The car went on for a while and then slowed down and turned sharply. We could tell from the echoing sounds outside that we had driven into some kind of underground car park. When he opened the boot, the lights were orange-coloured and I could see some cars parked. I looked all around to see if there were any people I could shout to for help, but it was empty.
‘Lisa, you first,’ the man ordered, and brought out the dreaded sports bag.
‘Where are we?’ I asked, but he didn’t reply, just grabbed my arm and forced me to get into the bag again. He zipped up the top and I heard him slam the lid of the boot with Charlene inside.
This time I was in the bag for longer and it became really uncomfortable where I was scrunched up against the bottom. My legs hurt where they were bent up to my chest and my back was getting twisted and I was scared he might bump my head on something as the bag swung back and forwards. He was walking up some stairs and I could hear him puffing and panting with the effort. There was a little hole in the bag that I could see out through and I realised we were going up flights of stairs, round and round in the stairwell. We must have gone up four floors altogether.
He put me down on the concrete floor outside the door to a flat and began fumbling with some keys. The cold of the concrete seeped through the nylon base of the bag, freezing my legs and back. Then the door was opened and I was carried inside and put down on a carpet.
He unzipped the bag and pulled me out. I was in a small room, maybe ten feet by ten feet. It had a big old sofa in it, a TV, a single bed in the corner and a small window with the curtains drawn so the light was very dim.
‘Sit down,’ he said, pointing at the sofa. I obeyed. ‘I’m going down to get Charlene now. Don’t even think about escaping because the man next door has a big, fierce dog and it will rip you to pieces if you take one step outside.’
I wouldn’t have tried anyway. I was so terrified by now that I did what I was told without answering back or even questioning him much.
Before he left, he switched the TV on. It was some kind of talk show about politics, which I watched for a minute then ignored.
I looked around the room. It was cluttered and dirty, with bits of wallpaper peeling off the wall, and there was a strong smell of damp. To me it smelt like boiled cabbage, which I hated, but Dad had told me that’s what damp smelt like. I couldn’t see clearly because the curtains were closed but with the light that came through, I noticed a sort of glass-fronted cabinet and a shelving unit loaded with books. There appeared to be lots of ornaments all over it but I couldn’t make out what they were. The bed in the corner had a bare mattress, and the sofa I was sitting on was an orange colour with stains and rips and cigarette burns all over it. It was filthy. I tried not to touch anything I didn’t have to.
I wondered again when people would realise we were missing. Perhaps if the teachers thought we were off ill, it wouldn’t be until quarter past three when Mum came to pick me up from school. I didn’t have a watch but I guessed it was only late morning by then. It was still bright daylight outside and I knew that at this time of year, it was starting to get dark by the time school finished. When would the man phone our parents to demand the ransom? Would they go to the police? I remembered that kidnappers always warned in the ransom note that you shouldn’t go to the police. Would our kidnapper do that?
I heard keys in the door and then he came into the room with a bizarre kind of parcel wrapped in black bin liners. I realised that it was Charlene, who was completely swathed in black plastic, with holes cut out for her nose and eyes. Maybe she had been too big for the holdall. He unwrapped her quickly and then told her to sit down, so she put herself down beside me on the sofa. Our eyes met briefly.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked the man.
‘Never you mind. Call me whatever you like,’ he said. There was no expression on his face. He spoke calmly, without any accent I could make out.
‘Why have you brought us here?’
‘I told you. I brought you for ransom. Don’t even think you’ll be able to escape from here. Come over to the window.’
He put his arms around us and led us over to look out the window, and when he pulled back the curtains we saw that we were several floors up, at the same height as the treetops. That’s all we could see – just a cloudy, greyish-white sky and bare tree branches swaying in the wind. When we looked down there was a rooftop a couple of floors below and we could just make out some shops underneath that.
‘You’ll never be able to escape through the window because you would break your legs if you fell from that height.’
He led us back to sit on the sofa again. ‘The front door is kept locked so you won’t get out that way. You just have to sit tight and wait like good little girls until your parents get me the money.’
‘Have you phoned them yet?’ I asked.
He took a pouch of Golden Virginia tobacco out of a money belt he was wearing and started passing it backwards and forwards from one hand to the other as if he couldn’t decide whether to have a smoke or not. ‘No, I’ll do it later.’
‘Can’t you do it now? Please? They’ll be worried otherwise.’
‘I said later. Not now.’ He looked at the sleeves of Charlene’s jumper, which were all raggedy. She had a thing about eating her jumpers. ‘It doesn’t look as though your family’s got much money, sending you to school in a jumper like that.’
