Trafficked Girl

by Zoe Patterson

  I was still scared, but I felt a strange sense of relief too, because if I was going to be killed by a stranger, the eternal decision about whether to end my own life or continue my miserable, pointless struggle to survive would have been made for me. My only real concern was that he would do it quickly and painlessly. But even though I welcomed the thought of death and had already decided that I wouldn’t struggle or try to fight him off, something inside me seemed to tighten when the van came to an abrupt halt.

  There was a sound of metal scraping on metal as the rear door opened and he reached in to grab my arm and pull me out. But instead of dragging me into some dark alleyway or abandoned building plot, he slammed the door shut, jumped back into the driver’s seat and drove away, leaving me standing at the side of the road, bemused and disorientated.

  It was a few seconds before I realised I was in a street I knew, not far from the foster home. I didn’t have any idea what time it was, but maybe, if I hurried, I could get back before 8 p.m. Then I could have a drink from the bottle of whisky I always kept hidden in my room, and no one would ever need to know what I’d done.

  Surprisingly perhaps, despite the drinking and the risk-taking, I did sometimes still go to school and try to focus on studying for my GCSE exams. Even during the period when I’d been living at home, I’d been doing quite well at school and it had been predicted that I would get ten GCSEs and eventually go to university. Since I’d been at the foster home, however, my schoolwork had deteriorated.

  My teachers seemed to have become resigned to the fact of my drinking and to have decided that as they couldn’t do anything to change the situation, they might as well try to ignore it. One of them even helped me to walk across the playground one morning when she saw me drunk and staggering as I tried to get to my next lesson.

  In the end, I left school with seven GCSEs, six at grade C and just one grade B, which wasn’t bad, I suppose, in view of everything that was going on, but was a huge disappointment to me. The only thing I got any pleasure from during those years was studying and learning new things, and it turned out when the results came in that I wasn’t even any good at doing that. Or, at least, that’s how it felt.

  I was still living in the foster home when I did my GCSEs and after I left school that summer, I went to college to study for A levels in English, Sociology and Psychology. They were subjects that really interested me and I wanted to work hard and do well. Unfortunately, however, I wasn’t emotionally mature enough to handle the increased independence of college coupled with the responsibility of having to guide my own studies, and it wasn’t long before I started skipping classes.

  I’d often use the money Sandra gave me for lunch every morning to buy cider, strong lager or whisky. Then I’d just wander around the streets or go and sit in the children’s playground my dad had once taken me to, where the swings and slides were now rusty and broken. The playground was behind a church next to open fields, and I liked it because of that memory and because no one ever seemed to go there except me and a friendly black cat, who always rubbed his head against my legs and purred when I stroked him.

  I would sit there for hours, drinking and writing short stories or just listening to music and thinking about my life. Then I’d go back to the foster home and run upstairs before anyone could question me, which was easy to do in a madhouse full of kids. Eventually though, someone from the college started phoning Sandra every time I didn’t go in, then she started lying in wait for me and asking sarcastically, ‘So, Zoe, did you have a nice day at college today?’ Just to let me know she knew.

  I was still self-harming, cutting my legs as well as my arms by that time, and one night I made a cut in my wrist that was so deep I couldn’t stop it bleeding and had to tell her. I did go into college the next day, and when I came back in the early afternoon and went into the kitchen to get a glass of water, Sandra was there with one of her friends.

  I had only just walked through the door when Sandra said, ‘Show Fran what you did to yourself last night. Go on, Zoe, show her.’ I was really embarrassed and shook my head without saying anything. But she kept insisting, until eventually I pulled up my sleeve, peeled back the bandage, and revealed the red scabbing wound on my wrist to Sandra’s friend. Then I fainted.

  I think it was the stress of being forced to reveal something about myself I didn’t want anyone to know that made me pass out. I’d never done it before, and I can remember feeling scared when everything suddenly seemed to go blurry, then saying to my mum in my head, ‘I’m going to have to go now. Someone’s talking to me,’ and thinking I was being rude because I couldn’t answer them.

  The next thing I remember is hearing Sandra’s friend asking anxiously, ‘Is she all right? Should you phone for an ambulance?’

  ‘No. She’s fine now,’ Sandra answered. ‘But you see what I have to put up with! Come on, let’s go into town.’ It was what they did most days when the younger kids were at school and everyone was out, and Sandra clearly wasn’t going to allow a fainting, self-harming teenager to disrupt their plans. So I went upstairs to my room, and a few minutes later heard the front door close behind them.

  It was a few weeks after that incident, when I’d been living in the foster home for almost a year, that the placement broke down. For some reason, I’d decided to tell Sandra I was gay, and although I was very anxious about confiding in her, I hadn’t expected her to respond the way she did, saying she couldn’t cope with me any more. So it was a planned move. In fact, I discovered recently that she told social services, ‘I want her gone by Christmas,’ which I didn’t know at the time and which I found surprisingly upsetting. I’d always thought that it was my fault the placement broke down, although I realise now that Sandra didn’t ever give me the care and emotional support I so desperately needed, and that she did the wrong thing by allowing me to drink.

