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Certain details in this story, including names, places and dates, have been changed to protect privacy.
HarperElement
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published by HarperElement 2020
FIRST EDITION
© Jade Kelly and Douglas Wright 2020
Cover design Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020
Cover photographs © Nelly Yotova/Arcangel Images (girl, posed by a model); Silke Kemmer/Arcangel Images (background)
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
Jade Kelly and Douglas Wight assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Source ISBN: 9780008388959
Ebook Edition © June 2020 ISBN: 9780008388966
Version: 2020-06-05
Dedication
‘Take me back to where the sky and sea collide,
where I knew in that moment we were infinite’
Contents
1 Cover
2 Title Page
3 Copyright
4 Dedication
5 Contents
6 Prologue
7 Chapter 1
8 Chapter 2
9 Chapter 3
10 Chapter 4
11 Chapter 5
12 Chapter 6
13 Chapter 7
14 Chapter 8
15 Chapter 9
16 Chapter 10
17 Chapter 11
18 Chapter 12
19 Chapter 13
20 Chapter 14
21 Chapter 15
22 Chapter 16
23 Chapter 17
24 Chapter 18
25 Chapter 19
26 Chapter 20
27 Chapter 21
28 Chapter 22
29 Chapter 23
30 Chapter 24
31 Epilogue
32 Acknowledgements
33 Moving Memoirs eNewsletter
34 About the Publisher
LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter
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Prologue
‘Ssh!’
‘What?’
‘I think I can hear something.’
‘You’re imagining it.’
‘I said, “Shh.” I can’t hear over you two talking.’
I cocked my ear towards the door. There was sometimes a telltale sign – the squeak of the living-room door hinge, the creak of the bottom stair, a squelch of a leather boot that might give some indication that she was approaching. If we all heard it at the same time we’d each be under the duvet without anyone having to sound the warning. It offered little to no protection, of course, but nevertheless we’d try to cover the most vulnerable parts of our bodies, the areas she always went for – the hair, stomach, legs. If one of us clocked something there might only be time to sound the alarm and duck for cover, leaving the others to fend for themselves. Not being quick enough to get under the duvet could be fatal. As would being caught sitting up or, worse, out of bed. Even being caught before you could feign sleep, just lying there with one eye open, meant punishment. Who was I kidding? Like she needed an excuse. When someone metes out beatings for fun they’ll come up with any reason to satisfy their lust.
We’d been silent for nearly a minute. Still nothing.
Just because I hadn’t heard another sound meant little. She could still be waiting right outside the door, ready to pounce. She’d been known to wait several minutes just to catch us out. Tonight was a tricky one, though. She had guests in – her older children – who didn’t know anything of what went on upstairs, just like Terry, her ever-trusting hubby. They’d never believe what she got up to. Not that sweet old lady. The one who wanted us to call her Granny. She wasn’t capable of anything like that. They’d be like everyone else who didn’t believe us. ‘Nasty girls,’ they’d think. ‘Say anything for a bit of attention, they will. After all we do for the little wretches.’
But just because she was entertaining didn’t mean she’d take her eye off the ball. There were no nights off. No respite. No easy rides in the Bad Room.
‘Well?’ Sara said. She always found it hardest to keep quiet. That was my fault. I’d brought her out of her shell a little. Before I was condemned to the Bad Room she was a little church mouse. She wasn’t much older than me but you’d never tell from looking at us. Such a skinny thing, like her big sister, Arlene. Now she was a funny one; given how old she was – two years older than Sara – and that she towered over everyone in his house, including her sister, you’d think she might put up more of a fight. But she was like the dogs you saw on those animal cruelty adverts on TV, the ones with the haunted eyes that gave a glimpse of the terror they’d faced.
‘Maybe nothing,’ I said. I’d been in this place so long my mind played tricks on me.
‘As I was saying,’ Sara went on from where she was sitting on the top bunk above me, her bare legs swinging down, atop a duvet that was half pulled back for ease of entry. ‘If this goes on we’ll have to steal food from school tomorrow.’
‘Me steal, more like,’ I said, recalling the last time I’d swiped some muffins when we’d gone without food for a day. The mention of food brought on a pang of nausea, the memories of sweet choc-chip muffins made my mouth water. Today hadn’t been too bad; we’d actually had breakfast. Nothing for lunch and she had played her game with dinner again; leaving a ham sandwich – if you could call it that – at the bottom of the stairs but neglecting to call us to get it, then making a big deal of punishing us for being ungrateful. ‘If you lot don’t want your dinner, that suits me fine. You can starve.’
