Chelsea

The babysitter in Hayes. Early twenties. I was thirteen, already in the middle of the Hatch End chaos — burglaries, drugs, the near-miss with the police. She made the first move. Months later the news came that she had given birth. The child’s name was Chelsea.

The story I was given was that Chelsea died of a brain haemorrhage at nine months old. That was the official version that reached me. The reality was more complicated than it appeared. When you have to deal with the reported death of your daughter at fourteen and you already know that social services cannot be trusted, something hardens that never fully softens again. I was the living proof of a neglected system. I had no intention of handing any child of mine into the same machinery that had already failed me. No one in the wider family was told. They still have not been told. The fact sat in me like a stone. I did not have the language for grief and I did not have the emotional equipment to process it. The numbness simply expanded to cover the new territory.

Rave drugs found me around the same time. School ended. I was moved again. The baby remained a private fact, locked away with everything else that had no safe place to land. I have never sought sympathy for any of it. I have always kept a positive attitude on the surface and been good company. That is not the same as being unhurt. It is simply the way I learned to survive in a sequence of rooms that were never mine.