Chanelle Hayes - Baring My Heart (4 page)

T
hings with Mum and Dad went from bad to worse. They still refused to talk to me about my real mum and lashing out at them was the only way I could express myself. I remember, during one enormous row, I tore into them, shouting, ‘Why did you ever bother adopting me? You obviously don’t love me!’

The tension in the house wasn’t helped when I started seeing this boy from school, called Scott, who was a couple of years older than me. Dad instantly disliked him, as he’d heard on the grapevine that he was a bit of a bad boy, into drugs and hardcore partying.

‘What do you see in him?’ he asked me. ‘He’s no good. Trust me, a father knows these things.’

Nothing is more effective at making you keen on a guy than your dad’s disapproval, so I paid no attention at all. I presumed Dad was just upset because he had correctly guessed that Scott and I were sleeping together. Despite me only being 15, I always felt really mature for my age, so sex just seemed like a natural progression.

Scott and I had known each other as kids, when he lived next door to Zoe, one of my best friends. Her parents have always been close to mine, so she’s more like family to me than a mate. She’s one of the nicest people I’ve ever known.

Anyway, the three of us would hang out together and play football against the wall by his house but his family moved away and I forgot all about him. A few years later, they came back to the area and he turned up at our school again. Zoe grabbed me in the playground one lunch time and, giggling, said ‘Bloody hell! Look who it is!’

She was pointing to this good-looking lad having a kick-about with the boys and said, ‘It’s him! You know, the guy who used to live next door to me.’

‘Oh my God!’ I shrieked. ‘He’s fit now!’ And he was. Scott was tall and dark and looked really cool, in that ‘doesn’t give a shit’ way. Eventually, I plucked up the courage to talk to him.

‘Oh, yeah, I remember you,’ he said, looking me up and down approvingly. ‘Well, you’ve grown up, haven’t you?’

We got on well immediately and it wasn’t long until he asked me out, much to my excitement. Scott just seemed so worldly wise and, even in his school uniform, he looked way older than me. Despite only being 15, I felt at least 21 in my head and I wanted nothing more than to be a fully-fledged adult.

As a result, losing my virginity to him a month or so later didn’t seem like a big deal at all. Sure, it was a bit awkward when we first slept together but when isn’t it? I still hate having new partners, even now. Scott had been asking over and over when I’d be ready to ‘do it’ but he seemed OK to wait. The day it finally happened, his parents had gone out and we went up to his bedroom for the inevitable. He put a Tracy Chapman CD on, which sounds unbelievably corny now but, at the time, it felt so sophisticated. Cheesy or what?

Although he seemed to know exactly what he was doing, being that bit older, I’m afraid to say that it wasn’t some
mind-blowing
experience for me. In fact, it was pretty forgettable and I was left thinking, ‘Is that really it?’ How overrated it was. ‘Where are the dramatic noises they make in films?’ I thought. ‘Why is my mind not being blown right now? And why am I thinking about the essay I’ve got to hand in tomorrow?’

Still, I was glad we’d done it, mainly because I now thought I was so damn grown up. We were nearly caught out though, as his parents came back soon after and said, ‘What’s going on here?’ I’m sure we looked pretty sheepish as we emerged from his bedroom protesting our innocence but they probably had us well sussed.

After that, we began sleeping together regularly – whenever we could really. I was already on the pill, as I’d had some cysts on my ovaries, so we didn’t have to worry about contraception. And I guess I thought I was in love. Looking back now, that relationship barely even registers on my radar now but it was so important back then. It felt so liberating, especially as I felt like I was being treated like such a baby at home.

The fact that my parents didn’t like him and wouldn’t let him sleep over at our place meant I began spending more and more time at his house. One time, Mum turned up there looking for me, clearly worried out of her mind, but I stayed up in his bedroom, trying not to utter a sound.

‘Is Chanelle here?’ I heard her ask at the front door. She sounded fraught with worry but I didn’t move a muscle. ‘I’m worried about her. She hasn’t been home for three days.’

‘No, she’s not here Christine,’ Scott lied through his teeth. ‘I haven’t seen her. Sorry.’

I felt bad for deceiving her but it was easier to do that and a small part of me enjoyed making them worry. But, when I did show up at home again, Dad was livid.

‘Get out of this house!’ he blasted. ‘If you refuse to respect your mother and me and how we run this house, you might as well leave for good.’

So off I stomped back to Scott’s place, my hiding place from reality. The only trouble was it wasn’t long after this that Scott unveiled his true colours. And it turned out that my dad had been right to be wary of him: he was a total druggie. I discovered that he was doing a lot of ecstasy with his mates and, despite me at first thinking it was entirely up to him if he wanted to pump his body full of dangerous chemicals, it began to affect our relationship. The drugs made him act so selfishly – like the time I cooked him a special Valentine’s meal at his house. I’d slaved over a hot oven and got us a nice bottle of wine but, in the end, he turned up really late that evening, without letting me know where he was. I ate the meal on my own, feeling utterly sorry for myself. When Scott finally showed up, he couldn’t eat anything because he was gurning so badly. I was so upset. But I also couldn’t go home because I knew I wasn’t welcome there. I had no choice but to forgive him.

