LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter 4

      Tom, Evie and their kids would sometimes come round to our house and Tom would offer to cook supper for us all. Mum has never been very articulate when it comes to saying what she wants. So when they turned up at the front door, uninvited, with Tom holding carrier bags full of ingredients for the meal he wanted to make, she just shrugged and let them in.

      I loved having people in the house again, instead of it just being Mum and me. Usually, it was more like a shrine to cleaning products than a home, and I liked sitting at the kitchen table listening to everyone talking and laughing, even if it was only for a couple of hours. Despite her apparent indifference, I think Mum liked it too, because she was at least as lonely as I was. She probably would have preferred it if Evie and Tom had come without the kids though, and if I hadn’t been there either.

      ‘You know why he comes round here, don’t you?’ she would often say to me after they had gone. ‘He’s sniffing round you. It’s obvious what he’s after.’ I had no clue what she meant. I was 11 years old and no one had ever explained to me about the birds and the bees. Although I had seen people having sex when I was very young, I had only recently found out where babies come from, by reading an article in one of Evie’s magazines, which actually left me more bemused than informed. And anyway, although I quite liked Tom, it was Evie I was infatuated with.

      Tom was obviously crazy about her too. What he didn’t know, however, was that while he was at work, Evie often saw other men. Living in that town, it was a secret she wasn’t going to be able to keep forever, and eventually people began to gossip. But it was Zoe who gave it away in the end. If I wasn’t available to babysit, Evie had to take the children with her when she went to meet whatever guy she was currently seeing behind Tom’s back. When Tom got home from work one evening and asked Zoe what she had been doing all day, she told him, and then added, ‘And Mummy was kissing a man at the bus stop.’

      After things began to go wrong between them, Tom started coming round to our house on his own. He would cry as he talked about their relationship and how he really wanted to work things out with Evie, and I would do my best to comfort him. Then I would tell him about the latest row I had had with Mum and he would sympathise with me and tell me that whatever had happened wasn’t my fault. Gradually, as we became closer, I started to believe that he was the only person who really understood me. Until then, it had always been Mum and me against the rest of the world. Now, it was Tom who was my only real friend and ally.

      Sometimes he came round to our house just after I had had a screaming argument with Mum and had retreated to my bedroom, slamming the door and turning my music up as loud as it would go. Tom would have a cup of tea with Mum and then come upstairs and sit with me on the bed, listening while I told him what had happened, then smoothing my damp hair and telling me everything was going to be okay. Mum isn’t the sort of person who gives comfort or cuddles, or even brief hugs. When I was angry or upset, her reaction was to shout even more loudly than I was doing, and I always ended up feeling worse than I had done to begin with. So it was a new, and very pleasant, experience to be listened to and sympathised with.

      I don’t really know what sort of relationship there was between Tom and Mum, or if there was any particular reason why she would storm out of the house if he came up to my room without first stopping to have a cup of tea with her. She didn’t like anyone giving me attention that could have been paid to her. So it may simply have been jealousy and there may have been nothing between them at all. Perhaps her reaction was just another facet of the many tensions that existed at that time as a result of the complicated cross-relationships between Evie, Tom, Mum and me.

      I still wasn’t going to school. I spent most days with Zoe, waiting for Tom to finish work so that we could go on a bike ride or hang out together. Despite the fact that there was an age difference of more than ten years between us, Tom was the best friend I had ever had. But then something happened that changed our relationship and made everything even more complex and confusing than it already was.

      It was an evening in December and I was in my bedroom wrapping Mum’s Christmas present when Tom knocked on the door and came in. I was already in my nightie and when he touched the bow on the front of it, his hand rested on my boob just long enough for me to notice but without it seeming weird. Then he started talking about Christmas and I probably wouldn’t have remembered what he had done if it had remained an isolated incident. In fact, things escalated so slowly after that night I hardly noticed what was happening.

      At first, it was just rough and tumble, the sort of games a brother and sister or any other kids might play. Then one day he kissed me, on another day he lifted up my top to look at my boobs, and before long I believed that we were ‘in a relationship’. He never put pressure on me to do anything I didn’t want to do. If I tried to turn away while he was kissing me, for example, he always stopped immediately. He did everything in a way that made me believe, at 11 years old, that it was what I wanted. And when he asked me to do things I didn’t want to do, I did them because I wanted to please him and because I was tired of being lonely and he was my only friend.

      I can only remember one occasion when Tom tried to force me to do something I didn’t want to do. It wasn’t long after he had kissed me for the first time. We were in the garden of his mum’s house when he suddenly grabbed my hand and pushed it down inside his trousers. I had touched boys of my own age at primary school, but never a man before, and I was really shaken. When I tried to pull my hand away, Tom grabbed my arm and held it where it was. I was more confused than frightened, until I saw the dark, almost threatening look in his eyes. By the time he released his grip, his fingerprints had left little red marks on my skin, which slowly turned into bruises.

      I didn’t have any concept that what he was doing was wrong. I had read articles in Evie’s magazines about little girls whose dads crept into their bedrooms at night and did horrible things to them that traumatised and scarred them for the rest of their lives. And I had read about women who were raped – usually by men they didn’t know – who were very frightened and struggled to try to get away. But what Tom was doing to me wasn’t anything like what had happened to the little girls and women in those magazine stories. Tom didn’t ever hurt me and I wasn’t afraid of him. I often felt embarrassed by what he did to me, but only because I didn’t have real breasts, like Evie did, and I thought he must be comparing me to her and would soon realise I wasn’t really worthy of his attention.

      I read a lot as a child. It seems odd when I think about it now, but I was probably reading Harry Potter during the time when I was becoming involved

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