‘Hi, it’s Chanelle,’ I said sheepishly. ‘I know you’re not expecting me but I’ve come to visit.’
‘Are you kidding? You’re mad!’ she said, laughing and not knowing the half of it. ‘It’s late – why didn’t you tell me you were coming?’
‘Um, it was a spur of the moment thing. I wanted to surprise you.’
‘Well, you’ve done that. OK, wait there and I’ll come and collect you.’
Emma picked me up on her scooter and, as soon as she saw me, she said, ‘Let me guess. You’ve fallen out with your folks.’
‘Yep. Majorly,’ I said and nodded. ‘I hate them.’
She smiled sympathetically. ‘Right, tell me all about it later. Hop on.’
I put the helmet on and climbed on behind her and we set off for her mum’s place a few miles away. But within minutes, just after we joined the M62, we were faced with a total disaster.
‘Shit! The police!’ Emma said, as a flash of blue lights appeared behind us.
‘Shit!’ I echoed, as she pulled over onto the hard shoulder. ‘What will we say? I’m not going home. Please don’t tell them I’ve run away!’
With both of us panicking, the policeman approached us and said, ‘Do you know it’s illegal to ride a scooter on the motorway?’
‘Er, no. I’m really sorry,’ Emma fibbed. ‘I had no idea. But I won’t do it again, I promise.’
‘Well, I still have to impose a penalty fine. You’ve broken the law and you were posing a serious danger to yourself and other motorists.’
She gave her details to the officer, as I sat there praying that would be the end of it and we could scoot off to her mum’s house via some country lane instead. But the look of terror on my face must have been a giveaway because the policeman then asked for my name and address. After I’d told him, with my heart thudding, he frowned at me.
‘So what are you doing here this late at night? Wakefield is a long way away. Do your parents know you’re here?’
‘Yes. Well, kind of. Anyway, they won’t mind. They know Emma,’ I stammered.
‘How old are you please, miss?’
‘Er, I’m fifteen.’
The policeman sighed and looked at his watch. It was at least 11.30pm by now and he looked as if he really could do without the hassle so late in the evening.
‘I think you had better come with me to the station,’ he said. ‘We can call your parents and ask them if they’re happy about you being away from home.’
‘No, please. It’s really OK. They’re fine with me doing what I want. You don’t need to call them,’ I begged. ‘Please just let me go home with Emma.’
But he was adamant and insisted we both go to the police station, which was so humiliating. My first attempt at running away and I couldn’t even make it through a couple of hours before being found out.
‘Mr Hayes, I’m sorry to disturb you at this hour but I have your daughter Chanelle here at Hull police station,’ he said into the phone. There was a pause. ‘Yes, she’s safe and well. But I take it you didn’t know she was here?’
There was a pause. ‘No, I thought not.’
As their conversation continued, I sat with my head bowed, feeling like such a baby. And though I tried not to cry, I couldn’t help it.
Emma hugged me. ‘Don’t get upset,’ she said. ‘You can come and visit me another time.’
‘It’s not that. I’m just going to be in so much trouble,’ I said.
‘Don’t worry, it’ll be fine,’ she tried to reassure me. ‘They’ll just be glad to get you home.’
‘You don’t know my dad,’ I said, sniffing.
Then I heard the officer say, ‘Yes, of course. We’ll look after her here until then. See you later.’
It turns out that Mum and Dad hadn’t realised I’d gone until they got that call – no doubt assuming I was tucked up in bed and fast asleep.
In desperation, I tried one more time to win over the officer. ‘Do I really have to go home? I want to stay here with Emma.’
It was no use. ‘Yes, you do have to go home, young lady. You’ve got two very concerned parents back in Wakefield. Do you realise the risk you put yourself in by not telling them where you’d gone?’
I said nothing and stared at the ground. And as I waited for Dad to pick me up from the freezing cold police station, I felt nauseous about his reaction. When he arrived an hour or so later, he looked pale and worn out but he didn’t even need to say anything. I could tell from his expression how angry and disappointed in me he was.
We drove back without speaking a word. Mum was still up when we got home and she dashed to the front door and flung her arms around me when we arrived. But then she took a step backwards and the expression on her face changed drastically.
‘What on earth were you playing at? You can’t just go off on your own without telling us. Anything could have happened and we would never have known where you were.’
Feeling too exhausted for a big scene, I ran straight upstairs to my room and shut the door. I climbed into bed fully clothed and remember crying myself to sleep.
Next morning, I feared the worst but, weirdly, it was like nothing had happened. I think Mum and Dad must have decided that creating more drama would not get us anywhere. I was prepared for a full-scale row but, instead, they seemed to want to bury it and carry on as normally as possible.
But within weeks of that, the tension soon built up again and I decided to go to Bridlington, where we often used to go on our caravan holidays. There was a girl called Jo, who Alison and I had become friendly with the summer before, so like a homeless stray, I turned up on the doorstep with my things and begged to stay. My plan was just as ill-thought out as before though, as her mum insisted on calling my parents and I was carted back home again, embarrassed and furious in equal measure.
But just like last time, Mum and Dad were happy to brush over what I’d done.
‘I hope we can draw a line under this behaviour now,’ Dad said. ‘You need to live by our rules if you want to stay in this house, OK? We can’t have you skipping school either. Your education is too important.’
I could see that this much was true. And, while I was mortified to have made such a mess of running away again, part of me was relieved to get back to school. I genuinely didn’t like missing my lessons so, after that, I vowed to stop the disappearing acts.
CHAPTER SIX
First Love
Things 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.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A Cry for Help
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.
Chanelle Hayes - Baring My Heart Page 4