What's Love Got to Do with It?

by Jenny Molloy

  Some months earlier, once I had received the date of the operation, I’d booked a holiday for Simon and me in Ibiza. It was supposed to be a reward for Simon going through rehab and a place for me to recover from the surgery – I wanted to return to the island where I’d been reborn.

  Between work, Simon and all the associated emotions that came with the impending operation, I was exhausted by the time the holiday was due to start. Nevertheless, I still thought I’d put so much effort into this relationship, that even if I had the smallest chance I had to stick it out.

  The night before I was due to have the surgery, Simon went out, coming back at six in the morning. I went downstairs to wait for the taxi to take me hospital, alone.

  I had the operation and, although some things were fixed, I was still pretty weak by the time we left for Ibiza. I had all the medications I needed and was really looking forward to the sun. I planned to take trips around the island to various beaches and lie, reading and recuperating. Simon said he’d rather stay by the hotel pool. I knew he was going to look for drugs but I couldn’t face an argument, so I left him to it.

  On the second day I had just left the hotel when I realised I’d forgotten my purse, so I returned upstairs. The door to our room was still open. Simon was sitting on the sofa, where I’d left him, with his back to me, but now he was shaking and moaning. My laptop was next to him on the sofa and I saw he was masturbating to child porn.

  I thought he was going to beat me to death when he turned and saw my horrified face. I was weak from the operation, my wounds were sore and weeping. The only thing I could think of to say was a lie: ‘I’ve just had a call from the rehab centre. They’re prepared to take you back. Ill get you a flight back to London. If you stay here, then I’m going to leave.’

  To my amazement, he agreed. The only catch was there was no rehab and I had no money left for a flight. I called Dad.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll send the money by Western Union now.’ The money arrived, I asked the hotel to help me book a flight and, still to my amazement, Simon actually went. When I got back to the room, I realised I couldn’t stay there for another moment. I didn’t want to be in the same space that man had been. I asked the hotel to transfer me, which they did, and I started to pack but, as I did, I began to feel dizzy and blacked out.

  I woke up on the bathroom floor with a huge bruise on my forehead. This moment was rock bottom for me – so I thought. By the time I was able to make it to bed, Simon had left a dozen messages on my phone. He’d landed in London and was threatening me with everything under the sun, from abuse to destroying my home, and accusing me of having affairs and deliberating infecting myself with HIV so I could pass it on to him.

  Feeling too weak to stay in Ibiza on my own, I found a pay phone (my mobile was barred after Simon had racked up a load of charges calling a teenage boy he’d had an affair with while in rehab) and called Dad, who came to the rescue once again, sending me £500 so I could come home early. I spotted Simon sitting on my doorstep smoking a cigarette and told the taxi driver to keep driving.

  I went to the only place I could – to see Dad.

  Dad came with me to the police station and, after about an hour’s wait, we were ushered into an interview room with two young male police officers.

  ‘So you say this man, a drug addict, with whom you’ve been living for some years now, hit you when you were recovering from an operation, some weeks ago.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you caught him watching child pornography on your laptop, in another country, a few days ago.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The two officers exchanged a look, similar to the way a mechanic does with his colleagues when you ask him if there’s a cheaper option than replacing the whole engine.

  ‘I don’t think there’s much we can do for you.’

  I was already shaking with fear and exhaustion and, as soon as the officer finished talking, I started to cry. ‘I should have known,’ I said, repeating the statement as I prepared to get up and go. This, as far as I could tell, was a typical case of cops not seeing past the transsexual issue. Dad suddenly swelled in his seat.

  ‘You listen to me. My daughter has done everything she can to help this man who – it has been well documented – turns out to be a psychopathic drug addict. Look at her. Simon is six feet tall, built like an outhouse. If you don’t do something, then he’s going to kill her. And when that happens, because it will happen, that will be on you.’

  ‘Look—’one of the officers began.

  ‘No, you look. Either you or some other officer is going to help us. We’re not leaving until you do. I don’t think you realise how serious this is. If you send us away now and this man hurts one hair of my daughter’s head, I will hold you entirely responsible.’

  The two officers exchanged another glance. Then the older one said, ‘Maybe Sandra can help you.’ He turned to his colleague. ‘She’s had training in this, hasn’t she?’

  The other officer nodded and a few minutes later they said they’d call a detective specialised in domestic violence who might be able to help us.

  Simon lied as usual. He turned on the charm and told the detective that I was making stuff up again, rolling his eyes, but Sandra wasn’t fooled and managed to get him out of my flat and into temporary accommodation with promises of rehabilitation. There was nothing we could do about the child porn; it was my word against his and because my laptop had been left in public places, all Simon would have to do was say that a number of people could have had access to my laptop and the case would have been dismissed.

  Simon made friends with three drug dealers at the hostel and they were all young, huge men. I started to receive abusive calls and once, after Simon had phoned me for a rant, he forgot to put the phone down and I heard them say what they were going to do to me. They were laughing when I heard him suddenly say, ‘Fuck! She can still hear me.’

