Trafficked Girl

by Zoe Patterson

  It was a terrifying film that was totally unsuitable for children of any age, let alone an anxious little girl who was already frightened of going to bed at night and who looked, in her mind at least, a lot like one of the children who became the clown’s victim. I kept closing my eyes and trying to turn my head so that I wouldn’t see whatever horrible thing was going to happen next. But every time I looked away from the television, Jake grabbed my hair, pulled my head sharply back and upwards, then punched and slapped me repeatedly in the face until I opened my eyes – and saw what the clown was doing.

  The more I whimpered and cried, the more Jake twisted my hair and laughed, refusing to let go even when I started to scream. Mum was in the kitchen and must have heard what was going on, but it was only when the noise I was making began to annoy her that she stormed into the living room, lifted me up off the floor by one arm, dragged me into the kitchen and shouted in my face, ‘There’s something wrong with you. It’s only a man in a mask for fuck’s sake.’ At just six years old, it was a concept I couldn’t grasp, and even if I had been able to, I don’t think it would have done anything to lessen the fear that had been implanted in my mind. So I was still crying as I sat in the kitchen with headphones on, listening to music at maximum volume and trying to block out the music from the film, which seemed to have got inside my head.

  Although it was Jake who forced me to watch It that day, Ben was there too, not saying anything or trying to stop him, perhaps because he was also a bit scared of his older brother. Then, a few days later, Mum and Ben decided to play a ‘joke’ on me by telling me they’d just seen the clown in the front garden and that he was coming to kill me. I was terrified and could feel my heart thumping even before they pushed me into the hallway and closed the living-room door. While I was sobbing and begging them to let me in, they just laughed and held the door shut, clearly delighted by how successful their prank had been and totally unmoved by my rapid descent into hysterical distress.

  A couple of days after that, I went up to my room when I got home from school to find that Mum had bought a new duvet cover for my bed with a picture of a clown on it, who had buttons on his costume that were almost identical to the ones the clown in the film had had. She didn’t tell me about it, and I screamed when I opened the door and saw it on my bed. And when I pleaded with her not to make me use it, she just laughed spitefully and told me to ‘get used to it’.

  It wasn’t just Mum who bullied and tormented me when I was a young child. I don’t really remember Dad doing it; he laughed at me when she did, and didn’t stand up for me as often as he should have done, but mostly he just kept out of things. For example, there was one day when we were sitting in the living room watching TV when Mum suddenly threw herself out of her chair, grabbed me by my hair and started banging my head on the floor. She would often attack me without any provocation or warning, and the reason that particular occasion sticks in my mind is because, as she pinned me to the carpet, with her knee pressing down so heavily on my back that I was struggling to breathe, I saw my dad and two older brothers lean forward and sideways so that they could look around us at the TV.

  When Mum eventually stopped hitting me and bashing my head on the floor, she shouted, ‘Get upstairs to your room.’ And after I’d scrambled to my feet, bruised and crying, I stopped for a moment at the door and turned to look at my dad and brothers, but they didn’t even glance in my direction.

  ‘I said get out. Now!’ Mum shouted, taking a step towards me and raising her hand as if she was going to hit me again. So I fled upstairs, where I stood at the window in my bedroom, looking out on to the dark street with my palm pressed against the glass, praying silently, ‘Can’t anyone see me? Someone notice me, please. Someone save me.’ Then I crawled into bed, stifling a scream of pain when my head touched the pillow, and sobbed myself to sleep.

  I wouldn’t have expected my brothers to intervene in a situation like that. But the fact that Dad didn’t even seem to notice – and certainly didn’t care – that Mum was hurting me felt like further proof that I didn’t matter. That was why I was grateful whenever he did mediate on my behalf, because although I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he did it, at least I got a clue that although I didn’t matter, I didn’t always deserve Mum’s treatment of me.

  The only time Mum ever concealed her dislike of me was when she came to meet me out of school. I was always torn between not wanting to leave the classroom, where I felt safe, and knowing she’d be angry when we got home if I kept her waiting. The fear of her anger always won, and when I walked out into the playground I’d often find her chatting with the other mums and handing out little chocolate bars to some of my friends. She’d give me a chocolate bar too, but I knew it was just for show and that as soon as we got home she’d become ‘normal’ again.

  I’d probably been going to school for a couple of years when a little girl called Rachel must have followed us home one day. I was in the living room when she knocked on the front door, and I heard her ask Mum, ‘Is Zoe in? Can she come out?’

  ‘Wait there a minute,’ Mum told her, in a voice that was so completely different from her friendly ‘playground voice’ that although I didn’t know why I was in trouble, I knew I was. So my heart was already racing when Mum came into the living room and started slapping me with her open hand so viciously I could hardly breathe for sobbing. She was breathless, too, by the time she stopped beating me and said, ‘Now go and tell your friend you can’t go out.’

  Despite my mum’s extreme reaction that day, I was sometimes allowed to go and play at friends’ houses, some of which weren’t very different from ours, while others were like something out of another world. Nan and Granddad lived in a council house that was always quite tidy and clean, especially compared with ours, where everything was covered in a thick layer of dust, every room stank of stale cigarette smoke, the carpets were worn and stained, the walls were bare and in need of painting, and all the furniture was mismatched, as if it had been chosen at random by someone with no interest at all in their surroundings, which I suppose was actually true.