At this stage, I of course had no idea about my real mum’s drug problems, or even who she was, so it’s odd how I’ve always been quite anti-them. It’s almost like I had some sixth sense from birth about what had happened to her.

Scott never quite understood my attitude either.

‘Just try one pill – you’ll enjoy it,’ he’d say.

‘No thanks,’ I’d scoff. ‘There’s no point. I hate drugs. It’s such a dirty thing to do.’

It’s a view I still hold very strongly today but, back in my fiery teen world, I was about to put my parents through one of the most horrendous tests of their lives.

I
had settled into this kind of horrible, destructive pattern with my parents, where I was basically living with Scott but would occasionally turn up at home to pick up some clothes or books – and fly headfirst into another row. One day, we were fighting about my ‘lack of respect’ towards them when I simply felt that I couldn’t take any more. As the sparks flew, I could feel my anger rising like a big ball of fire.

‘How can you have a go at me about this trivial crap when you’re hiding such big secrets from me?’ I yelled. ‘You know how much it means to me to find out the truth about my mum but you won’t just do that one small thing for me. That’s the reason I’m always at Scott’s – because I can’t stand being here with you! All you do is lie to me and treat me like a stupid idiot. I won’t put up with it any more, OK?’

As they stared at me, stony-faced, I shrieked, ‘You don’t care about me. Not one bit. Why are you keeping this from me? If you were good parents, you’d just tell me. I’ve had enough!’

Mum tried in vain to calm me down. ‘Look, we’re not going
into this all over again,’ she said. ‘Now dry your eyes and just try and see it from our point of view for once.’

They both left the room and I suddenly felt like I didn’t belong with this family at all. ‘These people don’t even love me,’ I thought. ‘The only person who loved me was my real mum and she’s dead.’

I wasn’t in control of it but something inside me had snapped. I’d tried reasoning with them, I’d tried shouting and screaming, I’d even tried running away and I felt there was nothing else I could do. I just couldn’t cope with it any more.

I’d never had any suicidal thoughts before but, all of a sudden, my next move seemed blindingly obvious. Looking back, I feel mortified that I could have hit such a low point at such a young age but what I did next seemed to make perfect sense. It wasn’t something I had planned at all but I knew exactly what to do. I went into the lounge and took a bottle of whisky from my dad’s drinks cabinet and stormed up to the bathroom with it. I could hardly focus because I was crying so hard but I locked the door and got on with it. I’d seen this sort of thing on TV shows like
Casualty
and it looked easy enough. There were a load of painkillers in the bathroom cabinet, which I knew would do the trick.

I caught sight of my face in the mirror and it shocked me. My eyes were wild and mascara was streaming down my face. I remember thinking how much older I looked, like there was a huge weight on my shoulders that should never have been there.

From the noise I’d made and the sound of my crying, Mum and Dad realised I was up to something and started banging on the bathroom door.

‘What are you doing, Chanelle? Let us in!’

‘No! I’ve had enough.’ I screamed. ‘You don’t love me! Go away!’

There was no stopping me now. I was completely hysterical.

‘I don’t want to live here any more. Let me leave or I’m going to swallow all these tablets!’

Mum again begged me to open the door. ‘We can sort this out, just don’t do anything silly,’ she shouted.

Dad, too, was beginning to sound panicked. ‘It doesn’t need to be like this. You’re our daughter. We love you.’

‘I don’t care what you say,’ I screamed. I don’t think that I really wanted to die but, the way I was feeling, if there had been a button I could have pressed that would just turn everything off, I would have hit it in a flash.

I started rifling through the half-used packets of paracetamol, aspirin and ibuprofen and began popping the pills out of their foil packets and forcing them one by one into my mouth. Somehow, I knocked them back with slugs of whisky, which tasted absolutely vile and smelled just as bad. Even a faint whiff of the stuff these days makes me feel queasy and I haven’t been able to swallow tablets properly since then either.

I have no idea how many pills I took but it must have been about 20. With the hammering on the door becoming more and more frantic and the booze and tablets starting to take hold, I decided to go one step further. I went to the bathroom cabinet and reached for my dad’s razor.

I sat on the edge of the bath and began stroking the blade across my left wrist. I watched in some kind of semi-conscious trance as the blood sprung from my veins and ran over my arm in thin streaks, covering my fingers and dripping onto the floor. God, it stung so badly. It was absolute agony. The cuts weren’t very deep but I’ve never known pain like that and I still have the small scars on my wrist today.

You might be wondering if I secretly liked the pain I was inflicting on myself but, in all honesty, I absolutely hated it. This
was not about self-harm for me, where you cut yourself to let stuff out and make yourself feel better. I wasn’t doing it for relief, I just didn’t know how else to make myself heard.

