Girls and Boys Come Out to Play
by Kirsty Eccles
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: Frankie learns a valuable lesson in life. You’re allowed to reveal home truths, but not if they contain the ‘P’ word.
_____________________________________________________________________
‘I’ve never read such depraved, disgusting filth in my life. What do you think you were playing at Frankie?’
The Principal was nearly apoplectic with rage.
‘We’ve had enough of your antics to last a lifetime, Frankie,’ she continued. ‘And if you keep treating Mrs Martin to this level of abuse, because that’s what it is Frankie, then you will be excluded. Permanently. Do you understand?’
He said nothing. There was nothing to say.
‘What did you expect me to do, Frankie?’ Mrs Martin asked him as they went back to the classroom, his head hung low and his feet scuffing the ground.
He didn’t answer.
‘It’s not a rhetorical question,’ she said. ‘You are already on a shoogly peg Frankie, you’d better start thinking and fast.’
‘Nothing, miss,’ he said. What else could he say?
‘Take this,’ she said, waving his essay Charity Begins at Home ‘and I don’t care what you do with it, but I suggest you burn it so that I’m not tempted to show it to your parents.’
He took the grubby, rat-eared bits of paper from her and shoved them in his pocket.
‘And next time you hand in a piece of creative coursework, make sure it’s something that doesn’t break all the laws of libel and decency. This is not what we mean by a work of fiction, whatever rubbish you read in your spare time,’ she added.
She was finished. That was it. Job done.
What had he been thinking of? He didn’t know. It was the title. It enraged him. He thought it was time people woke up to themselves and stopped thinking that he was some kind of teenage troublemaker. Oh, it was all right when they were reading of serial killers and Fifty Shades of this or that, but hit them with a home truth they didn’t want to recognise and suddenly he was the perpetrator of the crime. He would laugh if it wasn’t so sick.
Frankie sat playing with his Zippo lighter, a present from his uncle that his parents didn’t know about. Like so many things about his uncle no one seemed to know about, or turned a blind eye to, and he wondered whether he should just burn it. No one believed him anyway. Call Childline. Yeah right? Like they’d be any different from the school. No one would believe him in a million years. But he’d laboured long and hard and not just on the word count. The emotional toll it had taken on him to finally write this piece was immense. And okay, maybe he thought they wouldn’t ‘believe’ it as such, but he did think they’d at least ask a few questions, on his behalf. He’d been so wrong. When they said you had to be alert to bullying and abuse they didn’t mean a word of it. Priceless. The head accusing him of being an abuser. He shook his head. He thought Mrs Martin was better than that. He didn’t think she’d like what she read, but he’d worked hard to make sure the spelling was right, and stupidly he had convinced himself she was someone he might be able to trust. She was always saying they could ‘tell her anything’. And she was his guidance tutor as well as his English teacher. Well, he knew better now. You couldn’t trust grown –ups, not any of them. They just spun garbage lines like ‘family is safe’ and ‘charity begins at home’ and they didn’t have an idea in the world what was actually going on.
He was going to read it one more time, before burning it. To remind himself that he was not a liar. They could pick him up on the spelling and they could tell him it was disgusting and he couldn’t argue with them on either count. But they couldn’t tell him it wasn’t true. That was unfair. Even at fourteen, too old to cry, Frankie felt the tears well up in his eyes as he thought about it. This was just another level of abuse, wasn’t it? Not being believed. And all because his uncle was a charity worker. He pushed back the tears and he read. As if he needed reminding. As if it wasn’t part of his waking and sleeping self every single day.
Charity Begins At Home.
When people say that charity begins at home they mean that good things start with the family. I don’t think this is always true. For example, my uncle runs a charity. He has always done this ever since I was a little boy. And my uncle isn’t really a good man. But everyone thinks he is because he runs a charity. For children. In Africa. It’s far away and so no one who pays money into the charity in this country really sees what’s going on. But I’ve seen it and I know it. And I don’t think it’s right. I know it’s not right. But no one believes me.
