Escaping Daddy. Maria Landon

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СКАЧАТЬ I asked. I started on cannabis but before long speed became my drug of choice and I took it whenever I could get my hands on some.

      There were times when Dad would get caught by the police for thieving or fighting and sent to prison for a while. Terry and I would then go into children’s homes or foster homes and I was surprised to find that they weren’t as terrible as Dad had warned me they would be. But by that time he had messed with my head so much that I couldn’t settle anywhere. A lot of teachers and social workers told me that they thought I had the potential for a better life, but I always ended up back in trouble one way or another. As soon as he came out of prison Dad would order us to go back to him and I always wanted to go, hoping beyond hope that things would be different this time; that this time he would be kind to me, that he would stop doing those things to me.

      But it was all a game to him. He convinced me that wherever I was taken I should run away and go back to him at the first opportunity. I never questioned this wisdom, even though I sometimes knew I was better off in the places the social workers sent me to. I desperately wanted us to be a happy little family, but he just wanted to have me in his power in the same way he had with Mum. Whatever efforts the authorities made to get me to safety he just had to snap his fingers and I would go running back to him. Sometimes I would try to explain to people what he was doing to me, but Dad always managed to get out of it, to turn everything round so it seemed as if I was the problem, not him.

      Social workers were as confused as I was. One wrote about me: ‘Maria is in some ways functioning at a four-or five-year-old level and in others at a sixteen-year-old level, plus being an intelligent twelve-year-old. She is over-fond of her dad and wants him close to her, up to a certain point, and beyond that she starts complaining.’

      At one of the homes, when I was fourteen, I asked if they would try to make contact with Mum for us. They managed to track her down and she actually came to see us. For a while it looked as though Terry and I might be able to live with her, but we were all too damaged. Within six weeks the relationship had broken down because Mum couldn’t cope with our disruptive behaviour and we were taken back into care.

      I was fifteen and on the run from one of the care homes I’d been assigned to when I met a guy called Brian. He was a thirty-five-year-old biker and I fell in love with him because he was a kind and decent man. I had ‘property of Brian’ tattooed on my upper arm, just above a tattoo I already had of Dad’s name. We even bought a silver ring down the market and announced to the world that we were in love. Brian gave me the courage to break away a little from Dad, even though I was still working on the street to make the money I needed for the drink and drugs I was using.

      Brian wanted to help me to escape from my fear of Dad and from the social workers who he thought were letting me down, so we hitchhiked down to London together. It was a dream that neither of us had thought through and we ran out of money almost immediately. Brian might have been older than me but he wasn’t capable of earning a wage and supporting us; he was a dreamer with a dope habit who liked playing his guitar. The only way we could support ourselves was for me to go back to work doing the one thing I knew how on the streets of King’s Cross. I was terrified and I didn’t want to do it, but the thought of going back to Norwich and letting Dad know I had failed was worse. I didn’t want him to see that he had been right, that I couldn’t manage without him.

      The other prostitutes working in King’s Cross all looked older and harder and more vicious than any of the girls I had ever met in Norwich. These were people who everyone had given up on, junkies and schizophrenics and God alone knew what else. I’d never really known many black people before and I didn’t understand the way they or their pimps acted or talked to me. It was like occupying an alien landscape and everything seemed strange and dangerous, angry and aggressive. Most of the time I got myself high on speed or acid before I went out to work, just so that I could overcome my fears.

      When the police eventually caught up with us they arrested Brian and Dad, accusing them both of living off my immoral earnings. Everyone knew Dad was a pimp but I was forced to stand in the witness box for an hour and half with him staring long and hard at me as I finally plucked up the courage to give evidence against him. Even then I still hated and loved him in equal proportions. I was relieved that people now believed me and that he was going to have to pay for what he had done to me over the years, but I also felt guilty that I was betraying him and ensuring he went back to prison again.

      Everyone, including the judge, could see that Brian was my boyfriend and not a paedophile in the way Dad was, but he had still broken the law by sleeping with me while I was underage and so he had to serve six months in jail while Dad was given four years.

      I don’t think anyone in social services thought that I would wait for Brian, but I did, putting all my energies into finding new ways to escape from the care homes they put me in. Eventually, once Brian was free and I was seventeen, they admitted defeat and let us live together in Brian’s council flat, which was the moment when I fell pregnant with his child.

      I desperately wanted a child, having already suffered a miscarriage the previous year. Most of all I wanted to be a good mother. I wanted my baby to have the best possible start in life and never be made to feel the way I had felt throughout my childhood. As the date of the birth drew closer my intentions became more and more serious and I began to realise that Brian was never going to be able to be a good and responsible father. He might be a lovely, kind man, but he would never hold down a proper job and I could see that his drink and drug problems were getting worse not better. Dad would soon be out of prison and I was terrified of being forced back into his clutches simply because I had no alternative. I didn’t want him to be allowed anywhere near my baby when it arrived.

      I had wanted so much to be independent and to show the world, and Dad, that I was an adult and could manage on my own, but I realised the relationship with Brian wasn’t going to work and I was going to have to throw myself on the mercy of the social services. I needed help. I hated the idea of people seeing me as a failure again and I was terrified they would insist on taking the baby away from me, but they responded graciously to my plea and eventually put me into a little flat on my own. So many people in the social services over the years had told me that they thought I could do better with my life, but I had never believed them, always allowing Dad’s words to undermine my confidence and make me suspicious of anyone who told me I was better than I thought, that I could make something of my life if I wanted to.

      My baby, Brendan, was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me. I didn’t sleep at all the first night after his birth, just lying there staring at him, promising him I would do everything I possibly could to give him a decent life and that I would make sure he didn’t have to endure the sort of upbringing I’d been given. I convinced myself that just because Mum had left us and Dad had abused me and put me on the streets didn’t necessarily mean I was doomed to repeat all their mistakes. I told myself that by having such a wonderful baby to look after I would be one of the damaged children who managed to escape from their past. I had imagined that Dad was the only problem, not realising there would be other people and emotions lying in wait to ambush me.

      In the euphoria of the first few hours with my baby I thought my problems were behind me–but they weren’t. I was eighteen years old but inside the tense, feisty teenager I had become I was still a sad, desperate child. Despite the aggressive, cheeky face I showed to the outside world, I was feeling as lost and alone in the world as I had when my father first raped me and then laughed at my pain, terrified now that the shadows of my past would catch up with me again, dragging me back into his world of scams, populated as it always was by hookers, addicts and drunks.

       Chapter Two The Overdose

      When I was a little girl, if anyone had asked what I wanted to do with my life I would СКАЧАТЬ