Slave Girl by Sarah Forsyth Read Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Sarah Forsyth
gentleman but he was also much older and more mature than me. Although there was only seven years between us it felt like he was going on 50. His idea of a good time was going up to his precious golf club and drinking in the bar. Don’t get me wrong – I wasn’t exactly teetotal. I could enjoy a drink as much as anyone but the golf club was a bit stuffy for me, and Chris’s insistence on spending so much time there, drinking with the other boring old men, began to rub me up the wrong way.
It didn’t help that wherever we went I seemed to get a lot of attention from other blokes. They made it obvious they fancied me and were pretty unsubtle about doing so right in front of Chris. I rather enjoyed the attention – it felt good to be appreciated, though I’d never have done anything about it. But Chris hated it, and as time wore on he became more and more possessive. I suppose that because I was so openly flirty he was worried I might run off with someone one night – and no matter how much I promised him that I never would, the anxiety grew inside him like a cancer. The more he complained, the more I became defiant and resentful. It felt like he was stifling me, squeezing the enjoyment out of my life. We argued and argued, settling into a pattern of flare-ups and dull silences. We both of us realised that the writing was on the wall.
It didn’t help that around this time the ghosts of my past turned up to haunt me again.
Out of the blue one evening there was a knock on the front door. When I opened it there were two women CID officers from Northumbria police. They said they knew I had been in several care homes in the area and they wanted to know if they could talk to me about my experiences.
People assume that I must have been pleased when the police turned up. After all that I had endured at that terrible care home someone was prepared to do something about it. And in a way, of course, I did feel like that. But when you’ve been sexually abused as a child – especially over such a long period – it’s never as easy as a simple feeling of relief: because it hurts to talk about what was done to me. For years I have tried to push those awful memories to the back of my mind and I have to steel myself mentally to dredge them up again.
And on top of that there’s the effect on me once I have started to spill out the river of poisonous memories. Like most abused children the pain of reliving what I endured was almost like a physical force: I felt sick and weary and scared all over again. The whole point of going through this hurt is that justice might be done – that someone might be forced to answer in a court for what they did to me. But I’d told Social Services about the abusers in that care home when I was 13, and other than agreeing not to send me back there, nothing had been done; certainly no one had been prosecuted.
That’s the thing about hope: when it’s raised and then dashed the pain is unique and terrible. And to do that to an abused child – to put her through the ordeal of re-living painful memories, to raise her expectations and then do nothing – well that’s nothing short of cruel.
So I can’t say I was happy that evening when the CID officers arrived on my doorstep, but one of the other children who’d been in the same home, who had also been targeted by the same men had given them my name, and she had said that I had been abused too. I was non-committal at first, but the police kept talking to me – quietly and patiently – and in the end I agreed to give a statement. I went to the police station and I told the officers all about the abuse: I told them about the ‘Yellow Brick Road’ game and the little room where the men would take us and rape us. And I told them which of the staff had hurt me.
And that was the last I heard about it. Days, weeks and then months went by without any contact from the detectives. All that difficult and painful process – then nothing. Once
It didn’t help that wherever we went I seemed to get a lot of attention from other blokes. They made it obvious they fancied me and were pretty unsubtle about doing so right in front of Chris. I rather enjoyed the attention – it felt good to be appreciated, though I’d never have done anything about it. But Chris hated it, and as time wore on he became more and more possessive. I suppose that because I was so openly flirty he was worried I might run off with someone one night – and no matter how much I promised him that I never would, the anxiety grew inside him like a cancer. The more he complained, the more I became defiant and resentful. It felt like he was stifling me, squeezing the enjoyment out of my life. We argued and argued, settling into a pattern of flare-ups and dull silences. We both of us realised that the writing was on the wall.
It didn’t help that around this time the ghosts of my past turned up to haunt me again.
Out of the blue one evening there was a knock on the front door. When I opened it there were two women CID officers from Northumbria police. They said they knew I had been in several care homes in the area and they wanted to know if they could talk to me about my experiences.
People assume that I must have been pleased when the police turned up. After all that I had endured at that terrible care home someone was prepared to do something about it. And in a way, of course, I did feel like that. But when you’ve been sexually abused as a child – especially over such a long period – it’s never as easy as a simple feeling of relief: because it hurts to talk about what was done to me. For years I have tried to push those awful memories to the back of my mind and I have to steel myself mentally to dredge them up again.
And on top of that there’s the effect on me once I have started to spill out the river of poisonous memories. Like most abused children the pain of reliving what I endured was almost like a physical force: I felt sick and weary and scared all over again. The whole point of going through this hurt is that justice might be done – that someone might be forced to answer in a court for what they did to me. But I’d told Social Services about the abusers in that care home when I was 13, and other than agreeing not to send me back there, nothing had been done; certainly no one had been prosecuted.
That’s the thing about hope: when it’s raised and then dashed the pain is unique and terrible. And to do that to an abused child – to put her through the ordeal of re-living painful memories, to raise her expectations and then do nothing – well that’s nothing short of cruel.
So I can’t say I was happy that evening when the CID officers arrived on my doorstep, but one of the other children who’d been in the same home, who had also been targeted by the same men had given them my name, and she had said that I had been abused too. I was non-committal at first, but the police kept talking to me – quietly and patiently – and in the end I agreed to give a statement. I went to the police station and I told the officers all about the abuse: I told them about the ‘Yellow Brick Road’ game and the little room where the men would take us and rape us. And I told them which of the staff had hurt me.
And that was the last I heard about it. Days, weeks and then months went by without any contact from the detectives. All that difficult and painful process – then nothing. Once