Girl A

by Girl A

  The girl who played with Barbies was growing up – so she thought – and my parents didn’t know how to handle her. They’d try to give me extra chores to do, but I’d either just delay and delay doing them, or else flounce off to my room. Either way, they’d eventually just give up and end up doing whatever it was they’d wanted me to do. A typical encounter would go something like this:

  ‘Will you please take the boys to the park, Hannah?’ my mum would ask.

  ‘Why?’ I’d invariably reply. ‘It’s you who had them – you go.’ I loved my little brothers, of course, and there were lots of times I’d take them to the park, the shops, sometimes to the river, but there were times, too, that I wanted my freedom.

  Mum, of course, would get upset and then Dad would come in and yell at me. Part of me felt guilty, but I wasn’t letting on about that.

  Dad seemed to be the one who took this transformation in his little girl the hardest. When I was a child, his face had always seemed so jovial, so serene and confident. Now it was lined most of the time by worry or anger – or both.

  To be fair to myself, I did come in mostly on time. It was just what I did when I was out that caused the problems. At the end of the day, I was just a kid looking for laughs – anything to get away from the drudgery of everyday life in a town going nowhere.

  * * *

  I found myself chatting to Ricky more and more than in the early days of wagging school and ending up next to the railway tracks. He wasn’t in my top five, and I didn’t fancy him at all, but he was a laugh and on the nights we wandered around town, I’d often hang back and talk things over with him.

  He lived in a big house, he said, with his dad and various other relatives. It was wild and free there – no rules, just lots of beer that his dad, Harry, bought with his benefits money.

  This was another example of how everyone was looking for a little way to make their life seem better: a lot of people in the town lived for signing-on day, so they could get hold of a little bit of money to find a way to forget their troubles for a while.

  Ricky’s dad’s place sounded great, such a contrast to my own house with all of Mum and Dad’s, ‘Do this, do that, tidy up in the kitchen, get the Hoover out and for God’s sake stop getting drunk all the time.’

  ‘You should come up,’ Ricky said. ‘One weekend, maybe, and stay over. There’s loads of room and we can party all night.’ I couldn’t wait.

  Harry wasn’t the only laid-back adult around that helped us youngsters have fun. Like I said, most of the teachers turned a blind eye to us smoking at school because they knew there’d be a mutiny if they tried to crack down. Some of them would even join us! But there were limits, especially with the head teacher.

  One break time he caught a few of us smoking in the playground and told us to put our cigarettes out and go in. I did put mine out, but only after taking one more drag and blowing the smoke in his face. He went mad.

  ‘Go straight to my office,’ he ordered, pointing to the entrance, his finger quivering with rage. Inside, he gave me a long lecture about my behaviour, which ended in a three-day exclusion from school.

  I had to wait in the ‘naughty room’ while my dad was sent for.

  When Dad got there, he was as angry as only he could be. In the car he started shouting at me. ‘Why do you behave like this?’ he asked, not waiting for the reply, knowing I’d just sit there in silence. ‘Your sister doesn’t, the boys don’t.’

  It was a good point. My siblings had all been through the same thing, but they didn’t cause my parents any trouble – even Lizzie, who was closest in age to me. She was always good, while I was the black sheep. Part of me wanted to be like her, but I can’t quite explain it: there was just something in me, for some reason, that craved these ‘fun times’ I had with my mates.

  Chapter Five

  The Honey Monster

  By early summer 2008, we were all meeting up most evenings, drinking cider as we headed into the town centre to walk around and have a laugh. As ever, we were always on the lookout for something new and fun to do, so when an opportunity arose, we leapt at the chance it offered.

  Most of the time the police left us alone. Sometimes, though, they’d suss the old Lucozade trick and would pour the cider away in front of us. I didn’t get any more cautions, though. Maybe they’d given up on us, I don’t know.

  By now it had got to the stage where I just couldn’t stand being at home, and my family – or my parents at least – couldn’t stand me being there.

