Bought and Sold Read online

  There were many times when I wanted to hug Mum and make everything better for her. And other times when I was angry with her because she did something that made me feel anxious and frightened, although, at the time, I couldn’t have put that feeling into words.

  When we moved out of that house, Mum didn’t want to go. But things between her and John were starting to unravel, and I think she hoped that by going along with what he wanted to do, she might be able to ward off their inevitable break-up. It didn’t work, of course. We hadn’t been in the new house very long when things started going from bad to worse. Mum and John were arguing almost constantly and then John lost his job and started staying at home all day, drinking. Every so often, they would have a huge row, John would storm out of the house and go to stay at his sister’s, and Mum would cry and mope and play loud music. After a while, they would get back together, I would let out the breath I had been holding, and for a few days everything would be all right. Then the whole miserable cycle would start all over again.

  There were fields behind the house we had moved out of; it was in a nice part of town, on a nice street where two of my best friends also lived. So I was upset when Mum told me we were moving. And I was devastated when I discovered that our new house was on a rough housing estate where, for reasons I didn’t ever understand, kids like me who wouldn’t say boo to a goose were picked on and sometimes physically assaulted.

  The only good thing about living in that house was Dean. Dean lived next door with his parents. When my sister and I saw him for the first time on the day we moved in, he was sitting on the garden wall holding a hedgehog. We had been watching him from our new bedroom window, and then he turned round and we ducked down out of sight. But we weren’t quick enough because he had already seen us, and when we looked out again he waved and beckoned for us to go outside.

  Dean was a really lovely lad. I got to know him well over the next couple of years and we became good friends. It still breaks my heart when I think about how badly he was bullied and tormented by some of the other kids on that estate. He was about four years older than me, very good-looking and had a girlfriend when I first met him. Perhaps the people who made his life such a misery by repeatedly attacking his house, beating him up and spreading malicious, totally unfounded rumours about him knew before he did that he was gay.

  I had always enjoyed and done well at school, so I was looking forward to moving up to secondary school. Because we had moved, I didn’t go to the one I was originally meant to go to; I went to one that was local to our new house, where it didn’t take the other kids long to identify me as a geek and where I was bullied almost from day one. I was put into the top set, and while my teachers praised and tried to encourage me, the kids in the playground pushed me, pulled my hair and occasionally punched me. Apparently, they didn’t like the way I talked or looked or the clothes I wore – or, of course, the fact that I was a geek.

  One of the reasons I had been put into the top set was because I was a quick learner. So it didn’t take me long to realise that, as the bullies clearly weren’t going to change their behaviour, if I wanted to fit in, I was going to have to change mine. Within just a few months of starting at the school, I was dressing differently, I had dropped my ‘posh accent’ and adopted all the slang words the other kids used, and I had begun to mess around in lessons.

  That was the first time I put into practice my ability to hide who I really am and pretend to be someone I’m not. I hated myself for doing it, but it worked: I was put down into a lower set at school and the bullies turned their spiteful attention to other targets. What I really hated though was the fact that my teachers were disappointed with me, although not as disappointed as I was with myself, despite my apparent indifference to their concern as they asked me, repeatedly, if there was something wrong.

  Now that I was on the side of the bullies, if only peripherally, I began to make friends, one of whom was a girl called Carly. Like me, Carly had started out in the top set and been moved down when her behaviour deteriorated. She was better at ‘not caring’ than I was though, and one day, when we had skived off school together, she took me to the car park of an office block near where she lived, pointed to a van and said, ‘Let’s see what’s inside.’ The thought of breaking into anything made me feel sick with anxiety. But I sensed that it was a test and if I failed it, it wouldn’t be long before I was right back where I had started.

  It was a stupid thing to do, particularly in a public place in broad daylight. Someone saw us and called the police, who caught us in the act and took us back to school in a police car, and then I was driven home. I was lucky to get off with a warning from the police, but I got into a whole load of trouble from my mum. Anyone who had heard me shouting back at her would never have guessed that I was embarrassed and ashamed of what I had done.

  The second time the police became involved was when I was caught shoplifting make-up in a shopping mall with another friend. This time, they phoned Mum from the police station and told her to come and take me home. She was really upset and angry when she got there, and although I would have died rather than show it, I felt bad.

  The police told Mum to make sure I was in court on time the next morning, and when I said that I wasn’t going to go to court, one of the policemen said, ‘It isn’t a matter of choice. You have to go.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ The arrogant hostility in my voice sounded convincing. ‘And who’s going to make me?’

  The answer was that they were, by keeping me in a cell overnight and taking me to court the next morning in a police van. I think they had to get Mum’s permission, which I’m sure she gave them willingly, in the hope that being locked in a police cell for the night might shock me into realising how it was all going to end if I didn’t sort myself out pretty quickly.

  By the time they dragged me, literally kicking and screaming, into the cell I really was angry. But I was scared too.

