Daddy's Little Earner (18 page)

‘Later,’ he said.

But that was a golden rule that Dad and Lucy and
everyone else I knew in the business had always drummed
into me. Always get the money up front. As I was beginning
to feel a bit scared anyway I used his reluctance to pay
as an excuse to call the deal off and fumbled to get out of the
car. The moment my fingers touched the door handle he pulled me back into the seat with all his strength and
smacked me hard in the mouth. I knew then not to argue
or fight any more, just to give in. Years of experience with
Dad and his tempers told me that this was a man who
didn’t care how much damage he inflicted in order to have
his own way. I knew that if he was willing to act like this
right from the start then he might be prepared to do far
worse if I didn’t cooperate. I could tell that he didn’t see
me as a person at all and that there would be no chance of
appealing to his better nature.

I know it seems odd to claim that I was raped, given
that I was selling sex, but that was how it felt. I hadn’t given
my consent to it and yet he did it anyway, leaving me
feeling violated, cheated and furious. I said nothing – just
waited for it to be over and hoped he wouldn’t turn really
nasty afterwards. Once he’d finished, he nicked whatever
money I had in my purse before pushing me out of
the car, flinging my bag out after me and driving off leaving
me in a heap on the side of the road, scrabbling
around on the ground for my scattered possessions, every
last scrap of human dignity gone.

I was so hurt and angry I wanted to report him to the
police or talk about it to someone, but what was the
point? I was an underage prostitute on the run from a
children’s home: what chance did I have of getting any
sympathy from anyone? I knew from things I’d heard the
other girls saying that I was lucky to have got away as lightly as I had. In the end all I’d lost was the money and
my dignity, but I could have ended up beaten to a pulp
or even dead.

I was arrested a couple of times for soliciting but
because I was underage I just received cautions. That was
always Dad’s trump card when persuading me to do anything
illegal, the fact that I was too young to be prosecuted.
The police were nearly always looking for me anyway
because I was known to have run away from school or
from some children’s home or other. One time I was cautioned
for carrying an offensive weapon when a policeman
noticed the skewer on my ring.

Strangely enough, some of the police seemed more
concerned about the worry I was causing my father than
about the damage that was happening to me. One time I
was picked up by a policeman on Ber Street who knew
that not only was I in care and under age, but I was also a
ward of court. I knew this man was a friend of Dad’s.
Dad had recently been beaten up for some reason, and
this guy seemed to know all about it.

‘You do cause your dad a lot of problems,’ the policeman
tutted as he drove me back to Dad’s flat. He was
talking about Dad as if he was a sweet old man who
couldn’t understand why his delinquent daughter was
the way she was, rather than the man who had instigated
and encouraged everything I had ever done wrong in my
life. On the way there he stopped off at the fish and chip shop to get something for us to take for Dad’s supper, ‘to
cheer him up’ as he put it.

The only explanation I can think of why Dad was
allowed to get away with as much as he was, was because
he was a grass – but there is no way he would ever admit
to such a disgraceful thing. In the sort of circles Dad
moves in, pimping your underage daughter is one thing,
grassing to the police quite another.

E
ventually the authorities at Wymondham College
were forced to expel me halfway through my second
year there because of the number of times I had run
away. I’m sure they made allowances for my family
background but in the end I understood that they had to
show the other pupils that it simply wasn’t acceptable to
take off from school whenever you felt like it. Terry got
expelled a bit later for other minor misdemeanours.
Although it was a great school, it had never really been
a suitable place for children with as many problems as
we had.

At Break I had made a really good friend called Mel
and I hoped that now Wymondham had chucked me out
I would be able to go to the local school with her and another
girl called Fiona, but the social workers decided I should
be enrolled in yet another school – North Walsham Girls’ High – which was at least ten miles away from the home.
That meant I had to get up an hour earlier than everyone
else and catch a different bus on my own. I could never
understand why I always had to be treated differently,
kept separate from everyone as though I had some sort of
infectious disease.

Mel and I had a lot in common. Her dad was friendly
with my dad to start with so she understood a fair bit
about the sort of world I had come from. He was another
alcoholic and had been violent towards her mum, which
was why she had ended up in care. Unlike the girls at
Wymondham she understood a lot of what I was going
through, although I thought she always seemed a real
lady compared to me. I was the one who always seemed to
get into trouble with the staff while Mel gave the appearance
of floating above it all. Everyone at the home loved
her, including me. It would be fair to say I was in awe of
her. Although she was a few months older than me she
was like my little sister and I felt I had to be really protective
of her.

I wish now that I had felt more comfortable at
Wymondham and had stayed all the way through
because then I would have come out with a great education
and some qualifications. I would also have been able
to keep up the sports that I loved, but I didn’t appreciate
any of that at the time; all I knew was I felt I was the
wrong person in the wrong place, somewhere I didn’t fit in. Dad only had to give me the slightest encouragement
to give it all up. But where was I going to fit in? On the
block with him? I really didn’t want to keep doing that.

After leaving Wymondham I never saw my hockey
stick or tennis racket again, nor the model swan that
week after week I had lovingly crafted from a block of
wood in the woodwork classes and was really proud of.
The fact that no one thought these were things worth
keeping safe for me reinforced my own certainty that I
was worthless myself.

When I started at North Walsham Girls’ High at the
age of thirteen I was still heavily into my tennis. One day
when I was having a tennis lesson at school I started getting
horrendous period pains and being sick. I was sent to
the sick room and Mrs Davison was called from Break to
come and collect me. I was absolutely terrified that I was
going to be in trouble for having made her come to pick
me up. I was so ashamed and frightened, but she couldn’t
have been kinder. She took me home and let me lie on the
settee with a blanket over me, watching Wimbledon
while the staff came back and forth with warm milky
drinks and paracetamol and whatever else I needed to
help me get better. These small acts of kindness always
overwhelmed me and made me feel like a worthwhile
human being, but never for long. I never got over the
belief that they didn’t really care for me, that they were
only doing their job.

