my class paid a visit to the secondary school I would be moving on to after the summer holidays. My first impression was that there didn’t seem to be any proper school building, just a collection of pre-fabs with large windows and echoing hallways. But it was what was happening inside the buildings that made me anxious. There were about 60 kids in every classroom making a noise that seemed to reverberate off every solid surface. I knew within minutes of arriving at that school that I wasn’t going to be able to manage there.
It was a sign of how comfortable I was with the teachers at my primary school that I talked to one of them after that visit and told her how I felt. As a result, it was decided that someone would try to find out whether there were any alternative arrangements that could be made for me. What I think it needed, too, was for Mum to push on my behalf. But she didn’t do things like that. I don’t know if anyone did try to make other arrangements for me. If they did, it never came to anything. And it didn’t really matter, as things turned out, because by the time the new term started, my childhood had been halted dead in its tracks and everything had changed.
Once the last term ended, I didn’t see any of the kids from my primary school anymore. The area I lived in was very strongly class divided: the private-estate and council-estate kids didn’t go to the same schools and didn’t mix outside school either. So I didn’t know any of the kids who lived near me, and none of my friends from school ever came to the private estate where I lived. I suppose it was mutual segregation – the class barrier worked both ways.
During term time, I used to go down to the council estate on my bike to see friends. But it wasn’t an area most people would have chosen to walk through, because there was a lot of tension due to the gang culture that existed there. Although I was too young to attract much attention, I had begun to feel a bit uncomfortable as an outsider, even before the summer holiday started. None of us kids had mobile phones, so I couldn’t simply phone a school friend and arrange to meet somewhere else. And as Mum hadn’t made friends with any of the other mums, there was nothing to help keep those relationships alive. So, at the end of the school year, I suddenly lost all my friends and had nothing to do except hang around at home, getting under Mum’s feet.
It was one thing not really wanting me to go to school in case she needed company during the day, which she did a lot after we moved to the new house and she lost her social network. It was quite another having me there all the time, whether she wanted company or not, and during that summer holiday she seemed forever to be telling me to go away and leave her alone. I walked for miles that summer, on my own, through the tunnel that ran under a half-finished motorway and out across the fields into open countryside. I did it just to get out of the house. Then, one day, I made a friend, and suddenly I no longer felt as though I was the only person in the world.
Evie lived with her boyfriend and two children in a flat in one of the few other council-owned houses on the private estate, just a few doors away from us. She had been badly abused as a child and had learning difficulties. So although she was 18 when I met her, she seemed younger, and certainly wasn’t capable of looking after her children on her own.
Evie’s little girl, Zoe, was two years old, and the baby just a few months. I wasn’t very interested in the baby, although I did feel sorry for her having to lie for hours in a filthy nappy before Evie seemed to notice and bothered to do anything about it. But I did love Zoe, and often when I took her home with me. I would take her little sister too. Surprisingly, Mum would sometimes help me bath them and then look after the baby while I played with Zoe, which was a relief because the baby cried a lot. I think it was the fact that the children were dirty that triggered her mothering instincts, because, to her, keeping your children clean is a mother’s primary, perhaps only, responsibility.
What I really liked doing was taking just Zoe home with me. On the days when that happened, I would ransack the house for coins and take her to the second-hand shop in town to buy her some new clothes out of the 50p bucket. Then we would go to the public toilets, where I would change her into them before taking her to the park, all dressed up and looking nice.
That was all I did for most of that summer, go on long walks on my own and babysit for Zoe. I continued to babysit for her when the new term started. I don’t think anyone ever really believed I was going to go to the secondary school. I wasn’t aware of anyone from social services coming to look for me, although I suppose someone must have done. They must have contacted Mum too, but, again, I don’t remember her saying anything about it. She certainly never asked me why I wasn’t going to school. So, somehow, I just slipped under the radar. For the next few months, Mum cleaned the house and did whatever else she was doing and I spent most of my days with Evie or Zoe, out of Mum’s hair and happy not to be on my own.
In fact, I developed a crush on Evie. She was childlike in many ways and I was very naive, so it wasn’t until much later that I realised she was far more sexually aware than I understood at the time. We often used to play-fight. I would chase her around her flat and when I caught up with her she would pretend to grope me. Her boyfriend, Tom, never said very much, but he would often watch us mucking about. It was for his sake she was doing it, of course. But I didn’t know that, any more than Evie knew that what she was doing would turn out be a big mistake, for both of us.
Tom, Evie and their kids would sometimes come round to our house and Tom would offer to cook supper for us all. Mum has never been very articulate when it comes to saying what she wants. So when they turned up at the front door, uninvited, with Tom holding carrier bags full of ingredients for the meal he wanted to make, she just shrugged and let them in.
I loved having people in the house again, instead of it just being Mum and me. Usually, it was more like a shrine to cleaning products than a home, and I liked sitting at the kitchen table listening to everyone talking and laughing, even if it was only for a couple of hours. Despite her apparent indifference, I think Mum liked it too, because she was at least as lonely as I was. She probably would have preferred it if Evie and Tom had come without the kids though, and if I hadn’t been there either.
‘You know why he comes round here, don’t you?’ she would often say to me after they had gone. ‘He’s sniffing round you. It’s obvious what he’s after.’ I had no clue what she meant. I was 11 years old and no one had ever explained to me about the birds and the bees. Although I had seen people having sex when I was very young, I had only recently found out where babies come from, by reading an article in one of Evie’s magazines, which actually left me more bemused than informed. And anyway, although I quite liked Tom, it was Evie I was infatuated with.
Tom was obviously crazy about her too. What he didn’t know, however, was that while he was at work, Evie often saw other men. Living in that town, it was a secret she wasn’t going to be able to keep forever, and eventually people began to gossip. But it was Zoe who gave it away in the end. If I wasn’t available to babysit, Evie had to take the children with her when she went to meet whatever guy she was currently seeing behind Tom’s back. When Tom got home from work one evening and asked Zoe what she had been doing all day, she told him, and then added, ‘And Mummy was kissing a man at the bus stop.’
After things began to go wrong between them, Tom started coming round to our house on his own. He would cry as he talked about their relationship and how he really wanted to work things out with Evie, and I would do my best to comfort him. Then I would tell him about the latest row I had had with Mum and he would sympathise with me and tell me that whatever had happened wasn’t my fault. Gradually, as we became closer, I started to believe that he was the only person who really understood me. Until then, it had always been Mum and me against the rest of the world. Now, it was Tom who was my only real friend and ally.
Sometimes he came round to our house just after I
