Can't Anyone Help Me?

by Maguire, Toni

  I knew he no longer wanted me to visit, but we were trapped. We couldn’t explain to either his wife or my parents why that was. So he unwillingly became my accomplice as I exercised my right to my new freedom.

  He dared not discipline me or bar me from going out. Over the weekends I stayed there, I was careful not to let my aunt know too much, just in case she thought it her duty to inform my mother that I was making a life over there. She had little knowledge of it but, whatever I was up to, she knew my mother would not approve.

  Within a few weeks the smell of cigarettes clung to my clothes and my breath smelt of alcohol. Sometimes I thought my uncle must have felt as Dr Frankenstein had. He had created a monster for his own pleasure and was no longer in charge of it. I enjoyed watching him squirm at his impotence now that he had lost all power over me. I delighted in the fact that he was frightened of me, frightened of what I might do to bring down on him either the fury of my parents or, worse, the authorities.

  He tried to warn me more than once: ‘Jackie, your parents might stop you coming here if they hear what you’re up to.’ Of course, he never actually said what he thought I was up to.

  ‘As if I care,’ I said, giving him my recently learnt stock reply.

  ‘Well, you couldn’t get away with so much at home, could you?’ He was right.

  But the need to smoke and then to buy those little white pills that made the world slip away became too strong. My body wanted more of whatever my uncle had fed me over the years, and I had found out how I could come by it.

  After my transformation, when I visited my uncle’s house it was only to change and go out again. There was a coffee shop, not the smart one where I had been on the day I went shopping, but a sleazy one. Fruit machines lined the walls and the place stank of rancid cooking fat.

  On my first day back with my uncle that was where I headed. Wearing my new clothes and makeup, I sauntered in, trying to appear nonchalant as my eyes searched the crowd. I knew that what my mother called ‘bad’ teenagers hung out there and I wanted to meet some. I can’t remember the sequence of events that followed, just that I soon made friends of a very different sort from either the ‘nice’ children at my school or the few who lived on our estate.

  32

  There was an area of flats and houses where the local council, in their wisdom, had rounded up ‘problem’ families. Single mothers whose children, by the time they started school, were bringing themselves up. Battered wives, who told the council they were escaping violent men but, in their new homes, took back their abusers. It was where a teenage boy’s idea of a day out was sitting in juvenile court; a holiday was several weeks or months in a detention centre. The younger children were full of admiration for the ones old enough to do time.

  Teenage pregnancy was rife; alcohol and drugs were freely available.

  It didn’t take me long to find my niche, or to discover how easy it was to pay for the drink and drugs. It started with a kiss and a fumble behind the garages, then it was a hand-job for a teenage boy – easy work to me. Sometimes we sat on piss-stained stairways, at others in flats where the parents had no interest in what their children did. There was an old church hall where, once upon a time, the newly arrived minister had tried to get the youth on the estate interested in various activities; the venture had failed dismally because his targets were apathetic and antagonistic to his cause.

  So, whatever the weather, we found rooms, steps and corners where we could smoke and drink without interference. Girls who, with their makeup plastered on, looked older than their years went into off-licences and bought or stole what they wanted. I didn’t care whether it was bought or stolen, I just enjoyed sharing it. Small pellets of marijuana were crumbled into tobacco, then turned into a bulky cigarette that, once lit, filled the air with a sweet, cloying smell. It would be passed round, and when it came to me I would drag the smoke deep into my lungs before handing it to the next person. Dope was more popular than alcohol but, then, it was even more forbidden than underage drinking.

  And we all liked doing something that was forbidden.

  The people in the group I had become friendly with all had a different story to tell.

  There was Cathy who, at fourteen, played truant more than she attended school. Short, with chunky thighs, a row of studs adorning her ears and a tattoo of a snake around her arm, she was the one who was most vocal about her life. Her dad, she told me, was inside, not for the first time, it appeared. ‘Got caught breaking and entering again, stupid bastard! Anyhow, I’m pleased to see the back of him,’ she said. ‘He used to beat my ma up. She’ll take him back, though. She’s a loser too. He’ll get drunk, then come home and bash her about and I’ll have to listen to him shouting and her screaming again. Then next thing they’ll be all lovey-dovey and she’ll be telling me that he loves her and it was just the fucking drink that did it. Yeah, sure – suppose the fucking drink blacked her eye. I don’t think so! But do I care?’

  She most probably did, but she was never going to admit it.

  ‘Anyhow,’ she told me, ‘I’m leaving once he gets out. Getting my own place,’ she added confidently, without saying how she was going to find the money to do so.

  Then there was Mick, the fifteen-year-old son of an out-of-work coal miner. When I met him, I learnt that the woman my parents thought of as a national hero and miracle worker was considered a demon among my new friends. ‘Put my dad and his mates out of work, closed the fucking pits, the Fascist cow,’ said Mick, and a chorus of voices chimed in, blaming her for the strife and unemployment in the area.

  I heard how some of the older ones had marched alongside the men, only to be forced back by police – another section of the community they were vitriolic about. ‘Fascist pigs, they are,’ Mick said fervently. ‘My dad went to school with some of them, you know, but that didn’t stop them charging at us. Oh, the papers said they moved them to different areas, but that wasn’t true.’