  ‘You’re in danger, girl,’ I said to myself and I moved away, heading for a town as far as I could manage from Simon, into an emergency refuge, the kind of place where I’d worked. I wondered if I would ever be able to do that work again but I volunteered and soon found a job at a homeless shelter. That’s where I met Pete, a fellow volunteer; the first person since Dad who talked to me with trust in his heart. I’d come so far, been through so much, and it was hard for me to open up. I felt that if I talked, then I would totally break down – I was still so damaged.

  My life thus far with the people who were supposed to look after me had been a series of disasters – except for Dad – and when I tried to stand on my own, I’d found someone who abused me as badly as any other person in my life.

  Pete gave me the time to talk to him at my own pace – slowly, piece by piece and over time. Joined by our love for the work we did and each other’s passion, we fell in love.

  Then Simon called one night at 3am, crying: ‘I will always love you.’

  ‘Well, I don’t love you any more.’

  The following day, Pete opened the front door to find police officers on the doorstep. They said that Simon had alleged that I’d been harassing him and his girlfriend. This time I didn’t cry or panic. I told them that it was the other way around, that there were police records that proved it, records which explained that Simon was a jealous psychopath with a history of violence. With the help of a domestic violence outreach worker, we were able to convince the police to stop taking his calls seriously and to start threatening Simon with harassment charges.

  But I was worried about Pete. ‘I’m sorry,’ I told him. ‘You knew I came with baggage, I suppose, just not how much.’

  Internally, my emotional self was fast crumbling into an ocean of fear and pain. I really, really wanted to be with this man, someone who’d understood me from the first moment. I was expecting to hear the words ‘I can’t handle this’ or ‘This is too much’ and I even considered dumping him before it happened, I was that frightened of being abandoned. Pete
took a long look into my eyes.

  ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘And I’m here for you no matter what. We will get through this together. I want us to be together always.’

  Pete and I live together as man and wife now. I still struggle with my many demons but they’re shrinking and, if it ever gets too much, all I have to do is look at my favourite photograph. It is one of the three of us – Dad, Pete and me on the seafront, all smiling, relaxed – that’s my family right there. With their love, I know I can be who I want to be.

  AMANDA

  I needed to be drunk constantly and when I was drunk I liked to shout and scream; just open my mouth and let rip. When that wasn’t enough, I sharpened the plastic end of a Bic pen and pressed it into my arm. This happened most often during a blackout – I’d wake up the following morning without a single memory of the night before. I’d see the wounds on my arm and think, ‘Oh no, not again.’

  As for drugs, I literally used everything. I was only eighteen years old but craved total obliteration. It was as if an infinite and empty hole inside me needed filling with drugs. No matter what was in the medicine cabinet at friends’ parents’ houses, I’d crush it up and snort it all. This approach to getting high led me to casualty so often they called me The Frequent Flyer. I had not one but two out-of-body experiences, when I watched myself from above and knew I was dying. Two older boys who were into drugs, Trev and Cam, let me hang out with them because I was so crazy but even they tried to get me to slow down. I had a massive crush on Cam and, although we became a couple, we only ever hugged. They were decent guys and tried to do right by me, even though I shagged one of Cam’s friends when we were still going out. I don’t even know why. I couldn’t sit still and be sober. It was impossible for me. I either had to be getting high or catatonic. At points in between I smashed everything I owned; I destroyed clothes, CDs, make-up, mirrors, everything. The only thing I owned I couldn’t smash was a can of hairspray.

  I went from Malcolm and Terry’s B&B to a little bedsit paid for by the council, but the landlord threw me out when I jimmied the 50p electricity meter. I was terrified of being sober. If I was unlucky enough to come down, I became psychotic and had visions, seeing people and objects that weren’t there. When a time came when I wasn’t able to get hold of any drugs I got really scared and took myself to hospital. They put me in a psychiatric wing and, after many tests and a few days, I calmed down. The doctor told me I was badly anaemic and that there was something wrong with my hormones which would make it difficult for me to have children, although he said this might change if I stayed off drugs. Fat chance.

  I received £2,000 compensation for the sexual abuse I suffered at the hands of Bill and I blew it in two days. When I finally turned eighteen, I was removed from care with a £100 ‘leaving care grant’ and a duvet. I know the system wasn’t perfect but when I look back at the chaotic mess of these last years of care, I can’t but help wonder why I wasn’t placed in long-term supervised care. Whenever someone had shown me patience and understanding, like Malcolm and Terry, I had shown the first glimmers of improvement. Instead, when I left care I asked for help and my social worker replied that I should be able to cope on my own.

  So, cut loose from the one thing that might have protected me, I slept with every man who would have me, and took everyone’s money, either in loans or stolen straight from their pockets. When I’d pissed everyone off so much that no one wanted to see me any more (or those who did want to see me wanted to hurt me), I ran away to London. I packed one bag and walked out. I arrived on the Strand, just by Trafalgar Square, aged eighteen without a penny to my name.

