Can't Anyone Help Me? (18 page)

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.

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 tremor 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.

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.

Maybe a combination of all that made me take the next step. It is not something I have ever been able to work out clearly.

Autumn had announced its arrival by turning the leaves of the oak trees a deep russet brown. Some had already fallen and they scrunched under my feet when I stomped angrily down the road. The trees always look their most beautiful, I thought, when their leaves are about to die.

In the morning there was frost on the cars, and as I walked to school my breath rose in wispy clouds.

The sun’s rays had lost their warmth and daylight faded by late afternoon, leaving a misty grey twilight. Those gloomy days depressed me because they told me it was the run-up to Christmas. My aunt and uncle would visit us and I would have to act the role of a normal girl in a normal family.

For the last couple of weeks at school before we broke up, there would be a buzz of excitement. I heard plans being made, parties being arranged, which I knew I would not be invited to, as my classmates discussed what they considered to be the best time of the year.

At home I tried to catch sight of Kat but I was too proud to knock on her door. I didn’t want to see her slightly impatient look as she muttered an excuse not to spend time with me.

There were occasions when she wanted to take her bike out and we would go together, but our friendship had faded. I had noticed she had also changed. Instead of the jeans she had once lived in, she had started wearing dresses. I had seen her laughing with her mother and stepfather as they had all climbed out of the car after what had clearly been a family day out. She loved the baby and often took him out in the pram for walks.

I had felt her stepfather looking at me with barely concealed distaste when he had seen me trying to catch her attention. I knew, without anything being specifically said, that it was partly his influence that had begun to end our friendship.

Maybe that was one of the reasons I wanted to be accepted by my new friends. Dressing like them was an important part of it. So was having enough cash to chip in my share for drink and marijuana. Since Dave had been seen to favour me, the boys who had once been happy to snog me in the shadows now kept a careful distance.

I really wanted a coat. Not the warm navy blue reefer jacket my mother had bought me – I would rather have died than be seen in that.

Definitely not cool, I thought. No. I wanted a leather jacket like Dave’s, black, with a quilted lining and silver studs on the arms and collar. ‘How much would one like yours cost?’ I asked him.

He laughed at me. ‘They don’t do them in little girls’ sizes,’ he said dismissively.

But I wanted one, even if I had to get one a size too big.

‘A hundred,’ he admitted, when I refused to be fobbed off.

Where, I wondered, could I get that sort of money? But it was the overriding desire for the jacket that gave birth to my next step. I remembered the wads of notes I had seen men give my uncle. Cut out the middle man and get it for yourself, I thought. For if there was one thing my uncle had taught me, it was that there was no shortage of men who would pay to have sex with underage girls.

The first was a business colleague of my father’s. I’d seen him looking at me when he had visited the house. I simply asked him for a lift.

‘My, how you’ve grown,’ he said, with the appreciative smile I recognized. ‘How old are you now, Jackie?’

‘Thirteen,’ I lied.

‘Boyfriend yet? Pretty girl like you must have one.’

I knew that jacket was coming nearer. ‘Oh, I’m not really interested in boys,’ I said, giving him a sideways look. Then I said the words that so many balding, paunchy middle-aged men dream of hearing from a pretty young girl. ‘All the boys I know are just so immature.’

It took just a second for the stock answer I was to hear many times in the future to leave his mouth: ‘Oh, if only I was twenty years younger!’

I wonder what difference you think that would make, I thought scornfully, but didn’t show it. I lowered my eyelids and peeped at him through my lashes. ‘Age doesn’t matter, does it?’ I said.

I earned twenty pounds for a quick grope and a promise that it was just between us.

My new career had started.

No more hand-jobs in exchange for a drink or a toke on a shared joint. I wanted more and I’d found it.

My reputation grew. I cannot remember who was next to slip two five-pound notes into my jeans pocket. I just remember he gave me ten pounds for doing much less than my uncle’s friends had asked of me.