Chapter 17
We spent the first few days in the Christmas holiday caravan ricocheting between the stages of grief.
Shock, anger, depression, denial (easier while at school), plus some disgust, fear and humiliation for good measure.
The one emotion Lacey and I didn’t embrace was acceptance.
Instead, Lacey skipped the last few days of college to focus on getting us out of this mess.
This included visiting the Citizens Advice drop-in and calling the council homeless line.
However, it was almost impossible to make any progress when our parents refused to go to appointments with her.
The situation was further complicated because they’d been illegally renting from Lennie.
At seventeen, Lacey qualified for emergency housing.
However, if she implied her younger siblings weren’t being taken care of, that, in fact, we were slowly freezing, starving and stinking to death in the woods, the professionals would ask about a social worker, and other questions that made Lacey turn and run.
It was only because she was calling herself Kat and pretending the caravan was in a wood on the other side of the city that no one came looking for us.
At least, I hoped that was why. The thought that social services might not investigate children potentially living in such squalor was too depressing to contemplate.
When it became apparent that finding a proper house wasn’t going to be straightforward, I took it upon myself to make things as positive as possible for my little brother.
Lacey and I were still debating whether to take Blake and run, but the reality was my savings were nowhere near enough to find us somewhere to stay while Lacey got a job.
In the meantime, I took Blake into the woods that first weekend and we collected some holly branches and ivy, along with a tiny shrub that appeared close enough to a Christmas tree to count.
I had pilfered paper, scissors and sticky tape from school and we made paper chains to hang on the tree and across the ceiling.
Blake also left school with a pile of handmade decorations on the second to last day of term.
I wondered what he’d told his teachers about his new home, but when I picked him up in the playground on the last day, Mrs Bull was elated that we were enjoying our first family holiday.
‘Has Blake told you where we’re staying?’
‘Oh yes.’ Mrs Bull beamed. ‘He’s told me about the playpark and the café.
The huge indoor swimming pool, and all the Christmas decorations.
And Father Christmas coming to visit, if he’s good.
Which he always is, so no worries there!
It sounds wonderful. We can’t wait to hear all about it after the holidays. ’
It turned out my brother wasn’t as na?ve as he seemed.
He did, however, ask me the most important question on the way home.
‘Alexis, how will Father Christmas know where we live now? Mum said if I’m good he might come this year and I have tried my actual hardest. He went to Liam and Poppy’s houses last year and they’re loads naughtier than me.
Do you think he might really bring me a present this year? ’ He gave an anxious hop.
I choked back the swell of anger and tried to think of an answer that wouldn’t lead to yet more disappointment.
‘You know he’s very busy and has lots of children to deliver presents to, so I think he will come, but he might only bring a small present again.’
Every year since Blake was old enough to know what Christmas meant, Lacey and I had come up with something for him. Never the scooter or the Transformer he asked for. Whatever we could find in the charity shop, or before I was working, steal from the supermarket.
‘But I’ve been really good, Alexis. He might bring me a Nintendo DS. He might!’
‘You never know.’ I mentally ticked off a good chunk of my savings. There’d be a second-hand one in Cash Converters. The least this boy deserved was one special present.
‘But we haven’t got a chimney. How will he get it inside?’
‘Lots of houses don’t have chimneys. He’ll use magic.’
It broke me that my brother wittered about this the rest of the long walk out of Crandon and along the muddy path through the woods, even as I felt relieved that for now, at least, his worries were still so innocent.
Not how we were going to wash his filthy trousers or the hacking cough that all of us had developed.
How long we were going to sleep in a heap on the floor, and how we would ever forgive our father for letting this happen.
After spending the first day of the school holidays mooching and getting under each other’s feet, Lacey started disappearing most of the time and I took Blake out to the library, the grotto in Crandon’s tiny shopping centre, anywhere else I could think of that provided free shelter.
Christmas Day came and went. Blake was amazed with his Nintendo, but quickly subdued, taking it more as a sign that he ‘wasn’t naughty’ than something to be enjoyed in itself.
We ate tinned hotdogs rolled up in slices of cheap bread while Mum and Dad slept off their hangover.
Lacey and I exchanged tiny gift bags with goodies from the local pound shop.
Our parents had decided the caravan ‘holiday’ was their present to us this year.
We were hardly surprised. It wasn’t the first year we’d had nothing from them to unwrap.
It was a few days later when things descended from horrible to horrific.
The weather had been dropping below freezing at night, while during the day it never seemed to get properly light thanks to icy fog lingering beneath the trees.
We had spent three full days in the caravan, too cold to change our clothes and too miserable to brush our hair or teeth or bother with anything much at all.
Blake spent hours staring out of the window, clutching the Nintendo he was too listless to play in between coughing fits.
I tried to read, study, and keep my head above the waters of despair.
We lived off dry cereal and toast, and microwaved jacket potatoes topped with baked beans, the sound of endless Christmas TV specials reverberating through the bedroom wall.
On 28 December, we woke up to a world blanketed in white and Blake begged me to let him go outside and play. I was reluctant, because that meant wet clothes, and until term started, I couldn’t access the money in my locker to use the launderette. But we were rotting away inside that stuffy caravan.
For the first hour or so, we lost ourselves in the beauty of the woods.
We filled our lungs with fresh, sweet air, the funk of the past week falling away as we crunched through snow, untarnished apart from our two sets of footprints and the odd animal or bird track.
