Chapter 4
When I was nine, my school entered a national competition called ‘When I Grow Up’.
The children wrote down their dream jobs and drew annotated pictures.
My class covered all the typical careers: doctor, teacher, football player, police officer, astronaut, cowgirl.
A random girl wanted to be a Senior Account Manager like her daddy.
My dream?
I wanted to ‘not be poor’.
Not even ‘rich’, or a ‘millionaire’ like one of the older children put. That concept was utterly beyond this exhausted, perpetually anxious scrap of a girl.
I drew myself lying in a bed beneath a pile of blankets, reading a book.
Beside me was a giant fridge, open to show all the food.
Not the biscuits, crisps and sweets other children might crave.
I lived on that trash. This fridge had thick cheese sandwiches, roast chicken, pasta and fresh fruit.
In one corner of the drawing, I added an oven, a stew bubbling on the stove.
There was a fireplace with yellow and red flames.
A wardrobe containing clean jeans and jumpers. A coat, hat and scarf.
The windows weren’t broken. There was a big lock on the door.
A first-aid box.
I didn’t know how to depict quiet, so instead I put a sign on the wall: ‘NO SHOUTING’.
Every inch of that room was spotless, everything in its place.
Nobody asked me about any of this. Why I dreamed of food and clean clothes.
What had triggered a nine-year-old’s fixation on being warm.
The school must have known the Nixons lived below the poverty line.
My mum seldom showed up there – I walked with Lacey, and when Blake was old enough, I brought him.
When Mum did turn up for something, it was in saggy jeggings and the same grubby hoodie with flip-flops.
She reeked of cigarettes and days-old sweat.
I wished she never came. The other children laughed at how she huffed and puffed as she dragged her heavy frame down the corridor, limping on her bad knee.
The teachers surely noticed I wore Lacey’s old uniform, complete with holes, stains and a skirt secured with a hairclip.
I never had money for trips, fundraising contributions or Christmas cards.
Occasionally, a couple of children would allow me to join their gang for a while.
I was eager to please, with a wild imagination and a reckless disregard for danger.
Falling off the school shed roof or getting caught pilfering apples from the tree overhanging the playing field was a welcome distraction to the real drama going on at home.
Mostly, these friendships fizzled out before they solidified into anything lasting.
Parents always denied any requests to have Alexis Nixon over to play.
I was dirty, with scabby sores and a ravenous gleam in my eyes that made adults feel uncomfortable.
I often had nits, or worse. My house and junk-filled yard were a disgrace, my mother an embarrassment, my dad a criminal.
By the time I started secondary school, I was learning ways to hide our crushing deprivation.
This was mainly motivated by shame about my parents, and the simmering fear of someone realising how bad things were and putting me in a children’s home.
Mum, who had grown up in a shockingly outdated and neglected corner of the social care system, had described with great relish the horrors I would encounter there.
I also couldn’t help nursing the feeble hope that maybe, if I seemed a tiny bit normal, someone might like me.
Now thirteen, Lacey had joined a group of other kids who played at being ‘tough’, and I dared to hope I might also find a friend.
Mine and Lacey’s new obsession was keeping clean.
We washed our clothes and bedding as often as we could – in the sink, when for several weeks we had no working machine, although our bedroom grew damp and musty in the winter from wet clothes hanging up to dry.
Despite the mouldy walls, Lacey and I kept our bedroom spotlessly tidy, ripping up the carpet because it was easier to sweep floorboards and hiding our precious bottle of multi-purpose cleaner in the wardrobe.
We learned to tolerate cold showers and became skilled at shoplifting.
One of us would distract the shop assistant in our tiny local supermarket while the other slipped toothpaste, shampoo or sanitary towels into our puffer coat pockets.
We knew how to get the most value out of our free school meals, what time the Co-op cleared the out-of-date food and were happy for us to help ourselves, how to stretch a few pounds into a week’s worth of dinners.
Survival was all-consuming. Not simply keeping warm and clean and fed.
But social survival – scouring the charity shops for clothes that weren’t completely awful.
Pretending the jagged haircuts attempted using blunt scissors at home were deliberate.
For Lacey, school survival became about avoidance, while good grades were my only hope.
I befriended the school librarian so she’d let me use the computers whenever I wanted and walked two miles to the public library during evenings, weekends and holidays.
I studied through hunger pangs, hands stiff with cold, parental slanging matches and the endless exhaustion that accompanies fighting through every single second of your life.
The October I turned fourteen, I made it my mission to get a job, persuading a local kebab shop to hire me.
My mum and dad insisted on taking my cash wages as ‘a family contribution’, despite them never having earned a legal penny in their lives.
I lied to them about how often I worked and how much I was paid and gave them half.
The rest was either spent on food and essentials or squirrelled away in my school locker.
For over a year, my stash grew. I was going to ace my GCSEs; I had enough money to buy mascara and a not-terrible pair of trainers found in a closing-down sale. A few other kids started tolerating me tagging along with them at school.
There was a light at the end of this bleak tunnel, and I was sprinting towards it for all I was worth.
That is, until we got evicted two weeks before Christmas.
The tenuous thread stopping the Nixons from falling apart snapped. We lost everything.
I’m not sure my family ever got any of it back.