our way.
Some of the customers were okay, but others were a bit dodgy. It was always dead quiet during the day because most of them only came in at night. It wasn’t like some pubs, where you could go for dinner or a nice bar snack. It didn’t even have a kitchen. The best you could hope for was a packet of crisps.
There were two rooms: the main bar area and a lounge we called the ‘tap room’. In the tap room, people of all ages would sit and smoke weed openly. It was a funny sight: scruffy teenagers and wayward old men passing joints around for hours on end. There were always tons of underage people in there, some of them barely older than Laura and me. Carole turned a bit of a blind eye to it. I don’t think she was really that bothered, and in all the time Mum worked there I never saw the coppers come in.
Laura and I usually hung around in the tap room while we waited for Mum. Its saving grace was that it had a pool table and we were allowed to have a few games, provided none of the regulars wanted to use it. But that day, some had come in early, so we’d been told to sit in the bar instead.
‘This is shit,’ I moaned to Laura, and she rolled her eyes in agreement.
It was then that I saw Nadine for the first time, standing at the back door. Nadine was a big girl, much bigger than Laura or me, but it wasn’t just her size that drew my eyes to her. She had frizzy, mousy brown hair with cheap blonde highlights that needed topping up. She was still wearing her school uniform, and her stomach spilled out of her white shirt over her short black skirt, which barely covered her bum. She’d only fastened a few of her shirt buttons and I tried not to stare at her huge breasts – I realised I could see her bra. I could tell from her school tie, which she’d carelessly fastened in a loose knot round her neck, that she was at one of the local high schools, or the comp, as we called it. She looked much older than me and I soon discovered she was fifteen and in Year 10. She intimidated me, but not just because of how big she was. There was just something about her. Even before we’d spoken a single word, I knew she was the kind of person you had to respect, or there would be trouble.
‘Who are you?’ she asked, eyeballing Laura and me. It sounded like an accusation. Laura looked to me helplessly.
‘I’m Sarah and this is my sister Laura,’ I replied, trying not to sound nervous. ‘Our mum works here.’
‘Yeah, I’ve seen you around,’ Nadine said to me, ignoring Laura.
‘So who do you chill with, then?’
Around Rotherham, ‘chilling’ was code for drinking and taking drugs. It sounds silly, but I instantly felt proud that Nadine was speaking to me, almost like I was her equal. Knowing they were around her age, I rhymed off the names of some of the boys from Elaine’s, desperate to seem cool and grown up.
‘Oh, yeah?’ she said. I hoped that she was impressed, but I wasn’t sure. ‘Anyway, I’m off. It’s shit in here tonight.’
There was no one serving at the bar so Nadine barged behind the counter and grabbed a litre bottle of vodka. She obviously did it all the time, because she didn’t even look round to see if anyone was watching her, and Carole wasn’t exactly the kind of person who’d pay to get CCTV installed. Then she swung her handbag over her arm and disappeared out of the back door.
The next evening, I saw Nadine again. Laura and I were waiting for Mum in the tap room when she swept in and planted herself down next to me. She smelled of fags and cheap perfume.
‘So, how old are you, Sarah?’ she asked. She lit up a fag and took a puff, before passing it to me. I took it from her as Laura shifted uncomfortably. I knew she felt weird about me smoking, but I didn’t feel bad. Instead, it gave me a bit of a buzz. There were just two years between us but I suddenly felt much older and cooler.
‘I’m