Fifty Shades of Domination - My True Story (12 page)

Two months later a birthday card, containing money in lieu of a present, arrived from my birth-mother. I ripped the card into pieces, left the money untouched in the envelope and sent it back, ‘return to sender’.

CHAPTER 13

LEAVING HOME

I
t was a shocking telephone call for me to overhear. A few half-whispered words that were to destroy the security of the only home I had ever known and leave me homeless, penniless and without a family to depend upon.

My grandmother was in the front hall, speaking with the local social services department and trying to arrange for me to be taken into care. I had never planned to eavesdrop on her; I had just slipped into the house quietly and crept upstairs so as not to disturb my grandparents. Then I heard her one-sided telephone conversation.

‘But surely you
have
to take her into care if we can’t cope. She’s only
just
16 and anyway what difference does her age make?’

It is hard to describe how I felt when the hammer blow understanding of what my grandmother was discussing
struck home. I was horrified and deeply upset, silent tears were running down my cheeks and, in the quietness of my upstairs bedroom, I felt more rejected than ever before. It was, of course, a situation I had provoked through my own behaviour but nothing could take away from the fact that this was the only loving mother I had ever known, now trying to have me removed from her life. I had no real concept of what being ‘taken into care’ meant other than that it was the sort of thing that happened to girls whose parents had died, or been sent to prison or who had been so bad themselves that they had to be locked up in a council home. The fear of losing the security of my own house, the comfort of my own tiny bedroom, the love of my grandparents and the stigma of council care simply overwhelmed me. Within seconds I regressed from being a feisty, lippy, sometimes foul-mouthed teenager to a little girl who desperately wanted her mummy.

Looking back on that day now, I understand exactly how close to the edge I must have driven my poor grandparents for them to make such a decision. As a teenager, however, full of the fake bravado of youth, desperately trying to learn an adult independence, I could see no explanation at all. As fast as my fears had grown and my tears had flowed, the shock was replaced with an ice-cold anger.

‘I heard you, I heard who you were talking to,’ I shouted to my astonished grandmother as I flew down the stairs. ‘You bitch, you cold-hearted deceitful, hateful fucking bitch.’

Even by the standards of the monumental rows we had on a regular basis, my language was cruel and unfair but driven by a mix of anger and fear. ‘How could you do that? If you just
want me to go, you only had to ask, not go sneaking off to get me taken away.’

Startled because she had not known I was even in the house, my grandmother did her best to defend herself from an attack which must have arrived out of the blue. ‘It’s your fault Miranda; you’ve driven us to this. We just can’t cope with you anymore. It’s too hard to try and look after you and you don’t make anything easy.’

The row was short and sharp and bitter and, not surprising in the circumstances, deteriorated rapidly into my foul-mouthed rant and my grandmother’s embarrassed but angry defence. My grandfather must have been in the house but I cannot remember him saying anything at all as I stomped upstairs, banging doors and finally throwing a few clothes into a rucksack. As I tried to pick what things I could pack, I heard my grandmother making another call, this time to my birth-mother trying to explain what was happening. It made no difference to me; if my adoptive mum and dad didn’t want me, I certainly wasn’t going to take advice from the woman who had given me away. By the time I clumped my way downstairs again there was nothing left for any of us to say. Neither of my grandparents said or did anything to stop me leaving. I was 16; I had no money, few clothes with me, no idea where I might stay and no family left to whom I might turn. As I angrily slammed out of the front door I was, for the first time in my life, truly on my own.

My grandmother had hit an insuperable problem in the telephone call she made attempting to place me in care. Being over 16 meant that the local authority had no responsibility to take me into care or to offer me any support. If she had made
the call just a few months earlier, when I was still 15, then she might have had more success. Clearly now, I was going to get no help from officialdom. The truth is that I would not have known how to access any such assistance, even were it there to be offered.

Standing on the pavement outside of the house I had lived in forever, I had not a clue where I could go. Still angry, I wandered the streets for a while then used some of the little money I had to call a girl with whom I had been working in my Saturday job at a local chemist’s shop. I have no idea what I told her but, although we hardly knew each other outside of that job, she was kind enough to let me stay on her sofa for a few nights. In fact, I was to stay with her several times in the months to come, although always being careful to find somewhere else to move to at regular intervals so as to give her some respite from my ‘temporary’ presence in her flat.

Another friend, Julie, also offered me a sofa to sleep on. She lived not far from where my present-day dungeon is located, and unlike my first temporary refuge, she did have the benefit of central heating. After many winters of freezing in my grandparents’ home, that was, for me, a luxury beyond measure. The downside of being with Julie, apart from the awkwardness of living on a sofa and out of a suitcase, was that she was in the process of separating from her husband and he clearly resented my presence in her life. I was desperate to find somewhere else to live and then found the answer in being asked out for a drink by a guy who lived rent-free in a London squat. At that time I was mostly definitely not dressing to impress potential boyfriends. The fashion was all
for baggy trousers with even baggier tops. But I knew I was a pretty young woman and the guy asking me out was more than passable. He was fit and muscular, a bodybuilder and the sort of guy who did turn me on. He was never going to be a permanent partner in life but moving in with him temporarily would ease my growing accommodation problem and give me a boyfriend of sorts as well. He worked part-time as a bouncer, his squat was rough and ready, on one of the worst council block estates in London, but my choices were strictly limited. I moved in.

