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

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 his fist into them when he was in a rage.

Ben wasn’t violent like Jake was, but I didn’t have much contact with him either – even seven years is quite a significant age difference when you’re a child. I do have a couple of nice memories of him though, like the time he came to meet me from school one day and gave me a ride home on his push bike, which made me think he cared about me. Sometimes, when Jake was out, Ben used to let me sit on his bed and watch him drawing, and he’d talk to me when he took me into town to get my hair cut, or ask me questions about what I’d been doing at school.

He made a paper bird for me once too. It had wings like fans and he stuck it to the ceiling of my bedroom with a bit of cotton he took out of Mum’s drawer, which she’d have been angry about if she’d found out. I thought it was brilliant. But Mum made him take it down when she saw it, because the Sellotape would damage the paint, she said, although that clearly wasn’t the real reason, because, like the rest of the house, my room was in need of decorating and another bit of peeling paint wouldn’t have made any difference.

I didn’t ever actually play with Ben though, like I did with Michael as he got a bit older. Eventually though, Mum did what she was always did if anything ever looked as though it might turn out well for me – she intervened to change the course of events by trying her best to destroy my relationship with Michael, and by the time he was seven years old he sometimes called me names too, just like Mum and my older brothers had always done. And although I tried to tell myself it wasn’t his fault, it hurt me far more than Jake’s taunting and sneering ever did.

I know that lots of children are bullied by their siblings. Perhaps when kept within reasonable limits it becomes part of the process of learning what’s acceptable behaviour and what isn’t and how to deal with being teased. Maybe some parents don’t allow it at all, and some probably don’t even notice it’s happening, whereas others, like mine – or like my mum, at least – actively encourage it.

It went way beyond ‘just a bit of sibling bullying’ with Jake though. For example, there was one day, a few months after I’d been forced to watch that first horrific film about the clown, when Ben, Jake and I were in the garden and Jake suddenly took a step towards me, sliced the air between us with the long-handled knife he’d been using to cut the tall, weed-infested grass and said, ‘I could chop off your head with this and nobody would care.’ There was no humour in his expression when he said it and his eyes were hard as he turned to Ben and added, ‘I could tell Dad it was an accident. He’d believe me if you backed me up.’

Ben looked really scared when he said, ‘Okay.’ And I was scared too, because I really did think they were going to do it and I knew what Jake had said was true – Dad would believe them and nobody would care.

Chapter 4 (#u8c2e2541-c0fb-57b3-aad4-1f23760b0305)

I never relaxed or enjoyed anything when I was at home. Everything I did was wrong and the only time anyone ever really spoke to me was to tell me off. So it had been a completely new and unimagined experience going to school and discovering that there was a world where I wasn’t an unwanted, unloved outcast, and where sometimes an adult actually praised me for getting something right.

I don’t know if it was the realisation that I wasn’t always wrong, or as stupid as my mum always told me I was, that made me love learning. ‘Zoe soaks up knowledge like a sponge,’ my teacher wrote in one of my early school reports, which made me feel proud of myself for the first time. So then I worked even harder, behaved even better and did everything else I could think of to please my teachers so that they’d say the magic words, ‘Good girl, Zoe.’

Not everything about school was positive, however. Some of the teachers I had during those first few years helped me a lot, but there was one who was horrible. Miss Heston was my form teacher when I was seven and she had some very odd ideas about how to teach and interact with young children. One incident I remember particularly occurred when I pinched the arm of one of my classmates because he said he had sunburn. I don’t know why I did it, but it obviously hurt him quite a lot and when he told the teacher what I’d done, she made everyone in the class sit down, then said, ‘Zoe Patterson, come and stand by my desk.’

I hated being the centre of any kind of attention, but particularly if I was in trouble, and as I stood at the front of the classroom, twisting my fingers nervously and staring at my feet, she told me, ‘I’m going to show you what that feels like.’ And before I realised what she was going to do, she grabbed my arm and started giving me a Chinese burn.

Presumably her intention was to inflict on me a pain similar to the one I’d inflicted on the boy with sunburn when I’d pinched him. In which case, she’d have been pleased to know that the Chinese burn really hurt. But I’d had years of practice holding back tears and I was determined not to humiliate myself in front of all the other kids in my class, and not to give my teacher the satisfaction of seeing me cry. Mum often used to try to reduce me to tears when she was hurting me, and I always knew that she’d hurt me even more if I cried, and would eventually lose interest and give up if I didn’t. For my teacher, however, my stoicism seemed to have the opposite effect, and after watching me closely for a few seconds as she twisted the skin on my scrawny arm, she suddenly swung me across her knee and started slapping the backs of my legs.

