There was one positive aspect to having Miss Heston as our teacher, however, because my older brothers had had her too, and Ben and I used to swap stories about the things she did. For example, when Ben was in her class she put strands of her hair in the goldfish tank to prove that it’s a bad thing to do because it gets caught in the fishes’ gills and suffocates them; and sometimes she’d put a sweet in her mouth, then take it out and insist on some child who’d had been naughty eating it. Ben would laugh at the expression on my face when he told me things like that, and I’d laugh too, because I liked the feeling of having even that brief point of contact, which was something we hadn’t ever really had before. It was just a shame that the year I spent in Miss Heston’s class made it even more difficult for me to distinguish between normal and abnormal behaviour, and that I ended the year with even lower self-esteem than I’d had when I started it.
Fortunately, most of my other teachers were more balanced and encouraging, and when I was nine I had a really nice one, who encouraged me and gave me work for science that the older children were doing and that I found really interesting. It was when I was in his class that I was sitting in the garden at home one day working on some homework he’d set me when Mum came out and asked what I was doing.
‘I have to write down what time I see the moon,’ I told her. ‘My teacher said you can see it in the daytime as well as when it’s dark.’
‘You’re fucking stupid,’ Mum told me scornfully. ‘The moon doesn’t come out in the day. Everyone knows that. Except you and your stupid teacher apparently.’ Then she stomped back into the house, muttering her contempt.
But the moon did come out while it was still light. I saw it. And I was glad that Mum had been wrong and my teacher was right. It felt like a small triumph, and I think it might also have sown a seed of doubt in my mind about some of Mum’s other ‘facts’ and made me think that if she was wrong about the moon, maybe there were other things she was wrong about too.
During that year when I was nine, Jake was 18 and had left school, Ben was 16 and doing his GCSEs, and Michael must have been five. The three of them still slept in the same room, and one night Jake came home drunk and put the stereo on loudly so that it woke everyone up. Ben was a bit shorter than Jake and quite skinny, and the reason I remember it particularly is because it was the first time I’d ever seen him stand up to his older brother. I suppose it was because he was in the middle of taking his exams, which he worked hard for because he wanted to do well and go to university. And after he’d put his fist through the speaker in their bedroom, he and Jake went outside – at my parents’ insistence – and fought it out.
It must have been around that same time that I was doing my homework one evening when Ben told me I could borrow his pen. ‘It’s on the desk in our room,’ he said. ‘Just go up and get it.’
I’d just picked it up and was turning away from the desk when Jake came in and shouted at me, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ He’d already taken a few steps into the bedroom before he realised I was there, and there was a clear but narrow passage between me and the open door. So, before he could stop me, I darted past him, across the landing and into my bedroom, where I just managed to shut the door before he started thumping on it with his fists.
Although Jake isn’t very tall, he was always quite chunky, and certainly much bigger and heavier at 18 than I was at nine. And he was angry. So although I threw all my weight against the door and tried desperately to hold it shut, it wasn’t very difficult for him to force it open, and send me flying across the room. I was still trying to scramble to my feet when he picked me up by my hair and punched me in the face, splitting my lip and filling my mouth with blood.
Ben came upstairs a few minutes later and when he saw me standing in the bathroom with a blood-stained wad of toilet paper pressed against my mouth, he told me, ‘It’ll be all right. Just go back to your room and close the door.’ And that was the only thing that was said by anyone about what Jake had done to me.
The following year, when I was ten, Dad was made redundant, and it wasn’t long before my life at home had become even more miserable and difficult to cope with.
I can’t remember when Dad first started saying peculiar things to me. I always hated it, even when I didn’t know what he meant when he said things like, ‘You shouldn’t wear any clothes when you’re in bed,’ or pointed to my private parts and asked, ‘Do you know what that is?’ What I hated even more, however, were the creepy gestures he made and the way he flicked his tongue in and out of his mouth while sticking his chin out and looking at me sideways.
Mum thought his comments and gestures were funny – when they were directed at me – and she’d warned me almost every night for as long as I could remember, ‘Be careful of wandering hands in your bed tonight. You don’t want to wake up and feel them touching you.’ She’d smile her nasty smile when she said it, then switch immediately back to being angry as she added, ‘Just you remember though: you stay in your bed until I say you can get out.’
She always laughed when she knew she’d frightened me, and I was always frightened when I was in bed, even before I knew that the wandering hands she was warning me about were my dad’s.
Dad had been making lewd gestures and saying inappropriate things to me for years. I didn’t understand their sexual connotations when I was younger, I just found them creepy and disturbing. But it got worse after he had to give up work and was at home – or at the pub – all the time, and he started doing things like sitting in the living room with his flies undone and asking me to sit on his knee, which I always refused to do.
Ironically, after spending so many hours of my childhood alone in my bedroom wishing I could be part of the family, I longed to go up to my room when he was being like that, but Mum wouldn’t let me. Sometimes, there’d be something on TV to do with sex that I didn’t want to see, and while I tried to block the screen so that my little brother couldn’t see it either, Dad would keep asking me if I knew what the people were doing. Then he’d blow kisses at me and gesture with his fingers and tongue in a way that made me feel dirty and vulnerable.
