Читать книгу I Know What You Are: Part 3 of 3: The true story of a lonely little girl abused by those she trusted most - Jane Smith, Taylor Edison - Страница 5

Chapter 11

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If Diyan couldn’t give me a lift to somewhere I wanted to go, he used to give me money for the bus. One evening, I had popped home to Mum’s to get a change of clothes and was sitting on a bus heading back into town when I took a dislike to some girl and started staring at her. I thought I was so hard. But really I was being incredibly stupid. When I got off the bus, I decided to have the ‘last word’ and slammed my fist into the window right beside where the girl was sitting. Although it gave her a very satisfying fright, the glass didn’t break, of course. But one of my knuckles did.

I have always been wary of going to the doctor, so when I got to Diyan’s flat, he bandaged my hand for me, then rooted around in his first-aid box and found me something to take for the pain. In fact, Diyan was a bit of a hypochondriac, so his first-aid box was the size of a suitcase and contained what, for anyone else, would have been more than a lifetime’s supply of bandages, tablets, ointments and any other odds and ends that he might ever conceivably need.

I used to laugh at him about it, but it was actually quite fortunate for me, because I was accident prone, particularly during the periods when I was drinking heavily. I have broken toes – on two separate occasions – by kicking walls when I was in a bad mood. I have fallen down stairs and broken my wrist, which Diyan also bandaged up for me but which never set properly and is still misshapen and sometimes painful. And one night, when I was very drunk and making a cup of tea in Diyan’s little kitchenette, I dropped the kettle and spilled boiling water all over my feet.

He never said anything when I came home damaged and dejected. He simply examined my latest injury, dug around in his first-aid box, administered whatever pills and potions were required, and then put me to bed to sleep it off. Remarkably, the boiling water didn’t leave any scars on my feet, and I came through most of the other incidents relatively unscathed too – certainly a good deal better than I would have done without Diyan’s help. In fact, I don’t know whether I would have survived those three years without him.

During the last couple of years I was with Diyan, I was spending time with Saleem too. Because his flat was in the same house and they both worked at the same place, Diyan often gave him a lift in the mornings. But they didn’t actually like each other and didn’t ever socialise together. When they were working different shifts, I used to hang out in Saleem’s room sometimes, getting stoned, while Diyan was still at work. I wasn’t sleeping with Saleem. I was past my sell-by-date as far as he was concerned and he had other girls he was pimping for by that time, ‘new’ girls between the ages of 14 and 17, who were more easily cajoled and coerced.

Saleem still held parties, although they were much smaller events than they had been when I was involved, usually with just two or three guys and two or three girls and only the occasional threesome. To me, that was further proof of something I already suspected – that it was my fault the parties I went to turned out the way they did for me. I thought that the reason I had been so badly abused must have been because of something I was doing wrong, particularly in view of the fact that the parties had been presented to me as such a fun idea.

There was a large lounge upstairs in the house, where the girls used to hang out, and I started going up there too, hoping that I would get the chance to join in and have a drink with them. But I had never had any friends of my own age and I didn’t know how to act or what to say to the other girls. I used to stand there for half an hour, watching silently from the sidelines, feeling embarrassed and uncomfortable, then edge my way out of the door again, as inconspicuously as possible, and go back down to Diyan’s flat.

When I started projecting some of the anger I felt towards myself on to other people – like the perfectly innocent girl in the bus – I would sometimes pick fights with the other girls. One day, when there was a party in the house and some girl started mouthing off at me, calling me stupid and ugly, I pushed her down the stairs. I was drunk, which always made me even less able than usual to express myself verbally, and just gave her a shove, without having any real intention of hurting her. Fortunately, she was drunk too, and she wasn’t badly hurt. It wasn’t until much later that I realised how easily it could have ended in disaster – for both of us. But it was after that incident that I started avoiding everyone, although I did continue to smoke weed with Saleem.

My mental health was already precarious and the cannabis only made it worse, until eventually I was so paranoid I became convinced that everyone was laughing at me. The more paranoid I became, the more time I spent drinking with Dev and strutting around town looking for reasons to air my attitude problem. And when I wasn’t doing that, I was sitting alone in Diyan’s room, listening to music with a can of cider in my hand.

