Daddy's Little Earner (21 page)

I realized that the Mcquarries had put their necks on
the line for me and it was a real wake-up call. I believed
they were right in what they said and that if I had gone to
Holloway it would have been the end of the line for me. I
would have become like the other women in there and
would have been destined for a life of violence and crime
from the moment I walked through the door. As well as
being surprised, I was deeply grateful and moved that
they had stuck up for me. Not many people had ever
spoken out for me before.

Soon after that, Mrs Mcquarrie came to see me one
day when I was working in the kitchens and she invited
me to sit down and have a fag with her in her office. This
soon became a regular thing; she invited me into her
office most days to have cups of coffee and cigarettes with
her like we were friends. Other members of staff used
to come in and tell me it was time to go into school but
she would stick up for me.

‘No,’ she would brush them aside, ‘she’s all right. I’ve
got a little job for her later.’

I used to love watching her in action. She only had
one hand because of an accident when she was young.
Although she had a false hand she never used it but it
was amazing what she could do one-handed, the phone
wedged between her shoulder and her ear, a cigarette
dangling from the corner of her mouth and writing
something at the same time. It would make me laugh just
to watch her juggling all her jobs at once.

She and her husband showed me a lot of kindness
after saving me from prison. I think I must have become a
bit of a pet project for them. The Christmas after Mum
had kicked us out, I had nowhere to go during the holiday
period. I confided in Mrs Mcquarrie about how hurt
I was that Mum never got in touch with us.

‘Why don’t you send her a card?’ she suggested.
‘You’re a grown-up too now; maybe you could make the
first move towards another reconciliation.’

I did as she suggested, but I still didn’t hear anything
back. Mum couldn’t have made it any clearer that she
wanted nothing more to do with us. All the other children
at Bramerton were going back to friends and relatives for
the holiday and there was just going to be me and a lovely
lad called Martin left behind. To my total astonishment,
the Mcquarries did this amazing thing: they sent their
entire staff home and stayed at Bramerton themselves instead of going to their own house in Norwich. On
Christmas Day they brought Martin and me breakfast in
bed and turned the dining room into a proper family
room, bringing in their family Christmas tree and decorations
and buying us both presents. I’ve still got the silver
bangle they gave me. After lunch we sat around watching
television together. They could have employed staff
to deal with us but they chose instead to give up their own
Christmas break for us. It still hurt to think that our
families didn’t want us but it was so touching that the
Mcquarries would do that for us, especially when I had
given them nothing but trouble. I was overwhelmed by
the gesture, feeling that I was unworthy of it, but they
couldn’t have been nicer.

On the Boxing Day of that year another little girl
had to come back to join us because her baby nephew
had died of a cot death, which made me feel less sorry for
myself. So many people in Bramerton were in an even
worse state than me. For years afterwards I would hear
about other children I knew during those years and there
would be stories of how they were now heavily into their
drugs or in prison or dead. Many of them had been too
damaged at the start of their lives to be able to cope with
the pressures of the real world once they were forced
to go out into it.

I may have started to get closer to Mrs Mcquarrie but
it didn’t make me calm down and become an angel overnight. There was an incident with another girl in
Bramerton, which added even more to my reputation
as someone you shouldn’t mess with. This girl was
on the game too, so she must have been pretty tough. We
always had to wait outside the dining room before we
were allowed to go in for meals and when I asked her
before one meal what the time was she was really rude
to me.

‘Whatever is your fucking problem?’ I wanted to
know. ‘Don’t talk to me like that.’

‘You think you’re so special…’ she spat back.

She was still mouthing off as we went in and took our
places round one of the big circular tables. She sat down
opposite me, carefully poured herself a cup of tea, stood
up and threw it over me. I sat for a few seconds, dripping
and gathering my thoughts. I then stood up, picked up
the giant teapot which was filled and ready to serve the
whole table, lifted the lid and hurled the entire contents
at her, flooding the beautiful laminate floor which had to
be buffed every day to keep its shine, and leaving no one
in any doubt that I wasn’t going to be pushed around
without fighting back. Fortunately the tea wasn’t hot
enough to cause scalding, but it was uncomfortable all the
same. Everyone else at the table leapt up as the tidal wave
of hot liquid exploded across them and the staff were trying
to get to me in order to restrain me before I attacked
the girl again, all of them slipping and sliding around on the wet floor while the boys cheered and jeered their
encouragement.

‘Go on, Ria!’

It was like a slapstick scene from a Laurel and Hardy
movie. We both got punished for that outburst but I didn’t
feel as guilty as I did about the glassing, partly because she
had been the first one to throw the tea but mainly because
it had been so funny watching everyone falling about,
and because no one ended up being badly hurt.

Not surprisingly I didn’t trust any men at that age
and I could be pretty horrible to any that crossed my path
and displeased me. Dad had always told me how you
couldn’t trust the men who worked in children’s homes
because they were all perverts and I believed him. Looking
back now I know there were some really nice chaps
working in the homes who I didn’t give a chance to; men
who genuinely wanted to help troubled youngsters like
me. There had been one male carer at Break who I was
always accusing of trying to see me in the bath although
looking back I’m sure nothing of the sort had ever crossed
his mind.

Having said that, there were a few men who made the
girls feel uneasy at Bramerton. We weren’t allowed to
have any locks on our doors so we had no privacy and
there were certain members of staff who seemed to pop
up from nowhere, hovering around the corridors during
bath times. There was one man who we knew used to take his shoes off to sneak upstairs at the time when we
were all getting undressed for bed, so we sprinkled drawing
pins on the steps and listened gleefully to his muffled
exclamations and shouts of pain as he stepped on them in
his stockinged feet.

