by Nikki Ashton
22
Sarah
“You’re right,” Adam said. “It’s nowhere near as big as yours.”
“If you don’t want people to know, there’s a reason for that, a reason that’s just as important to you as mine was to me.”
Adam laughed on the end of the line. “You’re fucking amazing you know that?”
“I don’t know about that. I just know my dad would have wanted me to fight and it took doing what I did to realise that. You know I believe he was looking down on me all that time, especially that night I tried to end it all.” I smiled as I thought of how protective my dad had always been and possibly still was being.
“How come?” Adam asked.
“I cut one wrist and then passed out when I saw the blood.”
“I-I, oh shit Sarah,” Adam said with soft laughter. “I hate to say this but that’s....”
“Ironic?” I giggled despite grimacing. “Yep, I know which is why I like to think it was Dad helping me out. So, go on tell me your secret. What has you lying awake at night?”
I wasn’t sure how much more I could take because telling Adam everything had wrung me out like a dishcloth. I felt raw and weary, but I knew it was important to him to tell me.
“I’m not even sure why I never told anyone, well I do, but it seems pretty trivial now.”
“Nothing is trivial if it upsets you,” I whispered, snuggling further down under my covers.
“Well, my dad left when I was five. Mum threw him out to be more exact and I have no clue where he went. I got a kiss on the head, he told me he loved me, and then he left. That was the last I saw of him.”
“That must have been awful. God, Adam you were just five years old?”
“Yeah, it was bad, and I remember crying for a whole week, but Mum just kept saying we were better off without him. I didn’t believe her though. The man taught me how to play football and to ride a bike, he loved me, and I loved him. Believe it or not, that’s not what has me so fucked in the head.” He sighed and then continued, “When he went Mum started to go out with all these different men, the first long term one was a bloke called Dean, he was pretty cool and took me fishing or to cricket matches even though both bored me. He lasted around six months until he couldn’t handle my mum’s moods any longer. Jimmy was next and he lasted a lot longer. He stuck around for three years and he’s Lori’s dad. I didn’t like him as much, but he was okay and he didn’t shout or hit me; he didn’t actually communicate with me in any way to be honest. Then Mum found out she was pregnant, and Jimmy just left. He took a load of our stuff with him, including my Xbox, some of Mum’s jewellery and our TV, but he did leave us something; a whole load of debt, oh and Lori of course.”
“So that means Roger isn’t Lori’s dad?” I was surprised. She had the same colouring as him and they seemed close.
“Nope, Jimmy is but he’s never seen her and never wants to. He texted Mum to tell her that just after she was born.”
“Oh my God, no,” I whispered as I felt an ache in my chest at the thought of someone not wanting sweet little Lori.
“Yeah a real charmer. So, that was ‘dad’ number three gone. Or I like to think of him Stepdick Number 2.” Adam gave an empty laugh. “That pissed me off as well, that Mum got me to call them dad. I fucking hated it.”
“Especially if you still missed your real dad,” I offered. “I can’t imagine calling anyone else Dad, ever.”
“Yeah, well, she didn’t get it and thought I was just being a dick about it.”
Adam let out a long sigh and I had a feeling his secret was about to be revealed. I also had a feeling that it was something he shouldn’t be ashamed of.
“So Mum decided we needed a fresh start and a friend of hers told her about this little town just outside of Manchester called Maddison Edge where a friend of his had a house to rent and he also knew there was a job going at the local library for an administrator and his friend had offered to get Mum an interview.”
“Wow,” I replied. “That was lucky, my mum had to go out to Bidston Green an hour away to get her job. And your Mum was pregnant too, good job they were willing to take her on.”
“Yeah,” Adam groaned. “I’m pretty sure the friend of Mum’s was a married man who just wanted her out of town, so he got his friend involved who pulled some strings. Anyway, I was nine and Mum was pregnant with Lori.”
“And that’s where Roger comes in?”
“Nope, he’s dad number five. Stepdick Number 4 would you believe. He came into our lives about a year and a half ago and he moved us in almost straight away. Him and Mum married a year ago. Good old Roge who wants to be my dad but will never be. None of them are good enough to fill his shoes.”
“But he still left you,” I whispered.
“I know, and that’s all down to my mum. She burned his pictures, Sarah. She made it really clear he couldn’t see me again, she didn’t care how her being a bitch to him affected me.”
“I’m so sorry, Adam.”
“It’s fine,” he replied. “I got used to him not being around, it was all the other knobheads who she tried to replace him with that I hated, especially Eric. It was when she started work at the library that she met him.”
Adam fell silent and I heard him moving around and I wondered if he had changed his mind about telling me.
“Adam, you don’t have to do this you know.”
“No, I want to. You told me something far worse and I should just stop being a fucking pussy about it. So, we moved here, she met Eric and within a month he’d moved in and yet again I was encouraged to call him Dad; but by then I’d pretty much lost any respect I had for my mum and wasn’t going to do it and I told Eric that the night he moved in. And that night…” he paused and coughed, and I held my breath hoping his story wasn’t anything like mine. “Well that night when Mum went to bed early because she was six months pregnant by then, he took me into the kitchen washed my mouth out with soap and then punched me.”