It was being alone that I found really difficult – just like my mum, I suppose. I hadn’t ever been on my own before. My earliest memories are of being surrounded by people when Mum and I lived in Cora’s flat, which became the doss-house. Then we moved in with Dan and his children. Then, for me, the parties and years of abuse began. Now, though, because of my paranoia, I didn’t want the company of other people and I began to isolate myself. I hated myself and everyone else. Eventually, I was so full of anger that I began to hate Diyan too. I treated him very badly at that time. But I didn’t really want to be without him. So I was shocked and upset when he told me one day that his British passport had come through and he was going to Iran for a few weeks to visit his family. When he left, I went back to live at Mum’s.

Diyan had been away for a couple of weeks when he phoned and told me, casually, ‘My family have found me a wife. I’m going to get married.’ He said it in the sort of voice you would use if you were telling someone an inconsequential bit of news you thought might be of passing interest to them. But I felt as though all the breath had been punched out of me. It took a huge effort of will to contain the sound, which was somewhere between a scream and a wail of pain, that exploded out of me as soon as I had hung up the phone. I had a bed in my room at Mum’s house by that time, and I had been lying on it while I listened to Diyan. Now, I buried my head in my pillow and sobbed.

Mum must have heard me, because she shouted, ‘Are you calling me? Taylor? What do you want?’

‘Nothing,’ I managed to shout back. ‘I’m fine. It’s okay.’ Although the truth was I didn’t think I would ever be okay again.

Diyan and I had been together for three years and, despite the way I had been treating him for the last few months, I really did believe that we were going to be together for the rest of our lives. The idea that our relationship was already dead and waiting to be buried was too immense and incomprehensible for me to process. It was so inconceivable, in fact, that I put it to the back of my mind after a couple of days and began to look forward to the day when Diyan was due to come home.

At around the same time as he had left England to go to Iran, I had started college. The pupil referral unit sent me on an introductory course, which included classes in independent living skills, maths, English and ICT. My reasons for wanting to go to college weren’t academic, however. I went because I wanted to learn how to socialise and to be with other people, so that I could get on in the world beyond Diyan’s bedsit. Which was fortunate, in a way, because it meant that when the course itself turned out to be incredibly boring, I was determined to stick it out.

My mental health was still erratic at that time, but I had good days and was getting to the point of almost being able to control it – at least enough to hold things together when I needed to. I was 16 and restless and I hoped that completing my course at college might enable me to get a proper job and do something interesting with my life. More than that though, I wanted to learn to be normal, and I realised that I could only do that by observing kids of my own age. I was still very self-conscious and convinced that everyone was making fun of me. But I persevered, and eventually I did make some connections, although not the sort of friendships that would have involved meeting up with people in evenings and at weekends.

It took me years to learn how to act normally and to master the skills that enable me today to deal with simple, everyday interactions. If someone patted me on the shoulder, for example, I would react by jumping out of my skin or spinning round and slapping them, because I thought they were going to shove or hit me. It was mortifying to react like that to every sound anyone made behind me, and it was a huge relief when I was learned to conceal my panic and not respond visibly in any way. I did so well, in fact, that I even learned the art of telling a joke!

Diyan was supposed to be away for two months, but he ended up staying in Iran for almost three. I kept telling myself, ‘I love him enough to be able to ignore the fact that he’s got a wife. She’s in another country. She’s not going to affect me.’ When he finally came back, however, his new wife was all he wanted to talk about. He showed me photographs of their wedding and of all the places they had visited together and didn’t seem to be able to understand why I wasn’t happy for him. I suppose the way I had been behaving before he left had made him believe that, certainly from my perspective, our relationship had run its course. So I couldn’t blame him for taking the opportunity that had been offered to him to move on.

The truth was, I was devastated. Although Diyan hadn’t ever said anything specifically to make me believe it would be the case, I had always assumed that when I was 16 we would be able to live openly together, because our relationship would be legitimate and there would no longer be any risk of him getting into trouble because of it. Perhaps it was an assumption I had made simply on the basis of what Tom used to tell me when I was 11.

Diyan had been keeping me for the last three years, but when I was 16 I had planned to get a job, probably in a café, and start paying my share of our living expenses. I had it all worked out in my head: with my income, we would be able to afford to move out of Diyan’s bedsit and rent our own flat. We would put money aside every month for holidays, stay in hotels and do all the other things real couples do. I even imagined the children we were going to have, and how we would furnish and decorate the little house we would eventually buy.

