Looking back over my story now, I can see that I haven’t really been able to explain the role Frances played in my life during those three years after I was first taken into care. I think the reason she seemed important at the time was because she was the only adult who tried to engage with me in any way. Maybe she was gay and recognised that I was. But she was much older than me, and I wasn’t at all interested in her in that way. She was more like a mother figure – or what I imagined a mother figure to be – which is probably why I found it so hurtful when she veered between being nice and horrible to me. In the end, though, she didn’t do me any favours: she just confused me and made me feel even worse about myself. Perhaps she had problems of her own. It’s only now that I realise that isn’t an excuse for the sort of erratic, manipulative behaviour she exhibited when it’s your job to care for children who desperately need consistency and approval.
It’s difficult to describe how I felt throughout that period of my life. I had given up and become resigned to the way things were because I really believed that nothing would ever change and that my life would always be the same, for however long it lasted before I eventually committed suicide. And when you feel like that, it’s almost impossible to summon the mental or physical energy to do anything that might make things better.
For example, a condition of my residency at Highfield was that I attended an alcohol programme that was run during the day. However, because I was very depressed and all I wanted to do was sleep and drink, I found it very difficult to engage with it – or with anything else. So I was still putting myself at risk, asking people to go into shops and buy alcohol for me.
Not long after I moved in, a guy who agreed to take the money I offered him and buy me a small bottle of whisky came out of the shop with a carrier bag containing the bottle I’d asked for and a much bigger one. ‘You can have the big one if you share the small one with me,’ he said. So I went with him to a house around the corner from the shop, where we sat on the floor of his room and drank it.
The next thing I knew, two police officers had burst into the room, where I was lying on the bed naked from the waist down, with no memory of anything that had happened. Apparently, one of the neighbours had dialled 999 because she heard screaming, and after I’d scrabbled around on the floor to find my clothes and put them on, I gave the police officers my name and address and they took me back to Highfield.
I never heard any more about that incident, so I don’t know if the police followed it up with the man who’d bought the whisky. Probably not.
A few days later, I was given a verbal warning about not taking part in the alcohol programme. I did go to it, in fact, just not as often as I was supposed to. So I don’t know if it would have done any good if I’d gone to every session. Maybe not, because I don’t think I was ready for a programme of any sort after everything I’d gone through and without the one-to-one support I really needed. For me, drink was the only thing that ever made anything better – or at least seemed to, because in reality it was actually making everything far worse.
There were several men who used to park opposite Highfield and drive alongside me as I walked down the road. I just kept walking and pretended I couldn’t hear them telling me to get into their cars. But after one of them threatened to kill me if I ignored him again, I started asking a member of staff to go with me to the shop. Even that didn’t deter the men, however, and on at least a couple of occasions when I was with someone, they drove slowly beside us asking us to go for a drive with them. ‘Don’t acknowledge him. Don’t look at him,’ the member of staff said as we hurried back to the house. But I could see she was shocked and shaken by it.
I was afraid of the men too, but I’m ashamed to say I didn’t always ignore them. Sometimes, I’d tell one of them that I was on my way to buy alcohol and if he offered to buy it for me, I’d let him give me a lift. The truth was, I was drinking even more by that time and didn’t really care what I had to do to get it. Being abused had become a way of life for me and as I couldn’t see any way out of it, I thought I might as well try to get some advantage from it. Then, one day, my friend Lizzie was attacked and raped in a park just down the road, which made me think again about what I was doing.
A few weeks after Lizzie was attacked, we were walking back to Highfield together when a man drove past us very slowly, obviously trying to get our attention. At first, we just ignored him, then Lizzie suddenly grabbed my arm and whispered, ‘It’s him! That’s the man who raped me.’ And when I glanced towards the car, I realised to my horror that it was a man called RJ, who I sometimes went with willingly because he supplied me with alcohol.
‘Run!’ I said to Lizzie, and we darted down a side road, where we waited until we were certain he wasn’t following us, then ran back to the house. ‘But he knows where I live,’ I told her when we’d caught our breath. ‘He’s got the payphone number here.’ Then I explained how I knew him, before adding, ‘I won’t see him again though, now that I know what he did to you.’
We did tell the staff about RJ and they told the police, but they never caught him, and eventually he stopped phoning the payphone and threatening to kill us.
Because I was drunk most of the time, I didn’t have the judgement required to avoid getting myself into dangerous situations, or the ability to extricate myself once I was in them. So when I met a man who went into the shop to buy alcohol for me on several occasions without asking for anything in return, it felt as though I’d found a friend at last. He said his name was Logan, and after a while, when I began to feel that I could trust him, I gave him my phone number when he asked for it and he’d send me texts when he was in the area, then we’d sit in his car and drink the alcohol he’d bought for me at the shop.
One day, I told him I was gay, and he said he didn’t mind. Then the next time I saw him he said, ‘I’ve got a friend who’s gay. I could introduce you to her if you like. It’s a shame though. If you were straight, you could have moved in with me.’
