Trafficked Girl

by Zoe Patterson

  She rang and arranged to come to the flat a few times after that, and each time I would get excited at the prospect of having a visitor and someone to talk to for a while. But she didn’t ever turn up, or let me know that she wasn’t going to be able to make it, which made me feel even worse than I did before. Then, one day, she sent me a text saying, ‘I can’t do this any more,’ followed by a second message that was even more cryptic and said, ‘It’s all or nothing. I have to give you all or nothing. And I can’t give you my all.’ It didn’t make any sense, and it was the last time I ever heard from her.

  I was supposed to be going to college full-time, but not long after I moved into the flat I just gave up again. Then the college gave up on me too, and sent me a letter like the one I’d had before saying, ‘As you have not attended for X days’ – I can’t remember how many days it was – ‘we consider you to have left.’ So then there was no reason for me to get out of bed at all, except to buy alcohol.

  I can remember at around that time looking out of the window of the flat one day and thinking, ‘Did all those things really happen to me when I was in care? What was the point of living through all that just to end up in a situation that’s every bit as bad – maybe even worse – as the one I was in when it all started?’ With no college work to do, no friends, and parents who didn’t want me around, what was the point of any of it?

  I did still have a care worker, but she was unsympathetic, and when she came to the flat one bitterly cold day and saw that there was no food in the cupboards, she told me, ‘It’s your responsibility to look after yourself now. If you choose to spend all your money on alcohol, you’re the one that’s going to have to deal with the consequences and sort it all out.’ And because I didn’t know how to sort it out, and was tired of being unhappy, I decided to kill myself.

  Chapter 16

  I had been prescribed antidepressants on numerous occasions but had never taken them regularly. A member of staff used to give me one every day when I was living in supported housing, then watch to make sure I swallowed it. Once I turned 18, however, I became responsible for getting and taking the tablets myself. I don’t know how many I took that night, or how many drinks I’d had, and I don’t have any memory of phoning my old foster carer Sandra, who must have phoned for an ambulance. I can’t have taken many though, because I was only in hospital overnight.

  It was Sandra who picked me up from the hospital the next morning too. She didn’t say much as she drove me back to my flat. When we got there, she searched all the cupboards to make sure I didn’t have any more tablets hidden away anywhere, then said goodbye and left, and I never saw or spoke to her again.

  Although she hadn’t commented on the fact that the flat was cold and the fridge and food cupboards were empty, she did apparently phone social services to tell them, ‘Zoe’s struggling’. But when my leaving care worker came round to check on me a few days later, she was critical rather than encouraging or sympathetic, telling me, in effect, that what I’d done was stupid, that I was an adult now and should behave like one. ‘I’ve got younger children who are still in care who need me much more than you do,’ she said irritably. ‘So, in future, you’re going to have to think twice before you contact me.’

  Perhaps she thought my suicide attempt had just been attention seeking, and maybe she was right. But there are reasons why people feel the need to seek attention, and making them feel guilty and inadequate for not being able to manage the way adults are supposed to do is likely to do more harm than good. And, to be honest, I didn’t feel like an adult at all. I think I’d stop maturing psychologically four or five years earlier, when I was 13, and I simply didn’t have the mental capacity to deal with any of the things adults have to deal with. Unfortunately, it was a realisation that made me feel even more helpless and hopeless, although maybe I’d have been a bit less self-deprecating if I’d known then that a lot of the problems I was having are common amongst people who have experienced trauma of some sort.

  I hated being on my own all the time when I was in the flat. Sometimes, though, you do need to be careful what you wish for, because one day Keith – the boy who had been adopted by Sandra and Bill and had sexually abused Rachel – turned up at my front door. I think Sandra must have given him my address, and it was stupid of me to let him in, knowing what I knew about him. But I was so surprised to see him standing there when I went downstairs and opened the front door of my flat that I didn’t really have time to think of an excuse.

