Mummy, Make It Stop (16 page)

Before he went, he came to see me and Tanya in our room. He had always been nice to us, and I could see he was upset. ‘I’m sorry, girls,’ he said, with tears in his eyes. ‘It’s not working out between your mum and my kids. We’ve got to go.’

He could have said that Mum was nasty to his kids all the time; he was being considerate because she was our mum. No doubt he realised that with his kids gone, we would get the brunt of her temper, and felt for us.

I was sad too, because I liked John. He was patient and wouldn’t bite our heads off for no reason at all. He would listen if we wanted to speak to him and was always ready to give us time. Though we hadn’t known each other well, I would miss him.

The split sent Mum into self-destruct mode. Over the next few weeks she began drinking more and more. She also began taking anti-depressants. When she’d been drinking she could go one of two ways - either she would be happy drunk and making all sorts of promises about what we were all going to do, or she would be violent and aggressive. We never knew which it would be, though the latter was more likely.

Mum took to spending most of each day in the local pub. When she did come home it was either with some man she was seeing - most didn’t even last the week - or she’d bring back a crowd of drunken people who sat around our house drinking, smoking and eating.

They would drink extra-strong cider, known as Mad Dog. Mum used to put a hole in the lid of the can and drink it through the hole; she said, ‘It gets ya pissed quicker.’ They were all smoking cannabis too, and giving each other blow-backs - where you take in the smoke and then blow it into someone else’s mouth - in front of me and Tanya.

It began to feel as if our home was no longer our home. Day after day, Mum sat around the living room with her ‘mates’, most of whom wouldn’t have given her the time of day if she hadn’t given them somewhere to hang about and drink. I’d come in from school to find fourteen or fifteen people sitting around in a cloud of smoke, all with cans in their hands and glazed expressions, the TV blaring in the middle of the room while they stared mindlessly at it, or laughed at nothing.

‘There you are, Fatty,’ Mum would slur. ‘Get us something to eat, will ya?’ I’d go to the shop for potatoes and bread and then head into the kitchen to make plates of chip butties for them all. I’d do my best to clear up, emptying ashtrays and collecting up the cans, while one or other of them would crack a joke about me and they’d all roar with laughter. Then Mum would try to embarrass me by talking loudly about sex, and telling them all I’d never had a boyfriend. I cringed, wishing she’d just leave me alone and let me be invisible, but she seemed to enjoy taunting and humiliating me.

Around this time, I had my first period. I told Mum that morning, and when I came in from school she announced it to all the people she’d brought home from the pub, while I raced up to my room, hot tears of humiliation running down my cheeks.

The following month I whispered to Mum that I needed sanitary towels. ‘You’ll have to use toilet paper,’ she said. ‘Or borrow something from the neighbours. I need my money for booze.’

I had no choice - I went over to a neighbour who had a daughter a bit older than me, and asked to borrow a few towels. I was so embarrassed I could only look at the floor.

Most of the people who Mum brought back were men, and a lot of them were younger than her. But I don’t think she cared who they were, she just wanted company, and anyone would do.

One of them was a hugely fat man who lived up the road. He stank of body odour and was covered in scabs. I could hardly stand the sight of him, but he and Mum would sit swigging from cans and laughing at me. He would be really horrible to me, joking about how ugly I was. I hated him.

Mostly, I stayed away from him and all the rest of them, staying in the kitchen and only going through to the living room when Mum called for me to make more food or get some cans from the fridge. Sometimes I ended up cooking tea for ten people.

I had stopped smoking at Cherry Road. With caring adults around, I hadn’t felt the need to try to impress by smoking. But now that I was home, everyone around me was doing it. One day Mum, drunk as usual, taunted me: ‘Come on, Fatty, if you think you’re so clever, let me see you smoke a cigarette - properly. You’ve got to smoke the whole thing and take it all down.’ She cackled with laughter and so did the assorted layabouts slumped around the room. Red-faced and desperate to fit in, I did. I felt horribly sick as I inhaled drag after drag, but I finished it.