When I laughed and answered, ‘No thanks to both propositions,’ he pulled a fake hurt expression, then he laughed too and said, ‘Well at least let me take you to a party tomorrow. It might go on quite late, so maybe you should tell the staff some story about where you’re going and give a fake address. Then we can stay as late as we like without them reporting you missing to the police.’ So, the next day, I wrote down the address of a friend from school and told a member of staff I was going to stay the night with her.
The house where the party was being held was about 30 minutes’ drive from Highfield and there were four or five men and a girl of about my age there when we arrived. The girl seemed really nice and I was chatting to her when Logan said we had to leave. ‘But why?’ I asked him. ‘We’ve only been here for about half an hour and I’ve only had one drink. You said it was going to go on late.’ He wasn’t really listening though, and the next thing I remember I was in the passenger seat of his car and he was on top of me.
As the world slowly came back into focus, I saw that he had his penis in his hand, then realised that my underwear and trousers were around my thighs and I couldn’t move. It was obvious that nothing was going to stop him and I remember repeating, ‘Use a condom. Use a condom.’ Then everything went blank again, until I woke up at 4 o’clock in the morning, still in the passenger seat of his car, with my underwear and trousers on. He had parked just up the road from Highfield, and he didn’t say anything as I got out and walked away.
When I got back to the house, there was a police car outside and I can remember thinking as I let myself in and tiptoed past the office that all I wanted to do was go to bed and sleep. But when a member of staff called to me, I went in. Although it turned out that the police were actually there about another matter that had nothing to do with me, one of the officers told me to sit down and started asking me questions about where I’d been, who I’d been with and what I’d been doing. Then someone tut-tutted and said, ‘Look at the state of her,’ obviously without having any co
ncern for me at all, as if she thought I had deliberately set out to make such a horrible mess of my life.
Even though I’d only had one drink that night, I zoned out and didn’t answer when they asked me if I’d had any alcohol or had ‘taken anything’. So eventually they told me I could go to my room, where I passed out on the bed.
It was only when I woke up the next morning that I realised my underwear was on back to front and my body was covered in bruises. It was obvious that I’d been drugged, although when I told a member of staff everything I could remember about what had happened, she just shrugged as if to say, ‘What do you expect?’ So I went back to my room and tried to shut it out of my mind.
I didn’t see Logan again. But about five weeks later, I discovered I was pregnant.
I was terrified as soon as I realised I’d missed a period, and when I told Lizzie, we went into town and she stole a pregnancy testing kit for me. Then, back in my room a few minutes later, we watched in horror as a cross appeared on the screen.
‘It can’t be right,’ Lizzie said. ‘You must have done something wrong. You’ll have to do it again.’
So she went back into town, to a different shop, and stole another one. And when that was positive too, I told a member of staff, who made an appointment for me to see a doctor the following day.
It felt surreal, like watching something that was happening to someone else, when the doctor confirmed that I was pregnant and booked me in to have an abortion. No one asked me how I felt about being pregnant or what I wanted to do, and there was no mention of any options. And because I felt so detached from it all, I just allowed them to make all the decisions and didn’t ask any questions.
I’ll never forget the day I had the termination. I still have nightmares about it, and still feel a terrible sense of guilt and shame, as well as a lot of anger because things could have been very different if I’d been given some support. Even though my pregnancy was the result of rape, and I know I wasn’t in any fit state to raise a child myself, I hate the thought that the baby – who would be a child of 12 now – wasn’t given the chance to live and be adopted by parents who would have loved him or her. I won’t ever forgive myself for that.
I never accepted another lift after I’d had the abortion, and not long afterwards I decided to go back to college. First though, I had to choose some courses, so I spoke to an adviser at the college who told me, ‘What you ought to be studying is Health and Social Care with Religious Studies.’ I suppose he thought that, being in care myself, I’d have an insight that would enable me to help other kids in similar situations. And maybe he was right. But it wasn’t what I wanted to do, although, unfortunately, I didn’t have enough confidence to say so, and it wasn’t long after I’d enrolled to study the subjects he suggested that I realised I hated them.
About a month after I started studying again I turned 18, and on the night of my birthday Lizzie and I went out to celebrate. We both had a lot to drink during the evening and when we got separated somehow, I decided to walk back to Highfield on my own. It should only have taken me about 20 minutes, and I don’t know long I’d been walking when a man suddenly appeared and tried to drag me off the street. He took me completely by surprise, and maybe it was because I was so startled that I managed to fight him off and get away. When I got back to Highfield, I went straight up to my room without stopping at the office to say hello the way I normally did, and ignored a member of staff who tried to speak to me.
Just after lunch the next day, one of the deputy managers came to find me and said she needed to talk to me about something serious. ‘The police phoned,’ she said, after we’d gone into the office and she’d closed the door. ‘They say a girl who matches your description was seen on CCTV last night struggling to get away from a man who dragged her behind the library, out of sight of the camera. They’re worried in case he sexually assaulted her. So, was it you, Zoe? If it was, it’s something you should report.’
