Can't Anyone Help Me? (24 page)

She hadn’t enough imagination to think of fresh insults to hurl at me so she repeated the earlier one: ‘Just a common little whore, that’s what you are,’ she hissed.

At that I felt a mist of rage descend. What did she know, the ugly cow? I thought angrily. ‘What’s the matter? Found out your boyfriend’s one of the ones I’ve been with?’ I snapped.

She gripped the top of my arm hard and laughed. ‘He’s got better taste, Jackie.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That’s what all the wives and girlfriends think.’

A red tide suffused her cheeks and she propelled me into the headmistress’s office without a further word.

‘She’s admitted it and not a scrap of shame either,’ she said, as she entered the room.

The expression on the headmistress’s face was neither triumphant nor sneering. Her face showed no pleasure at having caught me out in something that the school would not be able to tolerate. Instead, she just looked incredibly sad. She dismissed the teacher, who almost flounced out of the room in her disappointment at not being a witness to my final half-hour at the school. The headmistress told me to take a seat, as she had wanted to speak to me in private.

‘I remember you when you first came here, Jackie. You were a troubled little girl even then,’ she said, more with some remnant of affection than anything else.

I, too, remembered those early days. A picture of the panic attack I had had on my first day at school when her voice had reassured me that I was going to be all right and that I was safe came into my mind. I saw her face as it had been that day, concerned, not angry as I had expected.

For the first time I felt a wave of shame at what I had done and, unable to meet her eyes, I looked away.

I knew that whatever I said or however sorry she felt for me, now that she knew what I had been doing it was impossible for her to keep me at the school. With that realization, I wanted to be a small child again, to rest my head on her shoulder as I had after that panic attack, and to be told that everything was going to be all right. But there was no turning back and I had to accept the consequences of my actions.

I was right. She said that they had tried to help me but in her opinion I needed more than the school could give. Therefore it was no longer the right environment for someone with my problems.

I’ll corrupt the other children is really what she means, I thought.

‘I suppose you did it to finance your drug habit,’ she said. ‘Yes, Jackie, I know about that,’ she added, when she saw the surprise on my face. I did not answer her, for what was there to say? If she knew about that, then I was sure my parents did as well.

She had already spoken to them about her decision, she said, as though she had read my mind. They were already at the school and were going to take me home. She told me she was sorry that somehow the school had failed me, that she knew I had problems. Then she repeated what she had already said: that I needed a special type of care that she and the school were unable to provide.

She wished me luck and hoped I would sort myself out.

I would have preferred her to be angry, even to have said the same words the teacher had. Her sadness and disappointment hurt much more than those harsh words had.

I wanted to say something, anything, to show that I, too, was sorry, but the words stayed in my throat.

‘Come, Jackie,’ she said, ‘your parents are waiting outside. I’ll walk you out.’ She touched my arm briefly as I went through the doors. ‘Goodbye, Jackie,’ she said, but I was too emotional to reply and, without a backward glance, I walked through the gates to where my stony-faced parents were waiting in their car. Still silent, I climbed in.

Once back at the house, after she had venomously told me how I had shamed her and that I was a filthy little girl whom she wanted nothing more to do with, my mother refused to speak to me.

My father at first demanded the names of the men I had been with. I told him I had never asked. ‘I could go to the police,’ he said. ‘They’ve committed a crime.’

‘Well, it wasn’t rape, was it?’ I said defiantly.

‘No publicity,’ screamed my mother, no doubt imagining headlines splashed across the newspapers, exposing the debauchery within the middle classes.

‘How many, Jackie?’ my father whispered angrily, when my mother was out of earshot.

I looked at him with pity then. ‘More than you want to know,’ I said.

‘It hasn’t just started, has it?’ he said tiredly. ‘You were selling yourself to get money for drugs before you went into hospital, weren’t you?’

I saw his shoulders slump when I answered him with just one word, ‘Yes.’

‘Why?’ he asked, but that was something I couldn’t answer.

I was banished to my room. Meals were placed outside my door; a curt knock announced their arrival. For the following week not only did my mother not speak to me, she refused to acknowledge my existence.

At the end of my week’s banishment, I was told to come downstairs as they wanted to talk to me. My parents explained what had been arranged. I was being sent to a school that catered for problem children. I was to pack suitable clothing and be ready to leave in the morning.

‘It’s where I wanted you to go to before you were admitted to hospital,’ my mother told me. ‘It was your father who insisted on us giving you more support. Well, that’s backfired on him, hasn’t it?’

Those, I think, were the last words my mother spoke to me for several years.

The next morning, true to their word, they drove me to the school where I was to board. My parents had been right: it was a place for disturbed children. They had been taken to the school to stay there until they were considered old enough to fend for themselves. In some cases their parents, unable to cope with their children’s behaviour, had left them to the care of the professionals, while others had been removed from their homes by Social Services.

‘That,’ I said to my therapist, ‘is the end of the second part of my story and the beginning of the third. Maybe underneath,’ I reflected, ‘I wanted my parents to say that, no matter what I had done, they loved me, that they would help me, that there had to be a reason for my actions. But no. All my mother cared about was her reputation. And my father, well, he was just angry with the men who had paid me for sex. But did he try and go to the police? He was right. What those men had done with me might not have been rape but it was a criminal act. I was under age and, at twelve, I in no way looked sixteen. So they couldn’t have used the defence that they hadn’t realized how young I was. In fact, they couldn’t have in the year after I came out of hospital either. Even with makeup on, I still looked young. After all, that was what they’d liked, wasn’t it? No, he just shouted and blustered at first, then got upset, but in the end he agreed with my mother, that it was pointless trying to bring charges. Instead I was to be sent away.

