by Jenny Molloy
I’d been saving up, using all my spare change, and had about £40 in a jar in my room when it went missing. I asked Davina what had happened and she started to cry, confessing that Stanny had given her £5 not to say anything.
I got hold of Stanny and told him to give me the money.
‘I don’t have it.’
‘Give it back to me.’
I grabbed him, shaking him, not noticing he had a knife in his hand. ‘What are you doing?’
He screamed, ‘Go away, go away, go away!’ and as he struggled to push me away, he somehow swiped the blade between my thumb and forefinger, managing to slice out a good piece of flesh. The doctor stitching me up asked me how I did it. I said I cut it on a can. He paused and looked up for a moment, caught my eye, knew I was lying and carried on. Neither of us said anything more as he finished the stitches.
By this time I was headed down a bad route. I’d started smoking cigarettes before quickly moving on to cannabis, spending all I could on this wonderful natural herb that made me feel so good. If it was a dark December day, raining and cold, smoking cannabis made it seem as though the sun was shining in a city of rainbows. When Dad found out, he got really cross. He put all drugs in the same class – grass was as bad as heroin, as far as he was concerned and, even though he demanded and then begged me to stop, I refused. Eventually, when neither of us would back down, I left home.
To begin with I stayed with friends and managed to live for six weeks this way, hiding in bedrooms and spare rooms. I didn’t like living off their charity, so looked for something to do to make money. Which was harder than I first thought. I was at a friend’s house, bored, while she was out trying to buy some grass, when I met her older sister, a glamorous eighteen-year-old called Kath. Her room smelled like a shop – that smell of new stuff – and it was full of boxes. There were designer clothes, electronic gizmos of every description – from men’s shavers to laptops – and a few bottles of perfume, all in their original boxes.
‘What’s all this?’ I asked. ‘Where’d you get all this cool stuff ?’
‘Don’t touch none of it,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to take it back later to get refunds.’
She told me how she worked with a gang doing something called bar code fraud. This is when you go to Boots or John Lewis, for example, and pick out the most expensive DVD player, priced at £500, and swap its bar code for the cheapest one, say £50. She would then pay for it with cash. Later she would go back and get a refund, also always in cash (you don’t need a receipt to get a refund, according to UK law). If they wouldn’t give her a cash refund, she’d say that she’d decided to keep the item, and then give it to her boss who had people he could sell it to. Sometimes he would give her bar codes to stick over the original ones.
‘I could do that!’ I said.
‘You’re too young.’
‘I’m sixteen,’ I said (I was actually fifteen). ‘And when I dress up I look a lot older.’ I kept on at Kath until she agreed to introduce me to her boss, who turned out to be a chubby, middle-aged white man from Manchester who wore tight T-shirts and dirty, grey tracksuit bottoms. He employed thirty women working from ten cars in seven-day shifts all around the UK. He paid all my expenses – travel, cheap hotels and food – so all my basic living needs were taken care of. Anything I made I could spend on what I liked – drugs, booze and clothes. I started slowly and made about £30 each day after exchanging several thousand pounds’ worth of gear. It was a massive operation and must have come to over a million pounds in terms of the amount of goods stolen and money exchanged over a year or two.
The driver of the car, usually a woman in her early twenties, was in charge and if we got caught we had to say that she was our guardian, which meant she was allowed to pick us up from the police station. I think I stayed in every single Travelodge in the UK. My boss and colleagues didn’t care that I was fifteen and officially missing from home; after all, this was a criminal enterprise. All that counted was my ability to change tags and buy and return goods according to their instructions.
I bought a mobile phone to stay in touch with Stanny and Davina and, after two weeks on the road, I got a call from Stanny’s social worker. She said that Stanny hadn’t stopped fighting and the situation had worsened to the extent that several older boys were out to get him and had thrown a brick through our lounge window. It was too dangerous to leave Stanny and Davina in the house, so they were going to take them into care.
All I could think about was how mad and upset Dad was going to be when he found out. Mum didn’t seem to care about anyone or anything these days. I was in John Lewis when I got the call. I took a bar code glued on to a cheap men’s shaver and stuck it on to the most expensive model worth almost £300. It was all going fine, as it normally did, until I got to the checkout and the bloke saw both bar codes. I’d forgotten to remove the original.
After a quick review of the CCTV footage, I was arrested. My boss got me out, as promised, but I got caught again almost the next day, this time in Leeds. I didn’t want to end up in court, so I said I wanted to leave. ‘No one’s stopping you,’ my boss said, so I took off, there and then.
We were in Manchester and for some reason I decided to do a bit of shoplifting on my own. I still don’t know why I thought this was such a good idea. I was caught for the third time in a matter of days. The police were really nice to me; they didn’t charge me and even put me on a train back to London when I told them I just wanted to go home. They probably should have called my dad, but it felt to me as if this was the quickest, easiest option for them and that was fine with me. Instead of going home when I arrived in London, I met up with a friend and carried on. The next time I was caught shoplifting, a social worker appeared.
