Trafficked Girl

by Zoe Patterson

  Not long after that, Yvonne took us both into town to get what was referred to as ‘personal needs’ – toothpaste or sanitary pads or something similar – and while we were out she bought Natalie a Cadbury Creme Egg. It was a deliberately mean thing to do, and when I asked if I could have one too, she just shrugged and said, in a very un-Christian way, ‘No. You’re not my key child.’ So I stole one and slipped it in my pocket without anyone noticing.

  That was about as bad as I got really – just doing daft little things like demanding toast and stealing a Creme Egg. Even so, I ended up spending a night in a police cell on a couple of occasions, which was also totally out of perspective with what I’d done.

  I don’t know what triggered my reaction the first time. Something had happened that upset me and I ended up locking myself in the toilet upstairs and kicking off the loo seat. Earlier that day, I had volunteered to decorate the notice board that hung on the wall outside the office, using some wrapping paper that had been bought by a member of staff. I took a lot of trouble over it and it looked really nice by the time I’d finished. But when whatever it was that upset me happened in the evening, I got angry and ripped it all down again, then ran upstairs and locked myself in the toilet.

  Tearing wrapping paper off a notice board and kicking a toilet seat didn’t really amount to the crime of the century. But Yvonne was on duty that day and she called the police, and when I eventually came out of the toilet, she told me, ‘We’re going to send you to a different home, one for kids who are really violent and have loads of criminal convictions. That’s the sort of place you ought to be living in.’ Then the police arrived and I was put in handcuffs and taken to the police station, where I was locked in a cell for the night, which is a very scary experience for a 13-year-old.

  When I was sitting in the back of the police car, the officer who’d arrested me turned around in his seat and asked, ‘How long have you lived at Denver House?’

  ‘Almost a year,’ I told him.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he said, with what seemed to be a genuine expression of surprise. ‘You’ve done well to live in a children’s home for almost a year and not to have been arrested before.’ Then he laughed and turned away again, and I could feel my cheeks burning with shame.

  After I’d been interviewed the next morning, I was given a caution, which is apparently classed as a conviction because it involves an admission of guilt. So although the caution itself only lasts for five years, it stays on your record for life and shows up if you ever have a Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) check, as I did some years later. I suppose they thought they were teaching me a lesson – which they did, although maybe not the one they intended to teach me. But can you imagine what would happen if every child in the country who ever did the equivalent of kicking off a toilet seat ended up spending a night in a cell and then being given a caution? The cells would be full and the police wouldn’t have time to do anything else. Which would be good news for serious criminals, I suppose.

  The other time I spent the night in a police cell was when I’d gone with some of the lads into a derelict pub down the road from the unit. We didn’t even have to break a window to get in, and as the pub had been empty for years, anything that might have been left in it that was of any value had already been taken or smashed and destroyed, so we didn’t do any damage or steal anything. We were just messing about behind the bar, pretending to serve each other drinks from broken beer pumps, when the police arrived.

  Someone must have seen us climbing in through what remained of the window and phoned them, and I suppose we were trespassing. Once again though, there was no major crime being committed. In fact, we were more at risk from broken floorboards and falling masonry than the dilapidated building was from us. But you’d have thought we were doing something terrible judging from the reaction of the police officers – who arrived in four police cars.

  What was really ironic when I think about it now was the fact that some kids messing around in an abandoned pub elicited such a swift, censorious response from officers working for the same police force that had repeatedly failed to act on information that a little girl hadn’t returned to a children’s home by the early hours of the morning and could probably be found at an address she had included in a note left in her room saying, ‘If I don’t come back, this is where I’m being taken. I don’t want to go. I don’t want to be abused by these men’.

  Like many kids who end up in residential children’s homes or with foster parents, I had been taken into care because of what someone had done to me – in my case, because of severe bruising resulting from my mother’s regular beatings. It wasn’t that I had done anything bad or had behaved in any way that indicated I needed to be professionally contained and restrained. To the police who came to the pub that day, however, we were, once again, simply ‘care kids’ who were doing what a lot of people would have expected us to do – causing trouble.

  I didn’t argue or strike any kind of attitude when I was arrested. I knew we shouldn’t have been in the pub, so I wasn’t angry or resentful when we got caught. I just cried, then got even more upset when one of the two officers who were driving me to the police station said I’d be spending the night in a cell.

  ‘But I’ve got school tomorrow,’ I told him. ‘I want to go to school.’

  ‘Well, I suppose you’ve got a choice then,’ he said, looking at me in his rear-view mirror. ‘We can either take you down to the station where you can spend the night in a cell and miss school tomorrow, or you can give me a blow job, then we’ll take you back to Denver House and you can get up bright and early in the morning and go to school.’

  I didn’t know whether he was serious, although he seemed to be, but they both laughed when I said, ‘I choose the cell,’ which made me feel even more angry and humiliated.

  When we got to the police station, I was charged with burglary with intent to steal, even though we hadn’t had any intention of taking anything and, in any case, there was nothing there to take. Then I was locked in a cell and left there until about 4 o’clock the following afternoon, when I was given a warning, which was another black mark that turned up on my CRB check a few years later.

