Some previous inmate of the room I was in at Denver House had made a hole in the wall, which someone had repaired with a bit of wood. But the nails were very loose and it was easy to remove it, which I sometimes did when the lad in the room next to mine tapped on the wall and offered to share a cigarette or joint with me. Remembering things like that makes me really sad, because it was such a normal ‘kid thing’ to do and it reminds me that that’s what we were, just kids who wanted to do all the normal stuff but weren’t allowed to because we had issues and our behaviour had to be monitored and controlled.
It was the lad in the room next door who put his hand through the hole and loosened the bit of wood that night. I think he was just going to say hello, until he saw that I was crying and holding an empty paracetamol bottle and asked me, ‘Have you done something, Zoe? Have you taken some pills?’
When I shook my head, he asked me again, ‘You have, haven’t you? How many did you take? What’s wrong?’
‘Everything’s wrong,’ I told him. ‘And yes, I did take some tablets. I just want it all to stop.’
I can’t remember what happened after that, but he must have gone downstairs and told a member of staff, and a few minutes later someone came to have a look at me, to see if I was in imminent danger or could wait until after the handover from day-time to night-time staff. And I must have been okay, because it was about half an hour later when Frances came into my room and said, without any trace of sympathy, ‘I’ve been told I need to take you to hospital.’
She didn’t speak to me again until we were almost there, when she suddenly stopped the car and started banging her fists on the steering wheel saying, ‘I don’t know why you’ve done this, Zoe. It’s something to do with me, isn’t it? You’ve been funny with me for a few days, although I’ve no idea why.’
‘It’s not because of you,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t have anything to do with you. It’s because of … It’s lots of things, to do with my parents and what was happening with Abbie and now with Natalie. And the reason I’ve been funny with you, as you call it, is because of what you said about me the other day in front of another member of staff.’
It had been the first time I’d felt really angry with Frances, rather than anxious and guilty because I thought I must be doing things that upset her. It was in the evening and Natalie was in my room when Frances suddenly burst in with another woman and said, ‘Phew, Zoe, your feet smell.’ Then all three of them had started laughing and making jokes at my expense, which had really upset me and humiliated me.
‘Oh yes. I did do that, didn’t I?’ Frances laughed again at the recollection, apparently oblivious, or indifferent, to the fact that she’d hurt my feelings and distressed me. Then we continued our journey to the hospital, where I was kept in overnight, before being picked up the next morning by another member of staff and taken back to Denver House, where Natalie was waiting for me.
I didn’t ever seriously consider not going with Natalie and Pete. None of the staff at the unit had taken any notice when I asked for help, and as I didn’t have anyone else to turn to, I didn’t seem to have any alternative when Natalie said, ‘We’re going out.’
We would sit on the low brick wall around the corner from Denver House almost every evening, waiting for Pete or a taxi driver to pick us up. Sometimes, Pete came with a friend, although usually he came alone, and Natalie would sit in the front passenger seat, chattering away to him cheerfully, while I sat in the back, trying to switch off and telling myself, ‘It’s just something I have to do. It doesn’t matter.’
There’s a time in the evening when people put lights on in their living rooms before they’ve drawn their curtains, and as we drove through unfamiliar streets, I would often catch a glimpse through a window into a cosy-looking room and wonder what it must feel like to be going home to a house like that, where someone who loved you was waiting for you.
When we arrived at whatever house we were going to that night, someone would give me a drink, and because I knew I wouldn’t care so much when it kicked in, I’d drink it as quickly as possible, hoping it would start to take effect before the first man told me to follow him up the stairs.
After a while, Pete gave me a mobile phone, then started phoning me in the morning sometimes to say, ‘Don’t go in to school today. I’ll pick you up in 20 minutes.’ That’s when he began to take me further afield, down the motorway to other towns, where other men abused me in other houses. I had always been frightened, but the fear got worse after that, and I believed that it really was just a matter of time before I went with him one day and didn’t come back.
I had started Year 9 just after I’d been taken into care, but I missed a lot of school that year. I did try to do enough work to get by, because school was my only anchor and I wanted to stay on and do GCSEs. But I had already started to lose touch with my friends when I began to drink and take time off, and I think some of them judged me differently after I went to live in the children’s home. Being a kid in care seems to create a barrier between you and the ‘normal’ kids, and even some of the friends who knew me before seemed to think I must be a thief or had done something else to warrant being ‘put in a home’.
Sometimes, I’d stay behind after school to talk to one of my teachers, which was a bit sad really, because you’d hope to have ‘better’ things to do at 13 and 14 than hang around at the end of the day with a teacher. I didn’t ever tell the teacher anything about the bad stuff that was happening; it was just nice to have someone to chat to. I think she must have known about some of it though, because there was always a teacher at the review meetings that were held with my key worker, my social worker and a really nice woman from the NSPCC called Mandy. My GP was invited to the meetings too, although I don’t think he ever went, and so were my parents – Dad went a couple of times, but Mum never did.
