by Emilie Pine
Sitting in the television studio, though I connected the bereaved mum to my own mum, I did not connect her son’s fate to mine. After all, I didn’t inhale aerosol fumes to get high. I took drugs, but I had rules. I never touched crack or heroin. I thought that this boundary, marking out the limits of my wildness, would keep me safe. I really thought I was bulletproof.
But there were danger signs even I couldn’t avoid seeing. I went for a weekend to Manchester with a DJ I’d been flirting with for months. He’d given me lifts in his car, given me presents, given me drink, given me drugs. He was over twice my age. He loved to parade me at parties, to announce to all and sundry that I was jailbait, or sometimes to pretend that he was my father, before kissing me, or licking my face. But I had never been alone with him. In Manchester, after his guest-slot at a student bar, we went to the hotel. And I realised I had made a horrible mistake. He was aggressive. He wanted it rough and when I said that I didn’t like it like that, he said that he had paid for everything, and so I owed him. Somehow I placated him, feeding him drinks from the mini-bar. When he passed out, I locked myself in the bathroom. I sneaked out in the morning when I heard the hotel maids in the corridor. I walked to the station, dodged the ticket inspectors on the train, and got back to London. The next time I saw that man was at the usual Friday club, when he started throwing empty pint glasses in my direction, shouting warnings to other men that I was a tease. The bouncers stood and watched as the glass shattered around me.
I got a head injury some months later when I was hit in the face with a beer bottle on the dance floor of a nightclub. The woman who hit me claimed I was dancing too close to her boyfriend. Head wounds are bleeders and the bathroom floor became a lake of red as the blood hit the wet tiles. The club promoter was concerned, but also needed me off the premises. ‘What age are you, really, Emilie?’ Even bleeding, I was not unaware of the irony behind the question, given that I was on a guestlist for his club, that he’d bought me countless drinks, and that he’d tried to sleep with me many times. He knew I was underage. Rather than answer, I left. A concerned group brought me to A&E. I returned home, in the early hours of Christmas Eve, with stitches that stretched into my hairline.
And I still hardly ate. In fact, not eating was a positive advantage for my lifestyle. I had no money of my own, so eating out was hardly an option. I spent time with men who would tell me how great my (undernourished) body was but who never offered to buy me dinner. After I got sick of nightclubs, I started hanging out a lot with friends in squats and at raves, existing on a diet of Mars bars and wraps of speed. My lunch money, which my mum always set aside, usually went on sugar-rich alcohol, enabling me to skip yet more meals. After years of not eating, I was constitutionally prepared for this rhythm. But it was still exhausting.
And it was cold. We spent a great deal of time, me and my friends, being cold. Actually cold, as in shivering, because the temperature was low and we were outside and not wearing sufficient clothes. We shivered outside clubs, at bus stops, smoking cigarettes, queueing for gigs, waiting for the Tube, waiting for friends, waiting for men. We stamped our feet, hands pushed tightly down into our pockets, arms clamped to our sides. For a while, before we knew people on the scene, we had found a half-way house in a bank foyer off Oxford Street, where the card swipe was broken and the door opened to a gentle shove. We’d sit there for hours, till we were sore and cramped, and it was light enough to go home. It was warmer than staying on the street, though not much. I briefly had a boyfriend who lived in a room over a tattoo parlour, and he’d let us stay there some nights. Even if we wanted to go home, it was not simple. Emerging from North London clubs, we caught night-buses, cutting south through the city to Trafalgar Square, but there was always another wait in the cold for the one that would take you home, and the bus stop was a lonely place. One night, as the bus approached the Trafalgar terminus, the kindly-seeming driver asked me and my friend if we wanted to stay on the bus, to wait in its warmth. He pulled into a side street. Then he turned the bus engine off, the lights too, and when he moved towards us he suddenly seemed less kindly. He’d seen our child travel cards, so there was no point in warning him we were underage. Our youth was part of the kick. As he got closer, we screamed and banged on the windows. He cursed us and pulled the door lever.
