Trafficked Girl: Abused. Abandoned. Exploited. This Is My Story of Fighting Back.. Jane Smith
which seemed to have got inside my head.
Although it was Jake who forced me to watch It that day, Ben was there too, not saying anything or trying to stop him, perhaps because he was also a bit scared of his older brother. Then, a few days later, Mum and Ben decided to play a ‘joke’ on me by telling me they’d just seen the clown in the front garden and that he was coming to kill me. I was terrified and could feel my heart thumping even before they pushed me into the hallway and closed the living-room door. While I was sobbing and begging them to let me in, they just laughed and held the door shut, clearly delighted by how successful their prank had been and totally unmoved by my rapid descent into hysterical distress.
A couple of days after that, I went up to my room when I got home from school to find that Mum had bought a new duvet cover for my bed with a picture of a clown on it, who had buttons on his costume that were almost identical to the ones the clown in the film had had. She didn’t tell me about it, and I screamed when I opened the door and saw it on my bed. And when I pleaded with her not to make me use it, she just laughed spitefully and told me to ‘get used to it’.
It wasn’t just Mum who bullied and tormented me when I was a young child. I don’t really remember Dad doing it; he laughed at me when she did, and didn’t stand up for me as often as he should have done, but mostly he just kept out of things. For example, there was one day when we were sitting in the living room watching TV when Mum suddenly threw herself out of her chair, grabbed me by my hair and started banging my head on the floor. She would often attack me without any provocation or warning, and the reason that particular occasion sticks in my mind is because, as she pinned me to the carpet, with her knee pressing down so heavily on my back that I was struggling to breathe, I saw my dad and two older brothers lean forward and sideways so that they could look around us at the TV.
When Mum eventually stopped hitting me and bashing my head on the floor, she shouted, ‘Get upstairs to your room.’ And after I’d scrambled to my feet, bruised and crying, I stopped for a moment at the door and turned to look at my dad and brothers, but they didn’t even glance in my direction.
‘I said get out. Now!’ Mum shouted, taking a step towards me and raising her hand as if she was going to hit me again. So I fled upstairs, where I stood at the window in my bedroom, looking out on to the dark street with my palm pressed against the glass, praying silently, ‘Can’t anyone see me? Someone notice me, please. Someone save me.’ Then I crawled into bed, stifling a scream of pain when my head touched the pillow, and sobbed myself to sleep.
I wouldn’t have expected my brothers to intervene in a situation like that. But the fact that Dad didn’t even seem to notice – and certainly didn’t care – that Mum was hurting me felt like further proof that I didn’t matter. That was why I was grateful whenever he did mediate on my behalf, because although I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he did it, at least I got a clue that although I didn’t matter, I didn’t always deserve Mum’s treatment of me.
The only time Mum ever concealed her dislike of me was when she came to meet me out of school. I was always torn between not wanting to leave the classroom, where I felt safe, and knowing she’d be angry when we got home if I kept her waiting. The fear of her anger always won, and when I walked out into the playground I’d often find her chatting with the other mums and handing out little chocolate bars to some of my friends. She’d give me a chocolate bar too, but I knew it was just for show and that as soon as we got home she’d become ‘normal’ again.
I’d probably been going to school for a couple of years when a little girl called Rachel must have followed us home one day. I was in the living room when she knocked on the front door, and I heard her ask Mum, ‘Is Zoe in? Can she come out?’
‘Wait there a minute,’ Mum told her, in a voice that was so completely different from her friendly ‘playground voice’ that although I didn’t know why I was in trouble, I knew I was. So my heart was already racing when Mum came into the living room and started slapping me with her open hand so viciously I could hardly breathe for sobbing. She was breathless, too, by the time she stopped beating me and said, ‘Now go and tell your friend you can’t go out.’
Despite my mum’s extreme reaction that day, I was sometimes allowed to go and play at friends’ houses, some of which weren’t very different from ours, while others were like something out of another world. Nan and Granddad lived in a council house that was always quite tidy and clean, especially compared with ours, where everything was covered in a thick layer of dust, every room stank of stale cigarette smoke, the carpets were worn and stained, the walls were bare and in need of painting, and all the furniture was mismatched, as if it had been chosen at random by someone with no interest at all in their surroundings, which I suppose was actually true.
It was a contrast that was even more apparent in the gardens, because while Nan and Granddad’s was immaculate, ours was even worse than the inside of the house. The only bit of our garden that my brothers and I ever played in was the patch of overgrown grass just outside the back door. Beyond that, there were two rickety sheds Dad had built out of old doors and other discarded debris he’d found in skips, and behind the sheds were a couple of broken fridges, some scrap metal and various other rubbish that had been dumped there over the years to rust and decay.
Despite the fact that the only two houses I’d ever spent any time in before I started school were so totally different, I don’t think I was consciously aware that one was clean and the other was dirty, or that one was ‘good’ and the other ‘bad’ in some respect – until my friend Carly invited me for tea at her house one day. In Carly’s house everything was clean and smelled nice, and we ate our tea sitting at a dining table with her parents, who talked to us and to each other and didn’t say anything critical or unpleasant. I had tea at their house several times after that first occasion, and although I don’t remember consciously comparing my life to Carly’s, I think I must have stored away in my mind the idea that there could be a different, better kind of ‘normal’ than the one I was used to.
The only thing I didn’t like about going to Carly’s house was having to eat in front of other people, which I’m still paranoid about today. I always took a packed lunch to school, which I thought was an indication that Mum did love me after all, otherwise why would she bother to make me a sandwich to go with the crisps and cake or chocolate bar in their colour-coordinated packaging. Looking back on it now, I realise it wasn’t for my benefit at all: she just wanted my teachers to think she was a good mum. But at least I could eat it all with my hands, which saved me from the embarrassment of having to use a knife and fork. Because although Mum always gave me cutlery when she brought my tea up to my bedroom, no one had ever told me how to use it. So whenever I ate with Carly and her parents, I was always anxious about doing it wrong and used to watch and try to copy what they did, so that I didn’t look stupid.
I can remember one day when I was eating at Carly’s house and the food kept building up on my knife, making it increasingly difficult for me to cut anything with it. I didn’t know how to get it off and I was starting to panic when her dad must have noticed my embarrassment and said, laughing, ‘Just lick it off, Zoe. That’s what we do.’ It probably seemed like a small thing to him, saying something to make me feel better, but it meant a lot to me at the time.
I’ve always had very low self-confidence, which my oldest brother Jake, particularly, played a role in crushing when I was a little girl. Jake and Ben were in their teens by the time I started school and their lives were completely separate from mine. Even before then, I never played with Jake. In fact, I didn’t really see much of him at all – which was a good thing as far as I was concerned – because by the time he got back from school every day, I’d already be upstairs in my room, where I’d eat my supper; then he’d often go out again with his mates and not come home until after I was in bed. When I did see him, he usually ignored me, which, again, was a good thing from my point of view because he only ever said nasty things to me or paid me any attention because he was angry.
I know Ben and Michael were scared of him and I think my parents were wary of him too, because he had a very bad temper. In fact, he made several holes in the walls and door of the room he shared with Ben and Michael by smashing