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