She was really nice and explained that she wanted to help me sort things out for my family and the best thing I could do would be to go into foster care before anything too disastrous happened to me. She explained that a gang had attacked our house again, this time smashing every single window in the house. I couldn’t go home and I was obviously rubbish at shoplifting. Maybe foster care wasn’t such a bad idea.
SARAH
Sarah came into my life like a beautiful gift. I had been in recovery from my own addiction for three and a half years and was feeling a bit bored of the same people being in the same recovery meetings. Sarah appeared shy, looked vulnerable in a wistful way, and far younger than her years. The connection felt instant, even before I realised the crucial lessons that she would teach me over the coming years – lessons about the reality of what it is like to have a baby, carried inside you for nine months, taken away because of your addiction. The battle to refuse to remain in that place, to refuse to allow the trauma to trap you into more pregnancies, resulting in the same outcome. I had no idea what it felt like for my own mum to have that first baby so cruelly taken. I felt such love and pain for my mum over the coming months as I got to know Sarah, grieving for the loss of my sister, and grieving for my mum and the loss she suffered at not being able to be a mum to my sister, and not being able to make the remarkable changes that Sarah somehow found the strength to make.
I don’t remember life with my birth mother. Dad worked while Mum stayed at home with me and my older brother and sister. The neighbour would babysit while Mum did her make-up and went out for the night. She was beautiful and found it impossible to stop having affairs and so Dad, fed up beyond forgiveness, eventually decided to end it. Us kids stayed with Dad while Mum moved in with one of her short-term lovers.
My first memory is of my fourth birthday, of my dad and step-mum laughing at the tacky, pound-shop makeup Mum had sent me. Dad used to say I looked just like her, but I can’t say I’ve ever seen it myself. I could barely see her past all the bright colours, make-up and jewellery she liked to wear.
My sister, brother and I reluctantly went to visit Mum every now and again. She once yelled at us, ‘Why do you come and see me if you hate it so much?’
My brother answ
ered, ‘Because Dad wants us to.’
She slapped me once, after I called her a ‘megabitch’ for leaving Dad and generally being a pain.
We carried on like this until I was six, at which point Mum just vanished. She didn’t explain and I blamed myself. The pain of the abandonment stayed with me – although for many years afterwards I did not realise where it came from.
Life at home was good, although Dad smoked a lot of weed and drank quite a bit (but not as much as Mum had). He was a good father to us and our step-mum was lovely. Dad was strict and protective and trouble came after I turned twelve. I started wanting to go out but Dad forbade me to go beyond our local park. I obeyed until, goaded by friends, I decided to ignore him. The problem was, because I was frightened of him, I delayed coming home because I knew he’d be angry with me and so I stayed out later and later until it was dawn the following morning. I’d started the evening hanging out with friends, then went to a party and from there we went to another party, which turned out to be at a squat, full of drunk and drugged-up eighteen-year-old kids and a few crackheads.
I was still there the next day when a woman came up to me with a piece of paper. ‘You have to go home,’ she said. She handed me the paper. It was a bad photocopy of my passport photo. ‘Found it tacked to a lamp post,’ she said.
That left me even more scared but I think she must have called the number because a short time later Dad kicked the front door off its hinges and dragged me out.
Instead of being mad, however, Dad was just happy I was safe and I got lots of attention, kisses and cuddles. This I really liked; Dad had stopped kissing and cuddling me since he’d said I was becoming ‘a young lady’. I thought if cuddles were going to happen every time I went missing, then I’d go missing again. These signs of affection quickly wore off and eventually turned to anger and frustration, by which time I’d been hooked into hanging out with the wrong crowd, and I’d stopped caring about school. Dad decided to send me to live with Mum to get me away from my ‘bad’ friends, but I just used her flat as a hotel and hardly spoke to her – only asking for money and, when she said no, taking it from her purse. She couldn’t cope either and so, after asking for help from the council, I was given a room in a hostel for the homeless. I was seventeen years old. Everyone else there was in their thirties and forties and they all, without exception, spent the day getting smashed any which way they could. I loved it. It was like one long party and I’d hang out with them and visit the squat they bought their drugs from, a large house in Finsbury Park in north London, which smelled funny but the party never stopped. People were always smoking, drinking and listening to music. We ate for free from the Hare Krishna food van and from a homeless charity that gave us a delicious meat stew and cheese rolls from a once-weekly soup kitchen in Arlington Road, near Camden Market.
I was in another squat, quite a nice one, it was clean and tidy compared to the others I’d seen, and I was high, as usual, when this ferocious-looking old man came in and frightened me by speaking in an incomprehensible growl. At that moment another man appeared from another door, older, good-looking and when he spoke, he sounded just like Dad, so I ran over to him and hugged him, asking: ‘Can I hang out with you?’
The man’s name was Robbie and he said of course and we took speed together. Later on, I watched him injecting heroin.
‘Can I try it?’
