by Louise Allen
Mrs Deacon’s eyes popped out of her head. ‘Louise!’ Then the sprinkler system started and girls began shrieking at the tops of their voices. It was raining in home economics, all over everyone. The girls were beside themselves – all their neat plaits and ponytails were getting wet. We were drowning in class. It was hilarious. At the same time, sprinklers were also going off all round the school, which I didn’t realise then, and girls doing mock exams had ink running down the page.
It was utter mayhem. The school bell was ringing at the wrong time of day, girls were being ushered out of classrooms, giggling and delighted to be let out early. Mrs Deacon pulled open my oven and out gushed black smoke and everyone started coughing. My ‘baby’ was a molten mass of plastic. Mrs Deacon switched off my oven, grabbed me by the arm and pulled me past all the girls, who were looking at me with shining eyes full of admiration, trying to stop laughing. Everyone was spluttering, gasping, giggling. I didn’t care, as she shouted at me, ‘You are going to the Head. Right now!’
This was the best fun I’d had at school for a very long time. Did I care? No! I smiled. Bring it on.
19
The Worm Turns
The next day the traffic light outside the headmistress’s office turned green. Barbara and I went in and sat on our usual chairs facing Mrs Drayton with her tight grey perm and crisp navy suit. I crossed my arms and stared at her.
‘Well, Louise,’ she began stiffly. ‘What have you got to say for yourself?’
I said nothing, and just stared back. Mrs Drayton pushed a big box of men’s Kleenex across the desk towards me, and I leant forward and pushed it back. She looked totally outraged. Playing Mrs Drayton for all she was worth, Barbara chipped in: ‘I don’t know what to do with her. I’ve done all I can. You can see what she’s like…’ Barbara dabbed at her eyes with a hanky. Mrs Drayton looked pointedly at Barbara and then at me.
‘Louise, you know full well that you are not allowed to wear that hair and make-up at school.’ I glared at her, not giving an inch. ‘And you know that you have done a terrible thing in home economics – not only did you disrupt the exams, but the entire school.’ I continued to stare at her. ‘Do you realise how serious this is?’
I wanted to smile, but barely repressed it. Of course I did. In a way. But I didn’t care. I knew how serious everything was all the time. I’d simply had enough. I didn’t say anything; I just continued to stare at her, eyeball to eyeball.
‘Very well,’ she said, looking down and shuffling papers on her very tidy, wooden desk. ‘You will be suspended for the next two weeks. You need to think very hard about what you have done.’ She was scribbling notes. ‘Oh, and I want that hairstyle gone when you come back.’
Yeah, right. I was thinking very hard. I was thinking about what a bad girl I had become and I was amazed by myself. I was bored, bored, bored. I was fed up with everything. I knew what would happen the minute we got out of that office: I would be sworn at, berated, put down, and then, at home, I would be punched, slapped and kicked. I was absolutely sick and tired of it. I was bad here, and bad there. But I didn’t care if I was suspended: good riddance. In terms of my life, it just meant more of the same: more of being kept home to do the housework, as always. And more wandering around looking at lovely things, escaping into the healing calm of beauty when I could, drawing all the time and preparing myself for the great day when I would finally be free.
At this time I tended to go to a couple of local cafes: I loved the Nosebag, and there was also the Omni. Both were vegetarian and attracted young people in hordes. I hung out most the time with the pupils who were at the ‘comp’, the school I had wanted to go to in the first place. They didn’t wear uniforms; they were creative and artistic, musical and fun, real individuals, and a lot of them came from the ‘nice’ families who had professional parents. But they were interested – like I was now – in talking about things going on in the world: politics, art, music and animal rights. We played music all the time in the cafes: Sex Pistols, Eurythmics, Blondie and Siouxsie Sioux. I felt at home there, and although I was poor I was able to disguise myself with my art and be punky and funky. I could hang out over one herbal tea bag for hours on end. It was great.
