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‘No.’
‘You’re a whore.’
He gripped my head tighter as he rammed into me.
‘Say it.’
Anger hardened inside me.
‘Say it.’
‘No.’
‘Just say it,’ he screamed.
He was hurting me so much. My body kept slamming into the side of the table. I just wanted him to stop—for the shouts to be silent. My anger died.
‘I’m a whore,’ I said.
‘Again,’ he shouted.
‘I’m a bitch.’ My voice was utterly expressionless.
With a moan he stopped moving on top of me and I reached back to take the condom, push him away and pick up my dress. The boy didn’t look at me as he walked towards the shower. Later, after he’d got out and put his clothes on, he turned to give me £5.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, his eyes not meeting mine.
‘Just go,’ I said. ‘I don’t want your money.’
The boy said nothing as he left. I sat down quickly, feeling my legs lose their strength.
‘I cannot stand it,’ I whispered, my head in my hands. ‘I cannot bear this life much longer. I would rather be dead than suffer this.’ I could see blood in my mind, feel aggression in my heart and, for the first time, feared I wouldn’t be able to control whatever was trying to rip out from inside me. I wasn’t sure what I might do if I saw the boy again. I sat in silence and stared at the wall, trying to push down the animal which was clawing to get out from inside me.
I knew I had to win the struggle for control. My desire for survival was still strong. It had to be. I had to get home to my children. They were all that had kept me going through all the terrible hardships and abuses I had suffered. I had told them that Mummy would come home and I knew I had to survive if I was ever going to keep my promise.
Chapter One (#ufa4a3453-0c84-5275-a7b4-23fcfcc44ac9)
I believe your birth is like your life and you are born with good or bad luck which follows you forever. I weighed just over two pounds when I was born three months prematurely and no one thought I would live. But I fought, held on to my life and survived just as I have done ever since.
I came into the world in Ukraine at about 6pm on 16 January 1976, after my mother Alexandra slipped on an icy street as she ran for the bus. Her waters broke and I had been born by the time my father Panteley arrived at the hospital. The doctors warned my parents I would not survive but my father had me moved to another hospital where I spent three months until I was well enough to go home. They called me Oxana.
We lived in a town called Simferopol in Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union, and my parents were rich compared with many in the Communist country. My father was a lorry driver and my mother worked in a nursery. They’d met at college and my mother was just seventeen when they married and my brother Vitalik was born. Six years later I arrived and together we lived in a huge apartment block of more than six hundred flats. We were lucky because we had two bedrooms and a large balcony and could afford to eat meat every day. My mother, who was small, beautiful and smelled of a perfume called Red Moscow, was an excellent cook, and Sunday was the best because we would have chicken livers or lamb with white sauce and onions followed by biscuits or cakes. That was my favourite day of the week, when we were all laughing together and my parents weren’t working.
But things started to change when my father gave up his driving job to run his own car repair business. Suddenly my world wasn’t quite as happy. I don’t know what came first—my father’s jealousy or my mother’s nights out—but after that the beatings started. I would lie in bed listening and praying to God to protect me. Papa was like a bull who couldn’t control himself, while Mamma couldn’t stop her tongue. I listened to the awful noise of their rows, wishing that they would stop and terrified that it was my fault they were no longer happy.
The noise from our flat must have been horrendous, but no one ever got involved in the arguments between my parents because anything between a husband and wife was considered private. Besides, there were plenty of other families like mine in our apartment block and if you got married then it was no one else’s business what your husband did to you. Women were the ones who provoked men after all—if they answered back they were hit, if they wore a short skirt they were a slapper who deserved what they got. One day a policeman came and sat with my father in the kitchen. By the time he had left, Papa had signed a document saying he wouldn’t touch my mother but what good is a piece of paper against a powerful fist? Nothing could heal the rift between my parents.
‘He’s a bastard,’ my mother would tell me as we lay in the bedroom we shared. Vitalik had the other while my father slept in the living room. ‘I’m going to leave him. You can come with me, Oxana, and we’ll be happy together.’
I wanted us all to be happy but I wished that we could stay together too. I loved my papa, even though he was so angry all the time with my mother. I was also frightened of my mother because she had drunken rages of her own and could turn against me in an instant. Sometimes she would scream at me after one of Papa’s beatings that I hadn’t protected her, and she would hit me. Once she beat me with a bunch of roses; I was covered in scratches and had to stay off school for a week.
Maybe it was because of all this that my brother Vitalik changed. We’d always been friends when we were young but he lost interest in me as he became a teenager and soon the arguments between my parents often included him. He started smoking, stopped going to school and hung around with a bad crowd which worried my father. Then when I was nine, my parents’ wedding rings and a gold necklace disappeared. Papa was furious; he was convinced that Vitalik had stolen them and it was the first time I realised that it wasn’t just my mother he could hit.
‘Why are you doing this?’ my father screamed. ‘I’m working hard to make a better future for you and your sister and you do this to me.’