  I did try to engage with the counselling that was organised for me while I was living in the foster home, but I found it really tough. What no one seemed to take into account was that whereas it might make perfect sense to tell a 16-year-old girl who has been repeatedly sexually abused and has a major alcohol problem that she needs to stop drinking, you have to be able to give her a reason for making the huge effort involved in trying to face life sober. And you have to be able to give her the answers to questions like: What is there to look forward to? What will be there to soften the edges of life if I do stop drinking? What does the future hold for me? Because the answers to all those questions was so obviously ‘Nothing’, the counselling just seemed pointless.

  Once it was decided that I was going to have to move on from the foster home, and because I was 16, I was appointed a leaving care worker, who turned out to be Yvonne, the not-always-very-Christian lady from Denver House, who, with some other members of staff, had recently left the unit and joined social services’ leaving care team. I was horrified when I found out, and when I told Sandra that I didn’t get on with Yvonne and didn’t want her to be involved with my case, she said, ‘That’s fine. I’ll sort it out with her when she arrives.’

  When the day came, Sandra was as good as her word and told Yvonne pretty much straightaway that I would prefer to have a different leaving care worker.

  ‘Really? Why?’ Yvonne’s mouth contorted into a tight-lipped smile as she looked at me and asked the question. Unnerved by the cold look in her eyes, I glanced quickly at Sandra, who answered for me.

  ‘It’s nothing personal,’ she told Yvonne, in a tone of voice that made it clear she wasn’t someone who could be bullied and intimidated. ‘It’s just that she’d prefer it not to be anyone from Denver House.’

  ‘Oh, come along now.’ Yvonne’s smile got tighter as she turned her attention back to me. ‘That’s all behind us. It’s in the past. We’ve both started a new chapter in our lives and I’d really like to work with you.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, Sandra’s involvement giving me a resolve I might otherwise not have had. ‘It isn’t what I wa
nt.’

  Suddenly, much to the surprise of both Sandra and me, Yvonne burst into tears, then told me, between sobs, ‘You can’t imagine how much you’ve hurt me. I wish you would change your mind. I can’t go back to the office and tell my manager that you don’t want me to work with you. Won’t you reconsider, Zoe? Please.’

  But when I still said ‘No,’ the tears stopped as abruptly as they’d started and Yvonne’s tone changed completely as she snapped at me, ‘Well, you won’t get Susie’ – who had been my key worker while I was at Denver House – ‘if that’s what you’re hoping for.’ Then she snatched up her handbag, scowled at us both and stormed out of the house. Which was a bit shocking, but at least made me feel vindicated for not wanting her to be involved in any way with my future life.

  I had just turned 17 when I left the foster home and moved into supported housing, which was a two-bedroom house that I shared with a lad who was about the same age as me. I don’t know if they’d do that today – put a vulnerable teenage girl in a house where the only other occupant was a lad and where a key worker came in for just 20 or 30 minutes a day. Maybe they wouldn’t normally have done it then, but no one had bothered to check my files and read my history. If they had, they’d have realised I needed a lot more support. At the time, it felt as though the care system had simply washed its hands of me.

  I didn’t really like the idea of sharing a house, even with a lad who seemed to be okay and was hardly ever there. But my experience of fostering hadn’t turned out the way I’d hoped and I didn’t want to go into another residential home like Denver House, so I knew things could have been worse. Suddenly though, after living in a house full of noisy kids, I found myself surrounded by silence, sitting alone for hours on end, struggling to look after myself, and spending all the money I was given every week, not on heating, electricity, food, service charge and the other bills it was intended for, but on alcohol.

  When you’ve lived with other people all your life – even people who’ve been horrible to you – it’s a very frightening experience to find yourself on your own and responsible for doing things you don’t know how to do and can’t see the point of anyway, because the one thing you do know is that you aren’t going to end up anywhere you would want to be.

  My key worker, a woman called Helen who worked for the housing association that provided the accommodation, came to see me every day and was supposed to teach me ‘independent living skills’. And although she did show me how to work the heating and taught me how to cook a couple of basic meals, why would I want to go to all the trouble of making a pasta bake, eat it, and then sit staring at the walls feeling miserable when I could spend the money on whisky and not feel anything at all? So I drank. Then the heating got shut off – during a very cold December – and my leaving care worker, a well-dressed woman in her mid-thirties called Delia who had been allocated to my case after I’d said that I didn’t want Yvonne and who also visited me occasionally, ended up some months later having to sort out all the bills I hadn’t paid.

  I was already studying for A levels at the sixth-form college when I moved into the house, and I found it increasingly difficult to motivate myself when I was living on my own. The fact that I had almost no social skills didn’t help, because I didn’t know how to behave with the other students in a way that would have enabled me to fit in. Looking back on it now, I realise I was depressed – as I was for most of my teenage years. So after a while I stopped going in to college and eventually they sent me a letter saying that as they assumed I’d left, they had cancelled my place.

