by Girl A
The staff weren’t very welcoming. I’d barely given them my name before they were telling me I’d have to leave if my attendance was no good. I was shocked. Elouise squeezed my hand and headed off to class, while I was taken to the learning mentors so they could decide which class I should be in.
I spent the first morning sitting next to a girl called Courtney. She seemed nice enough, but I hated the class as a whole – the pupils were just so completely wild it made me feel uncomfortable.
Looking around in the first break, I felt a glimmer of hope. In my old school everyone had had brand-new bags and named shoes, and if you didn’t have them you’d be picked on. Mum and Dad had got me all the new stuff – the bag, the shoes, the blazer – because they hadn’t wanted me to be bullied. I knew they’d struggled to do it, because money was tight and getting tighter. Here, people didn’t even take bags and they were mostly wearing trainers. So it looked like one less thing to worry about.
Also, people at this school seemed to smoke everywhere – on the corridors, the playground, and they actually had a smoking area for the kids – not so much because the teachers were being lax and irresponsible, but because they knew the kids would do it anyway. We’d never have got away with that in my old school! They’d have expelled you.
I didn’t smoke, but I liked the fact you could because it felt less strict. I guess you could say it was rougher here, but in a way I was relieved by that. It wasn’t as snobby; I felt maybe I could belong after all.
That first lunchtime, Courtney pushed her chair back from the desk and started whispering: ‘Quick!’ she breathed. ‘Let’s get to the dinner queue before the good stuff goes.’
School dinners were really nice here, and the chicken tikka sandwiches were the best. Everyone seemed to want them. You had to run to the front of the queue to get the chicken tikka!
But I was still worried about the class I’d been put in, and once I’d found Elouise, I asked her whether they might let me change. ‘It’s worth a try,’ she said. She came with me to see the mentor I’d met in the morning, and actually she was fine about it. And so I ended up in Elouise’s class, sitting next to her.
This second class was so much better than the first, and by mid afternoon I’d begun to feel a little less nervous. It certainly helped to have Elouise close by. Overall, though, the people at this new school were all tougher than I was used to, and in those first few weeks I discovered that the place had more of a reputation for fighting than for the kids it turned out. It made me realise I’d struggle there unless I found a way to fit in.
It wasn’t the sort of place to go in for a lot of school trips – they cost money after all, and this school struggled to find the budget for everyday schooling. So, for us, a trip was a walk up to the shop at the top of school, and that was just so we could buy cigarettes. Yes, it didn’t take me long to join in on the smoking. I guess it was the most obvious thing I could do to fit in.
It was a team effort to get your hands on some cigarettes. People used to put bits of their money together, out of their dinner money, so they could buy a pack of ten Richmond. Usually, it was four of us clubbing together: me, Elouise, Courtney and another chubby girl in my class called Hayley.
We’d have to ask someone to buy the cigarettes for us, but that wasn’t a problem – there’d always be someone willing to do it. Why would they care?
I didn’t smoke properly, and it was only now and again, when I had money. We’d have half a cigarette before school and half at break, in school or out of school – it didn’t really matter; school wasn’t bothered. The first time I tried, I coughed and spluttered until I was blue in the face, while the other kids howled with laughter. But after a while I found a way of not inhaling properly and, finally, I started to look like the rest of the crowd: leaning back against the wall in our school uniforms, blowing smoke through our nostrils or out the sides of our mouths.
After this, it seemed the next stage of my extra-curricular education would be in drinking; the lessons I was learning at this school were certainly life-changing, but not in the right way exactly.
I started drinking when I was thirteen. You could get cheap white cider and stuff on the estate. You’d buy it and put it in Lucozade bottles from home, then wander around the estate with your mates. The girls I was with – Elouise, Courtney and Hayley – had all grown up around Heywood and, for them, smoking and drinking were rites of passage – just things they’d started doing when they got to a certain age. The normal rules of suburbia didn’t seem to apply around my way. In this new world, even twelve-year-olds had weed in their pockets, and I got used to seeing used syringes, cans, bottles and discarded condoms in the play areas. It was all a bit of a shock at first, but gradually I got used to it.