I heard some of the children gasp when she did it, and someone gave a single high-pitched bark of laughter. Then the room fell completely silent except for the sound of the teacher’s open hand smacking my bare legs, until eventually she snapped at me, ‘Go and sit down,’ and I struggled to my feet. The skin on my wrist and the backs of my legs was burning as I walked unsteadily back to my seat, but there was a small glow of satisfaction inside me too, because I’d managed not to shed a single one of the tears that had been building up behind my eyes from the moment she’d called me out to the front of the classroom.

It never crossed my mind to tell my parents when something like that happened at school. After all, I had hurt the little boy, so it really was my fault and I’d got what I deserved, just like I so often did at home, although with at least some underlying justification on this occasion. To me, what happened that day at school was simply a variation of ‘normal’ and not worth mentioning to anyone. And I knew my parents wouldn’t have done anything about it if I had told them, except Mum might have beaten me again for getting into trouble with my teacher.

I already knew Miss Heston didn’t like me. She made it clear in lots of ways, such as on the day she put a box of hats on the floor in the middle of the classroom and told us all to pick the one that matched the job we’d like to do when we left school. It’s difficult to imagine yourself as an adult when you’re seven, and perhaps even more difficult to visualise having a job. But in amongst all the hats there was a jockey’s cap, and as I liked the idea of being able to ride a horse, I picked it up and was just about to put it on my head when I noticed a black hat with a chequered band and a silver badge, like a police officer would wear. ‘Maybe that would be even better than being a jockey,’ I thought, reaching for the black hat with one hand while replacing the jockey’s cap with the other, just as Miss Heston slapped my arm and said, ‘No, Zoe Patterson. Leave it. You’ve made your choice.’

So I kept the jockey’s cap and went to stand by the wall where we’d been told to line up to have a photograph taken. Then, just as I was putting it on my head, my hairband slipped down in front of my eyes and when I raised my hand to tug it back into place, Miss Heston snapped at me again saying, ‘Don’t pull it up. It can stay like that,’ and took the photo. I still have that photograph and whenever I look at it, it reminds me of Miss Heston and makes me wonder why she was like that. Because it wasn’t just me she was mean to; there were other kids who regularly got into trouble too, like the boy she pushed into a sort of bookcase one day because he’d been swearing, then slammed the door on him repeatedly, while we all watched with a mixture of sympathy and guilt – or at least I know I did, because I was glad it was him and not me being punished on that occasion.

There was one positive aspect to having Miss Heston as our teacher, however, because my older brothers had had her too, and Ben and I used to swap stories about the things she did. For example, when Ben was in her class she put strands of her hair in the goldfish tank to prove that it’s a bad thing to do because it gets caught in the fishes’ gills and suffocates them; and sometimes she’d put a sweet in her mouth, then take it out and insist on some child who’d had been naughty eating it. Ben would laugh at the expression on my face when he told me things like that, and I’d laugh too, because I liked the feeling of having even that brief point of contact, which was something we hadn’t ever really had before. It was just a shame that the year I spent in Miss Heston’s class made it even more difficult for me to distinguish between normal and abnormal behaviour, and that I ended the year with even lower self-esteem than I’d had when I started it.

Fortunately, most of my other teachers were more balanced and encouraging, and when I was nine I had a really nice one, who encouraged me and gave me work for science that the older children were doing and that I found really interesting. It was when I was in his class that I was sitting in the garden at home one day working on some homework he’d set me when Mum came out and asked what I was doing.

‘I have to write down what time I see the moon,’ I told her. ‘My teacher said you can see it in the daytime as well as when it’s dark.’

‘You’re fucking stupid,’ Mum told me scornfully. ‘The moon doesn’t come out in the day. Everyone knows that. Except you and your stupid teacher apparently.’ Then she stomped back into the house, muttering her contempt.

But the moon did come out while it was still light. I saw it. And I was glad that Mum had been wrong and my teacher was right. It felt like a small triumph, and I think it might also have sown a seed of doubt in my mind about some of Mum’s other ‘facts’ and made me think that if she was wrong about the moon, maybe there were other things she was wrong about too.

During that year when I was nine, Jake was 18 and had left school, Ben was 16 and doing his GCSEs, and Michael must have been five. The three of them still slept in the same room, and one night Jake came home drunk and put the stereo on loudly so that it woke everyone up. Ben was a bit shorter than Jake and quite skinny, and the reason I remember it particularly is because it was the first time I’d ever seen him stand up to his older brother. I suppose it was because he was in the middle of taking his exams, which he worked hard for because he wanted to do well and go to university. And after he’d put his fist through the speaker in their bedroom, he and Jake went outside – at my parents’ insistence – and fought it out.

