Hear Me Out Read online

  ‘You’re going to love it,’ he’d told me as we’d driven towards the gates. ‘It’ll be just like St Trinian’s.’

  I wasn’t quite ten years old and had no idea what St Trinian’s was. Years later, of course, the irony was that I ended up in the part of Roxy in the movie, St Trinian’s: The Legend of Fritton’s Gold. The St Trinian’s films go back years. They’re centred around a boarding school for girls where the pupils are all juvenile delinquents: smoking, gambling and getting up to all sorts of crazy mischief. I don’t know; maybe if my school had been a bit more like St Trinian’s, I’d have enjoyed it more.

  Godstowe was much closer to home. True, I was still boarding, but at least I got to come home on exeat weekends. Again, I didn’t really settle. The school was full of middle-class girls, lots of whom came from families with money. I came from a working-class background, and once again I’d got into the school purely on my grades. The trouble was, I wasn’t all that interested in the more academic subjects. Instead, I lived for sports, music and drama. I loved netball and basketball and horses, and I was mad about singing and the idea of acting. That was the good thing about Godstowe; I could play sports and indulge my passion for all things musical.

  On the downside, it was at Godstowe where I developed a phobia that stayed with me for years. Emetophobia is a fear of vomit, and in my case it was a fear of seeing another person throwing up. It started when there was a horrible stomach bug going around the school. It spread like wildfire around the dorm, and, in the middle of one night, the girl in the top bunk above me threw up violently. You can just imagine the sound of her retching and the sick hitting the floor. For weeks afterwards, I slept with my hands over my ears in case it happened again. In the end, I caught the bug, too; everyone did. There was constant sickness and vomiting all around me – it was torture. It got so bad that I couldn’t go to sleep without being curled up with my fingers in my ears, even when I was at home – just in case I heard someone throwing up.

  These days, the phobia isn’t so bad, although I’m still not great around someone who’s ill or being sick. Still, there have been times when I’ve even been able to hold a friend’s hair back while her head is stuck in a toilet bowl after having one too many cocktails. I have to say, this is usually when I’ve been twatted myself, so possibly slightly numb to the situation. Mostly, I keep a safe distance away, giving the customary bang on the toilet door and shouting, ‘Are you all right in there, babes? Do you need anything?’ while they chuck their guts up.

  After a year at Godstowe, not settling down, I went back to my old state primary school for the final year. It was so weird being back with some of the kids I’d been with when I was little. I’d been away from them for two years, and suddenly I had to get used to a whole new routine and way of life all over again. It wasn’t the first time it had happened, and it certainly wasn’t to be the last.

  CHAPTER TWO

  As I write this, I’m back in the family home again.

  Throughout my cancer treatment, I’ve been living with my mum, Marié. Thank God for her, and the small team of friends that I trust. I don’t know how I’d have got through the last few months without Mum, and my friends Anna and Mousey. The truth is I wouldn’t have.

  At some points in our lives, Mum and I weren’t as close as we should have been. Although it’s really not the case, she can sometimes come across a bit shy and mild on first meeting. Over the years, that has led to certain people taking advantage of her. Being protective of her, it made me upset and angry, and I think I somehow resented her for letting it happen. It put a bit of distance between us for a while. As well as that, I always felt like I had to be independent. I learned it from an early age, being away from home at boarding school. Even though there were other kids and teachers around, I was out in the world on my own, away from home and family. You don’t have any choice but to learn how to survive on your own.

  Mum is in her late seventies now, and she has become everything to me through this illness, especially since I’ve been staying with her. I know how hard this is on her too. I often worry about her, especially as she’s gotten older. I can’t bear the thought of anything happening to her. In a strange way it’s comforting to know that I will probably leave this world before she does; at least then I won’t have to go through the pain of losing her. The truth is, I can’t live without her now. She cares for me and helps me because, at times, I am too weak to help myself.