So, there I was, a young teenager, trying to fit in with a whole new world. For the first time ever, my confidence took a real knocking and I did whatever I could to fit in. Where I’d once excelled at maths and been given £20 to spend in Claire’s as a reward, the only new skills I was picking up now were the best ways to get hold of fags and booze without my parents or the school or the police finding out. And the reward for my efforts? Acceptance from the other kids. It was becoming a formative year to say the least.
Our initial gang of four extended to six with the addition of Shauna, another of my school friends who was a few weeks younger than me and Milly, one of Elouise’s old friends. Together we’d head into the town centre at weekends, or else to each other’s houses for sleepovers.
My place was the same house Mum and Dad are still in: a better-than-most council terrace with leather sofas, pet rats, a wide-screen TV in the lounge and never enough bedrooms upstairs. It was a bus ride to the town centre and its landscape of long-abandoned mills, dingy barbers’ shops, two taxi ranks near Morrison’s, and the tatty kebab shops and pizza places.
We’d not stay over at my house very much, to be honest. Mum and Dad didn’t seem to approve of my new friends, so it always felt a bit frosty when they’d turn up. Mum and Dad seemed to think they were a cut above everyone else on the estate, and they thought my new-found friends were beneath me. As far as I could see, though, I was no different – and neither were my parents. It was just that they’d been used to something different where we’d lived before. Me, I just knew I had to adapt, to try to fit in.
We had our wildest times at Hayley’s place. We’d be open-mouthed as she’d tell us how she’d first had sex with a lad when she was twelve. For all that she appeared slow, she was pretty quick at getting lads into bed or wherever. Night after night, sometimes as we lay in her room in the darkness, she’d give us blow-by-blow accounts of her lurid encounters. With another girl you might have thought she was making it up: not Hayley.
My life at home began to change, my attitude not helped as teenage hormones began to flood my still boyish frame: as well as the physical effects that took place, a lot of emotional ones did, too. I started to rebel and kick back against Mum and Dad. They’d always been quite strict when I was a kid, but it hadn’t seemed to matter then. They’d probably tell you there’s always been a rebellious streak in me and now, living in a tough town on the edge of the Pennines, that streak was coming to the fore.
Mum and Dad, especially Dad, had found their drop in social status a catastrophe that they struggled to cope with. They struggled with me, too, and, as the family’s money ran out, and they headed into debt, every little row suddenly seemed to go to a whole new level. A simple, ‘Can you help with the washing up, please?’ would turn into a full-scale war of shouting, stomping and screaming. And I wouldn’t be the only one screaming.
‘What is wrong with you?’ Mum would screech after me, as I shook the whole house with one of my epic door slams. ‘You’re grounded!’
Maybe like a lot of parents, they were fine dealing with their kids when they were little, but couldn’t make the switch to dealing with those same kids when they hit adolescence. Especially when they hit it as hard as I did.
Gradually, Mum and Dad began to get wind of my antics outside the house. As it dawned on them that I was, after all, ‘mixing with the wrong crowd’, the arguments would get even worse and it would be the front door I’d be slamming as I tried to escape them. Home felt like the last place I wanted to be when I could be hanging out, having a laugh with my new friends. They probably were the wrong crowd, but to me they were cool and I wanted to be with them, wanted to be like them, and just to fit in. The shyness of childhood was still very much with me, but somehow I’d managed to make these friends and I was going to do everything I could to keep them.
At school, my mates and I would be the first to head off to the top gate to have a smoke, and in the evenings and at weekends we’d hang around together. At our old home, I used to go shopping and to the pictures (though by the time we left I didn’t really have the money to do that); here, the kids didn’t do those things because they were usually broke, too. They’d just go around the estates or to other people’s houses and chill. It was a big difference, but it made me feel that bit happier, like I fitted in.
