Ben (26 page)

Simon was put on remand in Leicester. The accusation against him was that while selling and fitting security locks on windows, he’d actually robbed an old couple. I pictured the old lady and thought of my grandma. I knew there was no going back for us if the charges were true.

Simon denied everything, apart from the fact that he had gone back selling door-to-door without telling me. He said someone else in his gang had done the stealing. While that was his story, I had to believe him. Every fortnight, his prison sent me a ticket and I pushed Leighanna onto the train for the journey to Leicester. It wasn’t the sort of trip I had dreamed of taking my daughter on.

The remand centre didn’t have jail bars exposed to the open air like in Kos, but if anything it was scarier being led through a windowless warren of corridors to see the father of my children.

Returning to an empty house was the worst part of all. Despite Mum being on call and my nurse never more than a day or two away, every hour I was left alone with my baby the doubts about my abilities as a mother grew louder in my head. The harder I tried to shake them off, the more awkward I was getting. If I filled a bath too cold or a bottle too warm that was a signal for tears. If I hadn’t washed the outfit I wanted her to wear that day, cue more self-loathing.

On face value, I was showing classic signs of post-natal depression. Health visitors deal with this every day. What they didn’t know, however, was how much of my depression had started a long time earlier and a long way away. It was there before Leighanna’s birth, it was there after and it’s still here today. The only difference
is I’m aware of it now. I can recognise the signs and take appropriate measures before it escalates. Strong emotions, of course, are the biggest triggers. And when are emotions stronger than when you have a precious bundle of joy staring up from your arms?

Being alone also gave me a chance to think about Simon. When he announced, just before his appearance in the crown court, that he was going to change his plea to ‘guilty’ in order to implicate others, I wasn’t surprised. Not at him being guilty, nor at him still trying to cover it up with a lie. When it came to the court date, I didn’t show up to see Simon sentenced to five years.

The press had a field day. A lot of commentators said Simon had been harshly treated because he was a sort of celebrity and the judge had wanted to make an example of him. One year, five years, a hundred years – it didn’t matter to me. There were people out there who wanted to give the whole family a kicking and took any chance they could get. They couldn’t criticise us about Ben in public, so this was the next best thing. Everyone knew we lived in council houses and got by on disability allowances and charity – and now, thanks to Simon, we were thieves as well. It didn’t make for easy reading.
Is the whole country thinking these things or just one or two journalists?
It made me question everyone I spoke to for a while.

What I couldn’t know was that worse was to come.

Somehow I thrived as a single mum, although being in the public eye for the reason I was placed a huge responsibility on my shoulders. It wasn’t good enough for me to be a normal mum: I had to be a brilliant one. Every time I stepped outside the house I felt strangers’ eyes burning into me, assessing me, judging me. I swear
I heard people saying, ‘I hope she looks after this one better than the last one,’ but never clearly enough to challenge anyone on it. It didn’t matter. Leighanna was my only concern. After one overheard remark, I remember looking at her snuggled up in her pushchair, and promising, ‘Mummy’s never going to leave you.’ How many parents say that and have no idea it could even be a possibility?

I was true to my word – at first. When the chance to investigate sightings came up, I let my parents – often Dad on his own – handle them. Each time they went away I sat at home and chain-drank coffee; I had the concentration span of a pinball machine. I pictured every detail of the trip in my mind and could not relax till they returned. Hard as it was to endure the waiting, it would have been worse to actually travel. I couldn’t let Leighanna see me go through the devastation I’d experienced in Turkey and Corfu. I needed to be strong. I was everything she had.

In the last few months before my overdose I’d thrown myself into housework to keep busy. Looking back, I know I had become obsessive about it. I also know it happened again when it was just me and Leighanna at home. I didn’t have anyone to talk to at nights and, apart from shopping and going to the park, there was little going on during the day. I was back in the position I had found myself in when Simon abandoned me before. Although my family were at least close this time, all my friends were in Skegness, not Sheffield. Ploughing my energies into cleaning and mopping and tidying filled the void of a missing social life. It was as though I was afraid to be alone with my thoughts.

