What's Love Got to Do with It?

by Jenny Molloy

  But we stopped midway between the boys’ and girls’ dormitories. ‘What’s this?’ I asked. We were in a lonely-looking, long corridor, with cameras on the walls, and many doors all looking the same.

  ‘This,’ I was told, ‘is your new room.’

  ‘On my own? Between the boys and girls?’ I was in a staff room in a corridor between two wings, in splendid isolation. I had watched the Berlin Wall come down and Nelson Mandela walk free from jail – but now I was in a literal no-man’s land, through no fault of my own. I couldn’t even leave the room at night to go to the bathroom otherwise the alarms in the corridor would go off. A bucket, which I refused to use, was my emergency chamber pot.

  I never saw my dad again. Mum eventually won custody of my brother and sister and they moved with her into sheltered accommodation. There wasn’t enough room or money for me, so this was going to be my home for the foreseeable future until Mum was better sorted out. She couldn’t come and visit because the unit was a long way from home and Mum, who I would eventually find out had become an alcoholic and would never be fit enough to take me back, had neither money nor a car.

  I was assigned a key worker and met her in a small room just a few doors down from my cell.

  ‘Hi, I’m Debbie,’ she said, reaching out for my hand, the first person to offer me this symbol of potential friendship. She had big, red-framed glasses, wild curly hair and loved nothing more than to dance pagan rituals on the fields of southern England. Debbie, who believed in guardian spirits, was just the person for me. She was the only person who talked to me like she talked to everyone else. Normally when anyone spoke to me, they put on a special tone like they were addressing someone who was mentally disabled or someone they found disgusting. I quizzed her about her dancing and then, more significantly, about the guardian spirits.

  ‘What are these guardian spirits then, Debbie?’

  ‘They are angels sent to look after us here on earth.’

  ‘Well, where’s mine then?’

  ‘They are here. I can see your aura is damaged, you should meditate, let the spirits in and heal you.’

  ‘Whatever, Debbie,’ I said laughing. ‘You’re mad.’

  ‘Try it, sweetheart.’

  I thought it was ridiculous but there was something in Debbie’s expression, not pity, but sincerity. She really believed some salvation would come my way if I did what she said. I liked the idea of guardian angels, of someone watching over me the whole time who would never abandon me. And so, from that night, I started to meditate, to think and then dream of my angels, and for the first time I felt a little less lonely in my solitary cell as I drifted off to sleep.

  ‘I’m sorry, Johnny, there’s nothing I can do. I’ve got to move on.’

  I cried, demanding that Debbie stay for me, accusing her of hating me by leaving. But I was powerless. Her child was sick and she had to be near a specialist hospital in another city. I was hard on her, a reflection of just how much she meant to me.

  I had spent eighteen months (so much for temporary) in this nightmare place and I thought I had started to win the respect of the staff. As a result of my improved behaviour and enjoyment of study, I was chosen to go, as the best-behaved boy, along with the best-behaved girl, who was seventeen years old, to a party in a private house.

  We were driven there in a minibus, practically jumping in excitement – this was my first party, I couldn’t wait. But after we walked through the front door and were swathed in smoke and deafened by dance music, it turned out everyone was on drugs or drunk and, even worse, orgies were taking place in some of the rooms. I ran from the house and hid in the minibus. Two members of the female care home staff were there. We thought we were lucky to be going on that trip but, instead, our reward for good behaviour was supposed to be joining in with the drugs and sexual abuse. I had a lucky escape. The girl stayed inside and I have no idea what happened to her in there. She didn’t answer when I asked her and she said nothing on the trip back to the unit.

  Then, suddenly, it was announced that, as my mum wasn’t able to look after me, they had found me a foster family. The other kids teased me, saying they were real weirdos; they had to be to take me.

  ‘You know what happened to the last kid they had?’ Darren asked.

  ‘No, what?’

  ‘Jumped in front of a train.’

