Dad went to Alan Hopkinson’s trial, on 28 May 1999. I was curious about it but he wouldn’t tell me much.
‘It didn’t last very long because he pleaded guilty. That’s the main thing. And he’s gone to jail for life,’ he said.
‘What did you think of him?’ I asked, curious.
‘To be honest? Nothing. I thought he was a total nothing, really. You can’t tell anything just by looking at people.’
‘Did he look upset?’ I asked.
‘He just kept his head down. He didn’t look up at anyone, not even the judge. He’s got an illness that can’t be cured and now they’re going to lock him up and throw away the key. So that’s a result.’
He wouldn’t say any more, so I left it at that. The next morning, though, when we were in Tesco, I saw Alan’s picture on the front page of a newspaper. The headline read: ‘Jailed. Nine life sentences.’ It felt funny seeing his face there. I started to read the story underneath but Lisa and I weren’t mentioned in it. It just said he’d been jailed for sexual offences against young girls.
Nine lives sounded like an impossibly long time. If a life is about seventy years, then nine lives would be about six hundred and thirty years.
‘They run concurrently,’ Dad explained briefly. ‘At the same time.’
I still didn’t understand but that sounded like a proper punishment for what Alan had done, so I put it out of my mind.
Then Lisa told me she was stopping her counselling. That night I had a huge argument with Dad.
‘She hasn’t had as tough a life as you,’ he explained. ‘You’ve got a lot more to deal with, what with your mum dying and then Bert.’ He spat the name out. I could tell he hated even thinking about him.
‘She’s had to deal with her mum leaving,’ I pleaded. ‘We’ve both dealt with our stuff and moved on. Dad, please let me stop.’
He shook his head. ‘You can’t say I’m not indulging you in every other way, but you have to bear with me on this. I don’t know why Lisa’s dad let her stop, but I think it’s doing you some good and I think you’ve still got some issues to work through.’
He had started going to counselling himself, and since then he kept coming out with meaningless and infuriating phrases like ‘issues to work through’. I didn’t usually backchat Dad but I was very upset that Lisa had been allowed to stop and I hadn’t.
‘You’re the one who needs counselling, not me,’ I yelled. ‘You’re just trying to make yourself feel better, but it’s making me feel worse! It’s making me really depressed.’
‘You have to talk to Penny about that next time,’ he said calmly, making me even madder.
‘You don’t know anything about how I feel or you wouldn’t be doing this! You don’t care that it makes me miserable because every time I have to remember what happened all over again. It’s almost as though you’re punishing me for being abducted.’
‘I’m sorry, but you’re not going to shift me on this one, sweetie. I’ll get you new clothes if you want them, I’ll get you sweets, or take you to the cinema, whatever you want, but I think it’s important you keep going to counselling.’
I stormed out of the room, slamming the door as hard as I could, absolutely furious with him. Why could he not understand how I felt? Why was he being so mean?
Next day when I saw Lisa smiling away in the playground I transferred all my anger onto her instead. How come she was allowed to be happy again? I hated her for being cheerful and for getting over things, while I was forced to stay back in that ‘invalid’ state with everyone tiptoeing round me. And I decided that it was all because I had had a worse time with Alan, and my poisonous thoughts about how it was Lisa’s fault we were kidnapped came back to me. She’d got off lightly. She owed me for going along to look after her. Instead, I felt as though she had left me behind.
I found it hard to be nice to Lisa for a while. I was very snappy with her sometimes, but she never seemed to hold it against me. I didn’t tell her but I felt as though I had been betrayed by her. It was as if she had let me down.
‘Do you still have those nightmares about Alan?’ I asked one day.
‘Yeah,’ she admitted. ‘I keep my piggy lamp on so I can see when I wake up. It’s not every night, but quite often.’
I hadn’t had a single nightmare about being at Alan’s. Not one. I had dreams about Bert sometimes, but not Alan. From the minute I got back I could sleep in the dark without a problem. In fact, I prefer pitch dark – I don’t like sleeping with the light on. So didn’t that mean I was recovering faster than Lisa?
I didn’t want to go out on my own, but we weren’t allowed to anyway. Philomena or Dad would take me to school and pick me up again, and if I was going shopping or to a friend’s they always dropped me off at the front door. Lisa was the same, though. I couldn’t imagine why people would think she was getting over things more quickly than I was. She was just the same as me. We were both fine as long as people left us alone to live our normal lives.
I started to make a new group of friends in Year Seven – Stacey and Cheryl especially – and by the end of the year I knew I was Miss Popular. I became very cocky and bigheaded because everyone was my friend. They were all fascinated that I had been kidnapped by a paedophile and wanted to know about it. I thrived on being the centre of attention and gradually Lisa and I drifted further and further apart.
