Can't Anyone Help Me? (17 page)

I didn’t care what my teachers were going to think or what my mother thought. If the school hadn’t thrown me out already, a few red curls were hardly going to make them.

So, ignoring her tirade, I just said it was my birthday present. After all, I pointed out sarcastically, I was too old for teddy bears.

‘But it’s not your birthday, Jackie,’ she said.

‘Oh, well, Uncle said I could have my present early.’ I gave one of the shrugs that infuriated her.

Another torrent of words poured out, this time claiming I was a spoilt child who could twist my uncle round my little finger. Finally she said she was going to talk to him and ‘stop all this grown-up nonsense’. Little did she know that the last thing my uncle wanted was for me to be grown-up.

Well, he might as well take the blame for something, I thought, trying to keep the smirk off my face.

She, sensing truculence in me, objected again.

‘Oh, get used to it,’ I snarled eventually. ‘Everyone looks like this.’ A statement that both she and I knew was blatantly untrue, certainly not in the area where we lived.

Another frosty look came my way. ‘Well, you’re not going out looking like that. You’re grounded.’

Our eyes met in anger, then hers dropped. ‘I don’t know what your father will say,’ was her parting shot.

The argument was over. My father was not going to say much. He wanted a quiet life.

In my room I painted my nails black before I rang Kat to invite myself over. Then, with another coat of mascara and a renewed smear of lipstick, I left the house stealthily by the kitchen door, clutching the new cassettes. There was a limit, I thought, as to how much I could get away with.

When she saw my transformation, Kat looked more alarmed than impressed.

‘Don’t you like it?’ I asked.

‘Er, yes,’ she said hesitantly, but the expression on her face said something different.

I realized that, for all her talk of how she wanted to piss her mother and stepfather off, her rebellion consisted of listening to music they hated, smoking the odd stolen cigarette and complaining about helping with the washing-up. That was as far as it was ever going to go.

‘Come on, let’s take our bikes and go into town,’ I said, thinking we could mooch around the shops and have a Coke – I was dying to get a wider reaction to my new look.

She made up some excuse about having promised to help her mother, but I knew she simply didn’t want to go.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

I turned on my heels and walked away.

That was the start of another lesson. Those who have something to lose guard it, while those who no longer value themselves are more careless about other people’s opinions.

It did not take me long to find other more willing friends. If there were no other troubled children in the safe middle-class village where I lived, I knew there were in my uncle’s, and I knew exactly where to find them.

The following week I was told I was going to spend another weekend at my uncle’s house. Having another of those parties, I thought, as I listened to my mother talking on the phone, confirming the guest list and the dinner arrangements. That thought never failed to make me angry. But if she was pleased that I was staying away for the last weekend before school started, it didn’t stop her tackling my uncle as soon as he walked through the door.

‘What do you think you’ve been playing at?’ she asked accusingly.

‘What do you mean?’ he said, glancing worriedly in my direction.

‘Letting her buy those clothes and do this to herself.’

‘Oh, come on, Dora,’ he started to say, as he looked at her nervously.

I saw his hand go to his shirt pocket for cigarettes. Then, under my mother’s steely glare, he remembered he was in a no-smoking zone and ran his fingers through his hair instead. ‘She’s growing up – anyone can see that,’ he added.

‘Well, don’t give her money for any more! And don’t let her touch her hair, except to wash some more of that colour out.’ Every night she had stood over me, making sure I was shampooing it. As her hairdresser had predicted, the brightness of the red had faded during the week so that now I was more of a honey blonde with some patches of red still showing through, like the fur of a mottled ginger cat. I thought it still looked cool but I had been thinking of redoing it at the weekend.

‘And no more makeup either,’ she called after us as we left.

We drove to his house in silence. I didn’t want to be there. I disliked the small dark rooms, the bare garden and my bedroom with its sparse, cheap furniture. Most of all I hated looking at the door that led to the room where my uncle kept his photographic equipment.

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.

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.