  I knew from my parents’ discussions over breakfast that in fact it was, but I had no intention of saying so. On and on they went and the general opinion strongly aired was that the police had betrayed the working classes in which their roots also lay. Betrayed by the non-working ones as well, I thought, if what my father had said about some of the agitators in the picket lines was right, but again I kept quiet. Aping the opinions of their parents, the group spoke with the brand of wisdom that only those with limited knowledge possess.

  Listening to them, my vocabulary extended even further. ‘Bloody tossers,’ I said in agreement.

  I, who had heard that Margaret Thatcher was the saviour of modern Britain, soaked up everything they said for it was all so contrary to the ideology of my parents and their Conservative friends. My new friends’ talk was even better than the Johnny Rotten interview, I mused. Sensibly, I kept very quiet about my parents’ views. But I also kept quiet about the detached house I lived in, the two-car garage that housed my father’s large saloon and my mother’s smaller one, and the fact that we had a cleaner – who, thankfully, did not live on the same estate as they did.

  For the first time I encountered people who did not take money, or the things money can buy, for granted. My aunt and uncle might have said they both needed to work, but that was all. In that area most of my new friends’ parents had to wait each week for the dole cheque to arrive. Either their mothers had to bring the children up on their own, living on state handouts, or their fathers had lost their jobs and become so despondent by the lack of employment in the area that they had given up looking for new ones. However, shortage of money was not something that appeared to bother my new friends. Unlike their parents, they had found ways of supplementing their incomes.

  Shoplifting was one of the main sources. ‘Going on the chore’, they called it. ‘Easy,’ they told me confidently, when I asked how they did it. ‘Just take the small things, bits of makeup and perfume, then drop them into your pocket. Small shops are the best. The bigger ones are getting wise and watch
for it. You go in pairs, and while one of you is talking to the assistant, the other nicks the stuff.’

  ‘Where do you sell it?’ I asked curiously.

  ‘At school, to posh kids like you who get pocket money,’ they said, with a laugh.

  They were curious about me: my accent betrayed my background. I told them my dad beat my mother. I still felt some loyalty to my parents and somehow I found it easier to tell stories that were not grounded in truth than to divulge the facts about the wife-swapping parties. Underneath I knew that, in their limited way, they had tried with me. But that did not stop the blind rage I felt at them. Neither did I want to admit that I knew my parents didn’t love me for that would have labelled me as a loser. Although my new friends might have had to fend for themselves, and most of them thought their fathers were useless, they all showed some feelings for their mothers. Feelings I did not seem to possess. If she had loved me, she would have wanted me at home, wouldn’t she? And if I had stayed there, my uncle would not have been able to do what he had done.

  Round and round those thoughts went, only to be pushed to the back of my mind as I greedily held out my hand when the joint was passed to me and inhaled deeply. Dope, I found, made the world a happier place. Like the drugged drink my uncle had fed me for so long, it made the world blur – but differently. Even the weakest joke made me giggle uncontrollably. I could hear every note soaring out of tiny speakers and I was more aware of colours, which grew more vibrant.

  If only I could smoke it when I was painting in class, I thought. I might get some really good stuff then.

  It was on one of those weekends that I met Dave again, the boy I had met when I was five. The same boy I had been told was part of a dream and had known was not. He still had that unruly chestnut hair and was dressed in tight jeans. But this time his hair was styled and his jeans the new drainpipe ones. The softness of boyhood had left his body and his face. Over the years since I had met him he had shot up to nearly six foot tall. His shoulders were broad, and under his T-shirt, I could see the definition of muscle.

  The cowed, defeated look he had worn when we had met was gone. Instead his face had hardened and there was a defiant bravado about him. It showed in the way he walked and even in how he stood. In his new self-contained confidence he appeared to be in his twenties, but I knew he could not yet have left his teens.

  He might only have been a boy by legal standards, but in my new friends’ eyes he was a man, one, I noticed straight away, who had captured their respect.

  How we recognized each other after all that time, I do not know. But we did. Oh, not at first: it was my name that brought a look of recognition to his face. ‘Is your uncle … ?’ and he said my uncle’s name.

  Shit, I thought. Then, as I studied him, I saw an older version of the boy I had met all those years ago.

  ‘Yeah, but I’m having no more to do with him,’ I replied, only to receive a disbelieving look.

  ‘I mean not in that way,’ I whispered. I looked away as my cheeks burnt with embarrassment. Of course I asked him not to tell. ‘It was just that one time,’ I lied.

  ‘Oh, come off it, Jackie,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard about that uncle of yours. He and my dad –’ He stopped, but I guessed he meant they had met again.

  He said he had thought initially that I was his daughter, not his niece, and that seemed to make him angry. Then he did what he had done when I was five and he a few years older: he took my hand, laced his fingers through mine and squeezed gently. ‘You all right?’ he asked.

  I told him that my uncle was too scared to touch me now. That something had happened – I didn’t want to talk about it, but it had frightened my uncle. He was scared I might talk. ‘Would you?’ he asked.

