Slave Girl Read Online Free

back down to Gateshead. I dreaded going back but even I couldn’t have known how bad for all of us that decision would turn out to be.
    Dad had opened new businesses while we’d been away: more ducking and diving, more bad debts and more broken promises, but he’d also taken up with another woman, someone he’d met in the local Chinese takeaway. I don’t think we even stayed one night with him.
    Instead, we went to live with Mum’s mum, four miles across town. My Nana had always been a canny woman – sensible and sound, she had seen through Dad the very first moment she met him. And then, of course, she’d had to watch her daughter getting beaten and bruised by him: it’s no exaggeration to say that Nana hated Dad.
    I suppose I can’t have been an easy child in those days: certainly, I never really felt happy or safe. Mum tells me that I was headstrong, wilful and difficult, and I can believe that. I don’t think I felt the same as my brother and sister – but then I wasn’t: Dad had turned me into someone very different from them.
    We found somewhere else to live while Dad carried on with his new girlfriend, but there was tension and bitterness in the air and I don’t suppose I helped much. In the end Mum decided she couldn’t cope with me and I was sent to the last place on earth I should have been living: Dad’s flat.
    It was bad enough being sent away from Mum and my brother and sister: once again I felt like an outsider, somehow marked out by the dirty little secret of what Dad was doing to me. But living under the same roof with him and his new family was a nightmare from the very beginning.
    His girlfriend – my new step-mum – was a rough, hard woman with two little children under five years old. I loved those little bairns – but God, I felt sorry for them. My dad was even more violent with his new lady-love than he had been with Mum. And he wasn’t fussed about what they saw. Every week, without fail, he would beat up my step-mum. It didn’t matter what she had or hadn’t done, he’d knock her about something wicked. I once saw him with my own eyes put her head through a window; another time he stabbed her with a little fork in front of all of us.
    The kids were terrified. They used to cling to me and cry. ‘Don’t let Daddy kill us tonight. Please, Sarah, please.’ And I’d hold them and try and soothe them, and keep them beside me till they fell asleep.
    But I didn’t get to sleep those nights. Not as easily as that, anyway. Dad would beat my step-mum with his fists and then send her to bed. And then he’d come for me.
    I was old enough by then to know that this wasn’t just ‘our little secret’ and in truth Dad had stopped even trying to pretend that the abuse was in any way normal or ‘loving’ – maybe leaving Mum had in some way freed him up from the fear of being found out. Maybe that’s why he didn’t seem to care whether my step-mum guessed or even knew. Maybe, too, the fact that I had been sent to live with him – put completely under his control – made him much bolder and more confident about satisfying his twisted desires any which way he chose. Oh, I was old enough to know alright, and believe me, I put up a fight the best way I could. But it didn’t make a scrap of difference.
    There’s no easy way to say this because there was no easy way for an 11-year-old girl to describe what Dad did. He raped me. On the sofa, in my bed, sometimes with the aid of a sharp knife he’d taken from the kitchen drawer, he forced himself into me, whether I struggled or not. That man raped me. And I was 11.
    Some people ask why I never told anyone about what Dad did to me. But those people don’t know what it’s like to be a small child abused by a big powerful man. And that power isn’t just physical: Dad – like most abusers – used emotional and psychological threats to keep me quiet. He’d tell me that no one would believe me or that everyone would hate me or – worst