  I did try to keep out of trouble, but no one seemed to take me seriously when I attempted to do anything to help myself. Even when I asked if I could join the local library, a member of staff burst out laughing as if the idea of a ‘care kid’ wanting to read a book was ludicrous. But books had been the only thing I’d had during all the solitary hours I used to sit in my bedroom at home, and I missed reading. So I kept on asking until eventually someone took me down to the library and provided the confirmation of my address that enabled me to join and take out some books.

  Apart from the regular staff at Denver House, there were people who only came in when someone was needed to cover a shift, and one day one of them asked if she could borrow a library book I’d just finished reading. Which would have been fine if she had ever worked at the unit again while I was there; but she didn’t, so I didn’t get the book back. When I told a member of staff what had happened and said, ‘I can’t afford to buy a copy of the book and, anyway, it isn’t fair that I should have to pay for it when it was a member of staff who took it,’ she sounded impatient, as if I was being unreasonable, when she answered, ‘Well, you wanted to join the library, and any books that are taken out on your library card are your responsibility.’ I knew I wasn’t being unreasonable though, and I was fed up of always being in the wrong. So I decided they could stick their library card and I wouldn’t go there any more, which really just meant I’d shot myself in the foot.

  When I look back on it now, it’s clear that even when I wanted to do something that any rational, caring person would have encouraged me to do, nobody tried to help me. In fact, sometimes, like when I said I wanted to join the library, they sneered at me, then acted as if it was my fault when an adult did something that made it all go wrong. They didn’t ask the questions they should have aske
d either. For example, when Pete gave me a phone so that he could contact me when Natalie wasn’t around and I gave the number to some of the staff at the unit, and to my family, no one asked the blindingly obvious question: how has a 13-year-old girl in care, with no access to money, suddenly got her own mobile phone?

  I wanted them to have the phone number for the same reason I used to leave notes of car registration numbers in my room – because I thought it might help them to find me if, or when, I disappeared. Maybe it wouldn’t have done, but at least I felt as though I had some sort of link with people who knew me when I was in a house somewhere being sexually abused by men who wouldn’t have been able to pick me out of a line-up of girls just ten minutes later.

  There was no phone in our house, not that my parents would ever have phoned me if there had been, even before Mum got Michael to tell me they didn’t want anything to do with me any more. But my brother Ben – who was 21 when I turned 14 while living at the children’s home – had his own mobile phone, so I did sometimes get texts, and very occasionally calls, from him, although he never said anything nice.

  For example, I’d get a text out of the blue saying something like, ‘Mum said there’s something up with you. Why are you doing this? What’s wrong with you?’ I knew he was referring to the fact that I was having sex with men all over the place, which Mum told him – and everyone else – I was doing because I wanted to. And although that was my social worker’s fault for having told my parents it was my choice, I did tell them myself many times that it wasn’t true and that I was being bullied into doing horrible things nobody would ever do willingly.

  I didn’t have any money to make calls or send texts on the mobile phone Pete had given me, but we were occasionally allowed to make calls to our families from the phone in the office at Denver House, and sometimes I’d speak to Ben. Then, one day, when I was feeling lonely and miserable and phoned him just to say hello, he told me, ‘Listen, Zoe. Don’t contact me again. I can’t deal with this.’

  I was devastated. Despite teasing and sometimes bullying me when I lived at home, Ben was the only person who had ever cared enough about me to do things like take me into town when I was little to get my hair cut and buy me clothes. I couldn’t bear the thought that he believed the stories he was told about me having ‘loads of Asian boyfriends’ and that, as Mum always claimed, I was the sole cause of stress for her – as if she would ever have cared what I did as long as I didn’t live at home.

  Frances – the member of staff who was sometimes nice to me – was in the office that day when I rang Ben, and when I dropped the phone and started sobbing, she picked it up, which is when he apparently told her, ‘Don’t let Zoe phone me again.’

  I’d had a vast number of horrible experiences by the time I was 14, many of which I still struggle to come to terms with today and that I know will leave their mark on me for the rest of my life. My brother Ben saying that he didn’t ever want me to contact him again was one of the worst, because although my spirit was crushed by the brutal violence of the men who sexually abused me, they were strangers who had no reason to care about me. Whereas Ben was my brother; he had lived in the same house as me from the day I was born until the day I was taken into care, and he had witnessed the many, many beatings our mother had given me, without ever once seeing me do anything that might have warranted them.

  Michael had told me he didn’t want me to go home again, now Ben had severed all contact with me, and as they were the two people I loved most, there really didn’t seem to be anything in my life worth living for.

