Array Girl A: Girl A: My Story

I guess that’s what threw us together. Elouise wasn’t the brightest kid in the area, but we got on together and would hang about at each other’s houses, mostly watching TV and having sleepovers.

When I heard I’d be going to her school I felt a real sense of relief. At least I’d know someone there and, who knew, I might even end up in her class.

Despite the delay in getting a school place, it was all a bit of a rush in the end: I’d gone to a meeting at the school on the Friday and started that next Monday. Over that weekend, Mum and Dad rushed me to Asda in Rochdale so we could buy skirts, shirts and a pair of dolly shoes. I was meant to have a jumper, too, but we’d not gone to a proper school uniform place so I had to do without.

Elouise called for me that March morning, and the two of us set off. I felt nervous as a kitten as we went through the top gates of the school. She was smiling, while I tried to ignore the shouts and catcalls as the two of us headed towards Reception.

The staff weren’t very welcoming. I’d barely given them my name before they were telling me I’d have to leave if my attendance was no good. I was shocked. Elouise squeezed my hand and headed off to class, while I was taken to the learning mentors so they could decide which class I should be in.

I spent the first morning sitting next to a girl called Courtney. She seemed nice enough, but I hated the class as a whole – the pupils were just so completely wild it made me feel uncomfortable.

Looking around in the first break, I felt a glimmer of hope. In my old school everyone had had brand-new bags and named shoes, and if you didn’t have them you’d be picked on. Mum and Dad had got me all the new stuff – the bag, the shoes, the blazer – because they hadn’t wanted me to be bullied. I knew they’d struggled to do it, because money was tight and getting tighter. Here, people didn’t even take bags and they were mostly wearing trainers. So it looked like one less thing to worry about.

Also, people at this school seemed to smoke everywhere – on the corridors, the playground, and they actually had a smoking area for the kids – not so much because the teachers were being lax and irresponsible, but because they knew the kids would do it anyway. We’d never have got away with that in my old school! They’d have expelled you.

I didn’t smoke, but I liked the fact you could because it felt less strict. I guess you could say it was rougher here, but in a way I was relieved by that. It wasn’t as snobby; I felt maybe I could belong after all.

That first lunchtime, Courtney pushed her chair back from the desk and started whispering: ‘Quick!’ she breathed. ‘Let’s get to the dinner queue before the good stuff goes.’

School dinners were really nice here, and the chicken tikka sandwiches were the best. Everyone seemed to want them. You had to run to the front of the queue to get the chicken tikka!

But I was still worried about the class I’d been put in, and once I’d found Elouise, I asked her whether they might let me change. ‘It’s worth a try,’ she said. She came with me to see the mentor I’d met in the morning, and actually she was fine about it. And so I ended up in Elouise’s class, sitting next to her.

This second class was so much better than the first, and by mid afternoon I’d begun to feel a little less nervous. It certainly helped to have Elouise close by. Overall, though, the people at this new school were all tougher than I was used to, and in those first few weeks I discovered that the place had more of a reputation for fighting than for the kids it turned out. It made me realise I’d struggle there unless I found a way to fit in.

It wasn’t the sort of place to go in for a lot of school trips – they cost money after all, and this school struggled to find the budget for everyday schooling. So, for us, a trip was a walk up to the shop at the top of school, and that was just so we could buy cigarettes. Yes, it didn’t take me long to join in on the smoking. I guess it was the most obvious thing I could do to fit in.

It was a team effort to get your hands on some cigarettes. People used to put bits of their money together, out of their dinner money, so they could buy a pack of ten Richmond. Usually, it was four of us clubbing together: me, Elouise, Courtney and another chubby girl in my class called Hayley.

We’d have to ask someone to buy the cigarettes for us, but that wasn’t a problem – there’d always be someone willing to do it. Why would they care?

I didn’t smoke properly, and it was only now and again, when I had money. We’d have half a cigarette before school and half at break, in school or out of school – it didn’t really matter; school wasn’t bothered. The first time I tried, I coughed and spluttered until I was blue in the face, while the other kids howled with laughter. But after a while I found a way of not inhaling properly and, finally, I started to look like the rest of the crowd: leaning back against the wall in our school uniforms, blowing smoke through our nostrils or out the sides of our mouths.

After this, it seemed the next stage of my extra-curricular education would be in drinking; the lessons I was learning at this school were certainly life-changing, but not in the right way exactly.

I started drinking when I was thirteen. You could get cheap white cider and stuff on the estate. You’d buy it and put it in Lucozade bottles from home, then wander around the estate with your mates. The girls I was with – Elouise, Courtney and Hayley – had all grown up around Heywood and, for them, smoking and drinking were rites of passage – just things they’d started doing when they got to a certain age. The normal rules of suburbia didn’t seem to apply around my way. In this new world, even twelve-year-olds had weed in their pockets, and I got used to seeing used syringes, cans, bottles and discarded condoms in the play areas. It was all a bit of a shock at first, but gradually I got used to it.

So, there I was, a young teenager, trying to fit in with a whole new world. For the first time ever, my confidence took a real knocking and I did whatever I could to fit in. Where I’d once excelled at maths and been given £20 to spend in Claire’s as a reward, the only new skills I was picking up now were the best ways to get hold of fags and booze without my parents or the school or the police finding out. And the reward for my efforts? Acceptance from the other kids. It was becoming a formative year to say the least.

Our initial gang of four extended to six with the addition of Shauna, another of my school friends who was a few weeks younger than me and Milly, one of Elouise’s old friends. Together we’d head into the town centre at weekends, or else to each other’s houses for sleepovers.

My place was the same house Mum and Dad are still in: a better-than-most council terrace with leather sofas, pet rats, a wide-screen TV in the lounge and never enough bedrooms upstairs. It was a bus ride to the town centre and its landscape of long-abandoned mills, dingy barbers’ shops, two taxi ranks near Morrison’s, and the tatty kebab shops and pizza places.

We’d not stay over at my house very much, to be honest. Mum and Dad didn’t seem to approve of my new friends, so it always felt a bit frosty when they’d turn up. Mum and Dad seemed to think they were a cut above everyone else on the estate, and they thought my new-found friends were beneath me. As far as I could see, though, I was no different – and neither were my parents. It was just that they’d been used to something different where we’d lived before. Me, I just knew I had to adapt, to try to fit in.

We had our wildest times at Hayley’s place. We’d be open-mouthed as she’d tell us how she’d first had sex with a lad when she was twelve. For all that she appeared slow, she was pretty quick at getting lads into bed or wherever. Night after night, sometimes as we lay in her room in the darkness, she’d give us blow-by-blow accounts of her lurid encounters. With another girl you might have thought she was making it up: not Hayley.