Then one day, the police arrived at our home. A car had been stolen and there had been an accident. After that Vitalik disappeared. He was just fifteen.
After my brother had left, I felt almost invisible. I was a good girl who never caused my parents any trouble but I was also a very sensitive child. Every day I would write in my diary how many bad things my mother or teachers had said to me and it made me sad that nobody liked me because I was the clever girl at school. Things got worse when Vitalik went away.
‘There’s the thief’s sister,’ my classmates would snigger as I walked by.
People would turn their backs as I walked into the playground and teachers would mark my homework down for no reason. At that time, Ukraine was a Soviet country where many things weren’t accepted. Religion was one. Lenin was our god and people who believed otherwise could get into trouble. I remember one day when a girl came into school wearing a cross. We didn’t see her for a whole year after that. There were some churches of course and I was baptised into the Greek faith but my family never practised their religion openly. We celebrated Christian festivals but there was no Bible at home or trips to church.
In Ukraine, difference wasn’t trusted. Children were taught to hate homosexuality, black skin and anything foreign. Everybody had to be the same. There was just one big supermarket where everyone shopped and it didn’t sell any luxury goods or foreign foods—things like tampons and disposable nappies were unheard of. Instead we ate simple meat and vegetables, women used pads of gauze every month to stop their blood and children drank milk. When Coca-Cola arrived in Ukraine there were a lot of people who believed it would make them sick and I didn’t have my first sip until I was thirteen—the same day I tried chewing gum.
My country was hard in other ways too—it wasn’t wealthy and everyone had to work. Just a dollar a day could mean the difference between eating and starving, and I always knew that some people had a lot less than my family.
What I loved more than anything else was Bollywood films. The singing, the dancing, the colour, the costumes—everything about them was beautiful and I was convinced that India must be heaven on earth. My favourite one was called Disco Dancer and starred Mithun Chakrabarti. He was so tall and handsome that I saw it twenty-three times and couldn’t stop crying when it finally stopped being shown. I loved the way that Bollywood films always had a happy ending full of love. They made me believe that one day my prince would find me and we would live together happily ever after. I just had to wait patiently for that day to come.
Then something happened that turned all the colour in my dreams to grey.
Chapter Two (#ufa4a3453-0c84-5275-a7b4-23fcfcc44ac9)
It was the summer of 1990,I was fourteen and on a secret day out at the beach with two friends, Natasha and Alina. I knew I’d be in trouble if Papa found out, but I had had a wonderful time sunbathing and chatting with my girlfriends. Now we were going to buy some food before walking to the station ready for the hour’s train journey home.
As we stood in the queue for pastries, a handsome boy waited behind. He looked about eighteen and was wearing shorts, no shirt and good sunglasses.
‘Excuse me, could you tell us what time it is, please?’ Natasha asked as she turned towards him.
He looked at his watch. ‘Nearly six o’clock,’ he replied.
I was worried. It was much later than I’d thought. ‘We have to go,’ I said urgently. ‘We’ll miss the train and we’ll never be home in time. I have to get back before Mama comes home from work.’
‘Don’t worry, Oxana,’ said Natasha breezily. ‘There’s plenty of time.’
She didn’t seem at all worried as she started chatting and laughing with the older boy. I didn’t like it—she seemed so open and free with him, and it wasn’t how I’d been taught to behave.
‘Why don’t you come and meet my friends?’ he asked, when we’d bought our pastries.
‘Sure,’ replied Natasha, and she began walking off with our new friend.
‘But we’ve got to get home,’ I cut in, looking at Alina.
‘Not yet,’ she said as she turned to follow Natasha and the boy. ‘We can always catch the next train. Don’t be a scaredy cat, Oxana.’
I stood for a moment. What should I do? I could go on my own to the station or for once try to fit in with my friends. I didn’t want to be left alone. I turned to follow as the boy led us behind the shops to the edge of a small wood.
‘My friends are in there,’ he said, gesturing at the trees.
Twigs cracked under our feet as we walked into the sudden darkness. I saw a group of about seven boys a little way ahead. They looked between sixteen and eighteen, and were sitting on blankets with food and bottles of homemade wine surrounding them, smoking. We went over and sat down with them. Natasha accepted a bottle immediately but I felt more and more nervous. We were going to be so late.
Then I heard two boys muttering behind me.
‘What are we going to do?’ one asked in a low voice.
I strained to hear and made out a few other words.
‘…and you can take her,’ the other said as he looked at me.
Fear filled me. Something was wrong.
‘Come on, let’s leave,’ I whispered to Alina. I turned to the boy next to me and said with a smile, ‘We need to go to the toilet.’
‘Over there.’ He gestured at some bushes. Alina and I got up and started to walk casually away.
‘We need to get away from here,’ I told her in a low voice.
‘What do you mean?’ she replied.
‘Trust me. There’s something wrong. I’ll count to five, then we’ll run.’
‘Okay,’ Alina said and my heart beat as I waited to count down.
