Chapter 3

Bondy and I looked at each other, horror clear on both our faces. Almost as one, we each took an arm and towed her, unprotesting, to a nearby bench where we all sat down.

“You father has been doing that to you for six years?” I hissed.

She nodded. “Nearly. It was just before Christmas, and it was the first anniversary of my mother’s death.”

“Oh shit,” I whispered. Some of the things about her became clear. She was aloof, slightly arrogant, never actually a bully, but could be cold and horrible. She knew how to destroy people, make them fear her, drive them away from her, but she also knew how to make people worship and love her. It was all a defence mechanism.

“It’s not your fault,” whispered Bondy.

“I know,” she whispered. She paused, then added, “but it doesn’t feel that way. An’ I have to keep doing it to protect my little sister.”

“Fuck, how old is she?” Asked Bondy.

“She’ll be fourteen in November.”

I had an epiphany. “Is she your second concubine?”

“If she’s still thirteen, then no, but she’s supposed to come with me anyway. If she’s over fourteen, then yes.”

“You do realise that you’re the one in charge,” I said. “He can’t become your concubine if you don’t want him to.”

“But he won’t let me go with anyone else.”

“If it happens like that, just tell the Confederacy people that you don’t want him, and there’s nothing he can do about it.”

“But he might hurt me. Worse, he might hurt Amber.”

“Amber’s your sister?”

“Yeh. The only reason I haven’t left home is because if I did he’d start raping her.”

“How do you know he hasn’t?” Bondy asked. “For all you know,” he broke off at Talulah’s wildly shaking head.

“He hasn’t. He’s told me he hasn’t. He told me, threatened, that if I ever leave he will go to her, and use her as he’s used me.”

“Then when you get collected you need to take her, but not him,” I said. Bondy nodded.

“Shit,” she exclaimed. “I’m late.” She stood up hurriedly. “Dad always collects me from school. Collects us. To make sure I’m not going out with any boys. He’ll kill me if he finds out I’ve told anyone, or that I’ve ever talked to a boy.” She turned on us suddenly. “And I’ll kill you if you ever tell anyone.”

“We won’t,” we both assured her.

She glared at us, fright clear on her face, and dashed off. We followed her more slowly, and saw her getting into a black Mercedes.

“We’ve got to help her,” Bondy said.

I nodded. “But how?”

“I dunno,” he sighed. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

“Dad,” I said at the first opportunity I had to get him alone that evening. “Can I ask your advice?”

“Sure. What do you need? Girls? Money? School?” He smiled encouragingly at me.

“Well, girls, sort of, but not in the normal way.”

“Oh?”

“There’s a girl at school,”

“Oh, and you think you’d like her to be a concubine?”

I frowned at his interruption. “No. No, she’s a sponsor.”

“Oh. Okay. What about her?”

“She being forced to take her father and her younger sister as her concubines.”

“Who’s forcing her to do that?”

“He is. Her father.”

There was a long silence, and slowly his frown got deeper. “Is this what I think it is?” he asked heavily.

“He’s raping her.”

Dad nodded slightly. “How do you know?”

I explained about what had happened today at school. Going right from the start and my first approach to Bondy. It was long and convoluted in the telling as I kept forgetting bits and having to go back and fill them in, but not once did Dad interrupt me. When I’d finished he just stared at me. “What do I do?” I asked plaintively.

He smiled slightly, “You? Nothing. You’ve done exactly what you need to do. Me? I’m going to see if I can include her and her sister in the collection, and exclude him.”

“How are you going to manage that?”

“Don’t know yet,” he said slowly. “What’s her name?”

“I can’t tell you. She begged us not to tell anyone, and if I tell you that, I’ll have broken my promise.”

Dad looked at me. He gave me a soft smile. “You think you’re protecting her by not revealing who she is?”

I nodded.

He nodded for a moment before giving a little sigh. “The problem is, if you don’t tell anyone, then she can’t get the help she needs. Just by telling you she may, unconsciously, have been asking for help. If you do tell me, I absolutely promise I won’t go charging into the school and making trouble. I absolutely promise I won’t go to the police or Social Services. Not yet anyway. I do absolutely promise to see if I can think of a way to protect her and her sister, such that there’s no comeback on them.”

He looked at me for a long time, a serious but open expression on his face. He was inviting me to tell him, without pressuring me.

