Thrown Away Child

by Louise Allen

  I lie back and start counting wildly. One, two, three, four; one, two, three, four. I spend ages doing that, staring blankly at the ceiling, holding myself tight where it hurts. Following cracks, going along lines. Eventually I feel steady enough to pull my clothes off and put on my old pale-blue nylon dressing gown. I hobble down the landing to the toilet, feeling very vulnerable. I sit on the toilet and wee red water. It is not my time of the month. How will I explain the blood on the bed? How will I get it off? Barbara will not hear anything against Kevin. Or Mark for that matter. I hate Kevin – and Mark – more than I can possibly explain right now. I am bleeding, torn, in pain and feel scared. But I also know, sitting there, that there is absolutely no one I can turn to for help for something like this. So obviously it must be my fault. I desperately need a friend to confide in – someone who might help me get away from this place. I can’t tell Sean, as it’s too embarrassing. I pin all my hopes on finding a friend in my new school.

  15

  Fighting Back

  I knew the minute I got to the high school that it was the wrong place for me. It was strict, gloomy and rigid. I was put into the bottom stream right from the start as I was thought of as ‘thick’. My grades were terrible, obviously, as I had missed so much school over the years. All I could do was draw and paint. My ‘remedial’ history was like a neon sign around my neck spelling ‘Dummy’. So I ended up in the cookery and needlework classes with the dead-end girls who were going nowhere. The school only paid attention to the clever girls in the top classes who were going to go to university. I was shoved in with the girls who were going to get pregnant as soon as blink. I couldn’t spell, my maths was terrible and my general knowledge was poor. I hadn’t been allowed to watch TV or the news, so I didn’t know what was going on in the world. I was a dunce, according to the school.

  Right from the start we were at odds and it wasn’t going to get any better. It was a rigid, cold institution and I didn’t feel at home there. The headmistress ran everything with an iron rod – which was something I was used to, and sick of. She had a traffic light outside her office, and when you were summoned you had to sit and wait until it went green. It felt very humiliating somehow. I didn’t know how to learn. I couldn’t sit and pay attention in class because my mind was whirling with everything that was happening at home. I just couldn’t focus. When the teacher started talking I would drift off. Or I would panic, not understanding what I was supposed to be doing, as I’d been daydreaming too much. Everyone else would have their heads down, scribbling notes or writing an essay, and I’d be looking out the window at the trees. School hurt my head. I just couldn’t do it and I wasn’t interested any more. I couldn’t get engaged with it; I felt it was all too late.

  I realised I’d been stupid to think I might find a friend among these girls in their neat little uniforms, who could have no idea about my sordid real life outside school. They all seemed to have nice mummies and daddies who took them on holiday or to the cinema, or bought them nice clothes and LPs, and took them out for meals. I was in a different world from all of them, or so it felt. I even seemed to be in a different world to the poorer girls from the council estates, all of whom seemed to have more than me. I had all these nasty secrets, this hideous way of life, this shameful background, and nobody knew about it. Or perhaps they might guess, as I was still wearing shapeless clothes and the wrong kind of shoes. I’m sure I still smelt fairly bad. Somehow I had the mark of the ‘loser’ on my forehead and everyone could see it. I’d been told all my life that I would amount to nothing, and I was now amounting to absolutely nothing. And I hated every minute of it.

  However, despite everything, I gradually began to create a new Louise. Maybe the contrast between me and everyone else became too hard to bear and I had to do something to shape myself. It started with little things and then began to grow and grow. One Sunday morning, around this time, I went into Ian’s garage when he had unusually taken the van out to collect something. Increasingly I snuck into his garage. I didn’t hide my poo there any more, but I felt it was a bit of a hidey-hole from the house. I did sneak a bottle of cherry brandy in there (they never drank the bottles that Ian got from customers at Christmas; they sat there from one year end to the other). So I hid this bottle and slugged some brandy from time to time when things got tough, such as after the Cola bottle attack.