However, on the school front, there were now endless meetings with social workers, the local authority, and even educational psychologists. Things were hotting up. When I went back to school, after the two-week suspension, I still had my Toyah Wilcox-inspired shocking-pink and sea-green, crazy-colour hairstyle. I was also sporting dramatic black eyeliner. So I was called in again to the headmistress and told in no uncertain terms to get rid of it. I crossed my arms and said no, defiantly. We were on a collision course all right. Mrs Drayton was clearly beside herself (which I secretly enjoyed watching), and then I was sent to talk to an educational psychologist in another room.
No one spoke to me directly about what was going on or why I was rebelling like I was. They all swallowed the Barbara line of me being a girl with a giant chip on my shoulder. They all believed Barbara and, because of that, I was untouchable. They could all believe that garbage if they wanted to – I knew the truth – but I wasn’t going to tell it to anyone either. It was mine. My secret. My life. My power. All the conversations that were going on about me went on behind closed doors. No one sat down with me and asked me anything. I had never told anyone about the madness at home as I simply thought I wouldn’t be believed. I also felt too ashamed to admit to it. All through this, despite me looking like a punk, I was extremely polite. The one thing I had learnt from my imprisonment in the house of horrors was to be polite and gracious – even to (or maybe especially to) my enemies. I wasn’t rude even if I wasn’t going to comply with everything they wanted me to do.
So I went to the room with the educational psychologist and I sat down next to him at a big wooden table. He got out some big black files, and started turning pages. I had never met this man before in my life. I was sitting in this room with him, on my own, feeling a bit spooked. (‘All men are filthy rapists’ had been drummed into me by Barbara, although she’d deny it if I ever mentioned she’d said it to me over and over.) He was a little man in his forties, in a brown leather jacket. He had a ginger moustache and longish hair with dandruff. I didn’t understand why I was there with him or what he wanted, so I braced myself.
‘Hi, I’m Robert,’ he started, trying to be jolly, and then put in front of me some white sheets of paper with huge black ink splodges on them.
‘OK, Louise,’ he said, talking down to me a bit. ‘Let’s look at these pictures together.’
As he was talking, I took my pen (which was always in my pocket) and I started drawing on the pictures, embellishing them, making lines come out of all the curvy shapes.
‘No, no, no!’ Robert was outraged. ‘No, no, Louise, you can’t do that!’
I looked at him, innocently, as he was now wide-eyed, sweating and looking very agitated. ‘I thought you wanted me to do something with these?’ I asked calmly.
Robert was looking very distressed, and shuffling his papers.
‘These are very expensive. They are special tests,’ he tried to explain. He was clearly rattled.
‘But they look like pictures I could draw on and play with,’ I explained, sweetly.
‘No, no, no,’ he was shaking his head. ‘Oh, dear me, I don’t know… Look, you are supposed to say what they remind you of.’
‘Oh,’ I said, blinking. He was now really cross with me, and I realised that I had even broken the rules in this ‘assessment’. I didn’t actually mean to, but it had just seemed obvious to me to draw on the pictures. I drew all the time, on everything, everywhere. I also felt deep down that I had met so many social worker types in my time that I was used to giving them what they wanted. I was like a performing seal. I assumed he wanted me to ‘express myself’. They always thought they were making me ‘open up’, but I had learnt to play them. I was playing Robert, to some extent, and now he was rattled.
&nb
sp; I knew he would give a bad report of me to the headmistress and tell her I wasn’t playing the game. I was just thinking, Okay, so I’ve messed this up, so I can get out of here. Yippee! Bring it on. I could see that Robert was totally frustrated by me, like Mrs Drayton, as I was not playing his nice little ink-blot game. I was playing my fuck-it-up game, instead. At the end of the meeting he seemed actually hurt that I’d ruined his expensive set of pictures. I felt elated. I had won something at last.
Of course, this meeting led to yet another meeting with even more do-goody officials. A few days later I was ushered into a big room in the centre of Oxford. There were about six people sitting round the table with notes in front of them, all with lanyards on. It was just me on one side of an enormous table against six of them. Barbara was outside the room in the corridor, waiting for me, getting even more wound up. I had been slapped, kicked, punched, shouted at and starved a lot over the past few days for the shame I was bringing on her and her family. I just laughed. I didn’t care any more. I was sick of her and her bloody family. I wanted to be rid of them – and everyone else who told me what to do all the time.
