the sort of person who gives comfort or cuddles, or even brief hugs. When I was angry or upset, her reaction was to shout even more loudly than I was doing, and I always ended up feeling worse than I had done to begin with. So it was a new, and very pleasant, experience to be listened to and sympathised with.
I don’t really know what sort of relationship there was between Tom and Mum, or if there was any particular reason why she would storm out of the house if he came up to my room without first stopping to have a cup of tea with her. She didn’t like anyone giving me attention that could have been paid to her. So it may simply have been jealousy and there may have been nothing between them at all. Perhaps her reaction was just another facet of the many tensions that existed at that time as a result of the complicated cross-relationships between Evie, Tom, Mum and me.
I still wasn’t going to school. I spent most days with Zoe, waiting for Tom to finish work so that we could go on a bike ride or hang out together. Despite the fact that there was an age difference of more than ten years between us, Tom was the best friend I had ever had. But then something happened that changed our relationship and made everything even more complex and confusing than it already was.
It was an evening in December and I was in my bedroom wrapping Mum’s Christmas present when Tom knocked on the door and came in. I was already in my nightie and when he touched the bow on the front of it, his hand rested on my boob just long enough for me to notice but without it seeming weird. Then he started talking about Christmas and I probably wouldn’t have remembered what he had done if it had remained an isolated incident. In fact, things escalated so slowly after that night I hardly noticed what was happening.
At first, it was just rough and tumble, the sort of games a brother and sister or any other kids might play. Then one day he kissed me, on another day he lifted up my top to look at my boobs, and before long I believed that we were ‘in a relationship’. He never put pressure on me to do anything I didn’t want to do. If I tried to turn away while he was kissing me, for example, he always stopped immediately. He did everything in a way that made me believe, at 11 years old, that it was what I wanted. And when he asked me to do things I didn’t want to do, I did them because I wanted to please him and because I was tired of being lonely and he was my only friend.
I can only remember one occasion when Tom tried to force me to do something I didn’t want to do. It wasn’t long after he had kissed me for the first time. We were in the garden of his mum’s house when he suddenly grabbed my hand and pushed it down inside his trousers. I had touched boys of my own age at primary school, but never a man before, and I was really shaken. When I tried to pull my hand away, Tom grabbed my arm and held it where it was. I was more confused than frightened, until I saw the dark, almost threatening look in his eyes. By the time he released his grip, his fingerprints had left little red marks on my skin, which slowly turned into bruises.
I didn’t have any concept that what he was doing was wrong. I had read articles in Evie’s magazines about little girls whose dads crept into their bedrooms at night and did horrible things to them that traumatised and scarred them for the rest of their lives. And I had read about women who were raped – usually by men they didn’t know – who were very frightened and struggled to try to get away. But what Tom was doing to me wasn’t anything like what had happened to the little girls and women in those magazine stories. Tom didn’t ever hurt me and I wasn’t afraid of him. I often felt embarrassed by what he did to me, but only because I didn’t have real breasts, like Evie did, and I thought he must be comparing me to her and would soon realise I wasn’t really worthy of his attention.
I read a lot as a child. It seems odd when I think about it now, but I was probably reading Harry Potter during the time when I was becoming involved in a ‘relationship’ with Tom. Reading was a form of escapism for me – I loved the Harry Potter books. But there weren’t any books, or even television programmes, that involved an 11-year-old girl having a relationship with an adult man. At least, there weren’t any that I saw or was aware of at that time. So I decided that what Tom was doing was something private, something lots of people do, but don’t talk about. I think I knew that wasn’t true, although I certainly had no idea that it was abuse. But when you’ve spent your life not understanding a lot of the things people do, it’s sometimes easier to tell yourself a lie rather than become fixated on trying to work it out.
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