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.
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.
