Bought and Sold. Megan Stephens

and think I was crying because I had a terrible stomach ache, until I realised that I get terrible stomach aches whenever I’m frightened or upset. So I think the tears – and the stomach ache – were because Dad was leaving.

      When he came out of the living room into the hallway, I called down to him, ‘Please, Dad, don’t go.’ When he stopped and looked up at me, I held my breath for a moment because I thought he might not be going to leave after all. But then he waved and walked out of the front door.

      I adored my dad and in some ways I never get over his leaving. But I’ve got lots of good memories of my stepdad, John, who came to live with us not long after Dad left. I used to love school when I was young and one of the things I really liked about John was the way he always talked to me about whatever it was I was learning and then helped me with my homework. He was tidy too, unlike Dad, and the house was always clean and nice to live in when he was there.

      We lived in a good area of town at that time. Mum had made sure of that. She said she wanted my sister and me to have more opportunities and a better life than she had had, which is also why she insisted on us always speaking and behaving ‘properly’.

      Dad had not moved very far away when he left – just to the other side of town – and some weekends my sister and I would go to stay with him. Mum told me later that he had started drinking and taking drugs before they split up. I didn’t know about the drugs as a child, but I think I was aware that he drank, or, at least, I was aware of the consequences of his drinking, because of the sometimes scary way he behaved when he was drunk.

      Whenever my sister and I went to stay with him, Mum would give him money so that he could look after us. But he must have spent it on alcohol, because we would go home on Sunday nights with tangled hair and dirty clothes, feeling ravenously hungry. It didn’t make any difference to the way I felt about Dad though: I still adored him, and I would scream and cry every time we had to leave him.

      I don’t know if he was trying to fight his addictions or if he was happy with his life the way it was. Perhaps drugs and alcohol were all that really mattered to him. It certainly sometimes seemed that way, and that when he’d had to choose between his addictions and his wife and children, we had been the ones he had abandoned. He even gave up seeing my sister and me at weekends in the end, when he became so weird and unpredictable that Mum had to stop us going there.

      I missed Dad a lot for a while, and then a couple of friends of Mum’s and John’s started coming over at the weekends with their two children and I began not to mind so much about not going to visit him. Every Saturday evening, Mum would make a huge bowl of popcorn for us kids to eat while we watched a film. Then we would go up to bed and the adults would turn on the music. I loved those weekends.

      I did still miss my dad, but staying with him had started to get a bit frightening and, to be honest, I wasn’t sorry not to be going there anymore. There was never anything to eat in his house and when we told him we were hungry, he just got angry and shouted at us, which made me anxious – for myself, for my little sister and for him. So it was nice to spend the weekends just being a kid at home, playing and joking around and not having to worry about anything. Until the fights started.

      As I was the oldest, it felt like my responsibility to look after my sister and the two other kids who stayed with us at the weekends. So when the screaming and shouting began to kick off downstairs, and the three of them looked at me with big, scared eyes, I told them stories and pretended I wasn’t frightened. The next morning, we would creep downstairs and start clearing up the mess the adults had made in the living room, in the hope that if they were pleased with us when they woke up, they wouldn’t be sullen and uncommunicative with each other.

      Later, when I was in Greece, I often had the same feeling of almost desperately determined optimism that I used to have on those Sunday mornings at home as we picked up the overflowing, often overturned, ashtrays, empty beer cans and bottles, and disposed of the shattered remains of whatever objects the grown-ups had hurled across the room at each other. I can still remember the feeling of heart-stopping dread I had the morning we came downstairs and found blood smeared across the living-room walls. There were words written in it, as if someone had traced the letters with their finger. I can’t remember what the words were now. I just remember the way my stomach contracted painfully as I read them and that I thought I was going to be sick.

      Despite the way it sounds, Mum was good at looking after us, most of the time. I know she really did want the best for my sister and me, and she worked hard to make sure we had everything we needed. I just wish she had realised at the time that all the fighting had a damaging effect – first the fights between her and Dad, and then the alcohol-fuelled rows that took place on Saturday nights with John and the couple who used to stay at our house at the weekends. Anyone who’s ever woken up as a child to the sound of their parents shouting at each other will know how it feels to lie awake in the darkness, listening but trying not to hear.

      Sometimes, when Mum and John had had a particularly bad row, John would storm out of the house, slamming the front door behind him. He would often stay away for a few days, and while he was gone, Mum would just sit in the living room when she got home from work, watching television or listening to music and crying. It’s a horrible feeling as a child to be worried about your mum or dad: you feel as if you have to do something to put things right for them, but you don’t have the slightest clue what to do or how you would set about doing it even if you did.

      There were many times when I wanted to hug Mum and make everything better for her. And other times when I was angry with her because she did something that made me feel anxious and frightened, although, at the time, I couldn’t have put that feeling into words.

      When we moved out of that house, Mum didn’t want to go. But things between her and John were starting to unravel, and I think she hoped that by going along with what he wanted to do, she might be able to ward off their inevitable break-up. It didn’t work, of course. We hadn’t been in the new house very long when things started going from bad to worse. Mum and John were arguing almost constantly and then John lost his job and started staying at home all day, drinking. Every so often, they would have a huge row, John would storm out of the house and go to stay at his sister’s, and Mum would cry and mope and play loud music. After a while, they would get back together, I would let out the breath I had been holding, and for a few days everything would be all right. Then the whole miserable cycle would start all over again.

      There were fields behind the house we had moved out of; it was in a nice part of town, on a nice street where two of my best friends also lived. So I was upset when Mum told me we were moving. And I was devastated when I discovered that our new house was on a rough housing estate where, for reasons I didn’t ever understand, kids like me who wouldn’t say boo to a goose were picked on and sometimes physically assaulted.

      The only good thing about living in that house was Dean. Dean lived next door with his parents. When my sister and I saw him for the first time on the day we moved in, he was sitting on the garden wall holding a hedgehog. We had been watching him from our new bedroom window, and then he turned round and we ducked down out of sight. But we weren’t quick enough because he had already seen us, and when we looked out again he waved and beckoned for us to go outside.

      Dean was a really lovely lad. I got to know him well over the next couple of years and we became good friends. It still breaks my heart when I think about how badly he was bullied and tormented by some of the other kids on that estate. He was about four years older than me, very good-looking and had a girlfriend when I first met him. Perhaps the people who made his life such a misery by repeatedly attacking his house, beating him up and spreading malicious, totally unfounded rumours about him knew before he did that he was gay.

      I had always enjoyed and done well at school, so I was looking forward to moving up to secondary school. Because we had moved, I didn’t go to the one I was originally meant to go to; I went to one that was local to our new house, where it didn’t take the other kids long to identify me as a geek and where I was bullied almost from day one. I was put into the top set, and while my teachers praised and tried to encourage me, the kids in the playground pushed me, pulled my hair and occasionally punched me. Apparently, they didn’t like the way I talked or looked