I was seventeen the first time i ever met my dad. Up until then i knew virtually nothing of him apart from what my mum had told me although my mum loved to bend the truth, something which i learned pretty quickly as soon as i started thinking independently. The real story goes quite different to the one she had told me, but i didn't find that out until i left. When i was three it was 'some children don't have daddies and you're just one of them darling', when i was seven it was 'dad couldn't look after you properly and we agreed it was best you stayed with mummy'. When i was ten i got the truth, not off my mum though, it was my uncle who was baby sitting me for a weekend whilst my mum was at a work conference in London. I always loved staying with my uncle, the usual strict discipline i received every second from my mother didn't apply, we did fun things like eat biscuits for tea and go on bike rides without changing out of our best clothes in case they got dirty. On this particular night, we sat in the kitchen while i drunk orange juice and he taught me how to roll cigarettes.
"Don't ever smoke, but if you do never buy pre-rolled, always roll them yourself baby," I, of course didn't know or care about cigarettes at the time and quickly erased his words from my brain without thinking about it, even though when i was sixteen and smoking with my boyfriend for the first time i insisted on rolling them myself to impress him and it worked i think, he told me it said in Dazed and Confused that rolling your own cigarettes is the height of coolness. Alone with my Uncle, i wrestled with the idea of asking him about my dad for a few minutes before actually doing so, i knew they used to be friends and that was how my mum and he had met in the first place.
"Why don't i just stay with my dad when mum goes away?" i asked the pre-formulated question after i had finished my juice.
"Well he's not really around is he," My uncle suggested, i liked the way he didn't try and sugar coat it and spoke to me like his equal and not a little kid.
"Where is he?" I asked and he explained he lived in London now, "Why doesn't he want to see me?" i persisted on.
"i think he does," he replied, "but your mummy doesn't let him, she doesn't want you to get hurt, that's all,"
"Is he dangerous?"
"Not at all, he's a good man but your mum doesn't think he'd be any good as a dad," That didn't seem fair, he was my dad; why didn't i get a say? I thought, "Your mum just wants whats best for you, Mona, you've just got to trust her," I decided not to push any further, at least i had some sort of an answer, an extra snippet of information to tantalize my imagination. I used to spend hours from then on, day dreaming about when we'd finally meet. Every time i went to see my uncle i asked him a bit more and from what i could tell he sounded like a brilliant man, wild, young and fun; the exact opposite of my mother.
At the time i attended and all-girls catholic school in Bridlington, where i lived from the ages of four to thirteen. It was my mums idea of keeping me out of trouble, in all honesty it did the opposite, the strict rules and daily religious assemblies were enough to drive anybody into committing copious amounts of sins. For example, my best friend at the time Elsie lost her virginity to a girl behind the alter in the chapel whilst after school clubs were running. Most nights after school we would all go to Frontier which was a nightclub in Brid, but that got closed down for letting under eighteens in eventually. We don't talk to much anymore.
We weren't catholic but my mum liked to call herself christian even though she never went to church, one year though, when i was in year seven my mum began this weird process of getting closer to go God and we did actually go to the nine AM Sunday service every week until i was baptized, but like a lot of fads, my mum eventually stopped going; claiming the early starts were giving her wrinkles. When i was thirteen we moved out of Brid to small and mainly rough part of Leeds where my mum had a new job as a teaching assistant, again i attended an all girls school but this one wasn't Catholic. I remember at the time being absolutely furious she was making me leave my home, it was where my friends were, who's house was i going to stay out when my mum went out now? Uncle Alan was at least a thousand miles away now.
It was around this time, about two years later, upon starting college that me and my mum fell out. I couldn't pinpoint exactly when it happened but i'm pretty sure it was something to do with my dad. On my sixteenth birthday i received a letter from him, he told me he wished he'd been here for me, he wished he lived back up in Yorkshire, he told me he was going to come and meet me soon because Cassandra (My dearest mother) couldn't keep me locked up forever and that he couldn't wait for us to be together. That alone was enough to drive me insane but Cassandra insisted on pushing it all that further by burning the letter on the gas stove and projecting (very loudly) that there was no way in hell we were ever going to meet, he was an evil man who wanted nothing more than to snatch me away from her and leave her all alone as the ultimate form of getting his own back.
Luckily i had saved the address so i could write back but i didn't waste this prime opportunity to raise hell with this women who happened to be my mother. I can still remember rampaging out and returning returning late that night, drunk and ready to reign havoc, i believe i used the keys to scratch about ten silver lines into her new car and then left to stay at my then boyfriend's. It sounds unrealistically animated but this ensemble continued for a good few months until we officially hated one and other, for every item of hers i stole or broke, she would return the favour her own way. One time she held me down and cut my hair, the dirty blonde loose curls unraveled before my eyes until my hair was hacked to pieces and i resembled a three year old let loose with some silly scissors. Most of the time it was just words, i knew how to be mean but so did she. Eventually we didn't speak, we just existed next to each other which in a way was worse than our fighting, we would both wake up at seven o'clock every morning and have breakfast and she would go to work and i would go to college and then we'd come home and go to our rooms at the end of the night.
On the 16th of September she kicked me out for final and i went to live with my boyfriend as that was the only place possible, i had wrote to my dad explaining the situation and after a couple of weeks he replied. Then a month after my eviction i had ditched my boyfriend, my mother and school to take a train to go live with a man i had never met.