Even my nan turned up at a meeting one day, which I was going to go to myself until I saw her standing in the doorway and fled. Apparently, they let her stay, which they shouldn’t have done because it had nothing to do with her at all, but she could be very determined and stubborn, so maybe she just refused to leave. In the end, I think I only ever went to one meeting. I’d already told my social worker and the staff at Denver House what was happening, so I couldn’t see the point of sitting there listening to them talking about me, never to me, knowing that nobody was going to do anything to help me anyway.
Mandy was different though, and she did get me some counselling in the end. But because horrible things were happening to me every week, it wasn’t possible for the counsellor to keep pace with it all so that she could work with me on a specific problem. What those counselling sessions did make me realise, however, was that if I’d been put somewhere else, somewhere better than Denver House where I’d been given the support I so desperately needed from people like Mandy, who actually cared about kids like me, things might have been very different for me – then and now.
Chapter 10
When I went out with Natalie, I used to leave notes in my room at the unit saying things like, ‘If I don’t come back, this is the address of the house we’re being taken to’. Or I’d write down Pete’s phone number, or the number of one of the other men who used to text me to tell me what time they were going to pick me up. I know that at least some of those notes were found and read by members of staff, because they would have disappeared by the time I got back.
If we hadn’t come back to the unit by midnight – which happened regularly – the staff would report us missing. Then, having done what they were required to do, we were no longer their responsibility and they seemed to forget about us. But the police only came to find us a couple of times.
On one occasion, a police officer found me in a car with a man who must have been twice my age. He shone his torch on my private parts as I was frantically struggling to pull up my underwear, but he didn’t speak to me at all; he just told the man to take me home and then left. His attitude seemed to be that I wasn’t l
ike his daughters or the daughters of any of his friends, and that what I was doing in a car parked on a dark street was only what you’d expect from ‘a care kid’ like me. It was an attitude that was apparently shared by all the other police officers I encountered while I was in care. They’d probably act differently now – even though they might think the same way – but there wasn’t the awareness 16 or 17 years ago, when I was a young teenager.
No one can ever really know how they’d react in a hypothetical situation: you might think you’d do one thing and then do something completely different when it actually happened. What I am certain about, however, is that if I’d had the help and support I should have had from the staff at Denver House, Abbie and Natalie wouldn’t have been able to bully me and my life wouldn’t have been destroyed by being trafficked and sexually abused. Unfortunately, the staff seemed to share the police’s opinion that we were going to behave in certain ways and just needed to be contained – and restrained when necessary – until we were 16 and no longer their problem.
Some of the kids at the unit were quite often physically restrained, although not always for doing things that seemed to deserve it. I was more timid than most of the others and didn’t ever kick off the way some of them did, but even I was restrained a few times too, for being upset rather than aggressive or violent. One day, for example, I was told that there was a phone call for me in the office and when I picked up the receiver, Mum said, ‘Michael has something he wants to say to you.’ I could hear some muffled sounds, like someone speaking with their hand over the receiver, then my little brother said, ‘We don’t want to see you any more. We don’t want you to come home again.’ The line went dead before I had a chance to say anything, and although Michael was only eight or nine at the time, so I knew he wouldn’t have thought of saying anything like that himself and that Mum must have put him up to it, I was still devastated and burst into tears.
Letting other people see you when you were crying and vulnerable wasn’t a good idea at Denver House. I was bullied a bit by some of the other kids while I was there, and although it was never anything serious, I knew it would increase if I ever showed any kind of weakness. Which was another reason why all I wanted to do when the phone line went dead was get out of the office and up to my room, where I could cry with my face in my pillow so that no one could hear me.
Even though it must have been obvious to the members of staff who were in the office while I was on the phone that something had been said to upset me, instead of asking me if I was all right or just letting me go up to my room and hide until I might want to talk about it, someone shouted, ‘Don’t let her go.’ And as I was running towards the door, another member of staff grabbed me and pinned me to the ground.
It was a totally unnecessary and disproportionate response to the situation, and the sort of thing that happened a lot at Denver House. Instead of being sympathetic and realising that I was likely to feel embarrassed about crying in front of other people, they made it seem as though I had done something wrong and needed to be restrained. So although they did manage to calm me down and then tried to talk to me, I could understand why some of the other kids reacted more aggressively to that sort of thing, because it isn’t a huge step from being upset to being angry.
That phone call was typical of Mum. She was always thinking up new ways of being nasty to me, and getting my little brother, who she knew I loved, to say what he said was one of her more successful attempts. It wasn’t just because it was Michael that had said it that upset me though; despite the fact that my occasional visits home were always miserable and sometimes very distressing, at least I’d somewhere to go, and a family – until now.
I’m sure every kid who ever stayed at Denver House could be a pain sometimes. The other thing we all had in common was that the problems that put us there weren’t originally our fault, although we probably all thought they were, and perhaps the staff did too. For me, there were certainly some occasions when I would have benefited from being able to talk to someone with more understanding and less tendency to overreact than most members of staff seemed to have.