  They were extremely religious. The man, Eric, tall, potbellied and balding, was a minister, and his wife, Barbara, a thin, dark-haired woman with a pointy chin and nose, quoted the Bible at me whenever I said or did something wrong, or had the wrong expression on my face (which was all the time).

  Barbara was always saying something about how ‘Man born of woman, is short-lived and full of pain.’ Well I was a woman born of a woman who everyone thought was a man but I wasn’t about to go into that with these two crackpots. They also said I was full of evil spirits and they were going to rid me of them. This involved prayer and sapping my will through starvation. I didn’t know why they wanted to foster kids because it was clear to me that they didn’t like kids at all.

  When the social worker came to see me, she squinted for a long time before writing lots of notes in a file on her clipboard. Why did she have to write so much? It wasn’t as if I was saying anything.

  I lived off Cup-a-Soups from a vending machine at school (the only thing I could afford from the so-called lunch money my foster parents gave me). I’d already thinned out quite a bit at the unit but now I started to disappear into my clothes. My belt tightened up a notch, then two, then three.

  The next time the social worker came, she looked me in the eye and said: ‘How long have you been anorexic?’ I didn’t have the courage to say that I was full of evil spirits and these lovely people were starving me to get rid of them. I dreaded being taken back – at least here I was allowed to go to a normal school (not that school’s much fun when you’re starving all the time).

  I came home one day to find Eric waiting at the top of the stairs.

  ‘Come here.’

  I walked up, bag over my shoulder, feeling dizzy as I reached the top.

  Eric raised a copy of the Gay Times. ‘What’s this?’ he demanded.

  ‘None of your bloody business!’

  This mag was about my most precious possession, hidden under my mattress. I was furious that Eric had been through my room and raged as he, with the most righteous of expressions, berated the evil spirits in me that had turned me into a homosexual.

  I reached for the magazine to take it back but Eric snapped it away, holding it up over his head like he was the Statue of Liberty, and pushed me back. But for the lack of food I might have kept my balance or caught the banister but instead the world blurred, my limbs flailed and I fell backwards on to the stairs and rolled down, arse over tea-kettle. I slammed into the front door with a bang and just knew I had to get out, just as I had known to run from Dad before I was seriously hurt. Barbara appeared and starting spitting her religious nonsense at me.

  I stumbled to my feet and screamed: ‘You’re a stupid, fucking, crazy bitch who wouldn’t know Jesus if he slapped you in the face!’ and ran out the front door.

  It was almost two years to the day since I’d run out of my family home. It was freezing and foggy and I headed for the city. It was too cold to sleep on the streets so I kept walking, blue-nosed, until I saw a hospital and snuck into A&E. A police officer shook me awake at dawn. ‘Come on.’ No chance to pee or wash my face and we were off to another care home, but not before the final humiliation in front of a social worker. Eric and Barbara had told social services I had abused them verbally before attacking them. In response I pulled off my T-shirt and turned around. My malnourished body was covered in red marks and bruises from where I’d fallen down the stairs. I was so angry but I couldn’t speak. I didn’t know what to say. The social worker said and did nothing except fill out the paperwork, a literal box-ticking exercise, then made some calls and drove me to another care home. This latest one was a
bit more like a normal house, but it was too little, too late. A pattern had been set now. When things got too much, which was often, when my well of loneliness seemed bottomless (which was almost all of the time), I just walked out and stayed out.

  I was walking the streets randomly one night when a car slid up alongside me. The window wound down and a woman’s voice said: ‘You all right, love? You look cold. Why don’t you come with us? Sit in the car for a bit, we’ll put some music on. Got lots of CDs.’

  I glanced inside and saw a smiling young woman with large earrings, wearing a black leather jacket and smoking a cigarette. There was indeed a large selection of CDs spread out over the dashboard. I was freezing and could feel the warmth of the car pouring out. I couldn’t face walking away from that wonderful heat and so I shrugged and got in. They took me to a nice-looking house, although it was quite bare inside, hardly any furniture, just a double bed in the back room with a TV and video player.