By the time Leighanna celebrated her first birthday in February 1995, Ben had been missing for over three and a half years. Towards the end of that year, she played a significant role in the
search for her brother – role being the operative word. A TV company suggested doing a recreation of Ben’s final moments, and there was only one possible candidate to play him.

If I hadn’t already seen little Saliha in Turkey, I would have been more shocked at how much a girl can resemble a boy. Leighanna, at eighteen months, was the spit of Ben at the same age. So by the time she was twenty-one months – the age he was when he disappeared – she could easily pass for him on film.

I couldn’t face going to Kos, not again, so Mum and Dad agreed to escort their granddaughter. I authorised the cutting of her hair to help her look like Ben as much as possible, and hunted out some clothes of his. I’d kept them in a box in his room, ready to unpack when he returned. When they had obviously become too small, I still couldn’t bear to part with them.

I don’t know how Mum and Dad got through revisiting the old haunts again. What they must have gone through watching Leighanna being directed to toddle down the lane while they pretended to eat a lunch – just like they’d done nearly four and a half years before – can only be the definition of hell. They both still blamed themselves for what happened to Ben. I think they wanted to take part in the programme as a kind of penance.

Of course, it wasn’t all doom and gloom. Leighanna can be very theatrical at times but she doesn’t like being bossed about, not now and not then. The TV crew tried everything to get her to walk where they wanted, while she was only interested in marching off in the opposite direction. The very things that had mesmerised Ben at the farmhouse – the flora, the animal noises, the distant goats and birds – took Leighanna’s fancy as well. Showing a flash of ingenuity, one of the crew produced a plastic duck and, once
their star had established how much she’d like to hold it, walked backwards, just out of camera, to entice the little girl forwards. The secrets of showbiz!

Viewing the finished film was almost as painful as if I’d gone out there myself. For those ten minutes of the recreation, I wasn’t watching my daughter: I was watching Ben.

There was another reason I didn’t travel with Leighanna to Kos.

By the time Leighanna was eighteen months old, I was bouncing off the walls. We saw relatives as often as we could, and my parents and brothers sometimes came to us. I remember one visit. After they’d gone, I closed the door and rested my head against the wood. I just needed a few moments before I went back into the lounge, back to the couple of small rooms where I’d spend the next thirty or fifty hours without speaking to another adult human being. I loved my daughter so much but I’d gone from being Ben Needham’s mum to Leighanna Needham’s, without a break in between. And all by the age of twenty-two. Somewhere in the process, Kerry Needham seemed to have been squeezed out of the picture altogether.

A few weeks later I was on the bus with Stephen. He told me a joke he’d heard at college and I burst out laughing. I noticed a woman across the aisle staring.

‘Are you Ben Needham’s mum?’ she said eventually.

‘Yes, I am.’

‘How can you laugh when he’s missing?’

I’d committed the crime of laughing at a joke. To this stranger I wasn’t honouring my son. She didn’t care that I saw him in Leighanna every day and that I spoke to his photograph as though
he were really there. People see what they want to see, and I knew nobody was seeing
me
.

Getting a job seemed the obvious answer on so many grounds – it would take me off benefits, it would get me out of the house and it would allow Mum and Dad to spend more time with their granddaughter. But was I ready psychologically? It was because I had been working instead of looking after Ben that I was crucified by Greek public opinion. Worse, if I started now, there would inevitably be a section of society who saw it as me ‘moving on’ and criticise me for that.

My application for a weekend bar position in a club in Rotherham was submitted with more than a hint of apprehension. I knew that my reaction to their decision would decide me one way or the other. Less than a week later, I received a reply. I had the job – and I couldn’t have been happier. I knew then it was the right decision for me.

My shifts were Thursday, Friday and Saturday night, roughly nine till two o’clock in the morning. Mum agreed to look after Leighanna, and I would either spend the day with them till my next shift or if it was Sunday, take Leighanna back to ours for the week. The club paid for taxis to get us home, so safety was never an issue.