Mum started sleeping on the sofa every night after Dad was made redundant, so he slept alone in their bedroom, which was next to mine, and I could hear him masturbating at night, which really frightened me, because although I didn’t know what he was doing, I thought he was going to do something to hurt me.
He drank more than ever after he was made redundant, and I can remember being really scared every time I had a bath in case he came home from the pub while I was in it and insisted on coming into the bathroom to use the toilet. I would have my back to the toilet when I was in the bathtub, and however long he took to have his pee or however loudly he grunted and groaned, I didn’t ever turn around.
The one time Mum did try to get him out, she came in when he was using the toilet and started shouting at him, and it ended up with them screaming at each other, then having what sounded like a physical fight at the top of the stairs. Even then I didn’t turn around, and as I wouldn’t have dreamed of getting out of the bath without Mum’s permission, I just had to sit there as the water got colder and colder, waiting for them to stop yelling and hitting each other.
What made everything even worse was that while Dad’s behaviour towards me was becoming weirder and more suggestive, Mum continued to warn me to ‘Watch out for hands in your bed’. Then Dad started hitting me too, which he’d never really done before, and although he didn’t ever do it as regularly as Mum had always done, he did sometimes bruise and hurt me, like the time he used a plastic pool cue from my brother’s mini pool table to beat the back of my thighs and calves, injuring me so severely I couldn’t walk properly for a week. I can’t remember why he did it; probably just because he was drunk.
Later that same year when Dad was made redundant, Granddad died of a sudden heart attack and Mum started sending me to Nan’s every Saturday. I hated having to spend the day with my nan, not least bec
ause she never spoke to me and wouldn’t let me speak either. She used to chatter away to my brothers all the time, and even took them on holidays with her, so I thought it must be my fault that she didn’t like me.
There was one good thing about those Saturdays, however, which was that Nan would take me to the library. Even then she wasn’t actually nice to me, and if I started to say something to her while we were on the bus, she would cut across me and snap, ‘No! You are not to talk.’ She always said it loud enough for people to hear, which was really embarrassing and made me feel stupid, so then I’d spend the rest of the journey trying to avoid making eye contact with anyone. It was only later that I realised the real reason for those trips to the library was so that I would have something to occupy me when she made me sit in silence for the rest of day.
I didn’t see my grandparents very often before Granddad died, so I don’t think his death had a particularly significant impact on me. It did seem to affect Mum though, or maybe it was Dad not working and being at home more often that caused her to start beating me even more viciously than she’d done before.
There was one day when she burst into the bathroom while I was on the toilet and hit me so ferociously with the heel of her shoe that she knocked me off the seat and on to the floor. She didn’t say why she was so angry with me, and after she’d stormed out of the bathroom again, I just lay there for a few minutes, wondering what I’d done wrong.
It wasn’t unusual for her not to give a reason for punishing me. In fact, I rarely knew why either of my parents was furious with me, or understood why they blamed me for everything and seemed to dislike me so much – Dad too by that time. And because I usually didn’t know what I’d done wrong, I didn’t know how to do it right.
I was still lying on the bathroom floor trying to work it all out when I noticed a little plastic shaver on the side of the bath. I don’t remember even thinking about what I was doing as I grasped the edge of the bathtub with both hands, pulled myself up into a sitting position, reached across to pick up the razor, and made a couple of quick cuts on my knee. I know I was angry too by that time, and that I’d suddenly felt overwhelmed by an almost physical sense of despair. So maybe, subconsciously, I thought that releasing blood from my own body might release some of the pressure that felt as though it had built up inside me to an almost unbearable level.
Whatever the reason, it did feel like a release, even though the cuts I made on my knee that first time were only superficial and stopped bleeding quite quickly. I must have been a bit frightened by what I’d done though, because when I went to school the next day, I showed the cuts to a friend and told her about Mum hitting me with her shoe. I didn’t normally talk to anyone about anything that happened at home, but by the time I was ten years old I was finding it increasingly difficult to cope. So I think that by telling my friend Fiona and asking her to tell our teacher, I was hoping someone would step in to help me.
‘She didn’t believe me,’ Fiona said when I saw her the next morning. ‘She said I mustn’t talk about things like that.’
We had moved up into the next class by that time, and no longer had the really nice teacher who’d encouraged my interest in science. Our new teacher was okay though, so I was a bit surprised when she didn’t say anything to me about what my friend had told her, and it wasn’t until some time later that it crossed my mind to wonder if Fiona actually did speak to her.
I’d seen several frightening films since Jake forced me to watch the one about the clown – A Nightmare on Elm Street, for example, and Child’s Play, which is about a serial killer whose soul gets into a really scary doll called Chucky. I hated them all and never watched any of them willingly, but sometimes Jake insisted and sometimes there’d be one on TV when my mum decided I had to be downstairs. Again, I don’t think I realised that making a young child sit through films like that wasn’t normal, until I was in the corridor at school one day telling a friend about something I’d seen and a teacher who was standing nearby suddenly spun round and said, ‘Zoe Patterson, that’s horrible! Don’t ever let me hear you talking about that sort of thing again.’