  If I’d been older, or had some money, I’d have moved out. When I moaned to Ricky about it sometimes, he’d say, ‘Come up to my place if you like. You’d like it.’

  For some reason I’d still not been to his – most times when I was staying away overnight it was at one of the girls’ houses – and I was tempted to take Ricky up on his offer. He made his place, or rather Harry’s place, seem like the coolest house in the whole of town. It sounded a laugh: a big house, much bigger than ours, with none of the ‘boundaries’ and ‘responsibilities’ and tellings-off about ‘respect’ that were suffocating me at home.

  In the end, there was no particular family row that made me leave home. It had just become inevitable. I’d fallen out so many times with Mum and Dad, vanished into thin air so many times, that it just became a natural step – on both sides. So, somewhere towards the end of Year 10 at school, in the June of 2008, I sort of drifted away and up to Harry’s place.

  * * *

  My first time there had been after a night out in town with a group of mates, Ricky included. Courtney was with us, too, and her boyfriend.

  You didn’t even have to get inside Harry’s house to know it was pure bedlam in there – the graffiti on the walls outside told you that. I nearly turned straight round and headed home that night, but since it was gone 1 a.m. and I was drunk, I thought better of it.

  Inside, everyone still seemed to be up. It was like Fagin’s kitchen, full of people smoking weed and looking as if they could do with a wash. Mum and Dad would have gone ape if our place was ever like that, but this lot didn’t seem to notice.

  Most of the people there were in their late teens, early twenties. The four of us were younger than all of them. Out on the streets together, we always felt in charge but there, we felt a bit intimidated. Courtney and I looked at each other. She seemed a bit shell-shocked, but then gave one of her nervous giggles and accepted a can of cider.

  Together we looked around, taking in this strange new environment. The graffiti I’d seen outside was also here on the inside walls: in the hall and kitchen were lots of badly drawn people with balloon ‘thoughts’ coming out of their heads, all of them mindless and making no sense.

  There were three dogs at Harry’s: all of them mongrels, all mad; one of them with its back legs broken. In the kitchen, I nearly tripped over this one as it came shuffling up to me, dragging up dirt and dust from the floor in the process. I could see fleas all over its head and pushed it away with my foot. Ricky said it had had its legs broken when a mate of one of his brothers had decided to throw it out a bedroom window for a laugh. They’d not taken it to a vet, so its legs hadn’t healed properly, leaving it crippled and in pain. The RSPCA eventually put it down after they raided the place.

  If the dogs were dysfunctional, the humans in the house were as bad – drinking lager and cider, laid out with smoke from their drugs wafting over them. Some were Ricky’s relatives, a lot were just the hangers-on that the family seemed to attract.

  There had been a few grunts to say hello as we walked in, but only one of them had spoken properly to us. ‘Who’s this then, Ricky?’ said an old guy, sprawled on the only sofa in the room – a brown fake-leather one with rips in the cushions that meant you could see the stuffing inside. He was smoking a roll-up and drinking from a can of Carling.

  This, it turned out, was Ricky’s dad. Harry. His shirt was untucked and there was days-old stubble on his face, but he had a nice, reassuring sort of smile. He
looked a bit like one of those pensioners you see wandering slowly along Blackpool prom. Sitting there among the rest of us, all much younger, he seemed a bit lost and a bit ancient.

  We sat on the floor for ages, listening to all the drunken madness of the place and carrying on getting as smashed as they were. Courtney then went upstairs with her boyfriend, giving me a wink as she did so. Then, a while later, I headed off with Ricky, so he could find me somewhere to sleep. Just sleep, that is. There was never anything between us. We were just mates.

  Just before we settled down in the same room as Courtney and her boyfriend, Ricky pushed some drawers against the door. ‘No lock on it,’ he whispered. ‘This way, no one else will get in. The rest can sort themselves out.’ I fell asleep on a bed with no sheet and no pillow. It was that sort of place.

