Megan Stephens - Bought and Sold

I stayed at Dad’s for almost a whole, miserable month. The only thing about it that wasn’t entirely negative was that it made me realise that my childhood would probably have been worse rather than better if he had stayed with us, as I had previously always wished he had done. The house was always full of his friends, just sitting around. I tried to hide the fact that most of them made me feel really uncomfortable, but he could obviously tell and he would say embarrassing things to me in front of them and then roar with laughter.

I could have gone home, but I stayed because I was still angry with Mum. She hadn’t abandoned me: she wrote to me and sent Dad the child benefit she got for me every week. I know she would have been appalled if she had seen the way I was living and had known that I had stopped going to school. I don’t think Dad ever even thought about how old I was and what I should actually be doing every day. And as I had obviously dropped off the radar as far as social services were concerned, I just hung around his house, like his friends did, smoking cigarettes.

I had been staying at Dad’s for almost three weeks when my sister moved in too. It was really good to have her there.

Sometimes, one of the men would turn up with a child, who would be left for my sister and me to look after. We were in the bedroom one evening playing with a little boy whose father was downstairs, when a fight kicked off. We sat there for a few minutes, listening to the shouting and hoping it would stop, and then I crept down the stairs. Dad was lying on the floor of the living room in a pool of blood and one of his friends was bending over him, holding a knife and screaming, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ At first, I thought the man had already stabbed him and he was dead. But then he groaned and moved. I found out later that the man had taken exception to something Dad had said and picked up the TV and smashed it over his head.

I was still standing on the bottom stair, too shocked to be able to make any real sense of what had happened, when I heard a sound behind me. Spinning round, I saw my sister and the little boy huddled together and shivering. I held my finger to my lips and whispered, ‘Shhh.’ Then I pushed them ahead of me back up the stairs and into the bedroom. When I had closed the door silently behind me, I told them, ‘We need to get out of the house. We’re going to have to go downstairs again.’ The little boy whimpered and shook his head. ‘It’s all right,’ I said, trying to convey a sense of confidence I didn’t feel. ‘Just follow me and don’t make a sound.’

Everyone was still fighting and shouting as we tiptoed swiftly and silently down the stairs, across the hallway and into the kitchen. As soon as all three of us were out of the back door, we started running. We didn’t stop until we reached an alleyway, where we huddled together, trying to catch our breath. Running away had been an instinctive reaction. But when I tried to think what to do next, I drew a blank. So we were still standing in the alleyway, glancing nervously over our shoulders every few seconds because we were afraid that the man with the knife might come after us, when we heard the wail of a siren. The police car was followed almost immediately by an ambulance, and by the time we crept back to the house, Dad was already being lifted on to a stretcher.

The little boy’s father took him home and my sister and I were looked after for the night by neighbours. When Dad got out of hospital, my sister went back to live with him again. But I had already decided that I was going to go home to Mum.

It was a good decision, in theory. In practice, it would prove to be a case of out of the frying pan, into the fire.

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