Then I passed out.

Mum left me lying on the floor and ignored me. I came to a minute or two later, sick and dizzy, and crawled upstairs to bed, shrieks of laughter ringing in my ears.

I didn’t give up. I tried again - on my own - and within a couple of weeks I’d become a smoker. I hoped it would help me fit in, but it didn’t really.

In this climate, with my self-esteem on the floor, no friends and an endless supply of chips, my weight ballooned. By the time I had turned thirteen, a few months after I came home, I was a size sixteen. This only made me feel more different than ever. Everywhere I went I felt inadequate and inferior to others, singled out and awkward. I was becoming more and more miserable, and ate to try to feel better. But the more I ate, the more different I felt - and the more I got picked on.

I began to feel paranoid. I was sure people would look at me and know what had happened to me - that I’d been abused and been in care. I had no-one to talk to - after one or two visits to make sure we had settled in, Anna had stopped coming and I felt more alone than ever before.

The truth was that, even to people who didn’t know about the past, I did look different. Not only did I have no school uniform apart from baggy track bottoms and a grubby t-shirt, but while the other kids wore trendy trainers or nice shoes, my ancient trainers had holes in the soles and the toes. And my school bag was a battered carrier bag, into which I had to cram my books and whatever I had to take to school that day. Even the nice kids would giggle as I walked past them.

Then one day I made a friend. She was called Susie, and she was a year younger than me. I knew who she was because her brother was in my class. We got talking one day on the way home, and struck a deal. I had to go home for lunch each day, while she got dinner money. So we agreed that she’d spend her money on ten cigarettes, which we would share, and I would make us both a sandwich at home. Every lunchtime we’d walk back to my house, where we’d eat and smoke in the kitchen until it was time to go back to school.

I really liked Susie - we got on well - but her parents didn’t like me. They lived in a much smarter house than ours, away from our estate, and both of them worked. Susie wore a smart school uniform, and they didn’t want her mixing with a plump, scruffy kid like me. So we kept our friendship secret. But even though it was restricted to lunchtimes and the odd evening when Susie could slip away, the friendship meant a lot to me. It was about the only good thing I had.

It was after Mum found a new boyfriend that I found out Anna hadn’t stopped coming after all. It turned out that she was still seeing Mum once a fortnight, but Mum always engineered it so that Anna came when we weren’t around, or she would walk to the social services offices in town for the meeting, just to make sure Anna didn’t see us. It was malicious; she hated the fact that we liked Anna and she still resented Anna for taking us away. She often said to us, ‘You’re all little bastards. It’s social services fault, they’ve ruined you.’

Mum’s new boyfriend, Reg, was pale-faced and skinny, with lank, mousy hair. He smoked a lot and his teeth were brown and rotten. He claimed benefits and worked cash-in-hand, selling hot dogs and burgers outside city-centre pubs. He and Mum seemed to get on well - at any rate, they had a lot of sex and were always nipping upstairs - and he’d hand his takings over to her when he came in, so she liked the extra money.

He started hitting me almost as soon as he arrived. He was always doing it, sometimes even throwing me to the floor. He didn’t need a reason; anything I did would be excuse enough.

It came to light when the school nurse gave me a routine examination and saw there were numerous bruises all over my body and on my face too. She must have called social services, because Anna came round a day or two later and took me out for tea.

I was really glad to see her. And when she asked me about the bruises I told her that it was Reg. Anna looked worried, and later she spoke to Mum about it. Mum said she knew about it and that he only hit me when I ‘deserved it’.

Perhaps I might have been taken back into care at that point, except that Reg walked out on Mum a week or two later, so the problem was solved.

Now that Jamie was in the shed and John’s kids had gone, we had a spare room. So Mum invited Auntie Coleen’s eldest son, Andrew, to move in. He was about nineteen and he paid rent and helped with jobs about the house and garden. He was friendly enough. But after a couple of weeks he began going out with Jane, a young single mum who lived across the road. Jane was twenty-three and she had a two-year-old son, Kevin.