To say that my new home was in a rough part of town would be a monumental understatement. Half of the flats were boarded up, no stones had been left unthrown in breaking plenty of windows and it was the type of neighbourhood where even policemen feared to tread. The outside walls of each flat must once have been white but the little peeling paint that remained had long since turned to 50 shades of dingy grey. By early evening, the time when I would arrive there from school, young gang members were hanging out on every corner. I would sometimes watch from my window as the occasional passers-by foolish enough to walk through the estate were subjected to a barrage of catcalls and threats from this weird, drug-addicted boys brigade. Whatever danger my family had feared I was in from going out late-night clubbing was as nothing compared to the dangers I faced once I left the security of their home.

My new friend’s flat was on the first floor and so it involved a trudge up a staircase, strewn with litter and reeking of the smell of fresh urine and stale disinfectant which the council would splash around more in hope than expectation of
improving the environment. I would often get off of the bus in the nearby high street and walk past those yellow police notices appealing for information about ‘an incident’ which had occurred a night or two before. There must have been times when they ran out of signboards. Most of the incidents were muggings, or stabbings or gang fights of one kind or another and as I and my boyfriend were just about the only white people living on the entire estate I could not but help feel vulnerable. I was always thinking: ‘Oh God, please don’t let me get any problems tonight.’ We may not be talking New York ghetto here but being barely 16 years old, with no family who wanted to know me, and living in a place like that, really rammed home to me how alone in the world I truly was. Amazingly, despite my constant nervousness, I was never bothered by anyone, a fact I put down to my boyfriend being a body-builder whose sheer muscle-power earned him a grudging respect on the mean streets where we lived.

The other odd thing was that the flat itself, an illegal squat for which nobody paid rent, was actually a clean and decent home. It had central heating, believe it or not, and some carpets, windows and even a working oven. A previous tenant had left the flat partly furnished and my friend had reached an agreement to pay the utility bills so that it still had running water, gas and electricity. It was almost like having a two-bedroomed flat, on split levels, with an upstairs and a downstairs.

On one of my first nights alone in the flat my attempts to do English Literature homework were interrupted by a commotion outside. I saw scores of uniformed policemen sneaking along the wall and then converging in a rush on the
building below. They rammed open the door and soon afterwards dragged out a group of guys with all of the accompanying chaos and noise that you could possibly imagine. I was thinking, ‘Oh bloody hell, nobody even knows where I am at the moment; anything could happen, somebody could break the door in and I’m here on my own.’ I felt entirely alone and vulnerable. When the guy I was staying with got home I breathlessly told him the news. ‘Big deal, what’s the problem? It’s a crack house down there. They raid it all the time. One opens up on the estate, they raid it, shut it down and another opens up across the way.’ It was a sobering thought; this was not the place for homework and I had to live here and get to and from my school each day. Life was going to be challenging.

My nights with the bodybuilder had already turned into a sexual relationship although it was clear we were never going to be a dedicated couple. In many ways it was a shag of convenience for both of us. I was 16 and legal now, although he was at least twice my age. Even so he had a great body, a bodybuilder’s muscles in places where many men don’t even
have
muscles, and was certainly a lot better endowed that the earlier teenage love of my life. He also had a car, so could sometimes save me a three-bus journey by dropping me at school in the mornings or picking me up after classes. He had no problem with me staying with him but also made it clear he did not want me living there full-time. He already had a ‘steady’ girlfriend who used to turn up occasionally and other women as well. I never minded because I was not looking for romance; this was just a place to stay and I never minded making myself scarce when he had other company for the night.

The downside was that I could never unpack my small bag of clothing and the few bits and pieces that comprised my entire worldly possessions. I would never know who might be in the squat on the three or four nights a week when I couldn’t stay. As a consequence I lived a nomadic life out of the rucksack, moving between school, work, the squat, the flat where my friend from the chemist lived and the occasional night on other friends’ sofas. The biggest difficulty of all was getting the money on which to live. I had mostly free accommodation but I still needed to feed myself, buy some clothing, pay for my bus fares and just have some money for day-to-day survival.

Work was nothing new to me. I had always had a job of some sort to supplement the tiny amount of pocket money which was all that my grandparents could afford to give me. I’d done a paper round, worked in shops, in a bakery and lots of other things. They were all such crap jobs, and the one thing I did know was that I wanted more out of life than that. I used to look at the people I was working with in some boring shop job and think to myself, ‘This is their whole life. How terrible it must be to have no education and be stuck in a job like this, not just for a Saturday or one evening a week, but for your whole life.’ I knew that wasn’t going to happen to me. The irony was that the only way that I could now support myself and stay at school was to take more of those same crap jobs from which I was so desperate to escape.

So I got a job cleaning offices in the morning before school, and another job cleaning houses at the end of each school day. Then at weekends I managed to get work in a local chemist shop which was close enough for me to cycle
to on Saturdays and on a couple of afternoons after school. Between classroom and work there wasn’t time for any sort of social life and the only light on my horizon was that I was finally earning enough from my multiple jobs routine to be able to afford a room of my own. I said goodbye to the squat and moved into a tiny bedroom in a shared, terraced house in West London. I still drive past the house most days now on my way to work at my far more spacious dungeons nearby. One of my abiding memories of living there is that I didn’t have the faintest idea of how to cook anything. It wasn’t only a lack of money which forced me into eating little more than plain rice and vegetables. I was scared of poisoning myself because I had no idea of how to tell if meat of any sort was properly cooked or not.

To meet the rent payments I added yet another job, working as a gardener during the long summer school holidays. A small gardening company employed me to water the flowers and mow lawns for well-off residents in grander, detached houses in a somewhat posher nearby neighbourhood. I often mowed the lawn in my bikini, which may have helped my employment prospects, although the company owner was a perfect gentleman who never took advantage of my admittedly skimpy work attire.