My uncle takes little orphaned girls and boys (and sometimes they aren’t really orphans but their parents can’t afford to keep them so they give them to him, or maybe they sell them to him or swap them for something like a cow or goats) and he raises them in his charity school. And they all think of him as their ‘father’ and the newspapers say that they all love him like a father and he loves them like as if they are all his own children. Like they are his family. That’s not true. Because of what he does to them isn’t what a good father should be doing to his children.
Yes, he gives them presents and he takes them on trips and he gives them food and clothes and all that. That’s good, I suppose. But what do they have to do in return? That’s the question no one ever asks. Everyone just pays their money into the charity to keep my uncle away in Africa and they all think the children are better off because they have more clothes and food than they would have otherwise, and they get to go to school. But there are more important things than that for a child.
My uncle uses these children, not in a way an adult should use a child. He is like a god to them it’s true. But what evil kind of a god is he? He goes into their dormitories at night and he chooses one of them to spend the night with him. Or when he comes here on trips he will sometimes bring his special favourite with him. We’ve even had one of them stay with us when my uncle came to visit. The boy, Lakshmi, stayed with me in my bedroom. He didn’t speak a lot of English, but we talked. And I found out things. He didn’t want to say bad things about my uncle because he’s frightened of him. But I got some things out of him. He told me he was happy to be sharing a room with me, because he thought he’d have to share with my uncle, like back at the school. I knew what he had to tell me and I told him that I knew about it. Because my uncle tried to make me do that once too. Only the once. And he pretended he was joking after and he bought me a load of things because he said I had ‘misunderstood’ him and he wanted to make it up to me. He bought me a CD player and a racing car set. And he keeps buying me things, whenever he comes to this country. Like he bought me a lighter last year and told me not to tell my parents, ‘because they would think I wasn’t old enough’. He wanted me to keep it a secret. Not just the lighter. Everything. Because he knows I know. And what he tried to make me do, calling it loving, I hadn’t misunderstood him at all. I was ten and at ten you know fine well what is and isn’t right. What people should try to make you do and what they shouldn’t. I didn’t believe that my uncle would do that to me because I thought he loved me. But that’s not love. Never. And once I got Lakshmi talking I found out that the very same stuff that my uncle tried to do to me, he was doing to Lakshmi. And not just him. To all of them. All the boys and girls in the charity school he runs.
Lakshmi didn’t want me to tell anyone, not to make a fuss. He was proud that he was a special boy who got to come on a trip to Scotland with Father David, but he told me that he wished he was my brother and could stay at my home because my dad didn’t do things like that to me. He said he loved my uncle because otherwise he would have been all on his own, and if my uncle found out he’d told me, he would get beaten and he’d probably be thrown out of the school and then he’d have no way of making money to get food because he’s only twelve. And everyone would shun him because even though everyone knows what my uncle is doing, they all turn a blind eye because he’s doing such good charity work ‘saving’ the children from poverty.
But I think there’s more than one kind of poverty. And I know that Lakshmi told me not to tell, but I think it’s important that people understand that charity doesn’t always start at home and that some homes are not places of safety and some people are doing terrible things to children and it might be you who is putting money into a charity box that goes to fund my uncle keeping up his abuse. Because I know that’s what it is. It’s abuse. Sexual. And mental. And that’s poverty. When you are a child and you don’t feel safe because the adult who is meant to be keeping you safe is doing terrible things to you and you can’t tell anyone because they won’t believe you. That’s worse than going hungry or wearing ragged clothes. I believed Lakshmi. I don’t think it’s right that I should keep his secret and I wish I could do something to stop my uncle and make sure that Lakshmi and those other children are still safe. Because someone should be looking after them. And properly. But my uncle is just using them. He set up his own charity about twenty years ago, before I was even born, because he was ‘on the run’, my mum said, from this country because there were ‘rumours’ about what he was ‘up to’.
