Escape From Evil (19 page)

Boys came first and, initially at least, nothing much changed. My first boyfriend worked at Robert Dyas with me. He was eighteen years old and another bike fan, so we used to cycle everywhere, especially at weekends, when we both went out with the Brighton Cycling Group for thirty-mile rides. I loved the whole routine of packing sandwiches and a bottle of Coke into my panniers and setting off with a bunch of other healthy people.

We went out for quite a while and eventually nature took its course. Because I had told Robert Dyas I was sixteen, that’s naturally how old my boyfriend thought I was. He would have been horrified to learn he’d slept with a fourteen-year-old – just as my father had a decade and a half earlier. In my case, however, I was already on the Pill, having been prescribed it to combat awful period pains.

It was another boy who set me on the path to alcohol. A really great friend of mine when I was young was a chap called Peter – one of my playmates from the woods. We were inseparable as mates for years and his parents were convinced we’d end up married. That never happened, but we did a lot of things together – including getting drunk for the first time.

Other kids had started talking about drinking and somehow we’d got hold of a bottle of vodka. Units and percentages meant nothing to us, so we just sat on a wall near his house and swigged it like it was Tizer.

I remember swinging my feet and trying to concentrate on them. The next thing I knew, I’d fallen off the wall and landed in someone’s garden. In a rose bush. Thanks to the vodka, I didn’t feel a thing, but to this day I still have a thorn embedded in my back.

When the bottle was empty we decided to go back to Peter’s house. En route was a greengrocer’s and, sitting out the front, pride of the display, were lovely-looking gala melons.

‘I’d love one of those,’ I said.

‘Me too.’

So Peter grabbed this melon and off we fled. We thought it was the most hilarious thing in the world, but honestly, what a pair of chumps! Peter’s house was only a hundred yards away and the greengrocer had known him all his life. There was no way we weren’t going to get caught.

Convinced we’d outwitted the greengrocer, we ran into the house and tiptoed up the stairs so as not to attract any adult attention. But obviously we were both wrecked, so it must have sounded like a herd of elephants passing through. Giggling elephants at that.

The hilarity continued. Peter’s room had a basin in it, which was just as well because shortly after I sat down to eat the melon – like an apple, skin and everything – I threw up. We both stared at the melony mess in the sink and Peter declared, ‘Coffee! We need coffee.’

So back downstairs we crept, but there was his mum cooking dinner. I hid in the doorway while he tried to have a sensible conversation, waiting for the kettle to boil. In the end, he panicked and filled the cups with lukewarm water.

After that, I would go to the woods with my friends and drink there. Whereas a few years earlier we’d been searching for pits of abandoned pottery and convincing ourselves we’d discovered Roman artefacts, now we were content to drink cider or sherry in secret – and smoke.

A lot of kids were saying they smoked, but I don’t think many did. It was like boasting you’d had sex – it was the cool thing to say, whether you had or not. But a few people did and I decided to give it a go. I remember, it was a John Player Black and it was absolutely disgusting, but I forced myself to persevere. I really wish I hadn’t. Until recently, I smoked forty a day.

I was helped in those days by the fact that it wasn’t just Robert Dyas – and my boyfriend – who thought I was sixteen. I could buy cigarettes and booze from anywhere, as long as I wasn’t wearing my school uniform. When I realized how unusual this was, I saw an opportunity. I bought a packet of twenty, a box of Swan Vesta and went back to school and sold a cigarette and a match for ten pence. Before long, I was making enough to give up one of my evening jobs. Most importantly, it reminded me of those Sunday mornings spent looking for pound notes with Mum and the time we sold melon at the Bay City Rollers concert.

I’ve inherited her eye for an opportunity
. It was a proud moment.

Speaking of Mum, while all the other kids were fabricating their sexual- or nicotine- or alcohol-based experiences, I never once joined in. If I’d revealed my skill at rolling joints and setting up bongs, I’d have been a legend. But I kept quiet. That was in the past. I’d done my best to forget it had ever happened.

I told even close friends that my mother had died of pneumonia, which is technically true. It’s only been in the last few years that I’ve been comfortable enough to tell anyone the truth. Obviously I was more scarred by the experience than I was prepared to admit.

It’s funny, looking back, how I managed to spin even something like illicit drinking and smoking so I came out of it looking more successful than anyone else.
Okay,
I thought,
you can’t be a winner doing this – but you can do it better.

So instead of buying the usual cheap brands like Rothmans or B&H, I always bought Dunhill. They were more expensive and, I reasoned, therefore classier. They were certainly more distinctive. And as for alcohol, I began keeping a bottle of red, a bottle of rosé and a bottle of white under my bed for when visitors called. I thought it was the height of sophistication to be able to offer a glass to girlfriends after school. None of us knew that these bottles, opened weeks earlier, were well past their sell-by dates, so would obviously taste rank. We thought we were so grown up.

While all this was going on, my body was changing too. I noticed people had stopped taking the mickey out of my looks and, actually, boys were queuing up for my attention. Girls, too, wanted to be my friend. I was Miss Popular and I loved it.

The more attention I got, the more I wanted. I started wearing make-up, agonizing over every little detail for hours before I went out. Best of all, I bought my first pair of shoes with my own money. The cool girls at school – probably the ones from Woodingdean – all wore high heels. I thought,
I’m going to get a pair of those.

My experience of shopping was close to zero. Granny had made most my clothes and the rest we’d picked up at secondhand fairs in the community centre. As a result, I was often four or five seasons out of date. So wandering around Brighton looking for the perfect pair of heels with cash burning a hole in my pocket was never going to end with the bargain of the century.