‘They haven’t got a lot,’ she said quickly, ‘But they’ll find whatever you want if you just let us go.’
‘I’m not sure what I’m going to do with you,’ he said, ‘I’ll have to decide.’ He sat staring from one to the other of us, and in the background the TV was blaring away with men talking about money and things. I was thinking that he must be mad. Who would do something like that? If you were going to kidnap someone, surely you would choose someone rich? Why us?
‘I need a wee,’ I said after a while.
He looked annoyed but he seemed to realise that there was nothing to be done about it and said grumpily, ‘Alright, I’ll take you.’ He turned to Charlene. ‘Stay there. Don’t move a muscle.’
He led me out of the room into the hallway and I saw there were four or five doors leading off it. The one on the left was a tiny bathroom with a bath, a sink and a toilet. It didn’t look very clean to me. I waited for him to leave the room so that I could pee but he wasn’t moving.
‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘I’m not leaving you on your own.’
I was really desperate by now so I just had to wee with him watching. When I’d finished he handed me a piece of toilet paper, then I flushed and washed my hands and dried them on a manky old towel that was hanging there.
We went back through to the front room. He had brought our school bags up from the car with him and he opened them and had a quick look through the contents: our lunchboxes, school books and pencil cases. Charlene’s bag was a really nice kind of knitted rucksack that her aunt had made for her with lots of different colours in it. Mine was my pink Spice Girls one.
‘If you get hungry, you can eat your lunches,’ he said.
Charlene and I looked at each other. I didn’t feel hungry at all. I felt sick. Neither of us said anything so he just put the bags down beside the sofa then he started pacing around from one room to the next.
We sat still on the sofa staring at the telly, and when he went out of the room for a minute I whispered, ‘You OK?’ but he came back in again before we could say much. We didn’t want to talk in front of him or let him overhear.
Every time he was in another room, I was straining to hear whether he was making the phone calls to our parents but I never heard him talking. Eventually I plucked up the courage and asked, ‘Are you going to ring our families now?’
‘My plans have backfired a bit,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what to do now. Maybe I should just let you go.’
‘OK,’ we both said eagerly.
I continued. ‘If you let us go, we promise we won’t tell the police or anything. We won’t even tell our parents. We’ll just go home as if nothing has happened.’
‘Yeah,’ Charlene said. ‘You could drop us somewhere round the corner or down the hill and we could walk back. You don’t need to drop us at our front doors.’
We got really excited thinking about this, but he just said he had to think about it some more and walked out of the room again.
I don’t know how long he paced about the flat while we sat on the sofa, but I guessed it was getting later because eventually kids’ programmes came on the telly and I didn’t think that happened till about four o’clock.
‘Our dads will probably be out looking for us by now,’ I whispered. The idea cheered us up. If he wouldn’t take us home, surely our parents would find us.
‘Do you think they’ll go together?’ Charlene asked.
I screwed up my nose. ‘Probably not. They’ll probably spread out.’
We sat and watched some cartoons and then Charlene said she was going to eat her lunch, so I opened mine as well.
‘What kind of sandwich have you got?’ she asked. ‘I’ve got ham.’
‘I’ve got turkey,’ I told her. ‘Can I have a bit of your ham one?’
‘Do you want to swap? I don’t mind.’
We swapped sandwiches and ate each other’s, then we drank our juice and ate our crisps as well. Mum had put in my favourite flavour of crisps, which was cheese and onion.
We could hear that the man was in another room. There were muffled thumps as though he was moving things around.
‘Are you scared?’ I whispered to Charlene.
‘Not really,’ she said.
‘Why not?’ I was amazed because I was very scared. It didn’t occur to me that she might be trying to be brave for my sake.
‘I know what he’s going to do with us,’ she said, ‘because there was a man called Bert at my aunt and uncle’s house who used to do stuff like that to me.’
‘What kind of stuff?’ I had no idea what she meant.
She seemed embarrassed. ‘Oh, you know. Just wanting me to take my clothes off and touching me and stuff. It was disgusting.’
‘Didn’t you tell your aunt and uncle?’
She shook her head. ‘I didn’t think they would believe me. He was a friend of my uncle’s and people never believe children, do they?’
I thought about it. I’d never been in a similar situation so I couldn’t say, but I agreed with her. ‘I suppose not. Did you tell him you didn’t want to do it?’
‘Yeah, all the time. I hated it. That’s partly why I wanted to come down and live with my dad – to get away from him.’
‘Did you tell your dad about it?’
‘No. I’ve never told anyone before. You’re the first.’