  It felt like I’d only just gone to sleep when there was a banging on the door.

  ‘Let me in, for fuck’s sake,’ boomed a girl’s voice, deep and threatening.

  ‘Go away,’ Courtney said, her voice croaky from alcohol and lack of sleep. ‘This is our room.’

  ‘No, it’s not – it’s mine!’ shouted the girl on the landing. ‘And you’d better open the door now or I’ll smash your fucking face in.’

  The girl with the booming voice was clearly someone to reckon with physically, because even as Courtney blanched, then dipped beneath her duvet, the door was beginning to open. Ricky clearly knew the intruder, and quickly jumped up to start pulling at the drawers so she could get in. A moment later, the fat face of a girl, red, blotchy and angry, appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Do that again and you’re dead,’ she shouted, her lumbering frame moving towards the window, reaching down to shift piles of debris and discarded clothes as she went. ‘Who’s moved my shoes?’ she glowered.

  I shrank away from her. I had no idea where her shoes were, nor anything else about her, but I wasn’t about to say. She had a presence that said, If you know what’s good for you, stay back.

  Luckily for all of us, she found the missing shoes next to the TV and seemed to calm down, before sitting down on Ricky’s bed to put them on.

  As I say, she was a big girl, wearing leggings that must have been four or even five times bigger than mine, plus a white, oversized T-shirt that had the words ‘Fuck You!’ picked out in black.

  Her eyes held mine. ‘Who are you?’ she asked, her voice gravelly, her eyes fixing me with the sort of gaze you daren’t ignore. I thought she must be at least a year older than me, maybe two.

  ‘Hannah,’ I said nervously. ‘I go to school with Ricky.’

  ‘Emma,’ she said, by way of introduction. ‘His cousin.’

  She started looking me up and down, disapprovingly. ‘Which school do you go to?’ she asked.

  I told her, and she scoffed. ‘Which year?’

  ‘Year Eleven,’ I said. ‘Well, in September I will be …’

  It turned out that although she looked older, there were actually only five months between our birthdays – and we were in the same school year. Not that it seemed to matter to her, because she said she hardly ever went.

  ‘They can’t make me,’ she said, breaking into a smile I thought she’d never find. ‘I just never turn up. And, anyway, it’s shit.’

  By that time we were all wide awake, so we went downstairs and spoke some more – her, me and Courtney. Straight off, she told us she was the hardest girl in Rochdale, and we didn’t doubt it. ‘No one fucks with me,’ she added, just to make sure we’d got the whole picture.

  Still bleary from the drinking, I found myself drawn to Emma as she sprawled on the sofa as if she, not Harry, owned it. Right from the start, she seemed to have a strange power. It wasn’t just her size, her physical presence. Even now I find it hard to understand, let alone explain – there was something menacing about her, while at the same time there was something about her that made me look up to her. I knew straight away that I was scared of her, but I also liked the way she seemed to stick up for herself. I found myself thinking, If she’s my friend, no one’s ever going to kick off against me.

  I hadn’t doubted her authority from the moment she’d spoken that first time in the bedroom, and I wouldn’t doubt it for a long time.

  We spoke for an hour or more. She told the two of us how she’d beaten girls up at school, and lads, and how she was so hard that she had to have a social worker. She wouldn’t take crap from anyone, she said, and I could see that she meant it.

  ‘Milly’s at your school isn’t she? You know her?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Yeah – threw her down the stairs a while back. Thought she was someone.’

  Beside me, Courtney, usually so bubbly, seemed to have gone into her shell.

  The conversation ended abruptly when Emma’s mobile rang. ‘Yeah, coming now,’ she said into the phone and, a moment later, she was gone, sweeping up her handbag and heading for the front door.

  Courtney and I watched her climb into the back of the cab, a red Toyota. I noticed it had a sign on the side that said it was from a company called Streamline. In the months to come I’d see it a lot.

