Dad seemed to be the one who took this transformation in his little girl the hardest. When I was a child, his face had always seemed so jovial, so serene and confident. Now it was lined most of the time by worry or anger – or both.
To be fair to myself, I did come in mostly on time. It was just what I did when I was out that caused the problems. At the end of the day, I was just a kid looking for laughs – anything to get away from the drudgery of everyday life in a town going nowhere.
I found myself chatting to Ricky more and more than in the early days of wagging school and ending up next to the railway tracks. He wasn’t in my top five, and I didn’t fancy him at all, but he was a laugh and on the nights we wandered around town, I’d often hang back and talk things over with him.
He lived in a big house, he said, with his dad and various other relatives. It was wild and free there – no rules, just lots of beer that his dad, Harry, bought with his benefits money.
This was another example of how everyone was looking for a little way to make their life seem better: a lot of people in the town lived for signing-on day, so they could get hold of a little bit of money to find a way to forget their troubles for a while.
Ricky’s dad’s place sounded great, such a contrast to my own house with all of Mum and Dad’s, ‘Do this, do that, tidy up in the kitchen, get the Hoover out and for God’s sake stop getting drunk all the time.’
‘You should come up,’ Ricky said. ‘One weekend, maybe, and stay over. There’s loads of room and we can party all night.’ I couldn’t wait.
Harry wasn’t the only laid-back adult around that helped us youngsters have fun. Like I said, most of the teachers turned a blind eye to us smoking at school because they knew there’d be a mutiny if they tried to crack down. Some of them would even join us! But there were limits, especially with the head teacher.
One break time he caught a few of us smoking in the playground and told us to put our cigarettes out and go in. I did put mine out, but only after taking one more drag and blowing the smoke in his face. He went mad.
‘Go straight to my office,’ he ordered, pointing to the entrance, his finger quivering with rage. Inside, he gave me a long lecture about my behaviour, which ended in a three-day exclusion from school.
I had to wait in the ‘naughty room’ while my dad was sent for.
When Dad got there, he was as angry as only he could be. In the car he started shouting at me. ‘Why do you behave like this?’ he asked, not waiting for the reply, knowing I’d just sit there in silence. ‘Your sister doesn’t, the boys don’t.’
It was a good point. My siblings had all been through the same thing, but they didn’t cause my parents any trouble – even Lizzie, who was closest in age to me. She was always good, while I was the black sheep. Part of me wanted to be like her, but I can’t quite explain it: there was just something in me, for some reason, that craved these ‘fun times’ I had with my mates.
Chapter Five
The Honey Monster
By early summer 2008, we were all meeting up most evenings, drinking cider as we headed into the town centre to walk around and have a laugh. As ever, we were always on the lookout for something new and fun to do, so when an opportunity arose, we leapt at the chance it offered.
Most of the time the police left us alone. Sometimes, though, they’d suss the old Lucozade trick and would pour the cider away in front of us. I didn’t get any more cautions, though. Maybe they’d given up on us, I don’t know.
By now it had got to the stage where I just couldn’t stand being at home, and my family – or my parents at least – couldn’t stand me being there.
If I’d been older, or had some money, I’d have moved out. When I moaned to Ricky about it sometimes, he’d say, ‘Come up to my place if you like. You’d like it.’
For some reason I’d still not been to his – most times when I was staying away overnight it was at one of the girls’ houses – and I was tempted to take Ricky up on his offer. He made his place, or rather Harry’s place, seem like the coolest house in the whole of town. It sounded a laugh: a big house, much bigger than ours, with none of the ‘boundaries’ and ‘responsibilities’ and tellings-off about ‘respect’ that were suffocating me at home.
In the end, there was no particular family row that made me leave home. It had just become inevitable. I’d fallen out so many times with Mum and Dad, vanished into thin air so many times, that it just became a natural step – on both sides. So, somewhere towards the end of Year 10 at school, in the June of 2008, I sort of drifted away and up to Harry’s place.
My first time there had been after a night out in town with a group of mates, Ricky included. Courtney was with us, too, and her boyfriend.
You didn’t even have to get inside Harry’s house to know it was pure bedlam in there – the graffiti on the walls outside told you that. I nearly turned straight round and headed home that night, but since it was gone 1 a.m. and I was drunk, I thought better of it.
Inside, everyone still seemed to be up. It was like Fagin’s kitchen, full of people smoking weed and looking as if they could do with a wash. Mum and Dad would have gone ape if our place was ever like that, but this lot didn’t seem to notice.
Most of the people there were in their late teens, early twenties. The four of us were younger than all of them. Out on the streets together, we always felt in charge but there, we felt a bit intimidated. Courtney and I looked at each other. She seemed a bit shell-shocked, but then gave one of her nervous giggles and accepted a can of cider.
Together we looked around, taking in this strange new environment. The graffiti I’d seen outside was also here on the inside walls: in the hall and kitchen were lots of badly drawn people with balloon ‘thoughts’ coming out of their heads, all of them mindless and making no sense.
There were three dogs at Harry’s: all of them mongrels, all mad; one of them with its back legs broken. In the kitchen, I nearly tripped over this one as it came shuffling up to me, dragging up dirt and dust from the floor in the process. I could see fleas all over its head and pushed it away with my foot. Ricky said it had had its legs broken when a mate of one of his brothers had decided to throw it out a bedroom window for a laugh. They’d not taken it to a vet, so its legs hadn’t healed properly, leaving it crippled and in pain. The RSPCA eventually put it down after they raided the place.
If the dogs were dysfunctional, the humans in the house were as bad – drinking lager and cider, laid out with smoke from their drugs wafting over them. Some were Ricky’s relatives, a lot were just the hangers-on that the family seemed to attract.
There had been a few grunts to say hello as we walked in, but only one of them had spoken properly to us. ‘Who’s this then, Ricky?’ said an old guy, sprawled on the only sofa in the room – a brown fake-leather one with rips in the cushions that meant you could see the stuffing inside. He was smoking a roll-up and drinking from a can of Carling.
This, it turned out, was Ricky’s dad. Harry. His shirt was untucked and there was days-old stubble on his face, but he had a nice, reassuring sort of smile. He looked a bit like one of those pensioners you see wandering slowly along Blackpool prom. Sitting there among the rest of us, all much younger, he seemed a bit lost and a bit ancient.
We sat on the floor for ages, listening to all the drunken madness of the place and carrying on getting as smashed as they were. Courtney then went upstairs with her boyfriend, giving me a wink as she did so. Then, a while later, I headed off with Ricky, so he could find me somewhere to sleep. Just sleep, that is. There was never anything between us. We were just mates.