  Kevin and I were now at war. If he came near me I blanked him or spat and fought like a rabid cat. I hated him and fought him at every turn. I wanted his father to come and take him away so he’d leave me alone. So sneaking into the garage was a wonderful break from it all. This morning, for some reason, Barbara was also out – probably walking the dog. Ian had a Roberts radio, and I went and turned the dial – something I would never usually have the nerve to do. I found Radio 1, and a fantastic, wild, loud music started. I suddenly burst into life and was jumping up and down on the spot, dancing crazily to the music. It was fantastic. It was angry – there was a male voice shouting stuff I didn’t really understand – and it was loud and gritty, and I jumped around, spun about, and felt absolutely marvellous. I felt free in those five fantastic minutes. Freer than I’d felt in all my life. Wild. Happy. Mad. Powerful. When the music stopped, the voice said it was the Clash singing ‘White Riot’. I didn’t really understand what or who that was. I’d heard about punk, which was all the rage at the time, and had seen people in town with weird and wonderful hairstyles in bright neon colours, wearing black clothes with safety pins and slashes. My pulse was racing, my heart was beating hard, but in a good way. I felt alive. I felt good. I turned the radio off and snuck out of the garage, making sure I left no trace. I had found punk – would I now find me?

  Around this time I began to see more of the wider world outside of our horrible house. We had always been surrounded by neighbours but Barbara would frown on any contact, particularly because they had so often written to the council and reported her for cruelty (albeit nothing was ever done). We still had social workers dropping in but Barbara handled them like a fine art. She knew just how to play her cards right and deny everything.

  Now I was bigger I was able to walk out of the house myself, and sometimes I met a couple of lads from down the road and we’d go to the park. They were at the local comprehensive, or ‘comp’ as we called it – the one I wanted to go to – while I was at the high school, which was supposed to be a cut above. However, what they didn’t know was I was in the thick stream and hated every minute of it. So I learnt to smoke with these lads. At first they taught me to smoke cigarettes, like Players No. 6 or Benson & Hedges, like breathing in a bonfire, which made me cough and retch. But I did get that nice light-headed feeling that I also got with Barbara’s green pills or with the cherry brandy. Then we would mooch down the ‘Rec’, the local park, which had swings and slides. I always liked being out of doors, as I loved nature, and one day they handed me a strange kind of cigarette that had tobacco but also a strong-smelling herb in it.

  ‘Wanna try it?’ said one of the boys. So I did. I had nothing to lose. I felt a nice warm glow. Then I began to feel nicely light-headed, and started giggling. I loved laughing. I had almost never laughed at home, as it had always been like a funeral parlour, and I was terrified most of the time. We stood by the benches, or by the trees and the swings, and smoked the joint and everything got swirly and pretty and light and funny. I felt good. I felt happy. I didn’t care any more. I felt free.

  I had to keep my new friends and smoking a secret, however, as there would be hell to pay at home if Barbara got a whiff (literally). I was good at disguising myself, though, and was a master at keeping control after my years of being pleasant and polite to her, hiding everything and trying not to show her how I really felt inside.

  The one subject I still loved with a passion was art. Somehow with art it didn’t matter whether you were academic or not. Everyone was all mixed up together. I began to copy the album covers of people I was beginning to hear about. I got hold of David
Bowie’s ‘Diamond Dogs’ from someone at school and sat in the art room copying the cover. When I brought home my pictures, Barbara was horrified. ‘That’s weird nasty stuff,’ she said. I thought it was wonderful, so I hid my drawings to save them from being torn up and put in the rubbish bin.

  As most of the girls in my class were heading for early motherhood or the Cowley Road – where there were gangs of nasty, gropey men wanting to drool all over them – I started trying to hang out with the girls in the ‘top’ classes at school. I was drawn to the cleverer girls, and wanted to be part of their gangs, but at first it was impossible. So I watched them. I began to copy them, and then began to create a new image for myself.

