No one spoke to me directly about what was going on or why I was rebelling like I was. They all swallowed the Barbara line of me being a girl with a giant chip on my shoulder. They all believed Barbara and, because of that, I was untouchable. They could all believe that garbage if they wanted to – I knew the truth – but I wasn’t going to tell it to anyone either. It was mine. My secret. My life. My power. All the conversations that were going on about me went on behind closed doors. No one sat down with me and asked me anything. I had never told anyone about the madness at home as I simply thought I wouldn’t be believed. I also felt too ashamed to admit to it. All through this, despite me looking like a punk, I was extremely polite. The one thing I had learnt from my imprisonment in the house of horrors was to be polite and gracious – even to (or maybe especially to) my enemies. I wasn’t rude even if I wasn’t going to comply with everything they wanted me to do.
So I went to the room with the educational psychologist and I sat down next to him at a big wooden table. He got out some big black files, and started turning pages. I had never met this man before in my life. I was sitting in this room with him, on my own, feeling a bit spooked. (‘All men are filthy rapists’ had been drummed into me by Barbara, although she’d deny it if I ever mentioned she’d said it to me over and over.) He was a little man in his forties, in a brown leather jacket. He had a ginger moustache and longish hair with dandruff. I didn’t understand why I was there with him or what he wanted, so I braced myself.
‘Hi, I’m Robert,’ he started, trying to be jolly, and then put in front of me some white sheets of paper with huge black ink splodges on them.
‘OK, Louise,’ he said, talking down to me a bit. ‘Let’s look at these pictures together.’
As he was talking, I took my pen (which was always in my pocket) and I started drawing on the pictures, embellishing them, making lines come out of all the curvy shapes.
‘No, no, no!’ Robert was outraged. ‘No, no, Louise, you can’t do that!’
I looked at him, innocently, as he was now wide-eyed, sweating and looking very agitated. ‘I thought you wanted me to do something with these?’ I asked calmly.
Robert was looking very distressed, and shuffling his papers.
‘These are very expensive. They are special tests,’ he tried to explain. He was clearly rattled.
‘But they look like pictures I could draw on and play with,’ I explained, sweetly.
‘No, no, no,’ he was shaking his head. ‘Oh, dear me, I don’t know… Look, you are supposed to say what they remind you of.’
‘Oh,’ I said, blinking. He was now really cross with me, and I realised that I had even broken the rules in this ‘assessment’. I didn’t actually mean to, but it had just seemed obvious to me to draw on the pictures. I drew all the time, on everything, everywhere. I also felt deep down that I had met so many social worker types in my time that I was used to giving them what they wanted. I was like a performing seal. I assumed he wanted me to ‘express myself’. They always thought they were making me ‘open up’, but I had learnt to play them. I was playing Robert, to some extent, and now he was rattled.
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sp; I knew he would give a bad report of me to the headmistress and tell her I wasn’t playing the game. I was just thinking, Okay, so I’ve messed this up, so I can get out of here. Yippee! Bring it on. I could see that Robert was totally frustrated by me, like Mrs Drayton, as I was not playing his nice little ink-blot game. I was playing my fuck-it-up game, instead. At the end of the meeting he seemed actually hurt that I’d ruined his expensive set of pictures. I felt elated. I had won something at last.
Of course, this meeting led to yet another meeting with even more do-goody officials. A few days later I was ushered into a big room in the centre of Oxford. There were about six people sitting round the table with notes in front of them, all with lanyards on. It was just me on one side of an enormous table against six of them. Barbara was outside the room in the corridor, waiting for me, getting even more wound up. I had been slapped, kicked, punched, shouted at and starved a lot over the past few days for the shame I was bringing on her and her family. I just laughed. I didn’t care any more. I was sick of her and her bloody family. I wanted to be rid of them – and everyone else who told me what to do all the time.
Now I was sitting opposite a middle-aged woman in a coral-pink cardigan and lanyard in the middle of the table, with people either side of her. She had big glasses on, like TV screens, and a plump, moist face and body. She leant forwards over the table towards me.
‘Sooooo, Louise,’ she hissed sweetly, ‘how do you feel?’
I looked at her in her ridiculous lobster-pink cardi and huge breasts that were leaning on the table, and I wanted to laugh. How do I feel? I wasn’t going to tell her and a room full of complete strangers how I felt. Was she mad? I sat there thinking, You want me to play the game – to do that thing you like, to tell you I’m sad and angry or whatever, so you can write down your stupid notes in your poxy little notebooks. Well, I’m not gonna do it.
I felt like I was on fire. I crossed my arms and gritted my teeth. I was not going to help. I was not going to be useful. I was not going to say anything she wanted me to. The worm had turned. And this worm had big fiery teeth, and it was going to bite. I felt like I was going to bite the lot of them, in a place that hurt. And the way to do that best was through silence and not giving them what they wanted.
Mrs Lobster-pink Cardi started again, trying to smile at me. She had big rabbity teeth. ‘Sooooo, I see you seem to have trouble staying at school.’
I smiled at this. ‘Yes, I do,’ I said simply. Wasn’t that obvious? See how easy this was. She was getting the hang of my game. I felt I was in charge. I could see exactly what she was doing. She had these silly questions and she was going to ask them, and then I had to answer and she would tick her boxes. And then they would go ‘Um’ and ‘Ah’ and ‘Er’, and then there would be a lot of talking to each other, ignoring me completely, and with Barbara, and with Mrs Drayton – but not with me!
Nobody had bothered to ask me all these years what it was like, so I wasn’t going to tell them now. I would play their game and play them at it better than any of them would ever realise.
‘Well,’ said Mrs Cardi. ‘Um, er… the school has a problem with children like you.’
Like me? Like me? What did she mean, ‘like me’? Then I launched at her when she didn’t see it coming. I told her how boring the school was, and how there was nothing to do if you were put in the lower stream. I was sick and tired of doing cookery and needlework – was that all they had to offer? I could see the cogs whirring in their tiny heads, as they had me down as thick, thick, thick. Yet there I was being articulate. I was telling them that they were not giving me enough to do, to think about, to work on; that I was bored with their stupid school and system. I watched as they all looked at each other significantly, and Mrs Lobster-pink scribbled something else down in her notes.
‘Sooo,’ she began again, showing me her rabbity teeth, ‘where do you go in the daytime?’ She leant forward and gave me one of those ‘you can tell me all about it’ looks. She had to be joking.
My daily circuit was precious to me. It was my refuge, my hope. I didn’t want to spoil my wonderful times at Blenheim, or in the Pitt Rivers or the Ashmolean. Telling these idiots would just ruin it all for me. Why should I tell them? Why should they know?
‘Well,’ she began again, in strained social worker tones (I could tell she was beginning to get fed up with me now), ‘we are concerned you are in danger.’
In danger? In the daytime? This was when I was not in danger. The danger I was really in was at home. But who had ever done anything about that? I couldn’t begin to explain all this to this ridiculous do-gooder of a woman in a stupid pink cardigan.
‘The only danger I’m in,’ I said, ‘is dying of boredom. At this school!’
I could see Mrs Cardi was shocked and exasperated. Looks shot round the table and they all sat back for a moment in their chairs. There was quite a pause, and then she started again.