Hatch End

By thirteen I was at Hatch End High School. Already in trouble. Already playing with drugs. Already burgling houses. The shy kid with blonde hair and blue eyes had learned how to move through certain rooms without being noticed until it was too late. I nearly got caught robbing another pupil’s home. Two of the others were captured bang to rights. My mate and I managed to lose the police. The adrenaline of that escape sat in the body differently from the numbness. It was one of the few things that cut through.

While the police were looking for me I was sent to stay in Hayes with my mum’s friend Kim Robinson. One night I was seduced by the babysitter, a woman in her early twenties. I was thirteen. I had almost no emotional equipment and no one to tell me what any of it meant. Months later I learned she had had my baby. The child’s name was Chelsea. The story I was given was that she died of a brain haemorrhage at nine months old. That was the version that circulated. The reality was more complicated. At fourteen I was left dealing with the reported death of a daughter while already understanding that social services could not be trusted with any child of mine. I was living proof of a neglected systemic failure. Childhood experiences like that make you colder, especially at the exact age when other people are beginning to discover what feelings are. I had none that I could locate and name.

I can still recall killing two of my brother’s pets — a lizard and a chick — in that period. It was not rage. It was the absence of the thing other people called feeling. The act itself was small and final and I registered it the way you register a change in the weather. I was expelled for the burglary. Schooling died. Rave drugs got my attention because they altered the inside of a head that had already learned to live with absence. I was moved again to one of the grandparents. None of them knew about the baby. They still do not. Strange, looking back, how large a fact can sit in a life and remain completely invisible to the people who are supposed to be closest. The numbness that had started after the removal at eight settled deeper and became the default setting. I moved through the days like someone watching a film of his own life rather than living it.