I turned 16 while Diyan was in Iran. But when he came back, instead of talking about the future we were going to have together, he showed me a photograph and said, ‘This is the woman I have married. I thought you would be happy for me.’ That’s when I realised that the life I believed we were going to share had never existed except in my own imagination.

Diyan and I often used to walk along the towpath beside the river. It was peaceful and pretty, and I had really enjoyed those walks to begin with. Then, before he went to Iran, I started to get bored of doing the same old things. He was happy doing normal couply things, like cooking a meal, watching television and just being at home in the evenings. He liked routine. It made him feel secure to go to the supermarket every Saturday or stroll along the same stretch of beach we had visited a hundred times before. But I wasn’t interested anymore in sitting with him on the swings at the children’s play park, watching the sun set in a glow of colour across the river. Perhaps I had grown so complacent in my belief that we would always be a couple, I felt safe wanting to go to parties and do all the other things 16-year-olds want to do rather than what I saw as mundane ‘couple things’.

I sometimes got frustrated with Diyan and told myself he was stupid. But it was only because I was angry with the world and sceptical of his belief that love and kindness could make bad things better. The truth was that I loved him. He had been my whole world for almost three years and the only good thing I had ever had for as long as I could remember. So although I sometimes lashed out at him, it hadn’t ever crossed my mind that, when he came back from Iran, we wouldn’t find the middle ground and be together forever.

The first time I went to see Diyan after he returned from Iran, I slept with him. But I knew that day that everything had changed – for both of us. He was married and planning to bring his wife to England as soon as she got a visa, and I had grown up and moved away from him. We were two totally different people – different from the way we had been three years previously as well as different from each other – and we didn’t really understand each other anymore. It was incredibly sad. After we had been together for so long, it was hard enough to admit, even to ourselves, that it was over and neither of us wanted to say it out loud. During the next few days, we gradually drifted further and further apart, and then stopped seeing each other altogether.

Despite the heartbreak of our separation, I hadn’t actually been faithful to, or honest with, Diyan while he was in Iran. There had been a funfair in the local park about a week before he came back and when I went to it one evening, I bumped into a guy called Baashir who worked in a takeaway food place in town. I had chatted to him before, and when I went back to his flat with him that night, we both got paralytically drunk. Even though it was after Diyan had told me on the phone about his marriage, in my mind we were still technically together, so sleeping with Baashir was like cheating on him. Maybe that’s why it felt almost like a punishment and why I hated every minute of it and kept thinking, ‘I don’t want this. I want Diyan.’

Baashir was the first person other than Diyan I had had sex with for more than two years. We didn’t use protection that night and I was very worried afterwards in case I had caught an STD or got pregnant. I had grown up a lot since the days when I used to lie on a bed in someone else’s house waiting for the door to open and the next faceless man to walk into the room and have sex with me. Being 16 years old and aware of the risks of having sex without contraception might not sound like a very significant marker of responsibility, but it was a real turning point for me.

After that first night, Baashir started following me around town, offering me bags of chips and drinks, and eventually I went with him again because there was no one else. I had no feelings for him at all. It was just that being with him seemed like a better option than being on my own, and I needed someone’s company at that time, because I had recently stopped drinking during the day.

I really wanted to control my mental health and it had become clear, even to me, what effect alcohol was having on it. If I didn’t have a drink in the morning, I would get the shakes and feel physically sick. I was getting fed up with not being able to cope. So I began to wean myself off drinking by telling myself, ‘Get through the morning and then you can have a drink.’ Then, when I had achieved that first self-imposed goal, ‘Now just get through the afternoon and you can have a drink tonight.’

Baashir was 19. He had arrived in England as an illegal immigrant from Afghanistan about six months before I met him and had been given a temporary visa. He was actually Pashtun, which is an ethnic group of Muslims who have their own specific religious and ethical traditions. None of the other Pashtun boys I knew had relationships with English girls. But when I became Baashir’s girlfriend, he was very protective of me and I knew no one else would dare lay a finger on me. In fact, most of his mates simply ignored me, and I quickly learned to ignore them too.

I didn’t love Baashir. What appealed to me about him was the fact that he was everything Diyan wasn’t. He liked parties, drinking vodka and doing all the other things I thought young people were supposed to do. After the pain of my break-up with Diyan, he seemed to offer me the perfect opportunity to take life less seriously and lose myself for a while.