I thought maybe if I went out to Africa then I might be able to do something to help and I started saving money. I told my mum I wanted to go there and spend the summer, like on a gap year, or a sort of work placement holiday. And she said ‘no way am I having you spend the summer with David. No way.’ So I think she knows fine well what’s going on. But my mum’s a good woman so I don’t understand why she hasn’t done anything about it. Except maybe no one would believe her if she told either. Or maybe she can’t because she thinks it’s important to keep family loyalty. And that’s okay but surely there are more important things and it has to be said that my uncle is a paedophile if he is, doesn’t it? I don’t like it. I don’t want it to be true. But I know it is. And so isn’t it right that I should tell, even if it is something awful that you wish wasn’t true? So in conclusion I’d like to say that I don’t think Charity does always begin at home and sometimes even if it does, charity isn’t always a good thing because it’s not just good people who get involved with charities. And sometimes there are more important things than family loyalty. Like the truth.
He finished reading. How could they have read this and then blamed him? He couldn’t believe it. At least they should check out the accusations, he thought. They owed him that much. But he’d learned a lesson today and that lesson wasn’t just that people don’t believe you if you tell them something they don’t want to hear. Sometimes they start giving you the same label. Like the Principal calling him disgusting and depraved, which he wasn’t. He wasn’t doing anything wrong or bad to anyone. Just telling the truth. But from her reaction you’d think he was the paedophile. And maybe that’s why his mum didn’t tell. The thought that things like that ‘run in the family’. Frankie finally learned the meaning of the phrase ‘vicious circle’. And that it doesn’t do to question the empty clichés that people want to believe in. He burned the essay. He only wished he could burn the memories. Or the truth. But memories and truth don’t work like that. They are more powerful than paper. When you know something like that, it’s not so easy to forget it, or to turn your head and pretend it hasn’t happened. Even if no one believes you. Which they usually don’t.
Swearwords: None.
Description: Frankie learns a valuable lesson in life. You’re allowed to reveal home truths, but not if they contain the ‘P’ word.
_____________________________________________________________________
‘I’ve never read such depraved, disgusting filth in my life. What do you think you were playing at Frankie?’
The Principal was nearly apoplectic with rage.
‘We’ve had enough of your antics to last a lifetime, Frankie,’ she continued. ‘And if you keep treating Mrs Martin to this level of abuse, because that’s what it is Frankie, then you will be excluded. Permanently. Do you understand?’
He said nothing. There was nothing to say.
‘What did you expect me to do, Frankie?’ Mrs Martin asked him as they went back to the classroom, his head hung low and his feet scuffing the ground.
He didn’t answer.
‘It’s not a rhetorical question,’ she said. ‘You are already on a shoogly peg Frankie, you’d better start thinking and fast.’
‘Nothing, miss,’ he said. What else could he say?
‘Take this,’ she said, waving his essay Charity Begins at Home ‘and I don’t care what you do with it, but I suggest you burn it so that I’m not tempted to show it to your parents.’
He took the grubby, rat-eared bits of paper from her and shoved them in his pocket.
‘And next time you hand in a piece of creative coursework, make sure it’s something that doesn’t break all the laws of libel and decency. This is not what we mean by a work of fiction, whatever rubbish you read in your spare time,’ she added.
She was finished. That was it. Job done.
What had he been thinking of? He didn’t know. It was the title. It enraged him. He thought it was time people woke up to themselves and stopped thinking that he was some kind of teenage troublemaker. Oh, it was all right when they were reading of serial killers and Fifty Shades of this or that, but hit them with a home truth they didn’t want to recognise and suddenly he was the perpetrator of the crime. He would laugh if it wasn’t so sick.