  ‘Stay here,’ the man said. Minutes later, two men came in and put a video cassette on the player. It was gay porn. We talked for a bit as they watched; our chat was all very friendly. They shared their smokes and drinks, and told me how beautiful I was. I was really skinny and had long dark hair. I was fourteen but looked a lot younger. I wanted to believe we were going to be friends but the conversation turned sexual and, although I told myself I wanted to do this for friendship and I did not resist, the men took turns raping me.

  The care home knew what was going on. The couple picked me up and dropped me off there almost every night. They gave me CDs for my trouble. There were only four other kids in the home but I wasn’t into speaking to anyone else. I just wanted to escape and, as I soon as I could on my sixteenth birthday, I signed myself out of the care home.

  The couple had once taken me to a house occupied by squatters who said I could live there once I got out of the home. They’d been evicted but I quickly found them by hanging out near a pub I knew they liked to go to and they kept their promise, giving me my own room in a large house, which was dry but lacked hot water or heating. They’d bypassed the meter to get electric, so we had light and small electric heaters were running in some of the rooms.

  They were punks and didn’t particularly care what anyone did or what they looked like. We were united by the fact we were misfits, society aliens, so I started to live as a woman and felt, for the first time, as though I were free. No one would have guessed I was a boy. I could tell from the looks I got from both men and boys that I was a good-looking girl.

  I signed on for income support and found out I might be eligible for a fashion design course at the local college. It seemed as though, despite everything, I still had a brain, because they let me in. Things were looking up.

  I was walking back from college to the squat one evening when I noticed a large group of boys behind me. They started calling me ‘poofter’ and when I replied that they all must fancy me because they were following me down the street, they gave chase. I ran but my heels were no match for their Reeboks, so they quickly caught up with me. They beat me to the ground. As the boots and fists came in, unable to catch my breath to even cry out, I knew then I could never be a woman and survive.

  If I had to be a man then I would go all the way. I changed my clothes and shaved my head before my wounds had healed. And then I discovered the gay clubs – great congregations of gay people, a wonderful world, safe at last in a place I could almost be myself. I lived in these clubs, it was where I would spend all my time, every day that I could.

  A tap on my shoulder while in the club and I turned and found myself looking at the handsomest man I’d ever seen – muscular, good height, tough-looking.

  ‘My name’s Simon. Can I buy you a drink?’ I was smitten. We went home together. He stayed the next day. We went out again that night. The next day was the same. I couldn’t believe that this man, who was thirty-two, double my age, wanted to love me, to be with me.

  Between the gay clubs and Simon I was in heaven. I wanted to be like this always. But after two months of bliss he said, ‘I don’t want to be gay. I’m not gay. You made me do this.’

  He said he’d been in a relationship with a woman before he met me. I was the first ‘man’ he’d ever had sex with. I could believe it. He was hard as anything, couldn’t appear more heterosexual, and as if to prove it he told me: ‘Anyone finds out about this, you’re dead.’

  I promised him then that I was going to become a woman and then he could take my virginity, something he became obsessed with. But my change wouldn’t happen overnight – I hadn’t the first clue how to go about it, so he upped and left, returning to his woman and abandoning me.

  It was as if a meteorite had destroyed my world. I couldn’t eat or sleep and was in so much pain that within a few days of Simon leaving me, I took an overdose. I woke up in hospital and, as soon as I was coherent, social services put me back into a secure unit. I ran away that night to look for Simon, to find drugs, and survived by selling my body for cash. I lived like that until social services managed to find me a Leaving Care flat in a house run by a homophobic man called Steve who couldn’t keep the disgust from his face whenever he talked to me. Steve just shrugged when I told him some skinheads had put fireworks through my door, like it was tough, I’d brought it upon myself by being gay.

  I tried to find a way out, though. First, I signed up for the Youth Training Scheme in fashion and then set about hitting the clubs every night I could manage. At one club I met a good-looking guy in his thirties. He said he was a doctor and he invited me back to his place, which turned out to be a large detached house on a quiet suburban street.