There was one carer who particularly hated me. The
home was built in a square with a house at each corner,
all joined by corridors. At one corner was the laundry and
the offices, on another the boys’ dormitory, then the girls’
section and finally a mixed-sex family type of set-up.
There were five or six bedrooms in the girls’ part, a sitting
room and a kitchen. At the end of each house was
a staff flat and this chap, who was a big ex-soldier, lived
in the girls’ house with his wife and children, who we
never saw. I was intimidated by him but determined not
to let him know it, so I tried to aggravate him as much as
I could.

We were meant to put our lights out and settle down
at ten o’clock but we would deliberately make a lot of
noise after that, just to wind him up. One night at about
midnight he completely lost the plot and came storming
in, ordering everyone out of their beds, even the girls who
were innocently sleeping. He lined us up along the corridor
and was screaming and spitting into my face, his
complexion bright scarlet, while I was just standing
laughing at him. I knew he wanted to hit me but he
couldn’t without losing his job and ending up in court and I exploited his impotence mercilessly. Because I had
been brought up to obey Dad or suffer the physical consequences,
people who were put in positions of authority
over me but weren’t allowed to touch me had real trouble
making me do anything I didn’t want to do. It must
have driven that one guy absolutely crazy, but he had to
back down or risk losing his job.

If I liked a carer I might try to please them, but I just
wanted to give the others a hard time. Maybe I was taking
revenge for all the times Dad had beaten me when I had
done nothing wrong, trying to even up the scales in
a warped kind of a way.

Bramerton was only meant to be for short stays, but I
was there almost solidly between the ages of fourteen and
seventeen. A couple of times they tried to move me on to
halfway-house establishments where I could live independently
within a community, to try to prepare me for
coping on my own in the outside world, but the first time
that happened I was accused of stealing some money,
which I never did, and the second time I was accused of
drug dealing because I scored some acid for two other
girls while I was in town. So both times I ended up back
at Bramerton again, feeling like a failure.

It was surprising that anyone still held out any hope
for me at all by that stage. It looked as though I was
doomed to be in a downward spiral forever, just like in
the nightmare I used to have when I lived with Dad, falling into nothingness, certain that it could only end
with my death.

I
was still escaping from Bramerton whenever the opportunity
presented itself and sometimes I went to stay with
Dad if he was out of jail at the time, because he put a lot of
pressure on me to get back to him whenever I could. However,
I was beginning to resent working on the block and
handing the money over to him when I could just keep it
for myself if he wasn’t around. Anyway, I preferred meeting
up with my friends in town. There was a cafeteria
where unemployed people used to sit smoking and making
a cup of tea last all morning and I met a few people
there. When I was on the run from Break or Bramerton,
and if I wasn’t with Dad or Kathy, I never really cared who
I stayed with as long as they were friendly and there was
plenty to drink or swallow. Most of the people I ended up
staying with I would meet and bond with in pubs, while
both of us were mellowed by alcohol.

I was fifteen when I met a guy called John who let me
stay for a few weeks at his place in the suburbs of the city.
People who drink together are often generous in that
way, like Dad used to be with friends such as Lucy. I never
had sex with him. Since I was having sex with men for
money and not enjoying it, I wasn’t in a hurry to do it for
nothing as well unless I fancied myself to be in love – not
even for friends who were being generous with accommodation.
I remember this guy had a bread van and I
used to go with him on his delivery rounds sometimes.
I had been there several weeks before he tried it on with
me one night. I wasn’t having any of that. I’d had enough
of men wanting to have sex with me – what I wanted was
friends I could have a laugh with who didn’t want anything
from me, so I stormed out of his house at about six
in the morning, probably shouting something about ‘that’
being all men ever wanted from me and slamming the
door after me. With self-esteem as near rock bottom as
mine was in those days it wasn’t hard for people to offend
me. I was always on the look out for more evidence of
how low my position in the world was and how little I
should expect by way of respect from anyone.

Having made my sad little moral stand I was then
without a place to stay and was walking down this road I
didn’t recognize as dawn broke. Unsure where I was
going to go next, I heard someone wolf whistling. Since
there was no one else around I could be pretty sure it was directed at me. I looked around for the culprit to give him
a piece of my mind. The only person in view was a friendly
looking bearded man with long dark hair leaning over
the balcony of his first-floor flat, grinning down at me. I
must have recognized something good in him straight
away because I didn’t give him an earful as I might have
done in the circumstances, and we got talking.

‘Why don’t you come up?’ he suggested after a minute
or two. Since I had no other plans and he seemed a congenial
sort, I did.

His name, I discovered, was Brian and he was an Irish
biker who’d been banned from driving and had had to
get rid of his bike, leaving him stranded in suburbia just
like me. He might have been without any wheels but
there was no doubting that he was still a biker in style and
spirit. It turned out he was thirty-five years old, a full
twenty years older than me. He was tall and slim and
nice-looking, at least I thought so. His flat seemed to be
full of people, some of them lodgers, some of them just
friends passing through, who gradually stirred into life
during the next few hours, all of them looking rumpled
and hung over as they appeared from under blankets and
inside sleeping bags.

Brian was a bit of an artist and he had painted a huge
Motorhead skull on the wall above the fireplace. It was an
exact copy of the original fanged face created for the
heavy metal rockers by an artist called Joe Petango. Brian had surrounded it with his own twisting patterns of dragons
and flames. There were more examples of his artwork
on his body, and one of his arms was completely
covered in tattoos that he’d designed himself. He had
a rose on his neck, which wasn’t like any tattoo I’d ever
seen before, especially not the amateurish slashings I’d
inflicted on my own body. Everything about Brian
seemed to be unique and interesting and part of his
personality.