Looking back on it now, she probably should have asked me how I knew about stuff like that. If she had, I might have told her, then perhaps it would have all come out. But she didn’t say anything else, and I didn’t either.
It was after that incident I started to off-load some of the horrific scenes that were lodged in my mind by writing horror stories, which I took in to school and showed my teacher. It was all really scary stuff, mostly with plots based on films I’d seen, although sometimes with a twist. For example, there was one about Chucky the doll coming into our school and killing all the teachers, which I think was the one that finally prompted my teacher to say, ‘Enough! If you can’t write about something nice, don’t write anything at all.’
I know it must have seemed odd to anyone else – the sort of thing a little girl in a horror film might do perhaps – but I enjoyed writing those stories; it was an escape for me, like reading. And, somehow, the fact that I was able to make up scary stories made the films seem a bit less frightening, although even today I still sometimes have nightmares about the clown in It. So I was really upset by what my teacher said and I stopped writing altogether after that.
I think I had already started losing confidence at school and becoming more withdrawn by that time. Things at home were getting worse too, because Dad’s behaviour was becoming increasingly odd and he had started insisting he wasn’t well and phoning for an ambulance. I don’t know what he said to make the ambulance come – I think he complained about something to do with his heart. But they always did come, and then always left again after checking him out, saying there wasn’t anything they could do for him.
It got so bad in the end that Dad’s brother and his wife came to our house one day to try to talk to him about what was happening, but he wouldn’t let them do anything to help him. I don’t know if it was Mum who got in touch with them. If it was, it would only have been because he was driving her crazy. She certainly never showed him any sympathy or tried to talk to him about what was wrong. She was just angry with him all the time and would shout things at him like, ‘What the fuck’s up with you, you stupid bastard?’
Mum and Dad were arguing almost constantly by that time, which was another reason why I didn’t mind when Mum started to encourage me to stay in my room again. ‘It’s best this way,’ she would say when she brought my supper up to me, ‘so that you can avoid your dad.’ Which seemed to make sense.
In any case, all I really wanted to do was sleep. My brothers just laughed at me and said I was ‘mental’, while Mum seemed to enjoy watching me slide deeper and deeper into depression. I don’t know whether anyone realised there was actually something wrong with me. Perhaps not, because Mum didn’t ever speak to me except to feed the fear I had of my dad. In fact, she didn’t even say anything when I started to leave the food she brought up to my room, which at any other time would have made her really angry.
I don’t think I realised I was depressed either, although I was certainly aware that I was struggling to cope. Then, one day, I came home from school and Mum told me, ‘Your dad’s not well. He’s had a breakdown.’ She didn’t explain what that meant, although I think I guessed it might be something to do with ‘things not being right in his head’, which is what she always used to say about him, particularly after he was made redundant.
It turned out that he’d been admitted to hospital while I was at school that day, and even after Mum had taken my little brother Michael and me to see him there a few times, I still didn’t understand what was going on. I just remember bursting into tears at school on a couple of occasions, then talking to a teacher about it. What I didn’t ever tell anyone, however, is that one of the things I found really upsetting was waving goodbye to Dad after we’d visited him in the hospital, because it reminded me of waving to him as he left the house to go to work when I was a small child. It still makes
me cry when I think about it today, and about how the dad I used to love turned into someone so totally different.
What was also very upsetting about those visits to the hospital was the fact that he didn’t acknowledge us or even seem to know we were there. So, after a while, Mum stopped taking us to see him. I know it sounds horrible to say that it was a relief not having him at home for those three months, but it was, because at least I didn’t have to worry about ‘wandering hands’ in my bed or listen to my parents shouting and fighting with each other.
Dad didn’t ever work again after that. He was quite a bit older than Mum and I think he was only a few years off retirement age when he had what she refers to as ‘his breakdown’. After he came out of hospital, he just sat around the house all day drinking, arguing with Mum, and saying things to me that I began to understand better as I got older and that made me afraid that one day he might stop just talking about it and sexually abuse me.
Chapter 5
Despite struggling to cope with everything that was going on at home, I did make some friends when I moved up to the high school, where I did quite well academically too. Then Dad’s sister died and he had to clear out her house, which caused more trouble at home and didn’t do anything to help his mental state, especially when he ended up having to bring a lot of her stuff back to our house and Mum gave him a really hard time about it.
Dad had been close to his sister. They’d kept in touch over the years, even though we didn’t see them very often, and after he came out of hospital and things got worse between him and Mum, he started going to stay with her at weekends and going out for meals with the cousins I’ve never really known. Eating out was something our family had never done and I think it was like another life for him, perhaps the sort of life he’d have been living if he hadn’t met and married Mum.
Trafficked Girl Page 4