Another night I found money on the street. I hailed a cab. But he pulled into a side-street too. Central door locking. I told him that I had a mum and a little sister at home, waiting for me. But he only told me that I was a bad girl. He showed me his aluminium baseball bat. He watched me in the rear-view mirror. I could tell he didn’t think anyone was waiting – because what other kind of girl is standing by herself on a kerb in north London at 4am? He was only into looking though. He stroked the bat, then left it on the floor of the passenger footwell. He started the engine and drove back to the main road, kicking me out so that I had to walk the rest of the way. When I got home, the hall light was on. Mum always left it on for me. I see that light now as a sign that she was waiting, worrying, all of those nights. That she only half slept, alert until the sound of my key in the door. I wish I could erase many of the consequences of my actions but, more than anything, I wish I could erase that worry.
FOR A WHILE, I was able to act out my badness without anyone noticing at school. I kept my uniform in a locker. I could get an early Tube looking like a shard of last night, yet by assembly I seemed like any other school girl in her regulation blouse and skirt. But in my second year in London my system to escape detection began to break down. Increasingly the hangovers made it impossible to get in before the first bell, and once I’d missed that, the rest of the day seemed hardly worth it. I started to skip weeks at a time. And when I did turn up, there was trouble. One day I was spotted by the P.E. teacher and she began a tirade about my missing all my games classes. I was on the brink of being taken to the headmistress’s office when my science teacher rescued me. Though I had also missed several weeks of her classes, she insisted to the games teacher that I was in fact a new pupil, and that since I had only just joined the school I couldn’t have missed anything. She ushered me into her classroom, showed me where to sit and gave me a fresh new exercise book. At the time, I was convinced that this teacher was losing her marbles, that she genuinely didn’t recognise me or realise that I was a continuing pupil. Now, though, I tend to think that she was well aware of who I was, and chose to shield me with a barefaced lie from a notoriously angry and unstable teacher; she kept up the ‘new girl’ pretence in order to protect both of us. I was grateful. Yet I never went to another of her classes. In fact, I never had another science class ever again. It was easier, in the end, to just drop out.
I was not alone, my two best friends had the same trajectory. More and more days missed. More assignments not completed. Calling into school as if it were a social club, then out again. There were a few teachers who tried to reach us, but in the main both teachers and administrators washed their hands of us. And who could blame them, when we did all we could to get expelled? Yet looking back now, though I see what a nightmare our behaviour was, I am stunned to realise just how young, and just how vulnerable, we were. One of my friends had severe dyslexia. Though she was in many ways the smartest, and certainly the most resourceful of us, she consistently failed tests and was pushed down the school streaming system. Was it any wonder that she chose not to turn up for her exams? Another friend left school at the same time as me. Her father was abusive to her. This fact was as clear as day to anyone with any sense. But no one did anything. We might have seemed all-knowing, but we were really so innocent. What we needed was help. What we needed was protection. Not to be just let go.
Without school as a destination, it was difficult to find places to stay out all day. Because unless you’re rich, the wild-child lifestyle is not just cold but also boring. At a loss for what to do, I started to feign illness so that I could stay home with daytime television for company. It was blissful by contrast. But pretty soon my mum
insisted I stop malingering and go back to classes. I couldn’t. I repeated it over and over, a chant, ‘I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.’ I was, in fact, right. The next day she went in to meet the headmistress. It turned out I had attended too few days to be allowed to sit my intermediate exams at a state school or, indeed, to be admitted to another comprehensive school at all, unless I repeated the year. The deputy headmistress suggested that we should all cut our losses and that I could get a job. She smiled – perhaps McDonald’s? Mum wouldn’t accept defeat so easily, so the only option left was for her to find the money to send me to a private school.