  He didn’t seem to realise that I wasn’t exactly delighted to see him though, and his attitude was friendly as he told me, ‘I was just passing and thought I’d come and say hello. So … Can I come in?’ I wanted to say no, but for some reason didn’t feel as though I could. So I opened the door wider and he went ahead of me up the stairs.

  I’d been trying really hard not to drink alcohol since the suicide attempt, but I asked if he’d like a glass of juice, and I had just turned away from him to go into the kitchen when he grabbed me from behind, put his arm round my neck and pulled me backwards, pressing me against his groin. My immediate instinct was to try and fight him off, but I froze when I realised he was aroused. Then, trying to keep my voice steady so he wouldn’t know how scared I was, I asked him what he was doing, and when he didn’t answer, I told him to take his hands off me.

  When he still didn’t say anything or release his grip, I tried to pull away so that I could turn around and face him. But he just tightened his hold on me, then dragged me backwards across the living room and pushed me down on the sofa – my sofa, in my living room, in my home. As my fear turned to anger, I struggled to fight him off, but he was much stronger than I was, and after throwing himself on top of me, he forced my legs apart, pinned my hands above my head and started trying to pull down my jeans.

  As I couldn’t move my legs, I concentrated on trying to loosen his grip on my hands, and when I eventually managed to wrench them free, he started grabbing at my chest and trying to kiss me. We seemed to have been tussling and fighting for a long time, although it can’t have been more than a few minutes, when he suddenly stood up, pulled up his trousers, sat down in the chair opposite the sofa and asked, as if nothing had happened, ‘So how are you, Zo? Do you like living in this place?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I answered, sitting up and buttoning my jeans. ‘The flat’s fine too.’

  ‘Well, that’s great,’ he said. ‘Sorry I can’t stay longer, but I’ve got to go.’ Then he stood up and walked down the stairs and out of the front door, which I locked firmly behind him.

  Ten minutes later, when I was certain that he’d gone, I left the flat, walked round the corner to a shop and bought a 3-litre bottle of cider.

  It wasn’t until I got back to the flat that I caught sight of myself in the mirror and saw the bite marks on my neck. The whole incident had been humiliating and horrible, but maybe the worst thing about it was the shame I felt when I realised that everyone in the shop had seen the marks too. Bursting into tears, I picked up the bottle of cider, then crawled into bed to drink it.

  I was having some counselling at that time, which had been arranged for me by the leaving care team. The problem was, I don’t think the counsellor had much experience of dealing with the sort of things I talked about, and because she didn’t seem to know how to respond, I found it difficult to engage with the sessions. However, I did tell her about the incident with Keith, and when I showed her the bite marks on my neck, she gave me some antiseptic cream, and never mentioned it again.

  Sadly, it was only the bad things like Keith’s assault that marked the passing of the days, weeks and months while I was living in the flat. Most of the time, I stayed in, drinking and sleeping, or, when I couldn’t bear to be alone for a minute longer, visited my parents. I’d been living like that for almost a year and had just turned 19 when my dad died.

  One of my parents’ neighbours rang to tell me Dad had had a heart attack. ‘The ambulance men are still working on him,’
she said. A few minutes later, I was standing in the living room of my parents’ house watching the paramedics use paddles to try to start his heart, while Mum stood in the hallway, crying and saying, to no one in particular, ‘Do something.’

  When they carried Dad out of the house on a stretcher, one of the ambulance men told me not to look, and I can remember thinking, ‘Don’t tell me what to do.’ So I did look, which is when I realised that I must have just watched my father die, because although they didn’t say he was dead, I knew they would have secured his head on the stretcher if he was still alive.

  Mum clung to me, sobbing and shaking, while they put Dad in the ambulance, which felt strange because it was the first time she had ever touched me when she wasn’t angry. What really surprised me, however, was that I didn’t feel sorry for her at all, because I knew she was only concerned for herself, as she always was. What I wanted to do was shake her off and say, ‘Don’t cling to me for comfort. What have you ever done to try to comfort me?’ I didn’t though. I went with her to the hospital, where we were met by Jake, Ben and Michael. And then she didn’t need me any more.