  Luckily, Mum is really healthy; in fact, she doesn’t stop. For the last couple of days, for instance, I’ve felt exhausted, so Mum has done all the cooking. She just gets on with it. She’s been strong because she has to be. I guess now we’re closer than ever.

  Mum’s house is in the middle of nowhere. There’s not really much to do, so on a day like today, when I’m feeling up to it, I’ve been reorganising my room here. What I’m really hoping is that I’m going to be able to have my own place again soon. I’ve had my eye on an apartment that’s not far from Mum’s, and I’ve asked my lawyer friend – Tricia, who helps looks after my affairs – to find out if there’s a chance I might be able to rent it. Of course, there are all sorts of concerns about me striking out on my own, particularly with my current health issues. Still, I’m pretty confident that, with help, and my mum being nearby, I can do it.

  Having my own space is vital to me; it always has been. While people might rightly think of me as a social animal, there’s a big part of me that craves quiet and privacy. It’s the yin and yang in me.

  Until then, I’ve made a nice little space for myself here at Mum’s place. My bedroom is a little haven with some soft twinkly lights over the bed, and my computer to hand if I get the urge to put some track ideas together. My love of music is the thing that has always kept me going, and over the years I’ve taught myself to use technology to put my new tracks together. It started off with DJ decks and a mixer. I enjoyed playing a few gigs and dropping tunes at home for my mates while we shared a few bottles of vino, but I eventually realised I wasn’t cut out to be a superstar DJ. That was when I progressed to music software, where I could create my own sounds and music.

  Whether or not anyone hears what I’ve created is not all that important. It’s the creative process that means something to me; making something from nothing and hearing it come to life. When I’m focused, on my own, I can sit up half the night mucking about with sounds and beats. I get lost in it; although you’ll understand when I tell you that it hasn’t been all that easy lately.

  When you have cancer, it takes over everything, and I don’t mean just the disease. I mean the treatment, the appointments, the mountains of medication, the strict timetable of everything, the rules about what you can and can’t do and where you should or shouldn’t go. While the rest of the world is going on around you, it’s like living on your own little planet. When you add to that the weirdness of 2020, with Covid-19 and the lockdown, and then straight into another lockdown at the start of 2021, my whole world just feels surreal at the moment. It’s why writing this book is so important. It’s something for me to focus on, something positive.

  Like most kids back in the day, I loved to go out and play. Right from the off, I was a tomboy. I was that kid who was always knocking on the neighbourhood doors.

  ‘Can so-and-so come out to play?’

  Back then, I hung out with more boys than I did girls. I loved being out on my bike, and you wouldn’t catch me dead in a dress. My fashion was cut-off trousers or snazzy leggings – I fondly remember a little spotty pair I had. Of course, there were always jeans, and because of the era – late eighties, early nineties – there was the inevitable shell suit. God, when I think back, it’s hard to imagine ever wearing one of those things, but back then I was obsessed. I remember having a blue one with little bits of yellow and pink on. Absolutely hideous, but at the time I loved it.

  There was a cricket green near us, so sometimes I’d play cricket with the boys, or we could be found in the local park, climb
ing trees, which was always a massive thrill. Some of the trees in our local park were old and huge, and it was always a competition to see who could get the highest the fastest. There was one enormous tree that was the biggest challenge. Once you got up to the lowest branch, you’d have to swing like Mowgli, throwing your legs upwards to wrap around the branch, which was just a little higher up. Higher and higher we’d go, never worrying about how the hell we were going to get down again.

  My daredevil antics didn’t stop at climbing trees, however. When I was about ten or eleven years old, I decided that I was going to run away from home. I can’t remember what prompted me to do it at the time that I did, but I remember that, for some reason, I’d been banished to my bedroom and I was not happy. I knew if I was to achieve any kind of successful escape, I certainly wasn’t going to be able to stroll down the stairs and out of the front door. Instead, I decided that my bedroom window was the best option. Unfortunately, my bedroom was on the first floor, much too high to jump from, so I was going to have to come up with a plan.