  I did go round for tea one day to one of the posh girl’s houses and it was a complete revelation to me. Miranda’s family lived in a big red-brick house with lovely front and back gardens. They had huge white lampshades from a shop called Habitat, which were all the rage. They had lovely Moroccan carpets, wooden floors (no swirling orange carpet, like at ours), and big beautiful Indian cushions made of velvet and little mirrors. I was in awe of this house. I also watched the parents let the children speak. Miranda was allowed to join in the adult conversation – something I had never been allowed to do (I was always told to ‘Shut up, you little bitch’). Even though Miranda was in the middle stream (not the top), her parents let her talk about things on equal terms with them. I was shocked. I was always told that only the adults had any say in a matter. All decisions had been made for me, and I’d never been asked about anything.

  After this, I wanted to voice my opinions more. For years I had been silent. Whatever happened, I bit my lip and put up with the punishment or the slagging off. I was amazed that Miranda’s parents were interested in what she had to say, and never missed a parents’ evening. Barbara and Ian had never shown up at any parents’ evenings at any of my schools. It was only the difficult meetings with social workers that Barbara actually turned up for – because she had to.

  I began to steal make-up from local shops and use it. I wanted to try fashion, to create my clothes, to change my appearance. I began using colour on my eyes, lips and hair. Of course Barbara forbade it and shouted at me, or slapped my face, calling me a ‘slut’ or a ‘whore’. But I’d heard it all before. I was getting tired of her violence and her attitude. I was beginning to think for myself, just a little bit. I didn’t know why she thought she could slap me about and starve me all the time like she did. I began to create a whole personality for myself, a new persona. I started to play her like she played me. I would tell her what she wanted to know, so she wouldn’t ‘kill’ me, as she constantly threatened to. I began to tell lies, to create stories. Some were complicated lies. Some were sad. Some were just to survive. Sometimes I told them to Barbara to get out of being punished. Sometimes I told them to new friends, to make them like me, or to reduce Barbara’s oddness.

  One girl at school said to me, ‘Your Mum is really scary,’ and I just said, ‘Oh, she used to be a nanny and believes in discipline.’

  Of course, this was the truth, Barbara had been a nanny, but it wasn’t just discipline she believed in; she was out to destroy me. She hated me. I never confessed what was happening at home – I was too ashamed. Sometimes I turned my mother into a wonderful ‘happy hippy’ mother, or a ‘Waltons’ type of ‘mom’, and I described how wonderful she was to the other girls. I made out she was a fabulous mother, and home was great.

  I was so desperate to fit in, to stop being the odd one out, that I almost starting believing in these fantasies myself. I gave the impression that my parents loved me, that I mattered, that they would do anything for me. It was a complete pack of lies, but I began to need to believe it. I told some new girls that I was from a large, happy family, a bit like the Osmonds, and I had a lovely bedroom with white furniture and a white phone. I told wonderful stories of the travels we’d had to faraway places. The other girls lapped it up. I was rich, a princess, and nothing was too much for me. They believed it, or so I thought.

  One day I was embellishing on this, out on the hockey field at the back of the school. Somehow it got back to the headmistress, who called Barbara and me in to see her. We sat in her office (once the traffic light went green) and I was told to stop telling lies. Barbara sat there saying, ‘I have no idea what to do with her, she is such a liar.’

  I said nothing, but I remembered all the years when she had told everybody how wonderful she was to me, and then beat me up at home. Inevitably, once we got home from school, Barbara ripped off my clothes and whipped me with a wet, smelly floor cloth. She kicked me in the belly, spat on me and I was utterly humiliated. After this punishment I didn’t speak to her for days. She starved me completely too, but I didn’t care, as I now refused to eat.

  From then on, every time I said anything at school I was accused of being a liar by the other girls, and it was an embarrassing situation to be in. Whatever I now said, it was a lie, so no one believed me about anything. I had cried wolf once too often. The upshot of all this was that I was furious. I was livid and boiling with rage underneath, but I didn’t realise how much. I wanted to change myself, my image, my life, but it was all too slow. By inventing things I had tried to create a better me, but it had all backfired. Everything I tried always came back to Barbara feeling she had the right to kick and slap everything out of me, to torture and blame me. I hated the way she twisted everything all the time. I was always under suspicion. She never took responsibility or owned up or said sorry. Never. It was always my fault, all the time. Thus, I was coming up to the boil.