  Later that day, we were driving away from the hospital in a taxi when Jake asked Mum, ‘Should Zoe come home with us?’

  ‘No. She’ll be all right,’ Mum said. So they dropped me off at the flat on their way, which made me feel as though they’d slammed a door in my face to shut me out, even though I don’t know if I’d have wanted to be with them that night any more than they wanted me to be there.

  Mum had had a health scare herself a few months before Dad died. I didn’t know the details, but whatever had happened must have really scared her, because she’d given up drinking. So she was sober when I went to see her the next morning, although it was difficult to tell at first, because of the way she was wailing and crying. Ben was there too, trying to sort out some of the paperwork Dad didn’t ever put into files, and it soon became apparent that what was really worrying Mum was how she was going to manage financially with Dad gone when she’d never had to pay a bill in her life. What was also obvious was that no one really wanted me there, so I only stayed for a few minutes, then went back to the flat and had a drink.

  I feel incredibly sad about it all now. At the time, however, I think my overwhelming feeling was relief at the thought that I was no longer going to have to endure Dad’s horrible gestures and sexual innuendos, which he was still making the last time I saw him, a few days before he died.

  The funeral had to be delayed for a couple of weeks while Ben tried to sort out probate and release some money from Dad’s bank account to pay for it. There were quite a few people there when it did eventually take place, including Ian, the son from his first marriage, and several members of his family who he saw regularly but who we’d had very little contact with over the years.

  I was dreading the funeral, because I knew it was going to be one of those days when you just have to grit your teeth and get through it, and it proved to be every bit as difficult as I’d imagined it was going to be, partly because of the way my nan behaved. Nan was Mum’s mum and didn’t even like my dad, but she insisted on travelling with us in the family car from the house to the crematorium, which meant there was no room for Ian, so he had to go in the hearse with the coffin. Then, during the service, Mum sat with Jake and Michael on the first pew, and just as Ben, Ian and I were about to sit down in the one behind them, Nan pushed in front of Ian, so he ended up being squashed at the end of a pew that was meant to seat three people, while I was wedged in next to her, which made me feel really angry.

  Although Ian hadn’t had a great deal of contact with Dad when he was very young, the father he’d known was obviously very different from the one Jake, Ben, Michael and I had grown up with, and Nan kept poking Mum in the back then pointing at Ian because he was crying.

  Of all the things that made me angry and upset that day, one of the worst was remembering something Dad had told us not very long before he died about getting on a bus and seeing Nan sitting there with a friend. ‘She looked straight at me,’ he said. ‘So there was no question about whether she’d seen me. But she didn’t even acknowledge me.’ Now, there she was at his funeral, elbowing her way into something that didn’t really concern her at all. That was what she was like about everything though, and she’d always had a lot of control over our family.

  In fact, Nan had done a lot of things I had never been able to understand. And about three months after Dad’s funeral, when I started challenging Mum and asking her questions I’d never have thought to ask her before, some of those things began to make more sense. That was when Mum told me that Granddad – her own father – had sexually abused her when she was a child, starting from when she was nine and escalating after she reached the age of 12.

  Hearing about the things he’d done to her made me feel protective towards her, like I used to feel when Dad was being horrible to her. But although it explained some of her behaviour as an adult, it didn’t excuse all of it. Suddenly, all the disturbing and previously inexplicable memories I had of the things my granddad had done to me when I was a small child began to make sense too. But when I asked Mum why, knowing what he was like, she’d let me go to their house on my own, she just shrugged as if to say, ‘This isn’t about you.’