I tried out, Goldilocks-style, for three new schools. At the first, though I turned on my best and nicest smile for the interview, and made sure to mention my interest in joining the choir, the headmistress saw right through me. She did not return my mum’s calls. The second gave me a day’s trial, but the day did not go well. There was some suggestion that I had made the Italian teacher cry. I was used to being in large, noisy classrooms where a certain amount of anarchy was normal. I was used to having to shout to be heard, or being left to my own devices at the back of the room. I was used to a school where no disciplinary action was taken when my class conspired to lock the art teacher in the supply room. This new, posh, quiet-girl school, with its policies on which side of the corridor to walk, was beyond me, and I wasn’t invited back.
At the third school, they asked me to do a simple mathematics question on probability, which I answered correctly. As the headmaster filled out various forms, I interrupted him to ask that my first name not be spelled with a ‘y’ at the end. At previous schools, staff had taken an almost gleeful satisfaction in scratching out the way I spell my name, and in making me write it out ‘correctly’ as punishment for ‘defacing’ my exercise books. The headmaster looked at me a moment. ‘You can spell your name any way you want.’ He explained that there were only two rules – first, turn up and, second, do the work. There was a zero tolerance policy for breaking them, which initially had both me and my mum worried. But they also scheduled classes to begin after ten, permitted cigarette breaks and allowed you to bring coffee to class. All teachers and pupils were addressed by their first names. There were only six students per class. And, crucially, the school had no uniform or dress code. No more locker-room costume changes for me.
I was relieved and, oh my God, was my mum relieved. Even so, the change of school was not all plain sailing. The other kids were all rich and so I was back to feeling poor. Many of them were rich bullies. Most of them had, like me, failed at surviving in the mainstream system. One morning, a boy turned to me in the hallway and told me to get back into the gutter. A few years later I might have tried out the Wildean line about lying in the gutter but looking at the stars. Instead, I told him to fuck off. I continued to stay out all night, drinking and taking drugs, but I managed, despite this, to follow the rules; I turned up and I handed in my coursework. I did a creative writing class and received praise for the first time in a long time. I took my intermediate exams. I registered for my final exams. At the encouragement of a favourite teacher, I started thinking about the prospect of third level. It turns out that the ambition of the nerd-girl dies hard. It wasn’t an overnight transformation, and it wasn’t always even a conscious choice, but I gradually began to pay attention to my life. And, because of this, I made it through. You know that fact, of course, because you’re reading this now.
I could end the story there. I could say that education saved me, and in many ways that would be true. But it would only be part of the truth. Because there are things I’ve left out. And if I’m to tell it, then this is the part where the story turns, and where I find myself, again, asking why I’m telling it at all. Let me pause, and just look out the window for a while. Let me stand up and walk away from the desk. Let me take a minute.
AT FIFTEEN, with two of my friends, I ran away from home.
We left notes saying we would not be back. We took sleeping bags and all our savings, about £12. We hoped, if we hung around in the city centre, that we’d meet someone who would let us stay at their place. We did, inevitably, attract attention, from a skinhead who offered to put us up somewhere if we went with him ‘right now’. But for all our bravado, we preferred sleeping in shop doorways to the risk of getting in a van with a man who could drive us who knew where.
Falling asleep on the street is scary. Waking up is shameful. The people who worked in the shops and offices we slept outside stepped over us in the mornings. During the day, we begged for money. This was initially also shaming, but could be a surprising illustration of people’s generosity too. One smiling man bought us all ice-cream sundaes, delivered with the line, ‘Don’t say I never give you anything.’ We were euphoric. But that kind of human contact was rare, and as we got tired and our voices grew whiny, we seemed increasingly invisible to all those passersby.