It was Mum’s idea to get me to babysit Kevin - unpaid - so that Jane could come over to our house and be with Andrew. Of course, he could have gone to her place, but Mum wanted them both to join in her endless parties. So I was dispatched to mind the toddler.

I didn’t mind - it got me out of the house, and Kevin was quite sweet. But they began leaving me there for longer and longer. Jane had made up a bed so that I could stay over, and I would often wake to find that she hadn’t come back yet, and I had to give Kevin breakfast. One day I woke to a loud bang. Kevin had got up and stuck his fingers into a socket, and fused the whole downstairs. At twelve, I was too young to know how to look after a small boy. But no-one seemed to care. At one point I was left looking after him for two weeks, while Jane and Andrew lived it up at our house. The only time I was allowed home was to collect more clothes.

By the time I had been home for six months, I felt life couldn’t get much worse. I was fat and wore rags. I was the butt of everyone’s jokes. I dreaded school so much that I hardly ever went. And the only value I had to anyone was as a babysitter or to make butties and cups of tea. They all thought I was a waste of space, and that’s how I felt about myself. I wished every day that I’d never come home from Cherry Road. I missed everyone there so much. I would lie on my bed thinking of them, wondering what they were doing and imagining what I would be doing if I was still there.

I hated everything about living back at home. Mum had conned everyone. She didn’t love us at all.

Then one afternoon Mum called Jamie, Tanya and me into the living room and made an announcement that left us staring at her with our mouths hanging open, not sure we had heard right.

‘I think it’s time you all saw your father,’ she said. ‘I’ve been in touch with him, and he’s coming over - tomorrow.’

Chapter Twelve

I had often thought about my real dad, and wondered what he was like. Mum had painted a horrible picture of him over the years, telling us he was a monster with three staring eyes, who scared anyone who saw him, a vicious, drunken man with a terrible temper, who would lash out for no reason, and who hit her and us kids. We were all better off without him, she told us, and we believed her.

But sometimes I couldn’t help wondering where he was and what he was doing, and if he really was that bad. I dreamed about a dad who would love me and be glad I was his and come and get me, and in recent years I’d had this dream almost every day. I wished that I could see for myself what my dad was like, but I never really expected to - and certainly not through Mum. So when she announced that she’d been in contact with him, the questions came thick and fast from the three of us.

We wondered why Mum had contacted him, after so many years. ‘Just thought it was time,’ was all she’d say. But the truth was that without a man by her side to ease the burden, Mum was finding the responsibility of us children a bit too much. She’d left us to George, and then Terry. With no-one else around, she wanted our dad to step in and help. And of course she was short of money and hoping for a handout.

It turned out that our dad was living less than three miles away. I was pleased that we’d be meeting him at last. But I couldn’t help feeling worried. ‘You said he was horrible and wicked,’ I said to Mum, nervously.

‘He’s not that bad,’ she said, gulping down her coffee.

I had believed her so completely that it took me a while to digest the new information - perhaps our dad was not a monster after all. I wondered about the three eyes, but decided not to push Mum by asking too many questions.

She had arranged for him to come to the house the next day, a Sunday, which didn’t give us long to get used to the idea. As the rest of the day passed, I began to feel excited. I was finally going to see my father. I’d be able to fill in some of the blanks in my life, and that felt good. All the other kids I knew who didn’t live with their dads at least saw them - in most cases every week. We were the only ones I knew of who had no dad in the picture at all.

I wondered why Dad had agreed to come. After all, he’d left and not bothered to contact us for all these years. If he’d cared about us, surely he would have been in touch? What had Mum said to persuade him to come over?

I thought of all the times when having a dad around would have helped. He could have rescued me and Tanya, instead of letting us go into care. He could have had us over to his house, instead of leaving us with Terry and George. Where was he when all those awful things were happening? I had so many questions running through my head, but I knew I probably wouldn’t have the nerve to ask him a single one of them. I wanted everything to be nice when he came, I didn’t want to risk pushing him away. But deep down I was angry with him, upset that he had left me and not bothered to come back.