Trafficked Girl: Abused. Abandoned. Exploited. This Is My Story of Fighting Back.

Mum had more or less recovered from her illness by the time I started school, so I was glad to have somewhere to escape to. I hadn’t ever played with other children before going to nursery – my older brothers only ever teased or bullied me – but despite having no experience of socialising, I got on well with the other kids and really enjoyed school, for the first few years at least, until what was happening at home made it difficult for me to cope with anything.

Despite being abused and excluded by my family, I accepted everything that happened at home as being normal. I think I was about ten years old by the time I even thought to compare my life and my brothers’ with any sense that the difference might be unfair. It was just the way things were: my brothers sat in the living room watching television and eating their meals with our parents, while I sat alone in my bedroom.

I spent many, many hours of my childhood on my own, sitting on the floor in the middle of my room staring at the walls. I wasn’t allowed to sit on the bed, move the furniture or play with any of the toys Mum arranged strategically on a shelf so that she’d know if I’d touched anything. I wasn’t even allowed to open the wardrobe or drawers until I was at least 11. Mum used to give me some clothes every morning and say, ‘This is what you’re wearing today.’ It was all about control, although obviously I didn’t realise that at the time. All I knew was that if I got so bored of just sitting there doing nothing that I managed to convince myself I’d be able to put something back exactly as I’d found it, she always knew. Then she’d shout at me and beat me, often with a half-smile on her face that reflected the enjoyment I think she got from punishing me.

There must have been many reasons for Mum’s behaviour, some of which I partially understand now, and some of which will, I’m sure, be locked away forever in the murky depths of her own psyche. One thing I did eventually become aware of is that she has obsessive-compulsive disorder, which got worse over the years, but which was already apparent in many of the things she did when I was a small child – although again, I didn’t realise that at the time. Some indications of it included the way she used to line things up on the bathroom windowsill – bottles and plastic containers of make-up all placed just so, and woe betide anyone who moved them – and the fact that, later, she always chose a cake bar and crisps to put in my school lunchbox that had a colour-matched wrapper and packet, which I used to think was an indication of the fact that she did care about me after all. Even today, she puts what she calls ‘traps’ around her house – an ornament or rug positioned at a particular angle, for example, or little stones lined up by her wheelie bin so that she’ll know if anyone has moved it, although I’m not sure why anyone would.

Not allowing me to sit on the bed after she’d made it, move anything or play with the few toys I had in my bedroom might have been aspects of OCD, if it hadn’t been for the fact that there were no such restrictions on my brothers. So I do think it was more of a control thing with me.

Usually, she would bring meals up to my room and I’d eat them there on my own, isolated from the rest of the family. I used to sit on the floor in my bedroom for hours, anxiously watching the door, waiting for it to burst open and for Mum to accuse me of doing something wrong, even when I wasn’t doing anything at all. I would sit on the floor in the living room too, on the rare occasions when I was allowed downstairs to watch television with the rest of my family. Sometimes, I’d hide behind the sofa, hoping they’d forget I was there, because I didn’t ever know why or when Mum might launch an attack on me.

In view of the way I was alienated and excluded from the family by my mum at every opportunity, it might seem odd to say that I’ve always had a strong sense of who I am, in some respects at least. The first time I think I ever became consciously aware of ‘me’ was when I was four years old and at nursery school. It was a very hot day and I was pushing a little lad around the playground on a toy tractor when he started pulling off his T-shirt. It seemed an obvious thing to do once he’d done it. So I took mine off too, and was startled when I realised a few seconds later that it was me the teacher was shouting at.

I can still remember how indignant I felt. Why was she picking on me, telling me to put my T-shirt on but not saying anything to the little boy? How was that fair? Although I’d learned not to expect fairness from my mum – and wouldn’t have dreamed of defying her in the same situation – I must have expected it from my teacher, because instead of doing as she told me, I bent down again and was just about to continue pushing the tractor when I saw her grab my T-shirt and start striding purposefully across the playground towards me. I don’t know what the reason was for my uncharacteristic defiance, but before she was halfway across the playground, I had taken to my heels.

Just a few days earlier, I’d watched an old black-and-white film with my brothers in which a man who was being chased slipped into the space between two buildings and his pursuer ran straight past. Although I was beyond the stage of covering my eyes with my hands and thinking no one could see me, I hadn’t quite understood how the incident in the film worked. So, as I was circling the nursery playground with my teacher in hot pursuit, I suddenly darted down the side of the building, flattened myself against the hot bricks and waited for her to run past. Then, a minute or two later, I resumed my game with the little boy, wearing my T-shirt and seething with righteous indignation.

It was an insignificant incident in itself, but I’ve held on to it – and a few similar memories – all these years because sometimes, when I seem to be in danger of forgetting, it reminds me who I am.

I don’t know what my dad was like before he married Mum. Maybe he was a completely different person and just got worn down by her until he began to accept her dysfunctional behaviour as normal. He was several years older than Mum and had been married and widowed for about ten years before they met. I think his first wife died suddenly and unexpectedly in her early twenties, by which time they already had a little boy, who went to live with Dad’s mum, apparently because that’s what his wife requested when she found out she was going to die.