I gasped and held a hand to my chest as I imagined a nine-year-old Adam being beaten by a man who’d been brought into the house to be a father figure to him.
“Did you tell your Mum?” I asked pushing a hand against my quivering chest.
“Yeah,” Adam replied in a quiet voice. “Told her the next day and she took my football off me for a week for lying.”
“Oh my God, Adam.”
I had an understanding now of why he was so hostile to Roger. He probably didn’t trust him not to leave like the other four men who were supposed to have been his father.
“She never believed me the second, third or fourth time, so I gave up telling her after that,” Adam continued. “Although I sometimes think she knew really. Eric brought good money into the house though, he said he loved her and when Lori was born, admittedly he didn’t have much interest in her, but he didn’t hate her being around. Why would Mum risk that for a mouthy nine-year-old kid? He hit me pretty much two or three times a week, sometimes worse than others but never where it would be seen. The only time he seemed worried was when he hit me around the back of the head with his belt and the buckle cut my head open. It was a big ugly square thing with his initial in the middle.”
I felt sick at the thought of what he’d gone through. I’d lost my dad in the worst possible way, but at least he’d loved and cherished me for the seventeen years I’d had him. What was worse, Adam seemed so matter of fact about it all.
“Did the hospital report him when he took you to be stitched up?” I asked.
“He didn’t take me; he was a porter at casualty, so we always had shit he’d taken from there lying around the house. He patched me up with some butterfly stitches and told me to tell my mum I’d fallen in the garden.”
“And no one ever suspected? None of your teachers or friends?”
“No, I made sure I always wore a vest or t-shirt under my school shirt.”
My stomach rolled as the line went quiet. He must have been so scared and on
edge all the time, always wondering when the next beating was going to come.
“Your Mum never ever said anything?”
“No, she said she never knew because Eric always did it when she wasn’t around. She had to wonder why I’d suddenly become introverted and moody though. Even Ellis’ Mum noticed the change in me, and we’d only been friends for a few months. Like I said though, maybe the fear of losing Eric was worse than the thought of her kid being beaten up.”
That was just a horrific scenario, but hadn’t my mum missed the signs too.
“So, what happened in the end. How did it stop?”
“The day I turned fourteen. By then I was almost six feet tall, so when he came at me, I punched him first,” Adam replied his tone low and hard.
And there it was, ‘I punched him first’. That’s what he’d been doing all his life since then.
“Not long after that,” Adam continued, “he met a woman on a boy’s trip to Benidorm and never came back. Left Mum high and dry; but at least I wasn’t getting beaten on any longer and Lori didn’t seem to miss him, but he didn’t do much with her anyway. Once he was gone, that was when Mum suddenly started to ask questions and decided to believe me.”
“Five years, Adam,” I cried, my voice breaking on his name. “He beat you for five years and your Mum said she had no idea. No one else noticed or stopped it?” The phone quivered next to my ear as my hand started to shake as thoughts of how lost and lonely he must have felt raced through my mind. He was just nine years of age and must have been so bloody scared every single day.
“Yeah, five years, Sarah. Five years I acted like a pussy. I let that man put his hands on me and hid it because I was scared that if I said anything he’d leave Mum, and then Lori wouldn’t have a dad, or worse we’d be taken into care and me and Lori would be separated. I wouldn’t have been able to stand that, and I didn’t want to have to move again; I loved it here. It was the first place that’d felt like home since my dad had left. I had friends, kids liked me and…” He sighed. “Kids were scared of me. You know what they say, the bullied becomes the bully, well that was true for me. I was knocked around at home, but at school, even then I damn well ruled the corridors. Once I got to high school, I got worse because I hung around with sixth formers who thought their shit didn’t stink, I guess their attitude rubbed off.”
Everything about Adam clicked into place. All the reasons that he treated girls like they were nothing. Why he always took the first strike. Why he demeaned girls when he was finished with them. It was all he’d known for a big part of his life. It was how his own mother had been treated by every man she’d been with, apart from Roger, and as for him, Adam simply didn’t trust he wouldn’t be like all the others and leave them eventually.
“Why keep it a secret now though?” I asked.
“Because if I don’t everyone will judge her,” he replied on a shaky breath. “They’ll all say she’s a bad mother and she should have done something to protect me, and—”
“And she should,” I blurted out. “She’s your mum it’s her job, Adam.”
“Yeah I know,” he snapped. “But she’s my mum and only I get to say that about her. Can’t you say that about your mum too? Didn’t you say your Mum checked out on you?”
I sighed because he was right. “Yeah, you’re right, but five years?”
I found it so hard to believe his mum didn’t know. How could she not have known what was happening to her son under her very nose. My abuse happened away from home, so Mum had no real way of knowing exactly what was wrong with me, but I was sure she’d have noticed bruising on me.
“Plus, you know if people at school find out I was beaten until my back and stomach were black and blue, don’t you think someone will try their luck with me and think it’s okay to take me down? My credibility would be shit.”