  I had told Helen I was gay, and apparently she’d told the manager of the house – who was a relative of hers – that she’d watched TV with me in my room, allowed me to drink alcohol and given me her personal phone number. Then, one day, when I hadn’t been in to college for about a month, she told me, ‘I’m really sorry, Zoe. I told her in confidence, but I’m afraid they’re going to ask you to leave the house.’

  A couple of days later, I had a meeting with my social worker and the house manager, who said, ‘It’s to protect the staff – and yourself,’ although she didn’t say what from.

  Sandra used to say that I wasn’t fostered, I was family. But although that clearly wasn’t true, I’d got used to living in the foster home and had been surprised by how lonely I felt and how difficult I found it being on my own. So although I didn’t want to go back into a residential home, at least I would be living with other people again. It didn’t really matter by that time anyway: when you’ve lived in the sort of places I’d lived for a few years and you know you’re not wanted in your own home and don’t belong anywhere else, there’s not much of your soul left for anyone to stamp on.

  Chapter 15

  There were six other residents – one girl and five lads – living in Highfield when I moved in, and a constantly changing staff who came in to do the morning shift, the evening shift and the waking night shift. It was a large, three-storey Victorian house, with steps up to a solid wooden front door and with a tiny yard beyond the kitchen that led into a cobbled back passage. Whoever had chosen the paint colours seemed to have done their best to ruin it, however, as the walls of the hallways and up the stairs were painted a hideous orange, which seemed slightly less horrible when compared to the purple walls of the dining room, which clashed horribly with the green carpet that covered half the floor and was identical to the carpet at Denver House. There were other similarities between the two places too – both had mismatched utilitarian furniture, for example. But the rooms at Highfield were slightly bigger and a bit less cramped, the mattresses on the beds were better, and the living room on the first floor had a high ceiling and a big bay window that made it feel light and spacious.

  Highfield was, in effect, a children’s home for 16- to 18-year-olds, although, because of our ages, we were expected to live more independently than I’d done at Denver House. Although we had to buy most of our own food, breakfasts were provided and I was quite proud of the fact that after I’d been living there for just a few days, I persuaded the manager to add more options to the weekly list of provisions we had to choose from – which made me popular with the other kids too!

  Everyone had a cupboard in the kitchen, which you had to remember to lock or someone would pinch whatever you put in it. There was no lock on the communal fridge/freezer, however, although fortunately there was a little fridge in every bedroom, so after the first couple of days I kept my sandwiches and any other bits of food I bought in there.

  You don’t talk to anyone about anything that matters in a place like that, certainly not in the early days when you’re trying to fit in, and I spent most of the time in my room for the first few days, as I’d always done, until Lizzie, the other girl who lived there, invited me to have a drink and a smoke with her. I often sat in her room with her after that first time, and eventually we started talking to each other about our families and how we’d ended up in care.

  The other friend I made after I’d been at Highfield for a few days was a 13-year-old girl called Mia, who I met in a local park. She’d gone there for the same reason I had – to have a drink – and we ended up sitting on the grass together chatting. I didn’t say much about myself, but she had just started to tell me about how unhappy she was living at home when a group of five men in their early twenties came over and offered us some cannabis, which, stupidly, we accepted.

  The men had been talking to us for a few minutes when two of them walked away. Or, at least, I thought that’s what they’d done, until I heard laughing and felt something hit my back and turned around to find that one of them was peeing on me. Feeling sick, I stood up and said, ‘Come on, Mia. Let’s go.’ It felt a bit surreal for a moment, as if Mia was me at that age and I wanted to protect her so that she didn’t have the life I’d had for the last four years. So when she said she was going to stay, I kept insisting, until eventually she got up and came with me.

  Even though it was only the early evening, I walke
d all the way home with her before heading back to Highfield, and after telling her, briefly, about what had happened to me at Denver House, I added, ‘So you need to watch out for yourself, and stay away from men like that.’

  I didn’t ever see Mia again, but she obviously didn’t take my advice, because apparently she’s in prison now, for killing a man like the men we walked away from that night.

  While I was living in the foster home, someone who came for just a couple of days left a mobile phone when they moved on, and Sandra said I could have it. I’d given the number to Frances before I moved into the house where I’d lived for just a month, and she’d visited me there once. Then, when I was at Highfield, she phoned me one evening and asked if I’d babysit for her youngest child, a little boy who was 11 years old and who I’d met on one occasion at Denver House when she dropped in briefly and brought him with her.

  The little boy was already in bed when Frances picked me up from Highfield and took me back to her house, and as she didn’t have to leave for work immediately, she sat watching TV with me for a while. I don’t remember what we were watching, but she made some comment about a woman having a ‘typically lesbian hairstyle’, then added quickly, ‘Oh, sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.’

  I still hadn’t told anyone except Paula and my key worker that I was gay, so I was embarrassed and wondered what she meant. Then, a few weeks later, I was summoned to a meeting with her manager and another woman who took notes while I was asked questions about our relationship, which I answered evasively because I was anxious not to say anything that might get Frances into trouble. There was no follow-up to the meeting, so I didn’t really know what prompted it or what the point of it was. But although we spoke on the phone a few times after that, I never actually saw her again.