I’d done a little bar work before and I’d seen my old friends Peter and Martin serve cocktails often enough, so there were no surprises for me workwise. The biggest impact was the other staff. For five or six hours a night, I actually spent time talking to people my own age – and that was before all the shouted half-conversations with the men and women queuing to be served. Even if my colleagues did know my story it wasn’t an issue. To them,
I was just Kerry. Kerry the barmaid, Kerry the supervisor, Kerry the good laugh.

Kerry the mum was left outside the building.

At home I felt like I had the whole world on my shoulders, and looking at the rest of my team, I realised I was old before my time. They showed me what a twenty-three-year-old should look like. More importantly, they showed me how one could act.

I know now I was hiding from my real life. At the time I felt like I’d found it – I wanted to be free from the pain, the suffering, the depression, the responsibility I’d had weighing me down for a quarter of my life. So, when a girl called Joanna said everyone was going dancing after our shift, I was interested. There were clubs, she said, that didn’t get busy till after ours shut. I’d never heard of anything so decadent, certainly never taken part. All that was about to change.

We’d only been at the club an hour and I started flagging. The others were still going like Duracell bunnies; obviously they weren’t being deprived of sleep by a baby under two years old.

‘That’s not the reason we’re still awake,’ one of my girl friends said.

‘How do you do it then?’ I asked.

‘We take these.’

She showed me a little pill, considerably smaller than an aspirin or diazepam.

‘What is it?’

‘Tell me you’re joking.’

‘I’m not. I’ve never seen that before.’

‘Kerry – where have you been? It’s ecstasy.’

And so my education continued. By the time I got home, I was already late for picking Leighanna up. Instead, I went to bed and
faced the consequences later that evening. Mum said she had no problem with me having a night out, I just should have let her know.

How could I let my mother know the reason I hadn’t picked up my daughter was because I’d been too wired on ecstasy?

My eyes were opened to the world and I was desperate to catch up with everything I felt I’d been missing out on. As well as the pill that kept you dancing till dawn, I was also introduced to amphetamines, again by someone convinced I was pulling their leg about never having tried them before. I’m sure some of them thought I’d been living in another era. I felt like they’d come from another planet. Their nocturnal lives were so exotic, so exciting, I couldn’t wait for the end of the week so I could get to work and just let my hair down. It was wild, it was crazy and I loved being part of this new circle.

In one of the all-night clubs I was dragged along to all sorts of things went on, but it wasn’t the drugs that make it stand out for me.

There were always two or three big blokes on the door to make sure there was no trouble. I was just filing my way in one night when one of the guys pulled me aside.

‘Kerry Needham – is that you?’

I’d already had a couple of glasses of wine at the bar, and it must have shown as I stared up at the smiling, bald face looking back. Then the penny dropped.

‘Mick? What are you doing here?’

It was Mick Baxendale, my old karate teacher from Skegness. His brother Steven owned the club, and Mick had moved down to manage it for him. I don’t know if it was the wine or the fond memories, but when Mick asked me out later I said yes. It didn’t
matter that he was eighteen years older than me or that I hadn’t seen him since I was at school. There was a connection between us and from that moment I was hooked. Although Mick later ended our relationship, even now I would describe him as the love of my life.

I really thought I’d found myself in that nocturnal existence. My new lifestyle didn’t make me a better person but it did make me my own person. A person without a label.

The downside was that there was another person in my life, one who depended on me. Gradually, I began to see Leighanna less and less over a weekend. Then one day, I didn’t pick her up on Sunday or even go back on Monday. I can’t explain it. Mum turned up at Foxhill furious. I think I was still high. I honestly couldn’t see why she wouldn’t want to spend time with her grandchild. She couldn’t see why I wouldn’t want to spend time with my daughter.

Looking back, they were obviously worried about me. They’d seen the hurt I’d gone through with Ben, so they knew I was a good mother. What on earth could be happening to make me, as they saw it, abandon Leighanna? As much as they wanted to help out, they were willing me to rediscover my maternal instincts because that would mean I was back on track.