Perhaps the reason Dad didn’t look after the little boy himself was because he wasn’t a very reliable parent even before he met my mum. Or maybe his wife knew he would fall apart when she died, because I know he found it really difficult trying to deal with her death and was still working long hours so that he didn’t have to face it ten years later, when he met Mum. Perhaps that also explained why he made what turned out to be the huge mistake of ignoring the warning ‘marry in haste, repent at leisure’ and married her just two weeks later. She was still living with her parents at the time, so for her it was a means of escaping, which I now know she had good reason to want to do.

I don’t know how often Dad saw his first son, Ian, after he and Mum got married, but she more or less put a stop to any contact they did have when Jake was born – and with the rest of his family too, who we rarely saw when I was growing up.

Dad used to love singing karaoke at the pub and one day he came home with a karaoke machine he’d bought for a few pounds when they were throwing it out. Mum just sat there scowling when he took it into the living room and plugged it in, and after he’d sung a couple of songs himself, he told me to sing some of the nursery rhymes I’d just learnt at nursery school. ‘I’m going to record them,’ he said. ‘Then, when you’re an old lady, you can listen to them and remember what you used to sound like when you were four.’

I was too young to understand the concept of one day being old, like my nan. But I can remember feeling really pleased when Dad said I had a nice voice, then laughed and added, ‘You must have inherited it from me,’ which made Mum scowl even more.

The only other happy childhood memory I have is of another day when I was four and Dad took me to a big garden that was open to the public, where there was a lake and a real elephant that he paid for me to sit on and have my photograph taken. I can still remember how rough the elephant’s skin felt where it touched my bare legs.

Maybe Dad did other things with me on other days as well, but I can’t remember any of them now. I just remember that I loved him and that although he didn’t often do anything positive to make my life better, he wasn’t ever violent or mean to me when I was a little girl.

My nan was though – mean rather than violent – and I knew from a very young age that she didn’t like me. She and Granddad didn’t come to our house very often, but one day when they were there – I think it was around Christmastime when I was five – I asked Granddad to go upstairs with me because I wanted to show him something in my bedroom and Nan gave me a really cold look, then insisted on coming too.

When we got up to my room, they both sat on the bed while I looked for whatever it was I wanted to show him. I wasn’t used to having an audience and I was chattering away excitedly when I noticed that Granddad was staring at me in a peculiar way. Glancing quickly at my nan for reassurance, I realised she was scowling at me, for some reason I couldn’t understand. I’d had a lot of practice reading my mum’s facial expressions by the time I was five – trying to guess how angry she was with me and what she might be going to do next – but I didn’t have any idea why Nan was cross with me. So I just burbled away inanely, hoping to deflect her disapproval and not knowing why I felt so uncomfortable. Then, after a few minutes, she got up, stared at Granddad until he did the same, and we all trooped back down the stairs.

I did sometimes go to my grandparents’ house after that, but I wasn’t ever left there on my own again, until Granddad died when I was ten.

Maybe what I’d wanted to show my granddad that day was a new toy that had been sent to me as a Christmas present by one of Dad’s sisters. Mum and Dad used to give us a few presents too, which we’d open on Christmas morning before my brothers went to Nan and Granddad’s house for their dinner, Dad went to the pub and I stayed at home with Mum. It was the same every year, and it was always horrible. Mum didn’t ever eat very much, so I don’t know if she ate the meal she always cooked on Christmas Day, which I’d eat on my own in the living room, and Dad would have later in the evening when he got back from the pub.

Mum and Dad would both be very drunk by that time, and as soon as Dad got home they’d start to argue and shout at each other. Then that would escalate into a fight, which always resulted in the Christmas tree getting knocked over. There were very few consistencies in my life when I was child; what happened on Christmas Day was one of them.

A few years ago, when I asked my brother Ben what he’d thought at the time about him and Jake – and later Michael – being invited to Nan’s house every Christmas while I stayed at home, he said he’d never really thought about it at all. I suppose he was so used to me being an outsider in the family that it just seemed normal. Based on what I found out later about Mum’s childhood, one explanation might have been that Nan was trying to protect me, although I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the reason, because she didn’t like me and because she only ever did anything that benefited her.

Chapter 3 (#u8c2e2541-c0fb-57b3-aad4-1f23760b0305)

I didn’t watch much television as a child. I was usually banished to my room when the rest of the family were watching the videos my parents regularly rented. And although I hated sitting upstairs in solitary confinement, I don’t think I resented it: it was just another part of the ‘normal’ I’d learned to accept. There were a few exceptions to that particular norm, however, such as the time when I was five and Mum let me watch The Little Mermaid, which I loved, despite the fact that every time she walked past me as I was sitting, transfixed, on the living-room floor, she pulled my hair or pinched me, twisting my skin tightly between her thumb and bony finger, then laughing when I cried out in pain.

