He took me back to his house, where there was no electricity, no money to put in the meter, and nothing in the fridge or cupboards to eat or drink except beer. If Mum had known what things were like at Dad’s, she might have sent me there herself to get the wake-up call she thought I needed. Dad wasn’t bothered about the state of his house though; he didn’t even seem to notice. After dropping me off, he went out again to collect my half-sister, Vicky, who was coming for an overnight visit.
When Dad came with Vicky, he asked her, ‘Do you know who this is?’ The last time I had seen her was almost eight years earlier, when she was a baby, not long before her mum had walked out on Dad. So she had no idea who I was. After looking at me warily for a moment, she asked, ‘Is it your new girlfriend?’ Dad laughed and said, ‘No, stupid. It’s your sister, Megan.’ And Vicky burst into tears. Then she hugged me so tightly she nearly squeezed all the air out of me.
I stayed at Dad’s for almost a whole, miserable month. The only thing about it that wasn’t entirely negative was that it made me realise that my childhood would probably have been worse rather than better if he had stayed with us, as I had previously always wished he had done. The house was always full of his friends, just sitting around. I tried to hide the fact that most of them made me feel really uncomfortable, but he could obviously tell and he would say embarrassing things to me in front of them and then roar with laughter.
I could have gone home, but I stayed because I was still angry with Mum. She hadn’t abandoned me: she wrote to me and sent Dad the child benefit she got for me every week. I know she would have been appalled if she had seen the way I was living and had known that I had stopped going to school. I don’t think Dad ever even thought about how old I was and what I should actually be doing every day. And as I had obviously dropped off the radar as far as social services were concerned, I just hung around his house, like his friends did, smoking cigarettes.
I had been staying at Dad’s for almost three weeks when my sister moved in too. It was really good to have her there.
Sometimes, one of the men would turn up with a child, who would be left for my sister and me to look after. We were in the bedroom one evening playing with a little boy whose father was downstairs, when a fight kicked off. We sat there for a few minutes, listening to the shouting and hoping it would stop, and then I crept down the stairs. Dad was lying on the floor of the living room in a pool of blood and one of his friends was bending over him, holding a knife and screaming, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ At first, I thought the man had already stabbed him and he was dead. But then he groaned and moved. I found out later that the man had taken exception to something Dad had said and picked up the TV and smashed it over his head.
I was still standing on the bottom stair, too shocked to be able to make any real sense of what had happened, when I heard a sound behind me. Spinning round, I saw my sister and the little boy huddled together and shivering. I held my finger to my lips and whispered, ‘Shhh.’ Then I pushed them ahead of me back up the stairs and into the bedroom. When I had closed the door silently behind me, I told them, ‘We need to get out of the house. We’re going to have to go downstairs again.’ The little boy whimpered and shook his head. ‘It’s all right,’ I said, trying to convey a sense of confidence I didn’t feel. ‘Just follow me and don’t make a sound.’
Everyone was still fighting and shouting as we tiptoed swiftly and silently down the stairs, across the hallway and into the kitchen. As soon as all three of us were out of the back door, we started running. We didn’t stop until we reached an alleyway, where we huddled together, trying to catch our breath. Running away had been an instinctive reaction. But when I tried to think what to do next, I drew a blank. So we were still standing in the alleyway, glancing nervously over our shoulders every few seconds because we were afraid that the man with the knife might come after us, when we heard the wail of a siren. The police car was followed almost immediately by an ambulance, and by the time we crept back to the house, Dad was already being lifted on to a stretcher.
The little boy’s father took him home and my sister and I were looked after for the night by neighbours. When Dad got out of hospital, my sister went back to live with him again. But I had already decided that I was going to go home to Mum.
It was a good decision, in theory. In practice, it would prove to be a case of out of the frying pan, into the fire.
Mum and John had split up while I was staying at Dad’s, for good this time. Despite mostly blaming John for what had happened, I know Mum was really upset and that she missed him. I was sorry too: I always wished things could have gone back to the way they used to be in the early days of their relationship.
I think Mum was depressed and lonely before I came home, so she was glad to have me back. We got on a lot better than we had done before I went away and became really close – partly, I suppose, because I had grown up a bit in the month I had been living at Dad’s.
Shortly after I returned home, my sister was taken into care. I had just turned 14 and should have been in school, so they were probably looking for me too. Despite having made friends, both on the housing estate and at school, before I had gone to live with Dad, I hadn’t completely escaped from the bullying. So I had no reason to want things to go back to the way they had been. It seemed as though life had stalled for Mum and for me. And then Mum announced that we were going on holiday to Greece.
I’ve often wondered what would have happened if Dad hadn’t started drinking, if we had stayed together as a family living in the nice house we used to live in, and if my sister and I had finished school and maybe gone to university. I know that was what Mum wanted for us – a good education that would lead to us getting good jobs. Our lives might even have been different if John and Mum had worked things out and stayed together.
I do have some happy memories of the early days after John moved in. For example, we used to have a party at our house every New Year’s Eve. Everyone would be cheerful and laughing, and even when they all got a bit drunk, no one was ever angry or shouted. Then we moved to the new house, everything changed and I began to wish we could turn back the clock so that Mum could make some different decisions. But we couldn’t, so there was no point being miserable about how things might have been.
I hated leaving my sister behind in England when Mum and I went to Greece. I would have been glad that she wasn’t coming with us if I had known what was going to happen when we got there. I had never been abroad before. I was so excited I could hardly sit still on the plane. When we arrived at the airport in Greece, we got a taxi to the small, basic but clean apartment Mum had rented. As soon as we had dumped our bags and done a little dance around the room, we went to the beach. The sand was golden, the water was warm and crystal clear; in fact, everything about the place we were staying was just the way I had imagined it would be, but better.
That first evening, we went to a bar right next to the beach, and as Mum and I sat laughing and talking, I felt more relaxed than I had done for a long time. I still didn’t drink alcohol, but that night I had a couple of Bacardi Breezers – and then went back to coke when Mum realised I was getting a bit tipsy. We danced and chatted to other tourists and to the bar owner, who spoke really good English and entertained everyone by mixing cocktails and telling jokes.
There were three guys sitting at a table near the back of the room and whenever I glanced surreptitiously in their direction, one of them seemed to be watching me. He was the best dressed and the best looking of the three, and when he caught my eye I got a fluttery feeling in my stomach. It was one of the other two who came over and asked Mum and me to dance. In fact, he didn’t really ask us; he was Albanian and didn’t speak any English, so he just kept repeating the word ‘Hello’ and then did a sort of mime that made us laugh. We did