LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter 3

      It was not understanding something that made me anxious. Sometimes, though, I didn’t know that I didn’t understand, so situations that might have been distressing for another child were simply a bit confusing for me, because I was used to people doing apparently inexplicable things.

      An example of what I mean occurred at school when I was seven. At the end of a corridor in the school building there was a metal grille door with some stairs behind it that led up to a music studio. Some of the kids in my class had tried to open the grille, but it was too stiff and heavy for little hands. Then, one day, I was in the corridor when a boy called Billy managed to slide it back just far enough for him to squeeze through. Billy was in the top class, so he must have been 10 or 11, and when he looked straight at me and said ‘Come on’ I just stood there for a moment, staring at him, unable to believe he had really chosen me.

      There was one large room at the top of the stairs and a door that opened into a much smaller room with a row of washbasins along one wall. There must have been toilets too, but perhaps all the doors were closed, because I don’t remember them now. Billy and I were standing beside the basins when he told me to do something I didn’t understand. I was so proud of being in that forbidden place with someone who had actually asked me to go with them that I felt a rush of panic at the thought that I might be about to ruin everything by getting it wrong. No one had ever chosen me for anything before, and if I messed this up, maybe no one ever would again.

      Fortunately, Billy didn’t seem to be as impatient as a lot of the other kids were, and after he had explained it to me again, he put his hand into the pocket of his trousers, pulled out a necklace and said, ‘And then I’ll give you this.’

      All I remember after that is walking back down the stairs holding the necklace tightly in my hand. So I suppose I must have given him the blowjob that I only understood much later was what he described to me that day.

      I showed the necklace to my mum that evening and told her, proudly, that a boy in the top class had given it to me. As she was examining it, with a half-smile, I suddenly remembered the huge row that had followed the incident with one of my stepbrothers when we lived with Dan. I still didn’t know why Dan had been so angry, but some instinct told me that what had happened with Billy might be wrong in the same sort of way and that, if it was, it would be better not to tell Mum what I had done to deserve such a wonderful gift.

      Mum must have thought Billy had given me the necklace simply because he liked me. So it was unkind of her to remark, as she dropped it back into my hands, that it would have cost him £1, at most. She was probably right though, because it broke a couple of days later when I was threading it through my fingers and admiring it for the hundredth time. I can still remember how disappointed I was and how foolish I felt for having been so proud of something that Mum had been able to identify immediately as just cheap tat.

      I wasn’t ever abused or badly treated in any way by any of Mum’s friends when we lived in Cora’s flat. But I did see things that children shouldn’t see. For example, I have a very clear memory of sitting on the floor in the living room with my legs crossed and my hands in my lap, watching a couple bouncing around on top of each other on the sofa. I must have been three years old, and it was just another of the many mystifying incidents I didn’t even try to understand.

      For the people who were Mum’s friends at that time, there weren’t any boundaries between things that were sexual and non-sexual, which meant that, when I went to school, I had to learn, incident by incident, what was okay and what wasn’t. So I wasn’t expecting my teacher’s furious reaction when she found me sitting in the classroom one day with my hand inside the trousers of the little boy next to me. What might have passed as innocent exploration at the age of three or four was viewed as something entirely more sinister at seven. In reality though, I was still very naive.

      Gavin was the youngest in a family of several neglected children, most of whom were aggressive and quarrelsome. But Gavin was different, and because he was always nice to me and always stood up for me when someone teased or bullied me, he became my ‘boyfriend’. After that day, however, the teacher made us sit on opposite sides of the classroom. And I learned that, for some reason, putting your hand inside someone else’s trousers was not ‘acceptable behaviour’.

      Most of my other memories I have of school are associated with feeling confused, overwhelmed and quite lonely. There was an avenue of trees in the school grounds where I often sat on my own, picking up small stones and putting them in my pocket. Mum used to say she could tell from how many I had collected what sort of day I had had. Just a couple of stones was a sign that I had played with Gavin and some of the other kids. A whole pocketful meant I had been alone during all the playground breaks.

      I sometimes felt as though I was the only person in the world. I did have a few friends by the time I was seven, but Mum didn’t ever make friends with their parents. In fact, she didn’t have any relationships with women while I was growing up; just with guys. So there didn’t seem to be any connection between my life and the lives of anyone I knew, which meant that, in a way I can’t explain, I didn’t feel as though I was part of anything.

      I can remember feeling as though there was a huge, sad sigh building up inside me – although I couldn’t have explained it that way at the time – and if I started to let it out, I wouldn’t ever stop sighing. The reason it was there was because I rarely understood why the teachers shouted at me and why the other kids laughed.

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