I was in the reception class at school at that time and not long after I’d watched The Little Mermaid, I found a small, empty perfume bottle in the bathroom, which I slipped into my school bag because it reminded me of her. At break time that day, I filled the bottle with water and offered my friends a sip of the magic potion that would turn us into mermaids and enable us to live under the sea and have adventures. Before long, a queue of excited children had formed at the water fountain, because although everyone could see that I was just filling an empty bottle with water, it tasted sweet, like fruit and flowers, when they held it to their lips and took a sip.

‘It’s true,’ I heard them telling each other. ‘It really is a magic potion.’ And eventually I got swept up by their enthusiasm and began to believe it myself, perhaps partly because I so desperately wanted there to be a reality somewhere that was different from the one I was living in. So I was almost as disappointed as they were when playtime came to an end and we all trooped back into the classroom, still children rather than the mermaids and mermen we had expected to be. For me though, it was worth the disappointment to have shared all the excitement and been part of something, even if it had only lasted for one break time.

I learned to read quite quickly after I started school, and by the time I was six I had developed a passion for books that remains with me to this day. For some reason, although I had very few toys, Mum didn’t seem to mind me having the books Nan and Granddad gave me, most of which had belonged to her when she was a little girl. So, finally, as my reading skills improved, I had something to do during the hours I spent alone in my bedroom. I still ate supper in my room almost every night, except when Mum didn’t bring me any because she was angry or forgot and I went to bed hungry. But even a rumbling tummy can be ignored for a while when you’re able to step out of the real world into a Grimm’s fairy tale, one of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, or any of Roald Dahl’s wonderful books.

It was also when I was six that Mum finally gave me permission to use the toilet in the bathroom. I wasn’t allowed to wipe my own bottom though; I had to shout for her when I’d finished, then stay on the loo for however long it was before she came. Sometimes I’d be sitting there for ages, until my legs were tingling and numb. When she did finally appear, she’d be even more irritable and impatient than she usually was with me and would make me bend over and touch the floor while she scrubbed my bottom with the rough surface of a sponge she kept in a bucket beside the toilet exclusively for my use.

My brothers thought it was really funny, and Mum used to encourage them, and Dad, to laugh at me, while at the same time making a huge deal of the fact that the bucket and sponge were dirty and disgusting and no one else must ever touch them, which made me feel even more embarrassed and ashamed about having to go to the loo at all.

Sometimes, Jake and Ben would come into the bathroom while I was waiting for Mum, but even though Jake was always very aggressive and I was scared of him, not even his demands to ‘Get off the loo, slag. I need to use it’ or the threat he made one day that ‘I’m going to rape you if you don’t get off now’ would persuade me to risk the beating I knew I would get from Mum if I wasn’t sitting there when she eventually came in.

Mum’s humiliating bottom-wiping ‘game’ continued until I was nine years old, by which time I had lost any sense of dignity or self-respect I might otherwise have had and had simply accepted as ‘fact’ that I was somehow less human and certainly less important than any of the other members of my family. She used to play a lot of humiliating games like that with me. What made them even worse was that everyone believed her when she told them I was incapable of doing even the simplest thing myself because there was something wrong with me mentally. I believed it too eventually, despite the fact that I knew I was perfectly capable of doing everything she claimed I couldn’t do.

Not all the videos Mum rented or that we watched on TV were films for children, like The Little Mermaid, or old black-and-white films about men being chased and hiding down the sides of buildings. And one day when I was six, Jake and Ben – who always got a great deal of pleasure from scaring me – forced me to watch the video of a TV mini-series called It about a sadistic clown who terrorises and kills children. I didn’t want to watch it, but just before it started, Jake pushed me down on to the carpet close to the TV, then sat behind me throughout the entire programme with his hands pressing down on my shoulders so I couldn’t get up.

It was a terrifying film that was totally unsuitable for children of any age, let alone an anxious little girl who was already frightened of going to bed at night and who looked, in her mind at least, a lot like one of the children who became the clown’s victim. I kept closing my eyes and trying to turn my head so that I wouldn’t see whatever horrible thing was going to happen next. But every time I looked away from the television, Jake grabbed my hair, pulled my head sharply back and upwards, then punched and slapped me repeatedly in the face until I opened my eyes – and saw what the clown was doing.

The more I whimpered and cried, the more Jake twisted my hair and laughed, refusing to let go even when I started to scream. Mum was in the kitchen and must have heard what was going on, but it was only when the noise I was making began to annoy her that she stormed into the living room, lifted me up off the floor by one arm, dragged me into the kitchen and shouted in my face, ‘There’s something wrong with you. It’s only a man in a mask for fuck’s sake.’ At just six years old, it was a concept I couldn’t grasp, and even if I had been able to, I don’t think it would have done anything to lessen the fear that had been implanted in my mind. So I was still crying as I sat in the kitchen with headphones on, listening to music at maximum volume and trying to block out the music from the film, 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.