Boy, did we starve. I couldn’t tell you how much my stomach had shrunk since I’d moved here but it still hurt to go without. Gulping mouthfuls of water from the bathroom tap wasn’t the same. Even if the sandwich was one sliver of wafer-thin ham on two tea biscuits it was like a royal banquet to us.
‘I could steal too, you know.’ Sara’s soft voice came from above. I could picture her indignant frown. The legs stopped swinging.
‘Yeah, right. You’d brick yourself.’ I liked taking the mick out of her but the truth was I didn’t want her to get into trouble. If I got caught it would only be me getting the flak. Like last time. I wouldn’t want Sara to go through what I did when I got home and she had been waiting for me.
‘Bloody could you know,’ Sara had raised her voice above the acceptable level. I caught Arlene’s eye. She knew we were taking a big risk talking this loudly. Sara carried on regardless: ‘I’d bring back food for all …’
CRASH!
The door swung open so violently I thought it would break off its hinges.
Oh hell!
‘Who’s talking?!’
For a small lady she sure filled the doorway. I only caught a glimpse of black – the knee-high boots and that hair – before I dived undercover.
‘You!’
Even under the duvet, my eyes were tight shut. I heard the scream over the smack on flesh. Sara. She’d never have made it under in time. Another scream, the shaking of the bunk beds, a yelp and a bang and scream combined. I didn’t need to be watching to tell the nature of the violence. I knew well enough by the reaction. A slap to the thigh, a fistful of hair and a wrench that would have hauled Sara off her bunk down onto the floor. Definitely a sore one.
‘I’ll ask again. Who was talking?’
Don’t say a word, Sara. Don’t say a word. There was strength in numbers. We had to stick together. Pitting us against each other was the way she wanted it. I could hear whimpering. I imagined Sara’s lip quivering. Another slap. The yell.
‘You!’ The sound of another smack on cotton. Most likely Arlene this time. Maybe a boot to her stomach or back, depending on how she was lying.
‘So it’s like that, is it?’
I pulled the duvet a little tighter around my head. My whole body was rigid. Sara was still whimpering, probably on the floor where she fell.
‘I’ve told you to be quiet. Do you think I was born yesterday?’
Apart from the whimpering there was silence. Good girl, Sara.
‘This isn’t over.’
A shuffle towards the door, a pause, and then the door quietly closed shut.
It was done, for now. By her standards that was light. Perhaps it was a warning – just because she had family round we shouldn’t think she wasn’t still monitoring us.
I peeked out in time to see Sara, her face stained with tears, climbing unsteadily back to the top bunk.
‘You okay?’ I whispered.
She nodded. She’d done well. Months ago she would have blabbed, dobbed me in, even if it wasn’t me doing the talking. But we’d turned a corner. They were all right really, these two. Not like it had been when I first came to the house. Back then I thought them weird. Sitting on the floor in their room with their nightdresses on, even though it was four o’clock in the afternoon. What was that all about? Not saying a word, at opposite ends of the room, either playing with a little bit of Lego or drawing shapes in a notepad. Other times when I went in – quickly, mind you, just to get some clothes out of the wardrobe – they’d be in bed. No wonder they were so pasty white.
‘Thank God I’m not in there,’ I’d thought at the time.
Back then, in 2001, I was only ten. I didn’t know many things. But I knew you did not want to go in that room. You did not want to be a child in that room.
It was a Bad Room.
Then, without warning, I was in it too.
And I realised that I didn’t have a clue. Life inside the Bad Room was way worse than even I had imagined. I needed to draw on all my strength just to get through every spirit-sapping day. I had to use all my wiles to survive.
Luckily, I had years of practice in that matter.
Violence, persecution and neglect were pretty much all I knew.
Chapter 1
Most children, I imagine, when they look back on their early childhood might remember a birthday party, a special Christmas or a fun-filled family holiday. Thinking back might conjure memories of Mum’s warm cuddles, playing games with Dad and getting up to mischief with siblings.
I have tried to avoid delving too deeply into my childhood, because when I do it’s not the fun times I focus on, as these were few and far between. Mostly I remember the violence, the neglect and the times spent living in fear. Then there are the feelings of wanting to be as far away as possible from my mum.
I was born in 1988 to Mandy Gallagher and James Matthews, two teenage sweethearts from a town in Greater Manchester who were far too young to be parents. Mum was only 17 and Dad just two years older. I have only the faintest recollections of them being together, as they split when I was 18 months old. It was like there was a brief moment when he was there and we were all together, then he wasn’t and I had to go to a different house to see him.