  After I had done something I shouldn’t have done at school one day, Mum and John were asked to come in for a meeting to discuss my behaviour. The head-teacher asked me questions about what life was like at home – as if I was going to say anything with my mum and stepdad sitting there. I don’t think Mum ever understood why I was becoming increasingly unmanageable. I didn’t understand it either, although I realise now that it was at least partly because there wasn’t much stability in our lives at home, and because we felt as though no one really cared what we were doing or what happened to us as long as we didn’t cause any trouble.

  I had started running away from home. On all those occasions when Mum didn’t know where I was, I think she would have been shocked if she had seen the sort of people I had become involved with. When I wasn’t wandering around the estate, I was in houses where people were taking drugs, smoking weed and drinking. In fact, I didn’t drink, not only because I hated the taste of alcohol, but also because of what I had seen it do to other people. I didn’t take drugs either. But I did smoke, and I drove around in cars with boys being generally disruptive. I didn’t do anything else with the boys except sit in their cars: under my tough façade, I was still timid and insecure and never even contemplated having any sort of emotional or sexual relationship.

  Sometimes, Mum would call the police and they would come out looking for us. But they rarely found us. I didn’t like Mum at that time. In fact, I didn’t like anyone in my family except my sister – which anyone who heard our constant arguments might have been surprised to know. One day, when my auntie was at the house and she and Mum started laying into me about something, I just lost it. I picked up a bottle of ketchup and hurled it across the room. As it hit the wall, the bottle seemed to explode, sending shards of broken glass and disgusting red goop spraying out in all directions.

  I don’t know whether it was my auntie or my mum who called the police. Whoever it was, I got hauled off to the police station and kept there for a couple of hours, which made me feel obliged to keep up my act of being angry long after I did
n’t feel it anymore. In fact, it was horrible; it was like watching someone I didn’t recognise saying vicious, nasty things. The trouble was that it had gathered its own momentum and I didn’t know how to back down.

  Some of my behaviour was pretty much what you would expect from a teenager going through an angry phase and starting to test the boundaries of authority. But it took on another dimension altogether when I began to self-harm, although, in fact, I only did it a couple of times. I cut myself with a razor. I don’t know why. Maybe it was attention-seeking; maybe all my bad behaviour was really just another way of saying, ‘Look at me! Do something to stop me. Don’t let me get away with this.’

  If I got tired of silently criticising myself, I could always turn my attention to the things I thought were wrong with Mum. I would visit friends’ houses where there were framed family photographs above the fireplace and a nice car in the driveway, and I would ask Mum, ‘Why can’t you be like so-and-so’s mum?’ I think what I really wanted more than anything else was to fit in. Conforming was a big pressure, particularly on the housing estate where we lived, and I was sick of always feeling like the odd one out. I suppose that’s why people hounded and tormented Dean, the boy who lived next door: they thought he was different, so they chose to ignore the fact that he was gentle, funny and clever.

  Mum used to be one of those ‘conforming mums’, in the early days after John first came to live with us. She had a good job and was studying part-time for an NVQ. And when she wasn’t working, at the weekends, she used to take my sister and me out, sometimes for lunch and then to the zoo or the cinema, and we would have really good fun. She wasn’t the sort of mum who offered you her shoulder to cry on. If I ever tried to talk to her about something that was worrying or upsetting me, she would get angry and impatient. Thinking about it now, I suppose it was because she didn’t know what to do about her own problems, so feeling that she had to try to solve other people’s would have seemed overwhelming.

  She was a terrific mum, when she was sober. It was the drink that sent everything wrong. And the drink was always there, in the background. Drinking was just what Mum and John did when they were socialising with family and friends, which was okay, until I was about 12 and it started to affect all our lives. Mum says it was John’s fault, and I certainly don’t think he made things better for her in the end. But I know now, from my own experiences, that you have to take responsibility for what you do and, to some extent, for what happens to you. You can’t just lay all the bad stuff at someone else’s door and absolve yourself of any blame.

  Eventually, when I continued to miss lessons and run away from home, Mum contacted social services and asked for help. I think she hoped it would shock me into realising that life at home wasn’t so bad after all. It was my anger she found particularly difficult to deal with, which I can understand, as I don’t know myself why I was so angry or why I began to establish a pattern of making bad decisions.

  Social services allocated a social worker, who I really liked, to me. He would talk to me and do the sort of fun things Mum and John used to do with us. So, for me, it was quite a good outcome, although the arrangement only lasted until I ran away again. This time, I went to my dad’s.

  I was almost 14 and it had been a few years since my sister and I had stopped spending the weekends with Dad. But when I phoned him one day, after having a row with my mum and storming out of the house, he came into town to meet me. Although I was a bit embarrassed by the fact that he was drinking beer from a can as we walked along the road together, I didn’t think there was actually anything wrong with him. The truth was, however, that he had changed beyond all recognition.

  He took me back to his house, where there was no electricity, no money to put in the meter, and nothing in the fridge or cupboards to eat or drink except beer. If Mum had known what things were like at Dad’s, she might have sent me there herself to get the wake-up call she thought I needed. Dad wasn’t bothered about the state of his house though; he didn’t even seem to notice. After dropping me off, he went out again to collect my half-sister, Vicky, who was coming for an overnight visit.

