Addicted in cursive

A story its taken me 15 years to write.

Content Warning: This essay contains references to abusive relationships, emotional manipulation, threats of self-harm, stalking, and traumatic experiences. Please take care while reading.

I was 18 when I met him. It was my first time living back in London since I was born. I was embarking on a fashion foundation. My first boyfriend and I had just split up. We had met at a Christian summer camp when I was 15, but had just split due to being at different ends of the country. I’d broken my promise of going to Leeds where we would have finally been together after three years of commuting between Cambridge and Manchester. It wasn’t to be. Neither the relationship or the Christianity. Sorry mum. So there I was, in student halls in a Tottenham Hale high rise full of other art students from across University of the Arts. All fresh faced. All excited. All completely out of our depth. The pure chaos that ensued that year is a tale for another time. This story is about a boy I met there who I’ll call H for now.

I couldn’t tell you when I first saw him. It isn’t one of those, I saw him and felt tingles and knew we’d be together or anything like that. Quite the opposite. Don’t get me wrong, he was one of the cool guys in our halls. Covered in tattoos, piercings, ear stretchers. He smoked. Had been kicked out of three schools. He was creative, artistic, talented. And also, a trouble maker. The complete opposite of all I’d been in my teenage years. A religious, hard working, rarely touched alcohol, didn’t wear any make-up, straight down the line kinda gal. I was genuinely surprised by the attention I got when I came to halls. I’d never been a popular girl in school, I’d never really been aware of male attention much at all. So when I apparently made it into the ‘fittest girls’ lists in halls, I was confused. It was H who told me I was on the list. Red flag number 1.

H made a beeline for me from the beginning. He had a girlfriend at the time back in Coventry, but that didn’t seem to stop him. I remember a few times she came to stay with him at Halls after he’d spent all week lurking around the courtyard by my flat, leaning smoking on the wall by the door next to my particular entrance or exit. I was bemused initially. But eventually I succumbed to the attention. It gave me access to the fun parties at halls that I probably wouldn’t have known about otherwise. I was an introvert - reserved, shy and quiet. I remember one guy in halls, who was older than the rest calling me endearingly a ‘flower on the wall’. At a wedding of two friends from halls recently, everyone said I’m the most different from who I used to be. Yeah, I thought, I bloody well hope so. No flowering on the wall for me. That conversation prompted the telling of this story and the remembrance of all these memories I’ve buried. It was strange thinking back to it. It is like speaking about another person. An eighteen year old called Caroline who wasn’t me. My therapist a few years ago said this is a very common trauma response. To block things out, to not remember, for the memory to be hazy, for it to feel like it happened to a different person.

Due to the hazy memory trauma response there are some gaps but fast forward a short time and H and I were together. An item. Boyfriend and girlfriend. I was his. Which he very much upheld, to the point where fairly early on we were all out in Tottenham Court Road at a night called ‘Get F*cked at Your Mums House’ (it was genuinely called this), a man in the crowd walked past and put his hand on the small of my back and H totally flipped. Not at him. At me. For allowing him to put his creepy hand on me. For not hitting him off or shouting at him or another reaction which H thought would have shown him more respect. He yelled at me outside of the club for an hour eventually kicking in the window of Topshop on Regent Street which shattered and prompted ear piercing alarms at which we all scarpered.

18 year old me still learning about make-up.

These incidents became not incidents but regular occurrences in my life. Another time, out of jealously or anger with me over something, he trashed my halls room. He set alight the childhood pictures adorning my walls with his lighter. To apologise he went to Camden at 4AM and returned with a new tattoo on his wrist that read ADDICTED in capital cursive. He waved his clingfilm-wrapped arm in my face with a pleading look and said, ‘I’m addicted to you, this is why’. Writing this all out now I question myself what possessed me to be with such a person but I was eighteen, living alone for the first time in my life in the same high-rise building as him, and a whole group of strangers. I didn’t know myself or the world much yet, I thought maybe this is what relationships were.

H’s dad was in prison. For attempted murder. There was one time H had heard his dad was out on bail so we made our way to Coventry. He hadn’t seen his dad in a few years. We got a cab to the estate H last knew his dad to have lived on and found his flat completely boarded up and empty. We asked the local pub landlady if she knew who he was and where he might be and she went out back to make a call. Miraculously she returned to tell us he was on his way and would be here in a couple of hours. H and I sat in a pub garden nervously drinking ciders, waiting for his dad, who eventually turned up, skulking in with his new girlfriend and her tiny handbag dog. I don’t remember much about the exchange, probably a mix of the ciders and my nervousness at wanting to make a good impression to a convicted felon?

There is no excusing H for his behaviour but the saying traumatised people traumatise people is not lost on me here. During the same visit to Coventry H took me to his ex girlfriends cousins house. She was much older, in her 40’s at the time and with two young kids. It did strike me as odd that they were still friends despite the split. It later transpired that H had had a threesome with one of his friends, who I also knew, and his ex girlfriends 40 year old cousin one night previous before I’d arrived. He’d had me sitting on her sofa surrounded by her kids toys as she made me a cup of tea and they’d been laughing about H’s ex / her cousin in a less than kind way. Still, I stayed. The worst of it was yet to come.

When I eventually plucked up the courage to leave H after about two years, all hell broke loose. I think the anger at the fact I ended it, this sweet little wall flower that had put up with so much, made him livid. He was the one with the power, he’d thought. He’d told me we’d be married one day, even got me a promise ring one birthday. Initially I got threats. He said he would put incriminating pictures and videos of me online. The police said there was nothing they could do unless they were actually already up. Then there were the calls. I once stupidly answered a video call and there he was in the dark of his Whitechapel flat, with a broken bottle, slashing his wrists with it and telling me, everyone would know at his funeral that I was the reason he was dead. Then there were the calls from his mother and sister. Abusive messages. Once I got a call from his mum saying he was in hospital and I needed to go there directly to be with him, ‘he needs you’ she pleaded. It was a lie. Either one he’d told her or one she was in on. This happened on more than one occasion.

My dad was ill one summer and I went home for a month or so to help my mum care for him. At this stage I’d tried to move on with my life, I was at Middlesex University and had made a completely new group of friends. There were pictures of us on Facebook on nights out, we were studying fashion and trying to be cool so there were a lot of photos. H was obviously keeping a close eye on me through his screen and began frequenting the places these new friends were partying at. When I returned from Cambridge back to London he had befriended them and was now a much loved part of the group. After drug fuelled evenings, in the early hours of the morning he’d tell them how much he loved me and wanted me back and they began repeatedly asking me for months why I wasn’t with this incredible guy they’d all been seduced by.

There was one evening I was back at the infamous ‘Get F*cked at your mums house’ night in central. My flatmate at the time was back at our flat in Dalston hosting her friends birthday party while I was out. H had turned up at the door but she’d said I wasn’t in and he’d apparently left. I got back home around 2am, with a group of friends for an afters. It had been about four hours since he’d been at the door. I went into my bedroom to put my bag down but coming back into the hallway I realised I’d left my phone and went to retrieve it. To my complete horror, there was H crawling out from under my bed. To this day it is still incomprehensible how he managed to sneak in and lie in wait under my bed for all that time. He looked at me as if this wasn’t the craziest thing a person could do and demanded I went into the front room holding his hand and tell everyone he was my boyfriend and we were back together. He said if I didn’t he’d jump out of the window onto the oncoming traffic. I refused.

PART TWO TO COME.