One of the other times I got into what seemed to be a disproportionate amount of trouble was after I’d got up a bit late one day and found that I’d missed breakfast. The rule was that if you missed a meal, you didn’t get anything to eat until the next one, which was reasonable enough, I suppose, because otherwise there would have been kids asking for food 24 hours a day. They used to leave out a bowl of fruit and some juice, but I’d seen some of the kids spit in them. So, because I was very hungry, I sat on the floor in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room and demanded some toast. I wasn’t shouting or anything. I just kept saying, ‘I’m not moving until you give me some.’ Then the cleaners said they wanted to close the door and wouldn’t clean the kitchen with me sitting there, and a few minutes later, two managers appeared, lifted me up by my arms and dragged me through the building to the contact room, which was used for meetings and reviews.
I had just been acting out like any teenager might do, but they hurt me when they manhandled me, and as soon as they let go of me, I tried to climb out of the window. I saw a report later that said a member of staff had ‘tried to restrain me’, whereas what she actually did was grab hold of my hair and yank me backwards into the room.
A lot of what the other kids did wasn’t really bad either. It was just the sort of thing you’d expect from kids in that situation. Like breaking the lock on a shutter to get some food, for example, which was another incident I was involved in, this time with two partners in crime, one of whom was the lad I’d had a brief fight with when I first arrived at the unit, who was only 12 and didn’t normally get into any real trouble. Again, it wasn’t a terrible crime in the greater scheme of things. We were hungry, all the food was locked away, and we did something stupid to try to get something to eat.
After we’d broken the shutter, the three of us managed to hold the door to the dining room closed while a couple of members of staff were trying to force it open. Then we ran outside through another door, followed by a woman called Yvonne, who was the very stern lady who’d been in the office on the day I arrived at the unit. I’d subsequently discovered that she was someone who, although quick to tell everyone she was a devout Christian, didn’t seem to think it was necessary to practise what she preached.
When she came running out after us, Yvonne managed to corner the young lad, who was obviously quite scared because he knew he was going to get into trouble. He didn’t do anything though, other than stand there shouting. I can’t remember what he was saying, but it was just kid stuff. But suddenly, Yvonne started screaming, ‘Get off me! Get off me!’ So then another member of staff, a guy called Des, came running out and told Yvonne to go to the office and calm herself down.
Always dressed in jeans and a polo shirt with gel-spiked hair, Des did look a bit younger than his age, which was probably mid-forties. In fact, he’d been a kitchen fitter before he started working with disturbed children at Denver House, although you’d have thought he had a degree in psychology the way he used to go on about things like Freud’s belief that the human psyche could be divided into the id, the ego and the super-ego, which all developed at different stages in our lives and blah, blah, blah …
‘He didn’t do anything to her,’ I told Des. ‘He didn’t touch her. He was just shouting.’
‘Thank you, Zoe,’ he said, in a tone of voice that made it clear he wasn’t really thanking me, he was telling me to shut up, which was confirmed when he added, ‘If I need your help, I’ll ask for it.’
So I went inside and looked through the keyhole on the office door, then ran back down the corridor and told Des, ‘You’ve got to come and look at this. She’s scratching herself and making marks on her shoulders.’
I don’t know if I expected him to believe me, but he did come inside and she was still doing it when he opened the door, then turned quickly to me and said, ‘Okay, Zoe. Leave it
now. I’ll deal with it.’
Normally, they’d have called the police after an incident like that – three kids kicking off and smashing a lock on a shutter to steal some food. But on that occasion they didn’t. Des just went into the office and closed the door, and no one said anything more about it.
I don’t think Yvonne ever knew about the role I’d played in exposing what looked as though it was an attempt to claim that the lad had scratched her when she cornered him. I wouldn’t have been able to tell from her attitude towards me anyway, because she’d already made it clear on many occasions that she didn’t like me. Then, shortly after the lock-breaking incident, she became Natalie’s key worker, and from then on she was all about Natalie.
It was at around the same time that a girl called Debbie came to live at Denver House. She was probably a bit younger than me, and even more withdrawn and anxious looking, and when I saw Natalie bullying her one day, I felt really sorry for her. The door was open as I was passing Natalie’s room and I could see Debbie crawling around on her hands on knees, picking up dirty clothes and other stuff from the floor while Natalie snarled instructions at her.
Even though the kids often fought amongst themselves, no one would risk breaking the unspoken code and grassing on another kid. But Natalie was being really aggressive and Debbie looked terrified, and because I knew what it was like to be intimidated by her, I told a member of staff what I’d seen. Then obviously it got back to Yvonne, as Natalie’s key worker, and a few of days later, when we were all sitting in the dining room, I heard her tell Natalie, ‘You have to be careful, you know. You just don’t know who you can trust in here.’ She was looking at me as she said it, and I started to panic, thinking, ‘She’s going to get me battered.’ Fortunately though, Natalie didn’t seem to notice, so I didn’t get beaten up, as I know I would have done if she’d happened to look up from her plate and see the way Yvonne was staring very pointedly at me as she spoke.
Trafficked Girl Page 10