  When Dad came with Vicky, he asked her, ‘Do you know who this is?’ The last time I had seen her was almost eight years earlier, when she was a baby, not long before her mum had walked out on Dad. So she had no idea who I was. After looking at me warily for a moment, she asked, ‘Is it your new girlfriend?’ Dad laughed and said, ‘No, stupid. It’s your sister, Megan.’ And Vicky burst into tears. Then she hugged me so tightly she nearly squeezed all the air out of me.

  I stayed at Dad’s for almost a whole, miserable month. The only thing about it that wasn’t entirely negative was that it made me realise that my childhood would probably have been worse rather than better if he had stayed with us, as I had previously always wished he had done. The house was always full of his friends, just sitting around. I tried to hide the fact that most of them made me feel really uncomfortable, but he could obviously tell and he would say embarrassing things to me in front of them and then roar with laughter.

  I could have gone home, but I stayed because I was still angry with Mum. She hadn’t abandoned me: she wrote to me and sent Dad the child benefit she got for me every week. I know she would have been appalled if she had seen the way I was living and had known that I had stopped going to school. I don’t think Dad ever even thought about how old I was and what I should actually be doing every day. And as I had obviously dropped off the radar as far as social services were concerned, I just hung around his house, like his friends did, smoking cigarettes.

  I had been staying at Dad’s for almost three weeks when my sister moved in too. It was really good to have her there.

  Sometimes, one of the men would turn up with a child, who would be left for my sister and me to look after. We were in the bedroom one evening playing with a little boy whose father was downstairs, when a fight kicked off. We sat there for a few minutes, listening to the shouting and hoping it would stop, and then I crept down the stairs. Dad was lying on the floor of the living room in a pool of blood and one of his friends was bending over him, holding a knife and screaming, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ At first, I thought the man had already stabbed him and he was dead. But then he groaned and moved. I found out later that the man had taken exception to something Dad had said and picked up the TV and smashed it over his head.

  I was still standing on the bottom stair, too shocked to be able to make any real sense of what had happened, when I heard a sound behind me. Spinning round, I saw my sister and the little boy huddled together and shivering. I held my finger to my lips and whispered, ‘Shhh.’ Then I pushed them ahead of me back up the stairs and into the bedroom. When I had closed the door silently behind me, I told them, ‘We need to get out of the house. We’re going to have to go downstairs again.’ The little boy whimpered and shook his head. ‘It’s all right,’ I said, trying to convey a sense of confidence I didn’t feel. ‘Just follow me and don’t make a sound.’

  Everyone was still fighting and shouting as we tiptoed swiftly and silently down the stairs, across the hallway and into the kitchen. As soon as all three of us were out of the back door, we started running. We didn’t stop until we reached an alleyway, where we huddled together, trying to catch our breath. Running away had been an instinctive reaction. But when I tried to think what to do next, I drew a blank. So we were still standing in the alleyway, glancing nervously over our shoulders every few seconds because we were afraid that the man with the knife might come after us, when we heard the wail of a siren. The police car was followed almost immediately by an ambulance, and by the time we crept back to the house, Dad was already being lifted on to a stretcher.

  The little boy’s father took him home and my sister and I were looked after for the night by neighbours. When Dad got out of hospital, my sister went back to live with him again. But I had already decided that I was going to go home to Mum.

  It was a good decision, in theory. In practice,
it would prove to be a case of out of the frying pan, into the fire.

  Chapter 2

  Mum and John had split up while I was staying at Dad’s, for good this time. Despite mostly blaming John for what had happened, I know Mum was really upset and that she missed him. I was sorry too: I always wished things could have gone back to the way they used to be in the early days of their relationship.

  I think Mum was depressed and lonely before I came home, so she was glad to have me back. We got on a lot better than we had done before I went away and became really close – partly, I suppose, because I had grown up a bit in the month I had been living at Dad’s.

  Shortly after I returned home, my sister was taken into care. I had just turned 14 and should have been in school, so they were probably looking for me too. Despite having made friends, both on the housing estate and at school, before I had gone to live with Dad, I hadn’t completely escaped from the bullying. So I had no reason to want things to go back to the way they had been. It seemed as though life had stalled for Mum and for me. And then Mum announced that we were going on holiday to Greece.

  I’ve often wondered what would have happened if Dad hadn’t started drinking, if we had stayed together as a family living in the nice house we used to live in, and if my sister and I had finished school and maybe gone to university. I know that was what Mum wanted for us – a good education that would lead to us getting good jobs. Our lives might even have been different if John and Mum had worked things out and stayed together.

  I do have some happy memories of the early days after John moved in. For example, we used to have a party at our house every New Year’s Eve. Everyone would be cheerful and laughing, and even when they all got a bit drunk, no one was ever angry or shouted. Then we moved to the new house, everything changed and I began to wish we could turn back the clock so that Mum could make some different decisions. But we couldn’t, so there was no point being miserable about how things might have been.