  It was a contrast that was even more apparent in the gardens, because while Nan and Granddad’s was immaculate, ours was even worse than the inside of the house. The only bit of our garden that my brothers and I ever played in was the patch of overgrown grass just outside the back door. Beyond that, there were two rickety sheds Dad had built out of old doors and other discarded debris he’d found in skips, and behind the sheds were a couple of broken fridges, some scrap metal and various other rubbish that had been dumped there over the years to rust and decay.

  Despite the fact that the only two houses I’d ever spent any time in before I started school were so totally different, I don’t think I was consciously aware that one was clean and the other was dirty, or that one was ‘good’ and the other ‘bad’ in some respect – until my friend Carly invited me for tea at her house one day. In Carly’s house everything was clean and smelled nice, and we ate our tea sitting at a dining table with her parents, who talked to us and to each other and didn’t say anything critical or unpleasant. I had tea at their house several times after that first occasion, and although I don’t remember consciously comparing my life to Carly’s, I think I must have stored away in my mind the idea that there could be a different, better kind of ‘normal’ than the one I was used to.

  The only thing I didn’t like about going to Carly’s house was having to eat in front of other people, which I’m still paranoid about today. I always took a packed lunch to school, which I thought was an indication that Mum did love me after all, otherwise why would she bother to make me a sandwich to go with the crisps and cake or chocolate bar in their colour-coordinated packaging. Looking back on it now, I realise it wasn’t for my benefit at all: she just wanted my teachers to think she was a good mum. But at least I could eat it all with my hands, which saved me from the embarrassment of having to use a knife and fork. Because although Mum
always gave me cutlery when she brought my tea up to my bedroom, no one had ever told me how to use it. So whenever I ate with Carly and her parents, I was always anxious about doing it wrong and used to watch and try to copy what they did, so that I didn’t look stupid.

  I can remember one day when I was eating at Carly’s house and the food kept building up on my knife, making it increasingly difficult for me to cut anything with it. I didn’t know how to get it off and I was starting to panic when her dad must have noticed my embarrassment and said, laughing, ‘Just lick it off, Zoe. That’s what we do.’ It probably seemed like a small thing to him, saying something to make me feel better, but it meant a lot to me at the time.

  I’ve always had very low self-confidence, which my oldest brother Jake, particularly, played a role in crushing when I was a little girl. Jake and Ben were in their teens by the time I started school and their lives were completely separate from mine. Even before then, I never played with Jake. In fact, I didn’t really see much of him at all – which was a good thing as far as I was concerned – because by the time he got back from school every day, I’d already be upstairs in my room, where I’d eat my supper; then he’d often go out again with his mates and not come home until after I was in bed. When I did see him, he usually ignored me, which, again, was a good thing from my point of view because he only ever said nasty things to me or paid me any attention because he was angry.

  I know Ben and Michael were scared of him and I think my parents were wary of him too, because he had a very bad temper. In fact, he made several holes in the walls and door of the room he shared with Ben and Michael by smashing his fist into them when he was in a rage.

  Ben wasn’t violent like Jake was, but I didn’t have much contact with him either – even seven years is quite a significant age difference when you’re a child. I do have a couple of nice memories of him though, like the time he came to meet me from school one day and gave me a ride home on his push bike, which made me think he cared about me. Sometimes, when Jake was out, Ben used to let me sit on his bed and watch him drawing, and he’d talk to me when he took me into town to get my hair cut, or ask me questions about what I’d been doing at school.

  He made a paper bird for me once too. It had wings like fans and he stuck it to the ceiling of my bedroom with a bit of cotton he took out of Mum’s drawer, which she’d have been angry about if she’d found out. I thought it was brilliant. But Mum made him take it down when she saw it, because the Sellotape would damage the paint, she said, although that clearly wasn’t the real reason, because, like the rest of the house, my room was in need of decorating and another bit of peeling paint wouldn’t have made any difference.

  I didn’t ever actually play with Ben though, like I did with Michael as he got a bit older. Eventually though, Mum did what she was always did if anything ever looked as though it might turn out well for me – she intervened to change the course of events by trying her best to destroy my relationship with Michael, and by the time he was seven years old he sometimes called me names too, just like Mum and my older brothers had always done. And although I tried to tell myself it wasn’t his fault, it hurt me far more than Jake’s taunting and sneering ever did.

  I know that lots of children are bullied by their siblings. Perhaps when kept within reasonable limits it becomes part of the process of learning what’s acceptable behaviour and what isn’t and how to deal with being teased. Maybe some parents don’t allow it at all, and some probably don’t even notice it’s happening, whereas others, like mine – or like my mum, at least – actively encourage it.