‘Five, four, three, two, ONE,’ I shouted and started running through the shadowy wood. I couldn’t hear Alina behind me, she must have gone in a different direction, but I couldn’t stop. I just had to run. That was all that mattered.
Suddenly I felt hands on my back and was pushed to the ground before being pulled roughly around. Looking down at me was a boy of about seventeen with blond curly hair, blue eyes and big lips.
‘Listen,’ he snapped. ‘I can make you a deal. Either all these guys are going to fuck you or you accept just me.’
‘No way,’ I screamed. ‘Never.’
‘All right then,’ the boy said as he started getting up. ‘I’ll just call the others.’
I could sense he was nervous, unsure of what he was doing. ‘No, please don’t,’ I begged. ‘Don’t call them. I’ll go with you.’
‘Good,’ he said as he pulled me to my feet. ‘Now follow me.’
I was very afraid as the boy took my arm and we started walking through the woods. What was he going to do? Why wouldn’t he let me go?
‘Please don’t hurt me,’ I sobbed. ‘My parents are expecting me home.’
‘If you’re good I won’t give you to anyone else but if you’re not then I have a lot of friends.’
My heart beat fast. I hardly understood what happened between men and women but I knew that I didn’t want this boy to touch me and there was no way to get away from him. Even as my eyes scanned the floor for something to use as a weapon—a plank, a stone—he held tightly on to me.
‘Please don’t hurt me today,’ I pleaded as we reached a deserted house and he pushed me into an old shed at the back. ‘Can’t you just leave me tonight?’
The longer he didn’t touch me the better. I’d been told again and again that I had to be a virgin to be a good wife and I knew that meant not letting boys touch me. I couldn’t let this boy do anything to me or the word ‘whore’ would follow me forever.
‘Don’t worry,’ he replied. ‘I’m not going to hurt you. You just need to drink some wine and then it won’t be so painful.’
He lay a blanket on the ground and offered me a bottle before lifting his eyes to me once again. The silence was thick between us as we stared at each other. I saw in his eyes that he was determined to do it.
‘Please don’t hurt me,’ I whispered as the boy pushed me back onto the hard ground.
I was so scared I couldn’t move. I’d hit boys at school if they’d ever tried to touch me but this was so different. My body froze. Maybe he would let me go when he realised how afraid I was.
‘I won’t tell anyone about this,’ I sobbed. ‘Please let me go. I won’t tell the police or my parents.’
But the boy did not listen and started pulling at my clothes as I folded my arms around my body.
‘No,’ I pleaded as he ripped the thin straps of my pink top. ‘I’m a virgin.’
‘Oh, come on,’ he snapped in a low voice. ‘You must have had a boyfriend.’
Tears ran down my face as the boy pulled at my shorts and I stiffened my legs to hold them tightly together. He pushed himself onto me and I could hardly breathe. He was too heavy and strong to resist as he forced my legs open. I tried screaming but a hand clamped down on my mouth.
A hot jab of pain flooded in between my legs. I didn’t want him to do this to me and neither did my body. It hurt so much. The boy pushed again and again until he went inside me. I screamed.
‘Shut up,’ he shouted. ‘Relax and you’ll be fine.’
But pain filled me as millimetre by millimetre the boy robbed me of myself. I could feel his sweat dripping on me, his tongue licking me and smell the stink of his armpits. Sickness rose up in my throat.
I don’t know how long it was before he stopped moving and rolled away onto his back.
‘You see, it was nothing,’ he said. ‘I’m tired now. Tomorrow I’ll take you to the train station and you can go home.’
He dozed off straight away while I lay awake trembling, too terrified to move, until I finally fell asleep, grateful for the oblivion.
Early the next morning we woke up. I saw dried blood on my thighs as I pulled on my shorts. It hurt to move as I shifted from one leg to the other. I felt freezing, so cold I was almost shaking, and I wondered what he was going to do now. Home felt so far away.
He led me out of the shed and we started walking along a deserted road with trees on either side until we reached an empty beach.
‘Clean yourself up,’ the boy said as he gestured at the sea. ‘And then I’ll take you to the station.’
I looked at a toilet block on the edge of the beach—the kind of low building with no roof, low walls and holes in the ground that were found by the seaside.
‘Can I go?’ I asked.
‘Yes, but don’t lock the door.’
The boy waited outside as I walked into the latrine and looked at the back wall. I could climb it and run. If I could just get away, perhaps I could forget this had ever happened. No one need ever know.
I stayed still for a moment as I listened for the boy. I couldn’t hear him moving, just the sound of the sea as it rolled onto the beach. Holding my breath, I pulled myself up onto the wall. As my head appeared over the top, I looked down to see two men waiting on the other side.
‘She’s trying to escape,’ one called and I heard a grunt of frustration as the boy rushed into the cubicle.
‘You’ve made a real mistake,’ he shouted as he grabbed me. ‘And now you’re going to pay for it.’