It must have been around that same time that I was doing my homework one evening when Ben told me I could borrow his pen. ‘It’s on the desk in our room,’ he said. ‘Just go up and get it.’

I’d just picked it up and was turning away from the desk when Jake came in and shouted at me, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ He’d already taken a few steps into the bedroom before he realised I was there, and there was a clear but narrow passage between me and the open door. So, before he could stop me, I darted past him, across the landing and into my bedroom, where I just managed to shut the door before he started thumping on it with his fists.

Although Jake isn’t very tall, he was always quite chunky, and certainly much bigger and heavier at 18 than I was at nine. And he was angry. So although I threw all my weight against the door and tried desperately to hold it shut, it wasn’t very difficult for him to force it open, and send me flying across the room. I was still trying to scramble to my feet when he picked me up by my hair and punched me in the face, splitting my lip and filling my mouth with blood.

Ben came upstairs a few minutes later and when he saw me standing in the bathroom with a blood-stained wad of toilet paper pressed against my mouth, he told me, ‘It’ll be all right. Just go back to your room and close the door.’ And that was the only thing that was said by anyone about what Jake had done to me.

The following year, when I was ten, Dad was made redundant, and it wasn’t long before my life at home had become even more miserable and difficult to cope with.

I can’t remember when Dad first started saying peculiar things to me. I always hated it, even when I didn’t know what he meant when he said things like, ‘You shouldn’t wear any clothes when you’re in bed,’ or pointed to my private parts and asked, ‘Do you know what that is?’ What I hated even more, however, were the creepy gestures he made and the way he flicked his tongue in and out of his mouth while sticking his chin out and looking at me sideways.

Mum thought his comments and gestures were funny – when they were directed at me – and she’d warned me almost every night for as long as I could remember, ‘Be careful of wandering hands in your bed tonight. You don’t want to wake up and feel them touching you.’ She’d smile her nasty smile when she said it, then switch immediately back to being angry as she added, ‘Just you remember though: you stay in your bed until I say you can get out.’

She always laughed when she knew she’d frightened me, and I was always frightened when I was in bed, even before I knew that the wandering hands she was warning me about were my dad’s.

Dad had been making lewd gestures and saying inappropriate things to me for years. I didn’t understand their sexual connotations when I was younger, I just found them creepy and disturbing. But it got worse after he had to give up work and was at home – or at the pub – all the time, and he started doing things like sitting in the living room with his flies undone and asking me to sit on his knee, which I always refused to do.

Ironically, after spending so many hours of my childhood alone in my bedroom wishing I could be part of the family, I longed to go up to my room when he was being like that, but Mum wouldn’t let me. Sometimes, there’d be something on TV to do with sex that I didn’t want to see, and while I tried to block the screen so that my little brother couldn’t see it either, Dad would keep asking me if I knew what the people were doing. Then he’d blow kisses at me and gesture with his fingers and tongue in a way that made me feel dirty and vulnerable.

Mum started sleeping on the sofa every night after Dad was made redundant, so he slept alone in their bedroom, which was next to mine, and I could hear him masturbating at night, which really frightened me, because although I didn’t know what he was doing, I thought he was going to do something to hurt me.

He drank more than ever after he was made redundant, and I can remember being really scared every time I had a bath in case he came home from the pub while I was in it and insisted on coming into the bathroom to use the toilet. I would have my back to the toilet when I was in the bathtub, and however long he took to have his pee or however loudly he grunted and groaned, I didn’t ever turn around.

The one time Mum did try to get him out, she came in when he was using the toilet and started shouting at him, and it ended up with them screaming at each other, then having what sounded like a physical fight at the top of the stairs. Even then I didn’t turn around, and as I wouldn’t have dreamed of getting out of the bath without Mum’s permission, I just had to sit there as the water got colder and colder, waiting for them to stop yelling and hitting each other.

What made everything even worse was that while Dad’s behaviour towards me was becoming weirder and more suggestive, Mum continued to warn me to ‘Watch out for hands in your bed’. Then Dad started hitting me too, which he’d never really done before, and although he didn’t ever do it as regularly as Mum had always done, he did sometimes bruise and hurt me, like the time he used a plastic pool cue from my brother’s mini pool table to beat the back of my thighs and calves, injuring me so severely I couldn’t walk properly for a week. I can’t remember why he did it; probably just because he was drunk.