“And, so what?” I cried. “Being known as a bully isn’t credible. That’s not who you want to be remembered as. If you just let yourself be you, you’d be surprised at how many people would actually want to be your friend because they like you, Adam, not because they’re scared of you.”
“And what about my friends,” he growled. “People are scared of them, because of me. They have every girl in school after them, because of me.”
I sat up and swung my legs out of bed. “Then let them do it on their own, but you can’t carry on being the bully. You have to stop and just be you. Just be Adam Hudson the brilliant football player and lover of Napoleon Bonaparte. Be the boy who actually has a big heart if he’d just let it out once in a while.”
He snorted an empty laugh and the heaved out a breath. “How can I be anyone different when my whole life is mapped out for me?”
“It doesn’t have to be,” I replied as I stood up and walked to my bedroom window to pull back the curtains to the quiet darkness outside. “You’re not Eric and you’re not his son. You don’t have his bad blood inside of you.”
“I mean that I’m being forced to get a job, when I actually want to go to UCL and study history,” he groaned. “Mum says they can’t afford to send me, and she didn’t even bother filling in my student loan forms. So, I have to get a job when I really want to learn about the world and what it was like and what it might become. I want to travel and discover things other than complex set plays that might get us a goal in a match. I need to keep learning, Sarah. I need to see things that changed the world, I need to go to uni to give me that chance, but I have no bloody choice. How the hell do I change who I am if I can’t do what I want or need?”
I stopped with my hand on the curtains enthralled by Adam’s passion for the things he didn’t think he had any chance of having.
“Everything that has happened in your life has moulded you into the person you’ve become and most of that wasn’t your fault; but if you don’t make a stand then how can anyone have any sympathy for your situation?”
“I don’t want fucking sympathy,” he ground out. “I just want to live my life how I want to, but if I can’t I don’t see how I’ll ever change.”
“You’ll change because you’ll make a stand, Adam. You tell your Mum that you’re going to UCL. You tell the people who’ve already had their youth what you want to do with yours and you stick by it. If you don’t, you’ll become a product of circumstance and that will lead you down a very wrong path.”
I heaved out a breath, not only because I’d felt nervous to say those words to the boy who’d bullied my friends and made it clear he didn’t like me either, but because I needed to listen to them too. They were my mantra as well and I needed to tell my mum that I was not going to do languages at Lancaster after having a year out. I would take that year and spend it preparing for Kingston University and getting on to their degree course in teaching dance and choreography.
“Wow, nice speech.” I breathed a sigh of relief at his light tone.
“Yeah,” I replied as I bounced back on my bed. “It’s kind of what I needed to tell myself too.”
“How come?”
“Let’s just say me and my mum have had a similar conversation about Kingston Uni. I want to study dance and choreography to teach or work in film and television; she wants me to study languages and then die of boredom as a bilingual secretary.”
Adam laughed loudly and I was glad that he hadn’t taken offence at my words, because I truly did think he was a better person than he gave himself credit for. It wasn’t too late to let everyone else know that too.
“So, we could both end up in London,” he said with a flirtatious tone.
I grinned and didn’t want to think about what that statement might mean. Slow, baby steps were what was needed in this friendship.
“Yeah, and maybe I’ll meet you for coffee sometime. Although I’m taking a year out, so you might be waiting a while.”
“You are?”
“Yeah,” I replied heavily. “After the year I’ve had, Mum and I both agreed I wasn’t quite ready for University.”
“A
nd what will you do in that year?”
I shrugged even though Adam couldn’t see me. “Not sure. I don’t know if I’m ready to travel especially as I’d have to do it alone, so maybe I’ll help Clarice out full time; or get a job of some kind. I hadn’t really thought about it, you know with everything that’s happened.”
“I do,” Adam said, in a soft gentle voice. “I totally do.”
“Well it’s still dark, but I’m wide awake, so I think I’ll go and start on the bacon and eggs for breakfast. What about you?”
“Hmm, not sure, maybe I’ll start on that new leaf and do the same. I could make breakfast for everyone. Or maybe I’ll still act like a dick for the rest of the day and then land it on Mum and Roger that I’m going to try clearance for a late entry to UCL once I have my results.”
“You think they’ll take it okay?”
“No idea. I just know Mum thinks I’m shit at school and only capable of working some crap job for the next fifty fucking years.”
“Well tell them otherwise. Let them know you’re a history and maths genius. Think of it as your Battle of Austerlitz and show them how strong your right and left flanks are.”
I grinned as I heard Adam’s laughter on the other end of the line. What had been a hideous night the night before had resulted in something positive at least – Adam and I had some semblance of a friendship, and he might finally have the nerve to change his future.
“Okay,” he said and yawned. “You may well be wide awake, but I think I have the ability to sleep for another couple of hours yet, so I’ll let you go.”
“Okay and thanks for checking on me.”
He sighed. “No problem, that’s what friends are for.”
We said goodbye and then the line went dead and suddenly I didn’t feel so wide awake. The moon was still casting silver patterns through the window, so maybe a couple more hours of dreamless sleep wasn’t too bad an idea. I slid back into bed and snuggled down, falling asleep for another three hours, until I was woken by breakfast in bed from my mum who I gave the biggest, brightest smile to.