  One weekend morning I put on jeans and a T-shirt (I had now managed to get some younger-looking clothes from a second-hand shop), and I asked Barbara if I could go out for a ride on my bike. I had a second-hand (of course), dark-green ladies’ bike. It was very old-fashioned.

  She said, ‘Okay, fine,’ and I went to the shed to get the bike. Just as I was getting on it, on the gravel drive, Ian came back from being out in his van. In front of him Barbara said to me, ‘Where do you think you’re going, young lady?’

  I was straddled across the bike, foot on the pedal, ready to go, and said, ‘Out to see Miranda – you just said I could.’ Barbara looked at Ian and shook her head, dramatically.

  ‘You bloody little liar,’ she said. ‘You open your sodding mouth and out comes another lie.’

  I was amazed. Usually I would say nothing, but I suddenly felt really upset. ‘But you said—’

  ‘I said nothing of the sort. One day you’ll end up dead in a ditch with all these lies.’

  I was flabbergasted. But suddenly I’d had enough, and got off the bike and started to walk past her. I heard Ian say, ‘Barbara, stop now,’ but she was on her mission. As I walked down the gravel to the gate, pushing the bike, she was behind me saying, ‘Little bitch, little liar…’

  I just kept on walking, wheeling the bike, but she wouldn’t leave me alone. I was determined to open that gate. I could hear her saying, ‘You always make trouble between Ian and me; you’re a nasty piece of work.’

  By now she had got to the gate and nipped in front of me, blocking my way. Usually I would turn around and go back obediently, waiting to be beaten, kicked or slapped. I was used to being punished; I expected it. But in this moment, out on the gravel, about to get on my bike and leave to see a friend, something snapped. I saw Barbara in front of the gate and I threw my bike aside and ran at her. I grabbed her shoulders and shook her, and started shouting: ‘You fucking cow, you evil cunt,’ (I’d seen ‘kunt’ written on the school toilet doors, so I knew it was rude) and every bad name I could think of. I pushed her against the gate as hard as I could, and then ran to the dustbins at the side of the house, pulling them over, spilling the rubbish everywhere. I suddenly felt I had superhuman strength and I went over to a climbing rose on the side of the house (Barbara’s pride and joy), and wrenched it violently off the wall. I cut my hands on the thorns but didn’t care.

  I was raging. I wa
s beside myself. I was powered by such fury as I had never experienced before. I was shouting and swearing at Barbara all this time, and she was now cowering behind the front garden gate. I was showing my strength, my depth of feeling. I was wild with shouting. I had had ENOUGH! I went on and on and on; I was a volcano. I was exploding – it was my turn! All I wanted was a bike ride and I was sick of being stopped, sick of being called a liar, sick of all the mad twists and turns in Barbara’s head, sick of all the nasty evil. Sick of being blamed. I was experiencing the endless fury that I had seen Barbara display so many times over the years, which she threw straight at me for the slightest thing.

  I didn’t know it then, but while I was on the rampage Barbara had slipped inside and called the police. I was still running about, ranting, when two policemen eventually turned up on foot. They were both quite old and both very polite. When I saw them, I began to calm down. All this time Ian was hovering in the background, looking very pale and awkward. The two policemen just talked to Barbara. She played the whole thing as a sob story in her favour: ‘You don’t know how hard it is to look after these sorts of difficult children,’ she said, dabbing her eyes. ‘They have chips on their shoulders. They are such hard work.’

  Ian listened and said nothing. I looked at him and saw finally how weak he really was. He didn’t explain anything to the policemen about what had really happened. Ian had seen everything, and yet he said nothing at all. He knew what she was like and he never, ever, protected me. I hated him in that moment, even more than I hated Barbara. He was weak. He was useless and he had never done anything for me. Barbara was saying she had tried everything but someone like me was always angry and ungrateful. I was now much calmer, but I looked at the two policemen and I thought, You are such idiots. They didn’t ask me a thing and then just went on their way.