‘That was the …’ I searched for the right word.

‘The catalyst, maybe?’ said my therapist, helpfully.

‘Yes, that’s it – the catalyst for what happened next and the real beginning of the third part of my story. I knew my parents, the school, my classmates – everyone – thought I was bad and, like people do, I saw myself through their eyes and believed I was. I’m not proud of everything that happened next. It was, after all, of my own making,’ and, faltering, for the next part was still painful, I started to tell her what the next few years had brought.

It was at that school that I decided I was never going home. If my parents had washed their hands of me, then I had washed mine of them. I did not want to see my parents or my uncle or any of the people my parents socialized with. I was sure that everyone knew what I had done, even Kat. I knew if I ever returned to that area I would be a pariah, someone at whom fingers would be pointed before backs were turned. I couldn’t face that.

The people running the school were nice enough – I can still see the head: she reminded me of a fat pigeon. She was somewhere in her forties, I would think, a short woman with a formidable bust. However hard she tried to hide it under baggy jumpers and shirts, it still jutted out aggressively, and her equally large behind was encased in tight grey trousers.

But her bark was worse than her bite. She believed in us learning self-discipline, rather than being told what to do every minute.

‘Now, Jackie,’ she had said, on my first day there, ‘we do have a few rules,’ and she informed me that class attendance was compulsory, then outlined when we would have meals and free time. ‘But,’ she added, ‘this is not a prison. We believe that you have to set your own boundaries.’ She went on to tell me that at weekends we were allowed into town, that we didn’t have to wear uniform, and should we feel the need to talk, there was always someone on hand to listen.

Wow! I thought. This is better than I expected.

For the first few days I tried to find my feet, kept my head down and turned up promptly for all my classes. Each morning when I woke it took me a few seconds to realize where I was. There was none of the birdsong I had always heard through my bedroom window at home. It couldn’t penetrate the thick walls of the building. Neither could I hear cars revving, as I had when my father and some of the other men on our estate left for work. My mother’s voice didn’t call me to get up. Instead the harsh ring of a bell roused me, the bell that told everyone that there was just three-quarters of an hour before we were expected to be in the dining room for breakfast.

Just forty-five minutes to get into the shower, brush my teeth and dress. With that thought, instead of flopping back on to my pillow, I would swing my legs out of the bed and rush to one of the bathrooms.

Four of us shared that room – two sisters and a girl who, like me, had been placed there by her family. The sisters, whose single mother apparently showed little interest in either their well-being or their whereabouts, had been disruptive at school when they had turned up for classes instead of playing truant. Like me, they had taken drugs and rebelled against authority, but unlike me they had broken into a pensioner’s home and stolen money.

They should have been taken to court, but Social Services had argued that their bad home environment had turned them into youthful criminals. No charge had been brought against them; instead, they had been placed in the school.

The other girl was a small, angry person. Her stepfather had never left her alone, she had told us. He had been forever touching her. One day her mother had walked into the kitchen when she was fending off yet another pass. Her mother had accused her of trying to seduce her new husband. No matter what her daughter said in her defence, she was not believed.

‘She knew what he was up to all right, the filthy bastard,’ she said. ‘Just suited her to call me a liar instead of kicking him out. She went at me, you know, screaming and shouting. Her face was right in mine – I could feel her spit landing on my cheeks.’

‘So what got you in here?’ I asked.

‘The knife did. I went for him the next time he tried it on – sliced his arm.’ Her face lit up at the memory. ‘Oh, he told her I’d lost it. That I was jealous, that it was me who had tried it on with him. He said that when he’d pushed me away, I’d gone for him. So they put me in here. Stupid bitch, my mother is. He only married her for her money. When my dad died, he left plenty of life insurance, and what did the fucking grieving widow do? Took herself off to those singles clubs, shagged her arse off with the lowlife men she picked up in them, then met that fucking bastard and married him. She’s ten years older than him and looks it, even if she does prance around in tight clothes and bleach her hair blonde. But she believes he loves her. Wouldn’t listen to a word I said, just called me a pathetic little whore. Anyhow, I’m finished with her.’

‘Bleeding hell,’ said one of the sisters, when she heard that story. ‘How stupid can women be?’

Pretty stupid, I thought, remembering some of the black eyes I’d seen on the council estate and how those women had refused to bring charges against the men who had beaten them.

It didn’t take me long to meet the rest of the teenagers who were in the school. Damaged children every one of them. They had all – somewhere, somehow – been let down by the adult world. Once, maybe when they were little, with some degree of trust left, they could have been saved – saved from the beatings, the neglect and the abuse that had made them unruly and hard. Maybe if they had been taken away and loved enough they might have grown into happy teenagers. But that was not what had happened to that bunch of feral-eyed children. By the time they were placed in the school, it was far too late to help them. They saw adults as the enemy and the place they were in, however lenient, as a prison.

They came from all walks of life. Some were from impoverished areas but others, like me, had come from a home where lack of money was not the problem. Some had been born into dysfunctional families and had grown up hearing drunken rows for as long as they could remember. Having been carelessly disciplined, given meals sporadically and sent to school unwashed, they had run wild and rebelled against any type of discipline. Eventually when their school and their parents had had enough of them, they were sent to a place where they could have professional care. The bodies of others bore the scars and marks of old beatings and they wore their anger like a banner.