I was still clinging to the dream of having a home and a family. Now though, having lost Diyan, I had decided that it didn’t really matter who made that dream a reality. Baashir had a flat overlooking the river and one evening, when we were watching the sunset from his window and he was standing behind me with his arms around my waist, I suddenly thought, ‘Yeah, this will do. I can make it work with Baashir.’ I think it was at that moment I realised that, for me, what was really important was the dream itself. If I couldn’t make it become reality with Diyan, Baashir would do instead.

In fact, I had become so fixated on chasing my dream of having a home and a family as soon as possible that I allowed it to obscure what should have been the bigger picture. And, as a result, I made a decision that is perhaps my greatest regret.

It was while I was seeing Baashir that I met an English boy called Adam – a normal, 18-year-old teenager who liked to go bowling and whose idea of a meal out was a burger and fries at McDonald’s. Adam and I became good friends who enjoyed each other’s company and had great times together, laughing and joking around, like normal teenagers do. That in itself was a huge landmark for me, because I had begun to believe that I would never have any ‘normal’ friendships with people of my own age.

I know Adam thought I was his girlfriend. But when it came to deciding who I really wanted to be with – Adam or Baashir – I chose the dream instead of the more sensible option of waiting, getting a good education, then a job, and going through all the other stages that would have prepared me much better for becoming a wife and mother.

I actually sat down one day and weighed up all the pros and cons on each side. ‘Okay, so Adam … I’m happier with Adam. He makes me smile. I feel safe with him. I think I could quite easily fall in love with him. Then there’s Baashir … I don’t love Baashir. I don’t even really care very much about him. But he has got a job. So he would be a better provider and therefore a better father.’ When I looked at it like that, in simplistic, black-and-white terms – and bearing in mind my fixation on having my own home and family – the choice seemed obvious.

It was the wrong choice, of course. And although choosing Adam might not have turned out any better, for either of us, I wish I had given it a try. At least then I would have had a few years to be young and the chance to rebuild the childhood I had lost, to stay on at college and get some qualifications that would have given me real choices in life. So yes, when I think about it now, not giving my relationship with Adam a chance is definitely my greatest regret.

One of the many mistakes I was making was trying to run when I could barely walk. Losing Diyan felt like losing my security. Perhaps it isn’t surprising that, after my experiences during the first 16 years of my life, security was the one thing that really mattered to me – security and the longing for everything just to be normal.

I think it was when I was struggling to understand and copy the behaviour of my fellow students that I began to realise, that despite my relatively easy relationship with Adam, I was never going to have a normal life like his, even if, by some miracle, he did become the person I shared my future with.

For a brief period, I had options and opportunities to make a good life for myself. The problem was I didn’t have the self-confidence to make the right choice. Instead, I decided that I wasn’t cut out for qualifications and that it would be better to stay in my small world. So I dropped out of college and chose Baashir. I still sometimes wonder what might have happened if I had taken a different turning at that particular crossroads in my life.

Since splitting up with Diyan, I had been living back at Mum’s. When Baashir moved to a town just a train ride away, I stopped going regularly to college and started spending more time with him. Then, three months after we met at the funfair, we got engaged. Mum didn’t approve – whether of Baashir himself, the fact of our engagement, or because I was just 16 was never really clear. Whatever her reasons, she said she had ‘tried for years’ and that she was now ‘washing her hands’ of me.

After we got engaged, I more or less moved into Baashir’s shared house, where there always seemed to be a party going on. This time, though, I was a guest at the parties and didn’t have to sleep with anyone except Baashir. It felt as though I was being given the chance to start again and to rewrite my own history.

Baashir and I often sat together in his bed while he described the little shop he was going to get and the flat above it where we would live and raise our family. After the countless hours I had spent imagining the life I would have with Diyan, it was nice to be able to share someone else’s dream and to know that I was a vital part of it.

One of the best things about dreams is that they aren’t constrained by reality. In a dream, you can live with a man you love and your perfect children in a beautifully furnished flat above your own, thriving business without having to consider any of the practicalities of the real world. It was that sort of dream we were pursuing when we started trying for a baby.

I Know What You Are: Part 3 of 3: The true story of a lonely little girl abused by those she trusted most

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