The muffling effect of the snow made it seem as though we were the only people for miles around.
I then showed Blake how to roll a ball to make a snowman, adding pinecones for eyes and two stick arms. We were hunting for a suitable nose when our peace was interrupted by a burst of laughter.
Blake froze, eyes fixed on the direction of the voices.
I hoped – prayed – it was Lacey, coming with a friend.
Although I knew my sister would never bring a friend here.
Rather, I braced myself for yet another problem.
Someone arriving to evict us again, demand Dad pay up on yet another debt, or even arrest him.
It was, for a fifteen-year-old girl trying to survive the Wild West of a failing secondary school, even worse.
Six teenagers ambled into the clearing. Most of them went to my school.
Three of them were in my tutor group, including Courtney and Shannon, who had recently tolerated me hanging about with them a couple of times.
Out of all the people I would have wanted to stumble across my living situation, they were at the bottom of the list.
They stopped, eyes sliding from Blake and me, both of us doing a good impression of human ice statues, to the woeful excuse for a home behind us. It looked even grimmer than usual set against the background of sparkling white.
The nudges and exclamations were bad enough, but I’d faced enough bullying in my life to know when things were about to get ugly.
‘Go inside, Blake,’ I instructed quietly. He didn’t need telling twice, scampering over to the caravan and taking one more anxious glance at the group before clumsily opening the door and slipping inside.
‘Everyone heard Crandon’s dumbest crime family had been kicked out,’ a boy called Luke crowed. ‘But I can’t believe they’re squatting in our old hideout. Talk about a new low. Like, we knew you had no shame. But, seriously, have you really no shame?’
‘Priceless.’ One of the other boys tugged a Nokia out of his puffer coat pocket and lifted it up to take a picture.
‘How are you all fitting in there?’ a girl I didn’t know asked, innocently.
‘How does your mum fit in there?’ Luke added, causing a burst of guffaws.
‘Now, now, be nice.’ Shannon’s face shone with glee. ‘Perhaps their lowlife parents have ditched them. They’re living wild in the woods, surviving on mushrooms and berries.’
‘Hunting for squirrels,’ the third boy added.
‘Wait.’ Courtney – who I’d mistakenly believed to not be as bad as the rest – frowned, feigning confusion. ‘Does this mean you’re a gypsy now?’
‘Woah, Courtney!’ the boy taking photos said. ‘Aren’t you supposed to call them Travellers? Some Travellers consider the term gypsy derogatory.’
‘Less derogatory than calling her an ugly scrunter,’ she said, prompting exaggerated laughter.
I was still frozen. Almost literally, thanks to my cheap coat and boots. I’d barely breathed since they’d spotted me, and could no more reply, walk away or do anything else to end this torment than I could escape the rest of my nightmare life.
It was bad enough losing our home, most of our things, almost all my savings. Now, I had to witness all the progress I’d worked so hard for disappear. An avalanche of hopeful dreams, tumbling into oblivion.
The strange girl had tramped over to the caravan and pressed her face up against the window. ‘Wow. Guys, you have to see this.’
What a relief that the bedroom curtains were tightly closed.
Then one of them launched a snowball, hitting the main window, and it was instant carnage.
Knowing my little brother was huddled in there, and that the barrage of missiles would rouse even my parents, adrenaline kicked in, forcing my body into action.
I ran to the door and hurled myself inside, scooping up a shaking, sobbing Blake and bundling him into the bedroom as the caravan literally shook under the onslaught that now included stones and sticks.
Interspersed with a string of sleep-addled curses, Dad demanded to know what the hell was going on.
‘Sorry. Just some friends from school mucking about. I’ll tell them to stop.’
How pathetic to be apologising to my dad for something that was completely his fault.
I grabbed the old phone where we’d stuffed it into a cupboard – no landline here, of course, but a phone was too important to leave behind. Opening the door again, I brandished it.
‘I’m calling the police,’ I announced, channelling Lacey’s cool detachment as best I could.
There was a brief pause while they exchanged glances, silently questioning whether the threat was worth taking seriously.
‘Or I suppose I could call Tad Butcher and let him know his girlfriend’s home is being attacked,’ I called.
Tad was Lacey’s new boyfriend. A member of a decidedly not-dumb crime family, the rumour was he’d once rammed a potato peeler into someone’s buttock as revenge for grabbing his sister’s backside.
The gang turned and fled.
It made no difference. The damage had been done. I crawled under the heap of bedding on the floor and stayed there until Lacey came back. That evening, we told our parents they had twenty-four hours to find us a proper place to live or we’d call social services.
It took a couple more days, but eventually Mum took Blake and me with her to the council and wept as she described how Dad had disappeared with all her money and his ‘cousin’ threw us onto the street.
We were in a two-bedroomed bedsit by the evening. It was about as clean and homely as the caravan, but there was a shower, a boiler and proper appliances, including a washer-dryer. We had beds, even if Blake did sneak in with me every night for the first month.
By Easter, we had been moved into the three-bedroom semi-detached house in Crandon where my family still lived.
I did my best to ignore the insults and snide jokes at school – considerably toned down thanks to the threat of Tad Butcher. Because only four of us moved into that house. Lacey packed her own, separate bag, jumped in Tad’s car and didn’t come back until she was five months pregnant with Bronte.
The loss of my sister, best friend and protector was more painful than losing our old home. Lacey was home. I learned the hard way that the only reliable answer to your problems is yourself.