Now I was sitting opposite a middle-aged woman in a coral-pink cardigan and lanyard in the middle of the table, with people either side of her. She had big glasses on, like TV screens, and a plump, moist face and body. She leant forwards over the table towards me.
‘Sooooo, Louise,’ she hissed sweetly, ‘how do you feel?’
I looked at her in her ridiculous lobster-pink cardi and huge breasts that were leaning on the table, and I wanted to laugh. How do I feel? I wasn’t going to tell her and a room full of complete strangers how I felt. Was she mad? I sat there thinking, You want me to play the game – to do that thing you like, to tell you I’m sad and angry or whatever, so you can write down your stupid notes in your poxy little notebooks. Well, I’m not gonna do it.
I felt like I was on fire. I crossed my arms and gritted my teeth. I was not going to help. I was not going to be useful. I was not going to say anything she wanted me to. The worm had turned. And this worm had big fiery teeth, and it was going to bite. I felt like I was going to bite the lot of them, in a place that hurt. And the way to do that best was through silence and not giving them what they wanted.
Mrs Lobster-pink Cardi started again, trying to smile at me. She had big rabbity teeth. ‘Sooooo, I see you seem to have trouble staying at school.’
I smiled at this. ‘Yes, I do,’ I said simply. Wasn’t that obvious? See how easy this was. She was getting the hang of my game. I felt I was in charge. I could see exactly what she was doing. She had these silly questions and she was going to ask them, and then I had to answer and she would tick her boxes. And then they would go ‘Um’ and ‘Ah’ and ‘Er’, and then there would be a lot of talking to each other, ignoring me completely, and with Barbara, and with Mrs Drayton – but not with me!
Nobody had bothered to ask me all these years what it was like, so I wasn’t going to tell them now. I would play their game and play them at it better than any of them would ever realise.
‘Well,’ said Mrs Cardi. ‘Um, er… the school has a problem with children like you.’
Like me? Like me? What did she mean, ‘like me’? Then I launched at her when she didn’t see it coming. I told her how boring the school was, and how there was nothing to do if you were put in the lower stream. I was sick and tired of doing cookery and needlework – was that all they had to offer? I could see the cogs whirring in their tiny heads, as they had me down as thick, thick, thick. Yet there I was being articulate. I was telling them that they were not giving me enough to do, to think about, to work on; that I was bored with their stupid school and system. I watched as they all looked at each other significantly, and Mrs Lobster-pink scribbled something else down in her notes.
‘Sooo,’ she began again, showing me her rabbity teeth, ‘where do you go in the daytime?’ She leant forward and gave me one of those ‘you can tell me all about it’ looks. She had to be joking.
My daily circuit was precious to me. It was my refuge, my hope. I didn’t want to spoil my wonderful times at Blenheim, or in the Pitt Rivers or the Ashmolean. Telling these idiots would just ruin it all for me. Why should I tell them? Why should they know?
‘Well,’ she began again, in strained social worker tones (I could tell she was beginning to get fed up with me now), ‘we are concerned you are in danger.’
In danger? In the daytime? This was when I was not in danger. The danger I was really in was at home. But who had ever done anything about that? I couldn’t begin to explain all this to this ridiculous do-gooder of a woman in a stupid pink cardigan.
‘The only danger I’m in,’ I said, ‘is dying of boredom. At this school!’
I could see Mrs Cardi was shocked and exasperated. Looks shot round the table and they all sat back for a moment in their chairs. There was quite a pause, and then she started again.
‘Okay, Louise, do you want to come to school?’
I sat up in my chair and looked her straight in the eye, arms crossed. ‘Look, I never wanted to come to this school in the first place. I wanted to go to the comp, as it was a better school.’
Ripples of shock round the table.
‘I don’t want to come to a school like this. I never wanted to come to it.’
‘Okay, okay,’ she said. ‘So how do we keep you here?’