It was dark outside now and the only light in the room came from the flickering of the TV but I could make out that she had tears in her eyes, so I reached over and gave her a hug. We hugged for quite a while until we heard his footsteps in the hall and we sprang apart as the door opened.
‘OK, Charlene, I need you to come with me. Lisa, you’re staying here.’
He was holding a couple of pairs of women’s tights, in that kind of caramel-beige shade that old ladies wear. ‘Put your hands over your head,’ he told me and I did what he asked.
He used one of the pairs of tights to tie my hands together behind my head, then he tied my ankles together with the other, pulling the knot so tight that my ankle bones dug into each other and I cried, ‘Ouch!’
‘You’re not to move until we get back,’ he said to me. I nodded meekly.
As Charlene left the room with him, she turned round quickly to look at me and I saw from her face that she was scared after all. In fact, she looked petrified. I wished there was something I could do to help her but I couldn’t think of a single thing.
As he led me into his bedroom, my feet felt like lead and I had a big lump in my throat. This was it. It was going to be horrible. I swallowed hard.
He held my shoulders, guiding me until I was standing beside the bed, then he started taking my clothes off. I stood still, not helping him but not struggling either.
‘Just relax, Charlene,’ he said. ‘I won’t hurt you, I promise. It’s going to be easier with you because you’re bigger than Lisa. Lie down on the bed.’
I lay down carefully on my back, with my legs pressed tightly together. He took off his own clothes. His chest was pale and so skinny you could see his ribs. I didn’t look any lower down. When he lay down beside me, he smelled sweaty and dirty and his breath stunk of stale cigarettes.
He got a tub of Vaseline or something from beside the bed and started rubbing it between my legs. I just let my mind go blank and distant, the way I used to with Bert. I tried to think of my hamster, Fluffy, and the cute way she wrinkled her nose. Then I thought about the new bedroom Dad had made for me with the lovely yellow bed with an orange swirly border. My dad had spoiled me rotten since I came to live with him. He kept grinning and hugging me as if he couldn’t believe his luck.
He’d been applying to the authorities for custody of me for years, and finally, when I was about nine and a half, they said I could choose where I wanted to live, either at Auntie Vera’s or with my dad in Hastings. I said straight away that I wanted to go with Dad. I would miss Auntie Vera but I couldn’t stay in that house with Bert coming round all the time, and I thought it sounded nice to live by the sea. Dad was engaged to a woman called Philomena, who had a fifteen-year-old daughter called Ceri-Jane. They were both very nice to me when I visited and just before I moved down I got to be a bridesmaid at Dad and Philomena’s wedding, which was lots of fun.
For the wedding, I wore a gorgeous white dress over a red underskirt that showed at the bottom, and a red and white flower headband. I was very nervous at the beginning because I had to walk into the church first, in front of Philomena, and everyone turned around to look at me, but as soon as that was over, I relaxed and enjoyed myself. I loved the party afterwards, where there was dancing and a buffet just loaded with food that I could help myself to whenever I wanted. For the party I got changed into a red sparkly dress with sparkly little shoes and I felt very special. It was the first wedding I’d ever been to.
I tried to keep my mind focused on all the happy images of the wedding day, but the man was lying on top of me now, squashing me. Suddenly he tried to ram himself between my legs and I screamed at the top of my lungs. The pain was unbearable.
‘No! Stop! Please don’t!’
He put his big hand over my mouth and carried on trying to push himself inside me and I struggled in complete panic, finding it hard to breathe. His hand was covering my nose as well and I really thought I was about to suffocate or have an asthma attack. I tried to signal to him with my eyes that I couldn’t breathe but his expression was blank and staring as he concentrated on what he was trying to do.
Bert had never done anything like this. The pain went on and on. Once he moved his hand from my mouth, I started pleading and pleading with him to stop, tears streaming down my face. I tried everything I could think of.
‘If you stop now, I’ll never tell anyone. I’ll get my dad to give you anything you want. Please stop, please. I’m asthmatic. I might die.’
The intensity of the pain made it hard to cut myself off from what was happening, but I tried to think about my dad’s kind, loving face and how he was bound to be out looking for me by now. I prayed to God that he would find me soon.
Then, he did stop. He got off me and went out of the room. I curled up into a little ball and listened as he crossed the hallway to the sitting room. I heard him say a few words to Lisa and then he was back, making me lie flat and climbing on top of me so he could start stabbing away with his willy again. I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to look into his horrible face.
There was a clock on the bedside table and I could hear it ticking but I couldn’t see it while I was squashed up underneath that man with his ribs sticking into me and his horrible panting breath in my ear. I think he kept trying for about an hour, then he gave up. He seemed frustrated, as though it wasn’t working out the way he wanted it to. He pulled me on top of him then and made me lie there for ages without saying anything. His chest was heaving up and down with the efforts he’d been making.