But my naivety was exposed when it came to size. I didn’t realize that stilettos started at three inches. I saw an amazing pair of six-inch heels and I thought that’s what they all looked like, so I bought them. Who knows where I got them – it was probably a sex shop. All I do know is that, for the next two years, I would not be seen dead in anything lower. To this day, I won’t leave the house in anything less than four inches.

Shoes accounted for, make-up applied, that just left my hair. The craze then was for highlights, which I got and would spend hours teasing until it looked just so. I loved it. For the first time in my life, I cared about the way I looked and I loved the results. Other people did too.

Something had to give though. There wasn’t enough time in the day to cram everything in, so decisions had to be made. I couldn’t quit work because I needed the money to escape. I couldn’t stop my new fun socializing because I’d never been happier. Which only left school.

Almost overnight, I just switched off. School held no interest for me anymore. That part of my life was over. I was fourteen years old. Exactly the same age my mother had been when her life of troubles had begun.

Of course, I only discovered that later. Back then, in 1984, the only thing on my mind was escaping. I informed Grandpa that I would be leaving his home the day I turned sixteen.

‘You will not,’ he insisted. ‘You have to at least sit your O levels.’

‘You can’t tell me what to do.’

‘While I am your legal guardian, Wilson, I can.’

He always called me ‘Wilson’ when he was angry with me. Partly it was a return to his days commanding the troops. It was also a reminder to us both that I shouldn’t have even been there. I wasn’t a Beavis.

We argued for hours, but in the end I relented, even though his legal responsibilities would end on the day I turned sixteen.

In Grandpa’s defence, he’d already seen Mum married on her sixteenth birthday, having thrown her life away – as he saw it – when she was the age I was then. I didn’t know this. They kept it from me. But it was another parallel with the life of the woman I’d barely known.

Longhill let me take a few exams a year early, which I passed easily. What I really should have done, though, is sit them all then, while I still had some interest. By the time my proper exams came round, I had been doing very little schoolwork for a year. It was no surprise when the straight-A girl came home with Bs and Cs.

It’s only looking back that I realize how upsetting this must all have been for my grandparents. They’d seen their daughter unable to avoid the slippery slope. Now history was repeating itself. I was making a lot of the same mistakes.

It was with history in mind that I approached Granny one morning and said, ‘I’d like to contact my dad.’

I knew her feelings about him, so it was to her credit that she only put up a token fight.

‘Are you sure, dear? Are you really ready? You know what he did to you and your mother?’

I’d heard it all before, but that didn’t change the fact that I wanted to see him. In my mind, I needed to give my dad the opportunity to explain to my face why he’d abandoned me, as I saw it. I needed to hear him say it was all a big mistake and that he’d been searching tirelessly for me for thirteen years. That’s not how it worked out.

I should have guessed that my father would not live up to my dreams when he suggested our meeting place. He knew a pub in Rottingdean, the White Lion, and thought we should meet there.

He was already seated when I arrived. I think we shook hands, possibly there was a hug. No kisses though. Not yet. I can’t remember a single topic we spoke about for the simple reason that we didn’t discuss anything important. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t exactly rush to explain why he’d left Mum all those years ago or why he’d stayed out of my life for so long. And I had no desire whatsoever to ask him if he really had planned to put me into care.

There’s plenty of time for that one . . .

In the meantime, we broke the ice with the standard uninteresting probes.

‘How’s school?’

‘Fine.’

‘How’s your grandmother?’

‘Fine.’

‘And your grandfather?’

‘Scary. What’s your job?’

‘I run a holiday resort in France. Have you got a boyfriend?’

And so on and so on.

One awkward hour later, we parted with the vague promise to see each other again soon. I was in no hurry to do it again and from what I could tell, neither was he. Only years later did I question why Dad thought it would be appropriate to meet a fourteen-year-old girl in a pub!

Granny wasn’t happy when I reported how my meeting with my father had gone. As much as she’d expected him to disappoint me, she still didn’t like to see me get hurt. Not again.

At least our joint low opinion of Dad gave us common ground. On so many other topics we were at loggerheads. In fact, the atmosphere at home deteriorated quite rapidly. It was just a clash of wills, really. I wanted to leave and, despite my grandparents secretly craving their own freedom as much as I longed for mine, they didn’t think I should, at least not until I’d finished my education. Then, they reasoned, they could, in all conscience, say they’d done what they’d sworn to do on my mother’s death. But until then we were forced into an occasionally uneasy truce.

I wasn’t really drinking heavily, so they never saw me drunk, and because Grandpa was a heavy smoker, they never detected smoke on my clothes. Arguments tended to be over stupid things – like the time I was helping with the Sunday roast.

It had all been going so well. Granny was carving the meat and I was next to her, trying to tease the hot baking tray of vegetables from its shelf. It was my fifth attempt and yet again the tray was refusing to budge. The heat was pouring out and I was getting flustered. I gave it another go and – same result.

‘Bugger this stupid thing!’ I said and slammed the oven door shut.

‘What did you say?’ Granny’s voice screamed into my ear.

I was so angry at the oven I couldn’t even remember what I’d said.

‘Nothing,’ I replied.

There must have been something else bothering her because Granny overreacted. She shouted, ‘Liar!’ then spun me round. The next thing I knew, the tip of her great big carving knife was an inch from my face and she was shaking uncontrollably.

‘How dare you use language like that in my house!’

I was no longer listening. Whatever Granny’s problem was, I didn’t care. I couldn’t take my eyes off the glinting blade. I knew she wasn’t going to hurt me, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the Stanley knife I’d faced years before. I lashed out. I couldn’t help it.

‘I’m not scared of you, you old bag!’

‘What did you call me?’

‘You heard.’

That was the one moment when I thought she was going to lose it. She shook violently for a few seconds, then spat the following words into my face: