Chapter 25

It was almost 4:00 am by the time we got back to Harry’s place. There were about ten of us who were intending to crash there. His parents were away for the weekend.

Slumping down on the sofa, I watched as the drinks were getting poured and pills shared around. We were going to watch a movie called Clockwork Orange. I don’t honestly remember much at all because I was totally shattered. Drugs and booze took me down and I was soon out cold.

When I woke up, I was half dressed and, as usual, totally clueless as to why, or even if anything had happened. All I knew was I had tattoos that weren’t there when I was compus mentus the day before. Someone must have thought it would be highly hilarious to tattoo “Mod” on the top of my arm. I had love heart tattoos on my pelvic bones, so someone had been in places they shouldn’t. I must have really been out, I thought. How could I get tattoos without knowing it?

Lilly woke up in pretty much the same predicament. Someone had tattooed “CND” and “Y” on her forearm. It took her a minute to realise what had happened, then she quite literally went berserk.

“Oh my god! No! Oh my god! Who did this?” she shouted, scrubbing at her arm. It had the effect of waking the lads. They all had the look of, What the fuck? I could see them feeling their bruises from the night before. Lilly’s tantrum was not particularly welcome on top of throbbing hangovers.

“You lot are fucking wankers!” I snarled at Kev. We had been starting to have a bit of a fling but this blew his chances as far as I was concerned.

“I didn’t do anything,” he pleaded grabbing for me as I stormed into the kitchen looking for my bag.

“Just fuck off and leave me alone!” I shrugged him off. I didn’t want him anywhere near me.

Lilly and I grabbed our stuff and walked out of the house, followed by jeers from the lads about nice tits and ass. Kev was pleading with them to give it a break, but the boys were still far too high on drugs to listen. We stopped by the tattoo shop on the seafront but they were closed. It must have been far too early. We noted the opening times and arranged to go back to see if they could get rid of the tattoos before Lilly’s parents noticed.

Lilly came back to my digs and we sat in my room trying to think of what she could say to her parents if they saw her arm. She was terrified of their reaction.

“Just wear long sleeve tops until we can get it sorted,” I counselled. I couldn’t think of anything clever to say. She started getting herself into a right state thinking what else might have happened.

“What if they raped us?” she said.

“What if they did?” I was very blasé about it really. “There’s nothing we can do about it if they did.”

“We could report it to the police,” she said in between sobs.

“Sure. And what will they do clever clogs? Apart from discover we took drugs and tell your parents that is! Tell you what? You do what you like. As far as I’m concerned it’s forgotten. It’s not like it was planned. It was just a bunch of stoned and drugged up teenagers doing whatever. For all you know we asked them to.”

“Oh fuck, I hope we’re not pregnant,” was all she could say.

“Me too.” Yikes! I hadn’t even considered that!

The guy in the tattoo shop said we would have to wait for them to heal and then we could get them tattooed over the top. “I can’t do anything else, no one can.”

“Brilliant! Just brilliant!” Lilly threw her hands up in the air exasperated as she stormed out of the shop.

“Calm down,” I said.

“Now what? Long sleeves forever?”

“Just get it over with,” I said. “Tell your parents now before all the scooter rallies start. That way if you get grounded, you’ll be off grounding when you need to be.” I was trying to make her feel better, but I don’t think it worked really.

She was grounded for a month.

I hated it. Lilly and I did everything together and it felt like one of my arms was missing. I had purposely avoided the lads since that night. As far as I was concerned there wasn’t anything I could do about what they had done. But I knew I couldn’t trust them not to do the same again. We needed new friends and quick. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to get to the rallies and gigs without transport.

I rang around a few friends and started going out with a different gang of mods from Canterbury. They all knew me anyway, so it wasn’t hard to be accepted as one of them. There weren’t many girls in their crew either, so it was pretty novel for them to have a girl around. “J” was sort of the leader of that gang. He decided when and where and he became my next boyfriend. His scooter was pretty flashy. He had the Clockwork Orange spray painted on the side panels. It looked very tasty, and I loved riding pillion because everyone cooed over the paint job.

The lads from Margate kept pestering me all the time though. Kev kept calling round for me, or sitting outside my window on his scooter beeping and trying to get me to go out. But I couldn’t be bothered with any of them anymore.

A knock on my door brought me back to reality. Evie came in and sat down.

“I thought I had better check that you’re alive. Haven’t seen you for ages.”

“Oh? I’m okay.”

She went on to tell me that Albert had visited on a few occasions but I was never in. He left his number and said if I needed anything to call. I never saw Albert again. To be honest I wondered what happened. He dropped me off four months ago and I hadn’t seen him once. So much for caring! I thought. Just another person to come in and go out of my life. He was so sweet, I thought he was different. But I realised it was just his job to care, and I was no more than paperwork.

I looked in my mini fridge and saw a few cartons of milk, all lumpy and sour. I had a pile of those small, individually wrapped parcels which were slices of bread that Evie had wrapped together and put outside my room. I don’t think I had eaten any of it since I had arrived. Evie explained that she still had a duty of care, because there was a Care Order and she was expected to provide minimal food items. So whether I ate it or not, it would be at my door every day I lived there.

She congratulated me on how well I had been getting on with the other house mates. Little did she know it was turning into a bit of a drugs den. Almost everyone there did drugs of some kind. The kitchen had become a place for the preparation of drugs, or for making special meals or tea out of Magic Mushrooms or whatever new thing we could find that gave us a buzz. It was our way of dealing with things. We didn’t give any consideration to what it might be doing to our health, or if there were long term effects. Well you don’t think when you’re 15, do you? I did worry once though, when I had been asleep for over three days solid and no one noticed. I could have been dead for all anyone knew.