We used to drink together and listen to a lot of rave music. We’d make up CDs on the computer and dance around, mostly at the weekends. When I got home, I’d try to sneak in without my parents noticing. I’d tell Lizzie what went on – she was my sister, after all, and it was good to tell her what a laugh I’d been having. I couldn’t have told Mum and Dad. Well, you can’t, can you?
It was the Lucozade bottles that got me into trouble, eventually. Mum thought I really liked it, but of course I didn’t: it was just good for putting cider in once my sisters had drunk the pop. I’d just turned fourteen the night we got caught by the police. Not really caught, but my dad got a letter about it.
‘Hannah!’ Dad shouted, one morning. When I got to the kitchen he was clutching a piece of white paper with the letterhead for the local police constabulary at the top. His face was almost purple with rage.
‘What the hell is this?’ he raged, waving the paper around. My stomach dropped as I realised what it must be. I was in big trouble.
One night, we’d been going through Heywood as usual when a marked car had pulled up and a couple of policemen had got out. They could see we all had bottles, and that most of them said ‘Lucozade’ on the label. A bit obvious, really. Anyway, they started asking us what was in the bottles and we said, ‘Well, like, Lucozade …?’ – that sort of thing. A few of us, Courtney, Elouise, Milly and I, had thrown our bottles into the hedge, but not the others. The police sniffed them and smelled the cider, which didn’t exactly surprise them.
‘Doesn’t smell like Lucozade to me,’ one said, raising an eyebrow, while another went through the bush and found the rest of the bottles. All the cider went into the gutter. They gave us a lecture and took all our names.
That’s why Dad got the letter, and why I was grounded for a week. Plus, I got a caution.
But, often, not even grounding me worked – I would stay home for a few days, but then slip away when I felt like it. Maybe it was around then that my parents began to lose the fight to control me and make me behave the way they wanted me to. Things certainly got worse at home, and I felt I was gradually growing apart from them and, anyway, they had the younger ones to look after.
That, too, was something that rankled. As I got older, it felt as though I was expected to help look after my younger siblings all of the time. Mum and Dad say they were just trying to get me to do my share, but the rebel in me didn’t see it that way. The worst it ever got was after the twins were born. While Mum looked after them, it was down to me to get the others up in the morning, make breakfast and wash up the pots from the night before. To the teenage me, it felt so unfair.
I came to resent it more and more as I got older, and it made me want to wind Mum and Dad up more and more, so I could get even with them. They just didn’t seem to want me to have my own free time, and they certainly didn’t want me going out and getting drunk with my mates. They seemed to just want me to live a life of homework and drudgery around the house. Whenever I went out, they’d say things like, ‘Don’t forget, you’ve got to be home by 11 p.m.’ And then, ‘You’ll be in trouble if you aren’t.’
Yeah, whatever, I’d think.
The stricter they tried to be, the more rebellious I grew. Was it all part of growing up? Was it my surroundings or their parenting? Or was it all my fault? I guess everyone will have an opinion. But I didn’t have time to stop and think at that age: I was too busy doing what I wanted to do. And that was being a teenage girl, without a care in the world. Nobody was going to stop me having fun.
* * *
Courtney was my best mate by now: funny, mad Courtney, who was really bubbly and had a wicked sense of humour. I was a bit crazy myself, but shyer, more reserved, at least in school. In classes Courtney would have us in stitches, flicking bits of rubber at teachers with her ruler, and then putting on a dead-straight face when they’d turn around. She did it time and time again and always got away with it. Well, usually.
I started wagging school when I was still fourteen – only just fourteen, really, in the spring of 2007. Courtney, Hayley and I would sneak away from classes we didn’t like – PE and English, usually – and head off to the railway tracks near school. Hayley took us the first time, mostly because she fancied a lad called Wayne and he’d usually be there: him and Ricky, a lad the same age as me who was so rarely at school you could almost imagine he didn’t go there. We’d all sit together on the bank, drinking, smoking, chatting, playing music on our phones as the trains rumbled by. In the evenings, the same gang would often head off into the town centre together, walking, talking, sitting on benches while we drank cider, or else generally milling around as teenagers do.
