I Know What You Are: Part 1 of 3: The true story of a lonely little girl abused by those she trusted most

I Know What You Are: Part 1 of 3: The true story of a lonely little girl abused by those she trusted most
Jane Smith

Taylor Edison

The moving true story of a little girl with Asperger syndrome, controlled and abused by the one person she called her friend.Taylor had always struggled to make friends – she felt ‘different’. Taylor never knew her father and her mother wasn’t around much. She just didn’t understand people, and was alone and scared much of the time.That was until, aged just 11, an older married man called Tom befriended her. She loved having someone who would talk to her, listen to her, a protector. But when he moved away a few months later she was easy prey to the gang of drug dealers and petty criminals who groomed and abused her, using her as a form of currency to appease their debtors and amuse their friends.Increasingly isolated and desperate, it began to look as though the pattern of Taylor's life had been set – until she started to fight back, determined to build a safe future for herself, however long it took.

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Copyright (#u0a3b2798-db61-59c2-a6aa-f6a123d115e6)

Certain details in this story, including names, places and dates, have been changed to protect the family’s privacy.

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First published by HarperElement 2017

FIRST EDITION

© Taylor Edison and Jane Smith 2017

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

Cover photograph © Mark Owen/Trevillion Images (posed by model)

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Source ISBN: 9780008148027

Ebook Edition © February 2017 ISBN: 9780008216603

Version: 2016-12-20

Contents

Cover (#u2c4407c3-d469-5da3-8455-7403db847ec4)

Title Page (#ub13ac705-e377-5e93-8861-79c3a7cad5bc)

Copyright (#ua5712053-57c7-51f5-a4c2-a69158e6d887)

Preface (#u22129fc7-79a2-5dce-8c11-5aeedffbba22)

Chapter 1 (#u9e88976d-1601-568a-a58b-3bcf8c1828b0)

Chapter 2 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 3 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo)

Moving Memoirs eNewsletter (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Preface (#u0a3b2798-db61-59c2-a6aa-f6a123d115e6)

I used to feel angry with my mum because she didn’t intervene in what was going on when I was a child. But I realise that she’s got problems of her own and I just feel sorry for her now. What made me look at things differently was becoming a mum myself: I try really hard to do what’s best for my child – it’s just a natural instinct; so I think my mum must have been trying hard too.

I would have liked to have told my story without mentioning Mum at all, and especially without saying anything negative about her. But because most of it deals with abuse that occurred during my childhood, that would have made it seem as though she wasn’t there while I was growing up. And that isn’t true. So I’m just going to tell it the way it happened.

There are lots of reasons why people fall victim to abusers. In my case, it was partly because I have a type of autism called Asperger syndrome, which means that I have ‘significant difficulties in social interaction and non-verbal communication’. In other words, if someone tells me they’re my friend, for example, I believe them, even though the way they’re treating me is anything but friendly.

Friends have been a significant factor in my life – because I desperately wanted them as a child, because I didn’t know how to make them, and because my ‘social interaction and non-verbal communication’ problems meant that, for a long time, I wasn’t able to distinguish between my friends and my enemies.

I can’t change what happened to me from the age of 11. I know that some of it will continue to have an effect on me for the rest of my life. But I do try really hard to remember that I am not the bad person I believed I was when I was a little girl.

What’s crucially important when you have experienced abuse is to try not to define yourself in terms of ‘bad things happened to me as a child because I was a bad child’. That’s why I want to tell my story, because I hope it will help other people to realise that what is done to you isn’t what you are.

Chapter 1 (#u0a3b2798-db61-59c2-a6aa-f6a123d115e6)

I was two years old when Mum and I moved into the flat that quickly became a doss-house for an assortment of her weed-smoking friends. I didn’t have a bedroom of my own in that flat; my bed was wherever I happened to fall asleep each night, which was usually on the sofa or floor in the living room. Fortunately, Mum’s friends were nice to me and there was always someone who was willing (and able) to feed me when I was hungry or put me in the bath when I needed a wash. So I was perfectly happy, as far as I remember. Until I started school.

Because I had assumed – as children tend to do without even thinking about it – that what happened in my own home was ‘normal’, school came as a complete shock to me, for many reasons. As I hadn’t really mixed with other kids before I started school, I didn’t know how to make friends or even how to play with other children. And I wasn’t used to being shouted at the way my teacher shouted at me on my very first day when I didn’t do something she had told me to do.

I wasn’t being deliberately disobedient or naughty. I just didn’t understand what she meant. I was used to being given simple directions by my mum and her friends – ‘Stop it’, ‘Eat it’, ‘Go to sleep’ – and I was bewildered by the teacher’s collective instructions to the class, which became even more incomprehensible to me when she said things like, ‘Unfortunately, we won’t be able to go outside at playtime today as it’s still raining cats and dogs.’

It didn’t matter how hard I tried to understand what I was supposed to be doing, I invariably seemed to get it wrong. So I was always either already in trouble or feeling sick with apprehension, which meant that school was pretty much ruined for me right from the start.

Another thing I hated about school was that it meant being away from my mum, which was something I wasn’t used to, although that was true for most of the other children too, I suppose. I don’t have many specific memories of my mum when I was a young child, but I know she was almost always there – in body, if not in spirit – and that I never spent a single night away from home when I was a little girl. In fact, Mum and I had a very close relationship at that time, and even though it might have been odd and dysfunctional in some ways, at least it was familiar and comprehensible to me. I could tell when she was angry, for example, and I usually knew why; while she knew how to talk to me in a way that I could understand and that didn’t trigger a meltdown in my weirdly wired brain.

But I didn’t understand my teachers, and because the lack of comprehension was mutual, they would often back me into a corner, literally as well as figuratively, so that I felt trapped and panicked. As a result, it wasn’t long before a hostile relationship began to develop between me and my teachers, which, far from trying to rectify, Mum sometimes seemed actively to encourage. After being happy to let other people take care of me since we’d moved into the flat that was always full of her drunk and drug-addicted friends, I think the time when I started school coincided with a phase when she wanted it to be just her and me against the rest of the world. So maybe she resented the influence she thought my teachers would have on me, or perhaps it simply felt as though she was getting her own back on all the teachers she used to tell me about who she hadn’t liked when she was a child.

I didn’t want to be in conflict with anyone though, and as well as trying – and usually failing – not to annoy my teachers, I longed to be like the other kids, who seemed to be able to follow instructions that, to me, seemed impossibly complicated and indecipherable. I hadn’t been at school for very long before I realised that there must be something wrong with me, which I assumed was the fact that I was ‘retarded’, as Mum often told me I was. And that made me even more anxious to learn to behave the way the other kids did, because I really didn’t want to have to go to a ‘special school’ like the one Mum described to me, where they sent children who weren’t ‘normal’.