If it was tough enough for two teenagers to adjust to being parents so young, they had the added torment of having to deal with the loss of a baby. That’s because I was a twin. My sibling didn’t make it. Mum didn’t know she was expecting more than one. When she suffered a miscarriage, they were devastated. They hadn’t detected me at the time. It was only when she went into hospital to get checked out that they told her, ‘There’s another one here.’
They had found a new heartbeat – mine.
For any young woman it would have been quite an ordeal, but she was still a child herself and had to deal with that loss and the turmoil of emotions it caused her. What made it doubly difficult for Mum was that there was no support from her own parents.
Mum had never known her own father. Her mother was originally from Ireland and when she fell pregnant it might as well have been to a man with no name. Mum had two brothers and a sister and their father was never spoken about. What made things even worse was that she endured a toxic relationship with her mum, my grandma.
Mum doted on her mum, craved her love and approval. Every piece of jewellery that my grandma had was from my mum. She spoiled her. Over the years she gave her new pieces each birthday, Mother’s Day and Christmas, kitted out her whole house with stuff, but still my grandma seemed to favour the other children over her. Nothing she ever did was good enough. I know this, because she told me constantly, like she told me about my tragic twin. Mum had a habit of sharing this type of detail. She almost forgot that I was the child and spoke to me as an adult; she didn’t treat me like a normal mum should. Sometimes I felt she didn’t love me or that she wished my twin had survived. After all, she wasn’t even aware I existed until she went to the hospital with complications. She’d had to overcome feelings of despair and then had to deal with being told there was another heartbeat. Perhaps she didn’t bond with me properly, felt disconnected, and that affected our whole future relationship? We had conversations about stuff and I heard things that a child should never have heard. For instance, she told me that one time when she and her mother were arguing, Grandma held a razorblade to my mum’s eyes. After that, Mum couldn’t stand anything being held near her face.
Despite their volatile relationship, Grandma lived nearby and was always at our house. Four or five times a week we saw her. It was constant.
In contrast, my dad’s side of the family was fantastic. He was a painter-decorator and worked hard. My grandad was called Richard and he ran a few convenience stores. In the early years after Mum and Dad split, Dad would pick me up every week and take me to one of the shops. I helped Grandad by putting the sweets out on the shelves, or he let me go behind the till and play shops for real. He had broken up with Dad’s real mum when he was young as well and he lived with his wife, Heather. I never knew her as Grandma because Dad took me to visit his mum as well. She was my other Grandma. Dad had met a new woman shortly after splitting from my mum and they would take me out and make a fuss of me. They were a nice family.
My mum had two older brothers, William and Andrew. William lived locally and we saw a fair bit of him, but Andrew had left home at a young age and wasn’t in our lives. Mum’s younger sister was my Auntie Marie. She was the fun one, always hanging around our house and wanting to have a laugh. She couldn’t have been prouder to be an auntie and always wanted to take me out in the pram or pushchair to show her friends. She was full of mischief. If Marie took me out on the bus she’d lead me to the back seat, and as Mum waved us off Marie would say things like, ‘Stick your finger up at her.’
When we got home Mum would be furious and tell her off, but Marie just laughed. She once turned up with thirteen kittens she’d rescued from somewhere. They were so cute. I wanted to keep them all. Mum went ballistic, though, and said there was no way we were keeping all those cats. We had to give them all away.
At night sometimes, after she’d played with me all day, Marie climbed into bed with me. I loved it when she was around.
There were some nice qualities that Mum shared with her sister. Mum was house-proud and I remember our home was filled with photos, some professionally taken. She was a talented artist, too, and she sketched famous faces with ease. When it was my birthday she threw a party in McDonald’s and there were other times when she liked to surprise me in the morning by laying a Kinder chocolate egg with the toys inside next to my bed. I was into the little porcelain green frogs that were popular at the time and I remember collecting them for my grandma’s kitchen worktop.
So, even though Mum and Dad were not together, it wasn’t all bad.
The trouble was, Mum never got over my dad leaving her, so there was always an atmosphere between them. I was a daddy’s girl when I was little and I loved it when he came to pick me up. He had a lovely house and even at a young age I felt he had a better set-up than Mum. And when I went to Dad’s I was always playing, going shopping, getting treats. That’s often just how it is when two parents split up. Sometimes I couldn’t help myself and would come home from a visit announcing that I wanted to go and live with him.