  I figured that if I fashioned some kind of rope, I could throw it out of the window and slide down it; surely it couldn’t be much different to climbing up or down a rope in a PE lesson, right? I gathered together what looked like my most sturdy tops and jumpers and started tying them together. Once I had what looked like a long enough rope, I tied one end of it to my bed and threw the other bit out of the window, almost to the ground.

  Determined to make a clean getaway, I clambered out the window. I started shimmying down the stretchy, woolly rope, but the further I got, the looser the knots in the jumper appeared to be getting. At one point, Mum and Dad, who were watching TV at the time, looked out of the living room window only to witness their pre-teen daughter swinging precariously on a rope that was literally coming apart at the seams. Mum told me that they actually only got a brief glimpse of me dangling there before they heard a massive thud and I shot past their line of sight. Not unexpectedly, the jumpers had loosened and come apart, and I’d gone flying towards the ground below. Luckily, I wasn’t too badly hurt, but I certainly gave Mum and Dad a scare. I can’t really remember if my plans to run away went any further or whether I just gave up after that.

  It was around that time when I became friends with Gena; I called her my cousin although we weren’t actually related. Our mums were very friendly, and I used to call her mum Auntie Julie, hence everyone thinking that Gena and I were cousins. The two of us loved horses, so we’d often go down to the nearby stables and fields where we could take horses out to ride. I never owned a horse, there was no way our family could have afforded that. Instead, I’d found a card in a newsagents window after school one day advertising the loaning of a pony called Jago.

  Jago belonged to a girl called Deanie, who’d grown out of him and had got a bigger horse. Her family bred horses for show jumping and were a lovely and down-to-earth bunch. As it was just down the road from us, I thought this would be the perfect way for me to be able to ride regularly. Before that, I’d gone to Kate Hamilton’s stables, which was a trek all the way to Virginia Water. There I had to help out, cleaning and mucking out the stables as a way to subsidise my lessons. With this new set-up, Deanie gave lessons for a fiver an hour, much closer to home. I started smaller on a pony called Pandora, who was a 13.2-hands pony, but then moved on to Jago. A 14.2 bay thoroughbred, she wasn’t an easy horse by any means.

  During the times when I wasn’t boarding, I would get up at 6am every morning before school. I’d go down to Deanie’s family stables, feed Jago, muck her out and take her out to the field to exercise her. (Side note, I’d always be getting late marks at school because of this.) Once school was over, I’d be back at the stables, riding or jumping her or going out on hacks with Gena.

  Sometimes, Gena and I would be daring and ride bareback on the horses. Either we’d have a halter (headcollar) on the horse and ride cowboy-style, or we’d jump on the horse bareback: no stirrups, no saddle and no bridle. We’d race like cowboys without riding hats. I was only about 12 or 13 and this was the fearlessness and rebellion that came with youth, I suppose. Still, it was so dangerous. By some miracle, neither of us were ever hurt. Being on a horse, galloping through a field, was simply the most liberating feeling.

  When I think of myself then, I remember feeling like such an ugly duckling. I had a grim little perm, just coming out of a goth phase, so I was continually spraying my hair with Sun In because I was so desperate to be blonde. I wasn’t all that happy with myself. The horse riding made me happy, though, and kept me out of trouble, at least for a while.

  After jumping from school to school in my primary years, I was expecting things to feel more settled when I started secondary school. At Salesians School, some of the kids thought of me as a bit of a geek because I was always in the music room. I was also still very much into sports, and it was here that I got into basketball, as well as participating in netball tournaments. I was also good at swimming, ice skating, athletics and liked running.

  Nothing more than 100 metres, mind you; short distances were always the way to go as far as I was concerned. Anything longer than that, like cross-country, and I could be found sitting in the woods with my friend, puffing on a cigarette. We’d end up walking around the course chatting, rather than running.