  Chapter 11

  There wasn’t really any aspect of life at Denver House that was easy or made you feel good about yourself. No one seemed to look at anything from our point of view and try to think of ways to make things better and more manageable for us. Even something simple like doing our own washing was fraught with anxiety – although that wasn’t really the staff’s fault; it was more to do with the fact that kids would sometimes grab random items out of the washing machine and run around waving them over their heads. It was just a silly game, but I was very self-conscious about my laundry, because I would often return from the places Pete took me to with my knickers stained with blood and semen. So rather than putting them in a washing machine, I used to wash them by hand in the sink in my bedroom, which didn’t really get them clean. Which was why, one day, when I was going home on a visit, I decided to take some washing with me.

  After Michael had told me they didn’t want me to go home any more, my social worker eventually persuaded me to visit my family again, and when I turned up on the doorstep, feeling sick with anxiety, Mum had let me in. I’d been back a few times since then, but I don’t know why I thought Mum would simply accept the fact that I’d brought my washing home and let me get on with doing it, particularly as she had never once in my entire life done anything to try to help me. So I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was when I asked her, nervously, if I could use her washing machine and she grabbed the carrier bag I was clutching and pulled out a pair of knickers.

  ‘Mum, no. Please,’ I said, trying to snatch them out of her hand. But she punched my arm, turned away to examine them and shouted, ‘What the fuck is this?’ Then she showed them to Dad, who pinched his nostrils dramatically, and they both laughed.

  ‘You’re disgusting,’ Mum said, throwing the knickers at me. And there didn’t seem to be any point in denying it or telling her yet again that I wasn’t sleeping with men because I wanted to.

  Most of the time, life at Denver House followed what had become a normal pattern for me. I would get a phone call from Pete, or from one of his friends, telling me where and when I would be picked up, sometimes with Natalie, sometimes not. Then I’d be driven to a gloomy house somewhere, where I’d be given alcohol, cannabis and occasionally amphetamines. It was the drink I always looked forward to, because it helped to empty my mind before I was taken upstairs by the first of the men who were going to have sex with me that night.

  Just because I’d accepted it all and tried to blank it out didn’t mean I wasn’t desperate, and when Frances started to take an interest in me, it couldn’t have come at a better time. One evening she told me, ‘I’ve got some questions I want to ask you, Zoe. I’ll come up to your room when I’m on shift tonight.’ Mostly what she wanted to know about was stuff to do with my mum and the way she’d treated me before I was taken into care, but she also asked me to give her Pete’s phone number and the numbers of some of the other men who picked me up.

  Because she spoke to me differently from the way most of the other staff members did and seemed to have a genuine interest in me, I really thought she was going to do something to help me. So I couldn’t understand why nothing happened as a result of what I told her, particularly because I knew that everything any of the kids at Denver House said or did was supposed to be recorded in their files. It wasn’t until recently that I found out she rarely made notes about any of our conversations, even though what I told her confirmed what most of the staff already knew, or at least suspected, before I ever went there – that there was something going on. In fact, whenever Frances did make a note of anything I told her, she would preface it by saying she had been doing her normal evening rounds and I’d asked to talk to her. Which wasn’t true, because I only ever spoke to her about any of it when she came to my room and asked me questions. So I don’t know why she said that, or why she wanted to know about what had happened if she wasn’t going to act on what I said and try to help me.

  I’d been told when I first arrived at Denver House that I must not have any physical contact with anyone in the unit, neither staff nor other kids. But when Frances was on night shift, she would give me a hug and kiss the top of my head when she said goodnight, and sometimes she’d wake me up to say goodbye and give me another kiss and a hug when she was going off duty. It doesn’t sound like much, I know, but it had huge significance for me, because, apart from the quick hug my key worker had given me th
e day I’d ‘rescued’ her from being verbally abused by some of the lads, Frances was the first person ever to have hugged me.

  ‘You know more about me than any of the members of staff here,’ she used to say. ‘I think about you a lot when I’m not at work.’ And when she came in on Christmas Day even though she wasn’t on shift, she told me, ‘I’ve said I’ve come to see everyone, but really I’ve just come in to see you.’

  For a child who had only ever been spoken to nicely by teachers, and who, at the age of 14, had only been touched in anger or during unwanted sexual intercourse, the kindness and affection Frances began to show me made me feel very special. So I was confused when she still sometimes bullied me, and I didn’t know what I’d done to upset her when she said things to me like, ‘I’m the only friend you’ve got in this place. You’d do well to remember that, Zoe Patterson.’ In fact, another member of staff called Coleen overheard her on that occasion and came up to my room a bit later to ask if I was all right – and then, when I said I was, to tell me all about her aches and pains and about how glad she was to be nearing retirement age!

  It’s exhausting and very soul-destroying thinking that you’re always in the wrong. I seemed to have spent my entire life being punished for something by my mum, or punishing myself because I believed I was useless and that everything bad was my fault. So I took the blame without questioning it when, not long after Frances started coming to my room in the evenings, I seemed constantly to be writing notes to her telling her how sorry I was for upsetting her, without ever really knowing what I was apologising for.

  I’d been at Denver House for several months when one of the lads told me that Frances used to wake him up in the middle of the night and take him to play pool in the pool room. ‘She’s stopped doing it since she started liking you,’ he said, and when I saw how upset he was about it, I felt guilty about that too.