Mum was, perhaps understandably, bitter and jealous. Whenever I came back she interrogated me. ‘What is his new woman like, what’s the house like, what did they say about me?’
She was always very anxious, there was always an issue, always something she was kicking off about. That created a negative atmosphere and for as long as I can remember I could sense it was toxic.
Home for Mum and I was, for the most part, a first-floor council flat in an estate that’s been much maligned in the media since it was built in the seventies. It’s been called a ‘welfare ghetto’ because of the higher-than-average number of people living there on benefits.
Mum might have been one of the people trying to get by on benefits but to us it was home for a number of years. Our entire world was close at hand. Grandma lived on the next street; she ran a pub up the road, where Mum sometimes helped out. My Auntie Marie wasn’t far away.
After my dad left, that was our set-up. I lived with Mum and got to see him at weekends. If the situation had remained like that maybe things would have been all right. But things rarely do stay the same.
Aside from these early details, I can’t really remember any other significant good times with my mum. I don’t know if I’ve blocked them out. I have memories of her being in a good mood, when there would be new clothes and presents, but I can’t remember a load of affection.
Much of this was because by the time I was three Mum got involved with a new boyfriend. Paul Harries was 6ft 4in tall with a thick, dark moustache. From the moment he appeared on the scene he had an intimidating presence. Everyone wanted to please him because they were scared of him. They wanted to stay on his good side.
Everyone, except my mum, could see he was toxic. He was possessive and controlling but she worshipped the ground he walked on. What I didn’t know at the time was that he was one of the town’s biggest drug dealers.
I knew enough to know he was trouble, though. They might have loved each other, but when Mum and Paul kicked off it was chaos. And they kicked off a lot.
That’s when the trouble started with my mum. Mentally, she began to fall apart.
And when the trouble started, I was caught in the middle of it all.
Chapter 2
‘Come on,’ Paul said, when he was looking after me one day, ‘we’re going to a friend’s house.’
When we got there he left me to play with the other children while he and the two adults huddled in the kitchen around the cooker. I could see spoons, tin foil and little bags of sand. I might only have been four, and just a little child, but I observed everything and absorbed what was happening. I spent nearly all of my time around adults and I knew enough about their behaviour, the noises they made and the way they spoke to know when they were doing something wrong. Mum openly spoke about drugs and how much she was against Paul taking them. I saw one of the men hand Paul a bag of the sand. Was that the drugs she had been going on about?
We were in the house for quite a while. All the time I was playing with the other kids I kept an eye on Paul to see what he was up to. On the way home we stopped off at a shop and he bought me a teddy bear and an ice-lolly.
‘If your mum asks us where we went, just say we went to my friend’s and then to the park, okay?’ he said, patting me on the head.
I nodded.
Later on when I was alone with my mum she sat me down and started firing questions at me.
‘Where were you today? What did you get up to?’
I did what Paul said and told her we went to the park, but it was like she didn’t believe me. She kept quizzing me over and over. Remembering what Paul said, I stayed quiet. Then she went in a mood with me. I hated it when she did that as all I wanted was for her to pay me attention and like me. The longer I kept quiet the angrier she became until she started yelling at me. I didn’t think I had a choice so I told her what I’d seen at the house.
‘Paul got some tiny bags of sand and I was not allowed to tell you.’
‘Is that right?’
That night when Paul came home they had an almighty row. In my room I could hear them screaming at each other and the sounds of objects being thrown. When they had one of their arguments you did not want to be in the firing line. In the morning not a lot was being said between them. Paul got me ready to walk to the shops. On the way he held my hand.
‘Why did you tell your mum what we got up to yesterday when I told you not to?’ He spoke quietly but menacingly. He had my hand clasped between his thick fingers.
‘Mum kept asking what we’d done. She didn’t believe me.’
Paul began squeezing my fingers.
‘The next time I tell you not to do something you’d better not do it.’
I tried to pull my hand away but he was gripping it too firmly. It tightened even more.
‘Ow, you’re hurting me!’
My hand felt like it was being crushed. I started to cry and finally he released his grip. We carried on to the shops in silence, apart from my sniffs and sobs, and all the time I was terrified he would do something else to hurt me. From that day on crushing my hand became a regular punishment; as well as slaps to my legs that stung so hot even thinking about it today brings back the burning sensation. Often he’d hit me so hard an imprint of his hand would remain on my leg. The slaps came without warning and I lived in a state of fear that at any moment he might erupt and another one would be heading my way.