She was quieter, more of a good girl in class and not very pushy, whereas I became mouthy and confident. I wasn’t naughty in school but I could be stroppy and cheeky behind the teachers’ backs. Lisa started hanging out with the geeky set that got the good marks in everything, while I never did my homework. The gap between us was widening. In fact, part of the reason I was failing most exams was that I was dyslexic but at the time I just thought that studying wasn’t cool and I preferred hanging out with my mates.
I still felt angry when I looked at Lisa. I couldn’t help thinking that the kidnapping was all her fault. I’d gone along to look after her when I could have saved myself, and after we were rescued she just dumped me and went off with her other friends. It wasn’t rational but that was how I felt.
Gradually Stacey became my best friend. She was incredibly pretty, with long, light brown hair, and she dressed really nicely. She wanted to be a hairdresser and would try out lots of different styles on me: plaiting my hair, pinning it up, curling it. I think it was her who first started taking the piss out of Lisa’s hair, which was quite frizzy, wiry hair that looked dry and damaged. She was also much shorter than the rest of us in the class, and one day I coined a nickname for her – Matted Mini-me. Somehow it stuck and we all started calling her Matted Mini-me whenever we passed her in the corridor or the playground. It wasn’t that funny, but everyone picked up on it.
One day, as my little gang passed Lisa in the playground, I said nastily, ‘Oh, there’s Matted Mini-me’ and she turned to look at me with such a hurt, accusing expression that I felt terrible. But then straight afterwards it made me feel even angrier. She had no right to complain about a few names after what she had done to me. It got to the stage where I couldn’t bear to be in the same room as her because of the uncomfortable emotions it stirred up: anger, hatred, guilt and a deep sadness for the loss of the person with whom I’d sworn to be friends for life.
Lisa never said anything to me about it. She never asked why I was being mean, never tried to fight back in any way. I almost wished she had come up and confronted me because then I could have yelled some of the things that were on my mind and eating away at me. Maybe a big screaming argument would have done us a lot of good; but on the other hand, perhaps it could have turned nasty and made things even worse. The fact was that Lisa’s passiveness in the face of the insults made me feel even more determined to hurt her.
In September 2000 we started at Filsham Secondary School and once again Lisa was in my class. My bullying campaign notched up a gear and I started manipulating situations and spreading lies to try to make everyone else in the class hate Lisa as much as I did.
‘I heard Lisa calling you a slag,’ I told one girl. ‘She said your boyfriend is only going out with you because you’re so easy.’
The girl in question charged up to Lisa, yelling in her face. ‘Why are you saying stuff about me behind my back?’
Lisa would defend herself quietly. ‘I’m not, really. I didn’t say that.’
But they believed me, and Lisa’s treatment got worse.
Stacey used to sit behind her in class and pretend to whisper and then laugh, so that Lisa thought she was whispering about her. If we walked into the toilet and Lisa was there, we would hold our noses and say ‘Ugh!’ and walk out again. Every time I got a new recruit into the ‘I hate Lisa’ campaign, I felt triumphant. Stacey and I were the class leaders, the most popular girls that everyone wanted to hang out with, so they didn’t get friendly with Lisa if they knew what was good for them. If you were a friend of hers, you were no friend of ours.
Once or twice Dad asked me why we never saw Lisa around the house any more.
I wrinkled up my nose. ‘She’s become really stuck-up. She thinks she’s the greatest,’ I said.
‘That doesn’t sound like her,’ he said, giving me an enquiring look. ‘Why don’t you make more effort? Ask her over for tea at the weekend.’
‘Nah. She’ll be hanging out with her geeky friends all doing their homework,’ I sneered.
‘And that’s bad, is it?’ he asked with a raised eyebrow.
He finally let me stop going to counselling in October 2000 after a year and a half of weekly sessions with Penny. I still felt furious that I’d had to go for so much longer than Lisa. I was mostly angry with her, but I was angry with Dad as well. What with that and my teenage hormones kicking in, I was a bit of a nightmare at home.
When I was twelve Dad split up with Philomena and I think I was at least partly the reason. I’d often heard them arguing about me because she thought Dad was spoiling me after I got kidnapped by doing whatever I wanted, buying me whatever I asked for and letting me get away with being cheeky to her. She started trying to tell me off about things and I got more and more rude back and Dad always took my side.
When she finally left, I was glad to see the back of her. It was just Dad and me now and that’s the way I wanted it. I had to do all the cooking and cleaning round the place and became the lady of the house. No one could tell me what to do: not Penny, or Philomena, or Dad, or my teachers. All I cared about was hanging out with my friends and being one of the most popular girls in the school.