Robbie did it for me and I loved it straight away. The feeling was like a constant gentle soaring, a lovely, warm, out-of-body experience – like having an extremely long cuddle. Robbie took care of everything, of getting the drugs and looking after me and he would go and do whatever he had to do to raise the money, which usually involved stealing copper. Once we were evicted from that squat, we found another one that was a lot more unpleasant. It was filthy and freezing – there were no windows, no electric and no gas. Thank God the water was working. I didn’t like it at all but I didn’t consider going home, I just wanted lots of warm hugs from those delicious injections.
I woke up one morning to find a policeman with a disgusted expression on his face standing in my room. He told me to get up. I’d breached a community order I’d received for being drunk and disorderly some time earlier by not checking in at the police station. There were more officers downstairs arresting Robbie because the house was full of stolen copper piping that he was selling to support us. The police officer couldn’t believe it when I told him Robbie was my boyfriend. ‘He’s in his forties! He’s over twenty years older than you.’
I just shrugged.
He got bail but I was given a prison sentence of sixty days. It started to sink in when I was on my way to Holloway and I cried my eyes out. I’d been fainting and suffering dizzy spells (Robbie said it was lack of food because I wasn’t eating properly) and could barely walk from the prison van to the ‘check-in’ area. Part of the routine of checking in involved a medical, after which I was told: ‘You’re pregnant.’
The prison officers were quite sympathetic to me after that, even agreeing to let me have a single cell, after I begged to be alone. I was soon moved, however, for lack of space, and then I was in a cell with four drug addicts who were all taking heroin in the toilets. It seemed as though getting drugs in prison was just as easy as it was on the outside. Maybe it was thanks to the pregnancy, but I had no trouble staying off drugs and, after two months, I went home clean. Home this time was to Dad, who immediately told me there was nothing for him to forgive and he took me back in.
But I was in love with Robbie and I fully expected him to look after me and our baby. He was still using and when he asked if I’d like to have some heroin, I agreed. It never even occurred to me to think of the health of the baby until I went to the hospital for a check-up.
‘Take a seat,’ the nurse said. ‘We need to take some blood for testing, I’ll just get set up and then I’ll call you in, OK?’
I nodded and, as soon as her back was turned, I snuck out.
I couldn’t stay at home if I wanted to keep taking drugs and, as the council told me they wouldn’t house me until I’d given birth, Robbie said I could stay in his ex-girlfriend’s spare room. I should have thought this was a bit weird, but my head was all over the place and I didn’t give it a thought. I barely slept or ate, I just listened to music and made sure I stayed as high as possible, for as long as possible, until I passed out. Robbie never let me down and always seemed able to bring something back for me. I was also on probation and was supposed to be checking in with them, but I decided, for obvious reasons, that I wasn’t going to have any more contact with anyone official.
I was waiting anxiously for Robbie when the labour pains started. I’d been using constantly, had barely slept for two weeks and was feeling really edgy when a cramp caused me to gasp in surprise.
By the time Robbie turned up, I was doubled over in pain. We went to the hospital. The doctor said I was still at least three days from giving birth and Robbie wanted me to go home so, as always, I did what he wanted. He was as much of a drug as the heroin.
I was woken by a smashing sound and, once again, I opened my eyes to find a police officer in the room.
‘We’re looking for Robbie,’ he said. ‘Where is he?’
I was covered with blankets and wrapped up in coats and jumpers and he didn’t realise I was pregnant.
‘I’ve no idea,’ I said. ‘Haven’t seen him in ages.’
They could see I was high and not much use as an interview subject and they left. The next time I awoke, Robbie was on the bed, shaking me awake.
‘I think I can see the baby’s head,’ he said.
I was ambulanced to hospital and was put into a specialist unit where I immediately gave birth. The nurse let me see and touch him for a moment; he was crying but so small. At two kilos he was really underweight and I only saw him for a few seconds before they took him into intensive care – the memory is a blur.
I said I wasn’t using when the nurse asked but she just nodded down at the old
and new needle marks scarring my forearms. She didn’t need to ask, no one did. Michael, my baby, did well; he was soon out of intensive care.
The nurses said I could breastfeed Michael and he just latched on.
‘Aw, you’ll make an excellent mum,’ one of the nurses told me.
A young social services lady turned up and spoke to the nurses. They kept me in the special care unit and then the recovery unit for ten days – which sobered me up – before I found out what was going on. They were going to take my baby. I got up and demanded we both be discharged but the nurses stalled me until the police arrived with an emergency court order that allowed them to take Michael into 72-hour police protection. He was moved away from me to another hospital.
At every stage, I didn’t know what was going to happen. Everything was an unpleasant shock. I’m sure people had tried to tell me what was about to take place but it wasn’t until the heroin left my body that I regained my senses. It was only when I started to attend the daily supervised visits to see my son that I began to understand that he wasn’t coming home with me, that there was something wrong with the way I was living.
Looking at my tiny son nestled up against me, I decided I didn’t want to use any more. I still loved Robbie, however, and there was no way he was going to stop using.
Michael was taken into foster care and was placed with an elderly couple who lived near my dad, which was great as it meant I could see him every day. Robbie was forbidden from seeing his son and he wasn’t happy about that at all. He didn’t see how his heroin addiction came into it.