  I was full of hate, ready to hate and be hated. I’d stopped taking hard drugs and opted for alcohol and weed – which I loved because when I smoked it with booze my mind went numb.

  For some reason, in a rare moment of conscious awareness, I thought this might be the time to try and find my mum, move in with her and try and get my life under control. At that moment, though, I knew no one and nothing, so I slept on the street until a homeless man, seeing me shiver, gave me his sleeping bag and took me to the homeless charity London Connections. They were understanding and found me places in a few hostels until I got a live-in job working in a pub. It hadn’t been so long ago that I’d been working three jobs and I was smart enough to say the right things. It helped that I was young, good-looking and a fast learner – a bit too fast, as I quickly learned how to steal drinks. For the moment, at least, I loved the job because it took care of my homelessness and cash problem in one fell swoop. The only catch was that, as an alcoholic, working in a pub was a dangerous occupation and I was soon fired for stealing booze, as well as thieving cash out of the till. But I was always able to find another live-in pub job and I carried on this way – a few months here and a few months there, until I was twenty-four years old and had become famous across London for being one to avoid when it came to offering bar work.

  I ended up back at the Strand, living as much as I could in the slightly drier and warmer pedestrian tunnels of Charing Cross underground. I couldn’t find another way out and, with no other option, I became one of those crazy people you see on the street talking to themselves, looking really dirty, with one small bag stuffed with my world’s possessions.

  The PTSD was still there and was only made worse by the homelessness – I was on constant alert, unless I managed to get hold of some weed for a good smoke that would take the edge off for a while. But it also made me paranoid and won me no friends at the ever-patient London Connections, where I whiled away the coldest days drinking tea and grabbing what food I could. When the centre was closed, I’d sit with anyone on the street, yelling abuse at the paedophiles preying on child runaways around the Strand and Charing Cross.

  I didn’t want to be housed; I didn’t want to be indoors.

  I knew nothing about the world but ranted against the government and made up a number of conspiracy theories. I also spent my days wandering around central London processing a great many strange thoughts about my life and the world in general, and I smoked a lot of drugs. I wanted to be permanently stoned. In the winter I drank to keep warm and, if it rained, I drank on the buses. If you’re homeless in the winter and you get wet you’re screwed, you’ll never get dry again. It was a constant battle. I managed to survive, somehow, all on my own, for two years this way – two years that passed me by in a blur of streets, the occasional strange bed and the occasional beating carried out by some of the more dangerous members of the homeless community, which seemed to be divided into those who thought they’d figured out how to exist in the confusing pointlessness of life by sitting on the street and drinking the days away, and those who were on the street because they were just too horrible to exist in any version of the normal world, having messed up every last chance going through cruel violence. I felt like Travis Bickle, Robert De Niro’s character in Taxi Driver, looking from an outside place at all the mess humans had made of the world, something I was a product of. I just couldn’t understand it. What was the point of it all? What could I do about it? All these people, waking up, eating breakfast, going to work where they made money to put in the bank. And for what? What good did any of it do? Couldn’t they see the pointlessness and misery of life? What was in their mind that wasn’t in mine that allowed them to do this? I just wanted to be out of it – living in the present moment where my mind was too addled to think about the future and couldn’t even consider looking back at my past.

  Eventually, faced with a third winter on the streets, I took a chance when a doctor was in London Connections, braving the strange sicknesses of the street people, and told him I was vulnerable – that the streets were no place for an attractive young woman like me. He could do nothing but agree and he helped me get a flat – although I had to spend almost a year waiting in a series of foul, depressing B&B rooms across London first.

  Once I was finally presented with a flat in a block in the middle of a patch of no-man’s land in Mile E
nd (a yellow police ‘murder board’ was the first thing I saw when I stepped out of the underground station), just beyond London’s East End, I didn’t know what to do with it. It came unfurnished, apart from a mattress on the floor, and that was how I lived in it. I’d never settled anywhere for any length of time. Furnishings and possessions meant nothing to me. I had no idea how and where, or why, one filled one’s home with things.

  I needed someone to talk to, so I asked the doctor to help with getting me therapy. He sent me to a place on the other side of town where I looked at a woman who looked at me. She reminded me of Celia and we didn’t say much to one another, until we got on to the subject of social services and that got me fired up. Suddenly I poured out everything that had happened to me and why social services had messed up. She said I might have a case to sue them and so I contacted social services, asking for my files. They replied that they were missing.

  I still smoked weed and ended up falling in love with the dealer who sold it to me, a tall man with long, black hair called Russell. I was obsessed with him and thought if we could have babies then that would mean we’d have to be together, to live as a family and that everything would be all right. It felt as though my body was screaming at me to get pregnant but I had fertility issues and so I asked my doctor if he could help. A few days before I was due to go into hospital to have an ‘exploratory operation’, I received a letter from social services. They’d found my files. A whole load of boxes had been found in the basement during a building move. Nice to know they were taking such good care of them.

  On the day of the operation, I started to shake with terror. The nurses tried to reassure me, that it was just routine and that everything would be fine.