  I shuddered at the thought of reliving that time with the man and his whip. Just the fleeting memory of his face leering at me was enough to make bile rise into my throat. ‘What? And have everyone know about me?’ I answered. Our eyes met, and in his I read compassion and understanding. I knew I was not the only one who had something shameful to hide.

  His breath was warm on my cheek as he said, ‘Your secret’s safe with me, Jackie. Don’t worry, I’ll not tell anyone.’

  I leant against him, feeling that he was the one person who understood. His arm circled my shoulders and I allowed myself to feel comforted.

  ‘I thrashed my old man, you know,’ he said. ‘As soon as I was big enough, I hit him. I’d worked out at the school gym so much that they thought I wanted to be an athlete. But all I wanted was to be big enough to stand up to him and to hit him if he came near me. And I did. He leaves me alone now, and my little sister. He had his eye on her too, the dirty bastard. You tell me if your uncle tries to start anything and he’ll get sorted, OK?’

  That was the start of a friendship that others thought should have been impossible, separated as Dave and I were by the gulf of years, but we were bound by our shattered pasts.

  As I got to know the group better, I learnt that Dave was the main supplier of the drugs that were sold on the estate and in the schools. Some of the group worked for him, selling to their classmates as well as an assortment of people living on the estate.

  I learnt that in the area, young as he was, he already had a reputation for being hard, and handy with his fists. One boy had found that out when he had helped himself to some of the white powder he was meant to be selling. Ed, his name was, a short, skinny boy with bad teeth and greasy hair. I found him unsettling. Eyes ringed with dark shadows would have told anyone well informed that his addiction was speed – whiz, as we called amphetamine sulphate, the poor man’s cocaine. I was pleased that he was scared of Dave, for I had seen his eyes rake me up and down with a knowing sneer. It didn’t take the others long to work out that, for some reason, Dave was my protector. Nobody was going to mess with me if he was around.

  But whatever they whispered about Dave and his violence, I remembered the skinny boy with the dark bruises on his body who had skimmed stones across the river and tried to comfort me.

  33

  With him knowing me, although nobody guessed how, I was accepted. They knew I came from a different background and were curious as to why I wanted to hang out with them, but they just went along with it.

  I stopped talking then and looked helplessly at my therapist. Even though nearly twenty years had passed since the day I had met the adult Dave, just talking about him still upset me. ‘I know,’ I said to her, ‘that the only way to heal myself is to confront all of my past. To take all those memories that for so long I’ve pushed away and put them in order, then deal with them. But it’s so hard to recollect everything I’ve tried so hard to forget.’

  ‘You respected Dave, looked up to him, saw him as the one person who, knowing about your uncle, cared for you, didn’t you?’ she asked. Even though she knew the answer, her comment was framed as a question.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I did. People who didn’t understand said he was bad. But he was so damaged, so angry. And he took it out on the world.’

  I wished then, as I spoke about him, that I could cry. For Dave deserved a tear, but I was unable to shed one for him.

  My therapist waited for me to continue, then realized I needed some input from her. ‘Jackie,’ she said, ‘unfortunately, frightened little boys who have suffered abuse often grow up into confused and angry men. And with some, that anger can turn to violence.’ She sighed. ‘The prisons are full of young men with sad pasts. Girls tend to turn anger towards themselves, with self-harming and bad relationships. It’s tragic but true.’

  ‘I just took it out on myself,’ I said softly. I was thinking not only of the little scars left by cuts and cigarette burns but all the other things I had done to destroy my life. ‘Once I watched an interview with an elderly woman who was a survivor of Auschwitz. She spoke about the horrors of what had happened there, of what she had seen, so dispassionately. She was so dignified, that wrinkled old woman. Not a tear ran down her face, nor was there a tremo
r of anger in her voice as she recounted how her whole family had been lost. She knew, I think, that when hate is mixed with loss it creates a poison that seeps through you until every part of you is contaminated by an anger so intense that your ability to function as a human being dissolves. If only Dave and I had understood that,’ I said sadly.

  A picture of Dave when he was still a boy slipped into my mind: he had been brave enough to protest at what the adults wanted us to do.

  I remembered what he had been forced to do with me, and wondered what else he had been made to endure. I could only imagine. He had spoken of it to me only once and that was when we were older. But even then he had told me little.

  I thought of his kindness to the women he had cared for: his mother, sister and me. But I also remembered how the other boys had feared him. I felt the wave of sadness I always did when my mind visited the place where I kept his memory. Then I thought of the last time I had seen him, and his fate.

  But I was not ready to talk about that. Not yet.

  That, I thought, would have to wait for another session.

  34

  Was it just my desire for a leather jacket, or was it that the encroaching winter depressed me? Or was it another reason entirely that made my anger turn inwards so I wanted to hurt myself even more, to add degradation to the pain I inflicted upon myself? I used lighted candles to burn my skin and made tiny nicks with razors in places where they wouldn’t show, but the pain no longer released me from the dark thoughts and dreams that haunted me at night.

  I felt rage at my parents, a rage that expressed itself in sullen looks and a refusal to obey them. I was angry with my teachers and the other pupils for being happy, and even with Kat, who wanted less and less to do with me.