Now, I felt numb. Between my legs it was agony but I’d stopped crying and I’d closed down, like I did when I heard that Mum had died. I let my mind go fuzzy and tried not to think about things or let them touch me. I told myself this wasn’t the worst thing that had ever happened to me in my life. Mum dying was far, far worse, and I survived that so I would survive this too.
Finally he lifted me off him and gave me a baggy t-shirt to put on. We walked through to the sitting room where Lisa was still on the sofa, all tied up. Someone was screaming on the TV programme and he switched it off. The silence right afterwards was horrible. Lisa was looking up at me but I couldn’t meet her eye. I just sat in the corner of the sofa and pulled my knees up to my chest.
He untied Lisa, gave her a t-shirt and told her to change into it. Then he brought us a smelly old quilt and threw it over us.
‘Time to go to sleep,’ he said. ‘You can sleep together on the sofa if you top and tail. No more talking now.’
He left the room, closing the door behind him and switching off the light.
‘Are you OK?’ Lisa whispered in a tiny voice.
‘Yeah,’ I said.
‘I heard you crying. What did he do?’
I took a deep breath. ‘He raped me.’
There was a long pause then Lisa’s little voice asked, ‘What’s rape?’
She didn’t know. I’d known what rape was since as far back as I could remember. At my Mum’s house, she had let me watch eighteen-certificate films on the telly – whatever she was watching with her mates – and I’d seen everything in graphic detail.
I explained to Lisa about how the man puts his willy inside you and she seemed stunned. She couldn’t imagine how such a thing was possible and I had to assure her that it was.
‘So did that man put his thing inside you?’ she asked.
‘I don’t think he could get it in, but he tried. It really hurts.’
‘Oh my God! That’s horrible!’
We heard him walking about in the hall so we were quiet for a bit then I realised that Lisa was nodding off to sleep so I kicked her.
‘Don’t! We mustn’t sleep. You have to stay awake.’
She tried her best but I could tell even in the dark that she kept slipping off and I’d kick her again. I don’t know why I wanted her to stay awake. I just didn’t want to be left on my own.
When I was seven or eight, I used to have nightmares about a film called It that I’d seen back at Mum’s. Based on a Stephen King novel, it was about an evil clown who comes back to life every thirty years and murders the children of the town. In one scene, the clown comes up through the toilet and because of that I was nervous about going to the toilet in places I didn’t know. I hadn’t yet had a wee in our abductor’s flat.
For years, I had to turn the faces of my teddies round before I went to sleep so that I wouldn’t wake up to find any of them looking at me, and I had to get someone else to turn the light off once I was in bed because I couldn’t put my foot on the floor in the dark in case there was something lurking down there.
I kicked Lisa again and hissed at her: ‘Stay awake,’ but she just gave a sleepy murmur. ‘Please, Lisa.’
‘’M trying,’ she mumbled, but I could tell she wasn’t going to make it. I didn’t feel tired at all. Just scared and numb and sad: all those emotions mixed up together.
I remembered how happy I had been when I arrived in Hastings to live, and Dad showed me my new bedroom and let me choose new clothes and things I wanted for the room. At the beginning it had all been lovely. He’d taken me to Phoenix House to show me where he worked and they all made a huge fuss of me and said how lucky he was to have such a gorgeous daughter. But I hadn’t realised that he worked really long hours. He was at Phoenix House most weekends and on weekdays he’d leave at seven in the morning to go and work in a prison in Kent, where he did drug counselling, and he wouldn’t get back till seven at night. Sometimes it felt as though I hardly saw him.
Lying on the sofa, I had a sudden panic about my hamster. Who would feed Fluffy while I was away? Would someone change her water? Or would they forget all about her? Would I come back to find she had died of starvation?
I tried to picture what they would all be doing at home. Would Ceri-Jane be sitting in front of the telly doing her homework? Would Phil be in the kitchen tidying up the dinner things or would she be watching telly as well? What would Dad be doing?
Suddenly I knew exactly what Dad would be doing. I could picture him so clearly it was spooky, like a premonition. He would be in his car, driving up and down every street in the entire area, one after the other, stopping to search parks and waste ground, leaving no stone unturned until he found me. He probably had a big torch with him. I could picture the concentration on his face and I knew he wouldn’t sleep at all that night while his little girl was out there somewhere. If it were possible to find me, my dad would do it because he just wouldn’t stop looking until I was found. He would never give up.
With that comforting thought in my head, I finally drifted off to sleep.