Later that same year when Dad was made redundant, Granddad died of a sudden heart attack and Mum started sending me to Nan’s every Saturday. I hated having to spend the day with my nan, not least because she never spoke to me and wouldn’t let me speak either. She used to chatter away to my brothers all the time, and even took them on holidays with her, so I thought it must be my fault that she didn’t like me.

There was one good thing about those Saturdays, however, which was that Nan would take me to the library. Even then she wasn’t actually nice to me, and if I started to say something to her while we were on the bus, she would cut across me and snap, ‘No! You are not to talk.’ She always said it loud enough for people to hear, which was really embarrassing and made me feel stupid, so then I’d spend the rest of the journey trying to avoid making eye contact with anyone. It was only later that I realised the real reason for those trips to the library was so that I would have something to occupy me when she made me sit in silence for the rest of day.

I didn’t see my grandparents very often before Granddad died, so I don’t think his death had a particularly significant impact on me. It did seem to affect Mum though, or maybe it was Dad not working and being at home more often that caused her to start beating me even more viciously than she’d done before.

There was one day when she burst into the bathroom while I was on the toilet and hit me so ferociously with the heel of her shoe that she knocked me off the seat and on to the floor. She didn’t say why she was so angry with me, and after she’d stormed out of the bathroom again, I just lay there for a few minutes, wondering what I’d done wrong.

It wasn’t unusual for her not to give a reason for punishing me. In fact, I rarely knew why either of my parents was furious with me, or understood why they blamed me for everything and seemed to dislike me so much – Dad too by that time. And because I usually didn’t know what I’d done wrong, I didn’t know how to do it right.

I was still lying on the bathroom floor trying to work it all out when I noticed a little plastic shaver on the side of the bath. I don’t remember even thinking about what I was doing as I grasped the edge of the bathtub with both hands, pulled myself up into a sitting position, reached across to pick up the razor, and made a couple of quick cuts on my knee. I know I was angry too by that time, and that I’d suddenly felt overwhelmed by an almost physical sense of despair. So maybe, subconsciously, I thought that releasing blood from my own body might release some of the pressure that felt as though it had built up inside me to an almost unbearable level.

Whatever the reason, it did feel like a release, even though the cuts I made on my knee that first time were only superficial and stopped bleeding quite quickly. I must have been a bit frightened by what I’d done though, because when I went to school the next day, I showed the cuts to a friend and told her about Mum hitting me with her shoe. I didn’t normally talk to anyone about anything that happened at home, but by the time I was ten years old I was finding it increasingly difficult to cope. So I think that by telling my friend Fiona and asking her to tell our teacher, I was hoping someone would step in to help me.

‘She didn’t believe me,’ Fiona said when I saw her the next morning. ‘She said I mustn’t talk about things like that.’

We had moved up into the next class by that time, and no longer had the really nice teacher who’d encouraged my interest in science. Our new teacher was okay though, so I was a bit surprised when she didn’t say anything to me about what my friend had told her, and it wasn’t until some time later that it crossed my mind to wonder if Fiona actually did speak to her.

I’d seen several frightening films since Jake forced me to watch the one about the clown – A Nightmare on Elm Street, for example, and Child’s Play, which is about a serial killer whose soul gets into a really scary doll called Chucky. I hated them all and never watched any of them willingly, but sometimes Jake insisted and sometimes there’d be one on TV when my mum decided I had to be downstairs. Again, I don’t think I realised that making a young child sit through films like that wasn’t normal, until I was in the corridor at school one day telling a friend about something I’d seen and a teacher who was standing nearby suddenly spun round and said, ‘Zoe Patterson, that’s horrible! Don’t ever let me hear you talking about that sort of thing again.’

Looking back on it now, she probably should have asked me how I knew about stuff like that. If she had, I might have told her, then perhaps it would have all come out. But she didn’t say anything else, and I didn’t either.

It was after that incident I started to off-load some of the horrific scenes that were lodged in my mind by writing horror stories, which I took in to school and showed my teacher. It was all really scary stuff, mostly with plots based on films I’d seen, although sometimes with a twist. For example, there was one about Chucky the doll coming into our school and killing all the teachers, which I think was the one that finally prompted my teacher to say, ‘Enough! If you can’t write about something nice, don’t write anything at all.’

I know it must have seemed odd to anyone else – the sort of thing a little girl in a horror film might do perhaps – but I enjoyed writing those stories; it was an escape for me, like reading. And, somehow, the fact that I was able to make up scary stories made the films seem a bit less frightening, although even today I still sometimes have nightmares about the clown in It. So I was really upset by what my teacher said and I stopped writing altogether after that.