  It went way beyond ‘just a bit of sibling bullying’ with Jake though. For example, there was one day, a few months after I’d been forced to watch that first horrific film about the clown, when Ben, Jake and I were in the garden and Jake suddenly took a step towards me, sliced the air between us with the long-handled knife he’d been using to cut the tall, weed-infested grass and said, ‘I could chop off your head with this and nobody would care.’ There was no humour in his expression when he said it and his eyes were hard as he turned to Ben and added, ‘I could tell Dad it was an accident. He’d believe me if you backed me up.’

  Ben looked really scared when he said, ‘Okay.’ And I was scared too, because I really did think they were going to do it and I knew what Jake had said was true – Dad would believe them and nobody would care.

  Chapter 4

  I never relaxed or enjoyed anything when I was at home. Everything I did was wrong and the only time anyone ever really spoke to me was to tell me off. So it had been a completely new and unimagined experience going to school and discovering that there was a world where I wasn’t an unwanted, unloved outcast, and where sometimes an adult actually praised me for getting something right.

  I don’t know if it was the realisation that I wasn’t always wrong, or as stupid as my mum always told me I was, that made me love learning. ‘Zoe soaks up knowledge like a sponge,’ my teacher wrote in one of my early school reports, which made me feel proud of myself for the first time. So then I worked even harder, behaved even better and did everything else I could think of to please my teachers so that they’d say the magic words, ‘Good girl, Zoe.’

  Not everything about school was positive, however. Some of the teachers I had during those first few years helped me a lot, but there was one who was horrible. Miss Heston was my form teacher when I was seven and she had some very odd ideas about how to teach and interact with young children. One incident I remember particularly occurred when I pinched the arm of one of my classmates because he said he had sunburn. I don’t know why I did it, but it obviously hurt him quite a lot and when he told the teacher what I’d done, she made everyone in the class sit down, then said, ‘Zoe Patterson, come and stand by my desk.’

  I hated being the centre of any kind of attention, but particularly if I was in trouble, and as I stood at the front of the classroom, twisting my fingers nervously and staring at my feet, she told me, ‘I’m going to show you what that feels like.’ And before I realised what she was going to do, she grabbed my arm and started giving me a Chinese burn.

  Presumably her intention was to inflict on me a pain similar to the one I’d inflicted on the boy with sunburn when I’d pinched him. In which case, she’d have been pleased to know that the Chinese burn really hurt. But I’d had years of practice holding back tears and I was determined not to humiliate myself in front of all the other kids in my class, and not to give my teacher the satisfaction of seeing me cry. Mum often used to try to reduce me to tears when she was hurting me, and I always knew that she’d hurt me even more if I cried, and would eventually lose interest and give up if I didn’t. For my teacher, however, my stoicism seemed to have the opposite effect, and after watching me closely for a few seconds as she twisted the skin on my scrawny arm, she suddenly swung me across her knee and started slapping the backs of my legs.

  I heard some of the children gasp when she did it, and someone gave a single high-pitched bark of laughter. Then the room fell completely silent except for the sound of the teacher’s open hand smacking my bare legs, until eventually she snapped at me, ‘Go and sit down,’ and I struggled to my feet. The skin on my wrist and the backs of my legs was burning as I walked unsteadily back to my seat, but there was a small glow of satisfaction inside me too, because I’d managed not to shed a single one of the tears that had been building up behind my eyes from the moment she’d called me out to the front of the classroom.

  It never crossed my mind to tell my parents when something like that happened at school. After all, I had hurt the little boy, so it really was my fault and I’d got what I deserved, just like I so often did at home, although with at least some underlying justification on this occasion. To me, what happened that day at school was simply a variation of ‘normal’ and not worth mentioning to anyone. And I knew my parents wouldn’t have done anything about it if I had told them, except Mum might have beaten me again for getting into trouble with my teac
her.

  I already knew Miss Heston didn’t like me. She made it clear in lots of ways, such as on the day she put a box of hats on the floor in the middle of the classroom and told us all to pick the one that matched the job we’d like to do when we left school. It’s difficult to imagine yourself as an adult when you’re seven, and perhaps even more difficult to visualise having a job. But in amongst all the hats there was a jockey’s cap, and as I liked the idea of being able to ride a horse, I picked it up and was just about to put it on my head when I noticed a black hat with a chequered band and a silver badge, like a police officer would wear. ‘Maybe that would be even better than being a jockey,’ I thought, reaching for the black hat with one hand while replacing the jockey’s cap with the other, just as Miss Heston slapped my arm and said, ‘No, Zoe Patterson. Leave it. You’ve made your choice.’

  So I kept the jockey’s cap and went to stand by the wall where we’d been told to line up to have a photograph taken. Then, just as I was putting it on my head, my hairband slipped down in front of my eyes and when I raised my hand to tug it back into place, Miss Heston snapped at me again saying, ‘Don’t pull it up. It can stay like that,’ and took the photo. I still have that photograph and whenever I look at it, it reminds me of Miss Heston and makes me wonder why she was like that. Because it wasn’t just me she was mean to; there were other kids who regularly got into trouble too, like the boy she pushed into a sort of bookcase one day because he’d been swearing, then slammed the door on him repeatedly, while we all watched with a mixture of sympathy and guilt – or at least I know I did, because I was glad it was him and not me being punished on that occasion.