  What was even more distressing to me than the revelations about what Mum’s dad had done to her was her admission that she’d lied about the creepy things she used to tell me my dad had done – sniffing my underwear, for example, or watching me while I was asleep. ‘I was the one who moved things in your bedroom,’ she said, laughing as if she was telling me some really funny joke.

  ‘But I don’t understand,’ I told her, feeling sick as it began to dawn on me that when Dad did start to make sexual comments to me, she had encouraged him, and that, horrible as they were, making those comments was all he had ever really done. ‘Why?’ I asked her again.

  ‘Oh, you were such a happy little girl,’ she answered spitefully. ‘You were always smiling and cheerful and I thought, “Why should you have a happy childhood when I didn’t? Why should you get on with your dad when mine did that to me?” So when you went to live at that care-home place, I wanted you to know what it felt like to be unhappy and not fit in. I wanted you to suffer. How was I supposed to know you would be almost raped to death? It wasn’t my fault.’

  When you’ve been depressed for a while, you get to the point when you no longer feel any strong emotions, particularly if you self-medicate with alcohol, as I’d been doing for several years. But I was completely stunned and hurt by the words my mum was spitting at me, like a snake spewing venom.

  There was a photograph that I used to like looking at that had been taken on my first birthday. I was sitting on my brother Ben’s knee, pointing at a cake in the shape of the number 1 that had my name written on it in pink icing. I think the reason I liked that photo so much was because it seemed to be evidence of a time when my parents must have cared about me enough to have had a special cake made to celebrate my birthday. I can’t remember now if I mentioned it after Dad died or if Mum did, but when the subject did come up, for whatever reason, she told me, ‘Your dad had that cake made specially for you by someone he worked with.’ Then she laughed and added, ‘I made sure he never did that again!’ She obviously only said it because she knew it would upset me, and she was right: knowing the truth dispelled any idea I might have had that she had ever cared about me, and broke my heart because it was proof that my dad did.

  There was still one tangible reminder of something nice I’d done with my dad when I was a little girl. But when I asked Mum if I could have the tape he’d recorded of me singing nursery rhymes when I was four years old, there was an expression of smug satisfaction on her face as she said that it was one of many things she’d thrown away after he died.

  She told me much more over the next few weeks, and every story made me wonder which was worse, the effect her actions had had on me as a child, or the fact that she had
quite deliberately destroyed my relationship with the father I used to love and who was now dead, so it was too late for any of the damage she’d done to be put right. When I got upset about it, however, she just shrugged and said, ‘I never loved you and I wanted to destroy you,’ as if she thought it was a perfectly reasonable explanation.

  All the things Mum talked about during the weeks after Dad died made me think again about quite a lot of incidents that had previously seemed inexplicable. Like the recurring nightmare Ben told me he’d had after I’d been taken into care, for example, in which he was standing on the back doorstep of our grandparents’ house, frantic because he couldn’t move and save me from the monster that was doing horrible things to me in Granddad’s shed. Maybe it wasn’t just a random nightmare after all; maybe he’d seen or heard something that was related to the flashbacks I’d started having before I went to live at Denver House.

  Not everything Mum told me was about my father or hers, however, and I can remember her laughing as she related the story of how, when I was three years old, I’d come out of my bedroom clutching a toy in each hand and she’d said, ‘You can’t walk down the stairs like that. You’ll fall.’

  ‘I’ll be okay,’ I apparently replied. ‘I can do it.’ So she’d stood and watched as I stepped cautiously from one stair to the next.

  ‘You almost made it,’ she told me. ‘You were about four stairs from the bottom when you fell. You took quite a tumble.’ She laughed again at the memory of it. ‘Then you picked up your toys and I knew you were trying not to cry. But you see, I was right. I said you couldn’t do it. I knew you’d fall.’ She said it in the same tone of voice another mother might use to relate an anecdote about something clever or funny their child had done. But it was her cleverness she was recalling, for knowing better than a three-year-old, and the ‘funny’ bit was me falling down the stairs and hurting myself.