Mum and Dad would get mad at me when I came home drunk. They seemed to accept that I was drinking with mates, but they hated the idea of me getting drunk out of my skull. They said it wasn’t safe, that something bad might happen to me. I just laughed it off.
I was having fun.
The first time I stormed off and stayed out overnight without telling my parents was around June that year. There’d been an argument about me coming home drunk, so I had just gone upstairs, climbed out of my window and gone to Shauna’s house. Mum and Dad gave me a roasting when I came home the next morning, but it didn’t seem to do any good. Their words were like water off a duck’s back.
Chapter Three
Daddy
Tasty Bites was an Indian takeaway in the middle of town. It was on the usual circuit my friends and I would take on our walks around the centre: past the Edwin Waugh pub on Market Street, on towards the Balti House, then cut right by Dunne’s store and Morrison’s, and rejoin Market Street for a second time, near the barber’s where Dad used to have his hair cut for £3.50.
I suppose ending up in Tasty Bites was a natural progression for us, not least because if we were hungry, which was most times, we could pop in late and buy something like chips and curry sauce or a £1 pizza sandwich to share.
And there was another reason to go. By now Milly, more forward and older-looking than the rest of us had started going out with a guy from the takeaway. Saj, she told us in a whisper at school one day, was in his thirties. His thirties! When she told us that we were horrified, though it clearly didn’t seem to bother her.
I remember turning to Elouise as we headed off to Art and asking, ‘How can she do that? I could never go out with anyone that old. And they can’t even talk to each other because he doesn’t even speak English.’
Saj used to ring Milly while she was still at school, and there were lots of times she’d wag lessons so she could go off with him. The rest of us would giggle about it at the back of the class or in the playground. It did seem weird, but by the time it got to evening we were happy enough to call at Tasty Bites as we made our late-night tours of Heywood’s dull, forgotten streets.
I remember as clear as day the first time we met Daddy. It was Milly who intr
oduced us one night, having seen him around the back when she was hooking up with Saj who she was sleeping with. We’d all piled into Tasty Bites – me, Courtney, Elouise, Shauna, Milly and Hayley – and were hanging around by the counter when Milly peeled away and returned a few minutes later with a beaming Asian guy in tow.
‘This is Daddy,’ she said, all serious, trying to ignore the sniggers from the rest of us as we took in his name. Daddy worked with Saj and was a friend of his. It seemed such a daft nickname for the guy standing in front of us: a cheery old man in his fifties with a faint moustache, wearing blue jeans and a black, round-necked jacket.
To me, Daddy looked a bit like Father Christmas, but Asian: round and jolly, with a face that lit up when he smiled. He shook each of our hands in turn, smiling broadly and saying, ‘Pleased to meet you’ to each of us. In my case he winked, and placed his left hand on my wrist as we shook hands. Milly obviously liked him, and in those few moments I think the rest of us took to him, too. It just seemed we could instantly trust him. He looked like a friendly, safe man to be around.
He was also really generous. ‘Come, come,’ he said. ‘Let me show Milly’s friends upstairs. Would you like doner? A drink? Come upstairs, you can chill.’
So up we trooped, him leading the way, a little breathless, up the narrow staircase. He took us into what seemed to be a spare bedroom – almost bare, with only a double mattress on the floor.
‘Sit,’ he said. ‘Please sit, and I’ll bring you food and Pepsi.’
While he was gone, Milly filled us in about him. She had no idea why he was called Daddy, she said, but maybe it was because he was such a lovely guy. Anyway, he lived with his family in Oldham and was the takeaway’s delivery driver – he had a little blue car that he’d pile up with orders and deliver around the local council estates.