One night we took refuge in a hostel for homeless children. At the hostel we got a hot meal, and forms to fill out, and guidance on how to get on housing lists. During our interviews, discrete queries were made about domestic violence, about family abuse, about gang membership. We were offered counselling. The staff were sympathetic, though the other kids knew we were bullshitting when we said we were sixteen and, it felt to me, they guessed we were also bullshitting about our reasons for being on the street. In planning to run away, my friends and I had talked about how unhappy we felt at home, how much freer we would be elsewhere. We had said that running away was a radical thing that other girls would talk about but not have the guts to carry out. We had thought it would give us some kind of power. It was apparent within a few days of sleeping rough, begging and trying to keep warm in train station waiting rooms, that we were woefully mistaken. I wanted to go home. I was embarrassed, as my two friends still refused to go back. But this was one of those rare moments when I acted in my own best interests, and not in order to win a popularity vote. Because I had known, even as I had packed my bag to leave my mum’s house, that I couldn’t run away from what was really wrong. I was not battered at home. I was not treated cruelly. I had no real reason for running away. I was just lonely. I was just unhappy. I was just lost.
My younger sister was as affected as I was by being in this family, though she dealt with it by being the sweetest, most emotionally open child you could ever meet. It seemed that she wanted to be the opposite of me in temperament, like so many other younger children seeking to distance themselves from their older sibling. Yet she wasn’t distant, she was always hugging me and reassuring me. After I ran away, she was suddenly the only child in the house. A fact I did not even momentarily pause to consider on my way out the door. But I realised it with full force when I came home. I rang the doorbell and my sister came running and wrapped herself around me in the tightest grip I’ve ever felt. She was crying. She looked up at me with big sad eyes, and asked, ‘Why did you leave us?’ And I had no answer. I hadn’t anticipated that she’d miss me, or that she’d be pleased that I’d come home, or that she needed me to be there and not leave. In the selfishness I felt was sanctioned by my own emotional pain, I hadn’t considered anyone else’s needs.
Recalling the hurt and confusion in my sister’s voice at that moment, I realise that we both needed the same thing: some promise of unconditional love, some security, unavailable to either of us. And I think that maybe, in the end, we got it from each other. Two years later, when I had screwed up again and feared my mum would kick me out, my sister promised she’d keep the screw-up a secret. She told me she’d still love me, no matter what. Then she came to me with her bank book and, with great seriousness, offered to sign over all her savings so that I’d be okay. I couldn’t take it, so I hugged her, I reassured her, I smiled and joked until the worry left her eyes.
BUT I WAS NOT REALLY OKAY. And so there is another bit of the story that needs telling, of all the other nights I didn’t come home.
This is how it goes. I went to nightclubs, sometimes with friends, bu
t sometimes by myself because my friends were tired of going out all the time in search of attention. At clubs I flirted with the stranger at the bar. After so many drinks that I would have to concentrate really hard, gripping the edge of the bar itself, just in order to stay standing up, the stranger would ask me what I’d like to do. Slurring my words, I would ask if there was vodka back at his place. He would smile as an answer. He’d say we could take a cab. There were no phones to text anyone, no mobile apps to order my own taxi, no HPV vaccine, because all this was a million years ago. So I would end up in this strange man’s flat with a mug of vodka and no way out. The man may have thought that I gave him everything when my nakedness was there, in the room, gooseflesh. And sure, my body was there. But I was miles away. I had one thought only, reverberating through me, saving me but damning me too. I removed myself through this mantra: I am not here.
I thought I knew the value of what I traded – my adolescent body – and I thought that I was on the winning end of the bargain. But what it really meant was that I put no value on myself at all. And so the separation of body and self that I engineered, which began years earlier when I stopped eating normally, was made complete by these encounters. And they hurt. Physically. Mentally. Emotionally. They hurt. Every time. All the times.
I maintained a happy-go-lucky façade, but inwardly became cold, sensationless. I distanced myself from anything emotionally problematic. I basically shut down. Instead of talking to the people I was with, I continued the internal dialogue I had begun as a sleepless child, in which I would witness, as if from a great distance, my own actions, accompanied by a relentlessly fault-finding commentary. Though I have managed over the years to get away from most of my self-destructive traits, that particular dialogue is still with me. It is still what keeps me awake at night.