In all my confusion and anger and unhappiness in the
months after Dad made me go on the game, I had started
cutting my arms with knives and any other sharp implement
I could get my hands on. I don’t think I wanted to
actually kill myself, although I wouldn’t have cared too
much if I had thought I was going to die; I just wanted to
hurt myself because I thought I was so worthless I didn’t
deserve to be treated any better. It was like I wanted to
punish myself for being such a terrible person. I suppose
also that it gave me some kind of control over my body,
in ways that I didn’t have otherwise. When the blood
started to flow, I always felt a sense of release, however
momentary.

I never stopped running back to Dad but I became
much more reluctant, never knowing whether he
planned to put me out on the street to work, or to spend
the weekend abusing me himself. One Saturday at Break
I kept getting phone calls from Terry, who was back at
home on a visit. At this stage Terry didn’t know anything
about what Dad was making me do. When I answered
the phone Dad came on the line saying the two of them
were off for a day out at the seaside in Yarmouth with
Kathy.

‘Do you want to come?’ he asked.

‘I can’t,’ I said, knowing that the staff at Break would
never give me permission for a day out with Dad, even
if Kathy was there.

‘Just get on the train,’ he said, ‘and I’ll meet it at Norwich
and pay your fare.’

I held out for a while, making excuses, but I really
wanted to go if it was just going to be a family outing,
and Dad was always so persuasive when he was leading
someone astray. Only when I read my social services
reports many years later did I realize that the authorities
at Break knew exactly what was going on that day and
considered getting the police to meet me at Norwich
station, before thinking better of it and deciding to let me
go. I can’t actually remember if we ever got to Yarmouth
but I do remember Dad abusing me that weekend. I don’t
think Kathy had been there at all; he had just used her as
bait to get me to run away.

He kept me hidden from the police that night, and the
next day we went round to Nanny’s for lunch. I was even
quieter than usual, feeling devastated at him lying to me
and using me yet again. I had sunk into a mood and it was
impossible to drag myself out of it. I didn’t want to be there
any more, but I didn’t want to be back at Break and away
from what family I did have either. My cousins were at
Nanny’s bungalow too that Sunday and we all hung out in
the next-door garage after lunch, escaping from the adults
but with nothing else to do. Because of my sullen mood the
atmosphere was even more awkward than usual.

I went back to Break voluntarily that night and, feeling
desperate to share my unhappiness with someone, I told my friend Mel everything that had happened,
including the fact that Dad had screwed me. Although
her dad was a drinker and violent he had obviously never
tried anything like that on with her because she was
appalled and immediately told a member of staff who
contacted the police. I’m not sure if I had hoped she
would do that or if I had hoped she would keep it secret;
maybe a bit of both because I was totally confused about
what I did want most of the time. Anyway, the police
arrived at the school and said that in order to be able to
prove in a court of law what Dad had done they had to
get me examined within forty-eight hours so they could
gather the evidence while it was still fresh.

‘This time we will really be able to get him,’ they
assured me.

I felt torn in two. Half of me wanted to do whatever
was necessary to stop Dad from abusing me, but the other
half dreaded the idea of him being sent to prison and
ending up hating me for betraying him yet again.

It was late and dark when they got me to the police
station and they wouldn’t let Mel come with me because
they said she was too young. I had all the usual tests and
they asked me to spit into a test tube because Dad had
kissed me during the sex and would have left traces of his
saliva in mine.

The stress of the following weeks made my period late
so then I had to take a pregancy test. The thought that I might be pregnant by my own father was mortifying, but
thankfully it proved to be a false alarm.

When he was confronted with the accusation that I
had had sex with someone over that weekend while I was
in his care, Dad immediately had a cover story ready.

‘She must have screwed one of her cousins in the
garage that Sunday afternoon,’ he suggested, ‘round at
my mum’s.’

I was furious that he would tell such a blatant lie about
me just to cover his own back, making it look like I was
some sort of sex maniac, desperate to go with anyone who
asked. I was sure the tests would prove that what he was
saying wasn’t true but the results never seemed to arrive,
or if they did no one seemed to think they should tell
me anything about them. After months of worry the staff
told me that the police were dropping the charges.
Nobody ever explained to me why that had happened,
but Dad told everyone that the reason they couldn’t press
charges was because they had found more than one man’s
semen inside me so I had obviously been screwing around
that weekend. I was devastated that the authorities had
failed me again and that Dad would be willing to say such
things about me.

It was all just a game to him, like cat and mouse. He
would boast that he could twist social services round his
little finger and he was right. Looking back now I wonder
if the police dropped the charges in exchange for some information from Dad on some other criminal, but
even if that was true I know he would never admit it. Not
in a million years.

One day when I was fourteen I was in the kitchen at
Break leaning against the hatch to the dining room, talking
to someone on the other side. The huge kettle had
been filled to make hot drinks for our supper and the
flames from the gas ring were licking up the side. I felt an
itch on my back and looked over my shoulder to discover
the blouse I was wearing, which I had borrowed from a
member of staff, was in flames. I ran out screaming into
the hallway, the flames streaming behind me. Another
member of staff dragged me out through a door and rugby
tackled me to the ground, rolling me in the snow
that lay on the ground outside. I ended up in hospital for
a week, lying on my front, my back covered in angry
great blisters. When I came out of hospital I still had to
wear padding on my back, making me even more certain
I was an unattractive mess of a person. The doctors
warned me that I would end up scarred but in fact it all
healed eventually.