I had no memory of being dragged behind the library. I just remembered struggling when a man tried to pull me down the street, then running as fast as I could when I managed to get away. So I said it wasn’t me and that I didn’t know what she was talking about, because I was ashamed that I’d been drunk and because the fact that something like that had happened on what should have been a special birthday made me wonder if anything good would ever happen to me, which was a possibility I didn’t want to think about.
Within days of that incident, after chewing me up for the last five years, the care system finally spat me out and I moved into a flat to live on my own.
I don’t think the transition would be as abrupt today. In fact, what I didn’t know at the time was that it shouldn’t actually have happened the way it did, not least because I was probably less able to look after myself at 18 than I had been when I was first placed in care five years earlier.
I hadn’t gone home on many visits during the time I was living at Highfield. When I did, my mum was still violent and nasty, my dad still made lewd comments, and it began to dawn on me that they were never going to change. As I discovered later, I wasn’t the only person who had reached that conclusion: my leaving care worker and the social worker I had at that time stated in one of their reports that contact with my family was detrimental to my well-being, although, paradoxically, they also said it was a good thing that my flat was so close to my home.
Having lived in care for several years, you might think it would be nice to have my own place. But the flat was just somewhere social services put me and I didn’t feel safe there, mostly because, in my mind, it was still connected with the care system that had let me down so badly and so repeatedly. I didn’t have any say in it though; it was just a case of, ‘This is what we’ve found for you. This is where you’re going to be living.’ And although I suppose I was lucky to have somewhere, it was the sort of dismal flat on the first floor of a run-down semi-detached council house that made you think of that saying, ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.’
The previous tenant must have been a very heavy smoker, judging by the yellow nicotine stains on some of the walls, and the whole place was badly in need of redecorating. There was damp in the flat too, so some of the plaster was crumbling off the walls; none of the windows shut properly, and most of the furniture – which looked as though it had been left over from a sale at a charity shop – was broken and/or had graffiti all over it.
There were two flats in the house and the old guy who lived in the one downstairs seemed a bit weird, although I didn’t ever really speak to him. We each had access to half the garden and I was told that the council would clear my half before I moved in, which was a relief because it was so overgrown with brambles and weeds you couldn’t even see the paving stones underneath it all. It wasn’t cleared though, and after I’d been living in the flat for a while, I started getting letters from the council telling me that one of the terms of my tenancy agreement was that I must keep my half of the garden tidy, which felt like yet another responsibility I didn’t want and couldn’t cope with. I did do it in the end, however, despite the fact that I didn’t ever use the garden.
Nothing changed after I moved into the flat. The vicious circle just continued: I was lonely, so I drank; when I was drunk, I became an easy target for abusive men; when I was abused, I felt even more distressed and lonely; so I drank …
I was getting about £45 a week in state benefits, a minimal amount of which I spent on food and the rest went on alcohol, which meant there was nothing left over to pay my bills. The problem is, when you drink enough for long enough, it takes longer to achieve the deadening effect that used to come quite quickly. So you have to start drinking earlier in the day to try to shut down your conscious mind before the dark thoughts have a chance to get a grip.
I hated living on my own there. Every minute of every day was a struggle. So much so, in fact, that I started going home again just so I didn’t have to be on my own for 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Even
being with my parents, who often didn’t speak to me at all and who I knew didn’t want me in their house, was better than being alone in an unheated flat.
Going home was a chance to get something to eat too, although Mum would make me beg for a sandwich and then didn’t always give me one. When she did, she would sometimes serve it to me on the tin plate she used to force me to go to the toilet on when I was a little girl, and when I asked her to use a different plate, she just sneered and said, ‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’ And even though she was happy to supply me with drink, she also refused to give me any money for my gas meter. In fact, she thought it was funny I was in such dire straits, and on the one occasion when she came to the flat, she laughed when she saw how dismal it was and that it was so cold you could see your breath in the freezing air. She’d brought a little thermometer with her and she was grinning when she showed me the reading, which was in the red zone below zero. ‘You wouldn’t be in this situation if you’d kept your mouth shut,’ she told me again. ‘It’s only what you deserve.’ And I believed her.
Eventually, despite the way my parents treated me, I started going home almost every day, because at least it was somewhere. I don’t normally feel sorry for myself, but I can’t think about that time now without getting upset when I remember how incredibly lonely I was. One day I was living in Highfield with other people, the next I was entirely on my own. Even if the ‘care’ I was receiving fell far short of what it should have been, at least there had been people there, and someone else had been responsible for all the practical things like providing heating, hot water and food. My key worker did sit down with me to work out a budget before I left Highfield, but what I really needed was someone to help me understand and deal with the reasons why I spent all my money on alcohol.
I felt ashamed that I didn’t have any money to pay for an Internet connection or buy new clothes like most of the other students who lived with their parents could do. I was completely out of the loop at college, and just used to listen when they talked about what they were going to do at the weekend and where they would meet up on the Saturday night. So I was pleased when Frances got in touch with me again.
Trafficked Girl Page 16