  As we drew near, the ‘doctor’ started giving off a strange vibe. I should have run right then. When we stepped into the broad hallway, he asked me to take my shoes off; he said he’d just had the house re-carpeted in this expensive, plush carpet.

  ‘It’s like walking on fur,’ he said, as we removed our shoes. He opened the door to the lounge, saying, After you.’ I already had a sense that other people were in the house as I stepped through, and had just a moment to acclimatise to some bright lights before I saw a group of half a dozen men standing in a half circle and a video camera in the middle of the room. ‘Wow, you’re beautiful,’ said a small potbellied man in his forties. I didn’t hesitate. I ran to the front window, slid it up and leapt out, running down the road in my socks.

  I eventually got a tenancy of my first flat in another town where I studied massage on the Youth Training Scheme and worked in a nursing home. I spent all my time at work or on the many buses I had to take to get around, so there was little chance to go clubbing, although I had no trouble finding boyfriends. I treated them badly and was physically and verbally abusive, just to get a reaction. I was a mess; I’d sleep with people for all the wrong reasons. Sex was sometimes a bit of a disaster, depending on the type of guy I pulled. I could only be on the receiving end, I didn’t have the tackle, so I couldn’t go with men who wanted to be the female, and I made sure that those relationships remained platonic.

  I’d only ever loved Simon, the one man who’d treated me like a girl. I thought about him every day and searched the clubs each night looking for him before deciding I was going to be like him. I started going to the gym and getting tattoos done – this was how guys I liked looked.

  Eventually I ran away again, running to London without money or a job – just bleached hair, a wiry physique and the clothes I was in. Cut loose in the world’s wildest city, where trouble waited around every corner.

  AMANDA

  Memories of my own mum are never far away. One day at work at a refuge I was suddenly overcome with sadness and anger. Angry with myself for blaming my mum for having to sell her own body – and thereby her spirit and her soul – to survive. As I vowed to make mental amends to my mum when I got home, Amanda approached me.

  ‘I’m on my way to see social services,’ she said. ‘I’m going to read my files.’

  I couldn’t h
elp but wonder if she was ready. Seeing your past laid out in an aged folder is more traumatic than you might imagine. Long-forgotten memories can come crashing back in mighty waves that can leave you psychologically devastated.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Amanda said, seeing my expression. ‘I know I’m ready.’

  Mum and Dad split up when I was still a toddler. Even though Dad was only in his early twenties, he had two families on the go, with a total of six kids, two in ours and four in the other, and he chose the other family over my older brother, Mum and me, which was understandable, considering my mum really was a nightmare to live with.

  To be fair, she was extremely young, just sixteen years old when she had me. Dad was twenty-one and left not long after I arrived – I was just another noisy mouth to feed adding to the stress.

  Mum liked to drink a lot, preferably in company and preferably at a sleazy pub or club. To that end, she’d depart the house as darkness fell, leaving me and Jack, who was older by eighteen months, home alone while she spent the night on the town, partying and drinking.

  Apparently, we woke each other one night, after one of us had a nightmare, and we screamed so long and loud that the neighbour called the cops, who kicked the door in and followed up by calling social services.

  The social services got Mum some help, a volunteer who babysat – but not at night and not so Mum could go out drinking, which is what she did. Mum was caught out again when she was arrested for fighting over something to do with her new boyfriend, who had been in and out of prison for a number of violent offences. The police brought her home and found me and Jack – he was four, I was two-and-a-half. Once again, we were screaming the flat down.

  Reading all that back now, I can see how social services thought that if we were left in her care, there was a good chance we wouldn’t make it past our fifth birthdays.

  Things were so bad that I actually told a social worker that I didn’t want to go home and be with Mum, so we were fostered a few times, but that didn’t really work out. At one place the foster parents started to hit us and so I responded with a dirty protest, wiping my poo on the walls, and that was enough to get us removed. The foster carers who had abused us weren’t investigated.