Escape From Evil (9 page)

Whatever the social workers thought I was exposed to at home, they were about to subject me to something far, far worse.

They kept saying it was Mum’s fault, but that’s not how it felt. If they had such a problem with her behaviour why was I the one going to prison?

No,
I decided,
they want to punish me for some reason.
And, boy, did they succeed.

We pulled up outside a large detached house and one of the social workers asked me what I thought of it. I just shrugged. I wasn’t going to make this any easier for them.

Actually the house looked nice enough. It stood on the corner of the street and had a garden stretching all the way round. The turf was looking a bit worse for wear during the scorching August of 1976, but the space was large enough for some decent games. There was even a park across the road. In theory, then, it had everything to suggest a very welcoming home.

One step inside, though, and I knew something was wrong. On the way over the social workers had gone to great lengths to explain how special you have to be to be a foster parent. It takes a special person to step in and care for a stranger. It sounded like I was going to meet Jesus himself. In fact, the couple who owned the place were both fat and grubby-looking. I was probably seeking anything to complain about, but for some reason their appearance really offended me.

They look worse than Mum ever has. Why are they allowed to have kids?

There was something about the way they spoke over my head to the social workers that told me it wasn’t going to be the most loving of homes. I didn’t know how long I was meant to be there, but I already knew that every minute with this pair would feel like an hour.

Of course, they said all the right things to the social workers and even told me how much they’d been looking forward to meeting me. At least, that’s what their mouths were saying. Their eyes, on the other hand, looked like they already wished I was out of their sight.

Then I got the tour. I’d almost believed the spiel about foster parents being a special breed, but as soon as I saw the bedrooms I changed my mind. In fact, they weren’t so much bedrooms as dormitories, with two sets of bunk beds squeezed into each. It wasn’t a haven for the disadvantaged; it was a conveyor belt, one big sausage machine, with children going in one end and money from the local authority churning out the other. There’s no way these people were doing anything for the love of it. You could see it in their eyes.

Proof of how little they cared about any of us came when I was shown my bunk. I was sharing a room with another girl and two boys. It didn’t bother me – I was too young to be worried about undressing in front of the opposite sex – but I did think it was odd. Then one of our hosts explained everything to me.

‘Different ages in different rooms.’ Didn’t matter if you were a boy or a girl, that was the system.

That wasn’t all. Not only did age denote your dorm, it also dictated your bedtime. Seven-year-olds at seven, eight-year-olds at eight, etc. I think there was a cut-off at ten, but either way, what a weirdly regimented set-up.

Coming from an environment where almost anything went, being confronted by all these rules was an unpleasant eye-opener. I’d never had a bedtime with Mum. Granny used to try to get me to sleep at certain times, but usually I could string her out for a few extra minutes. This was different and I hated it. Even with about ten or eleven other kids running around, I don’t think I’d ever felt so alone.

As a six-year-old, my bedtime was rounded up to seven. On the one hand, I was glad to get a moment to myself. On the other hand, the second that light went out I just burst into tears. The other kids in my room, the boys in particular, weren’t too impressed.

‘Oi, shut up!’ came one unsympathetic response.

‘Yeah, be quiet, baby!’ came another.

That made the rest of them laugh. I felt so small and so very alone. But the more I tried to stop crying, the harder it was and the harsher the insults.

‘Not scared of the dark, are you, baby?’

Yes, I was – I always had been.

‘Maybe she misses her mummy.’

Yes, I do!
Didn’t they miss theirs? If they did, no one showed it.

‘Has poor little baby lost her mummy?’

Laughter.

‘Has your mummy dumped you here and run away?’

‘No!’ I cried. ‘That’s not true.’

That was the worst thing I could have done. It only gave them fresh ammunition. I was still denying it when I eventually fell asleep, still sobbing.

In hindsight, those kids had their own troubles and they were working through them as best they knew how. It wasn’t personal. I was just the latest target. For all I knew, they’d all been through the same tough initiation. Unfortunately, my tears weren’t the only expression of my unhappiness.

Waking up in your own urine is a horrible way to start the day. There’s that confused moment when you first come round and you try to work out what the odd sensation is. Are you awake or is it still part of a dream? And then you realize. And then you scream.

Suddenly it wasn’t just the boys in my room who were shouting at me to put a sock in it. There were bangs on the walls either side. A minute later the door crashed open and my foster dad stormed in.

‘What’s this bloody racket?’

I was so mortified I could barely find the words. ‘I’ve wet the bed,’ I said eventually.

‘Have you now?’ he grunted. ‘Well, sheets are changed once a week, so you’ve got a while yet. My advice is, don’t do it again.’

And that was it. He just walked out, leaving me to lie in my own wee. I’d been there less than twelve hours and already I hated him.

I must have managed to curl around the damp area, but by the morning it wasn’t so much the wetness that was the problem as the smell. I realized then that that was what the whole house stank of: soiled laundry that this pair of so-called caring citizens couldn’t be bothered to clean.

In my first week I think I wet the bed three times. You can imagine the stench of my pyjamas and the quality of sleep I must have been having as a result. The worse it got, the harder it was to get back to sleep. And the less I slept, the more scared I became.