‘You don’t,’ I said with a huge grin. ‘Not unless you lock me up. I’m beyond this. I’m too far beyond this.’ I looked round the table. Six adults. Me opposite. Mr Ink-blot Test was there. No one told me their names. They all looked at me like a specimen in a jar.
‘Oh dear,’ said the woman in pink, sitting back finally, shaking her head. ‘Louise, you will end up on heroin and be pregnant by the time you are sixteen.’
The next day I was thrown out of school: expelled. The letter came and Barbara was absolutely beside herself.
‘I wash my hands of you!’ she screamed. ‘After all I’ve done for you, you ungrateful bitch! You’re going into care!’
She smacked me around the head and face, and I didn’t flinch. I had heard it all before. I just walked out and went into town, and wandered and wandered. I found myself at the Museum of Modern Art and crept in, and there was an exhibition on of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs. I looked at the amazing black-and-white images, feeling sick to my stomach. I wasn’t going to show Barbara or the school anything but inside I was definitely terrified. I also felt as if a surge of volcanic-lava-like rage was building in me: I’m not doing this, I’m not having these people control my life any more, I’m not doing what they want. I didn’t want to stay with Barbara, but I didn’t want to go to another, unknown foster family either. I didn’t want to stay at home all day, but I didn’t want to go to school either. I was churning, fuming, shaking as I went around the exhibition.
As the images hit my retina, I was wowed by them: they were edgy, graphic, angry, violent, beautiful. They spoke to me. I thought, I don’t get any of ‘normal’ life, but I do get this. I understood the photographs and the feelings in them. I wanted to be part of that world – the world that made those sorts of things, so people like me, in the state I was in, could go and look at them and feel healed and understood by them. The pain in some of the pictures reflected exactly the pain I was feeling inside. A brutal, scary, empty, awful, terrified, exhilarated feeling.
Robert Mapplethorpe’s pictures saved my life that day, as did Patti Smith’s Horses album, which expressed exactly how I was feeling. I felt the pictures and music were honest; they expressed raw feelings as I understood them. I didn’t feel anyone else in my life was honest. Nothing was true. I didn’t trust anyone. I thought of Julie and her weird high-pitched giggle and barmaid clothes, and her odd comings and goings. She had never spoken to me directly, or explained anything about how I came about, or why she had given me over to the likes of Barbara. I thought of Barbara and Ian, and the awful spoilt Kevin, who was their ‘favourite�
�, and how they had made my life hell, in every way, every day. I thought of my friend Sandy and other girls at school who were being hunted daily by the seedy men down the Cowley Road; being used for sex because they were so lonely and desperate for affection, drugs and drink.
I felt like getting expelled was a defining moment, when I had rolled up my sleeves and said, ‘Right, you lot, bring it on.’ I felt it with clarity, with every pore of my body. I was in danger anyway, every day. Threatening me with being put into care was the last straw. I wouldn’t stay there. I wouldn’t go anywhere anyone wanted me to go. I would refuse. They couldn’t make me. I was done with being made to do things I didn’t want to. I felt like I suddenly owned my life. I was really on my own now. But I was fighting back!
I left the exhibition and wandered down to the Omni café. I got a herbal tea and sat in a corner, letting the atmosphere seep in. The coloured walls and chairs, the posters of punk and rock bands, the hiss of the coffee machine, the music from the jukebox, the murmur of students and young people chatting and laughing. By now it was ‘home coming out time’ from school. I sat and nursed my cold tea, and watched as a gang of pupils came in from the comp. There were a couple of girls I knew, Jan and Alex, and they saw me and said, ‘Hi’. I nodded and smiled back. They were ‘cool’ alternative girls, with crazy-colour hair, safety pins on their black clothes, ripped jeans, dramatic eye make-up. I liked how they looked; they felt like my kind of people.
I noticed there was a guy with them, good-looking with dark hair and fine features. He was wearing a black T-shirt and had slicked his hair all spiky with gel. He had a lovely, intelligent expression and a gorgeous smile when he laughed at a joke one of the girls made. I continued sitting at my table, and then the group mooched over from the counter and Jan indicated the seats round me.
‘Sure,’ I said. The guy sat down and my heart started pounding faster.