Frankie sat playing with his Zippo lighter, a present from his uncle that his parents didn’t know about. Like so many things about his uncle no one seemed to know about, or turned a blind eye to, and he wondered whether he should just burn it. No one believed him anyway. Call Childline. Yeah right? Like they’d be any different from the school. No one would believe him in a million years. But he’d laboured long and hard and not just on the word count. The emotional toll it had taken on him to finally write this piece was immense. And okay, maybe he thought they wouldn’t ‘believe’ it as such, but he did think they’d at least ask a few questions, on his behalf. He’d been so wrong. When they said you had to be alert to bullying and abuse they didn’t mean a word of it. Priceless. The head accusing him of being an abuser. He shook his head. He thought Mrs Martin was better than that. He didn’t think she’d like what she read, but he’d worked hard to make sure the spelling was right, and stupidly he had convinced himself she was someone he might be able to trust. She was always saying they could ‘tell her anything’. And she was his guidance tutor as well as his English teacher. Well, he knew better now. You couldn’t trust grown –ups, not any of them. They just spun garbage lines like ‘family is safe’ and ‘charity begins at home’ and they didn’t have an idea in the world what was actually going on.
He was going to read it one more time, before burning it. To remind himself that he was not a liar. They could pick him up on the spelling and they could tell him it was disgusting and he couldn’t argue with them on either count. But they couldn’t tell him it wasn’t true. That was unfair. Even at fourteen, too old to cry, Frankie felt the tears well up in his eyes as he thought about it. This was just another level of abuse, wasn’t it? Not being believed. And all because his uncle was a charity worker. He pushed back the tears and he read. As if he needed reminding. As if it wasn’t part of his waking and sleeping self every single day.
Charity Begins At Home.
When people say that charity begins at home they mean that good things start with the family. I don’t think this is always true. For example, my uncle runs a charity. He has always done this ever since I was a little boy. And my uncle isn’t really a good man. But everyone thinks he is because he runs a charity. For children. In Africa. It’s far away and so no one who pays money into the charity in this country really sees what’s going on. But I’ve seen it and I know it. And I don’t think it’s right. I know it’s not right. But no one believes me.
My uncle takes little orphaned girls and boys (and sometimes they aren’t really orphans but their parents can’t afford to keep them so they give them to him, or maybe they sell them to him or swap them for something like a cow or goats) and he raises them in his charity school. And they all think of him as their ‘father’ and the newspapers say that they all love him like a father and he loves them like as if they are all his own children. Like they are his family. That’s not true. Because of what he does to them isn’t what a good father should be doing to his children.
Yes, he gives them presents and he takes them on trips and he gives them food and clothes and all that. That’s good, I suppose. But what do they have to do in return? That’s the question no one ever asks. Everyone just pays their money into the charity to keep my uncle away in Africa and they all think the children are better off because they have more clothes and food than they would have otherwise, and they get to go to school. But there are more important things than that for a child.
My uncle uses these children, not in a way an adult should use a child. He is like a god to them it’s true. But what evil kind of a god is he? He goes into their dormitories at night and he chooses one of them to spend the night with him. Or when he comes here on trips he will sometimes bring his special favourite with him. We’ve even had one of them stay with us when my uncle came to visit. The boy, Lakshmi, stayed with me in my bedroom. He didn’t speak a lot of English, but we talked. And I found out things. He didn’t want to say bad things about my uncle because he’s frightened of him. But I got some things out of him. He told me he was happy to be sharing a room with me, because he thought he’d have to share with my uncle, like back at the school. I knew what he had to tell me and I told him that I knew about it. Because my uncle tried to make me do that once too. Only the once. And he pretended he was joking after and he bought me a load of things because he said I had ‘misunderstood’ him and he wanted to make it up to me. He bought me a CD player and a racing car set. And he keeps buying me things, whenever he comes to this country. Like he bought me a lighter last year and told me not to tell my parents, ‘because they would think I wasn’t old enough’. He wanted me to keep it a secret. Not just the lighter. Everything. Because he knows I know. And what he tried to make me do, calling it loving, I hadn’t misunderstood him at all. I was ten and at ten you know fine well what is and isn’t right. What people should try to make you do and what they shouldn’t. I didn’t believe that my uncle would do that to me because I thought he loved me. But that’s not love. Never. And once I got Lakshmi talking I found out that the very same stuff that my uncle tried to do to me, he was doing to Lakshmi. And not just him. To all of them. All the boys and girls in the charity school he runs.