Every house has its own voice, those noises you hear in the dead of night when things seem to be clicking and creaking. Some of the other kids loved to pretend there were monsters creeping along the landing and the younger ones always fell for it. That never bothered me. It was the dark that I hated. Even in my little cupboard under the stairs at May Road, I’d always had a bit of light at night, even if it was coming from the moon and stars outside the window. In fact, even though I’d already lived in more places than I could remember, none of them scared me like here because I’d always been with Mum.

Just remembering her set the tears off once more. Yet again I found myself demanding why I was being held captive here. It was horrible and scary and I felt so lonely.

I just want to go home!

Not being allowed visits from my grandparents or mother seemed so cruel. I made an effort to play with some of the other children, but my heart wasn’t in it. It didn’t matter what the game was, at some point I found my mind wandering back to Mum. I would wonder what she was doing, where she was. More often than not, I worried about whether she was all right. Was she eating? And were those men still coming round all the time?

I hadn’t thought about Mark and his cronies for ages before then. Now, with a bit of distance between us, I realized there was a cloud over my head whenever I thought of them. I couldn’t put my finger on it. Mark had always been nice enough with me and Mum had always seemed happy enough to see them. She’d certainly never thrown them out. So what was it? What was causing this feeling that something about them wasn’t quite right?

The foster dad at this house evoked similar unexplainable fears as Mum’s male friends. He was easier to dislike. I didn’t like the filthy way he dressed and he was always breathing heavily and wheezing unattractively because of his weight. I’d never make that snap judgement now, but kids live by such random prejudices. He just looked a wrong’un to me. On this occasion I was right.

I don’t know how long I’d been there when he first touched me. I was in my bedroom, alone, when he came in. At first I thought he was going to do the laundry early to help me out. But he didn’t. He just closed the door behind him and stared at me while I was getting dressed. Then he called me over and made me sit on his lap for a cuddle. I felt like cornered prey. I had no choice. I walked over to him and he crouched down, his back against the door, and then I sat on his knee.

I don’t remember what he did exactly, but I knew it wasn’t right. The closed door told me that. The fact that he’d never had a good word to say about me told me that. Everything about our cuddle was wrong.

And all the while I could hear that disgusting breathing, like an animal, each new foul exhalation making me have to fight the urge to puke.

It was only after that encounter that I remembered Paul, my old babysitting neighbour, who used to ask me to sit on his lap as well. He was nice. But hadn’t he done the same things to me that this man had just done? For the first time, I realized Paul hadn’t been so nice after all.

Even though I now suspected the truth about what our neighbour had done to me, I still promised myself I would never tell Mum. She had enough on her plate. It would break her heart to know she’d sent me into the arms of a bad man. That is, it would if I ever saw her again.

The worst thing about my stay at that foster home was not knowing when it would end. Just about the only question I asked in my first few days there was ‘When can I go home?’

‘That’s for us to know and you to find out.’

Something else to hate you for . . .

Then, after about three weeks of hell, my luck changed. For all my claims that it was a prison, we were quite free to come and go, as long as we didn’t miss meal times. The foster couple were contractually bound to provide three square meals a day – and that is what they were going to do. No more, no less. Ironically, I probably enjoyed it more than the others. However basic, it was, after all, still cooked food.

I was playing on the climbing frame in the park opposite the house when I heard a voice.

‘Hello, my angel.’

I nearly fell off the frame.

‘Mum!’

I didn’t know how she’d found me, but I couldn’t get down quickly enough. Before I reached her, Mum started backing away like I’d done something wrong.

‘Not so loud,’ she said quietly. ‘If anyone discovers who I am you’ll be moved somewhere else.’

I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t even give my own mother a hug in case one of the fat fosters was peering out of their window and saw us.

Reason number three to hate them.

But they couldn’t stop us talking. As long as I carried on playing on the swings and roundabouts, I could chat away. No one would suspect we were having anything other than a casual conversation.

The truth is, I would have been happy with that. I would have been happy with anything. I was just so delighted to hear Mum’s voice, she could have been talking in her sleep and it would have sounded like music to my ears.

I don’t remember much of what was said. Just Mum promising that she would get me out and telling me she was so sorry I was there at all. She would have said more, but I began to well up and she had to stop. There was no way she could not cuddle me if I was crying! Then our cover would be blown.

After what seemed like no time at all, Mum said, ‘I’ll come here every day at this time. Can you get out?’

‘I think so.’

‘Wonderful. I love you, Cathy.’

‘I love you, Mum.’

And then she was gone.

Going back to my open prison that night was a lot easier, knowing I had something to look forward to the next day. And I didn’t wet the bed.

Straight after lunch, I bounded across the road like a puppy off the leash for the first time. A couple of other kids from the home were there as well and they wanted me to play with them. I tried to join in, but my heart wasn’t in it. I couldn’t help scanning the park, searching for that familiar figure. But she never came.

The exhilaration I’d felt the previous day was replaced by gloom as I slumped back home. How could she do this to me? How could she just not turn up like that?

The worst thing was, I couldn’t tell anyone about it, so I had to endure endless comments about how I needed to cheer up. By the time I went to bed I was still furious. Only in the darkness, with the house beginning its nocturnal symphony, did that slowly change to fear.

What if she tried to come but couldn’t? What if she’s hurt?

It took no time at all to go from hating her for oversleeping to worrying she was dead under a bus. The dark does that to people, especially kids.

The next day I had two choices: go to the park or not. If I didn’t, I would never know if she was all right. But if I did and Mum didn’t appear, could I really take that pain?

Of course I went. I’d just about given up hope when I saw her.