  My first proper boyfriend, Jayden, came on the scene when I was about fourteen or fifteen. We first met at a swimming pool disco, which is like a pool party, with everyone in the pool plunging down the slides with the wave machines going, while a mobile DJ plays loud music. Jayden lived on the Dedworth army estate, which, at the time, was quite rough and ready. I liked the idea of a bad boy, and he seemed like a bit of a tough cookie, which appealed. I guess some things never change. In fact, I have to admit, sometimes we didn’t even make it into pool discos. Instead, we’d all end up hanging out in Windsor and wait until we found somebody who would kindly go into a shop and buy us some cider.

  I guess it was always more fun for me to be in the naughty crowd; smoking behind the school shed and getting up to mischief. I’d been bullied a little, so hanging with a particular group of kids who were seen as a bit tougher was a way of protecting myself from being bullied. At least that’s the way I saw it. There were groups of girls higher up in the school than me who I looked up to as big sisters; it was a safety thing.

  Still, even within these groups, there were always plenty of dramas unfolding. I’ve got vivid memories of girls rowing in the toilets, and it was always the same old thing: ‘she said this, and you said that and I heard you told so-and-so this, that or the other’. It was a bit rough and ready, my secondary school, but I loved it.

  I was such a tomboy that I think sometimes the boys thought of me as one of them. I certainly had a fair amount of banter with the lads, and I enjoyed that. There were times, though, that I wanted to be the pretty blonde girl who walked home from school with a boy and got a snog along the way. I remember one girl who always kissed her boyfriend at the end of the alley that we had to walk down on the way back from school. I watched her being kissed, and I was always envious. I wanted that too, but in my heart I never believed that I was the right sort of girl to get that kind of attention from boys. I’d been a sweet blonde with ringlets when I was little, but now I had brown hair, which I thought of as drab. In fact, as far as I was concerned, my whole look was a bit ‘meh’!

  That’s probably why I was able to have such banter with the boys without getting into too much grief. Other girls just didn’t see me as a threat. That banter with guys is something I’ve carried throughout my life. I seem to have a knack of making men laugh, perhaps because I say stuff that they don’t expect a woman to say. The difference now I’m grown-up is that, because of the way I look, I’ve sometimes been seen as a threat by some women. For this reason, I often have to be more careful about which men I’m having the banter with.

  At Salesians, some of the teachers called me ‘the catalyst’; it almost became a nick-name. As f
ar as they were concerned, whenever trouble or mischief was going on, I would be found right in the midst of it. I didn’t deliberately set out to cause trouble, but I was undoubtedly the joker in the pack among my classmates. Laughing and joking around, not paying attention and generally being disruptive. Along with a couple of other girls in my group, I always seemed to be getting into grief with the teachers. Still, at the same time, we generally got top grades and were in the highest streams for most subjects. I don’t know, perhaps that’s why I thought I could get away with it. Eventually something had to give, and my luck was going to run out.

  It got to the stage where my behaviour was having a negative effect on the other pupils, often dictating the way the lesson was going to go. In the end, it was decided by the powers that be that something drastic had to be done.

  Once again, I was on the move. Yes, my parents sent me to yet another school, but this time the emphasis was on discipline: I was sent to military school. And yes, it was another bloody boarding school. I was thirteen years old when I entered Gordon’s. By then, I was getting more interested in boys, and not just the banter, so I was relieved to find that this was at least a mixed-sex school.

  It was here I decided that I wanted to become more of a girl’s girl; ironic, I suppose, against the challenging backdrop of military school, but I remember it being a conscious decision: I wanted to have a boyfriend. I got my hair permed so I’d look more feminine, and did my best to try to be more girly. This was alongside wearing a CCF (Combined Cadet Force) uniform most of the time, and playing rugby in the rain and getting covered in mud most weekends. I was a proper GI Jane.

  The regime there was pretty strict. Once a week we had to bull up our shoes until we could see our faces in them before taking them to show the sergeant. If we were ever caught coming in late, we were gated and made to run around the field at 6am with a hockey stick above our heads. It was hardcore, but on the upside, I did get to go home a lot more than I had at my previous boarding schools.