“Talulah Evans,” I eventually whispered.

“Evans?” I can think of three Evans’, I don’t suppose you know his first name do you?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“What’s her sister’s name?”

I had to think about it. “Erm. Amber.”

“Amber Evans. Talulah and Amber Evans. And you say their mother has died, and it’s just the two of them?”

“I think so. I don’t think we asked about any other brothers or sisters.”

“All right. Leave it with me. I’ll see what I can do.”

“Can I tell her you’re trying to get her extracted?”

“Nnnnnnnnnn,” Dad started. “No,” he said slowly. “Not yet. I’ll let you know. Okay?”

I nodded. “Thanks Dad.”

“Be a good friend to her. Don’t tell anyone else at school unless she asks you to, and gives you permission to do so. Do not even hint at it, even to anyone else who appears to be a close friend of hers. If she wants to talk, let her. Do not tell her it’ll be all right. I hope it will be, but it might all go pear-shaped. Do tell her it’s not her fault. Don’t force her to speak about it, let her do all the driving. If she does tell you anything, you can tell me if you think it’s important, but no one else. Not yet. She’s in a very vulnerable position. Even more so because she’s now told you. She may even be scared, scared of you. She’s started to open up, so she needs protecting more than ever. You and your friend, Bondy?” I just nodded, not interrupting him. “You need to protect her in school, but out of school the only way you can protect her at the moment is by not talking about it. Her father must not know she has talked, nor even suspect she might have.” He smiled at me. “Do you think you can do all that?”

I nodded. “I’ll try,” I said fervently.

“Good boy.”

That evening I stole a pair of Joanne’s knickers. I would wear them that night, and again the following night, but not at school as I had PE on a Thursday.

As I put the soft, skimpy, knickers on, I got a huge boner, and began to wank. I thought of Joanne, as I often did, imagining her naked, but after a few moments my thoughts drifted to Talulah Evans. At first my boner got harder - she was after all very good looking and with a lovely bod, but as I remembered what she had been through, I softened and shrank. I couldn’t wank over someone being abused and raped.

Talulah avoided both me and Bondy for the next few days. She spotted us looking at her, I smiled but her eyes widened and she turned and hurried in the other direction.

“You’ve obviously got an ugly smile,” Bondy told me.

“She’s scared of us.”

“I know. But we can’t go near her. We have to wait for her to come to us.”

“But she needs to know she can come to us, so we have to go a bit nearer to her,” I insisted.

“We can always just invite her to join us. Beckon her over.”

“Might work. Can but try.”

The following Wednesday, at lunch, Bondy and I were sitting at a small table, a small gap between us and anyone else. “She’s coming this way,” Bondy whispered.

“Try and invite her over,” I said, fighting the urge to turn and look at her.

“She saw me, but she went and joined her normal crowd of hangers-on,” I was told a few moments later

“They’ll protect her in their own way, I guess.”

Then it was the weekend, and on Monday she nervously approached us. “You haven’t told anyone.”

“We said we wouldn’t,” Bondy assured her.

“We are your friends. You can come and talk to us at any time, about anything, and if you tell us it’s for our ears only, then it’s for our ears only,” I said softly.

“You’re not my friends,” she whispered.

“If we weren’t your friends,” Bondy said equally softly, “then we wouldn’t care about how you feel, and we might have told someone.”

She looked at us, pale, determined, scared, beautiful.

“True friends,” I said, “don’t hang around you when you don’t need it, but will be with you when you do. True friends will keep your secrets if you ask us to, but will help you and support you if you decide you do have to tell. True friends will do what is best for you, not for them.”

“And how do you decide what’s best for me?” she asked quietly, a hint of anger in her voice.

“What’s best for you, is what you tell us is best for you. But that includes more than just you physically. That includes you emotionally. We could have told the police or someone like that and had them take you away. You would be safe, but what about your sister? You know what might happen to her and if it did, that would hurt you emotionally.” I shook my head. “I want to tell someone, I really do. But until you tell us we can, we won’t. But we will support you. We will be your friends in need.”

She looked at us for a few moments longer then walked slowly off.

“Where did that come from?” asked Bondy.

“Um. Look, you’ve finished, so let’s go outside.”

“All right,” he frowned at me slightly, in puzzlement.

“All right, give,” he said a few moments later.

I told him all about the conversation I’d had with my father.