Lakshmi didn’t want me to tell anyone, not to make a fuss. He was proud that he was a special boy who got to come on a trip to Scotland with Father David, but he told me that he wished he was my brother and could stay at my home because my dad didn’t do things like that to me. He said he loved my uncle because otherwise he would have been all on his own, and if my uncle found out he’d told me, he would get beaten and he’d probably be thrown out of the school and then he’d have no way of making money to get food because he’s only twelve. And everyone would shun him because even though everyone knows what my uncle is doing, they all turn a blind eye because he’s doing such good charity work ‘saving’ the children from poverty.
But I think there’s more than one kind of poverty. And I know that Lakshmi told me not to tell, but I think it’s important that people understand that charity doesn’t always start at home and that some homes are not places of safety and some people are doing terrible things to children and it might be you who is putting money into a charity box that goes to fund my uncle keeping up his abuse. Because I know that’s what it is. It’s abuse. Sexual. And mental. And that’s poverty. When you are a child and you don’t feel safe because the adult who is meant to be keeping you safe is doing terrible things to you and you can’t tell anyone because they won’t believe you. That’s worse than going hungry or wearing ragged clothes. I believed Lakshmi. I don’t think it’s right that I should keep his secret and I wish I could do something to stop my uncle and make sure that Lakshmi and those other children are still safe. Because someone should be looking after them. And properly. But my uncle is just using them. He set up his own charity about twenty years ago, before I was even born, because he was ‘on the run’, my mum said, from this country because there were ‘rumours’ about what he was ‘up to’.
I thought maybe if I went out to Africa then I might be able to do something to help and I started saving money. I told my mum I wanted to go there and spend the summer, like on a gap year, or a sort of work placement holiday. And she said ‘no way am I having you spend the summer with David. No way.’ So I think she knows fine well what’s going on. But my mum’s a good woman so I don’t understand why she hasn’t done anything about it. Except maybe no one would believe her if she told either. Or maybe she can’t because she thinks it’s important to keep family loyalty. And that’s okay but surely there are more important things and it has to be said that my uncle is a paedophile if he is, doesn’t it? I don’t like it. I don’t want it to be true. But I know it is. And so isn’t it right that I should tell, even if it is something awful that you wish wasn’t true? So in conclusion I’d like to say that I don’t think Charity does always begin at home and sometimes even if it does, charity isn’t always a good thing because it’s not just good people who get involved with charities. And sometimes there are more important things than family loyalty. Like the truth.
He finished reading. How could they have read this and then blamed him? He couldn’t believe it. At least they should check out the accusations, he thought. They owed him that much. But he’d learned a lesson today and that lesson wasn’t just that people don’t believe you if you tell them something they don’t want to hear. Sometimes they start giving you the same label. Like the Principal calling him disgusting and depraved, which he wasn’t. He wasn’t doing anything wrong or bad to anyone. Just telling the truth. But from her reaction you’d think he was the paedophile. And maybe that’s why his mum didn’t tell. The thought that things like that ‘run in the family’. Frankie finally learned the meaning of the phrase ‘vicious circle’. And that it doesn’t do to question the empty clichés that people want to believe in. He burned the essay. He only wished he could burn the memories. Or the truth. But memories and truth don’t work like that. They are more powerful than paper. When you know something like that, it’s not so easy to forget it, or to turn your head and pretend it hasn’t happened. Even if no one believes you. Which they usually don’t.
About the Author
Kirsty Eccles was born and brought up in Dundee. She worked for more years than she cares to remember in financial services before switching to something less lucrative but more fulfilling – a career in advocacy services. Her debut short stories Girls and Boys Come Out to Play and The Price of Fame (now available as an ebook) were published by Guerrilla Midgie Press, and she now
works with the advocacy publisher full-time on creative advocacy projects.