  ‘Wow,’ Courtney breathed, once she’d gone.

  ‘Yeah, I know. Scary, eh?’

  ‘You bet,’ Courtney replied, still quiet, quieter than I’d ever known her.

  In the silence I tried to fathom this strange new person in my life. If you’ve ever seen the film, This is England, you’ve had a glimpse of Emma. She wasn’t psychotic, not like the shaven-headed guy in the film running the gang of skinheads, but she still carried that sense of menace. Like him, it wasn’t always so much what she said as how she actually said it. And, like him, she knew she had a reputation that made people scared. You just felt all the time that she was on the verge of kicking off, even if she wasn’t.

  There’s a scene in This is England where the hard guy cries – over a girl, I think. But not Emma. Over the next seven months that I got to know her, I never saw any soft side in her. I’d see her get mad plenty of times, but not upset: never upset. At times she’d rant like she had Tourette’s, not so bad that she’d scream, but pretty close. I would also come to realise that she had the kind of look your mum and dad give you when you’re little to stop you doing something – as a kid you know that look, and when it comes you can’t do anything but obey it. In Emma’s case, though, it didn’t stop you doing something – it made you do something, even if you didn’t want to. Added to this, her mood could switch as suddenly as a taxi light coming on, and it made her incredibly unsettling to be around. You just never knew where you were with her.

  Maybe it was that that drew me in, and made me look up to her in some weird kind of way. You could be mates with her, yes, but only on her terms – you had to be scared of her, too. I for one called her by her proper name, never her nickname. Braver kids than me called her the name that fitted her best: the Honey Monster, though it was always behind her back.

  The next time we saw her, she said she’d been out partying and chilling with some of her Asian mates. A friend of hers, Roxanne, had been with her and they’d had ‘a massive good time’. It only added to her allure for me. I was hypnotised by her, dangerously so.

  * * *

  Once I’d moved into this house of horrors, I actually found myself settling into the madness of what was beginning to feel like a chaotic version of home. I didn’t want to go back to Mum and Dad. Although this place was pretty dreary, I loved the freedom – and the sense that, finally, at fifteen, I could be somewhere where I felt less hassled, less put upon. My very own, independent me.

  I hadn’t actually heard from my parents. Maybe they didn’t mind, or else they were giving me the space to be a teenager. About time, I thought, though at the back of my mind, for all the people and wonderful chaos around me, I felt a little lonely, a little confused at times.

  Emma and I talked again, her telling me of all the places she knew and all the friends she had. She talked about having an Asian boyfriend and
lots of Asian friends. She seemed to know so many people.

  As I hung around with her more, I realised the sense of menace about her didn’t go away. You just knew that she wasn’t a girl to cross. Irresistibly, I was drawn evermore to the way she seemed to have so much control; I felt I was beginning to bond with her, like you do with a new best mate.

  I ended up staying at Harry’s place for longer than I’d anticipated. I suppose I’d effectively run away from home, without actually really realising it. I preferred living as an outcast at Harry’s place to being at home – and, anyway, I knew my mum and dad didn’t want me with them (or so I thought).

  I had no money, but that didn’t matter. For all the dirt and the fleas, there was always food and beer to be had, and Harry always seemed happy to buy more when it ran out. There were no rules at Harry’s, and no one seemed to mind what I did.

  One time, when Emma wasn’t in, a couple of lads started telling me to watch out ‘because she slept with Asians’. I thought they just meant she had an Asian boyfriend, so I ignored it. She can do what she wants, I thought. It didn’t affect me. And what was wrong with dating an Asian guy? Nothing. I knew some Asian people in the area had the reputation of seeing English girls as ‘cheap’ due to the fact that we went drinking, and wore the clothes we wanted to, but I knew they were a minority. I did worry about attracting attention from these guys, though, as it could get ugly when it happened – I’d seen it, on the streets. So I just thought these lads were small-minded and didn’t really know what they were talking about. I chose to stay quiet.