It must have been about then that I passed out – from a combination of the blood loss and the effects of the pills and whisky, I guess. Fortunately, my parents had already called an ambulance and, as it raced towards our house, Dad managed to force open the bathroom door with a knife.

‘No! Chanelle! What have you done?’ he screamed as they barged into the room and found me lying almost lifeless on the floor. They wrapped my wrist with a towel to stem the bleeding and, thank God, the ambulance arrived moments later. I was rushed to Wakefield General Hospital and taken straight through to have my stomach pumped. Obviously, I was out cold through all of this, so the only recollection I have after blacking out is of waking up in my hospital bed, feeling thoroughly dazed and sick. When I did come round, I remember looking down at my bandaged arm, wondering, ‘What the hell was I thinking?’

As the reality hit home, one of the doctors told me, ‘You’re a very lucky girl. If you’d taken many more tablets, you wouldn’t have had the choice of living or dying. Your organs would have been so messed up that you wouldn’t have stood a chance.’

I couldn’t believe I had come that close to dying, and just wanted to get out of the hospital. The doctors and nurses kept coming over to put tubes in my arms, or write a list of confusing figures on their clipboards, and I’d continually ask, ‘Can I go home now?’

‘Not yet,’ they told me, again and again. ‘The effects of the tablets can take a while to show up and sometimes they can cause long-term damage to your insides – even days after the overdose.’

This was the last thing I wanted to hear and a small part of me
actually wished I had died. At least then there would have been a point to it. But, as it was, I felt like I’d failed and that people would think I had only done it as a pathetic cry for attention. That was mortifying when all around me on the ward there were really poorly children suffering from cancer and terminal illness they had no control over. I kept thinking, ‘You selfish cow, Chanelle. At least you have your health, unlike these poor little things.’

When Mum and Dad came to see me, I just burst into tears as they approached my bed.

‘Hello, Jadey-pie,’ Dad said and smiled. ‘How’s my girl doing?’

Mum sat and held my hands and I couldn’t understand why they weren’t furious with me.

‘I’m OK,’ I said with a shrug, wiping away tears. ‘Aren’t you mad at me?’

They shook their heads and said, ‘We just want you to be well. Nothing else matters.’

‘So you don’t hate me for doing this?’

‘Of course not,’ said Mum. But, like before, they really didn’t want to dwell on my behaviour. ‘Look, we just want you home,’ she said. ‘We don’t need to talk about why you did it. We can just put it behind us and move on.’

When I did eventually go home, I knew how badly I’d upset them, so I agreed to start seeing a new social worker to address my ‘issues’. She was called Becky and I’ll be frank – she was a total idiot. I was going through the worst time of my life and yet she’d turn up saying, ‘Right, today we’re going to draw some pictures to identify our feelings.’

I was like, ‘Becky, let me be honest with you. I know I’m only fifteen but I’m not stupid – I don’t need the Crayolas. I’ll speak to you on a level but don’t even bother with this.’

In reality, I’ve always found it hard to tell people how I really
feel. My stomach would go into such knots whenever anyone asked me anything remotely heavy, so perhaps Becky never even stood a chance of getting through to me. But still, she drove me absolutely mad in her attempts.

‘How are you feeling today?’ she’d ask. ‘Why don’t you draw how you feel?’

So I’d say sarcastically, ‘Well, I can either draw a sad face or a smiley face. That’s about the extent of my talent in arts and crafts.’

I know it sounds ungrateful when she was only trying to help me, but this was not how to give therapy to a troubled teenager like me. One time she said, ‘If you draw me a picture with these felt-tip pens, next week we can try it with paints.’

Jesus Christ, what was she thinking? ‘What? I’m fifteen years old,’ I snapped. ‘Are you joking?’ Fair enough, that kind of psychobabble might have worked on four- or five-year-olds but it was just insulting to me. ‘Becky,’ I said, ‘I’m not trying to be rude but this is ridiculous. If you want to talk to me, that’s fine. But don’t expect me to sit here drawing stick men and smiley faces.’

And she replied, ‘Well, what about if we make a chart about how you’re feeling? Has it been a sad day, a good day or a medium day?’

‘I’m not drawing a chart either,’ I said. ‘I’m not three and I’m not wetting the bed. This is just not working for me.’

Those sessions with Becky used to make me so angry and I’d inevitably take it out on Mum.

‘Why are you making me see that woman? I’m not some imbecile,’ I’d say.

In the end, Mum arranged for my previous social worker Christine to step in – and she was a breath of fresh air because I trusted her implicitly. She picked me up from school sometimes and took me to Pizza Hut, so it felt like a treat, rather than some
kind of psychobabble session. We could actually talk about stuff, without her forcing me to draw daft pictures. I used to enjoy our chats because she never seemed to judge me or have any expectations of me. And if I felt angry and bitter towards my mum and dad on any occasion, that was fine too. She always encouraged me to express my emotions and that helped me a lot.

But while she was a calming influence in my life, the next almighty storm was already brewing.