CHAPTER 18
I have still not named any of the other boys, nor described them,

but one of them was just wiping his cock after he had finished with me in the day room when the hellbitch came in.

“Ye gods, it can’t even restrain its lust until it’s in private. Alf, Thirlmere, three days.”

No big deal. Along with my ability to cry, I had lost my fear of the darkness down there. I still got no food, nor water, so I always kept a slice of stale bread, if I could, in my pockets, sifting for crumbs as I lay in the dark, and drank as often as I could manage during the day. I had developed my version of a pregnant woman’s labour pack, the bare essentials in one place, in my own case as much in the way of odd scraps in my pockets as I could get and a fully hydrated body.

Three days was pushing it, though, as while I had got used to fasting, it was the thirst that got me. Once, only once, when the witch had sent me there for four days, I tried drinking my own piss from the chamber pot, but it didn’t really help. I suppose most people would have vomited by that stage, but, well..

It wasn’t the first time. I will say no more. Cunningham’s friends….

I went into the darkness almost grateful. Every day I spent in there was a day I wasn’t raped, and while I know the apologists for those things tell stories of ‘learning to like it’, that never fucking happened; every single time was a nightmare, and the nightmare was endless, a horror story in an infinite number of chapters.

I was actually looking at my approaching legal maturity, and what would happen then? Released into society with a thank you, and a story for the papers? Or a spade to the back of the head and a shallow grave somewhere? Or that cunt Mitchell, a needle, and just another teenaged dead junkie found in an alley? I clung to Karen, prayed to my goddess, she couldn’t fail me, because if she did, I was dead.

I had, by now, a technique of sorts, and it was a type of catatonia. I recycled, endlessly, the good times. Almost beating that lad on my first race. Betson and the apple juice. My first kiss with Em. My first sight of Karen’s thighs slipping smoothly together under the tiniest of skirts. Sid getting really, really excited about Niven’s invented universe. Nana screaming at the sky on a wild day on top of the high fells, feeling the world and life hammering through her soul. Racing Iain home. That kiss with Em in the alley when she came on my thigh. I knew all about coming, now, oh yes, but that, that was a small clean thing that I held in my soul to keep the filth of my life from soiling it.

I had lost track of the days when there was a sudden avalanche of light as the door opened. A dark silhouette stood there silent, just for an instant, as I lay on the concrete floor, and I was away in a world of love and life when I heard “Jesus fucking Christ, somebody call an ambulance”

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They brought me out of hell on one of those wheeled stretcher things and Karen was there, sobbing like her heart was being ripped out through her throat. There were flashes going off everywhere; I later found out Dave and Roger’s deal with the Bona Boy in Blue had included immediate access to the raid that had been meticulously assembled by a small team of mid-ranking officers under the Chief Super in question. Teams were assembled, equipment loaded into vans, and nobody, nobody at all, told the location of the raid until they were on their way. This was well before mobile phones were around, so the only way any of Cunningham’s friends or, I suppose, customers could warn her would have been by police radio, which would have been a quick route to a cell in the circumstances.

They formed up on two parallel streets, out of their vans with helmets and short shields, truncheons out, and as they waited either side, the CS rang the bell himself. Dave said that he saw it as a boost to his career, as opposed to what Roger could have done for it. Alf answered.

“Police, we have a warrant to search…”

The slammed door was put in with a sledge hammer and Alf was taken straight off his feet by a police dog, and the CS was into Flogger’s office as she rose in indignation to tell him his career had just gone down in spectacular flames. He showed her the warrant, and had her removed.

It was apparently an hour before they found me, as one of the smallest and newest boys told them of Cunningham’s little holiday home and Charlie locked himself in Esk and tried to hang himself with ‘my’ tie.

The copper who found me was apparently struggling to hold his stomach in check, because..

Because there were other rooms in the cellar, that I hadn’t seen, and although I now know what was there I don’t think I want to spell it our here. I had been wondering what would happen when I hit eighteen, and those rooms were apparently where some boys had graduated from the home.

They began digging the grounds the same day.

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I knew nothing of this, as some well-meaning quack had dosed me to the eyeballs with some seriously good shit while they ran a drip into me to try and boost my fluid levels, and the siren wailed, and the blue lights flashed, and I went away from everything.

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I was lying on clean sheets, and there was sunlight through a window. Someone was holding my hand loosely, and I could hear snoring. I tried to sit up, and nearly threw up as the room span.

“Stevie?”

It was a girl’s voice. A face came into view, flaming curls, beautiful, my beloved Karen, and then another, now even more beautiful to me, all spots cleared, well, nearly….you notice the smallest things, the least important, when your world changes, and it was Emily whose tears fell onto my pillow, and then the snoring stopped as they shook Nana awake and she wailed her pain to the world as she clung to me.

It was a long time before we could have any coherent conversation. I had sort of got out of the habit of talking to people, you see. For a while there had been visitors who wanted me to talk dirty to them, or praise their great prowess as wondrous lovers, but that had been my one successful bit of rebellion. It got me more time in the dark, but, as I have said, there was nobody in there to harm me.

I surprised them all when the first male nurse came in that day, by screaming and trying to get out of the bed, and apparently it was Karen who worked it out. The uniforms…from then on, all my medical visitors were female. I had any number of examinations, and once the antibiotics had done their job, and the lice had been removed, there were a number of...procedures to repair the damage done to me by so many rapes. And not once did I see that other doctor, for which I thanked the god I no longer believed in.

Nana was sleeping with me, on a cot in the room, and Karen, Emily and Sid were running a shift system so that we never, ever had to be alone, and that was something I was terrified of. I was fully aware that that bitch had a lot of friends, and even with the coppers stationed outside my room I could never be sure of anyone except my little group of friends.

One day, I woke from a doze to see two tall men staring at me, and I thought that was it, and then one of them started crying while the second wrapped him in a hug, and I remembered the two toffs from a lifetime ago, and I managed to smile at them. I didn’t know then how much they had done for me, but once I was well, and the full story had been given to me, I realised that they were part of a very select crew.

So many others before me, without that luck. Oh god.

Emily there, every day she could manage, as school still had its call on her, and Nana, prattling on without a pause, always in the most stupidly cheerful voice she could manage, until the day I asked her what was happening with Cunningham, Alf, Don, Charlie….

“Not now, pet, not now. When tha’re stronger, then aye, mebbe.”

Finally I left hospital, and Karen and Brian took us all in while I healed, and the police dug, and the case hit the News of the World first, and then every other paper, as the extent of the corruption and evil was unveiled, despite a very clumsy and partial arson of council records.

Nobody had yet mentioned my bodily changes, but Emily provided me with a number of comfortable items including some much better bras, acting as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Nobody stressed me, nobody was even the slightest downbeat around me, until I was well into my sessions with a therapist and a police witness statement scribe.

I look back now and I realise that my reaction to the male nurse had disturbed them, and they were all assuming I was as fragile as a snowflake. I had survived three years of hell; couldn’t they see I must have some inner strength, just a little bit?

The façade started to break when I asked the obvious question, the day after Don was found face-down in the Eden. The river, not the cell, of course.

“Where’s Iain?”